Locked out of the Meta: Luna

Luna seems to have become an extremely rare pick. I'm not entirely sure of it, but I think it is because she struggles against heroes who are more mobile than her which are heroes that happen to be popular right now such as Ember and Slark. She is also super squishy for her short attack range, unlike Morphling. She seems to only shine in big teamfights and base breaking with her glaives. Perhaps in the current meta she just doesn't carry hard enough unless it's a teamfight due to her hybrid nuker carry skillset like Gyro, though unlike Gyro she has no real role flexibility and much weaker crowd control.

Unlike the last 2 editions, I don't have any proposed buffs I'm confident in to make this hero more viable. I guess if we're gonna start, rescale the glaives from the extremely awkward 1/2/3/6 bounces to 3/4/5/6.

What do you think about Luna?

I think the "locked out of the meta" series all comes down to the same problem.

Instead of buffing all heroes who don't deal well with Slarks and Imba spirits, why not nerf Slark and Imba spirits in the first place?

Traditionally the standard way to counter high mobility heroes is to group up and push their base. Since pushing has been nerfed logically mobility heroes need heavy nerfs as a consequence. Buff orchid, give cast times and cooldowns to mobility spells, etc.

I think it's her weird peaking, she is so strong at lvl 7, then she gets weak again as she's so squishy and her nukes drop off. Then she gets strong again once she gets items. She's just hard to fit in a team because of this. The BKB change also restricts her fighting ability by a lot.

Buff her strength gain and give her some neat little bonuses, like -10 sec cd on ult or something, and she will be fine. Her main problem is that she:

a)can't deal damage without exposing herself
b)minding that, doesn't have any escape mechanism and is squishy as hell

thus, she can only win due to overfarm. But if Anti-Mage is at least quite hard to gank, for Luna they have traded escapes it for "early agression and pushing"... yeah, utilise a tactic that is one of the worst in Dota now using squishy melee hero without escapes nice job Volvo.

YYYYYEEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHHHH. YES EXACTLY SPOT ON GOOD ONE THANK YOU.
I've always had a problem with Slark, as you guys may remember :P, but you have articulated my thoughts exquisitely. +Rep

There's no point in buffing the hero. Luna is fine as she is. The only thing she needs is a better Aghanim's Scepter upgrade.

<- This. Funny, I nearly posted the same thing up earlier. You have to be very careful about buffing up these already pretty strong heroes when it's the meta that's changed rather than them. Think about the likes of poor Leshrac?

But yeah, very mobile heroes in the hands of good players are probably over-strong atm, with good counters they can be difficult to stop...even with counters, when they have equipment they are very hard to stop. I'd look first at throwing some nerfs rather than buffs - the likes of DK/LS/Luna didn't become bad heroes overnight.

Scaling lash time on Slark, longer cast animations on Ember Spirit...much easier than trying to over buff others to balance them out.

I hope Icefrog reads that Sando haha scaling leash time and longer cast animations on ember really does fix a lot.

Fear is also right that well Luna is not a bad hero she needs a better agh. But we have to rember that it's ok for heros to fall out of the meta its part of how DOTA works she does not suit this meta and hence she does not get much play at higher levels. Doesn't mean that she's a bad hero.

Play Luna
Max glaives and damage
Take stats
Only take nukes when you think you're about to start fighting with your team
Be two items ahead of everyone else
Win game