I think the new Hoodwink Aghs just isn't impactful enough, is too unwieldy to use, and needlessly complex. There are just so many "asterisks" to using it. It's a good mix of offense and defense, and the low cooldown and manacost are great, but… chances are you're probably just better off doing Ethereal Blade if you want good spell damage.
- The decoy charges up the full 5 seconds, which is often too long and is a weird timing for the combo
- The decoy aim is unreliable and sometimes it doesn't know which target to go for, and you can't tell it where to target
- The invisibility is nice, but it doesn't give you Scurry, so if you're like "oops, I wanted to dash into the trees after Decoy" you'll have to press E for Scurry, which will lose you the invisibility
- The decoy won't cast sharpshooter if you didn't have enough mana (reported as a bug in another thread)
Those are the main points I think. I have occasionally managed a double Sharpshooter combo but that needs a lot of setup.
Other Aghs ideas: a simple idea is to give two charges/double shot/ or bring back the BKB piercing
But the main idea I've had and a friend also was to make it a Scurry upgrade:
- Give Hoodwink permanent Scurry for full treewalking, which suits with her theme
- Give her +15% attack damge/+20% spell amp while close to trees. Whether you go for a spell damage build or a right-click build, your playstyle is supported
- Its suitable for the character and it can still be countered by tree-destroying abilities, and not all areas of the map have trees
Anyway, hope Valve changes up the Aghs again, I guess. or at least makes some adjustments to it to make it more smooth to use. I do like Boomerang as a Shard, though the old Decoy Shard had really cool scouting/misdirection utility.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/yu7wsv/hoodwink_aghs_sucks_heres_a_new_idea/