Fixing that UD have no access to regen is precisely what Blizzard cited as their reason for adding the dagger. All four races have a loose symmetry at Tier 1- heroes with summons to tank while creeping, heavy armor normal damage melee units, medium armor piercing damage ranged units and a source of both HP and Mana regeneration outside combat. Except UD. UD has no HP or Mana regen, unlike moon wells, clarities, scrolls of regen, healing salves, etc.
If Blizzard wanted to preserve this conspicuous hole in UD’s gameplay, they wouldn’t have added the dagger. But besides the fact that they did, plenty of pro players and people who actually understand the game design have pointed out the many flaws this has introduced. Notably, the lack of regen has utterly killed hero diversity in UD, leaving them reliant on death knight. That’s actually a twofold issue which blizzard only half identified in their balance patch explanations- DK is both the only source of healing for the regenless T1 of UD, and also an absolutely necessary speed buff for their slow units. Perhaps unknowingly, the change to necros actually help address this latter fact, since one of UD’s issues was that only frost nova served to help create a mobility differential with other races, whereas orc have scroll of speed, endurance aura, hex, ensnare, war stomp, bloodlust, stasis wards, orb of lightning, wind walk, purge- (NE and HU have their own skills like slow and slow poison). UD have both a glut of 270 ms units and only frost nova, unholy aura, impale, sleep, web, cripple and frost wyrm slow to make that up. Given the previous awful access to wyrms, cripple, impale, sleep- UD was left with just exceptionally good anti-air mobility but terrible anti-ground mobility. And thus forced to go DK-Lich every game
Blizzard identified the former as a flaw and want to rectify it. They’re right to do so. The game isn’t made better by DK being mandatory. Regen on blight doesn’t fix this in any way or form- every race already has regen on organic units. If anything, UD spends far more time off blight and has worse regen than other races overall.
If Blizzard wants to fix the access to regen for UD, then the dagger is a good starting point, but perhaps not a good solution.
To expand on my idea above, if they really wanted to go oddball, and idea might be something like this:
New Item: Grim Ward - 125 Gold
- 2 Charges, 400 cast range, 600 aoe
- Turns a corpse into a fetish ward that rejuvenates nearby units
- Regenerates 150 hp and 75 mana over 15 seconds to nearby units
- Ward has 1 hp and can be destroyed or stolen
Thus it could be used while in the middle of creeping, much like rod of necromancy, but you’d have to remain parked near the ward while in use unlike scroll / clarity- and in combat it could have a minor impact, but easily quickly destroyed by any hit
Play around with the numbers. But my main point is, burning through both rod and dagger charges just to restore 100 hp at a time is very inefficient at healing outside combat, restrictive on demand and doesn’t solve UD’s mana issues.