I've been reading up on Phantom Assassin and I am surprised that her winrate isn't higher than it is. I see her in almost every game and she is the most played hero of the month, not to mention that she is quickly gaining speed in the most played hero of all time list. I understand that a lot of the playtime she is getting is because of the Arcana and the Nemesis event, but I just don't understand how she is winning at such a poor rate.
The hero is incredibly frustrating to play against and can really only be harassed out of lane by early magical nuke spam. She is hard to gank without chainstuns due to her insane mobility with Phantom Strike, especially if the PA player is smart and uses Helm of the Dominator to position creeps as convenient blink escape routes. Even if you pressure her lane, she can retreat into the jungle with a Morbid Mask and still be a presence later in the game with very few items. And if you don't pressure her lane and let her farm, she will get that presence much earlier.
Coup de Grace causes her to innately scale ridiculously well with straight up damage, which is a stat found on several strong items, namely Black King Bar, which also happens to cover her greatest weakness, magical nukes. Not to mention that her great mobility, long-range farming ability and 1-point-wonder passive on top of her excellent damage scaling allows her to lane pretty much anywhere without massive issue. PA can go into the solo offlane role, the mid lane role and the safelane farmer role with relative ease if the player behind the wheel is knowledgeable of what such roles entail. Not to mention that she is able to have relative flexibility with her items. You can aim for the late game by allowing her to farm key items such as Midas or Battlefury, both of which she gains decent benefits from (AS from Midas is good for PA, the straight damage on BF is good for PA, in comparison to a hero like Morphling, who doesn't benefit in the same degree from the Midas AS, as that hero would rather have stats to shift around, making these "aim for the lategame" items more desirable on PA in comparison to a lot of other carries).
Alternatively, you could go for early stat items such as Drum of Endurance and Helm of the Dominator. With t2 boots, be it Phase or Treads, alongside a set of Drums, HotD and level 6, PA becomes a fighting force to be reckoned with and it allows her to actively participate in early/midgame teamfights. This alone makes her more desirable than a lot of other carries.
Obviously the hero is not without flaws, as she suffers heavily against BKB herself (Makes it impossible for her to stick on a target, as neither Stifling Dagger or Phantom Strike functions against a magic immune target) and she is at the end of the day, based on pseudo-random crit and evasion chance. Not to mention that her evasion passive can be completely negated by a 5400 gold item. I would like to point out though, that most carries will find themselves in an extremely poor situation if they rush MKB to deal with PA and when the enemy carries have to get another big item or two before being able to focus on the MKB, it allows PA to easily run away with the game.
The super high tier players/professionals also seem to deal with PA decently, which is what matters at the end of the day. Dota 2 is mainly balanced around the highest level of play. I do concede a fair amount of points regarding PA, but I still believe that her flexibility and excellent scaling is what currently allows her to stomp lower skilled pubs with ease. It is a hero you can pick and run away with the game with on your own, if you know what you're doing. I have a degree of an understanding that pubstomping heroes will always exist, but I think PA is on a different level than most of them and needs to be tuned, just a slight bit.
Well, we don't really actually know all that much about the actual composition of comets. They're not quite asteroids-aka big balls of rock or metal. They're sometimes described as big space snowballs, which while being a gross oversimplification is kinda close to the mark. But besides that, we didn't even know if we could even land on a comet until yesterday-there were worries that the probe would simply sink into the surface, or any other number of catastrophic events. Now that Philae's up and running, we're going to get so much stuff about what makes these things work.
Like Kay said, it was also practice for other things. The probe carried an experimental harpoon landing system. Basically you fire at the object and reel yourself in with it. I don't think it actually worked (I believe it failed to fire?) but it's an idea that's been suggested to use when landing on smaller bodies. Remember, shit like asteroids or comets have negligible gravity, so even if we can get into an orbit around one, that doesn't necessarily mean that landing is going to be easy (or even possible) with the aid of what little gravity there is. This is a system designed to land and attach probes (and maybe eventually spacecraft) in situations where you can't trust the object you're landing on to keep you stuck to itself.
