Dota 2 Patch 7.22b Makes Changes To Six Heroes

Valve surprised the Dota 2 community early this week with the release of patch 7.22b. What made it a surprise was that Valve launched a big patch with 7.22 on Friday. This latest patch makes changes to six heroes.

The first hero is Clinkz and in this update, his base strength has been increased by two. His Searing Arrows skill has its damage reduced, with the manacost lowered and scaled. The big change, however, is the Level 15 Talent. In patch 7.22, the Searing Arrows damage was lowered to +20 from +30. Under the new update, it has been lowered even further to +15.

One of the heroes that experienced the biggest change is Dark Willow. Her Scepter upgrade allowed her to attack without going out of the Shadow Realm. In addition, each attack continued to have bonus damage that is based on the duration of the buff.

A lot of players were up in arms about this upgrade, as it appears that Valve and Icefrog were listening. Under 7.22b, Dark Willow’s base time attack is now 1.5. The damage ramp up time of her Shadow Realm is upped to four from three. The Attack Speed bonus of her Level 25 talent is now +175 instead of +200. While this does not technically nerf Dark Willow, it does that exact thing to her Scepter upgraded abilities.

The same is true with Grimstroke, whose Scepter upgrade had many players complaining about OP status. In essence, getting the Scepter allows Grimstroke to get the Dark Portrait ability which:

• Creates an ink illusion of a target enemy hero.
• Illusion lasts 20 seconds
• Magic immune
• Has +30% movement speed
• Takes 200% incoming damage
• Deals 150% outgoing damage
• Cooldown 35
• Manacost 200

So to address the concerns, 7.22b increases the incoming damage to 350% and lowered the duration of the illusion to 15 seconds. This makes the illusion relatively easier to kill.

Up next is Lycan, whose Scepter upgrade results in one of the three creep waves having two wolves. While the wolves are not under the control of Lycan, they are still considered as his units. In terms of abilities, these wolves have the same movement speed as the lane creeps.

The update reduces gold and XP bounty of the scepter wolves by half. However, they now gain crit during Shapeshift. This appears to be a good change, and aims at helping give pressure on the lane.

Necrophos, meanwhile, had his Heartstopper Aura damage type changed to Magical from Pure, though it still does not trigger damage events. This change effectively nerfs the hero, as it is now easy to counter the effect of the aura, especially in the late game. Some are wondering why the change was made in the first place, as this was done in a previous patch.

The last is Slark, where in 7.22b his the duration of his level four Essence Shift has been lowered to 100 from 120. In 7.22, Slark had been given an increase in the base attack speed along with the rescale of the health regen offered by the Shadow Dance passive. It lowers the impact of the buffs Slark received in 7.22 a little.

With ESL One Birmingham already underway, let’s see how the this small change affects the meta and if Valve will bring out another update before the EPICENTER Major.