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1. Heardress is an item picked only by pure tanks in most of scenarios.Originally Posted by NitroS
Carrys usually dont have slots for it or prefer to buy some carry items. Supports usually dont have slots for it or prefer to buy some support items.
2. Supports in 99% of scenarios wont have a sh. Personally i prefer to 2-3 hit enemy supports and leave their carry alone than waste all we got on killing enemy carry and than deal with rest of his team, when we burned all we got.
+ SH counters way more sheepstick and hellflower than harkons, when you got sheepstick or hellflower your USUALLY having some sort of nuking/disabling hero so with sh activated they become useless. When you got harkons, your going for dps build so sh will affect you less since you will still have your regular dmg.
3. Jereziah can charm only 1 person, which means that you will 2 hit their entire team with harkon. I would say that harkon even counters jera, since in normal situation he charms carry and than usess ult to save rest of team. But with harkons he can only protect his carry while you can 2-3 shoot his entire team.
Jera is a bad argument as well since he counters almost everything that we got in game + he can be counters by elec as well making your theory pretty irrelevant.
Very simple situation, enemy got a tank with stacked up armor (armadon, elec, ctuluphand etc...) you use your sheepstick on that tank and what ? during 3.5 second disable you will probably take half of his hp unless you will burn everything you got and make yourself vulnurable to enemy team. On the other hand with harkons you can just get smb to stun the target and kill him within couple of seconds thx to magic dmg autoattacks + increase at the same time nuke dmg of your whole enemy team.
Situation 2, enemy got keeper and/or pr and give +10/20 armor to whoever they want. Yes you can use your sheep but even tho enemy cant do anything for 3.5s, you still wont kill him with your regular physical dmg that you would have on your carry hero. OFC you can burn him down with nukes but than you dont rly need that 3.5s disable, since all you want to cast will probably take less than 1 second + harkons would even aplify that dmg.
Ofc it can be picked up, its just a matter of hero you want to build it on and the risk that you are willing to take. Yesterday played with shadowblade, rushed steamboots + mightyblade and than harkons. At lvl 11-14 thx to ultimate i was around 2k hp and killing madman + w/e they had in their team on 3-4 hitts even tho, they had jera spaming his ultimate. (i dont remember the exact gametime (think it was around 23-28but my farm was rather average at 350 gpm, while madman had steam + runed + blessed orb just to prove it wasnt 150 gpm vs 550 gpm scenario)
If you read only what you want to read than it will probably look like that
Horrible buildup, drains mana like a boss, never had a time where i could "fit" harkons into the game.
I played carrydromeda with shroud + nullfire and smashed some 1650s-1750s with a 9/0/5 score at like 15min. Doesnt mean it is balanced, good or anything.
Ye its just that you prefer to troll rather than think bout autors intentions. I said that there was no noticable gold/farm advantage, i didnt mentioned if we won game or not or how lanning phase looked. Just tryed to describe game situation and stated two important facts. I had huge hp pool and great dmg letting me 3-4 hit people with similar farm/lvl because of getting harkons.
Written by me example was intendend to show how big dmg harkon can provide us with, even in early game on some heroes.
If you belive that my post was about how strong shadowblade is or how good player Im, instead of showing couple of numbers taken exactly from the game describing effectivness of harkons than you should stop writing on this forum and go back to your pubstomping fail builds.
The mana provided by Harkon's intelligence grants you around six hits. Also if it didn't come with a cost it would be hella broken because it's one of the best damage items in the game.
Stats are like women in bikinis, they are interesting to look at however they don't show you everything.
this nails it i think.
Harkon's will never be the kind of item that is "core" on a hero, unless it is changed drastically.
Situationally, it is absurdly strong. The problem is; most people don't even really consider it. They forget it's even on the table.
It's a huge DPS item, better than any other item including riftshards, in certain situations. These situations happen more often than people would think, but because nobody considers it or actually uses it, you have a huge amount of observation bias.
Here is how I would fix the situation:
Increase the damage on Harkon's from +27 to +28. This will remind people that the item does in fact actually exist when they check the changelog, and maybe some will try it and word will spread that it is totally usable given the correct situations.
I don't see why items have to be grouped in to the two categories of "buy every single game" and "never ever buy." Bad.
edit: also, don't see too much being discussed about how it's not just your future auto attacks that benefit from that -armor, it's all magic damage applied to that hero, making it VERY RELEVANT in team fights, actually much more valuable, as an orb, than shieldbreaker for this very reason. -armor has diminishing returns later in the game which ALL heroes naturally get via agility. magic armor cannot be gained except through items that specifically grant it.
in general mystic vest is the most people will have except for specifically built "tanky" heroes who have a headdress. subtracting a mystic vest just by auto attacking somebody is a HUGE, HUGE HUGE DEAL. i cannot even emphasize this enough. it's tagging them to take extra damage from ****ing nukes!!! the possibilities are much larger, and the stakes much higher, than people picture.
i think a lot of the reason people dislike it is psychological. it's hard to really see the benefits. it's an expensive item to buy that uses mana to auto attack, and the extra damage potentially done to a target over the course of a teamfight with nukes flying around isn't neatly displayed on the screen. it would have to be calculated, and it becomes far more nuanced than just auto attack situations.
i really don't think most people truly understand, even actual professionals, just how much damage harkon's can really dish out, in an actual, practical, teamfight situation.
for instance: let's say a given hero has mystic vest. that means they have what, 10.5 magic armor.
so a pyro ult would deal 452 damage. after being tagged with harkon's, the pyro ult does 714 damage. a fairly large difference i must say, and the key here is that pyro doesn't have to be the one to tag somebody with the orb. it can be anybody. it could be applied to numerous people before aoe is cast. it's a strong orb and if the person using it already has a nice auto attack, it's just that much nicer.
i'm not saying it's likely to be some game-breaking secret item that people should buy all the time and blah blah, just that i feel it has a lot more potential than people give it credit for. i really truly feel most people, even myself included at times, don't even remember that it exists.
Last edited by nom; 02-26-2012 at 10:05 PM.
I belive that if they added +damage on hit like master incantation which would indicate bonus dmg when comparing dmg that you would deal with physical dmg and magical while using harkons would change the oppinion of many people about this item ;]
Leave the item alone. People like me use to think it sucked. I just had a game with GraveKeeper. Went fast shroud then harkons. Was killing everyone with 2-4 autos. I forgot to even cast in most cases. Did I mention this was my first time play Grave also.
Its a super good weapon on some heroes. We don't need every item to be good on every hero such as power supply etc.
Imo something has to be done about the mana cost. Sometimes it's really worth picking up, but it drains so much mana.
My suggestions:
Key Binding - http://tinyurl.com/BindDemItems2
Remake votekicking - http://tinyurl.com/RmkVotekickingNao2
Ability to use item hotkeys while shopping - http://tinyurl.com/DemHotkeys2
why would you be vulnurable to the enemy team after using your spells on the tank? the team (except tank ofc) should be dead before you start targetting the tank.
though I can agree with you at one thing, that is that you might be able to burst him down in 3-5 seconds so you can actually utilize tanks running in first, with their team backing up 2-3 seconds later than them, or even more, or take him down easily if he is out of position.
Chu´ playing Codex 5 swedish version, someone asks him why he is listening to the swedish version
I totally agree with you, even after he was nerfed into the ground puppet is still a monstrous beast with a harkons. But it doesn't fit the meta at all anymore. Due to the high mana cost, its almost always a last or second to last item pick up. Games just don't last that long in this meta.
Not to mention that with all the anti physical armor items out there currently, players don't build up their hero to support a harkons generally.
The one thing i don't like about harkons is that you have to basically gimp yourself all game by getting items with loads of mana/int/regen and ignore the safer picks like hotbl/sols etc and all the normal damage items to eventually be able to use it properly and pick it up. Every time i see someone going for a harkons they are almost forced to ignore survival items.
In that sense, i think something about it should be adressed.
Last edited by Ogrim; 03-01-2012 at 09:11 PM.
It's best on heroes that can procrastinate fights until that shrunken head pops off. A DR or Hag with Sheep, Hellflower, and Harkon's is one of the scariest things in the game; they are literally capable of solo killing anything at that point. They can and will turn the tide of a game simply by spending all their free time roaming and killing anything in a few seconds. They need a huge gold investment, yes, but it is a comfortable statement to say that a mobile late-game int carry is the hardest carry available.
No one can argue (or at least shouldn't) that harkon's blade isn't a ridiculous amount of damage in an item. In most situations, late game it will be the largest damage boost your auto-attacks can receive (it might be less than a shield breaker if the other team has hero's with low agi gain, no tree/plague, built shamans headresses, and probably didn't build a demonic). There are several problems with harkon's however, that probably go a long way towards explaining why we don't see it picked up in high tier play. This will be a fairly long analysis, but I want to treat the item thoroughly.
1) Rushing Harkon's vs alternative damage items: Most heroes pick up vestments, so rushing a harkons will probably do less damage than a shield breaker early on (certainly less if the wielder isn't an int hero). Considering the amplification of team spell damage on the target, however, a very coordinated team could get equivalent or slightly higher damage. The mana cost, however, is the rub. Few agility or strength carries have the mana pools to support use of a harkons blade at any point in the game without other items (750 mana for 10 attacks is going to have some carries fairly close to empty), and even for int heroes who might have enough mana to last a little longer, the choice between casting spells and attacking with a harkon's will usually go to casting spells.
Hellflower competes with Harkon's here, as an item that can amplify team damage, increases the holder's dps, and trades draining mana, for mana regen. Hellflower also brings some cc, but only amplifies the damage against one target per team fight, so there are some other trade-offs still to be made.
2) Getting a Harkon's blade later in a game is better, but here the trend of the current meta-game is more of an issue. Due to the all the high burst damage out there, it's extremely rare to see a carry not build an expensive survivability item in any game that's not a stomp (I don't remember seeing a game like this in the last month or so, but if I've just missed a bunch of key games here, please correct me). This item may be a null stone, geometer's bane, HOBL, shrunken head, or possibly even shaman's or heart. None of these items provide enough mana for more than 2-3 extra harkon's attacks though, and the regen from a nullstone only does so much in a short team fight. This means the Harkon's will only be fully usable if the hero has a third item addressing their mana needs. Even at 400 gpm, a carry using Harkon's as their primary damage item will just have treads, defense item, a high mana item, and a few tps just before 20 minutes, and then they'll have another 10 minutes to get the Harkon's. With games usually decided by 30 minutes (this is just the feel i get, but maybe someone knows if it's true or not) having carry just getting a damage item 30 minutes in probably means the team could have easily won already, or else is in pretty bad shape.
This suggests that a team with plentiful mana regen (either through rings of sorcery, or allied heroes like Nymph) might be able to use a Harkon's earlier, but it's tough to say from purely theory-crafting.
3) Finally, there is the build-up of the Harkon's blade. Harkon's includes a mystic staff, which costs more than a level 1 shield breaker, but does much less damage on any hero, and is a single component. No commonly built damage item (except heart on a strength carry) has a component that costs that much. Plus this particular component is quite bad. Even for an int hero, it's just 25 damage and some mana for 2700 gold. This isn't an enormous problem, considering that hearts certainly get picked up, but it is certainly a drawback when it's compared to the build up for shield breaker in particular.
Conclusion: Harkon's blade is weak in the current metagame, but it's because of the mana requirement, the high-cost/low-value component, and it's limited early game effectiveness. As a difficult to acquire item that only becomes significantly more powerful than the alternatives late game it's not inherently bad, but rather extremely situation in the meta-game of today where games are usually decided before the traditional "late-game".
If Harkon's blade is intended to be used as a highly situational item, or late-game pick-up in ridiculously long games, then it's fine as it is. However, if it's meant to be used as an effective choice compared to shield-breaker, hellflower, or frost-wolf skull (hard to compare because FWS provides more hp and slow vs just damage), then some changes need to be made. These changes should probably be limited to changing the components, and/or lowering the mana-cost per attack, but it could be very easy to make the item the new "shield breaker" if it stayed the most powerful late game damage item, while being effective and efficient to obtain early.
^ lol'd
personally, as your lowlife 1500 player, i see no reason for anyone to pick this item up. pros or pubtrash alike
put simply, getting your standard dps items is standard BECAUSE IT WORKS. rifts, shieldbreaker, savage, frost, hellflower; whatever your item choice, people have gotten them for ages because they are strong. they work. you pick em up on your carry, they do tonnes of damage, you win. simple right?
why change to an item people rarely see, know little about and has a unique effect. i have seen this item built no more than 3 times in a normal game, and i dont blame them. its the last item id ever go for.
tldr: people dont get it because why deviate from a strat that is proven to work?
Quote: Nyaru
:WardOfSight: Courier, DoombringerOriginally Posted by Wolfoy
If you ever see an orange item, be sure to buy it asap cause I bet it helps team win
Holy **** you're right!
Mystic Vestiments are a core pickup in this metagame.
I would suggest this item have its toggle removed and not cost mana to use. Might as well make it Arcana + Recipe with levels to be like shieldbreaker.
Pretty good way to get rid of this Mystic Vestiments metagame.
Last edited by Cranium; 03-03-2012 at 02:03 AM.
I say it again, I think Harkon's mana cost per hit is too high. Agility carries won't afford to attack at very high attack speed with that when they also need to spend mana on other skills without burning themselves completely.
I say lower it to 35-40 mana per hit.
So.
After a lot of deliberation, over a number of years, I've come to the decision that Harkons shouldn't have a manacost.
The problem with the entire mana argument is that neither side engages the elephant in the room. "Harkons costs too much mana!" - "Harkons gives mana for 6 hits!" (implying the manacost is inconsequential) - discussion fizzles.
Here's the thing, if the manacost is inconsequential, then removing it should be an inconsequential change. Ironically, after claiming the manacost is inconsequential, and using it as an argument against lowering it, the same parties argue its batshit strong, and suffers from a bad image.
Meanwhile, the elephant has finished the tea party with muppets and snuck out of the room in the confusion.
The elephant is that no one builds Harkons even when it passes all the tests to be the best pickup; best damage, no counters present, no requirement for an alternative orb. People are rational actors, and had plenty of exposure to the item through PM when he was OP, but never adopted it elsewhere.
People don't ignore an item or hero like this because of an image problem, they ignore it because of perceived problems with it.
Rationally, Harkons loses to everything else early and normally mid. Buying it before super late is investing in the brilliant strategy of Not Winning Yet, also known as Throwing. This is before counters even come into question.
Harkons being the Right Item requires a confluence of events comparable to planets and stars aligning.
As pointed out, you can't really buff the damage aspect more, because without counters it's already batshit, you can't make it not an orb, because that opens up familiar life steal abuse, you can't make it cheaper, or easier to build, because game breaking items need to have high threshold components to make them a strategic choice for a team, rather than a coincidental biproduct of what you were doing anyway.
Which pretty much leaves you with three options.
Make an inconsequential buff to it to "promote" it.
Add a new effect (eg truestrike) to give it a second niche.
Remove the manacost to make the item a decision based more around counters than your own hero.
Personally, option 2 or 3. Or 2 and 3 and an increase to the recipe cost (since they're both good ideas).
It doesn't need the -5 MA. It already is effective against armor simply by turning attacks magic based. Wasn't that the whole point, to overcome armor stacking? For example if someone has around 60% worth of armor, and you have 100 damage, you do around 40 damage to them. In this situation Harkons would net you 75 damage even without the built-in -MA stuff.
Furthermore, if you want to boost spells, you have spellshards. It offers reduced cooldowns and manaregen. Harkons is supposedly more of an DPS tool.
Assuming -MA would be removed from Harkons, you would have a lot more room to improve other aspects about it, like remove or decrease the manacost or improve the buildup/total cost. Or just drop the -MA to something like -2 MA.
You could argue that one could simply purchase Mystic Vestments to counter this, and you would be right, but the problem there is on Mystic Vestments and the stupid way how MA doesn't stack like armor does (making the whole mechanic needlessly stiff to work with when regarding balance) and how MA can only be purchased in amounts of +5 and +10, nothing below that, nothing in between that and nothing above that.
You forgot to mention the fact that most of heroes (mailny ints) will never get above 10 armor (unless they are stacking some solid + armor auras), so harkons without - m.armor would only nerf your dmg vs them ... The -magic armor is what makes it good combining with the magic attribute attack. If you would take away MA depreciation than SB would become superior to harkons in 99.9% of scenarios.
Harkons needs the mana cost decrease and competitive teams who will discover Harkons user heroes(,
, rediscover
) and the synergy between them and magic burst lineups
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