My thoughts on your highlights, in order:
Why? Why not just buff wards? Make the stock larger, decrease their price, increase cast range, ect. Way to make supports feel even more meaningless, assholes. And you just know that the sort of people who walk into mid lane without calling role are going to get mad at anyone else who uses the scan ability, especially supports
The only good thing is now you can go to ward jungle or Rosh and its not a coin flip whether you get killed or not. But like, that was an element of skill/game sense that's been removed so I *still* don't like this change.
Again, why? I loved the "nukes always deal X damage" rule. It was a simple and understandable fixed point that the balance of the game could revolve around. Nukers reach a peak where they can gank, right clickers constantly grow. Simple, why mess with it? Especially with what's ultimately going to be a tiny buff except on heroes like OD and Zues that don't NEED that buff even slightly.
Edit: missed this one. I... think that could be actually kinda cool? It lets you consciously rush certain peaks of power that your character has. Probably aimed at higher level players who have memorized how long it takes to level up each hero.
Withholding judgement. On one hand, heroes who buy blademail have a habit of getting a little painful to play later in the game and this will reduce that. On the other hand... BKB is an item that nerfs itself every time you use it, I don't know that the developers need to be nerfing it too. Also the poor noobs, how will they be able to keep straight what spell immunity actually
does?
Totally fucking necessary. I've watched rapier Arc Warden at higher level play and its boring cancer.
This is likely to reduce ES's constant need to farm blink dagger. They probably thought it was boring that a hero always has to rush one item. I play ES so this is great, but... why? ES is one of those heroes that everyone is perpetually fine with, I don't think anyone
wanted this buff. And it kinda ruins the feel of the hero as the deadliest melee creep in DoTA (well, second deadliest after Ursa).
Double edit: Force staff can now be upgraded with a dragon lance to push enemies away. WW now has a scepter upgrade that turns artic burn into a toggle. This isn't the upgrade she *needed*, and its not exactly worth buying, but... dragon lance + always on artic burn = WW being even more of an artillery platform than she was before. Winter's Curse had its cooldown reduced and flattened. This is great, curse used to be a better Black Hole but now its more of a utility ability and the cooldown reflects that.