The rumors were true: Dota 2 patch 7.33 is released

For the past few weeks, people have been speculating that around April 20, a massive Dota 2 patch will be released. For a while we thought it was a joke because Valve rarely releases big patches ahead of Dota Pro Circuit Majors. But as it turns out, it wasn’t.

Dota 2 patch 7.33 could have been called Dota 2 patch 8.00. An even more appropriate name would have been Dota 3. Because the changes are so numerous and so significant that the game is hardly recognizable.

An overview of the changes brought by Dota 2 patch 7.33

 

Those who took a one-week break from Dota 2 and have returned today will be completely shocked to find out that everything’s changed. The map is different, there are two Roshan pits now, numerous neutral camps have been added, the map is easy to traverse thanks to Outposts (which are practically teleporters now), and so on.

Most of the heroes have been changed a lot and some of the new abilities they have look completely broken. Right now, everyone is complaining about Zeus, who can be played as a right-clicker and will completely destroy any illusion-based hero.

The map is considerably bigger than before and it feels as though the game is much more fragmented. However, the heroes can move a lot faster and that compensates for the larger arena.

An overall nerf has been applied to disables. Every stun in the game is roughly 10-25% weaker than before. Combined with the status resistance, this pretty much negates more than half of their effectiveness. This means that strength-based heroes should consider skipping Black King Bar entirely and just become tankier instead.

The map now contains mini-bosses that spawn at the 20-minute mark. Killing them gives a lot of gold and an Aghanim’s Shard to the lowest networth hero on the team. They can be quite difficult to kill, but they’re worth the effort.

The Roshan changes are truly bizarre. The dragon now moves from top to bottom using the teleporters and it’s much harder for a team to stop the other team from killing him when he is on their side of the map. Up until patch 7.33, Roshan was the focal point of any major battle that decided the game. Now he feels a lot different.

More unusual changes

The runes and how they spawn have been changed. They now appear in cyclical order, which guarantees that at certain times, a specific power rune will spawn. This can offer a big advantage to the team that gets it.

There’s also a new rune called Shield Rune, which gives a barrier equal to half of the hero’s maximum HP and lasts for 75s. Imagine finding this on a Pudge with 3000 HP.

The number of creep camps is enormous. Apart from the ones that were there, 12 more were added. This means that heroes that can farm the jungle with ease will have a huge advantage. If someone on your team can push the lanes, you can just go from camp to camp and grow much faster.

You only need several minutes to get way ahead of everyone else in the early game. There are two Ancient camps on each side. Imagine playing with a Templar Assassin. As soon as you reach level 7, you can start farming them. But it’s probably a better idea to stack them and wait until level 10.

Item Changes

Lots of items have been added or removed from the game. For a lot of players, this change will require a significant amount of effort to adapt. Strategies in which the removed items played a big role are no longer viable. At the same time, all of the timings have changed.

At the highest level, players tend to know when their heroes are stronger than their opponents’. But after Dota 2 patch 7.33, nothing is clear anymore. The number of possibilities is endless and even the strongest teams will find themselves surprised.

Here are some of the most important items that were removed from the game:

• Flicker
• Witchbane
• Tome of Knowledge
• Hood of Defiance
• Wraith Pact

Here are some of the cool items that were added:

• Phylactery
• Harpoon
• Dispenser
• Pavise
• Cornucopia
• Diadem
• Blood Grenade

It’s definitely worth experimenting with all of these new items. Some of them are stronger than others. In particular, Blood Grenade is a great way of making sure that you don’t get killed during the laning phase without getting ganked. And even if you get ganked, it provides a pretty reliable way of escaping certain death.

When obtaining neutral items, the process is now a lot more elegant. Instead of getting an actual item, you get a Neutral Token and you get to choose one of the five items that were offered to your hero for each tier.

Header: Valve Corporation