Are 6.84’s New Items Any Good?
Every time a major patch comes out, it seems to reinvigorate our game that’s existed on the same mechanics for over ten years. That’s credit to its developer and to the level of depth in Dota. In 6.84, as usual we saw reworks to heroes and xp and gold mechanics, but we also saw nine new items that threatened to change the game once again.
Enchanted Mango
I don’t think I’ve seen a highlight yet where an 
Enchanted Mango makes a significant difference. This item’s most noteworthy contribution of late has been as a punchline for Nigma’s Warlock Build, where he starts with four mangoes, one ward, and intimidates the rune spawn with Upheaval.
It’s certainly a hero dependent item, where in most cases it would replace a clarity for mana dependent heroes. For example, low mana pool lvl 1 heroes such as Earthshaker, Sven, and Vengeful Spirit could use a Mango to guarantee a 2nd stun in an early skirmish.
We’ve seen the item mostly used in offlaners, where it is more valued for its 1 hp/second regeneration than its 150 mana restore. The Mango then becomes a “break in case of emergency” item, and its use becomes too narrowly situational to warrant its purchase.
Rating: 2/5
Glimmer Cape
Glimmer Cape deserved its nerf, steering its use for more defensive than offensive purposes (recently, Cloud9’s NoTail picked up a glimmer cape on his Bounty Hunter). In the hands of Crystal Maiden and Witch Doctor it can give you a full duration ultimate, but its main utility has been to save yourself and your teammates, like a magical version of Ethereal Blade.
Glimmer Cape is a solid support item, and its use is becoming more impactful in a meta where heroes like Leshrac and Queen of Pain are growing in popularity.
Rating: 4/5
Guardian Greaves
Guardian Greaves empowered one of the highest win rate heroes of 6.84: Undying. Before his nerf, his win rate reached all time highs of 65+%. It’s no surprise that the win rate chart is dominated by healing heroes such as Abaddon, Omniknight, Undying, and Necrophos. Healing offsets your expectation of a team fight, extending a heroes lifespan to one more spell or one more hit. When you bring this concept into your average pub, it creates a bevy of mistakes.
Guardian Greaves is not a “win more” item. It’s an item that wins you the game. It helps you sustain a fight when pushing towers. It fits in the natural item progression for support heroes such as Undying and Omniknight. It has a 69% win rate. With the recent patch, it was indirectly buffed when it’s cooldown was left unchanged, whereas Mekanasm increased from 45 to 65 seconds.
Rating: 4/5
Lotus Orb
Lotus Orb is blademail’s cousin. Though the item creates awkwardly amusing interactions with spells like Batrider’s Lasso or Spirit Breaker’s Charge, the most underrated aspect is its ability to remove debuffs from a hero.
Lotus Orb fits as a late game luxury support item. Think of the chain of events during a gank. Your carry gets initiated on with a blink disable. The rest of the enemy team follows up with their chain of spells. If you can insert your lotus orb cast immediately after the initial stun, it gives your carry enough time to activate his BKB and turn the fight around. To me, this is more important than the reflect effect. Lotus Orb is highly situational, but when it works, it really works.
Rating: 3/5
Moon Shard
Moon Shard is not just a situational item, it’s a highly situational item. It’s an item that’s an afterthought when you have six slots full and 4.3k gold lying around. It gives no stats other than attack speed and a buff to night vision. Though vision is important, it doesn’t fit in the first six items of nearly any hero. Even when Moon Shard is great on heroes such as Tiny and Slark, it can’t take priority over their core and situational items.
So Moon Shard’s appeal comes from its ability to be consumed, where it is 50% less effective.
Rating: 1/5
Silver Edge
With the nerf to hex, 
Silver Edge, Doom, and an Aghanim upgraded Demonic Purge are the only items and spells that can “break.” It’s a great item on Slark and Dragon Knight, and it can turn Spirit Breaker into a late game utility hero.
Shadow Blade was already in the realm of overpowered-pub-items. Silver Edge makes it better, giving cores a way to handle resilient carries such as Phantom Assassin, Faceless Void, and Bristleback. Before this patch we would have to rely on Scythe or Lion/Shadow Shaman’s Hex. Since we no longer can’t, Silver Edge is one of our last resorts.
Rating: 3.5/5
Solar Crest
Medallion of Courage turned Roshan from a boss into an annoyance. 
Solar Crest is better. Out of all the items this patch, Solar Crest is the one that made the easiest transition into competitive play. It’s perfect on Visage, Dazzle, and Vengeful Spirit.
Because of the timing of Solar Crest, its use isn’t to take down Roshan faster but rather to fortify your hero that’s pushing, whether its your Bristleback hammering the tower or a Gyrocopter charging on a high ground push. If you’re a support player, you have to be happy with patch 6.84. It’s a patch for the supports.
Rating: 5/5
Octarine Core
Octarine Core has the largest gap in expectation and reality. Some Dota fans bemoaned Valve for bringing in the spell lifesteal mechanic from League of Legends, and some felt that this item would be too strong on heroes such as Zeus and Leshrac. The truth is that Octarine Core is strong, but it is also 6k gold.
Octarine Core’s benefit comes more from its cooldown reduction. For example, on a hero like Queen of Pain, Octarine Core essentially increases your damage by reducing your spell cooldowns, while increasing the usage of core utility items such as Orchid, Scythe, BKB, and Necronomicon.
One recent interesting trend is Octarine Core on Naga. With no cd on illusions, a 45 second sleep, and a 34 second cd on Boots of Travel, OC seems to be the perfect item for Naga’s split pushing strength.
If there’s one glaring flaw with the item is that it has made Aghanim Scepter obsolete on Invoker. A 2 second vs 3.75 cooldown on Invoke is negligible compared to the reduced cooldown for all of his spells. Here’s hoping we see some adjustments to his Aghanims upgrade in the future.
Rating: 3/5
The Item Meta
Glimmer Cape and Solar Crest are the star items of this patch. Most of the new items fall into situational use, where it can be exceptional on one hero but sub par on another. The rating to me is how impactful the item has been to the meta. For example, Glimmer Cape has far more utility across the board than games when a Leshrac or Naga dominates with Octarine Core.
Much like how hero picks can change from patch to patch and tournament to tournament, so can items. With TI5 looming on the horizon and pre-TI5 experimentation occurring until then, the meta is still wide open.
Couldn't agree more. Also, 1st.
OC on Death Prophet also very nais
Octarine core + scepter +refresher gives invoker 5 sec permanent disable and ability to do double(tornado emp meteor blast) casts(4k damage before reduction).
But i agree that invoker need some buff to ags. All this shit cost a fortune.
I don't believe aghs invoker is obselete at all. 2 seconds vs 3.75 is a massive, massive deal when comboing spells. and 2->1.5 is even nicer. I'd buy both items. Aghs first.
"bringing in the spell lifestyle mechanic" instead of "bringing in the spell lifesteal mechanic" triggered my autism.
One note you should mention is that mangoes are a valuable pickup against heroes who can sap your mana. This includes Nyx, Anti-Mage and Invoker but especially and above all, Lion. If you're a hero with spells that you absolutely need to cast at a critical moment, Lion can be impossible to lane against if he skills Mana Drain and has half a clue what he's doing. But a mango lets you stay in lane, stay at 0 mana and still have access to your spells if you need them.
@memecrafter just lold so hard lmao
@memecrafter Thanks! It was a battle against auto correct.
Personally Octarine Core is great because it provides Techies a lategame item to really strive for after Aghanim's. My largest concern withp playing Techies is that going into the lategame all of his usefulness burns away not just because base defense mines are so easy to deal with but also because it's so hard to replenish minestacks quickly enough. The CDR on OC radically reduces the amount of time it takes to guard all three entrances into your base, and really makes Techies actually viable in the late game. I love it
i would rather give 6/5 or 7/5 to solar crest.
-10 armor through bkb = back to ET era, where heroes which needed bkb were still dying when getting it due to no armor.
And that's also 30% miss through bkb
You shouldn't underestimate the power of a mango as a starting item on tiny. It enables him to do a ava-toss combo from level 2 on and basically whenever he needs until he has the manapool required to do it without the +150 boost.
Also, you can consider getting a mango as your starting item on mid and skip tangos. You get your bottle just as fast and you have a constant +1hp regen, plus the burst mana restore in case you need it.
I agree with codecept: mango is still being underestimated here. It just wasn't much hyped and people fear moving away from their tangoes, but slowly I see more and more mangoes in pubs. Slowly the item will become popular
Also... some things I'd like to bring up to debate.
- (Greaves) The item's winrate isn't really much about its power, but becase people make it when they are already winning by far. If your team starts off stomping and your supps are rich, the item is great at helping the ball roll to finish the game. But in fair matches, the recipe is too expensive for supps, and not that many cores will spend 5.3k on it.
- (Moon Shard) The writer seriously underestimated the item in favor of Mjolnir imo. The shard usually competes with mjolnir for item slots, but the benefits from them are really different: Mjol gets Static, lightning procs and most of the time more damage, Shard provides sheer atk speed for heroes with htting procs (bash, slark's ability, tiny's aburd damage) and night vision. The heroes looking for each item early are different too. The 4.3k +60 atk speed consuming part is just a cherry on top of it.
- (Crest and Halberd) Yes, Solar Crest is absurd. I'd like to add that it kindda replaces Halberd in a big number of situations, as both items are used to debuff physical DPS carries and Halberd fails to pierce BKB. Oh, also Silver Blade found another good use for Sange, bad for Halberd again.
- (Linken's Sphere) Is it just me, or the number of items using perseverance, plus lotus orb, plus bkb are essentially making the item pointless? Linken's was really situational already, now its just meh in every way.
Octarine doesn't reduce the cooldown of charge based abilities. Volvo fix plz
all the item icons look ugly except octa
i disagree with moon shard a lot. its main purpose is for 6 slotted heros to get attack speed. and on nightstalker with aghs it gives almost an 8th of the map vision. while situational, it is REALLY strong
Like others have said, Moon shard can be game-changing on the right heroes. After getting Aghanim's, Tiny's biggest priority is attack speed. Heroes with abilities that have a chance of proccing on each hit can see Moon Shard paying off very well when they're able to keep enemies perma-bashed in the late game. Carries with high BAT, like Juggernaut, Anti Mage, and Alchemist can also make a lot out of a Moon Shard.
Guardian Greaves doesn't have a high winrate because it's just good, it has a high winrate because only the wealthiest supports can afford it. If a support can afford to spend 5.3k on boots, they've probably already won the game BEFORE they bought them.
Guardian Greaves are not for supports, they are for tanky heroes like Bristle, Axe, Timber, Medusa, etc...
P.S. Also I'm dedicated support player and I'm definitely not happy with 6.84 patch. This patch is hell for supports.
Moonshard on Clinkz is the shit, situational pick when you are doing good, in stead of going for a 3rd damage item (orchid->bkb->), it could easily replace the crystalis.
Also Octarine Techies is broken AF, so is octarine Bristle and Ogre Magi core.
And Lotus Orb on wyvern, is good, not the shit, but good. And PS, have seen a new way of playing Tinker, with scepter, Lotus Orb, and Necro, un brakeable base, not leggit but close to.
I believe they will nerf glimmer cape by adding a slow or decrease on the magic resistance; and buff lotus orb, give it more stats, or make it so you have 0.5 secs of dispel rather than an instance.
Moon Shard Win Percentage 76.58%
Enough said... 1/5... Right.
Only higher win rate than Satanic, Assault Cuirass, Heart of Tarrasque and Eye of Skadi.
We’ve seen the item mostly used in offlaners, where it is more valued for its 1 hp/second regeneration than its 150 mana restore. The Mango then becomes a “break in case of emergency” item, and its use becomes too narrowly situational to warrant its purchase."
IMO you are underestimating it as this is a perfectly legit argument for getting the mango. Whenever I go safelane carry or offlane feederino with a melee hero that will only use spells to kill versus 1-3 ranged right-clickers, I will consider mangoing up instead of clarities or branches (if nothing else is urgently needed). The +1 HP regen is really good. Coupled with a PMS bought from the sideshop, you become very difficult to harras out of the lane w. right clicks.
Moon shard is a situationally great 3.-4. item as well on proc-based heroes who can get away with it. Faceless void w. MoM -> Maelström -> (BKB -> )Moon shard = perma-bash.
I guess, Moonshard is only good on NightStalker with AgS.
I wish Hex didn't get its break mechanic removed :<
I was a sad lion player.
I really don't think moonshard deserves a 1/5, just by looking at it's stats you can tell that a 4300 gold item be more deserving with a 75% winrate and 7th best win rate in the game
Guardian Greaves are called GG Boots for a reason, if you get them before the other team you can push for days.
People seem to be misunderstanding the Moon Shard win-rate. The win-rate only takes items that you own AT THE END OF THE GAME into account. And that is in your inventory, not consumed items. So, that means that if someone has Moon Shard in their inventory, there are three possibilities. They get it just before they win the game. They have already consumed one, and bought another. They forgot to consume it. Two of these are only really possible in an environment where you are winning a game, particularly in this snowball meta.
The author needs to review their usage of "it's" vs "its".
I like to buy Scepter and octarie core on invoker.
although I accept that seems excessive :D
you know if someone doesn't play invoker much when they say 3.5 and 2 seconds are essentially the same. aghs let's you cast 4 spells in the span of 4s. lotus will require 7s for the same 4 spells.
thats good for ply you can ply better
Guys, Moonshard on heros with crits like jugg or PA are great. But on people with bashs there is less gain than you think there is.
All bashs have a cool down, enough though you will bash more often statiscially. You won't see a big change. Only a reasonable change
I love getting moonshard on core Enchantress as my 4th major item. Attack speed is really all you need if you have a good team (or bad enemies).
i rate mango 10/5 any day
Well said bro! +1
Doom no longer applies break unless upgraded to aghs. Also, spell vamp was already in dota: lifestealer's open wounds allows heros to lifesteal from spells on that target. Alsoso, most of the hype around octarine core was the cdr, not the spell vamp. I'd will agree that supports got a lot this patch in solar crest, glimmer, and mango, but this was also a patch for core casters and late game in general. Great patch regardless.
So incorrect. Moon Shard is highly undermarked, while Solar Crest and Glimmer Cape recieved higher marks than they deserve. Glimmer was 4/5 item until it has got a manacost of ridicuosly high 130. Now it's more 3/5.
Naga ilu no cd in OC ? How?
^I think he means no downtime on illusions instead of no cooldown.
I disagree with what you said about invoker. On paper, a 2 second cooldown and 3.5 don't seem too far removed, but in practice it makes all the difference for those combos and clutch plays. If you were to go octarine on invoker, perhaps get it with aghs for that cool CD reduction on all your spells, plus a 1.5 second invoke.
Mango is really underestimated. Tango-mango-salve-armorring is the best all-purpose choice for a start equip. 3/5 at least.
Solar Crest was totally imbalanced for now: too cheap, too strong. Did any of you tried to stop PA with SC and BKB? Oh well.
What is the point of having a lot of attack speed if you lack of other stats? Assault couriass gives you attack speed but also gives you a lot of armor, for you and for your teammates, strength heroes like tiny who dont have a lot of armor because of they agillity need that, Mjolnir, gives you damage attack speed helps you to farm/push faster and alsto gives you the active speel which can be really useful on teamfights, also u can build the maelstrom before the mjolnir wich is cheap and can boost your farm a bit, and there are many other items that are better than raw attack speed, manta gives you stats and the active is really good on tiny for example to push and in other heroes to get rid of silences and shit, there are a lot of items that will help you more than a fucking 120 attack speed item cmon
i think glimmer deserved 5 but overwise im probably agree :)
invoker with 3.75s cd on ulti is shitty
u can only use 2 skills after tornado
so aghanim is still needed
Check out Dota2 Magazine @ www.dota2mag.com