14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has just rolled out a brand new patch for Dota 2 on its Steam service, implementing some sweeping changes to the Year Beast Brawl game mode, not to mention a few more tweaks to the pathing system.
Dota 2 received the New Bloom Festival 2015 in-game event last week, which brought forth not just new goodies, like the Winter Wyvern hero or the Crystal Maiden Arcana set, but also the all-new Year Beast Brawl game mode. The new competitive experience allowed two teams of players to go up against each other alongside an AI-controlled Year Beast monster that fought for their side and had various powers.
The mode was criticized for being pay-to-win, as players were able to buy ability points that upgraded their beasts by big margins, but with a decent strategy and even a good guide, many were able to win their matches without paying a single cent.
A brand new patch introduces big changes to Year Beast Brawl
Now, the Year Beast Brawl experience has been seriously changed by Valve thanks to a new update that's now live for Dota 2, according to the official website.
First up, the active abilities can now be used without having the Year Beast be alive. As such, you can summon whenever you want the Thundergod's Wrath, Hand of God, Global Silence, or Chakra Magic skills, provided that you have the necessary amount of points.
More active abilities have also been added, in the form of Tower Flak Cannon, which allows the towers, for 10 seconds, to attack all enemy units within their range. There's also a Glyph that causes buildings to become invulnerable for five seconds. The cooldowns for Global Chakra and Hand of God have been reduced in addition to this.
The pathing system has been tweaked even more to fix some issues, while the recent Alt+right click combination now stops on a collision with another object. Another experimental feature that quickly repeats right clicks as long as the button is held down has been added.
Last but not least, couriers will no longer morph when they move, and rendering problems caused by the Crystal Maiden Arcana should no longer happen on the Mac OSX or Linux platforms.
The new patch is already available for download in the Steam client.