With the qualifiers for The International 2019 complete, it did not come as a surprise that Valve dropped its latest update for Dota 2 with 7.22e. Having no other official tournament on the horizon, there is a chance that this is the version that the teams are going to be playing in TI9. Generally, the new patch brought nerfs to a number of heroes, but also buffed a few ones as well. Additionally, there are two other important changes.
The first significant change is that the Stout Shield no longer stacks. In previous tournaments, players often had Axe, or even Dark Seer, use two Stout Sheilds. The Stout Shield had a 50% chance of blocking 20 melee damage. Having two of them resulted in the chances increasing to 75%. This particular change means that offlaners now need to be more careful.
In terms of general changes, the patch now makes use of Pseudo Random for low ground miss and miss debuff chance. At its core, what this means is simple. Every time a player misses a hit, that players has a bigger chance to be able to land the next hit. In effect it's making it less random.
So what about hero changes?
Two heroes of note received nerfs. The first is Ember Spirit, and it has a large impact. His Sleight of Fist skill can no longer be used when the hero is rooted. In the past, Ember Spirit was able to escape damage when rooted which at the same time allowed him to dish out damage. This change prevents that. However, it is something that is not really unexpected considering that motion spells like Leap and Blink are disable during root.
Morphling is another hero that got nerfed. In particular:
- Base armor reduced by 1
- Morph
- Morph scepter no longer reduces cooldowns by 35%
- Morph scepter now allows ally targeting
- Talents
- Level 20 Talent changed from Morph Targets Allies to +15% Cooldown Reduction
The change introduced in this new patch meant that Morphling players need to take a step back and come up with a new strategy.
For buffs, we look at three heroes. The first is Mirana, which had her base intelligence increased by 3. Her Sacred Arrow skills had its base damage increased and the cooldown scaled to 18/17/16/15 instead of a flat 17 seconds. Luna, meanwhile, had her Level 20 talents increase with All Stats now +10 and Lucent Beam Damage at +125. Level 25 was improved as well with Lifesteal now at 35% instead of 30%.
Drow Ranger also had her talents changed, particularly her Level 15 Talent. In the first case, the additional Agility is now +14 rather than +10. The other choice is that instead of +550 Gust Distance/Knockback, it is now +30% Gust Miss Chance. What this means is that Drow now has a chance to turn the fight around. In addition, increasing the additional Agility meant that players can now have different strategies since the other talent is just as important.
If this is indeed the last update before TI9, it will be interesting to see how players are able to adapt to these changes. We say that since there are two upcoming competitions, but both are not DPC events. The first is the WCG 2019, which starts this week, and the second is the DOTA Summit 10, which begins next week.
