Force Staff

Force Staff and Glimmer Cape have identical buyer profiles in this dataset: eleven heroes rank each in the mid game, twelve in the late game, twenty-three in total, and both sit at the same point in the early-to-late spectrum. For two items that do completely different things, that is a strange coincidence — and probably not a coincidence at all.

Force Staff’s late-game list is led by Bounty Hunter, Lion, Winter Wyvern, Techies, Venomancer and Elder Titan, all ranking it first. Mid-game it appears second for Keeper of the Light and third for Silencer, Jakiro and Lion, with Outworld Devourer and Viper at fourth.

What that list has in common is fragility rather than role. These are not all supports — Viper and Outworld Devourer are cores — but they are all heroes whose contribution depends on being alive at a particular distance from a fight, and whose own abilities do nothing to maintain that distance. Force Staff is positioning bought as an item by heroes that cannot produce it themselves.

The two-stage split is worth reading as a budget question rather than a tactical one. At 2,200 gold from Staff of Wizardry and Fluffy Hat, it is cheap enough that a support can reach it mid-game but expensive enough that it competes with other things. Lion appears in both columns, third mid and first late, which suggests the item does not change in value so much as climb the list as cheaper obligations are discharged.

It also builds into Hurricane Pike, so some portion of the late-game picture is invisible here in the same way Blink Dagger’s is: a hero that upgrades stops reporting the base item.

The familiar caveat applies with particular force on an item like this. These ranks say when heroes buy Force Staff, not whether it saved them. An item whose entire purpose is avoiding a death that then does not happen is close to unmeasurable by this method.