4Game

After seeing synderen’s interview I think it’s a majority opinion that neutral items don’t add much strategic depth to the game, the right one to pick for your hero is usually obvious and it’s mostly luck if you can get an ironwood branch for timbersaw or possessed mask for your farming carry. The thread had a lot of ideas for how to fix this ranging from the same items for both teams to restricting items for late game only (40 min +) but those options have obvious issues (same items, not same heroes, only late game also benefits some compositions more, etc)

I think it might be interesting to have neutral items be part of the drafting phase; pick an item, ban an item, etc. and those items will drop for you at their time ranges. It would be cool at a pro level to add some strategic depth in picking items and then synergizing hero picks with them. I think they are impactful enough where certain items would be game winning/competitive picks. It would also help icefrog with the balancing aspect once he sees which items are most picked/banned. In regular games people could nominate item bans like hero bans.

Thoughts? My main concern is it would take too much time to pick 4 items for each phase and the draft already takes 10-15 minutes or so…