why did PA become bad anyways? Wasn't she on the cusp of being good like 2 patches ago?
I think really just as patches went on, and more heroes came out of the woodwork, her one-dimensonal-ness really makes her weak. There's plenty of items for magic stuff these days, and heroes that do that are in power right now, which of course makes her weaker, since magic damage just blows her up and doesn't care about her evasion.
It doesn't help matters either that BKB blocks her active spells either, meaning she has no way to get in unless her teammates are near the enemy, and even then, she can't get the extra attack speed to supplement the crits.
The idea of having attack effects on Dagger is good, but of course BKB cancels it out. Ranged bashing is nice, but of course BKB takes care of it. At first I thought Haly's idea of having her attack applied on Dagger would be too ridiculous, but thinking about it, if it were made to go through BKB and didn't have the pure damage, I think it would be necessary, and even then I'm unsure if it would be enough.