posted by EskayDota,
Over the years we’ve had weird and wonderful changes to our game. Which changes did we NOT get? There are the obvious items we’ve lost; Iron Talon, Poor Mans Shield, and new players won’t even know the struggle of getting anybody in the 2k bracket to upgrade the courier to a flying one. There are a number of features, cosmetics and so on that players would have adored, but were turned down by Valve before their implementation.

Abilities



Valve scrapped plans to make dewarding observers and sentries a channelled process. Instead of right clicking a ward to get rid of it, Valve were making plans to give every hero an innate channelled ability that destroy wards. It was of an unknown duration, but once it completed, the ward was gone. For an unknown reason, this was likely replaced with attacks on wards having 100% accuracy.

Golem Bash was an ability intended for everyone’s favourite big brother of the rock golem creeps. The bash was a 7% chance, 1 second stun and dealt 25 magic damage to the bashee. The buff to the ancient camp was never implemented, although potentially Valve got more or less what they wanted – arguably stronger - with those pesky Ancient Prowler camps being implemented.

Lich carry has never been a thing. You might have seen Lich played as a core in your pubs if you’ve been exceptionally unlucky, but it’s almost never been a viable choice. However, Valve had previously proposed a change to Lich that most likely won’t ever see the light of day. Unholy Pact was due to be one of Lich’s spells, except it seemed so strong, and could have potentially seen a rise in a brand new Lich core.



It had no cast time and would sacrifice 20% of Lich’s current health with no manacost. In return, it would grant a pretty sizeable 100 attack speed buff – each attack stealing up to 8% of the target’s mana for 5 hits. For a hero with even a 500 mana pool, 8% is just nearly as good as a diffusal blade. The attack speed buff lasts for 15 seconds on a 10 second cooldown, or until all 5 attacks had been used. Oh, and it also pierced spell immunity.

Features



Do you ever want to avoid that one annoying person in your stack? Have you ever set your Steam to be offline to do an undetected solo rank game? Well Dota 2 had originally planned an incognito mode. This would have not only hidden your profile from your friends, but also actually allowed you to enter a different profile name for your session. This setting was shelved around late 2013, however, and Valve have kept quiet on it since.



Single Draft currently lets you chose between 3 random heroes; a fun gamemode for trying to learn new heroes without the pressure of All Random. There was previously mention of a game mode called “Tag Team”, where players were assigned two heroes; a core and a support. They had the option of choosing between the two, and players would start with the old random gold bonus. This was last mentioned in early 2012, and is likely the basis for what became Single Draft. A fun fact for your friends in low priority.

Cosmetics



The early days of Dota 2 cosmetics was a wild west of a time. Valve still had very strict rules on the colours of items, and there were often thematic issues with what was being created by any community contributors. Amongst some notable sets, there is just one in particular that NEEDS attention. The Wrath of the Orca.

Used initially as a test of concept for a very early cosmetic system, Valve quickly deemed the set to be a complete colour mismatch between the cosmetic and Tide’s original skin. If this had made it into the game, it would most certainly be one of the most valuable and desired sets out there.



Alongside turning Tidehunter into an Orca, which easily would have been one of the coolest and silliest sets out there, around the same time Valve were making some sneaky plans with Warlock’s Golems. If you thought the current Golems looked cool, how about if Dota 2 met Half-Life, and mixed the DNA of a head crab with a rhinoceros. And thus; an entirely new sentence was born.



Heroes



Whilst there haven’t been any heroes removed from the game, an honourable mention must go to Maverick, The Gambler from the original Dota days. A hero based almost entirely off of gambling gold, there was never a Dota 2 remake of the hero, and you can easily see why.

His abilities included gambling gold with enemies or allies, dealing damage based on the amount of gold enemies had, using a wheel of fortune to decide which nearby enemy he hit, gambling a small chance to instantly kill creeps or do damage to an enemy with a small % to earn an extra profit, and, finally, he spent money to deal damage for his ultimate.

There was a brief and hilarious patch that very few will remember where his fourth ability, Learn Lucky Stars, counted Roshan as a creep that he could instantly kill; a “feature” that was of course removed from the game. Whether we ever get a Gambler Dota 2 remake is to be seen, but with the addition of brand new heroes never originally in DotA 1, it seems unlikely that bringing Maverick into the new age is anywhere near their priorities.



Header image credit: Valve

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    EskayDota

    EskayDota

    Sam Kennard
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