Why players love Oracle in Dota 2 patch 7.33d

Oracle has been an incredibly useful support since day 1. The hero was introduced a decade ago and has seen numerous changes. At times he was broken, and sometimes he was a bit too weak to be considered a meta hero. But now he certainly is part of the meta.

At the community level, players pick Oracle in roughly 5% of the matches and have a huge success rate: 53%. But why is this hero so loved by support specialists and how does an Oracle contribute to a team’s success?

It seems that the higher a player’s MMR is, the more likely he is to succeed with Oracle. In the 5000+ MMR brackets, Oracle’s win rate is above 55%, which is spectacular because it’s comparable with the win rate of the most successful heroes in patch 7.33d.

Oracle’s strengths

Oracle’s greatest strength is his ultimate. This hero can keep an ally alive for 7s-10s using False Promise and in many cases, heal him enough to bring him back to full HP by the time the ultimate expires.

In many situations, a hero who is under the effect of Oracle’s ultimate will teleport back to base and hope that the healing he gets while sitting in his fountain will be enough to counteract all of the damage taken in the last 5-7 seconds.

False Promise gives every core hero the opportunity to jump into the fight without worrying about the consequences. Heroes like Spectre, Huskar, and Phantom Assassin love this kind of superpower because they’re incredibly good at dealing damage to the enemy team but not necessarily at surviving high amounts of damage.

But if you can do your own thing without getting killed for 10-15s, that is incredible.

Oracle’s laning phase tends to be really strong. Using Purifying Flames, this hero can simply destroy an enemy that has less than 500 HP left. Few abilities are as good for nuking as this one. At level 3, when Oracle is level 5, you can deal 270 damage instantly. And after just 2.5s, you can do it again.

Of course, the target will heal a little bit because of how the ability works. But the fact that you can deal 500 damage over 2.5s is astounding and should not be underevaluated.

These abilities, combined with Oracle’s magic immunity buff (for 5s!) and his Fortune’s End, which dispels, turn the hero into an unpredictable killing machine.

Header: Valve Corporation