Update, October 31: Dota 2 update 7.07 is now live.
There’s not much else to be said. Dota 2 7.07, otherwise known as the Dueling Fates update, is now live. The download’s over a gigabyte, featuring two new heroes, a new matchmaking system, a faster game mode, and much more.
Fill some time with our list of the best Dota 2 heroes for beginners.
You can either scroll down a bit for more details or just launch the Dota 2 client and dive in for yourself.
Update, October 31:Purge will run his usual, in-depth Dota 2 patch stream today.
Read all the patch notes, but want a more in-depth, visual look at everything that’s changing with Dota’s latest 7.07 update? Legendary caster Kevin ‘Purge’ Godec is aiming to run his usual patch stream in just a bit, which should provide every detail you could possibly want on the new update.
You can check out Purge’s Twitch channel here. Purge says the stream is scheduled to start just a few minutes from now, so check it out.
Update, October 30:Valve have detailed what’s coming in the 7.07 update, including two new heroes, ranked seasons, an upgrade to the guide system, a faster-paced turbo mode, and more.
After months of speculation, Valve have finally detailed what’s coming in the 7.07 Dueling Fates update. The biggest additions are, of course, the two new heroes, and we’ve now got details on their abilities.
The first is Pangolier, a swashbuckling melee hero built on dashing into battle to disrupt enemies. Here are his abilities:
- Swashbuckle
- Pangolier dashes to a new position, assaulting enemies in the target direction with multiple quick thrusts, dealing physical damage and apply on hit effects.
- Shield Crash
- Pangolier jumps in the air and slams back to the ground. Enemies around him are damaged and grant him temporary damage reduction the more heroes he hits.
- Heartpiercer
- Pangolier reads his enemies perfectly, deftly slipping his blade past defenses to give his attacks a chance to slow the target and fully negate enemy armor after a short delay.
- Rolling Thunder
- Pangolier curls into a magic-immune ball and thunders forward, damaging and stunning any enemies he hits. Shield Crash can also be used while this ability is active to jump over obstacles. Has a brief channeling period.
Then there’s Dark Willow, a ranged fairy adept at controlling enemy movements with magical binding attacks. These are her abilities:
- Bramble Maze
- Dark Willow creates a maze of brambles that latch onto enemies who walk into a thicket, damaging them and applying a root.
- Shadow Realm
- Dark Willow recedes into the Shadow Realm, becoming untargetable and gaining increasing bonus magic damage for her next attack the longer she remains in the shadows.
- Cursed Crown
- Dark Willow bestows a cursed fae crown upon an enemy. After a four second delay, the target and any other enemies nearby are stunned.
- Bedlam
- Dark Willow’s companion Jex circles around her, dealing damage to nearby enemies. Cannot be used while Terrorize is active.
- Terrorize
- Dark Willow’s companion Jex strikes fear into her enemies, causing them to run towards their home fountain. Cannot be used while Bedlam is active.
On top of that is a change to how matching works, as players will now be matched according to a six-month seasonal cycle. Both ranked and unranked players will have their MMRs reset each season, seeded by their previous season’s value, and they’ll earn medals based on their skill rating in each cycle.
The search queue now offers a new game mode called Dota Turbo, which features the same rules as All Pick but quickens the pace by increasing gold and XP rewards, making towers weaker, and reducing respawn time.
There’s a new hero guide system under the Learn tab, allowing players to create, annotate, and share their own hero builds, helpfully marked by role and patch to make its uses clear. Ability Draft has also been updated with a new interface, hotkey swapping, and team chat during the draft. Ancient Apparition has been remodeled, and the Ping Wheel allows for easier communication options.
Other gameplay changes are far too numerous to list here, but you can check out the full rundown with the official patch notes. The update is due to hit this Wednesday, November 1.
Update October 20, 2017:The system works – to get a Dota patch release date, you just need one six hour parody stream, the most intricate machinima troll of all time and a lot of faith.
Valve have announced the release date for Dota 2’s next patch, the Duelling Fates. They’ll be adding two new heroes and a whole big batch of balance changes on November 1, and everyone’s quite excited.
The announcement was made via Twitter:
The Dueling Fates update will arrive on November 1st
— DOTA 2 (@DOTA2) October 19, 2017
Amusingly enough, Valve didn’t specify a year, but we’re gonna go ahead and assume at least 2018, maybe 2019 at a push. Who knows?
Exactly what’s in the patch hasn’t been divulged, and there have been relatively few teasers besides the original trailer embedded above. There’s a lot of expectation for a major shakeup, though it’s unlikely to add as many systems as the 7.00 update from the same time last year.
The release date means Dota Pit 6 will be the first major tournament using it, featuring the two teams that were in the finals of the most recent International – Team Liquid and Newbee. Should be good.
This also means we’ll be getting 7.07 patch notes a lot sooner than that, possible as early as this week or next. Expect more extremely long analysis videos and streams.
Update October 19, 2017:The wait for Dota 2’s patch 7.07 continues, and the community is still just a little bit unhinged about the whole thing.
Summoning the IceFrog, Dota 2’s pseudo-anonymous lead designer and hero of the community, is a long-held secret nobody has ever truly unlocked. The latest attempt, however, is the closest anyone has gotten.
Using Valve’s various tools for creating custom items and effects, one Reddit user has made this video of their personal unholy ritual:
In order the effects are, usually targeting the object that sets it all off:
- A mango expanding into a large number of other mangos (there are apparently 420 of them in total)
- Five Pugnas draining each other in a pentagram
- Three Venomancers casting Poison Gale
- Six Vengeful Spirits casting Wave of Terror towards the center
- Nine Shadow Demons casting Shadow Poison towards the center
- Four Warlocks casting Upheavel on top of themselves in the center
- Six Lichs casting ice armour before dying
- Three Ogre Magi cast bloodlust before being hit by several Overwhelming Odds from hidden Legion Commanders
- Four Linas cast Dragon Slave in a square
- Four Death Prophets cast Crypt Swarm in a square the opposite direction
- Eight Tusks cast Ice Shards in a circle pattern
- Seven Shadow Fiends cast Shadowraze
- Six Jakiros cast Dual Breath
- Four Sanity’s Eclipse hit on the outside, then nearer the middle, then nearer still
- 18 (we think) Phoenixs spawn and Icarus Dive in a circle
- 10 Magnuses cast Shockwave
- Four Freezing Fields go off
- The Golem summoning effect from Warlock goes off in the center
- Four Terrorblade sunders
- Golem summoning effect again
- A giant Enigma appears with screenshake and casts Black Hole with additional, custom frog particle effects
- Nine Morphlings cast Waveform away from the center
- Four Necrophos cast Reaper’s Scythe
- Everything dies and the IceFrog spawns, with 322 health, mana, damage, armour and attack speed – 322 is a popular Dota 2 meme regarding matchfixing. The IceFrog also has 7 strength, 0 agility and 7 intellect, to represent the patch number.
Good memeing everyone. It is hardly the only post of its kind on the sub recently, as others clamour for something, anything to do – such as analysing Terrorblade’s backstory. Art makes an appearence too, along with needlessly cruel patch-day ideas. It’s an intense time to be a Dota fan, but we’re not expecting the wait to last much longer. After the ESL One Hamburg Major the Christmas down period is expected to start, the perfect timing for a patch.
Or, y’know, never.
Original story September 29, 2017:Dota 2 works in cycles and it’s currently waiting for patch 7.07. Yearly mega-tournament and prize pool blowout The International functions as an end of season moment as much as in any other sport. Post-TI teams break up, reform, and get the sponsors in. Players take a break from the game and, most importantly, Valve work towards a big new patch.
The problem is that the uncertainty of Dota 2’s development – the same thing that makes it one of the most exciting games in the world to follow – means there is no due date for the season to start again. That means something needs to fill the void of information the community is ravenous for. So: memes.
As an example, the most upvoted post on the subreddit today is a Twitch emote photoshopped to look like various Dota 2 heroes. They’re pretty good, I particularly like Magnus’ horn – the guy is now taking requests for $5 a pop, if you want your own.
It’s a fairly common phenomenon in gaming, where the lagtime between announcements, changes, patches, or updates leads to official communities being flooded with something, anything to distract from the wait while no real content is being made. Dota 2’s are particularly strong, and the wait for 7.07 has been bad, even for them.
Here’s community favourite SirActionSlacks – he got married on Twitch during this downtime as well – explaining why the Scan ability needs to be redesigned to be more lore-friendly. He has a fair point, and also 6,555 upvotes, enough to front-page just about anywhere. Not enough for you? A matchmaking time ‘complaint’ is now one of the most popular posts ever on the sub.
There are legitimate reasons for all of this and it is a source of complaints. While Dota 2 isn’t dying, no matter how low the concurrent player count goes – number two on Steam isn’t something to sniff at, ever – there would be fewer problems if patches weren’t teased quite so far in advance. 7.07, the Dueling Fates update that will bring two new heroes to the fray along with an inevitable reboot of various key systems, was first teased during TI a month and a half back. Since then, nothing,no release date and certainly no communication from Valve. When it’s ready there will be a blowout, but for now: silence.
Compare that to League of Legends’ two-week cycles, or Overwatch’s constant developer videos and blue posts, or even the steady flow of new (brilliant) videogames to distract players.
Well, that and working out which hero fits which horoscope. Or just being nice. Or fine execution of otherwise tired memes. Plenty of legitimately great content fills the gap too, with incredible work like this Terrorblade set getting the recognition it deserves.
As for 7.07, it’s unlikely to arrive before December. Hopefully this video made for the purpose of speeding it up helps:
Please, Valve, people are losing it.