The Dueling Fates Patch is live. Two new heroes, a new mode and an expansive list of other gameplay changes have been added.

I encourage everyone to read the patch notes because it really is extensive as usual. But nothing beats seeing it for yourself in game. Check it out in this link: Dueling Fates Gameplay Patch Notes

One of the new modes is called Tubro mode which is like regular dota but gold and exp are earned faster. Towers and buildings are weaker. So it is a much faster dota. Valve is probably hoping that this will bring people into the main dota by offering something easier and faster to play. Hope this will shake up the meta and bring in new players.

I haven't played in over a year now but I think it's amazing that things have come back around and now -apem is back in the game.

As usual, Icefrog delivers tons of exciting changes, including a bunch of crazy, unexpected ones. There are some smart and subtle design tweaks to reduce toxicity and ease new players into the game. A number of Dota 1 features have returned out of nowhere. Neutral creeps sleep again!

While last patch was all about the ranged creep, since it gave nearly half of the xp per creepwave, this time they spread the xp around more between all the creeps. And made it way more costly for you to get creeps denied. Last patch, you would still get 70% of the xp for a denied creep. This patch? 25%. Auch! So now it's going to be even more crucial to dominate your lane. This means, that carries will be babysat more and roaming 4's will be discouraged. When it's so important to have strong lanes, you don't want to dedicate one player to run around all over the map.

If you're an offlaner and you can't really get much out of lane except for leeching XP, you should leave the lane ASAP and go jungle. It's that much of a difference from last patch. That said, Iron Talon is gone, so that might make certain offlaners less feasible this time around. Or teams will make sure to give the offlaner a strong support, knowing that falling back on the jungle is harder now.

You can't stack + pull the big camp at the safe lane anymore , now that the creeps meet closer to the tower. But at the offlane you can still pull it off. Which means that probably the offlane will become the new safelane (You put the hero with the highest farm priority in it) , since it's easier for supports to control that lane. The existence of the stack/pull camp & the nearby bounty make it the most important place for a support to be. For the safelane support, chaining the small and big camp seems like the best way to pull creeps. But that can be way easier countered now, since any fuckery with the big camp will make you miss your pull-through and push the lane towards their tower instead. If you have a trilane, you can fully control the safelane, but with only 2 heroes, it just seems like a worse lane compared to having 2 heroes in the offlane. having a stack + pull is HUGE, since it lets you control where the creeps meet, and lets you deny your own creeps, while also getting some xp / gold from the neutrals that die in the process. On top of that, the bounty rune is 2 steps away from that camp. So now that the offlane is the only place with such a stack+pull camp, the offlane simply has to have a minimum of 2 heroes.

For heroes that needed diffusal, Nullifier seems to be a good option now. It dispels & mutes the target and slows to 100% with every attack. Super strong on a hero like Ursa. Diffusal is still fine if you don't necessarily need to dispel things , and just want to slow. Kaya is great on nukers since it decreases the manacost of their spells and increases the damage it deals. Zeus, Skywrath, Lion, Winter wyvern are all great options.

Bane & Razor seem amazing mid. Creating a big disparity between your right click damage and the enemy midlaner means that you should get way more out of the lane. A mirana is not going to be able to kill/ deny creeps with 20-ish damage while you have 60. And now that you can rightclick through nightmare, building something like a mask of madness means that you can straight up solo kill people while they're being nightmared.

The new hero Dark Willow seems pretty strong as midlaner as well. Her W lets her take powerful podshots from afar and zone the enemy out. Once the enemy is whittled down, you have kill potential with the stun on a delay (E) + another shadow realm attack. Maybe even get a point in Q. Once you're lv 6, getting close to a hero with shadow realm + D causes massive damage. She seems really strong right now.

Pangolier seems like an utility core. He clears waves fast, is reasonably mobile and can wreck some heavoc in teamfights. Not a great rightclicker though and fairly squishy. But if you're able to get a good ult into shield into Q on the other team, a secondary physical damage dealer will melt through the enemy team. Might be a reasonable offlaner if he gets some support. Otherwise you probably have to play him as a utility safelaner and have a damagedealing mid hero like TA / Viper / Razor to actually kill people. Mjollnir seems great on him and you probably need some source of sustain to be able to roll through an entire team without dieing. vanguard did the job for me, but i can see diffusal being pretty good too, since it also puts the manadrain modifier on his Q.

When it comes to bounty runes, i think that the midlaner should still get it , since the faster you get your items, the stronger you are going to be against your opponent, and the bigger the chance is that you will win the lane. It's totally worth it to use the free TP scroll you get to TP back to the midlane after getting the rune. I just checked, and i ended up being lv 6 jakiro against a lv 3 shadow fiend at the 5 min mark. His tier 2 was down before the 8 minute mark. That's how much you can tilt the lane into your favor this time around, it's huge!

The patch has been out for a week so far and Valve has just issued an emergency balance patch to fix some meta issues. One of which is that the winrates of Medusa and Anti-Mage was spiked up by like 7%-10% thanks to a couple changes. For Anti-mage, he has benefited from the reduced cost to battlefury. Medusa got a huge buff when they allowed her split shot ability to be affected by lifesteal and other effects once you leveled her enough.

On the other end of the spectrum, heroes like Tiny and Morphling who were already struggling in the meta did even worse after the patch. I believe dotabuff recorded their average winrate as low as 37% for both.

The new heroes also got some balancing. I had expected pangolier to get the overpowered hero since he looked like a support that countered strength heroes like Bristleback. Instead, bristleback is stronger than ever (in pubs at least). The new hero to watch out for is Dark Willow. Valve described her as a support but she is being played as a mid hero right now because of her really strong abilities. She has a pretty strong team stun that can zone out alot of people. And her terrorize ability can open up teams to a great number of set ups.

Valve has said that they are also reworking the battlepass and I am curious* to see what they got up their sleeve.

*= and by curious, I mean that I am ready to throw my money away any day now.

Tiny feels so strong now. You can still play him as you normally would, mostly focusing on the blink avalanche toss combo (best suited for tiny mids & Io combinations) , but you can also choose for a more farm heavy style by maxing tree grab first. Not only does it farm stacks real fast, but you're also doing a ton of damage in team fights. And since Tiny already has a rediculous high base damage (77) adding a tree on top makes him quite the lane dominator. I like to build mana items first (aquila / wand / raindrops) into S&Y + Echo sabre + blink. His late game has improved quite a bit too now that his ult gives him +40% status resistance.

When it comes to morphling, i still feel somewhat in the dark with his ult. Morph already feels quite mana intensive with his spells, having to cast other heroes spells might require an extra mana item to his usual build. Being able to quickly cast a tombstone and switch back to normal morphling felt pretty good. Or morphing into Doom and using his scorched earth before switching back. but staying in a morphed form for more than 1 spell often felt like a bad idea, Especially because i would end up without any mana to waveform out of a fight.

Bane's damage leech talent has been moved from lv 10 to lv 15, which has toned down the carry bane builds. Now you can't time mask of madness with your level 10 which makes it a worse option.