The update that everyone’s been waiting for over four years is just one week away from becoming a reality. The “Techies” update isn’t only promising a new hero – which is one of the most infamous heroes in the game – but a slew of other features. The madness of All Random Deathmatch is making its debut along with a new All-Hero challenge, egging you on to win a match with each and every hero in Dota 2. And we’ll also see the introduction of the compendium stretch goals, such as new music and ballsy taunt gem.
Oh, and don’t forget the bug fixes too.
The meat of the update is a new hero called Techies. They’re a trio of giggling goblins that have a taste for explosives, lots of them. They can place various boobytraps around the map for their foes to blunder into, causing massive damage or stunning them for long periods. Even if they manage to evade their mischief, Techies can blow themselves up with one of the biggest nukes in the game.
Lets take a look at their skills:
- LAND MINES – Place an invisible bomb that automatically explodes when an enemy steps near.
- STASIS TRAP – Set a hidden trap to stun your foes.
- SUICIDE SQUAD, ATTACK! – Sacrifice yourself for the greater good, inflicting massive damage to nearby enemies.
- REMOTE MINES & FOCUSED DETONATE – Place stealthy remote explosives in strategic locations then, when the time is right, use Focused Detonate to set them off.
Although they look rather powerful, they can only reach that potential in the hands of a skilled player. They’re super squishy, and have the worst auto-attack in the game. You’re going to see a lot of bad Techie players until you witness a good one, and you can expect to see these three muskateers in just about every match you play from now on.
All Random Deathmatch is an interesting take on the MOBA formula. Each team spawns with randomly selected heroes. Every time a player dies, they respawn with a new random hero, while keeping their level and items. Each team can lose up to 40 heroes before their players will stop respawning. First team to whittle the enemy team down to zero or destroy the Ancient the good old fashioned way, wins.
If the sound of All Random Deathmatch make you squirm in your seat with intimidation, don’t worry: the new All-Hero Challenge will get you ready to face whatever hero Dota 2 throws at you. It will give you a random hero and challenge you to win a match with it, and upon doing so you’ll be presented with another hero. Slowly, you’ll eventually win a match with each and every hero, receiving a brand new trophy to boot. The new trophy systems allows you to show off your accomplishments in your Dota profiles gallery. Think of it like an achievement system.
A bunch of compendium stretch goals are also coming to fruition. There’s a victory taunt, a special laugh for Techies and a new kill banner. The most exciting goal however is the International 2014 music pack. Award-winning artist, Chance Thomas, has composed a number of new battle music peices. There’s a behind the scenes preview above, so do give it a watch.
The patch will hit the main Dota 2 client sometime next week. In the meantime, check out the changelong:
GENERAL
- Removed waiting for spectators in private lobbies
COMMUNITY
- Increased low-priority ban rate for players who receive high numbers of reports
USER INTERFACE
- Added many new loading screen tips
- Fixed and adjusted several tooltips and ability descriptions
- Alt-clicking on an item in an enemy hero’s inventory now informs your teammates that the enemy has that item
- Alt-clicking on the buyback button or your gold will notify your team of your current buyback status
- Items may now be dropped from the stash while dead
- Fixed replay highlight reel transition graphic getting stuck on sometimes
- Fixed a bug in the Coach UI where the help text sometimes overlapped the student checkboxes, rendering them unusable
ITEMS
- Players can no longer drop or take other players’ unsharable items on the courier
- Players can no longer store other players’ unsharable items in their stash
- Items on heroes controlled by players who have disconnected, but not yet abandoned, can no longer be dropped from their inventories
- Fixed a case where picking up an item owned by another player triggered an item combine, using items from the owning player’s stash. If the item was owned by an enemy player, this would combine and steal the whole item.
1V1 MODE
- Side towers are now always Invulnerable.
BOTS
- Added new Bot AI for Riki
- Added new Bot AI for Pudge
- Added new Bot AI for Axe
- Bots in solo bot matches will wear your equipped cosmetics
WORKSHOP
- Increased the size of the importer preview
- Added particle system attachment point editing as part of the submission process for certain wearable items (like Drow Ranger’s bow)
- Fixed a bug where sub model pages weren’t being flipped back to the first page when opening a model that only needed the first page
- Fixed the attachment list not being initialized properly, which was leading to the default selection being blank
- Fixed a bug where lighting in the preview would darken after the portrait editor was opened
- Updated text to make it clearer that model budgets are in triangles, not polygons
COMPENDIUM TOOLS
- Several new features for Third Party compendiums. Documentation at https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dota2_Compendium_Scriptfiles
- Fixed test_local_compendium not precaching images the way the download path did, which resulted in subtle differences in some cases.
- Fixed compendium video elements not working if they weren’t using the legacy element path.