Phantom Lancer's Identity

With the 7.37 patch came PL's current Innate, Illusory Armaments, turning his bonus attack damage from items/skills into base damage that his illusions can use.
Among the illusion carry heroes, PL would be the best divine rapier holder among them (in terms of damage output)
This did not seem to matter because there was still an issue of the illusions being too easy to counter, there were many in the likes of lion's shard that would simply just erase every illusion, this would even necessitate a fellow illusion carry, Chaos Knight, to have a facet that would prevent those easy responses from completely erasing the illusions.

Then comes 7.38, much of the easy illusion erasure is removed, PL gets a funny bug on Revenant's Brooch that even leads to a Dreamleague S25 win, then after that, back to nothing. All PL is left with is a new Lancelot Facet and the Aghanim's Scepter effect that provided an alternative poking play dynamic would be massively nerfed

It's been a long time since PL is regarded as a competent carry pick, pro play needed your picks to go faster, provide more impact. the games ask many from a core that PL simply cannot provide. This does not have to be in pro play, you can experience even in lower skill pubs. Mediocre laning phase, middling farming speed, needs too much to do too little. Phantom Lancer's Identity in being a singular horde is still there but nowadays less so of a horde and more of an annoying cloud of mosquitoes you can just swat and spray away.

Looking forward hoping for a patch that does let PL have a better presence in the meta, I will speculate what that would look like. Personally, There are 3 directions that could be taken.

• IMPROVED LANING KILL THREAT. This is usually achieved through having stuns but that would be a strange addition to PL's kit. A close enough addition would be a >50% slow on Q that would contribute on locking down enemies. This has been applied to Zeus jump and Dawnbreaker's hammer throw and has since been removed due to the amount of impact it would have. PL having an effect like this would let him snowball to a decent midgame while being able to shut down some offlanes
• STRONGER EARLY POWERSPIKES. Spectre used to have the same issue of being ineffective in lategame while also not providing anything early game. A recent change to her has been making her a constant global threat with an ult on a relatively quick cooldown compared to haunt. She still has a relatively weak lvl 1-3 laning but come lvl6 and above, spectre can become an instant +1 to fights and start the snowball from there. Although PL cant be a global threat, we can copy the idea of letting PL provide more to the team through a powerful lvl 6 kill threat. I dont have many ideas on how this could be done but something I've thought about is giving his R an active ability that when casted on a target enemy, PL and every illusion he has would reactivate the current level of Phantom Rush and dash to the target enemy to attack them for around 10%(?) more damage for a duration.
• COMEBACK MECHANIC+BETTER LATEGAME. As it is, PL finds trouble getting back into a game after a lost lane. Letting him come back can come from multiple directions whether it be, For PL specifically, there's a difficult dilemma in coming back to a game since he's not known for having a big gamechanging ult like FV or a faster farming system like Naga. A more definitive direction is to simply provide PL a better lategame. Give PL better talents that help with dealing with his counters, along the sorts of 15-20%(?) Magic resistance on level 20. Make it so the enemy team needs 2 counters that scale to lategame to even stand a chance against a PL knocking on your HG. It would be a niche pick because there'd still be a mediocre early-midgame but at least make it so that if PL gets to lategame unhampered, they can simply be an undeniable carry that requires a response on every turn.

some changes suggested are definitely radical, even OP, but this is all just a call for change since PL is in dire need of an improvement to even be nearly enjoyable to play

got better, much more refined ideas? maybe even disagree with the proposed direction to play and have something else you want to suggest? lemme hear about it here