dive range is static, range of spirits is increased but spirits already has good range. sun ray length is increased, damage for all is increased. i'm not a phoenix player, so I could be wrong, but I think it's entirely for sun ray range since if you wanted to increase damage of your other spells, you'd just get veil.
sun ray does have an already long range but that's not a valid reason to say that aether lens' range increase isn't beneficial. you can't go backwards with sun ray plus if you're maxing sun ray first, other items don't do much good that you may as well get an aether lens and make it easier to get a full duration sun ray safely.
^You can activate most items while diving and during sunray without cancelling Dive/Sunray and you don't need to be facing the right direction either. You can even use TP's while diving/sunray. You cannot blink during sunray since you are rooted but you can blink during dive. Force staff will cancel dive but not sunray.
all phoenix items are situational, so idk, depends on the game (as always) but its not a 100% ether lens hero so you can consider something else to start with and go for aether a bit later if you want that lenght so much
Please sign in to post comments.
Seen it done, mostly by pro teams. As far as I understand item interactions (http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Aether_Lens/Interactions), it doesn't work on Icarus Dive, negligible on Spirits, and only good for extended Sun Ray, which is pretty long anyway. Is it really worth?