About being usefull. I have seen people who was claiming goggles are usefull favor item, and i'm not saying they are completely useless. You can see mines with them, so they are usefull if you really want to see those mines !
Sure, but you've gotta admit I didn't add the Charm of Life to the list just because when you're oak on fortress mode on Cataract it's a fort busting tool with last stand, I listed items which have much, much broader usage than a gimmick like spotting reg's mines.
When I say some of those other items have a niche I mean things like the Cape of Plentiful Mana, which gives you 400% mana per second for 10 seconds on a 45 second cooldown... On Leviathan that's an AoE buff which gives more than 600 at level one and as the game goes on that can easily scale up to 1200 mana for 2-3 players at once. It has a legit niche on any flag with a mana regen flag and while that's currently only Leviathan and Exile, there will probably be more as more maps are added. That's not remotely comparable to the crazily narrow niche the goggles have.
On a sidenote though the goggles are actually fine if you assume eventually more stealth effects will be added to the game. I would wager that eventually a DG with limited stealth will be added or there will be items like invisbility potions/cloaks/etc. and there may be other unusual effects or abilities that make use of it like mines (you'll notice it still wasn't on my list because those don't exist yet though). /endtangent
I would like to see something like: additional passive +200 hp/mana and active 30s cooldown ability on goggles which sends 15 meters fake detonation signal which has 75% chance to detonate each mine.
Two problems here. First the passive 200 hp/mana is just balls-out insane. If it were just 200 health or 200 mana per second it would be the absolute best favor item and virutally no others would get any usage. 200 health per second is a full BotF every four seconds and 200 mps is just outright infinite mana, not to mention any % mana effects would modify it (it already works with the HoL, you can get a full mana bar back in about 3 seconds with a plenor crown).
Now that may have been a typo, maybe you meant 20, which is much more reasonable for health but still overpowered for mana, but I have a greater issue with your second use effect... It takes what's wrong about the goggles and then just amplifies it in hopes that it'll become good. It's only useful against one DG using one specific build, that's the whole problem with goggles in the first place.
Why do we have another 14 then ?
There's a few reasons. The most obvious one is that not all favor items are the same price. Some of them really are just meant to be filler items while you save up for the superior ones, take the Charm of Life for example, or the totem of war compared to the Ring of Divine Might. Because we all get capped out on favor points so quickly I think this is commonly overlooked. Not all cheap items are bad, but most are. The Anklets of Speed are good, but I would say that's because they're either too cheap or too strong.
Thematically cheap items sucking is fine, and if you excuse the poor quality of inexpensive items you cut down the list of favor items in need of improvement dramatically. It makes sense in every other game I've played, it's fine in this one. Rather than buff cheap items like the Coin Pouch or the Brilliant Bauble it make more sense to me to take what you like about those items and build new items with superior stats which cost more, especially with how badly favor points overflow after a week or two of play.
The second reason why some items are bad is because they were fine when created and game mechanics have changed. For example there used to be an invisibility cloak at the shop in beta. The goggles probably made more sense in that context.
The only items which truly and unjustifiably suck are the Furious Blade, Wings of the Seraphim and the Essence of Magic/Mards hammer, which are both just shitty versions of Blade of the Serpent.
