Techies was not any more useless before the rework than he is now. You still don't see him in pro games, and his winrate hasn't significantly increased. According to dotabuff he has 46% wr in divine+immortal. Sniper has 47%, and this hero has been very bad for years now. You can go mid with techies now, but you can go mid with many other heroes. In return you lose a hero that offers a much more unique playstyle. Now don't get me wrong, I hated old techies. But he was a unique addition to the game and offered a playstyle you couldn't get anywhere else. Now you can go mid and spam Q to farm and harrass? Amazing. Never been done before.
Yep, it was strictly done to remove old Techies.
Sniper has 47%, and this hero has been very bad for years now.
The main problem with Sniper is that most of his builds are slow to take off and he needs early-game items to style on enemies and snowball his way to victory, which has been negatively impacted by the current itemization shift towards building lategame items. You can still do Sniper with Boots+Wind Lace+Blades of Attack+MoM (fast MoM is good) with a Headshot-focused build (Get 1 rank of Q and max Headshot then Take Aim) and pulverize your opposition then build your way into perhaps Treads and definitely Diffusal Blade (2.5k gp for +55 dmg, +15% attack speed, a good slow, and a smidge of armor and mana is good value). After that you're looking at TP Boots (you need MS and these boots pay for themselves by letting you farm/roam and still TP in position whenever you want while saving you gold on scrolls - btw getting both TP boots and Treads is also decent value for the gold), Deso, BKB, Crystalis, or whatever (Skadi? Butterfly? Nullifier? Divine Rapier?). For ambushing enemies just drop Q (usually you want to hit them at the very edge of the AoE, with the AoE extending in the direction they need to flee in), hit MoM, and pulverize them with auto. If they are still alive when MoM runs out, immediately Q again for vision and ult. One of the important parts of this build is that
this is not a farming build. The goal is to go in hard and heavy and start ganking people fast to get hero kill gold and keep them from accumulating too much gold. I often used a Quelling Blade just to perform treecut ambushes. It was my 225 gp shadowblade. When ganking people, it is best to gank people
from the direction they normally need to flee in so they have a hard time escaping. Sealing escape routes is really big, but if you're fast enough and your damage is good enough you can just run at them, put up that shrapnel, and fire away. MoM can let you farm nicely in-between openings but you should
not start lazy farming when there are perfectly good victims to gank. Many times you should specifically gank their carry before he's remotely farmed (This is the benefit of the early MoM.) in order to wreck his exp and put him behind on items. That's how you start out-carrying with Sniper.
Dota always was fast paced, that is true. When I said they are making the heroes faster I literally meant that. Mostly having in mind movespeed increases across the board, or giving mobility to heroes that usually did not have it, like Zeus jump or Nightstalker flight, and new heroes generally having crazy mobility. Like MK, Marci, Pango. As a result the map gets smaller, split pushing is less effective and you get constant 4v4s while the carry tries to farm.
They also nerfed Phase Boots (
especially for ranged), massively nerfed the movespeed on Mask of Madness (from +30% to flat 20) in addition to making it silence the user, nerfed Sange & Yasha in several ways (much lower movespeed, no more bonus flat damage, no more attack slow proc, lower attack speed bonus), and pushed Drum of Endurance into more of a hard support item. As a result TP boots and Boots of Bearing are the premier movespeed items, but hey, at least there's naked wind lace now. They did make ridiculous blink daggers though, and the new emphasis on gap-closing moves is part of what fucks up Sniper. Honestly, raising movespeed for all heroes mostly has the effect of slightly raising convenience while slightly reducing the impact of distance and positioning. It also adversely affects those heroes who did
not get movespeed bonuses.
Even in the era of "farming for 30 minutes" matches were dynamic with crazy shit happening all the time. It's just your opinion that was boring. Carry was always the most popular role besides mid. So it's not like people hate farming. And the other 4 players weren't literally sitting in fountain waiting for the carry to farm up, they were doing their own thing. Besides, Dota always had crazy teamfights. But it also had more variety and strategy in how you approach the game.
Actually, what people liked was dominating people with farmed items. The actual process of farming was suffered as a necessary evil and it always made them buttmad that if they tried to farm for 30 minutes (which has always been a shit strategy) the game could already be lost by the time they finished farming. The problem was just that the 30 minute farm playstyle was shit and only worked because the enemy team was too retarded to capitalize on your team's weakness or gank farmers (ie. a low skill bracket strategy) and once you had your super items you were probably going to dominate (because the enemy team was too retarded to counter your hero either), but it really only took 1 guy who understands how to put the squeeze and snowball when the enemy team has a farmer to make 30 minute farm strategies implode.
Zeus gets a jump, to remove his only weakness.
Zeus's bigger weaknesses were BKB and Khadgar's Pipe of Insight, but the jump is indeed dumb. It removes positioning considerations from Zeus by letting him easily correct his position with a jump and it conveniently debuffs the nearest hero with massive movespeed and attack speed slows to make it even easier for him to gank or escape someone. That's just wrong. Makes me feel like I'd need to burn a BKB charge or a Lotus Orb to effectively gank Zeus if I don't have a silence or disable. They also raised Zeus's base MS from 295 to 315 and he has another +20 ms awaiting him as his level 10 talent. That's also messed up. The addition of invis-revealing to his lightning bolt is also something I'm not really on board with. It diminishes the point of invis wards and makes him a very effective de-warder without any real investment.
Windrunner can move and attack during her ult.
She could always do that. The only difference was that it was very easy to break ult if you weren't paying attention. Now you can switch targets and shit while retaining ult if you go back to your original target. Honestly, this wasn't a bad change.
Razor can also move and attack during his link.
Pretty sure he could always do that, ever since he got static link.
Slark ult is not invisibility anymore, you become completely untargetable.
Yeah that was disgusting. He's largely uninteractible during ult. All you have are AoE damage (which is less helpful because Slark regens up a storm while invis also) and AoE stuns (which are defeated by a timely Dark Pact, let alone BKB), so doing something about Slark during ult is mostly a question of whether you have a non-dispellable, BKB-piercing AoE ult.
The patch logs during the years are full of reduced cast points and turn rates.
True. That actually fucks a lot of the appeal of ganking someone from behind. The combination of Turn Rate + Cast Point made it very troublesome for someone to do a 180 turn and fire an ability at a ganker, and if they did they'd often have to do another 180 turn to flee.
Drow ult got changed from bonus agility to procs of bonus damage that ignore armor and evasion. You don't even need items, you will melt anyone with your ult.
Eh, old ult was more of a "lol I don't need items" thing. Between Precision aura and Marksmanship Drow was a pretty hard hitter with good attack speed with zero investment. The new Marksmanship giving bonus agi as a percentage of DR's current agi is pretty odd though, but the big convenience is the new Multishot giving Drow a free AoE ability when previously she had none.
Templar assassin gets stun at lvl 25, removing her only weakness (no CC).
I honestly don't give a fuck about that. A 1 second stun off of Meld at 25 is quite useful but level 25 is pretty late and nothing was stopping TA from building Orchid or whatever if she needs a CC, especially now that it's not even an int item. I'd sooner take issue with the level 15 talent that gives bigger psi blades or free 20% evasion as something that makes Templar easier to play.
You can't deny changes during the years are just giving heroes stuff they don't need, free damage, and making them more straightforward and easier to play. Coupled with the gold inflation and regen being a non-issue the game lost a lot of tactical/strategic depth.
Yeah this is all true. They also made Ethereal Blade stop being an agi item and shifted it over to an int item with spell damage amplification. That was a really bad call done primarily to make it even more convenient for int heroes to use it as a nuking item when old EBlade was more interesting, and they made Orchid stop being an int item to make it even more convenient for agi and str heroes to pick up. As for boosted base hero regen, that is not only a neat convenience in general, it also reduces the effect of harass, saves a good amount of gold on regen items, and makes the game more forgiving to people who carelessly waste mana and health. The downside to the boosted regen is that it makes it less effective to try to push enemies into a position of weakness, harass them out of lane, or adversely impact their gold with pressure on their health and mana bars.
Regardless of what others say blowing an entire team off the face of the earth in one giant explosion, actively making the game play like minesweeper more than dota and getting to buy time for your garbage carrys to actually play the game instead of being steamrolled 25 minutes in was FUN. It's not like there wasn't any counterplay, just buy wards/gem/bkb and have 1 (ONE) range hero. That's it, realistically that's all you'd need to counterplay Techies.
Now he's just another brool hero. Whoope. Can't wait until they start lobotomizing other heroes the community deem toxic. Who will be next? Puck? Invoker? PUDGE?
Yeah, range + gem was pretty much the bane of Techies' existence. If you had summons you could also use them to just trigger any land mines. BKB would still take damage from Land Mines and Suicide iirc (the one perk of mixed damage) until later patches where they removed the mixed damage (but Land Mines became physical). If you had aghs you could plant mines right at the land mine sign though, which would give unbreakable invisibility, and if you plant mines on ledges you won't have vision until it's too late, but people usually get wise to those stunts. And you could still use aghs to toss remote mines from a distance and Eul's with a Blink Dagger to set up stasis and other things. You weren't totally useless, but a simple gem did wreck a lot of the Land Mines playstyle. And that was before they did shit like give Zeus the ability to spot the invisible with his lightning bolts.
Deleting Techies is one of those signs that the developers really object to heroes that don't abide the meta. I don't think they'll go for Pudge next, he's too well-liked. I think they're mostly going to try to tune heroes deeper into certain intended metas, build patterns, and playstyles.
Pudge's OP right now, because it seems IceFrog is in a panic, and is trying to bring those TI 1/2/3 nostalgia crowd back. Dendi streaming Pudge mid almost non-stop. Even people like Miracle- have been forced to play Pudge carry. It's nuts.
People like to see Pudge hooks. It makes the stream-watching, esports-loving crowd happy. Trouble is, it doesn't make the game more fun to play.
My 2 cents? Orb effects not stacking in DotA 1, were the best mechanic that ever happened to the game. You had to choose. There was an unique gameplay element there. Now you can deal damage through the roof, and lifesteal at the same time.
Eh, I guess there's an argument to be had on the subject of lifesteal, but there was Skeleton King (Wraith King now) and later Vladimir's Offering to give heroes lifesteal without the orb effect, and then you had the likes of Naix and Brood with their own non-orb lifesteal. For the most part I'm not really convinced that the exclusivity of orbs was really necessary out of some form of balance consideration. It just limited item build combinations. At the end of the day orbs like Skadi and Deso weren't that necessary. S&Y (or just Sange) used to give you an attack slow anyway, deso was nice but there were plenty of ways to get your damage multipliers in, like Burize (now called Daedalus) or Butterfly, and Diffusal was probably the most mandatory orb for certain heroes, but the people using Diffusal probably used a Vlads alongside it anyway. Before vlads it was probably a bit uglier for them though, yeah.
Fucking Anti-Mage Diffusal can shave off all your mana in less than 5s.
Anti-Mage was always the kind of hero to shave off all your mana in 5 or so seconds, unless you had a massive pool, evasion, or ethereal. That's what he does. Manta Style + AM used to give 100% of his Mana Break passive. They only changed that in 7.23 (halved effect on illus now), when they also increased the size of AM's Mana Break. For a long time Phantom Lancer or Naga Siren with Diffusal+Manta would also obliterate mana pools in very short order, until they nerfed Diffusal. And before that there was a time when Manta flat-out included Diffusal Blade's effect (and used it as an ingredient) and gave 40 mana break to the hero and all illus at 100%.
Not much to add to what Absinthe typed out. This is just what happens when you don't understand your own creation, I guess.
I have my doubts that IceFrog is
still at the helm of this. Seems like other people have been taking over game design a bit. Maybe IceFrog is still involved, but nowhere near as actively as before, maybe he's left to other projects, or maybe he's gone full retard, I don't know, but I suspect the 7.00 was when IceFrog stopped really leading it, because typically in DotA version history a new major version means a new person leading the design and that's when the design started getting wild and looking more like what pleases marketing (more active competitive e-sports matches, casualized mechanics, copycatting LoL shit, free talent shit, random item drops to make the game more interesting for morons who can only repeat the same cookiecutter build, playstyle, and strategy each match) than the way it was previously designed. With that said, I know for a fact IceFrog hates Techies and it's not like IceFrog hasn't done gay enforced meta shit in the 6.XX days, like the implementation of BD protection, but as you noted, the current DotA design looks like it was designed by people who do not actually understand DotA.
Played and watched DotA for years starting in 2005 and yeah, -em was generally looked down upon. Most popular (and best) mode was -ar (at least in the EU), followed by -ap and then -apem. As years went by, -em became less and less common even.
Personally I favored -SH mode (Everyone on both teams plays the exact same hero.) which DotA 2 didn't even bother to implement, but man did that mode lead to a lot of fun and interesting item builds. -AR was good at making sure people knew how to adapt and improvise though, but DotA 2 nuked random gold and then removed the random option because I think they hated randomers in AP ranked. You can still have it manually spin to a random hero and select it if you want, but they basically killed randoming because they were the kind of player who would get anally devastated if they had a randomer on team.
I agree with most of Absinthe's points, I played dota for over a decade but haven't touched it since 2020. However, the real problem with the game - beyond all of the shoehorning of playstyles, "directed teamfight" feel, are the players themselves. The experience of playing dota is just fucking awful, in fact it might be worse than the old bnet days. No matter what bracket you're in, the proportion of quality games to complete waste of time is just depressingly low - 1 in 20 would be an optimistic estimate. More than anything, that's what made me quit. It just wasn't worth the time or aggravation.
Tough to say since I can't really compare. Back in the day, most of the time you would have leavers. Of those, most would leave when it was starting to look bleak for their team, so the game would continue 5v4 and it was generally considered playable. When I started hosting my own games, I, too, would start using banlists which helped somewhat. Needless to say, if you won a game 4v5 it felt pretty good. 5v4 was just about closing it. The main issue was that players loved to farm and thus would take forever to end the game. Another thing which happened too often was whining about (alleged) ksing. Some players would get upset about it for some reason. Though, all in all, I think players abusing other players happened rather infrequently (again, in the EU). And this is about Bnet. I've never played on other servers that had ladders and whatnot and I guess it was a lot better there since players were more serious and competitive.
Honestly, the BNET DotA crowd was often lower skill than DotA 2's, I recall. There was a good length of time when you could play both and it was obvious. BNET DotA was much more likely to plague you with the occasional dumbass who built naked boots or did really stupid shit. DotA 2 crowd was a lot more into flavor of the month and cookiecutter shit though. In BNET DotA double mid was fairly normal and people tolerated unorthodox builds better compared to DotA 2 players. In DotA 2 if you tried double mid often enough someone would flip out and possibly even start feeding. DotA 2 players were way, way more into bandwagon metas and not deviating out of it in the slightest. Many of them approached heroes as if the question of how to build and play them was a solved problem and all you had to do was follow the standard path to win, and if you did anything else you were bad. I still remember so many retards shitting on me for playing TP Boots Ember Spirit when he first came out (Meta was Phase Boots.) then apparently some pro did it and suddenly
not playing TP Boots Ember Spirit was the shit build. The new position system also pushes for certain hero role lineups, which is fun for bads maybe, but worse for good players. DotA 2 players are a bit worse at accepting lane swaps too, even though it's often a smart call when a lane is not working out for you. But at least with lane swaps you just insert yourself in the new lane and leave them to take your old lane or deal with the new trilane where you take farm, and usually they'll take it. But I've had DotA 2 players tell me to stfu just for telling them that Orb of Venom is a good pickup on Riki. Hey, it wasn't meta.
BNET DotA also had a lot of leavers, yes. It's part of the reason why people on BNET switched to hosting bots with banlists. If you ragequit, you were banned, and some banlists were shared between different hosting groups. 4v5 was never that hard though. Splitting that extra hero's gold between the rest of your team usually did a lot to get people caught up or suddenly rich enough to build that item to counter the enemy team's heroes, and often enough you could use the leaver to farm more gold and push the occasional lane for team, not to mention your leaver was often a feeder so you were better off without them. I've won plenty of 4v5s without trouble. The worst was the people who would deliberately feed the enemy team or who sold all their items and bought wards to waste all their gold before disconnecting, but that was less common than your regular DC. Now, winning with a dedicated feeder on team was a good feeling alright, and I've done it a number of times too. Not easy though.
Techies always was hilarious back in the day. The hero could do nothing or everything, if it was in the hands of a competent player. I remember some player dropping an item somewhere and some bob (from my team) would move there to pick it up, only to get blown to smithereens. It was hilarious. I also once made a techie player quit immediately when my first purchase was a gem (after the standard chicken which I always bought) as a ranged int hero and destroyed all his mines which he had so carefully placed in and near my lane. Poor guy.
Yeah gem counters Techies pretty hard, but there are some hilarious games against all those idiots who do not understand how to deviate from their build for a single item that they obviously need, and I've had a lot of fun playing Suicide Techies also, but man was setting up Suicide kills a pain in the ass with the aggressively nerfed AoE radius (It was bad enough that you were better off manually moving into enemies before blowing up than targeting with Suicide because he would blow up at a melee range that was far enough that it was too easy for enemies to walk out of the full damage AoE before your cast animation finished.) and 270 ms, iirc. IceFrog really, really, really fucking hated Suicide and made sure to nerf it into the ground, compared to the original Techies with the Suicide ult that did 1500/2500/3500 damage in a giant AoE. He also made sure it was never ported to Heroes of Newerth (HoN team also hated Techies) back when he was lead there. The mining playstyle he was somewhat more okay with, but it all still got nerfed and ultimately removed also. Ultimately HoN added some Techies mines to Engineer iirc.
