My summary of this patch is that Valve & IceFrog have ambitiously tackled a lot of issues that were weighing the game down and overcame balance dilemmas that were previously cornering them.
To add, the game is more in-line with general player trends and interest: shorter games, more action-oriented, more empowerment
Overview Game Effects:
- The game won't be necessarily shorter, but the game's phases will:
-- specifically laning stage and mid-game are shortened to give more length to the late-game.
-- This aligns with how they've been scaling items to higher tiers of "late-game" for years now and you can see the timeline of how diversified late-game and late-late-game itemization has improved for all roles
Regarding The Map:
- New map and objectives breaks the mold of what was a stagnated Dota match: block camp pulls, destroy tier 1, own a portion of their jungle, gank for kills and contest wards and the game would stall eventually until you farmed enough for high-ground.
-- The new map is not only massively larger, it has a lot more walkable space and the jungle camps are more spread, emphasizing the value in ganking especially with the gold changes (less creep gold + little to no scaling & new early-game kill gold earnings)
-- The new objectives emphasize how they want the game to be played: active, always gunning for new stuff and dampening frustrating aspects of the old map: efficiency of warding/dewarding, starving enemy carries from farming and stagnant laning
-- With a larger map, vision through wards are not as efficient and can give some room for losing teams to catch up or contest objectives that are more feasible for them to reach and farm
-- To add, the larger map makes Roshan so much less polarizing to contest and commit to. It takes longer, provides less incentive and contesting Roshan gives your team high-ground advantage
In terms of Heroes & Items:
- Dota 2's change to BKB is masterfully done, it still retains its essence but no longer is as polarizing of its efficiency (previously either its too long or too short and heroes' abilities were balanced in mind of BKB and not BKB balanced in view of the abilities).
-- In addition, the BKB change removes annoyances of not quite knowing how long the BKB will last and thus when you should cast on the enemy carry. Now the consequence of casting a spell too early on a BKB'd enemy is more a gradient punishment than a hard-stop
-- The new hero attribute type is ground-breaking, it solved a lot of heroes who teetered on two identities and gave more power to those who had two playstyles (one being more viable than the other).
-- The Neutral Item Drop Changes confronted the thorny subject on RNG Neutral Drops and added more items that incentivize more team-fighting and ganks
-- For Heroes, there's a lot to say on the subject but the trend in continuing to give supports more emphasis on their value, maneuverability (Twin Gates) and push for pro-activity aligns with their goal of making the early-game less stagnant.
-- Items like Blood Grenade are great for line-ups to help overcome their inability to initiate or start fights and you can see how item-scaling is being applied to more and more items (e.g: Diffusal, Crimson Guard, etc.) to give more diversity and viability across the board
-- Heroes like Arc Warden are interesting experiments to provide two "versions" of the hero to align with his contrasting two playstyles (right-click versus caster)
-- Innate abilities are also interesting out-of-the-box thinking to help simplify heroes and stream-line their approach to each game or the current pacing of the gameplay
-- Stun reduction across the board is a power-creep adjustment but it also helps de-emphasize the need for BKB and making roaming and ganking not as guaranteed
These are just my immediate thoughts after spending 4.5 hours reading the notes. I couldn't cover everything so heads-up I might be wrong or off on my interpretation
You can check me out on https://t.co/D4nTGbG58i or see the full VOD of my patch reading on https://t.co/EpRUFDE0w7 (not recommended, I just wanted to see how much I could write/regurgitate in one sitting and see how this new tweet long thing works)