DOTA 2

Julian the Apostate_sl said:

The mechanics of how different abilities and items work together are so arbitrary and maddening.

Eg. Tusk snowball saves allies from duel but not lasso.

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Tusk snowball makes people invulnerable, Lasso is just a stun. If you stun LC oviously the duel still goes, if you make the target invulnerable(snowball but also SD disruption, OD banish, enemy eul and such) then well, it won't die.

There's definitely a fuckton of weird mechanics, but not this one unless I misunderstand what you're saying. Tusk snowball is actually pretty fucking good nowadays since you can click someone to get them inside even if they themselves are stunned/disabled.

Well there's SD's Disruption, longer range, creates illusions, can be used offensively and doesn't force you to move into a weird direction after using it. I mean for all intents if your goal is to use it defensively, SD is a fuckton better. Offensively though Tusk's snowball has a lot of cool stuff, and the hero himself is pretty good. Especially the sigil, shit's WAY fucking good. Absolutely ruins melee carries days with all the slowing.

But eh, more tusk isn't a bad thing, hero is never played anyway. Think he has some pretty cool skills now even if very specific, but good for early ganks and shit as a 4, snowball with like a low range strong hero like venge, nyx, tree and so on, cool roams.

Cybsled_sl said:

Only downside to using that strat in pro games is all the heroes are clustered after the snowball ends, which would be very bad if the other team picked heroes that absolutely destroyed grouped heroes.

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Well as I said, you're also forced to go forward. If say your carry who's on high ground hitting T3 tower eats an arrow, SD just disrupt then guy runs out. If you have tuskar instead well sure you can snowball, but you're snowballing into the fucking base. And yeah, grouped together, so you probably end up in the middle of nyx impale or some such. So defensively it's pretty awful, it's mostly an initiation/ganking tool that happens to be usable defensively sometimes. The early snowball ganks are strong though, if you start snowballing while smoked with like any stunner, guy's pretty much fucking dead.

Tenks_sl said:

Hey guys I'm back on the hype train for TI. Can anyone give me a rundown about new heroes I can expect to see and any meta shifts? Is it still running tri lanes?

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To add on what Zaphid said, a new patch just hit like last week, so for now a lot of teams are still experimenting changes and shit. It'll stabilize in another month or so.

Current trends aren't too different than they used to be, as trends tend to be fairly cyclical. There's a come back of Dark seer for example, partly due to Sand King gaining a lot of attention due to his mechanics fixes letting him jungle with sand storm. For like 2.5years sand storm would not hit neutrals because they didn't want to code the "run away" mechanics on neutrals, now it's in so he can actually get a 10mins blink dagger off jungle creeps alone, which is obviously insanely fucking good. Invoker is pretty dominant again too, even though most people pick exort while the buffs were for wex, less strong mids against him so he does fine.

Defensive supports have become common again, with Shadow Demon, Treant and Dazzle being very common picks(dazzle was buffed quite a lot). As a result, AA became a common pick since he was buffed and hard counters defensive supports and heals. Skeleton King is actually played nowadays, mostly as a support but also as a carry, his ultimate is really good. Mirana is probably the strongest hero this past couple of versions, she was buffed a lot and she has replaced Windrunner as the "midgame with lategame potential semicarry utility suppport teamfighting do everything" hero. The second big new name is Centaur, who has become the perfect offlane hero, very tanky, can actually kill supports if they're being too cocky, very strong ultimate, only needs blink dagger to start playing, can jungle catch up or push lanes fast, can actually carry lategame if he gets farm.

Rhasta made a pretty strong come back with Lycan too, for push strats, as Necrobooks were made immune to Midas(but at the same time they now feed an insane amount of gold, like 200g each for lvl 3 necro which is a ridiculous amount if you don't micro them properly), but Sandking/Darkseer come back has dampened that quite a bit since both of them can easily wipe a team that's 15k gold ahead when they're pushing the base. Bat Rider still top pick/ban even though he's been nerfed a bit.

CheckdatDota: Heroesand filter for 6.81 to see trends.

Oh and forgot Ember Spirit, fuck him.

That too yeah, but the Sand King jungling change is the big aspect for him. Being able to farm a blink in early game while not stealing xp/gold from your other cores, with the meta generally being 2-3cores heavy already, that's a pretty big deal. Also gets xp from it obviously, so that's good since SK is very level dependant early game.

And while I wrote a bunch of shit, I still forgot a bunch of other shit. Ember Spirit high ban rate, really annoying hero. Naga Siren is still fairly high on pick/ban even though she was nerfed, she's played as a carry atm mostly(she has a period of time being picked as a support instead). Doom is fairly common pick. Axe picked quite a lot compared to before, lots of buffs on him make him very interesting to play. Both often played as offlaners, hard to kill and can go jungle if the lane is really fucked.

If you haven't watched in a while, a big change they made a while ago was swapping the easy camp with the pull camp, so now the pull camp is the easy camp, making it much harder to control the lane and have the supports farm off double pulls and shit. Also xp is now shared with everyone around neutrals, regardless of who gets the last hit(gold still goes to last hit), so the offlaner can come into xp range from behind the camp and leech the xp. This made supports a lot more reliant on ganks and having the lane for themselves for a few minutes to catch up and jungle-able heroes like dark seer, axe, centaur, doom, sand king, bat rider and so on more prominent.

an accordion_sl said:

Haven't seen an ember since the patch, pros tend to overreact to minor balance nerfs.

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Yeah he fell off quite a bit, his win rate wasn't that high last patch anyway. Still see Ember+Elder Titan together though, combo is pretty brutal but people have kinda learned how to deal with him better and they counter pick him badly too.