Morphling

Morphling is one of those heroes that has always existed in a very specific category—high skill ceiling, farm dependent, and absolutely terrifying when the conditions are right. The current patch gave him a completely new innate ability that changes how you think about attribute shift more fundamentally than before. Strength now provides bonus cast range and slow resistance. Agility now provides bonus attack range and movement speed.

And critically—these bonuses persist even while Morphling is morphed into another hero. What does this mean in practice? It means every point of agility Morphling has stacked before using Morph on the enemy hero, carrying additional attack range and movement speed bonuses into the Morph form.

A Morphling who stacked agility all game and then Morphs into a high-damage strength hero has the strength hero's abilities PLUS the movement speed and attack range bonus from all his banked agility. The interaction makes the decision of when to shift attributes and what ratio to maintain before using Morph significantly more tactically meaningful than it ever was before.

Valve also specifically fixed Morphling bugs in the follow-up patch, which confirms the hero was receiving attention and is being maintained for competitive play. The framing you gave is exactly right—he is strong when he has farm, and the keyword is "when." The current meta is explicitly a laning patch that rewards heroes who hit their power spike at 15-20 minutes rather than passive farmers who scale late. Morphling is not a hero who peaks at 15-20 minutes.

He is a hero who peaks at 25-30 minutes when Attribute Shift is fully maxed, his agility is enormous, and Waveform plus Adaptive Strike plus Morph form abilities create a combination the enemy team has no reliable way to calculate damage-wise before they are already dead.

He is disgusting in lineups with heroes who have strong active abilities he can steal through Morph—Lifestealer's Rage, Spectre's Haunt, and Slark's Dark Pact—because Morphling copying an enemy hero with a powerful kit and then using their own abilities against their team simultaneously is one of the most demoralizing experiences a Dota 2 player can have in any ranked game.

He thrives in drafts where the enemy team has no reliable way to burst him down before he can shift to strength and outheal the incoming damage—because maximum attribute shift speed at level four can rapidly move stats between pools faster than most burst combos can land their second spell, which means a Morphling who reads the initiation and immediately shifts to strength survives burst that would kill any other carry in the game at equivalent HP.

He pairs beautifully with heroes that can buy him time to shift and respond—Bane, Dazzle, Abaddon—heroes that interrupt the enemy initiation sequence or keep him alive through the vulnerable moment between taking burst damage and having enough strength to outlive it.

Avoid picking him into lineups with extremely fast kill speed that eliminate him before he can respond with any attribute shift at all—Shadow Demon's instant-kill chain, Phantom Assassin with a lucky crit before he can react—because even maximum Attribute Shift speed has a reaction window, and some kill patterns close faster than human reaction time allows.

Also feels genuinely terrible in the current laning patch meta when he is against an aggressive support plus carry duo that identifies his fragile early game and dives him repeatedly before he hits level eight, where Attribute Shift starts providing meaningful survivability.