Dota 2 has cracked out its ‘quality of life’ duster and set about some spring cleansing. Yesterday’s patch was the primary of the new fortnightly updates, and its focus is on enhancements that make the sport much less fiddly. Dota will be extra fiddly than an eleven-piece folk band, so that is excellent news. That’s very true for newer gamers, who’ve sufficient to cope with with out worrying about micromanaging the courier or determining which jungle camps are the lethal ones. Two of my favorite smaller modifications goal these points, however there’s lots extra right here moreover. They’ve added in-game recommendations on latest hero modifications, redesigned participant profiles and thrown in an entire bunch of UI tweaks and stability modifications – and that’s simply scratching the floor.
There’s far an excessive amount of for me to cowl, so these are simply my highlights. You can learn the total patch notes here.
First up is one thing that Dota may have accomplished with for lengthy whereas: in-game ideas that let you know what modified with the latest patch. “Now you can see which heroes have updates by looking at the top-bar portrait of a selected hero on the drafting screen”, say the patch notes. You also can “hover over an ability or item tooltip to see if and how they’ve changed.” As I discussed yesterday, it’s an particularly essential addition now that the sport’s getting extra common updates.
You can now maintain down Alt to see which of your teammates is carrying a TP scroll and whether or not it’s on cooldown, so now you may substitute these cries of “HELP HELP BEING GANKED BOT” with “PETER I KNOW YOU CAN SAVE ME FOR GOD’S SAKE HELP”.
I’m undecided what counts because the “extreme frequency” required to set off this, however gamers who commonly misbehave – “feeding, abandoning, player abuse, etc” – will now routinely obtain six-month bans. I’ve no downside with this.
The courier now exhibits when it’s carrying objects belonging to a different participant, which ought to function a neat reminder to allow them to know they’ll name for the courier if you’re accomplished with it.
Some of essentially the most vital UI updates embrace a brand new impact that exhibits when a constructing is benefiting from backdoor safety, and now you can see the tooltips for Talents by urgent Alt. They’ve additionally added a “progress overlay” that exhibits the solid level of a capability if you use it, which is the brief interval between if you use a capability and when it takes impact. You will be interrupted in that point, so realizing precisely how rapidly you may fling out your spells ought to show useful.
As for the “gameplay” updates, Valve have tweaked lots however nothing jumps out at me as majorly game-changing. To caveat: I imply that by the requirements of the previous patches, the place some modifications would make me scream “What have they done, is this even Dota anymore?” after which I’d have to go have a cup of tea and a lie down. There are loads of vital modifications to cooldown occasions, means injury scaling and whatnot – it’s undoubtedly value checking the full patch notes to see what’s occurred to your favorite heroes and objects.
