I have the same opinion. Passive abilities have the potential to be incredibly broken and yet they cannot be silenced or mana-drained, but only a handful of heroes have the ability to break, and a lot of those only through talents or aghs. The only option to apply break for heroes that don’t have it innately is through a 5.5k gold item that lasts for 4 seconds and only applies it after a successful hit, and you need to be a hero that makes good use of invisibility to buy it. Not at all a viable option to disable passive abilities a large amount of the time. And yet any patch where Bristle is allowed to steamroll the game you get people going “hurr just buy silver edge, the 4 seconds is surely all you need!”

I think if I had to design a new one, I’d agree it shouldn’t just be “spellcaster’s silver edge”. Most debuffs in the game only have one item associated with it so it should be an item designed with most heroes in mind with a good twist. Maybe it could be like a bottle of parasitic worms that applies the target and user with break for an equal amount of time like medallion debuff. Makes it more reliable than SE with a good amount of risk; of course, if the user has no passives it’d be a lot stronger so there could be the armor debuff and maybe a poison affect as well.