It seems just like Yesterday that Team Liquid beat Newbee 3-0 in Seattle to claim the title of TI 7 winners. But that yesterday was a good seven months away and the Dota 2 community can nearly see the road to TI 8 end. Well, there are still two Minors and Five Majors to be played before the big even in Vancouver, so there is a lot of Dota 2 to be seen this season! Talking about the season, how has it fared? 7.07 brought about a change in the heroes played at TI 7, with Necropos and Bloodseeker totally shoved off the map and more team fight based heroes like Gyrocopter and Razor making it through. 7.08 marked the start of a new phase and biweekly patches instead of the typical system of one patch every four to six months.

Most Picked

The advent of 7.08 had me thinking the changes would really shuffle the hero pool a bit every two weeks and while it is happening to a small extent, there isn’t a large shift. Teams prefer to stick to heroes they have practiced. Additionally, with so many tournaments, there isn’t a lot of time to experiment. Let’s take a look at how 7.08 has panned out in terms of what heroes have been used the most in the professional games:



(all stats taken from datdota.com)

Disruptor is the most picked hero in the meta and I guess the reason for that is he suits the team fight style these recent patches have been showing. The hero only needs an Aghanim’s Scepter for living up to his full potential and that too isn’t a necessity. Sand King is a very versatile pick, slotting in at either position 3 or 4. Puppey recently played it at position 5 as well at DreamLeague Season 9. In the TI 7 patch, there wasn’t a clear favorite carry for teams. The most picked heroes were either supports or offlaners. But this image paints a different picture for the post 7.08 meta. Of the top 10 most played heroes, five are mid or safelane carries with Gyro stealing the show in terms of picks and win rate!

The highest picks don’t often count for the highest win rate. That accolade goes to Terrorblade.

Highest win rates (more than 150 games):

Terrorblade: 58.15 %

Shadow Fiend: 56.89 %

Rubik: 56.18 %

Gyrocopter: 55.59 %

Death Prophet: 54.13 %

There was a small window where TB was wrecking everyone. And in the hands of Miracle, the effect was amplified. Valve nerfed the hero just a bit and surprisingly, the pick rate has gone down. Gyrocopter and Death Prophet make an appearance yet again. Not only are they highly picked, there is a more than 50 % chance they win the game!

Most Contested

This does not give the entire picture of the meta though. A lot of times, a particular hero is banned out for most games and he doesn’t make it to the most picked pile. So let’s look at the most contested picks from the meta (from 7.08 to 7.11):



(all stats taken from datdota.com)

Tiny has been contested in 93.14 % of the games since 7.08! If that isn’t crazy, I don’t know what is. Granted a majority of those are bans, but it shows how highly teams think of that hero (although the win rate for the hero is only 48.77 %).

The heroes in that list that really need to be nerfed are Omniknight, Razor, Sand King Death Prophet and Lycan. This bunch has been around since before TI 7 and looks like they aren’t going anywhere. Valve and IceFrog have a strange policy when it comes to certain heroes. Medusa got popular for a while and she was hit with nerf hammer, enough to make her a niche pick. What grinds my gears is these heroes have been around for around for a long time and they don not seem to be getting substantial nerfs. Somewhere in these biweekly patches there needs to come a patch which brings in a totally different set of heroes!

The Shunned Ones

While Tiny, Gyro, Sand King and the other frolic in green pastures, it has been a grim patch for some others. Let’s take a look at heroes who have been picked less than 10 times this meta:



(all stats taken from datdota.com)

Pangolier and Techies should be disregarded as they are not active in Captain’s Mode. But my heart does go out to the likes of Axe..when was the last time Axe was a core meta pick? If memory serves me right, not for the last couple of years atleast. Spectre and Windranger might as well be out of the game. Since 6.85 and 6.86, Windy and Spectre respectively are nowhere to be seen. A few showings here and there maybe, but IceFrog has been quite cold to them. When the roaming meta came on in 7.04, a lot of offlaners transitioned to position 4 like SK, Slardar, Clockwerk and Nyx Assasin. Phoenix sadly, didn’t make the cut. He is played as a support at times, but not the way these other heroes are. That is definitely a hero who could use some buffs. With the distance between mid Tier 1 towers being reduces and the Bounty Rune losing its experience perks, maybe the roaming supports will go out of fashion and we might see some new picks.

Game Durations

To be honest, there hasn’t been the biggest of shifts going from 7.07 to 7.08. There are few more games going into the 50-60 minute slot, but that’s about it. Most of the games are ending in the 30-40 minute time slot, which gives very little incentive to pick heroes like Anti Mage and Spectre. It has been the same story for the past year or so, since Shrines were nerfed/removed. The patches from 7.00 to 7.05 showed us some really long games, which would be more than welcome! The best way to do that, in my opinion, is enable a few tools for better high ground defense. With no in base shrines, a team on the losing side is more susceptible to getting wiped out and lose all three sides of barracks.

Verdict

The meta surely is enjoyable and has produced quite a few good games. But it is also getting to the point where it is getting a bit one dimensional in terms of picks. Ofcourse, there is always that team like team Secret that will pick a mid Kunka and make things more interesting, but other than that, it has been a lot of Tiny, Gyro, Death Prophet and Sand King. The hero changes in 7.10 and gold mechanics changes in 7.11 may steer us to a different brand of games in the near future, but it hasn’t happened yet.

A though that floated into my mind was, considering the fact we have biweekly changes, Valve could disable the top three or five picks of the professional meta from Captain’s Mode for two weeks. This would promote new strategies and circulate more heroes into the professional circuit.

There are seven tournaments to be played in lead to TI 8, which gives IceFrog and Valve sometime to experiment with the meta. The next Major, DAC 2018, starts on the same day the new patch is expected which is the 29th of March. It might be a intruding with a Major, but I hope 7.12 brings some crazy changes that makes team scratch their heads!

Cover image credits: www.dotafire.com