Dota 2 bug causes Iron Talon to affect non-neutral creeps

The Iron Talon is one of the most useful tier-one neutral items as a farming tool. Thanks to a bug discovered by a Dota 2 player today, however, it might be useful even later into the game.
The item has an active ability aptly named Chop, which removes a percentage of current health from non-player units. Its main use is on big neutral creeps when heroes are weaker early on, but it’s quickly replaced by more useful neutral items as the game wears on.
The item was recently buffed in Patch 7.25, allowing it to affect Ancient creeps. But it’s also caused it to have an unintentional side effect on other units.
Several player-controlled units and summons in the game, like Brewmaster’s Primal Split units and Lone Druid’s Spirit Bear, are classified as ancient-creep heroes. Since there are skills such as Frostbite and Sacred Arrow that work differently on creeps and heroes, giving these units the unique classification allows Valve and IceFrog to balance them on a case-by-case basis.
These two fringe cases now mean that Iron Talon works on these ancient-creep heroes. Since the damage is considered pure, it even goes directly through magic immunity and works with spell amplification, like Rubick’s Arcane Supremacy.
This affects four heroes—Brewmaster, Lone Druid, Visage, and Warlock—in particular, who have strong, beefy summons that are designed to be hard to kill, which Iron Talon bypasses right now.
Given how quickly Valve fixed the killstreak experience bug that was discovered by users, this more niche but potentially game-breaking exploit will likely be fixed soon. For the time being, this could be a support player’s time to strike back at the Spirit Bear with three times their net worth.