T3 Healbane Upgrade (Melee anti-heal): Banestrike

[Rosgath]

Every playstyle currently has a way to apply Anti-heal, except melee builds. I thought that this seemed like an awful gap and decided that, since a lot of people seem to want an upgrade to Healbane, a melee anti-heal item seemed like the right way to go for such an upgrade.

So here it is:



I will be clear that the Immunity to stuns is exclusive to stun effects. It's mostly there to help with landing an extra Heavy melee without fear of getting parried, but it does have some niche bonuses like granting immunity to things like Abram's Charge or Crushing Fists' 6 stack stun effect, or even Knockdown. It's a VERY brief window (less than half the duration of Unstoppable) so I think it's OK. It may need to be shortened, but I wanted it to be long enough that someone who buys it could actually respond in time to getting it and use it to force a Heavy Melee if they wanted to.

 

[Rosgath]

I considered Another version that will help it stand out a bit more from other sources of Anti-heal. This version makes it much stronger Anti-heal, but it takes some time to build up. It loses the melee specific benefit when an enemy hero dies, but it gains more anti-heal

 

[Minwu]

if your build has torment pulse, that item can already apply healbane on every tick. there's a couple other ways to slot bonus spirit damage into a melee build. spirit strike can also proc healbane, just on a bit of a cooldown. that's all to say it's already a very versatile way to apply healing reduction.

 

[Rosgath]

if your build has torment pulse, that item can already apply healbane on every tick. there's a couple other ways to slot bonus spirit damage into a melee build. spirit strike can also proc healbane, just on a bit of a cooldown. that's all to say it's already a very versatile way to apply healing reduction.

I'm not saying that there aren't anti-heal options available to melee heroes, I'm saying that there are no Anti-heal themed items designed for melee heroes. Melee is something of a "sub-category" of items, but it does have a lot of options. Spirit Snatch provides Spirit resist reduction, Lifestrike provides Lifesteal for melee, and Crushing fists provides raw melee damage and Bullet resist reduction. Those 3 are core components of what make most builds actually work, but one of the things that melee builds lack is a dedicated source of Anti-heal that isn't something jerry rigged to work into their build (like the combo you mentioned).

Spirit and gun heroes already both have multiple anti-heal options, but there aren't any melee oriented items which is why I worked up Banestrike.

Also, Healbane would be nice to have an upgrade since it's kinda... meh right now.