User blog comment:Persephone04/Item Ideas Part I!!! Boots, boots, boots!!!/@comment-11616642-20140428215652/@comment-1330314-20140429031146

Isn't that a bit of a cop-out, though? What would be the point of coming up with custom items if you know right from the start that they all have severe problems that would prevent them from ever seeing use?

Don't get me wrong, it's good to express creativity and rock the boat, but if you genuinely attach value to these ideas, wouldn't you rather spend more time turning them into items that could actually work? It doesn't necessarily have to be a super-deep analysis of gold value and relative utility or the like, just a simple "what if boots had interesting unique effects?"

One thing you can immediately do to make the above items better is to reduce stat overload. Current Tier 2 boots only offer at most one additional stat in addition to mobility, whereas your boots offer lots of stats that most of the time aren't even relevant to the unique passive. Another way of improving your concepts would be to list the build path for these boots: how are they related to the current boots? Do they build off of them, or are they separate upgrades entirely? What components are used to build to these boots, and how expensive are the items in the end?

Another, and perhaps slightly more complicated, way of improving your items would be to turn all of these unique passives into actives, or at least split the current passives between a passive that enables the active (i.e. stack generation, timers, other bonuses, etc.) and the active itself. Right now there's no real choice or gameplay involved in the power expression of these items, other than doing stuff and getting a power spike at certain intervals. It'd be a lot better to get to choose when you want these effects to happen.

Yet another detail is the similarity between a lot of these effects. Romero's Respite and Boots of the Apocalypse may seem different because the zombies they summon spawn differently, but in the end you're just launching minions at something. You'd be better off just having one boot item with a zombie-throwing effect (or active, see above). Magician's Remnant looks like you could do something really cool with a mirror image and have it copy you to some extent, so it should remain separate. Holy Knight and Witching Hour could probably be combined into some sort of shield-granting item with its own unique functionality (one offers a so-so spell damage increase, the other is and  rolled into a pair of boots), Devil's Advocate needs a bit of a change: its multi-damage type effect is piddly and it has too many effects on the side, and as others said its interaction with wards isn't too good. What you could do instead is turn it into an active that stealths the user momentarily and enhances their next basic attack.