It’s been a week since Valve released a hero balancing patch and now is the right time to look at first emerging trends. The patch itself was pretty interesting, reverting some of the changes made to the heroes over the last couple of years, but is the result a better, more interesting game?

While the new patch is still being explored and Valve is still tweaking things, we would like to discuss some of the most flexible heroes in the game, who are also among the biggest winners of the patch. While most heroes in the game have one or two distinct initial item builds, heroes discussed today can realistically go for any starting items and be situationally effective, making them very interesting indeed.

When one of your friends tells you they want to play Vengeful Spirit mid, you might load into the game and prepare yourself for a loss. Not anymore. Recently, streamers and some professional teams like OG and Nigma have been running the hero in core positions such as 1, 2 and even 3. So why are some professional players running Vengeful Spirit mid? How can you play this hero mid?

Core Pugna is currently one of the strongest heroes in pubs: his win rate in the Divine+ bracket is approaching 53% this month. At the same time, his popularity is still pretty low, indicating that while the hero might be strong, he does require a lot of knowledge to realize correctly.

The cyclical nature of patches might not be ideal, but it does keep things fresh. Every patch some heroes essentially get “rotated out” of the professional and high-level pub meta and are replaced by newly buffed characters. For the most part it works surprisingly well: there are usually no completely unusable heroes, they just become very specific. Sometimes, however, this well-oiled balance machine forgets about certain heroes and they are left by the wayside for way too long. Today we are going to discuss three such heroes.

It’s been a week since the latest Dota patch was introduced to the game and now is the best time to look at some preliminary trends. Spoiler alert: the game still needs some small fixes.

Players often talk about high ground advantage in Dota, but very few actually fully understand how important it is and how much it can change the battle. Today we would like to have a look through the advantages higher ground gives you and overview some of the common mistakes players make when they are in an advantageous position.

The significance of supports in the later stages of the game has been increasing steadily over the years. Despite that, many players are too accustomed to their sacrificial role in the game and it prevents them from having an impact and winning their games. Today we would like to have a look at three different supports who have a respectable winrate, but are still often misused in pubs.

While screen-filling armies is what defines the current patch, there are still heroes who manage to win more than 50% of their games, but are underappreciated by the community. Many of them are also not the most skill-intensive heroes and can be learned with ease by most players. Today we are going to look at three such heroes, who are already doing quite well and might even get a buff or two in the next patch.

In the current meta, and the current environment, nature is healing and animals are running free. Wolves, bears, treants, boars, and other creatures are running around like they own the map. And they kind of do.