Dota 2 patch 7.33 general impressions

Dota 2 patch 7.33 is the perfect illustration of the saying “be careful what you wish for!”. For months, players have been complaining that the previous patch was too small and didn’t really change anything significant about the meta.

The community openly declared that the game was too static and too predictable. Valve wasn’t taking care of it enough and the player base was shrinking because of all the negligence.

But now we know why the previous Dota 2 patch was so insignificant. Valve’s Dota 2 team was working on the current patch and probably wanted to test everything thoroughly before going live with it. Despite their best efforts, we now know that a lot of things are broken. And it’s not just the bugs. It’s the heroes too.

Significant bugs

When you change everything at once, it’s impossible not to break anything. In programming, one of the core principles is to avoid doing this. You change one thing, you test the result, and then you decide whether to keep the change or not. Then you move on and change another thing.

Valve made hundreds of big changes to the game. There are so many of them that some have called patch 7.33 Dota 3. These changes, for the most part, are major. They don’t just tweak a few numbers. They radically change heroes and game mechanics.

Right now, for instance, a lot of people are reporting Roshan-related bugs. Apparently, the dragon can be tricked into doing all sorts of things that he shouldn’t do. Sometimes, players don’t even want to abuse a bug. They just run into it without knowing what will happen.

Each Dota 2 bug can be reported on Reddit, but it will take months to clean up the mess. There are simply too many things to report, from hero abilities, to items.

At first glance, we can clearly say that Dota 2 patch 7.33 should have been delayed until the end of the second DPC Major. That would have been ideal for everyone. However, Valve probably wanted to release it now because it knows that it will draw a lot more viewers.

And it’s hard not to agree with Gaben on this. When the audience senses that there is something spectacular to be seen, it naturally becomes more interested in the action.

With this patch, Valve distanced its product from LoL by at least a light-year. Dota 2 was complex before. A lot more complex than LoL. But now it is impossibly complex. Hopefully, new players will not get completely lost when trying to learn how the game works. But even for a veteran, it’s a bit difficult to keep track of everything.

Heroes

One of the biggest problems with Dota 2 patch 7.33 is that a lot of heroes feel broken, in the sense that they are completely overpowered. Just take Phantom Lancer for example, whose win rate went from 48% to 60% in a matter of days. How do you counter such a hero when Black King Bar is no longer the item it was a few weeks ago?

Another hero that feels unnaturally strong is Zeus. He used to be a pure mage, now he’s more of a right-clicker. And what he can do in the hands of a good player is absolutely terrifying. After the 30-minute mark, playing against Zeus is a lot more challenging than it should be.

There are all kinds of new abilities that were introduced and seem to change the dynamic of the games completely. Until recently, some heroes looked very hard to counter. Now, the entire strategy that’s built around them can be nullified with a simple ability.

Take Undying for example. His Tombstone can now shelter an ally for a long duration and save him even from powerful spells like Black Hole. This makes Enigma a lot harder to play.

Because of the huge amount of farm that’s available on the map, heroes like Muerta, Anti-Mage, and Terrorblade can grow much faster. This results in huge discrepancies between them and the rest of the heroes in the game. Because of this, strategies more often revolve around one or two cores that are helped to get overpowered asap.

What is strange about Dota 2 patch 7.33 is that despite the apparent huge imbalances that exist and can be exploited, the games seem to last much longer. We recently saw what happened in the playoffs of DreamLeague S19, where three out of the first five games lasted for one hour or more.

What used to be a rarity is now the new norm. Of course, we don’t have a large enough sample yet, but it’s starting to become likely that Dota 2 games will last much longer on the current patch than on the previous ones.

Header: Valve Corporation