4Game

There are simply too many item buffs that have escalated out of control and left us with the game in the bland state that it is with virtually every game playing out the same. We used to have trilanes, we used to have junglers. We used to have high pressure line ups and late game oriented hard carries. We used to have ratting and team fight line ups. Mids used to rotate. Now we have 3 carries in duo lanes every game that is decided by the ten minute mark. The reason? Escalation and inflation.

There used to be one courier and every hero had 6 inventory slots, that was it. If you wanted 5 luxury items late game, you had to skip mid game items that were dead ends or sell them at half value and you had to buy boots of travel to free up another slot or just straight up sell boots. Carry potential was hard capped by this, mid game items where on the path to late game or were a gamble to put the pressure on early. It was regularly conceivable to only finish a force staff and boots in a 45 minute game as a 5.

Nowadays, you have stackable wards freeing up one slot, a dedicated tp slot freeing up another, 3 back pack slots for situational items, you have your own dedicated courier, you have aghs shard, aghs blessing and moon shard that take up no slots. You can now endlessly dump net worth into your hero in a way that you simply couldn't before and now ultra late game networth is a solid 20k gold higher per hero than it used to be. There are no super hard carries anymore because every core is a carry because there are no constraints and no compromises that have to be made. If you build for the mid game you are a sucker, not that there is much sacrifice to make to gain an advantage in the mid game anymore, nearly every single items builds out into a luxury one later on. More items than ever can be disassembled and you are never short of inventory slots that you would straight up have to sell an item anymore. Timings are mostly dead because of this because there are no meaningful choices to be made.

Items are constantly fluctuating and going through massive dull metashifts because they end up getting ridiculously popular before they get nerfed and fall off hard, mainly because inventory management is so easy that once an item becomes too powerful nearly every hero will buy it because they can squeeze it into any build. We've gone through every hero buying satanic, every hero getting abyssal, every hero getting aeon disk. This wouldn't happen if you weren't free to build whatever you wanted and still preserve your late game potential.

Sure after suffering for ages with little options for so long every extension to inventory management and build options felt good, but ultimately it's a pretty high fructose move that has led us to the past few years that has really killed off a lot of meaningful choices and run rough shod over a lot of the high economy heroes. I don't think we want to roll back everything to 6.8X days but the game could do with a few more constraints. Maybe take away a backpack slot or two or roll back the dedicated tp slot, maybe change Aghanim's shard into a held item instead of a buff. We need more strong items combinations that cap out in the mid game and are poor slot efficiency in the late game.