Agility Heroes Like Clinkz are Inferior

I've been trying to take this game competitively seriously and I really only want to play the character clinkz because he seems like an underdog. I've wanted to find out if there were any creative approaches with him as well as role fulfillment which could make his gameplay as significant as the others.

What I figured out is that at the end of the day in order for clinkz to be on par with the other heroes, he has to have magnus' empower, mask of madness, and crystalis.

The attack speed frequency coupled with the modern critical hit function which goes beyond double damage is clinkz' prime hope.

Until then he's simply not on par, but even after this, clinkz and other agility heroes are ultimately inferior for a few reasons.

Stat point function

-Strength: Increases max life, and life regen. When it comes to fulfilling a role such as durable/tank, these two things naturally work well with each other to complete that role. On top of this, you have items which act as multipliers to even further enhance that role.

-Agility: Increased attack speed, Armor. These two things have totally separate purposes, one is for taking hits from physical damage, and one is for offense. For characters like clinkz who use skeleton walk as their method of defense, they have hardly any need for that armor and would benefit much greater from an attack speed multiplier rather then a raw increase of attack speed. Sadly, you can't even achieve a multiplier effect with any of the items provided because non have an attack speed percentage enhancement, while strength heroes have items that enhance life regen by percentages.

-Intellegence: Increases max mana, Mana regen. These two things work well together. Generally speaking and through out history, distance intellegence heroes have dominated with powerful combo attacks to K.O. the opponent. Intellegence is like the reason why there is the saying "The best defense is a good offense". Not to keen on the items that intellegence heroes have but I'm sure some of them are having more of a multiplier effect then agility heroes are getting.

Possible Solutions:

I found myself playing clinkz by getting Crystalis(X2) To get two seperate instances of critical strike(Which don't even stack on the same instance despite not saying so), and then looking for items that both had agility and attack speed because I thought that agility points were enhancing a decimal place multiplier of attack speed in combination with the raw attack speed increase, but I found out that this wasn't the case because each point of agility enhanced attack speed by 1 point.

A.) If there was some sort of item in the game that enhanced attack speed by a percentage then this might correct the problem. If there was some sort of effect that could occur based on attack frequency, this might also help clinkz out.

B.) If Clinkz didn't lose his movement speed bonus despite being knocked out of windwalk, this would be very helpful to his role of harass from a far.

C.) If multiple crystalis' could stack on the same instance, for example, it would be rare for the 20% chance to crit on one instance to occur at the same time as another instance from another crystalis, but if it did, it should probably stack the damage since it doesn't even say that this doesn't happen.

D.) Sometimes I wish that agility points would increase armor and attack speed for melee agility heroes, and for missile agility heroes, increase movement speed and attack speed.

I hope all or some of these points are worthy of taking in to consideration, but I hope this opens up people's eyes to how large this flaw actually is and harms the degree to which people can take the game seriously in a competitive sense.

Thank you.


Another great point is that these problems are insulting to his role as a carry....

He is a very situational hero. Each carry is best in certain situations. Clinkz can operate as an anti-jungler and he can burst heroes down quickly. He is squishy when you haven't used your ulti, but he can escape easily regardless with max movespeed and invis. A simply solution is to buy a BKB if you are having trouble surviving. He has plenty of damage once he has his orchid, and for that reason he isn't very item dependant. He can operate well as soon as he has it. The problem I see is Clinkz' that they build straight damage, and as a result are dealt with easily in a teamfight.

Honestly, the way he functions with the high speed and mobility makes me think of Bilbo's role as the burgler from the Hobbit.

Remember how significant his role ended up being?

With that said, his role should be described simply as... well, since you can't really pick pocket in this game...

Rune stealer...

And maybe being such a thing is very significant...

I still stand by my point though that, sure, he might suppose to be weak, but his skills don't support his harassment role very well...


Once he is taken out of skele walk, he loses that run walk speed which could be very useful for him in running harassment.


I will say though that, Daedius + Mask of Madness + Searing Arrow are powerful... It's just kind of lame having to rush to those things.


Honestly though, imagine like....

Empower + Daedius + Mask of Madness

Then he might be on par.

Clinkz is played more like an assassin, you have to position yourself to get as much auto-attacks as possible. If that person turns around to try to cast a spell, you use Orchid Malevolent to silence and use that extra turn time to land more auto-attacks. This is literally how to try to get a kill on someone, Clinkz is a pure auto-attack glass-cannon

I just want to sum this thread up with my final realization...

I've realized that the only way to see "THE TRUE POWER OF CLINKZ" is if you accomplish 2 things.

A.) Get critical strike

B.) Reduce your opponent's armor below zero


This way, the added fire damage (Which is physical) can be used to its maximum potential....

Armor reduces the damage of the fire, so fire obviously works with crit....

Right?

If not... then you would rush armor reduction items, Assault mail, And Medallion of Courage....

And you would need an ally that reduces opponent's armor well...

Anyways, Searing fire is amplified by 175% on crit right?


Or clinkz has to have Slarder As an Ally and that's the end of the story...

The reduced armor is unnecessary. clinkz wouldn't benefit much from the armor of assault cuirass if he has good positioning. medallion could be good though.


the true power of clinkz is he can windwalk to someone, use orchid to silence them strafe+searing arrows, then windwalk out.
critical is good because strafe increases his attack speed which means more chances of critical stirkes. mkb would be a good option too.

you get bkb for teamfights so that you won't get nuked down.

keep watch who carries dust/wards/gem on enemy inventory. beware of heroes like slardar, bounty hunter, barathrum(dash+dust/ward), naga siren(net), meepo(net) and hero with silences.

orchid's mana regen also helps clinkz greatly so he can stay away from the base for a long time, and windwalking almost all the time.

I don't understand how you think attack speed works.

Technically the stat 'attack speed' applies multiplicatively.
1 attack speed means 1% faster attack. It is already multiplicative.
Dota 2 Wiki for more detail.

So, for every 1 agi, you get 1 Attack Speed, and then 1% Attack Speed? Wouldn't that be basically 2 agi?

If agi increased speed, almost every carry would have max movespeed and buttrhape other slow***s. I think they made movespeed hard to upgrade on purpose.

I'm pretty sure att.spd is additive at least with stats

I just want to make my points very clear here.... and sum this up....

Strength adds both life and life regen, plus strength heroes start out with more strength... they can therefore take hits from intellegence heroes.

Intellegence heroes get max mana and mana regen, which allows them to cast their abilities more frequently, plus start out with more mana.


Agility heroes are honestly on the **** end of the stick here... Look at it this way.....

Life and Mana we could call "Special Resources" Life may not be as special as mana so let's just say that the life resource is half as special.

Therefore, Strength and Intellegence heroes we can call "Special Heroes", and again life may be considered half as special, but when you have heroes in the game like Huskar who actually sacrifice life while having life steal attacks, life is simply right on par with intelligence in being special.

Agility is simply not special in any sense. It enhances the speed of BASIC attacks, and it enhances the the defense of BASIC attacks. It's like the only thing that agility heroes are really good at fighting is other agility heroes, and even then it's more like a stale mate.

Armor does not increase the resistance against magic, agility does not increase an ability like "Dodge" to dodge magic, and Shields, made up of agility items don't even ****ing BLOCK magic.

This clearly supports that barbaric RPG design hazard of Strength heroes are good against intellegence heroes are good against agility heroes are good against strength heroes.

Who really wants to just fricken sit and watch the characters that their opponent's choose before choosing your own? Who really wants to know every fricken detail of the game in order to be able to take it remotely seriously?

Now... agility is really only potentially "Special" like strength or intelligence if it did something like increased critical hit chance because the faster you attack the better chance you have of crit and I really think that is what the creator of dota intended agility to be, the highest offensive extreme.

You could make agility defensive like dodge magic, or block magic, but I think that dota is trying to be different.

Finally... It's also disappointing to see no mana leach items in the game... Mana leach would have to be treated carefully though in the sense that if there was an item that added something like 7% mana leach, it would have to strictly leach mana and not do any physical damage since you would be gaining mana and they would be losing it. Hard concept to make realistic there. The Clinkz character being more mana reliant could be helped by this function.

And that's really my insult to all competitive game designers... they run in to these little details that are vastly significant to the balance of the these competitive games, but just because they can't quite make sense of it in a realistic sense, they throw it in the trash.

Why?

Apparently because it's more immediately appealing to the average stupid human being that things seem to make sense, rather then not, and so therefore more likely that someone will purchase their product.

I've seen the blizzard company fall flat on their face because of greed, because of business philosophy and practices as this.

Everything is a joke competitively until these issues are resolved.