Dota 2 is a beautiful game that just got an extra coat of polish. Some important changes have been made. A few characters have been nerfed, a few characters slightly improved, but what makes this one of the most interesting balance changes and game alterations in some time is that it's added variety more than it's made any one way of playing viable over another. Here's what you need to know!
Aghanim’s Scepter
The most important change of the entire patch. It’s exciting to consider how this will change the way certain heroes are played.
Ags will unlock permanent Spirit Form on Keeper Of The Light, also causing his Illuminate blast to start healing. It will make Lich’s Ultimate have unlimited bounces, carrying on moving between heroes and creeps for as long as there are units for it to spread to, and it allows Abaddon’s Borrowed Time to take away 35% of damage dealt to allies and put it onto him, healing him in the process.
It’s tough to know how this will echo out into positional tactics. Abbadon, for instance, is regularly played as a straight support role and would find it tough to get enough gold for the Aghanims and the rest of the items necessary to really sustain properly in a later teamfight (say, a Heart Of Tarrasque).
Is this is going to make a serious change to how these characters are treated in early farming? Is this going to offer a different response to early successes over more traditional builds?
Randomisation
Axe’s Counter Helix and Legion Commander’s Moment of Courage now are weighted to prevent horrible streaks of good/bad luck through Pseudo Random Chance.
As a primer for the less initiated, Pseudo Random Chance means that there’s initially a low chance of an ability being triggered, missing a proc of either of these abilities increases the chance that they will happen the next time, resetting back to the base chance after it does. It’s still randomised, just fairer.
Chaos Knight has a 50% chance to summon an extra illusion when he uses Phantasm, which is a nice extra wrinkle to a character all about peaks and valleys of luck.
Brewmaster is guaranteed do a Drunken Brawler critical hit every 10 seconds without attacking and evade an attack every 10 seconds without being attacked
Unique Attack Modifiers
Now Huskar’s Burning Spears and Ursa’s Fury Swipes don’t prevent the effects of unique items from functioning.
For Ursa this is especially interesting because previously it necessitated a Vlad’s in order to solo-roshan. Can he do it now with just a Morbid Mask? We’ll see!
Will builds for both characters start including a Desolator in order to take down enemies even quicker? Will we start seeing more heroes lose their innate UAMs? This is some serious stuff!
Other Cool Things
Meepo is gone from Ability Draft, making the mode actually playable now. There were some other Bug Fixes regarding him, which are notable just for how broken his ultimate ability can make the game’s code.
When Vengeful Spirit is killed she inflicts a minus damage debuff on her killer and all enemies around her until she respawns. This is especially effective for her initiating a fight by swapping, purposefully dying to a crowd,then the rest of the team initiates on a weakened team. Though it’s not much of a Done-Thing, this would stop people building Bloodstone on her as it reduces her respawn timer.
You have to CTRL-Click to share wards now. Which, uh…
What Do You Think?
Is any of this vastly impacting how you play? Are you more interested in certain characters? Can you think of any interesting team combination from this? Let's hear them in the comments!
