is core lion legit?

He wants fast blink kinda like position 3 heroes and getting some additional items like Force Staff, Ghost Scepter Scythe of Vyse and Aghanim's Scepter make him even better as tempo controller ,we started to see position 4 heroes like Earthshaker and Sand King more on the offlane so is it legit to lane him 1v1,for example when you have aggro tri. yea most of a time you'll get blink by 20-25 minutes as a support,but getting fast levels and some gold could be really nice.20 sec cooldown AOE finger sounds pretty good.

There's no item Lion scales with besides Blink Dagger. Every other item is luxury.

His Aghanim's Scepter is honestly one of the worst Aghs in the game. It gives 175 additional damage to his ult which is pathetic (think that Ethereal Blade gives him about 700 additional burst damage in comparison, allowing him to solo kill). The AOE finger is pretty bad because people don't pack up that much so unless you're playing against PL or something it's only good for killing creeps. The 40->20 second cooldown reduction is maybe semi-decent but he still won't use finger twice in teamfights because he usually gets focused hard.

Force Staff/ Ghost Scepter are commonly seen on a support Lion both in pubs and in competitive. He doesn't need a core position to afford those.

You could argue "but I want my blink faster" which would make sense in the previous patches but now we're in 6.84 where every solo assist gives 100 additional gold to supports meaning that every support gets a 15 min blink easily.

The only thing a core Lion could scale with is Scythe of Vyse/ Refresher Orb, which is actually really good on him. I've seen pro players going Dagon/Eblade on Lion in pubs so this can work too...

Oh wait...you can just pick Tinker which does all that way way better.

So...no. People don't realize how much having a useless mid and/or playing a support mid pretty much loses the game at the picking stage. You don't have to feed to throw a game, playing a hero in a core role where he has no place does this just as reliably.

The big strengths of Lion over other picks are :
- only needs blink to be effective, completely item-independent otherwise
- broken laning stage. Can easily zone out every single offlaner in the game.
- two hard disables, one of them being AOE
- good early roaming potential before blink

This hero is a support. As a core there's nothing he does that Lina, Tinker etc don't do way better. What's going to happen is that once you'll have your dagon, eblade, sheep and refresher you'll be "oh wait Tinker is a good hero" xD

Lion is a great hero if you want to stomp the 1 v 1 mid game mode though...buit that's simply because his laning stage is stupid and level 6 finger is a free kill :)