Patron's Gift

[LoreKnight]

Patron's Gift would be Deadlock's equivalent to Aghanim's shard or Sceptre from DotA.
Functionally, Patron's Gift would be a reward from completing some sort of new neutral objective, similar to the Urn and Midboss. 1-2 heroes on the winning team would be granted Patron's Gift, allowing them to imbue one of their 4 abilities of choice with the Gift.
Depending on the ability imbued, it will gain a tailor-made bonus that alters or otherwise improves playstyles revolving around that ability, somewhat like a max AP upgrade. Most importantly, these are at least somewhat transformative changes, not just cooldown or damage buffs.

Here is just one possible example for every hero:

Infernal Resilience: Regeneration takes 15 seconds instead of 20 and also heals nearby allies for as much

Sticky Bomb: Can now be tossed as a projectile, being debuff-removed causes it to detonate early

Bashdown: Builds up additional melee damage the longer Billy is in the air after initially pressing the ability key

Gloom Bombs: Is now a charged ability, +1 charge

Hotel Guest: Allies can be targeted instead with self-cast, placing them in a comfy Hotel room where their cooldowns and health rapidly regenerate. Upon returning, they gain temporary unstoppability. There is an elevator at a conveniently close location upon entering, should they wish to leave early.

Eternal Night: +1 Targets, +50m range, -1,5m vision for victims

Kinetic Pulse: Now brings and affects friendly minions as well, granting them 2x the firerate bonus and provides an additional +25% movespeed to all affected allies

Spirit Snare: -1s arming time, being detonated with Charged Shot deals 50% of Charged Shot's damage in Spirit Snare's radius

Sleep Dagger: Applies a 0.3s stun on hit and pierces through all targets
Bounce Pad: Allies can now also perform the explosion on landing from a bounce, once per pad.

Afterburn: Afterburn spreads between enemies on contact

Air Drop: No longer disarms or applies -50% outgoing damage to carried allies

Frozen Shelter: Friendly objectives and full-health allies gain barrier equivalent to the healrate of Frozen Shelter while frozen. Barriers begin dissipating at the same rate 1 second after it ends.

Life Drain: No longer slows, damage to heal ratio increased from 80% to 100% against enemies and 150% on allies

Death Slam: Enemies connected by Death Slam are automatically hit by an instance of Flog

Spectral Wall: +100% Height, +4 wall segments

Sanguine Retreat: +1 recast per use

Traveler: Also grants +30 Spirit power and buffs T2 to apply to all allies in a 20m radius instead of only the Traveler target

Sand Blast: Also limits enemy's vision range to 15m during the duration, +1s duration

Rallying Charge: Paige can ping the map mid-charge, and the Charge will attempt to steer (at a set, slow rate) towards the direction of the ping

Time Wall: Ability grants barrier health to all allies who pass through, once per wall

Barrage: +25% projectiles, -25% duration

Storm Cloud: Lightning bolt is charged, +1 charge, 4s charge cooldown, resets charges on next Storm Cloud cast

Slice And Dice: Maintains momentum while airborne and resets airjump and dash limit

Audience Participation: Imbue the Copy with Patron's Gift.

Shocking Reanimation: Can accelerate the reanimation to activate twice as fast, but give back 25% less total health

Assassinate: Can overcharge over 2 additional seconds to gain bonus damage and ultimately pierce through walls up to a certain range for reduced damage

The Cube: Targets in the cube can slowly move (similar to ethereal shift), increased healrate spirit scaling from 0.14 to 0.24

Petrifying Bola: 10% of damage blocked by Petrify is instead dealt over 5 seconds once Petrify ends

Binding Word: Now cast at the ground, affecting up to 3 enemy heroes in its area. Enemies entering the area after it's been cast but before the trap is sprung are not affected.

Full Auto: Shares full firerate bonus, gives affected minions a 25% damage boost to their attacks, and shares T3's lifesteal

Crimson Slash: Deals additional damage to all enemies hit for each enemy hit at once, reduced bonus from non-heroes. Can heal from non-heroes at a reduced amount

 

[AleksiyFlek$$iy]

I agree that there's should be a way to improve or alter hero's gameplay. Your idea is great, but there are a few things to consider:

1. Completing an objective can be a good way to gain the reward. But if only a few participants can claim it, it would be unfair.
2. It would be definitely hard to make these changes to be equally useful to everyone.
3. Since the game lets you to play any hero with any "role", some changes can be irrelevant in some cases, especially for supporting abilities. I know this may seem like an exaggeration and there's multiple options, but still.

 

[LoreKnight]

Only a few participants receiving it is already similar to existing mechanics such as the Urn granting extra bonuses to the carrier. Additionally, this is loosely based off of the Aghanim's items from DotA 2, such as Aghanim's Shard, which is gained from destroying a neutral objective called the Torment Crystal. Only 1-2 players have received the shard from it throughout its iteration, which simply necessitated destroying it multiple times whenever it respawned or stealing the enemy's opposing torment crystal as well as your own.
Yes, it would be hard, and it wouldn't always suit every playstyle. That's why there's 4 options per hero, which I do see you recognize. If there's a legitimate and viable playstyle for a hero that none of the 4 imbues cater to, that's unfortunate and would likely require reworking or tweaking the bonus, of course. That's the whole catch with this concept is despite all my suggestions, I've still only done 25% of the brainstorming in this post alone, not to mention designing, placing, and balancing the objective(s) required to enable such an item.

Despite that, I consider it a net positive to the game's capacity for enabling player creativity in build and playstyle and worthwhile the effort. Valve's insistence on not only the Aghanim's Shard and Sceptre in DotA 2 alongside the facet system shows that they would supposedly agree.