The newest Dota 2 patch, 7.36, is more than everyone expected. After the massive changes made to the map last year, IceFrog decided to greatly enhance the game’s heroes by giving them two additional characteristics. One is the innate ability and the other is the facet.
These two characteristics dramatically change some of the heroes. And on top of that, the patch also comes with numerous buffs and nerfs. You’d need several hours just to read the notes. In this article, you’ll find a quick summary with some impressions.
Innate Ability
Valve
This ability means that heroes start with one ability, even if it’s a passive one, and can have two abilities in total at level 1. That changes the gameplay dramatically.
Take Templar Assassin, for instance. She now has her Psy Blades as her innate ability, and her natural attack range was buffed from 200 to 250. Because of this change, you can now skip Psy Blades at level 1 and just focus on maximizing Refraction and Meld. By the time you’re level 9, you can have both of these abilities maximized and a point in Psionic Trap.
No wonder that TA’s win rate increased by more than 8% almost instantly. But that’s not all. The hero’s facets and ability reworks give her even more power.
Hero Facets
Facets allow players to further customize and enhance their heroes based on the match-up. Some heroes will always pick a certain facet because it is much stronger than the alternative.
You can think of facets as level 1 talents, that you get to unlock without using a skill point. They’re pretty cool and can help significantly. In TA’s case, one of the facets gives her one point in her number of damage instances every time her Refraction loses a defensive shield.
Previously, it was quite difficult to do anything after the bonus damage instances were consumed. But now you have a lot more instances than before each time you cast Refraction and get hit by your enemies. This is particularly valuable when farming, because neutral creeps will hit you a lot.
Overall Changes
A lot of the previously overpowered heroes were nerfed. We’ve also seen some important buffs, but for the most part, Dota 2 patch 7.36 is all about nerfing the most picked heroes.
Unfortunately for Tinker, Morphling, Pangolier, Bristleback, Viper, Death Prophet, Lifestealer, and Anti-Mage players, their heroes were hit pretty hard. And they are not the only ones. This patch made dozens of casualties, something that will definitely change the meta.
There are very few item changes. Most of them don’t matter. But in some cases, a useful item might cost 100 – 200 gold more than before.
Header: Valve
