Patch Analysis for Dota 2 Patch 7.13 and 7.13b

As you guys well know, Valve stated that they will be releasing a new patch once every two weeks. I am going to make a patch analysis for all the upcoming patches starting from 7.13 and 7.13b. I will be covering only the most important changes which strongly impact the game and the meta. So let’s get right into it.

Balance Patch 7.13

General Changes:

⦁ Tier 1 Tower Team Bounty reduced from 120 to 100
⦁ Tier 2 Tower Team Bounty reduced from 200 to 120
⦁ Tier 3 Tower Team Bounty reduced from 200 to 140
⦁ Tier 4 Tower Team Bounty reduced from 200 to 160
⦁ Range barracks team bounty reduced from 150 to 100
⦁ Filler buildings gold bounty from 125 to 75

The bounties of all the structures in the game except the shrines have been reduced in 7.13. This is a nerf to grouping up as 5 and trying to take towers early, as it will not be netting the same amount of returns as before. Taking towers will still provide more map control but the reduction in team bounty is very significant, especially for supports as most of their gold income comes from assists and building bounties.

⦁ Glyph duration increased from 5 to 6
⦁ Melee Barracks HP increased from 1500 to 1800

This makes pushing highground relatively harder. These changes combined with the reduced bounties from structures means that games will stretch longer than before as the early-game lead through pushing towers will not give enough gold for teams to be able to push highground. This is a buff to the comeback mechanic of the game. If a team loses the early game, they can still make a comeback by splitting up to farm and making full use of the map while the enemy team is taking down towers as 5. This might also bring back greedy carry heroes like Anti-Mage who like to split push and farm around the map, dodging fights till they are heavily farmed.

⦁ Shrines HP increased from 1500 to 1750
⦁ Shrines now have 5 HP regen

It is rare to see teams defending their shrines in the current meta. They are generally taken down very fast after a tier 3 tower is destroyed. These two changes however makes shrines a lot tankier, making it harder for teams to destroy them. This might give enough time and incentive for the opposing team to come and defend their shrines.

Attribute Changes:

The attribute bonuses have been reworked in the this patch. There are no class-specific bonuses anymore except getting +1 damage from the primary attribute. The bonuses affect all classes now.The primary attribute gives 25% more benefit to the bonuses it provides.

New Strength: Apart from health and HP regen, Strength now gives magic resistance. Strength heroes also have more HP now as they get 22.5 HP per strength as opposed to 20 HP per strength. This makes strength heroes tankier than before.

New Intelligence: Intelligence doesn’t provide magic resistance anymore. This doesn’t change much about the early game but in the late-game, Intelligenve heroes will be a little less tankier. On the other hand, all the intelligence heroes will have more mana now, both in the late-game and early-game as they get 15 mana per Intelligence now.

New Agility: The new Agility attribute is not very different from before. The major change is that Agility heroes will now get extra attack speed and armor than before. They also move a little bit faster than before but this is balanced out as every class can now benefit from the movement speed gain through agility.

⦁ Removed Status Resistance as a Strength based attribute bonus

This was a very strong feature for all strength heroes especially in the late-game as you could reduce the durations of disables by a massive amount by naturally getting strength through levels. Now there are only two sources of status resistance viz. Tiny’s grow and Aeon Disk. This is a significant nerf to strength heroes but this is balanced out as they are tankier now with extra magic resistance and extra HP per Strength.

Lastly, lets not forget the most important change of patch 7.13.

⦁ Aegis now has an alt tooltip that explains how to pronounce the item

Finally the “Ayy-jis vs. Ayy-gis” debate can come to an end as Ice Frog himself has stepped down to inform us on how to pronounce the item name.

Changes in 7.13b:

⦁ Strength heroes base movement speed reduced by 5
⦁ Strength heroes base armor reduced by 1 (except Doom, Io, Lycan, Phoenix, Timbersaw, Tiny)

This balances out the buffs received by the strength heroes in the early-game from 7.13. They are a little less tankier now which mainly affects offlaners and more importantly, the roaming heroes. Roaming has been a very popular trend in the meta but it has been getting a lot of nerfs recently. Since most roamers are strength based, making them less tankier means that the chances of getting a return kill after a gank is higher now. This nerf combined with the nerf to bounty runes in 7.10 where the xp factor was removed, really hinders the roaming supports. I predict that this will lead to dual lanes being a lot more popular.

⦁ Intelligence heroes base strength increased by 2 (Except OD, Tinker and Bane)

Considering that most of the mid heroes in this meta are int-based except a few like TA, Dragon Knight and Razor, this is another nerf to roaming as it is harder to get a kill on the midlaner now. In my opinion, OD and Tinker were excluded because they are already pretty strong, specially Tinker considering that he’s been getting a series of nerfs since 7.07 but is still a meta pick.

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