How viable is it? It's an extremely cost-effective item even if you don't get the damage from STR. Can it be a viable early-game alternative for survivability and damage, especially on heroes that purchase early lifesteal or have it innately like Brood or Troll?
Posted Sep 8, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC
Armlet gives additional armors which is useless for agi heroes. They gain a lot of armors naturally.
Also they can't recover lost health. They usually tank creeps with high armor or buy Morbid mask to recover health little by little.
As you mentioned, extra Str does not give them damage.
So this item is underutilized and they have better options for their needs.
Oldschool Armlet PA is quite decent rn as it gives you a lot of hp and dmg. While also you can lifesteal from blink strike.
Other than that I dont recall many things that are strong.
This item is like a few minor balance changes away from being unviable on the strength heroes that buy it. I suspect agi heroes shouldn’t even consider it.
I remember watching some sniper armlet but it was years ago.
Brood has insane mana requirements and is pretty good for damage as long as she gets to control a target in the early game. Stuff like diffu or orchid are just more consistently useful.
Troll doesn't casually lifesteal. Mostly just gets by on high armour and blind on camps or bfury's regen. Wants to farm and desperately needs a bkb.
Also diffusal's basically the same bonus damage on an agi hero as armlet. No hp drain and a slow instead.
In general, agi heroes are cores that aren't looking to fight early, have more mechanically specific options to buy for that purpose or still want to keep up on farm despite fighting.
Fighting agi like mk, slark, riki, ursa, weaver, ember, bloodseeker, pango all fall under wanting either maelstrom, diffusal or echo. Or for ursa and mk, they might just buy bfury in some games.
Some weirdos like razor or viper that mostly need sustained survivability.
Idk why no one try undying with armlet. His ult amp armlet's strength as well so it ends up being nearly 40 strength or something stupid like that. He has plenty of healing from soul rip and decay also easily "heal" him a good chunk. Just did a silly match with phase boot armlet halberg, agh, agh shard, heart, octarine core. Without ult and any decay stack I sit comfortably at 5k hp. Ult up and it's like 7-8k hp. A few stacks of decay easily land you at 10k+hp. I dont even bkb since I rather enemy throw disable at a 10k hp montrosity than on my carries. Heart heals for 300hp/sec passive. Decay and soul rip heals for some stupid amount as well. Oh and did I mention he has 2 lives?
Armlet in general is beneficial on heroes that can negate the health drain through regen, or who actually want to have low health. The stats and the survivability of toggling are both great but as the other commenter says, the strength is not particularly useful to non-Strength heroes.
I think off the top of my head... I've seen some discussion of Armlet on a few non-Str heroes including:
Terrorblade - Having low health means combos with Sunder
Enchantress - Has lots of self-healing and more importantly with her insanely low health pool it's actually a good item for her stats wise, and the slow from Untouchable makes toggling between attacks very easy
Slark - he has a ton of regen and loves attack speed, but I don't think this is actually particularly good most of the time
I think you can probably explore Armlet on AGI carries more generally but you're not only going to get a lot of teammates calling you a troll... you're probably going to die a lot.
Also honorable mention, I wouldn't be surprised if core Ogre Magi armlet was decent.
Sorry I mentioned INT heroes but it's kinda the same topic in my opinion.
What about PA? She regens a ton through attaching, especially with phantom strike giving 25% ls now. She has high evasion so toggling is viable, and it basically doubles her hp early
Armlet Ench was legit with old Shard. The heal was way too much anyway, and you could toggle easier when the enemies are suffering from slo-mo attacks.
Fun fact about armlet slark, it’s how you counter Bloodseeker. The health bump from armlet puts you just over the thirst threshold.