Update 21 December, 2016: Valve has released the first patch for Dota 2 since the controversial version 7.00, which redesigned the game in many fundamental ways.
Yesterday Valve released the version 7.01 update for Dota 2, which has earned criticism on Reddit for its awkward UI and numerous bugs. The new update fixes some of these, but based on the complaints we tracked on Reddit (see below) will probably leave many players wanting on the technical side. The bigger news is the gameplay rebalance, which brings a keenly-hoped for nerf to Monkey King.
Undeterred? Here’s how to play Dota 2 for when Valve fixes all this.
Among the technical changes are the restoration of shop purchase hotkeys, fixes for “various crashes” and the browse items tab sliding out as a panel instead of taking the place of the shop UI.
In terms of gameplay, Monkey King’s nerf means Jingu Mastery no longer ignores armour when calculating lifesteal, its counter duration is reduced from 15 to ten seconds, and Boundless Strike’s critical strike is rescaled from 200% to 140/160/180/200%.
Enchantress has had her base intelligence raised by three and a couple of buffs to her talents, while Meepo’s clones are now able to pick up runes, which will make them that much more scarce for his opponents.
The patch notes are available in fullon Steam, but there’s a formatted and annotated versionon Reddit. There’s a lot there, with smaller tweaks to over a dozen heroes.
Original story 19 December, 2016: Despite having some nice ideas, Dota 2’s wide-ranging 7.00 update has apparently caused problems commensurate with its scope, according to feedback on Reddit and Steam.
ZealotHill has a list of bugs relating to mouse clicks registering, whileWatermelon420argues the HUD in the in-game shop is the worst thing about version 7.00, damning it as unintuitive. To this, VegapunkD argues “the worst thing is the bug that dont [sic] allow me to click in the minimap until I rightclick it.”
This clip from streamer Merlini is the focus of another thread. It shows him getting attacked by an Ancient Prowler Shaman, a powerful creep which would normally be safely inside its camp. What seems to have happened is it was stuck outside its camp through some kind of glitch, and thus had an aggro range, and thus crushed Merlini. Apparently, this isn’t an isolated incident, and other players report having it happen in other camps.
The Steam community concurs, with many of the most upvoted reviews since the patch being negative and offering a long list of complaints, from bugs to an awkward new UI full of tiny, hard-to-read icons. Cherryghost says: “as a colourblind user, the HUD has completely screwed me over. I’m having difficulty differentiating between greyed out skill/items and coloured (readied) ones.”
It’s a real shame, since many of the complaints do acknowledge that 7.00 offers some cool ideas, but the consensus is that they have been poorly implemented and overshadowed by the problems. Hopefully Valve won’t take too long to sort all this, but many players who enjoyed the game before are wondering why they’ve tried to fix something that, in their view, wasn’t broken.