General DiscussionMoon Shard

You don't like having permanent Strafe? I think there's more to it.

Its crazy when crit or bash type heroes gets it mid late game.

Night stalkers vision becomes insane from what I understand

Never actually got around to building one iirc

"permanent strafe"
strafe isn't 4k gold, doesn't use an item slot, and is available somewhere between lv 4 and 8 onwards unlike moon shard

"a lot of Strength carries just do so much more damage with a bit more attack speed"
so does evrey hero in the game. there's better dps items in most cases, unless you have really low attack speed and high attack damage. str heroes typically lack armour so something like armlet or AC would be better overall, offering extra damage output but also offering survivability.

"It's not the most cost effective thing around"
which is why few heroes get it as a core item, because other traits like survivability or cost-effectiveness or slot efficiency are more important.

It's winrate on dotabbuff for most heros is very high tho especially for its price , may be a sneaky good item.

Its 2x the attack speed of AC andro.

I think people are underrating this item

buy mask of madness for 1800 gold and get +100 AS

on slark its great with the vision and attack speed, but after some hp item first

equivalent to deso for attack speeders imo great if you can get away without building stats/tank

the armor debuff on ac plus the armor you get makes it better overall, and of course it costs more. I don't see a lot of heroes worth rushing moon shard over ac. Even tiny, probably benefits more from ac + aghs killing towers.

Doubt ac makes tiny kill towers faster he still doesn't attack fast with aghs ac and treads he just hits normal , the extra .65 as tho should increase dps a lot more then the negative armour debuff , I actaully wouldn't mind making both tiny scales so much with attack speed items.

I'll try to calculate it out. Tiny at 16 with full skills and 1 stats, with aghs and moon shard does 280 average dmg and 1.38 attacks per second. With ac instead of shard he does same base dmg but 1 attack a second. He gets 75% more dmg to buildings with aghs. Heroes only cause 50% dmg to buildings however. Then there's the armor reduction too, a t2 tower has 22 armor.

The master dmg forumla is all multiplicative, simplified for only what we need here it's: dmg x armor reduction x armor type modifier x dmg multipliers.

Moon shard dmg per hit:
280 dmg x 0.431 from 22 tower armor x 0.5 armor type reduction x 1.75 aghs increase = 105.6 per hit
1.38 hits per second = 145.73 dps to tower

AC dmg per hit:
280 x 0.495 from 17 armor with the ac reduction x 0.5 x 1.75 = 121.3
1 hit per second = 121.3 dps

Moonshard is roughly 20% more dmg

Let's try a 3rd tier tower that has 30 armor and see if ac helps more.

Moonshard hit
280 x 0.357 for 30 armor x 0.5 x 1.75 = 87.47 x 1.38 = 120.71 dps

AC hit
280 x 0.4 for 25 armor x 0.5 x 1.75 = 98 x 1 = 98 dps

Moonshard is roughly 23% more dmg

So you guys were right, moonshard is a lot more dps but only in a vacuum considering only tiny's damage. Remember the AC debuff will benefit your entire team while moonshard only helps tiny. If just one more person is hitting the tower I'll bet AC pulls even or way ahead depending on if that person is a support or well armed carry.

Also the difference is EHP on tiny is 3100 vs 5000 with those same items for the ac armor. Big difference. I still think I prefer AC then moonshard. AC is so overwhelmingly underrated by dota players, only ever built on recommended strength carries. It's so good for team fights.

Moonshard is an awesome 4th item though after treads, aghs, ac. Before I used to go manta (cus his illusions get the dmg from grow and aghs they hit towers really hard) or mjollnir just for attack speed. I think moon shard is a lot better and cheaper than both of those.

Well, my friend went aghs blink MoM moonshard on tiny.

He killed heroes in 2 or 3 seconds.

ofc u'll prefer AC to moon shard no question about it in 90% of cases for str carries. But moonshard as late game item isnt bad

AC->mjolnir/moon-shard->moon-shard for sven, slardar, wk, tiny, lifestealer definitely legit.

It costs 2.5 times more than mom and only gives +20 attack speed and night vision over it. No drawback though, but still pretty expensive to be one of your first core items. Late game it really shines though with potential +180 attack speed if you buy it twice.

About AC, if you're the main carry you could have someone else buy it (like an offlane bristleback or mid night stalker, etc), and normally you'll have mek/crimson and vlads auras to help with armour.

I just don't agree with having another hero buy it at all. For one it's a 10 armor difference. On a strength carry that's hard to make up. And then the chances of team also buying vlads to support you is quite low. On an agi carry that's fine since their innate armor is high enough.

does dotabuff track moonshard if it's consumed? if not then the wr is even higher, since if you are 7 slotting you probably win

I've found Moon Shard is pretty damn wonderful on Slardar.

Ac is better than moonshard but it's also decent amount more expensive so it's not quite apples to apples , next game I plAy tiny I going to try treads aghs into moon shard 9800 gold invested is too bad considering what those three items do for tiny. We'll see how it goes. One time I built a ac and a butterfly on him a few months back it was nice . The butterfly was bought at very end before final push so enemy had no mkb either I think that game I had aghs bot, ac , butterfly,bkb, manta. Between craggy procs evasion and bkb I was able to frontline the last team fight dishing out damage and surving the fight.