This past week in the 7.20 waiting room, a Valve employee hinted at a possible 7.19d patch, compLexity Gaming qualified for ESL Hamburg's while Aster and Newbee will replay their match, and Team Secret takes the PvP Championship title.

Here at Dotabuff we love discussing meta, trends, and hero popularity. It provides players with some sense of direction, allows them to better understand the professional scene and helps incorporating this knowledge in their own games. Sometimes we even get carried away, calling out heroes for being unplayable or praising them too much.

In one of our previous articles we highlighted how narrow the pool of viable support heroes is. With supports often being the first two picks and a heavy focus on the laning stage, players in high level games are often forced to pick one of four-five ubiquitously recognized heroes. Typical Silencer, Crystal Maiden, Dark Willow and Vengeful Spirit are all great heroes, but sometimes it can get tiring, playing the same thing over and over again.

Though he’s rarely seen in the professional scene, Riki continues to dominate pubs at a Spectre-like level across all skill brackets, sitting at a 59% overall win rate in the past month.

Two weeks of qualifiers in a row can be a little tedious for an average viewer, especially considering how Minor qualifiers generally feature teams of relatively unknown players. However, despite low fame, these teams produced some excellent Dota and definitely deserve recognition.

7.19b and 7.19c changes allowed for some meta developments, and while it may take time for the pubs to adjust, professional players are already adapting. It’s hard to call this adaptation innovative, since for the most part teams went for the “next best thing” of the TI patch, but at least we aren’t watching the same exact Dota as we did during The International 2018.

This week, fifteen teams claimed their spots at the Kuala Lumpur Major, with one spot left for the Dreamleague Minor winner, and China blocks Twitch.

Valve continues to release small balance patches and now it is highly unlikely we will see major balance changes until after the upcoming announced Minor qualifiers are over. That said, 7.19c brought enough changes to the game to potentially shake up the meta, at least in pubs.

This week marked the deadline for rosters before the new Dota season begins. Valve unleashes nerfs on the most popular heroes of the meta, while bringing back Ranked Role Matchmaking, as a Dota Plus feature.

There is still a lot of fun to be had in Dota while we wait for the inevitable “big” post-TI patch. 7.19b addressed the biggest issues of the previous patch, but was overall pretty tame, resulting in a meta that isn’t too different from what we were playing for the last couple of months.