As they had promised, the devs from the Dota 2 team have been releasing timely updates in preparation for The International 2018. The latest update released yesterday focuses more on the 2-1-2 lanings but has nerfed many strong laners. Let’s go through the biggest and most impactful changes.
Item Changes in the Update
Right away, the most notable change in the update is the cooldown reduction on Hand of Midas. Hand of Midas was so bad two patches ago that even Invoker players weren’t buying the item. But, now with another 5-second cooldown reduction, Midas will very probably make it’s way back into pro games. Another major item change is a huge nerf to Aeon disk, adding 25 seconds to its downtime. This update also brings minor nerfs to Maelstrom and Orb of Venom, and a small buff to Echo Saber.
Hero Changes
Moving on to the heroes, as you might’ve expected, Io and Nightstalker have been nerfed heavily yet again, similar to the previous update. Io now has a channeling time instead of cast delay on Relocate. This change is going to make positioning on the hero quite a bit tougher. As for Nightstalker, his Void will only do half its damage during the daytime. Basically, Nightstalker will only be stalking at night. This is a considerable nerf to his lane phase.
The nerfs don’t end there, though. Basically, this update has nerfed pretty much every hero that was picked in pro games.
Now that we have the “pub cancer” out of the way, here are some buffed heroes that you might be happy to see! Alchemist has had his “Greevil’s Greed” passive buffedo nce again. Players will be able to collect map-wide gold faster than ever. Invoker has also received minor buffs to his talent tree, making him more viable in pub games. The update brings yet another buff for Riki as well. You can read the complete and more detailed patch notes here for a breakdown of all of the specifics.
Overall, your pubs should be fairly safe now, unless you’re against an Axe-Skywrath lineup. Of course, Axe is still untouched so his battle hunger is still annoying. But the old pub-famous heroes are getting buffed slowly with every patch that comes. We can remain hopeful that pub games will soon become bearable once again!
Published: Jun 26, 2018 01:33 pm