Will Disruptor make a comeback in Dota 2 patch 7.32?

It’s been a long time since we last saw Disruptor being a highly contested hero in the Dota 2 meta. Over the last year or so, Disruptor has been rarely picked by professional teams. In pub games, he was picked in around 8% of the matches, which isn’t bad but it’s not that great either.

It seems that whenever they have a choice, teams prefer to opt for a support hero whose laning phase is a bit stronger. But now that IceFrog buffed the long-forgotten dinosaur rider, he may become a powerful hero of the new Dota 2 meta. The change is subtle, but it’s sufficient to trigger a change in attitude towards him by the community.

Disruptor’s strengths

Disruptor is similar to Kunkka, in the sense that it can bring a target back from afar and prevent it from escaping the battle. One of the most important mechanisms in Dota 2 is the one of disengagement. If you feel like the battle would not be favorable for you, you’ll usually try to dodge it. And that involves running away.

But you can’t run away from a Disruptor if his team has well-placed wards. And that’s because his Glimpse can be cast from a distance of 1800 units. That’s one blink distance and a half. For Dota 2, it’s enormous. Just consider the fact that the average movement speed of heroes during the early and mid portions of the game is 350.

A quick calculation will show you that you need to run for around 4-5 seconds to really get away from Disruptor. Quite often, you don’t manage to get far enough and he glimpses you into a really bad position.

Another strength of this hero is his ultimate, which deals high damage and silences for six seconds. Combined with Kinetic Field and possibly a Glimpse and a Thunder Strike, the damage taken by the target becomes enormous. And the cooldowns of all these abilities are quite low.

What buffed Disruptor in Dota 2 patch 7.32 were two things:

• Glimpse now deals 50 – 150/200/250/300 damage, based on the travel distance.
• The Spider Legs neutral item was removed.

These two changes greatly improve Disruptor’s ability to trap targets and kill them or at least assist in bringing them down. For a team that knows how to group up and harass the enemy heroes around the map, this option looks very strong at this point.

The TI11 qualifiers are just one week away. It will be interesting to see whether or not teams start abusing Disruptor the way they used to several years ago.

Header: Valve Corporation