14 DAY TRIAL // Valve rolled out a particularly surprising patch for Dota 2 just a few hours ago, in the form of update 6.83b for the multiplayer experience, which drastically alters some very popular heroes, such as Juggernaut or Faceless Void, while tweaking other gameplay mechanics, like the respawn time.
Dota 2 has been around for quite some time, and in 2014 the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) experience achieved new performances in terms of popularity, thanks to major tournaments like The International 4, not to mention plenty of other smaller but still very important eSports competitions.
In the last few months, Valve has also rolled out quite a few different updates that altered the game's mechanics and tweaked the balance of certain heroes in the title.
Now, after introducing gameplay update 6.83 through the Shifting Snows patch last month, Valve has just rolled out patch 6.83b, via Steam, which makes a small number of changes that have big repercussions for many popular heroes.
Juggernaut, Faceless Void and many more have been nerfed
First up, the patch brings a series of nerfs (aka reductions in performance) for many popular heroes nowadays, including Juggernaut, Faceless Void, Vengeful Spirit, or Tidehunter.
Juggernaut's base armor has been reduced by 1 while his Omnislash cast range has been lowered from 450 to 350. Faceless Void's Chronosphere mana cost has also been increased, from 150/175/200, depending on its level, to 150/225/300, which should make the Refresher Orb item on him much less effective.
Tidehunter's Anchor Smash radius has been reduced from 400 to 375, while Brewmaster's Hurl Boulder ability does just 50 damage, instead of 100 like it used to. Slark's Pounce damage has also been reduced from 55/110/165/220 to 50/100/150/200. Last but not least, Vengeful Spirit's Magic Missile cooldown has been reworked. Instead of a base cooldown of 10 seconds, it now goes through stages in the form of 13/12/11/10 seconds, depending on the spell's level.
Other gameplay changes are also included
Besides these obvious nerfs to the popular heroes, the new 6.83b patch for Dota 2 also tweaks a few other mechanics. The respawn time has been rescaled in order to add a few more seconds to your death period at early levels, while maintaining the timings during the mid- or end-game portions of a match. The team bounty for destroying the barracks of an enemy has been increased from 125 and 75, for the melee and ranged buildings respectively, to 175 and 100.
The new Dota 2 patch is now available for download via the Steam service and clocks in at around 18MB.
