Dota 2 players found a way to abuse Riki

According to Dotabuff, Riki has been the most successful Dota 2 hero of the last week. His win rate is off-the-charts: 59.3%. We rarely see such a spectacular win rate for a hero. Even when something is completely overpowered, people generally find ways to counter it. But Riki’s current abilities are beyond that.

The pick rate of this hero is above 16.5%, which suggests that a lot of people understand the implications of his toolkit. IceFrog noticed what the community is doing, which is why he nerfed Riki in a variety of ways in Dota 2 patch 7.33b. But the nerfs will likely prove to be insufficient.

That’s because the main problem is not that he does a bit too much damage with his abilities or that his debuffs last for too long. The way in which Smoke Screen works simply allows him to pick a target and kill it without anyone being able to interfere.

Riki’s strengths

On the surface, Riki is not that strong. His initial stats are abysmal and they don’t increase that much throughout the game. But the hero has a lot of qualities that more than compensate for that.

His movement speed is 315. But that’s without the 8% bonus that he gets from his level 15 talent. After you purchase a few more items, you can easily get to 450-500. This makes the hero very hard to catch. Furthermore, sentries are now a lot fewer than before while the map is much larger. So you can’t really have effective detection for Riki.

Riki’s power comes primarily from his ability to attack out of invisibility with a blink that can travel 600-900 units and slows the enemy by 100% for 0.4s. This is enough to give you the chance to then immediately cast Smoke Screen, which makes the enemy miss 30%-75% of attacks and become silenced for 6 seconds in a 375 area.

The ability can be cast every 20s-11s, which is more than enough to destroy any support hero. So as soon as Riki purchases a Diffusal Blade, an Orb of Venom, and a Blood Grenade, his targets can no longer escape the smoke and they get killed while being trapped inside of it.

Up until patch 7.33, the solution was to Force Staff your allies out of the smoke and place Sentry Wards near the fight location. But now you can’t place those wards with ease and you can no longer help anyone who’s trapped in Smoke Screen. This guarantees the kill every time.

Header: Dotabuff