Silver Edge: A Brief Reflection on an OP item

6.84 is here. Caught me with my pants down, it did.

And you're using it as your excuse to not do your third MMR match yet?

It's COMING, it's COMING, gosh. I'm a busy guy, y'know, cut me some slack.

You could be playing it LITERALLY right now. While you're typing this.

Eh... fair. I'll admit I'm procrastinating a bit, but I do wanna put something up in the meantime, and what better way than addressing the item that's almost surely going to be nerfed in 6.84b: Silver Edge.

Silver Edge is downright diabolical, and is INSANELY cost effective for what it brings to the table. Strength, damage, attack speed, invisibility, a slow, BONUS DAMAGE, DAMAGE REDUCTION, and a GODDAM BREAK. A BREAK! Why the hell would a Doom ever farm an Aghanim's Scepter when he can use this to disable passives? It even doubles as initiation FOR the ultimate!

It's... I mean, the break only lasts 5 seconds, whereas Doom would last 16 seconds or longer depending how long Doom stays nearby, yeah?

I really don't know if that's enough to justify it. Maybe? Maybe not. I guess the Aghs does up the damage per second. Still though.

Anyways, this isn't a very mathy or research-driven post, but I do want to maybe put this item in perspective. It's one thing to say 'this item disable passives' and another thing to visualize what that MEANS in a real game. So here's some examples.

Silver Edge --> Phantom Assassin: PA is now a glorified creep who can throw pure damage daggers and blink on people. This item disables both Blur AND Coup de Grace, which you might otherwise know as LITERALLY THE ONLY REASONS PA IS EVER PICKED.

Silver Edge --> Phantom Lancer: PL is now a glorified creep with a kind of OK nuke and... well, the ability to dispel the break with Doppelganger. Still tho, if you pair this with a silence, PL can't make illusions OR use Phantom Rush which... kinda makes him useless. Just saying.

Silver Edge--> Slark: Oh what's that? You didn't build any attack speed on Slark because of all the agility he'd steal from Essence Shift? WOOPS. NO ATTRIBUTE STEALING FOR YOU, FISHY FISHY.

Silver Edge--> Tidehunter: Speaking of fishes, Kraken Shell is gone! No more damage block, and no pesky purge letting this tanky bugger from escaping stuns, slows, and all the other debuffs! You can finally kill this guy without giving him a chance to use Ravage! Maybe. The purge doesn't take off break, because.... well, the purge is disabled. It's nice like that.

Silver Edge --> Alchemist: No bonus gold! For five seconds. The interesting thing is, it only cancels out the increased gold from the recent kill window: if Alchemist grabs a bounty rune while he has a level of Greevil's Greed, he still gets four times the gold even when broken. Dota... why you be so complicated? ;_;

Silver Edge --> Drow Ranger: No bonus damage from Precision Aura, no bonus agility from Marksmanship (even if she Gusts you away), no NOTHING. Drow is now a glorified creep with a silence and a slow. Which... is actually still kind of ok. But all her damage is gone, which is TERRIFYING.

I did do SOME research for this post, and I figured I'd document some of my more curious findings here. I'm not sure if these are intentional mechanics or bugs that are going to be patched out, but for now, there are two passives I've found that don't get disabled:

Necromastery on Shadow Fiend. Presence of the Dark Lord is taken away no problem, but Nevermore's other passive keeps kicking: you can still gain souls while under break and the damage from the souls you DO have doesn't go away from either the ultimate or his right clicks. I feel like this shouldn't be the case, but I'd understand if it's intentional, it WOULD render Shadow Fiend completely useless.

Permanent Invisibility on Riki. The interaction is really interesting here... when under the effects of break, Riki will fade back into invisibility after his two second fade time. For the remaining three seconds of the break, he'll be outlined in a silvery silhouette but be unable to be targeted by spells and will regain his regeneration. Pretty sure this one's a bug: the code for the ability probably needs to be altered so that Riki appears visible when he's attacked, silenced, OR broken: previously you couldn't break without silencing, so it didn't matter.

If I find anything else, I'll edit this post, and I do PROMISE to do another MMR match soon. Gimme a few days to see whether Solar Crest Silver Edge is as broken on a ganking Alchemist as I suspect it might be, yeah?

Safecyn, signing out.