As Dota 2 patch 6.83 continues to be played out, more and more players, personalities, and forum posters are voicing their concerns about the game's comeback mechanics and how they affect the metagame.

After making a spreadsheet comparing the comeback gold from the previous patch to the current one, I thought I’d share some trends that I found. This spreadsheet is a little unwieldy to show on mobile; I’ll be referring to it and providing a link to it at the end of the article. You can view it in higher resolution there.

Fields of gold

The biggest change to the area of effect gold system introduced in 6.82 (other than the comeback mechanic itself) was the integration of gold being given out by standing near a death, rather than only by contributing an assist.

In the past, it was only given to heroes who got assists and was based on the dying hero’s level, which means heroes with low assists or weird contribution like Dazzle, Treant Protector, or Shadow Demon would obtain less gold in teamfights than ones that had higher assist "impact".

This change gave those heroes the ability to accumulate items by being successful in team fights instead of doing one point of damage to each hero that died; I think that aspect was a positive change to Dota 2.

I bring this up because there are surely more heroes now that gain gold from a hero dying in a team fight. If you stand in the fight, you get area of effect gold. If you only focus one hero but two die, you still get gold for both.

[Update 3/31: In the original version of this article, we were mistaken about the mechanics of area-based assists; this feature had been implemented long before 6.82. The following section has been modified to fix this error. - Ed]

The biggest change in 6.82c, other than the comeback gold system, was the comeback experience system. The level of heroes on the winning and losing team is the first part of the calculation to figure out how much gold you will be giving up to your opponents.

Because there is a larger influx of experience into the game when kills happen, this will trickle into gold bounties and make them larger. For the scope of this article, I won’t dive in to examine that further.

Even with the recent "nerfs" to comeback gold since the beginning of the 6.82 patch, the trend is that each kill gives less than the previous patch, with the exceptions of a moderate (~10%) or greater advantage. It especially gives less for solo kills on all hero roles.

As mentioned, a link to my data and charts will be provided at the end of the article. The most important metric when calculating area of effect gold is something that is called NetWorth Factor.

Less for more

The NetWorth Factor is a percentage difference between the winning team and losing team, multiplied by the dying hero’s chunk of their team’s net worth. Area of effect gold sometimes pays out more than in the previous patch, because it was and still is partially dependent on the dying hero’s level, but the adjustment of that payout is based on NetWorth Factor.

NetWorth Factor only applies to your gold if you are winning. If you are losing, the gold you give is solely based on hero level, and that part of the equation is much less than the previous patch. The extra gold from NetWorth Factor is extremely small if your team only has a small gold advantage, but if you have a very top heavy hero like AntiMage, he may pay off at a bigger rate.

Two heroes in the area of effect (and especially three) pay out more gold than the previous patch at almost any gold advantage, but generally you need at least a 1000 NetWorth Factor on your hero before your opponents get an increase in gold from the previous patch. Four and five hero clusters pay less than before on average in 6.82c.

In the cases I examined, the least-farmed hero on the winning team doesn't feed that much extra gold compared to the previous patch. In fact, the biggest reduction between the past and 6.82c is that a solo kill gives far less area of effect gold than it did before.

While their bounty is affected by the NetWorth Factor of their team if they are winning, it’s still multiplied by their net worth in relation to their team’s. The major gold swings in 6.82c still come from the highest net worth heroes on the winning team dying, two-three hero skirmishes, or full team wipes.

These findings felt different than what I was expecting the problem areas to be when I started looking at the data, due to the recent concerns from the community. The most important distinction from the data that I’ve seen isn’t an influx of comeback gold into the losing team, but more the nerf to gold that you get by killing a team that you are handily beating — say, by 10% more of their net worth or greater.

During very close net worth games there is a very marginal difference between gold bounties, often a couple gold per section, but in higher percentages of advantage, like 25% or greater, an equivalent leveled and net worth hero will give almost twice as much gold as the enemy team.

In the scope of a disadvantage that severe, the losing team’s kills are giving moderately more gold than they did in the previous patch, even after reductions between 6.82 and 6.82c, and the winning teams kills on the losing team are consistently giving less.

The main complaints with the patch come from turtling, and this is where part two of the problem exists. I think the main issue revolves around buying back and the way it integrates with the area of effect gold.

Making the comeback

Since the losing team gets sometimes two times more gold than their opponents for a kill, it becomes more and more worth it for them to trade everything they have, including buybacks, to get a kill.

Buying back when your barracks are being defended allows you to come back into the fight with an extra hero and more damage, which forces the winning team to win a 5v6/7/8 if they don’t have buybacks AND Boots of Travel to get back to the fight.

If the defending team wins the fight, especially two or three heroes who clean up the fight, they get massive payouts in the form of area of effect comeback gold, which often easily covers the cost to their buyback.

The solution is not to stop buyback from ever happening. If it didn't exist, any carry pickoff in the late game would result in a lost tower or barracks, and the game would quickly devolve into five-manning in the late game all the time, — this wouldn't be fun to watch or play.

A solution lies in being able to collect area of effect gold from buying back while defending your barracks.

Stopping the flood

One way to stop that gold collection as it stands now is for all players who are pushing to disengage immediately upon buybacks; unfortunately, at many times your team is already committed to a fight, and cannot. Worse yet, if the enemy team has a high-mobility hero like Storm Spirit, you can guarantee that the gap will be closed immediately, often with huge area of effect damage.

I believe the solution is to prevent a hero who has bought back from gaining a percentage of reliable gold in addition to unreliable gold, or maybe even delaying reliable gold gain until a few seconds after buying back. This would give the enemy team a chance to disengage, or win the fight during that timer and lower their chances of giving the enemy team a huge gold swing.

In the past, buying back was in almost all cases a detriment to your item progression unless you got a huge kill streak or a rampage. As it stands in 6.82c, unless you manage to lose a 7 vs 5 team fight, or your opponents have a net worth similar to yours, buying back while defending a barracks is almost always worth it.

A possible solution is to again modify the NetWorth Factor multipliers as they have been a few times already, or to buff up the gold gained by killing the losing team to better equalize an advantage, but Icefrog (Dota’s developer) seems to be all about small buffs, and I think the pushing highground problem is one that could be partially solved by a buyback nerf.

Turning the dial back on the game doesn't seem to be Icefrog’s style, so I think we should focus on how to adjust the current mechanics that do have some positive features into a more fair and balanced Dota game.

In a second part to this article, I will be looking at some heroes and compositions that benefit from this style of play, and why you're likely seeing them a lot more often.

Here is an Imgur album of the statistics that I used to come to these conclusions. If you see any errors or corrections that could be made, do not hesitate to reach out to me on Twitter.

Kevin “Purge” Godec is a Dota 2 streamer, interviewer, personality and author of the “Welcome to Dota 2, You Suck” guide. You can follow him on Twitter or check out his stream.