Just when many Dota 2 players were beginning to wonder if we’d ever see a Compendium released for the Shanghai Major, Valve has finally released the digital guidebook for the next stop on the road to this year’s International. And the all-new Winter 2016 Battle Pass might be the most ambitious promotion we’ve seen ahead of a Valve-sponsored Dota 2 tournament.
In addition to announcing the Winter 2016 Battle Pass on the Dota 2 blog, Valve also added a new sub-section to the game’s website – as it does for most Dota 2 events – with details on what players can expect from the Winter 2016 Battle Pass. And there might be more going on with the Winter 2016 Battle Pass than we've seen in any Dota 2 promotion thus far.
The quest system will return, with a few tweaks to make it more enticing for the community, and unique rewards based on the objectives you choose to complete. Token betting has also returned, with a much larger weekly allowance and the ability to tip allies or enemies who earned a token of your appreciation. There's also a new achievement system, a seasonal winter terrain, new couriers and loads more.
Of course, the Dota 2 patch delivering the Winter 2016 Battle pass also includes its fair share of bug fixes and and other minor tweaks. Valve added a new Conduct Summary tab that lets players know how many abandons, commendations and reports they’ve racked up over the last 25 games. The Conduct Summary tab will also let you know how your stats stand up against the rest of the Dota 2 community.
Here are the complete patch notes for this week's Dota 2 update, via Steam:
- Added Conduct Summary popup, which tells you how many reports, abandons, and commends you have received in the past 25 games. http://www.dota2.com/conductsummaryfaq/
- Restored the notification when action was taken against a player whom you recently reported.
- Added support for Live Rewind while spectating.
- Improved CPU usage on low end machines
- Improved rendering performance (heroes, shadows, particles, water)
- Improved lighting integration of weather effects for visual clarity and quality
- Improved rendering of low and high quality water
- Default global items such as couriers are now visible within the armory so you can control their shuffle state from there.
- Improved the ability to control shuffle state from the context menu of items in the armory
- Bundles are now inspectable. The owned item details page will show you all items in the bundle and allow you to unbundle it.
- Announcer, Mega-kill, Music, and Voice items now preview their sounds in the loadout, owned item details, and store item details screens.
- Updated textures for Clockwerk's Power Cogs
- Added new Enchant Remnant animation for Earth Spirit
- Added a sound when blink dagger distance is within the threshold between the max distance and the clamped distance
- Updated Iron Talon sound
- Fixed Brood Webs ambient sound
- 50% chance between short and long version of Skywrath's ITB line
- Players competing in the Dota 2 Majors will now be required to use their registered name when competing in a tournament
- Fixed Illusory Orb doing no damage to Spirit Bear
- Fixed effigies appearing incorrectly in the portrait window in-game
- Fixed a bug and corrected textures to address prismatic gems not tinting Terrorblade or his Demon Form to the correct color.
- Fixed a bug where Terrorblade's Metamorphosis would sometimes leave Terrorblade's Demon in a running-in-place animation
- Fixed a glitch that occurred in the cast animation of Terrorblade's Metamorphosis
- Fixed a bug where some of Terrorblade's Demon Form particles were not being affected by prismatic gems when seen in the portrait window
- Fixed a bug where taunt animations looked bad when the hero became stunned or flailing
- Fixed Exalted Quality issue with Tempest Helm of the Thundergod Bundle and Tempest Helm item
- Fixed missing material on El Gato courier
- Fixed custom portrait for Timbersaw's Steam Chopper Top Hat
- Fixed broken idle rares for Captain Bamboo courier and Spirit of Anger bear
- Fixed model distortion in Children of Verdicia treant
- Fixed missing geometry on Armlet of Mordiggian
- Fixed Aegis winners display for 2014 splitting onto two lines.
- Chat: if you ignore someone, then their messages will immediately be hidden. If you unignore them, then the messages will reappear.
- Emoticons now preview in tooltips, and the store and owned item details pages. They also preview in the confirmation dialog that appears when you unlock a set of emoticons.
- Emoticons can be unlocked from the owned item details page.
- Workshop tools: Added support for previewing items using the currently equipped terrain
- Workshop tools: Fixed crash when placing too many trees in a map
- Custom Games: Fixed a memory leak with modifier_lua and CheckState().
- Russian Voiceover:
- Added Gyrocopter, Luna, and Necrophos.
- Reworked Silencer and Wraith King VO, and made volume adjustments to Sven.
Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes.com and follow Scott on Twitter for additional Dota 2 coverage throughout 2016 and for however long Valve continues to support Dota 2 in the months ahead.
