I'm happy they finally fixed the pull for the radiant safe lane. The dire safelane may pull from the larger creep camp, but the radiant was always stuck with pulling from the small camp alone. That fix only sins due to being SEVERAL — and I do mean SEVERAL — patches too late.
The worst about this patch is definitely
Faceless Void. Frankly I'm starting to be afraid of these major patches, because every time one comes out they decide to buff all ridiculously strong carries and nerf already ridiculously sluggish supports. For example, Chaos Knight did not need a buff to his W, Clinkz definitely does not need more agility, PA and Naga do not need more intelligence, Ogre does not need more health regen (he's already the support with most base health regen and armor out there)... the list goes on.
At first, I was happy about that lame Backtrack passive was gone. First, because it's a passive: you'll notice that most carries in DotA do not need any sort of skill: they're just mostly equipped with two passives and then a few cheap abilities. Heroes in this category include anti-mage, drow ranger, Luna, phantom assassin, phantom lancer, to some extent Sven, Ursa and others as well (and Riki until recently). Their abilities require absolutely no thinking (frost arrows?) or are spammable (PA), with a few exceptions (I've seen a few plays with Ursa where ability uses were not trivial to success).
In this regard, I was quite happy with the changes to Riki and Void's Backtrack going away. Finally, this hero can't evade a 1k dmg Finger of Death or Laguna Blade! Only to realize that they've made him even more cancerous. Now Void can cope his damage dodging with repositioning himself in a fight using a single ability.
No matter, at least it costs 90 mana and has a considerable cooldown. Oh wait. What is this? He's used this several times after Chronosphere and still hasn't exhausted his mana pool? Then I looked again. 40 mana, 4 seconds cooldown? Is this serious? An ability that dodges all sort of damage and grants the benefit of repositioning in a game where positioning is ever more important (more on this below)? At least you can expel anti-mage from the fight before he purchases a HoT, now you've got a new version of Magina that forces you even more to pick permastuns like Lion or Rhasta. If you don't, pick from two choices: either focus him and then you might just kill him, but have his entire team kill you, or focus his teammates and then he kills you. Either way, you lose.
My terrible experience with this hero was in a game where Magina was the enemy carry. We had a phantom assassin for carry, a bloodseeker and Void was their offlane. With bloodseeker, we managed to keep Magina under control, but the whole game Void just couldn't be killed with his new Q. He fetched this and the other kill and pulled out a monkey king bar before anti-mage even got his BF out.
The other large disappointment in this patch is
Silencer. In that they've completely screwed him up with his new Q. The old Curse of the Silent (Q) was fine and together with Last Word (E) and sometimes Glaives (W) I found myself being a very valuable lane support.
Some people believe the new Q is better. With the old Q and E maxed you could pull out from 600 to 700 dmg on a hero if timed right. I don't want to brag, but I was one of the veeery few Silencer players to do this correctly and I never found anyone pulling it right before it started being my regular play. The new Q deals at most 245 dmg when maxed, and then +140 dmg for every cast. Sure, theoretically this is great, but I'm going to argue why it's not:
- First, as I said, Curse of the Silent was of utmost importance to harass inlane. Not only because of the damage, but most importantly to stop that Windranger from powershoting in order to economize her mana (the new Q does NOT burn mana), just to give an example.
- In team fights, as Silencer, you do not want people casting around. When a team fight breaks out, your team will want you to use your ultimate, not watch around as they refresh the buff but kill the entire team. Because really, heroes like Bristleback and Zeus are gonna refresh the Arcane Curse debuff a lot, but does it really matter that he'll die when he's unloaded all the nukes on you and killed or injured to half HP your entire team? No, it doesn't. You'd rather put a Last Word on him so he can't do anything for 6 seconds and possibly combine that with your ultimate to ensure Zeus doesn't do anything for the whole team fight.
- In practice, these heroes do not die from this. First, because having supports like Omniknight and Abaddon in-game throw this debuff down the drain with unpaired kekface. Second, even if there are no such supports, the increased 140 dmg is fake because the heroes regenerate during this period. Heroes like Bristle and Ogre will almost always carry health regeneration items and, in high brackets, everyone ALWAYS carries a TP, so if you see you're going to die before the debuff wears out, you'll use your teleport scroll. Why didn't this happen with old Q? Because old Q lasts shorter for the same damage and burns away the 75 mana required in order to teleport.
This change takes its toll in one other level as well: I used to kill enemies in the distance using E and Q, but the new Q ensures that, if I want to kill someone, I'll have to chase them down. The result is that I find my death rates climbing up vertiginously. Silencer isn't a particularly tanky hero. Paired with people's tendency to target helpless supports that's installed in recent years (and definitely being stimulated by heroes like Void), I found that if I step just a bit closer into the mess, I end up getting targeted and killed. At first, I was like "Oh god, 4 deaths in just little over 10 minutes, this is my worst game as Silencer ever". Then it happend the next game, and the following one, and the one after that. I realized I was subconciously trying harder to stay close to the int fetch range (which is extremely small) and dish out damage, consequently getting targeted down and killed.
The result from all of this is that — while 99% of the Silencers I saw were skilling W and E but completely ignore Curse of the Silent — I have rarely, if ever, in well over 200 games as Silencer, skilled Glaives before Q. Not counting stupid pub games, I had 75% win rate as Silencer. In this new patch, I've completely gone the other way after having tried the new Q repeatedly : I rarely ever skill the new Arcane Curse. I go for E, W, and stats. Counting only the games with the new patch, my win rate must be around 40% with this hero.