Dota 2 update adds Skywrath Mage; everyone is now afraid

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Today’s Dota 2 update sees a new hero, Skywrath Mage added to the game after Valve return from their spring holiday. He excels at doing massive amounts of magical damage in a very short amount of time, coining the nickname “Giga Mage” in the original Dota. Also in is a new replay tab, where you can view all your downloaded replays in a nice orderly fashion.

Skywrath Mage is the glassiest or all glass cannons. All of his abilities either do damage, or amplify damage, which makes him a hero to be feared.

Lets take a look at exactly why you should quake in your boots:

Arcane Bolt: A slow moving projectile, it deals a flat 60/80/100/120 damage but is also scaled by Skywrath Mage’s intelligence. This means this spell hits hard early, mid and late game, so you shouldn’t ignore it when you see it coming your way.

Concussive Shot: This ability has a huge range, and will deal a moderate 50/100/150/200 damage but also slow heroes in a small AoE by 40% for four seconds. Useful for catching fleeing prey.

Ancient Seal: This one is a kick in the nuts. For 3/4/5/6 seconds the target enemy will not only be silenced, but receive 16/24/30/36% extra magic damage. Now since all of your attacks are magical, yeah, you get the picture. Note this also amplifies the magic damage from other sources too e.g. other players, neutrals.

Mystic Flare: Once Skywrath Mage hits level six, things start to get ugly thanks to his ultimate. Skywrath Mage deals 600/900/1200 damage within a moderate AoE to any heroes caught inside his ultimate. Depending on the number of enemy heroes caught, the damage is spread evenly among the heroes over a two second period. It also has an incredibly short cooldown of just 60/40/20 seconds, but a very high 350/575/800 mana cost. If you can catch lone heroes out when you have this bad boy ready, they’re as good as dead.

New scary hero aside, Valve have also added a convenient “Downloaded” replay tab, where you can view all your stored replays at onces. This is a huge improvement from only being able to watch the replay from the match report itself, which would often get lost in the nether of your game history.

Here are the patch notes:

– Added Skywrath Mage!

COMMUNITY

– Added stricter system implementing communication (voice and text) bans for abusive players.

– Combined voice and text reports into a single ‘communication’ report.

– Reduced reports per week to 4.

– Removed ability for spectators to report players in-game.

– Reports now allow single selection of behavior type only.

GAMEPLAY

– Beastmaster: Fixed Wild Axes losing vision after the second cast.

– Doom: Scorched Earth now shows its duration on the buff icon.

– Lich: Fixed Frost Armor auto-casting while Lich is channeling.

– Magnus: Fixed a rare crash involving Skewer.

– Slardar: Fixed Slithereen Crush not slowing attack speed.

– Spectre: Fixed Haunt illusions moving while out of the game.

– Timbersaw: Fixed Timberchain travelling too fast.

– Timbersaw: Fixed Timberchain not latching quite far enough.

– Tusk: Fixed Tusk not issuing an attack order on the snowballed unit after the snowball crashes.

– Enabled Drow and Tusk to Captain’s Mode (Tournament Version next week)

UI

– Added tab to the Watch section showing downloaded replay files.

VISUALS

– Riki: Added Smoke Screen and Blink Strike animations.

– Sniper: Added victory animations and more aggressive posing of idle, run and attack when enemy is in range.

BOTS

– Bots now know to avoid standing in Macropyre and Ice Path.

WORKSHOP

– Added a button to the preview that allows you to test your imported model in-game, in a local server.