It says a lot about the state of the hero, when they are being ignored by the pub and pro-scene alike. While it is unreasonable to expect all heroes to be viable in the same patch, there are some that have been out of meta for a long time and deserve some time in the spotlight. Today we are going to highlight a couple of such heroes and discuss how we would make them more viable.

If you’ve played Dota at a high enough level, you’ve probably seen obvious account buyers. Questionable match history, high win rate, suspicious hero selection on the account and absolute cluelessness during the match. Nowadays, it is a lot rarer than it used to be, but each such encounter left me with a single, lingering thought: “what exactly are you trying to achieve here?”.

The current support meta is quite diverse. A lot of currently popular picks are well-analyzed and don’t require further investigation, however there are some that are only now getting the recognition they deserve. Some of these support picks are also quite unexpected, so we are going to have a quick overview of the more exotic supports and how to make them work in your pubs or, better yet, how to avoid the call of the void and understand that maybe picking some of them isn’t the best idea in the first place.

Fissure Universe is not the first tournament on the new patch, but it is probably going to be the first one where the meta is somewhat settled. By now most teams are probably aware of the most broken stuff in the game and it is going to be much harder to cheese a victory from a stronger opponent. That means better teams should win more consistently and reliably, so today we are going to have a quick look at the state of the professional scene and which teams might be underrated.

Wandering Waters didn’t introduce any new regular items to the game, but it did heavily modify several potential options. While there isn’t anything blatantly overpowered in the new regular item pool, these new options definitely deserve a discussion — some of them are quite a bit better than they look.

It’s been a week since the release of the Wandering Waters and it looks like this was a patch dedicated to massive mechanics overhaul, rather than balance changes. We are definitely not complaining — the game feels very fresh, though there are definitely some kinks to iron out and some heroes to tone down a bit. Latter category is what we are going to discuss today — the most powerful characters to play right now.

The wait is over and we finally got the new, massive update. It is becoming somewhat of a trend, that the game receives something huge at the beginning of the year and we are all for it. The new patch is certainly going to shake up things in some very unpredictable ways, so today we are going to share our first impressions, knowing full well that some of our conclusions might be off the mark and we might miss something important. It is impossible to always be correct with something as complex and deep as Dota and that is why we love this game so much.

The obvious answer to this question is that they are not. The heroes do not have their facets quite yet and this on its own puts them in a weird situation when it comes to competitive play. However, given how the professional meta is getting a bit too static and given how there are multiple upcoming big tournaments, we are here to argue that adding them in their current state could be a good idea.

Dota is an ever-evolving game and that is undeniably good. The current balance update drought might be a bit longer than we would like it to be, but even in the absence of updates, there are still new meta developments emerging here and there. Today, however, we are not going to talk about temporary trends and will instead concentrate on heroes who, in our opinion, lost parts of what made them unique.