What could be the last 7.19 minor patch was released a week ago ,and today we are going to look at the changes it prompted. 7.19d was another small nerf patch, addressing the problematic heroes in public matchmaking, and the end result was very much straightforward.
Drow Ranger
A roughly 1.5% win rate loss was a little bit more than we assumed—after all the hero lost only five agility. However, when taking into account the overall damage loss for the whole team, possibly with 4-5 ranged heroes, as well as damage loss on ranged creeps and catapults, the impact does start to make sense.
These 2 (3 with the talent) extra damage sometimes mean an extra melee creep dies in your wave, before the ranged creep has the time to kill the attacker. It means that sometimes an enemy who would have died in the previous patch gets to escape with 10-20 HP and sometimes your catapult won’t get the last hit on enemy barracks and they start regenerating. A single game of Dota will be filled with multiple instances of when this damage would actually matter, so the end result does actually make sense.
Grimstroke
Grimstroke’s win rate remains highly volatile and it probably means people still don’t really know how to fully utilize the hero and what to do in different situations. As such, the trends for the hero aren’t particularly indicative of anything—the hero is still good in 5k+ and is still only slightly below average in all other brackets.
Going forward we expect to see even more nerfs for the hero: the community will find better ways to play the hero as the time goes and once the novelty starts tapering off, only the most dedicated players will stick to playing him, and this will probably have a significant positive impact on his win probability.
Necrophos
At a glance it might look like Necrophos didn’t much care about the nerfs and for the public matchmaking it is true. He is still a dominant force in lane, with good mid and even late-game presence.
At the same time, this nerf will probably impact how much the hero is played competitively. Latest trends have shown that most professional players attempt to build Necrophos with a decent amount of right-clicking in mind and the talent nerfs are big enough to be noticeable. Right-clicking Necrophos won’t be completely phased away, but he will be slightly weaker and will probably impact both the hero’s popularity and success in the professional scene.
Riki
A multitude of significant nerfs and the hero still wins more than 55% of his games—our Dealing with Riki post remains relevant.
We’ve talked about the hero at length and nothing in the nerfs list changes the fundamentals behind our points. Keeping in mind that Smoke Screen level 1 is now only 10% miss chance and you can fight back in it is probably the extent of what adjustments you can make when playing against the hero.
Terrorblade
While for the most part these nerfs look rather tame, do keep in mind that 0-mana cost and 50-mana cost for a spell is a massive difference. Terrorblade will now have harder time spamming Sunder in the late game, he can be occasionally caught off-guard with mana burn and mana drain abilities and this will make difference often enough to highlight.
The aforementioned change swings the Terrorblade vs Anti-Mage matchup—we’ve talked about how Anti-Mage is suddenly a hero, so you should be prepared to face him quite often in the upcoming couple of weeks and Terrorblade suddenly got a lot less reliable in this regard. Overall the hero has lost slightly below 2% win rate, and remains as one of the most successful carries in the game.
Small Nerfs:
For the most part these changes didn’t impact the heroes’ win rate by a significant amount. Silencer is still one of the best supports in the meta, Ursa is still reliable tempo hero, Earthshaker is a great greedy position four and so on.
The biggest losers of these small changes were Weaver and Treant Protector, with both losing slightly below 1% win rate.There isn’t anything particularly exciting to highlight here, since it does make sense that a hero with slightly weaker or slightly more expensive abilities is going to be slightly weaker. Both of them, however, remain perfectly playable.
