Underused Items - Veil of Discord

Ok I can see a lot better now what's happening with this item.

I would raise a few questions however:

- If you're playing as Zeus, why pick up the Aether Lens before the Veil? The only thing I can see there is the range boost to Lightning Bolt. But you're passing up approx 2.5x increased magic damage (for you and allies) and a whole heap of stats and survivability - why?

- If you're playing as Sand King, why would you pick up an Aghanim's Scepter before Veil? It boosts the damage of your passive, stun and ulti, at the time when magic damage is at it's peak. I like his aghs, it has good utility...but you already have a Blink Dagger for mobility?

- I find it's quite rare to land a 10+ hits Lich ulti, especially early game. And 4k gold is a lot of money for a support. Veil is half the price, and greatly increases the per hit damage, plus that of Frost Blast and anything else your team has to throw out. Maybe I'll pickup a Scepter later on still. Exceptions obviously when against illusiony heroes/ Meepo, when you've got Magnus or Enigma on your team or something.

Veil on Lion is actually a pretty good idea. Those 18 INT, HP and armor can actually be rather valuable stats on the hero. Yes it's better than Aghs, but then everything is better than Aghs on Lion, even after the buffs Lion aghs is honestly underwhelming, only good at farming creep waves and countering Phantom Lancer, volvo buff pls :)

On Zeus, it's really a core item. Seriously guys, you realize that it's a similar damage amplification to Octarine Core for a *third* of the cost? The big strength of Zeus is that the best items on him cost 2K gold. Which is also the reason why I love support Zeus so much, since he has exactly the same impact as a mid Zeus with only dirt cheap items : forcestaff, lens, veil, and ghost scepter.

Lich IMO needs mobility more than anything else. People are just not going to clump up when Lich walks up to them you know... The best damage amplification he can get is good positionning items. If by buying a dagger you no longer miss a single ulti, then it's a far better damage item than anything else you can buy...which it is IMO. So personally dagger or at least force into veil/aghs, not the other way round.

Aghs on Sand King is to apply Caustic Finale to the entire enemy team btw, not just mobility. That slow is really obnoxious.

Sando, you screwed up your math. Veil increases damage by 25%, not 19%. Without veil, damage is multiplied by 0.75, and with veil, it's multiplied by 0.75*1.25. If you divide the two, you get 1.25. You multiply the damage value by 0.75, not the damage amplification.

So what other good heroes? Earth Spirit used to be a good veil carrier, but now you need to rush Aghs to pull allies so there's no longer a good place for it. Venomancer it's really good on, but it's kind of the same Lich argument, dagger is 100000 times better because there's no point increasing your ult damage if you can't even land it ; so same thing dagger into veil/aghs not the other way.

Pudge. Now that's an interesting one. Mana and armor are extremely valuable on him. And personally I think Aether Lens on him is actually...a bit underwhelming, because it's 200 hook range and nothing else, ult range is actually more a liability than anything else. So Blink Dagger + Veil of Discord Pudge, I think it's actually legit.

Elder Titan. On the new 50% ET it's awesome. Buy veil and refresher and get a one man rampage :)

Jakiro, the thing is that Aether Lens + Eul's Scepter of Divinity makes Euls even more OP than it already was, so why buy anything else. As a late game item sure why not, although I'd rather have disable items like sheep, shivas, or...eblade. Or a blink or force on top. I think it's the same argument again, positionning is better than damage amplification.

Support Leshrac. It's good on support Lesh but nobody plays that. Skywrath Mage, same.

Batrider. I'm convinced that he can be built as a tanky frontline nuker if you get this and aghs.

Necrophos needs mobility and survivability items like Ghost Scepter, no real place for veil on him. Besides early Aghs on him is just so good, worth it for the 70 second cooldown alone.

Buy then maybe Sando is just going to flame me because dagger on every hero :)

I'm not going to flame you about the Blink Dagger...we've had that discussion before and there's a difference of opinion - I tend to prefer stats and positioning on support heroes over mobility, unless there's a big lack of initiation on the team. It's a matter of preference.

On the damage amplification, I'm just going on what the wiki says:

So that would seem to work out at 18.75% increase, rather than 25%. 0.75 * 1.25 = 0.9375. I haven't tested it in person so can't comment directly. Either way, it's a lot more than Aether Lens.

Jakiro I play almost exclusively as a #5. Tramp ward ***** dragon. Land your stun from outside site radius so they don't see it coming. Save your ulti for when you've got allies who can apply lockdown and/or the terrain supports it.

SK...well, your ulti is your primary damage source, and it scales down as the game goes late...get Veil early for maximum effect, ensure they're dead rather than slowed :). Still, that's probably a matter of preference again.

ET - totally agree, it's a great item on him. I'll even pick it up on Ogre Magi or Treant if the team benefits from it enough.

25% - 6.25% = 18.75% yes, but it doesn't work that way. It's multiplicative, not additive, you can't substract damage amplifications, it doesn't mean anything to do that, you have to multiply them. Formula is 0.75 (base resist) * damage amplification 1 * damage amplification 2 * ...

0.75*1.25=0.9375, and when you divide 0.9375 * base damage by the damage without veil which is 0.75 * base damage you get 1.25...which means that the damage with veil is 25% higher than the damage without veil.

Dota terms are pretty confusing because there is actually no such thing as "magic resistance reduction". Your magic resistance is always going to be 25% no matter what debuffs you get. Call it "magic damage amplification" and it's much clearer. Veil multiplies your magic damage by 1.25, just like it says on the tin :)

Sand King, true it's much more damage with veil than with aghs.

Neglecting the fact that Aghs on Lion makes the ult AOE tho. If you always hit at least 2 targets it's superior if you look only at the ult. The CD reduction is also not irrelevant so if my team does not have a magic dmg focus I'd never pick up veil over aghs.

Well yes, veil is only if you have other magic damage sources in your team, otherwise it's lens or forcestaff.

However even in that case you would pick up Ethereal Blade over aghs, because it's essentially better in every way.

Builds from Ghost Scepter, far more defensive utility (ghost on teammates), and more damage output.

Lion aghs is a bad aghs, no other way to put it. Not useless, but very underwhelming compared to alternative item pickups. Since we live in a meta of massive choices in terms of cheap support items, generally only really good aghs are worth buying, which Lion's definitely isn't. Otherwise stacking stuff like lens, dagger, veil, ghost, force, glimmer etc is always better. Kind of the same thing on Zeus really, (although admittedly Lion aghs is nowhere as bad as Zeus aghs so you can still buy it after all the better items).

I think you pick up Aether Lens on Zeus because it builds from Arcane Boots.

Other than that, Veil (as I said before) is really good.

And yes, I forgot lich.

Absolutely, the term is confusing. Most heroes have a 25% base magical reduction, and the Veil says it 'reduces magical resistance by 25%', it implies that a hero would have 0% magical resistance after use, which it doesn't. It could also imply that magic resistance % is reduced by 25%, which would give a resistance figure of 18.75%, which is also wrong.

So yes, 'magical damage is amplified by 25%' is correct - but it's not what it says on the tin :)

After remaining magic resistance is subtracted, this leaves you doing 93.25% total magic damage, compared to 75% total magic that you would have done against base resistance. An increase of a flat 18.75% (rather than a % on % rise of 25%). I think this is much clearer to most people, and allow direct comparison with Aether Lens.

Well Aether Lens multiplies your spell damage by 1.08, and Veil of Discord multiplies your team's magic damage by 1.25. How is that not a direct comparison?

Base magic resistance of heroes is always going to be 25% on any hero that isn't Meepo or Visage, and can't be affected by anything, so you can just take it out of the equation as a base multiplier for, well, everything.

It's a perfectly good comparison, and hopefully it highlights the issue. I think we both agree that the Veil's description is not particularly clear on this point?

My emphasis was on the 'actual' damage done, rather than %s on %s - which are misleading for most people. So if I had a nuke with 100 magic damage, it now does 93.25 instead of 75 if I use the veil. This is indeed a 25% increase, but it's much easier to parse as 19 per 100.