It is a luxury item. 3 mins cooldown makes in an inefficient early game buy.

Get treads, blade mail radiance early game.

Manta, Skadi mid game.

One of Abyssal/Nullifier/Blood throne for the last slot.

I usually get aghs as my sixth item followed by a refresher and then replace blade mail with bkb. It is very hard to beat a Spectre with double haunt, double shadow step and double bkb.

Some people split radiance into Nullifier/butterfly. But I prefer to keep the radiance.

Ask yourself “do I need any other items to be able to fight the entire enemy team at once?” if the answer to that is no, aghs is a good pickup, which shows the issue with it. Its just not enough impact to want to build over a core item like manta, not enough bulk to replace heart or skadi, no disable to help when you can actually hit someone with a haunt, no disable to replace skadi or basher, and almost no straight up damage to replace butterfly. As a spectre you don’t farm fast without kills, so you need to prioritize items that help killing a target and surviving after.

Old aghs when it was shadow step had a much more reasonable question to ask which was just “am I strong enough to want to be able to haunt to fights more often?” which needed a lot less to want.

Tldr, I want them to move the shadow step shadow dagger back to aghs. Something like “Grants haunt AND whenever a haunt illusion appears, a shadow dagger is cast on its target” would give the item a lot of use. Also it sounds cool as fuck for it to hit the entire team, would give the item much more reason to be bought.

Usually there’s a lot more items with more impact than aghs so i only buy it with the blessing upgrade. The only time i buy it earlier than usual is when opposing sniper/drow has linken and no one can break it from afar.

I think it’ll be prob be purchased earlier in games where they either have heros who don’t show often or a lot of blink daggers or where spec doesn’t rly need to do damage but giving full vision would be more beneficial for people who can go in for you.

Some hero like enigma who sits around waiting for his moment can be very disrupted by spec ahgs

Usually built it for those sneaky little bastard.

If the supports are smart enough to remain hidden at the start of the fight, and you need to kill the supports first, then buy aghs earlier. Otherwise, not much need.