You’re right: damage items are in a pretty good place right now. The only time I’ve ever complained about them was with with TB before the recent balance patch. I think most people will work with whatever works, so it is really only worth complaining about when one build is too far superior.
Right now the only damage item which is really bad is Stormcrown. There is a need for something to help CP junglers farm in the early game, and to give tanks (with no real damage built) add at least a little damage later. The current version is hobbled by its cool down, since a cool down of any length makes it slower and less reliable for farming and objectives. It’s not a dire problem, since most heroes (especially newer ones) have higher base damage or CP basic attacks baked in, but there are still heroes where it would be nice to have something which makes farming less painful, or to get a bit of reliable damage out of a captain build.
DE and BP probably need to be tweaked a bit to make them more useful to melee heroes. Maybe the stacks should fall off much more slowly for melee? The reality is that melee heroes simply can’t take very long building up stacks, but they might be able to do it if they could hold stacks while they disengage for 10 seconds and then hop back in. No melee damage dealers can stay on the front lines of a team fight for more than 5 or 10 seconds (tanks can, but not really damage-focused heroes), but there are several who can hop in and back out before they get focused too hard. Just giving melee heroes an extra 5 or 10 seconds before decay starts would help a lot.
Other than that, the cool down cap needs to go away or else every cooldown item needs to be reworked. Heroes that relied on their abilities over their basic attacks (like Skarf and Celeste) still do, and their basic attacks are still next to useless; the conditions that pushed them into maxing cooldown never changed. On the other hand, a ton of builds are fairly useless now because it’s so easy to hit redundant levels of cooldown. Part of why Stormcrown is a bad item now is because the types of heroes who benefit from it would also want other cooldown items, so it’s stats are wasted. Ideally, other stats would be important enough that going for a cooldown item would mean giving up something else. If mages were always stacking cooldown, then maybe CP wasn’t powerful enough?
Overall though, the damage items are in a really good place.
