This item lets AP mid start cloth armor vs AD mid and not feel bad about it. Who cares if the rest of the build path is meh.

Against this new meta of sending a **** ton of bruisers mid, this could be an equalizer.

Really looking forward to using this.

When fully stacked you get the value of a chain vest + blasting wand out of this item. For 1160 gold it is 1580 gold worth of stats with an additional +5 armor. Seems like it makes the incremental build to a zonya's much easier.

change the name because it sounds like plate of the warmogs

Well I didn't see the tooltip myself but from the way you describe it the stacks don't have a cooldown before they can build on themselves (like BT). Building a stack of 30 creep/neutral monster kills will be really easy if that's the case.

Additionally it doesn't mention anything about losing stacks on death.

Personally, I think encouraging Cloth Armor + Health Potions similarly encourages poor gameplay.

This helps turn the lane into a passive lane, similar to starting with a null magic mantle+pots or flask+pots. This turns it into a farm lane, and discourages offensive trades/fights.

This also goes against their philosophy for changing the top of the defensive mastery tree, which was the fact that easily obtained armor/MR discourages offensive lanes, and prevents skilled enemies from killing their opponent (when they should be beat out).

While it also provides a starting item choice option, it also would discourage the use of AD mids if there was too strong/too common of a counter to them... even if it just makes it less fun (a difficult to kill enemy that can't really fight you back with no offensive items).

I think that starting with a Cloth Armor shouldn't be the "go-to" against them, but purchasing a Cloth Armor and being able to make good use of it upon returning to the lane is a good option. You shouldn't simply assume that you will need defense against them, which would be the same as assuming you would always need a null magic mantle when seeing an enemy AP mid.

It's not even available for testing yet, and datamining has been known to have inaccuracies. Just thought I'd mention that.

I may grab it for Vladimir early.