The resurgence of Broodmother at The International 11

Broodmother was supposed to be a dead hero. A quick look at the community statistics on Dotabuff reveals that her win rate is one of the worst in the game: ~44%. On top of that, we’ve seen almost no Broodmothers this season in professional tournaments. Everyone considered her to be an awful pick.

In pubs, the spider is picked in only 1% of the games, but at The International 11, she was picked quite a few times and many teams were successful while playing this strange hero. The question is: why?

Broodmother’s strengths

Broodmother is not the same hero she was several months ago. The last few patches buffed her significantly, making her movement speed and health regeneration really strong.

In particular, her minimum movement speed bonus was increased by 50% thanks to the Spin Web buff. This means that it’s no longer easy to trap the spider and kill her with just one or two heroes. You now need to dedicate serious resources to stop Broodmother from destroying your tier 1 towers and stealing your jungle farm.

The base movement speed of this hero was also buffed by 5. And after level 15, the little spiderlings get a massive HP bonus. They practically more than double their life, reaching 250 HP. This makes them unkillable by most support heroes, which in turn shapes the way in which team fights are won.

If you play against a Broodmother as a support in an area full of webs, your life will be hell. You need to constantly get protection from your cores and they themselves need AoE abilities. Otherwise, it will take forever to kill the spiderlings.

Broodmother’s Spawn Spiderlings ability now deals 260/340/420 damage and can be buffed by the level 10 talent by 80 damage. So every 9 seconds (at level 1), a 340 nuke is ready to kill a target and spawn some spiders.

Broodmother can use her Silken Bola to guarantee that her target is slowed down by 55% (at level 4) and will miss 55% of the time. On top of that, the target takes 160 impact damage and 9 more magic damage per attack from every source. This means that if you have 10 spiderlings, they will deal +90 damage per attack.

The duration of the spell is 6s and the cooldown is 12s, so it’s not difficult to imagine why a Broodmother can no longer be dealt with after a certain point in the game, unless you bring in multiple heroes. Thanks to her abilities, this is the perfect space creator for your late-game carry.

Header: Valve Corporation