Update, August 7: More details about the new hero have reared their head, but it’s still not clear exactly how they’ll fit into the pre-exisiting Dota 2 pantheon.
More details about the new hero have been released including its name and abilities. Sylph will be a ranged hero, and its abilities will be Grapple, Shadow Realm, Flash Powder, and Will-O-Wisp, likely in that order from Q to R.
As we gear up for The International, check out our list of the best Dota 2 heroes for beginners.
There’s some discussion on this Reddit thread as to Slyph’s lore. Since Slyph is not explicitly named as a spirit, the new hero likely doesn’t fit in with the overall theme of heroes like Storm Spirit, Earth Spirit, or Ember Spirit, which some players assumed they would. Sylph is also almost always portrayed as female, and stems from Western rather than Eastern culture, further distancing the new hero from the Eastern Spirit brothers that currently inhabit the game
Original Story, August 2:Dota 2 might be getting a bunch of new heroes in the near future, and the first could be some sort of air spirit, according to the manager of Team Secret and adatamineof May’s Battle Pass update.
In a series of tweets posted yesterday, Matt Bailey, the manager of Dota 2 team Team Secret, said that in a meeting with Valve a spokesperson suggested “We would like to move a lot quicker on new hero development. We feel like the meta game overall is in great shape, but new heroes are an area that has not gone as quickly as we would like.”
Also arriving yesterday alongside Bailey’s tweets is this Reddit thread, which suggests that the first of these new heroes might not be far away. The information uncovered comes from an update released way back at the beginning of May, and suggests the hero could be called Sylph, which in Western tradition are mythological air spirits.
The strings uncovered in the datamine might have also revealed the new heroes’ abilities. They are . The last three of these in particular would seem to fit with the idea that the new hero could be some kind of elemental.