7.03 and the Competitive Meta

Dota’s newest patch, 7.03, arrived without warning. Although it is a small patch, some of the mechanics changes could have drastic impacts on pubs and, even more significantly, on professional bouts.

Although 7.00 made unfathomably large changes to the game in one fell swoop — arguably reinventing nearly a fifth of Dota’s heroes and fundamentally altering gameplay to a degree unseen in a decade — we’ve since only seen minor patches that have largely entrenched the metagame rather than adjusting it.

Hero Changes: Nothing too Heroic

There aren’t that many serious hero changes in this patch. In fact, most of the balance read like a second cleaning after 7.02 failed to shuffle the meta (neither dropping a single popular hero below a 50% win rate or lifting a single unsuccessful hero up to 50%). Part of the issue leading into 7.02 seems to be that the Dota 2 team has always put more attention on the upper-bounds of play, balancing mechanics with professional gaming in mind.

With relatively fewer events on 7.01, maybe there was a blight of information with which to balance the game.

Exactly two-thirds of hero changes were based in talent shifts, a pattern familiar after the last couple of patches. A few heroes, such as Shadow Shaman and Earth Spirit, will handle noticeably differently after non-talent changes altered attack ranges, damage, movement speed, and mana costs.

There honestly isn’t a single hero change that immediately jumps out of these patch notes as fundamentally game-altering. You’ll notice a pattern putting greater emphasis on mobility and experience, with movement speed and experience talents largely taking buffs.

Those changes seem to come alongside an attempt to emphasize fights. Take Enchantress, a hero who was barely touched in the Kiev Major qualifiers and is nearly the bottom of public matchmaking popularity, as an example: her changes include a movement speed increase, helping her early game escape and roaming and talent changes which basically her team fight.

Her level 15 talent, which is picked less often in pubs but wins far more often, now heals at a much faster rate but ultimately heals less overall. Instead of using it to sustain farm or pushes, it’s most effective used to burst-heal through combat.

Most of the hero changes are minor adjustments with a similar tactic. Ember Spirit did take serious changes intended to give a right-click build more popularity, but it doesn’t look like the emphasis is enough. Instead, the hero will likely recede in popularity.

Mechanics Changes: The Meat and Potatoes

The big changes in this patch actually only take a few lines of text.

Ignore Monkey King (he’s a failure of hero balance and probably will not see frequent professional play). Starting at the second bullet, the pace of the game has been shifted so that the laning stage takes longer and the mid game is condensed. In essence, these changes should give supports more impact on the state of the game and make comebacks more difficult. If teams opt to get an advantage from kill gold before taking objectives, then getting a surge of gold as objectives quickly fall in the mid game (like 6.79 – 6.81b played), it would lead to a metagame that influenced teams to break out of the laning phase directly into regular fights.

The reduction in scan cooldown should increase the speed with which teams can rotate and smoke gank, even without vision (particularly in the early game when there’s little reason to save a scan). The disincentivization of taking tier one towers coupled with the added difficulty of knocking them out as a team should further inflate the importance of rotations and team fights.

The first major set of changes is a rescaling of experience, which used to let heroes pull ahead between levels 6 – 10 but reeled them back to let other catch up in the teens. That’s no longer the case: now, heroes will scale more slowly in the beginning but have faster leveling late on, meaning the first team to get cores to level 10 will see experience-based power spikes unlike recent patches.

That probably won’t impact your pubs, but it will probably hit pro games. The last time a major patch led to slow progress in the mid game, Newbee created the deathball strategy and upended years of strategic thinking from the world’s best players.

To offset that possibility, early-game objectives and gold have been reduced in value, and tower armor has been increased when pushed by many heroes. That should stop the return of ultimate deathball strategies, but leaves a huge opportunity for splitpushing in the mid game.

I wouldn’t be surprised if most teams decide the only way to take a tower is to do so with a solo splitpushing hero or to do so after a fight victory. The days slow-pushing down outer-tier towers may be coming to a close, or at least coming to a stall.

Not only does a split-push strategy allow for heavy pressure as heroes get their first talents and core items, but heroes able to push without teammates (Nature’s Prophet, Morphling, Broodmother and Meepo come to mind) will actually push through towers 3 – 6% faster than in recent patches. That’s less time to for opponents to react and coordinate. Additionally, hero bounties have been reduced, so the risk to splitpushing is less than it has been in a long time.

As an afterthought, some teams are going to try utilizing Alchemist because he should be much stronger relative to the average farming hero at the end of the laning phase. Unfortunately, his death penalty still factors in net worth, so shutting the hero down will still be relatively easy for coordinated teams. I expect some pro teams to swear by this hero in the weeks to come, but I also expect him to fail when wielded against top-tier opponents such as OG and EG.

by Ryan "Gorgon the Wonder Cow" Jurado. Ryan is a featured writer for joinDOTA, the Score, Dotabuff, and more. You can reach him on twitter.com/theWonderCow.