posted by Liightsdota,
The extended duration of this tournament allowed the metagame time to evolve, and it was extremely interesting to see the impacts of Patch 7.27d, which arrived just 4 days before the playoffs began. Today we’ll look at where the metagame has landed following this tournament’s innovations.
Teams have adapted to the Ultra Lategame style
This adaptation was aided by the arrival of the patch 7.27d, which nerfed many of the popular lategame choices that had become common, and opened up opportunities for more aggressive heroes to shine. Furthermore, faster-styled teams realized that their opponents were largely content to play a passive farming game, so they reacted by aggressively invading the opposing triangle to drastically reduce the safe farming space for the enemy’s carry.
These aggressive rotations were carried out by ganking position 4 heroes like Clockwerk and Tiny combining with their midlaners. To ensure they were able to secure towers, teams playing this style had very successful tournaments on heroes like Beastmaster and Nature’s Prophet. It seems the metagame going forward will feature a more healthy mix of lategame scaling and early game aggression.
Double Ring of Regen on carries saves gold on early consumables
By grabbing two of these early for a mere 350 gold, V-Tune ensured that he was set on regen for the laning phase, saving gold in the future that would have to go into ferrying Tangos and Salves to stay in the lane. He used this style across multiple heroes including PL and Slark, bolstering his early game and ensuring he was healed up sufficiently when kill attempts came his way.
V-Tune wasn’t building these rings into anything following the laning phase, just getting rid of them when inventory slots became an issue. This can be an interesting option for carries to consider, saving them money through the laning phase that could go towards their first big item instead of regen to stay in lane.
Vengeful Spirit makes unbelievable combinations with the right partner
By enabling her cores to hit enemy towers without taking any damage, Vengeful Spirit allows skilled teams to quickly take down objectives and start constricting the opponent’s map. This high paced playstyle is further supplemented by her extremely low cooldowns, which allows Venge to constantly be ready for the next engagement.
Wave of Terror makes her excellent at stacking as well as dewarding high cliffs, or just scouting potentially unsafe areas for enemy heroes. Creative players will constantly be finding new ways to use Nether Swap to juke enemies and save allies. While this hero is still playable without a ranged carry pairing, it notably found much less success at the OMEGA League when those were banned and it was forced to play with something else like an Alchemist or Spectre.
Faceless Void provides crucial catch for mobile heroes
Chronosphere remains as impactful as ever, and Faceless’ ability to shake off damage makes him an extremely difficult target for the opponent’s offlane to try to kill. Void provides unparalleled lockdown from the carry position, which is extremely well suited to catching the very mobile heroes zipping around this patch.
Due to all of these factors, Faceless Void found extensive success at the OMEGA League and became the most picked and banned carry of the event. Another factor driving his success in the new patch was the heavyhanded nerfs to two of his strongest lane counters; Doom and Venomancer, which pretty much eliminated them from being picked up in this new metagame.
A new Nature’s Prophet build applies early pressure
Since the rework in 7.27, we’ve seen Null Talismans more prevalently across a wide range of heroes. However, Natures Prophet takes advantage of them in an extremely interesting way. The 6% spell damage boost that comes with a pair of these is enough to turn Wrath of Nature into a massive early game threat, which can fully destroy creepwaves.
This further supplements Nature’s Prophet’s high-pressure playstyle, by ensuring that waves are shoved in, forcing enemy heroes to make themselves vulnerable to ganks by showing on those waves. While this hero wasn’t picked up in every game, Nature’s Prophet proved to be a very effective threat in the right draft aiming to play around his early timings.
Now the OMEGA League has concluded, we’ve seen many adaptations that will be carried into future tournaments like OGA Dotapit Season 3. Have you been seeing more early aggression in your ranked pubs, or are people still favouring a very lategame style?
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