The Return Of Techies
Techies is now officially winning more games than he is losing. Ever since a swath of nerfs to land mines in patch 6.85, Techies hovered around a 45% win rate. Today in patch 7.01, his win rate has increased by over 7 points, sitting at 52.83%, which puts him 32nd on our pub win rate charts.
From Pub Menace To TI5 First Rounder
Techies’ win rate wasn’t always suggestive of how the community felt about that hero, which was that in a game with Techies, only one player was having fun. In pubs, Techies players often retreat from the game to shroud their movements and their mine placements, leaving their teammates to play 5v4. For the community, it didn’t matter that he was losing more than half his games. In Dota, there two types of games: ones without Techies and ones with Techies. And games with Techies had a tendency of being longer than necessary.
Because of his relative unpopularity, Techies was largely ignored, even with his buffs across patch 6.83 and 6.84 (most notably: increased land mine damage and reduced activation delay). That changed in 2015 and during Evil Geniuses TI5 championship run, Techies even emerged as a mandatory first round ban against them. While pub Techies players hid from the map to shroud their movements, EG put their Techies, played by Aui, in full view. Instead of creating space, Techies consumed it, closing off a full lane of the map.
It wasn’t worth the cost to breach Techies territory. Mines gave no bounty, melee heroes had no means of dealing with them, and there was a non-trivial gold cost in detection and the time used to destroy them. And in the end, Techies could always Suicide against any attempt to displace him from the lane.
The Path To Redesigning Techies
Patch 6.85 addressed some of these issues by both nerfing land mines and empowering other heroes by giving them tools to address Techies. Destroyed mines no longer deal damage, and melee heroes equipped with a Quelling Blade could dispatch them. Support heroes could also recoup their detection costs, since Land Mines gave a 10 gold bounty.
It was perhaps an excessive nerf, since Techies disappeared from EG’s playbook and was picked less and less in pubs. But it may have been a welcome consequence. Techies retreated into obscurity for more than a year without any changes, until patch 7.00.
Each of Techies skills was overhauled. One pivotal change was that Land Mines became Proximity Mines. Their damage was nearly tripled at lvl 4 (from 260 to 750), but they can no longer be stacked and now it takes 1.6 seconds for them to detonate, in which they reveal themselves and can be destroyed.
A result was that victims of Techies mines no longer die helplessly, feeling like there was nothing they could do. Because Proximity Mines have to be a minimum of 400 range away from each other, players who died to mines could attribute it to either their own missteps or credit it to at least some skill by the Techies player. The change makes the game feel more like Dota and less like minesweeper.
Another significant change was reworking Suicide Squad, Attack! to a slightly different ability, Blast Off, that has some team fight potential besides just dealing damage. Blast Off nudges Techies players to be more involved in team fights and to have more impact with the team aside from cheesy strategies, such as Toss+Suicide. Where Suicide was a last ditch effort to nab a kill—rarely was it used to kickoff damage in a team fight—Blast Off can be used to initiate with its silence. And most importantly, Techies doesn’t have to die at the end of it.
The trend of Techies’ redesign was to have him less playing his own game and become more involved in the game played by its other 9 players. With the cast time of Remote Mines reduced by 33%, from 1.5s to 1s, and a free Aether Lens talent to increase his cast range, Techies players could now toss artillery bombs from 900 range away.
The breadth of these changes should have been a buff across the board for Techies, but there was one last road block.
A Mine-or Bug
A bug allowed auto-attack to automatically target mines
The reaction to Techies rework has been delayed because he was released with a significant bug: players could still auto attack his mines. And because the rework made them visible for 1.6 seconds, players could just de-mine by auto attacking around the map. When this bug was fixed on January 12, his win rate spiked from 50.8% to 52.37% in a day. His pick rate since then has also increased, from 4.54% to 5.72%. As more and more players catch onto patch 7.00’s rework and new talent trees, they'll find that they have more ways to play Techies than to hide and mine. It's a welcome change for Techies players, but also for everyone else in the game.
Still fucking hate the hero
PERTAMAX FAIL
third lul?
i hate this game so much
https://www.dotabuff.com/matches/2946902869
No mention of the stupidly long root of stasis traps?
"It's a welcome change for Techies players, but also for everyone else in the game."
Not really a welcome change for everyone else; Most op shit since es at its release
Fuck this hero.
Waiting Brock Hall to comment about this news lol
have 450 plays, god hero)))
@mr_acewhite
Haha thanks for the shoutout. I won't say i have a lot of experience with he hero (read none), but it doesn't always take firsthand experience to see the potential in the changes made. The two things I see about this hero are as follows:
This is one of the few times I think a respawn talent is good in a losing OR winning situation. Being alive before and after a fight is beneficial to Techies to give them time to set up or reset, and to a point they can still do pretty well with minimal items, so the talent gels really well with the overall design of Techies rather than feeling tacked on.
The second thing is that Blast Off now feels like an aoe Doom, and probably should be switched with remote mines. I think the cooldown might be a bit too low as is, but it still does a ton of damage to Techies so there is a trade off. Techies might be the better pick over Doom as the silence is about half a doom in a 400 aoe with a minor damage difference to any single target, and can potentially engage from almost a BLINK DAGGER distance away without items. With a DS or Enigma, you're looking at a very dead opponent, and picking those two heroes doesn't limit you nearly as much as Tiny Techies does.
Really, this didn't change the hero up all that drastically, but instead put the past gimmicks (toss squad) to the forefront of the hero and made the rest of the spells feel like side benefits, like surge, diabolic edict, or return.
Cancer hero
The only reason i play techies is to piss off the enemy team
Love the stasis traps, especially when people are escaping and they just have to look at their hero paralyzed
I still report anyone who picks techies in a ranked game on either team. The funny thing is that I get 2 reports back in over 50% of the cases.
The hero you pick when you have 300 ping but are addicted to dota.
I think what makes dota beautiful is epic team fights and ganks and stuff but planting some mines and blasting yourself off like terrorists isn't something desirable or fun or skill dependent at all. Just delete techies from dota.
@purdurabu so you reveal your true self here but bitch about unrelated stuff in my post about techies.
I love this hero so much
Hate this
I still hate this piece of trash.
He still delays games.Still has good defense.I almost always have 1 hour long borefests with techies in the game.In the end my team just lets them end due to exhaustion
Screw this hero
Sometimes I play this hero against other cancer heroes like monkey or slark. I am not good at Techies but i like this hero. And it's Ok to me to play against techies.
Lol. So right after reading this, i decided to take Techies out for a spin. I know that in the past, if I ran a BOT game as techies, my fellow bot-mates would eventually just push up a lane and win the game. It might take upwards of an hour for the game to finish.
Not this time. With the skill tree build suggested by this article, and a couple of Bloodstones in my inventory as well as a heart, an octarine core, aghs and a pair of boots of travel, I literally had my way with all the heros (except Chaos which destroyed me at each encounter), while relearning the hero.
Almost 2 hrs later, we marched up the middle of the map and took glory for ourselves.
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/97226806233723831/DB5F94AAC1772CD27DDB0145A6B2E46899C94409/
Have fun out there!
With the current meta that many heros relies on trees like treant ,MK , brood to hide in/on them techies is realy good against these guys. This rework made techies extermly good in team fights and using blast off aggresivly is now a good option since you will not die at end !
A position 4 techies can now be very deadly specialy against a squishy team
ez reports
my new personal favorite hero.
seriously though I m waiting for a nerf in the future.
Why was this article made
but i thought techies is less cancer
Alice, Where are you???
he only delay games..
https://www.dotabuff.com/matches/2934938408
Is a person who has only played one game of techies (with a loss) really qualified to analyze this stuff?
Techies is actually playable and fun now. Yeah he can be a pain in the ass in some games but I've played games where I got completely shit on. You just need to play against him properly.
Бесит этот герой
My SO and I have a rule of thumb: is techies in the game yes/no? If yes, we'll just want to get onto the next game ASAP but can't push so the game will take forever. If no, thank nitwibble it's not a Techies game.
I love this hero. I used to hate him but the rework has made him amazing, and I have no issues going against him.
I find it hilarious that people keep pushing a lane that has the mine field sign. Whenever I'm against one, I make sure we switch lanes immediately after we see the sign.
I think I won 80% of my games vs a techies, and have won 65% when I play him.
Change lanes. Ez win. Good hero and good changes.
Report Techies please mute and report steam
"С начала нерфов Land Mines в патче 6.85, герой имел около 25% винрейта. На сегодняшний день, в патче 7.01, это значение возросло почти на 7%, и приблизилось к отметке в 53%"
Что с процентами?
Techies is a great hero.
Remember the good old days in DotA 1. There was no Minefield Sign, and Aghs would just increase the range and the damage of Remote Mines.
This changes just make the hero more interesting, and less frustrating in case of failure. Before 7.00, you had to stack the Land Mines, and if an enemy pulled a neutral creep over there: BOOM, you lost your time. Also there was a limit in the amount of Land Mines you could have simultaneously, like TA's traps.
Also, as the note says, it gives the Hero more fight-ability. It's not reduced to planting Stasis Trap in their faces anymore, now you can get in seriously.
Yes, it still plays differently from other heroes. But playing mind games and making the game a horror to the enemy team can be more funny than playing Pudge. The key is not being predictably. You can easily take over the other team's jungle if careful enough.
Everyone who hates him or say the game is 5v4, just don't know how to counter it, or never had the pleasure of detonating 80 remote mines making a triple kill.
I love this update, but a big nerf is on it's way.
Loves this. Thank you dotabuff
Techies jungle ?
Techies could probably turn a fight with strong nukes and disables.
Take note that root effect has been buffed significantly since 7.00
Techies is an amazing heroe, should be made immune to reports if he did well in a game. Can't have trash like the guys above me report me for doing well against them because of their own stupidity.
annoying hero of all time .
Techies are back on the menu lads! prepare for some mind-cracking!