Now and Then: Heroes of Tomorrow
Last week we have touched on the cycle of Dota 2 metas and today we will finish the series by discussing the heroes who have been out of the meta for quite awhile. However, there is a tendency for unpopular and unused heroes to resurface, and there’s a chance that next patch these heroes are going to get either minor reworks or buffs. They may become the meta of tomorrow, and it is always better to be prepared.
Instead of speculating on the potential buffs or reworks these heroes might get, we will discuss their current position in both professional and pub metas and will try to identify what exactly makes these heroes less viable than others.
Elder Titan
Elder Titan hasn’t been viable for almost two years now—ever since the “moving stomp” bug was fixed, the hero has been getting less and less attention. No amount of buffs seemed to help either—Elder Titan has been receiving nothing but buffs since 6.82, though not enough to offset the heavy nerfs in the patches before that.
The meta-data for the hero looks pretty impressive. His average win rate across all brackets is at respectable 52.5%. His win rate in top brackets is also quite decent—50% in 4-5k and 47.7% in 5k+ brackets. In lower brackets he easily qualifies for the Pub Winners tier. His pick rate, however, has been consistently low.
With many set-up heroes coming back to meta, the value of Elder Titan spells increases—
Puck, 
Enigma, 
Faceless Void, 
Dark Seer and even Q/W 
Invoker can all offer decent ways of initiating or counter-initiating a fight with a strong AoE disable. Moreover, the increased popularity of stat-based agility carries makes 
Natural Order a very potent skill, with its massive armor debuff. The hero also has a decent disable, which shines in better coordinated games, and most of his abilities scale well in terms of damage.
With all these traits, a natural question arises: “why is the hero so unpopular?”. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer. All of the above makes the hero brilliant in theory, especially for the current meta, but these ideas do not necessarily hold up in play.
For the most part, ET is too reliant on the concept of an “ideal teamfight”—a fight where all of a team’s spells hit in a very specific way. Outside of this scenario, he has less to offer, compared to other alternatives for either offlane or support roles. Moreover, this singular focus on teamfighting makes him extremely weak when his spells are on cooldown. And unlike similar heroes, he is a weak and “uncomfortable” laner— Enigma or even 
Tidehunter can offer so much more in the initial stages of the game and are a lot more independent.
This does not mean the hero is bad by any means, yet for the most part he is a “win more” type of hero. Not necessarily in terms of the macro game, but in terms of a single team-fight. He is absolutely monstrous if your team manages to land all of their abilities well and control the enemy team long enough, but then again—which hero isn’t?
Phantom Assassin
The 6th most popular hero in public matchmaking has never been a staple pick in the professional scene—she is occasionally drafted in the group stages and smaller tournaments, but when the stakes are high, teams generally try to avoid relying on pRNG.
Even a decent degree of control over pseudo-random mechanics do not seem to help the case of 
Phantom Assassin. In fact, in higher level games, where players are more likely to “prime” their critical hits, the hero is even worse off—her win rate steadily declines from lower MMR brackets to a decent but unimpressive 45.9%. Is the hero weak by design? The answer is “most likely”.
To understand the reason behind such a definitive answer, it is necessary to translate the hero’s RNG abilities into a more “calculable” framework—what, on average, do we expect her abilities to do at levels 16+?
Stifling Dagger is a slow with an expected damage of 214. It is on a very low cooldown and costs practically no mana, but the manapool on the hero is also very limited. It is a decent source of early-game harass and a last-hitting tool, but it is extremely unreliable as a source of damage.
Blur is a 50% evasion, which translates into a 100% EHP increase against physical attacks, after armor-related EHP increases. While it does sound very impressive on paper, on a hero with a very limited health pool and poor strength growth the effect is decent, but not by any means overpowered.
Finally, 
Coup de Grace can be seen as a 52.5% damage amplification which takes into account damage from items (bonus, “green” damage). Dealing 52.5% more damage with each hit is by no means weak, but it certainly pales in comparison to many other “steroid” abilities.
Sven’s 
God's Strength offers a lot more in terms of raw damage on a single target, while Juggernaut’s standard ability crits offer 35% extra damage. Medusa’s and Luna’s “ranged cleave” abilities give extra 300% and 172% damage respectively—not exactly a direct comparison, but still allows to put things into perspective. Finally, 
Daedalus offers a 36% damage amplification.
As stated previously, these are not a direct comparisons, since every hero in Dota is unique, but it allows to make an argument that Phantom Assassin does not scale particularly well—her overall damage output is simply not on par with other carries, while her innate survivability is limited to physical attacks and can be rendered useless with several items in Dota. As a mid-game hero, she is simply too reliant on a good start—options such as 
Gyrocopter, 
Juggernaut and even 
Luna all offer similar effects in the mid-game, while being able to start stronger early game, farm faster, and scale better late in the late game.
That said, the 
Phantom Strike is excellent at solving the main issue of melee carries—PA pretty much cannot be kited, only disabled or killed. In certain scenarios, this selling point of the hero can carry a lot of weight in the drafting stage. If the enemy draft doesn’t force you to get an early BkB, she can be pretty devastating with early-game DPS items.
Lifestealer
The hero is quite stable across “middle” MMR brackets in terms of win rate—it fluctuates somewhat, but on average it is at 49%. 2k and 5k+ are the significant outliers—in the bottom and top brackets the hero manages to win only 46% of his games. The hero is not particularly excelling in pub games, but what about the professional meta, where he had been a staple for almost three years?
“...now pierces spell immunity”— how often do the patch notes include this sentence? Often enough to make the go-to hero of TI3 less relevant and almost completely forgotten.
But it is not only that. While the introduction of new SI-piercing abilities is certainly one of the reasons behind the fall of the hero, there are many others, some of which are heavily meta-dependent.
He cannot flash-farm—his mobility is extremely limited and it is one of the biggest factors when it comes to clearing out stacks fast.
He is weak in the early stages and is extremely XP-dependent. His abilities all scale pretty well, but start off very weak. None of them provide direct damage or even a significant early-game damage amplification and the only soft disable the hero has has been crippled heavily and is generally unreliable.
He is not the strongest late-game carry—not only is he easily kiteable, with no innate mobility, but his damage output is also extremely conditional. He does amazingly well against targets with huge HP pools, but otherwise his damage is limited. Moreover, his lack of mobility forces him to concentrate more on MS items, rather than pure DPS ones.
He shines in the mid-game, but usually coupled with a ganking hero. he mid-game lineups are probably the ones which suffer the most in the current meta, since they tend to be too slow against aggressive, dedicated pushes, but not strong enough later on to battle uphill. The fact that Lifestealer requires a hero to carry him around for dedicated ganks limits his options as well as wastes time for several heroes, if the ganks are not successful.
The list could potentially go on, but cheesy tricks aside, the hero in its current form does not seem to offer much in any stage of the game. The ability to control neutral creeps and the potential combinations with other heroes can be devastating to the enemy team, but overall are too unreliable. [A]lliance have tried it early on in the previous patch, but it rarely worked out. Even the introduction of “mini-macropyre” on ancient Black Dragon seems to have done little to improve this strategy.
Final Thoughts
We had a look at three potential “future-meta” heroes and why they are less likely to be picked right now. Even though the selection of these heroes is speculative, the following analysis is generally based on statistics and the perception of the professional meta, based on pick and ban rate. The goal was not to dissuade people from picking the heroes, but rather offer an insight on why these heroes are currently performing worse than their alternatives..
first pls
3rd!!!!!
I really hate Naix on the other side
reason ET is not popular? cuz.. he requires set up or the enemy to just stand still.. for you do anything...
lolz hemp'th
Less than 20? Haha
Techies will be massively buffed in 6.87 and win TI6 for Secret.
Concerning PA it is in my opinion misleading to use expectation values, as PA benefits from surprise bursts of damage.
Take stifling dagger in the late laning phase for example. You can use it as low mana cost harass. Yet, once it crits you can jump on the enemy and potentially kill him.
elder my love i'm sad one day u will be strongest hero^^
11th damn...
12th
ez
I've said it before and I'll say it again- ET doesn't need "more bigger numbers"; he needs a rework for some or all of his abilities.
I don't want to change him VERY much, he's got some cool ideals and a lot of flavor, but he doesn't offer enough payback in response to the skill required to pull off his combos.
Bullshit, elder doesn't need good teamfight setups to be useful to his teammates. He's a very strong laner, astral spirit is a stong harass spell with low mana cost and small cd, moreover it gives him a good buff to lh or to counter-initiate gank attempts. In mid game, it will help to scout or nuke fugitives ennemies (and also disable blink daggers when chasing). If you max your astral+Natural order, you'll be able to deal 200+dmg in a single right click to the opposites heroes at 6:00. A good teamfight setup will just help ET to make a very good ech stomp +ult, and eventually lead his carries to make at least a triple kill. Echo stomp can also be used as escape for ganker or blinker like slark, PA, bh, AM ect... The only reason he's not popular is that he lacks of speed for spell's casting time, and he is weak in late game vs stong carries. Noobs are too childish to understand that timing with ET is the key to success.
LOL. He's a normal bracket player with only 12 games on Elder ^
Kek
Who the fuck maxs natural order over echo stomp
You dingus
Ugly heros and heros losing 1v1 fight wont ever be popular. All the top picks are cool killers.
P A? rofl
what about chaos knight
That is some nice post, being prepared to what will come in later is something I have not seen anywhere else, I also have not the slightest idea how to play against an experienced ET player so I would enjoy advice. Moreover there was Kuroky playing support lifestealer with Liquid and it worked in an interesting way, having a support turn into an ancient creep can be more useful than having a core turn into them, though I have only seen it there it is interesting at least, maybe you want to get a glimpse of the video on youtube. I also thought PA was a bit stronger than you mention, but I don't play much carry to be honest.
On a completely irrelevant note (yes, it is an irrelevant comment) you missed a "T" on the second to last paragraph on lifestealer on the second sentence, sorry to be a grammar nazi.
Elder Titan is a hero of tomorrow because he is a new hero, right?
In all seriousness, I really believe PA is actually fine where she is, but players need to figure out how to play her correctly. She probably needs a few buffs to not rely completely on RNG though.
it's all in the head...all 3 character designs suck big time
et is big and bulky and generally uncomfortable but not as much as magnus for me....after pa arcana came out original pa design is dog shit....and ls...cmon he's uglier than pudge and walks on all 4s like a dog or something
that's my analysis of these 3 heroes
Dame, i have had ET games that have been amazing, but only when we got a good team to pack it. Otherwise ET has initiated but nobody to do damn anything after.
ET relies on team players who are patient.
Interesting article. It's difficult to know how to 'fix' Elder Titan; the problem seems to be around his stomp and it either being brokenly good or worthlessly bad. As you mention, skill cap and team coordination is one issue here but raw utility is another and it seems like the trade-off just isn't worth nailing the tricky execution of the spell.
I feel like a change is needed. Perhaps something drastic like getting rid of the sleep status and making it inflict a shorter stun and slow combination effect (1+1/1.5+1.5/2+2/2.5+2.5 seconds perhaps). Full duration stun at the original values would be too strong, but ideally you need something to help you land your ultimate, hence the slow.
That would make the pay-off of landing a difficult spell greater. Alternatively you could keep the somewhat underwhelming sleep status effect, but just make it easier to land. What about removing the channelling aspect of the stomp's wind-up component? This way you aren't punished as heavily for whiffing the skill as it isn't placed on cool-down if you are interrupted or decide not to go through with it. The timed nature of the astral spirit means that you can't just endlessly spam out the wind-up as it's going to come back to you after 8 seconds max anyway. And the threat of a cancel-able stomp would presumably give him something to mess with opponents' positioning and last-hitting during the laning stage. This might be too strong of a buff, but if offset with nerfs to other aspects of the hero I think it could work.
What about Pugna?
ET dint need buffs he's good as long as his positioning and decisions are right.
Pick ET and type EZ = +25 mmr
what about terrorblade... even he is rarely picked but with enough farm TB is a monster... and he requires as much farm as AM ... even he needs some love
"ET dint need buffs he's good as long as his positioning and decisions are right."
Every hero in dota is good like that <.<
It's the same as saying enigma needs a nerf since he could potentially wipe out alone the entire enemy team with aghs and refresher....yes, you could be able to land a 5 man black hole, but is it really going to happen?
people tend to forget ET's actually a bit stronger in lane than most think. Ancestral Spirit buffs your damage for every creep and hero you walk over, it's a useful zoning tool because the enemy have either gotta back off to avoid the damage, or tank the spirit and give you free damage. Enemies often neglect this and wonder why you hit for 150 damage at lvl3.
Lifestealer is such a pain in the ass to play. Impossible to even get to your opponents without infest or shadow blade/blink + s&y.
Shit i do some math and found something interesting:
ET SS Lv 3 = 50% max hp dmg
ET+RO = 100% max hp damage
New meta kiiiiiiiiids he gonna top 1 most picked soon!!
ET needs a wake damage threshold or something on his stomp to be popular. Pub teams keep cancelling that sleep with their pitiful DoT.
Tru dat
I think ET is a very strong late game hero, While the person playing elder does need to know how to micro spirit and hero he can be very devastating in lane vs tri-lanes with spirit., and very good hero mid-late. While he does need some small threshold to allied teamate DoT's I think he is a very viable hero and the only thing he could possibly use is a slightly higher base armor to increase his lane potential.
With the latest buff to Elder Titan he is now an Enigma that can basically kill an entire team for 2000 Less gold than an enigma would need to do the same.
For the people that do not know how Earth Splitter works it does 50% of Max health (50% Physical, 50% Magical) Lets say Natures Prophet has 2000 health, If you have spirit out on top of Target with Natural order they will lose 100% of Base armor and Armor gained from Agility, and your spells gain 33% magic amplification. since prophet rarely build items like AC or Blade Mail anymore Prophet now technically has 0 Armor, and will have Approximate 1851 Health. Now Stomp deals 110p/109.5m so we are at 1631. Now if you itemize him with Veil and Aether lens which I think currently is the best way to play him, your ult at lvl 3 will do 1173 (500p+673m) damage at to the max health prophet leaving him at 458 Health. Two ults is murder.
Now why did i do this here, i really do not know, but Veil, Aether Lens, AC, Refresher, Sheep All these items are very strong and can instantly wipe a team if they make a bad mistake. He is a very strong hero with a very weak laning phase. Has problems against heroes with stuns and is not the strongest in early stages of the game. I love the hero and he is very strong because people do not know how he works, Even reading 以火攻火 post you can see that he has little idea how the hero works.
P.S. As ET with AL+Veil+Refresher, You never need a team if you make sure your spirit is on top and Earth splitter in the between them you win, but make sure they are within half a second from eachother or just uninstall dota.
Good luck, and much murder.
People just play elder titan boringly and wrong. i'm number 10 in the world with him, and basically got to 5k MMR with him. I buy an armlet and go full on fuck you mode. I micro both the spirit and elder and am able to get above 300 damage in every teamfight. People suck at elder because they have no imagination and their builds suck. Don't ask for reworks and buffs because you just can't seem to figure something out. Sounds like a redditer
this post is pure shit
how come elder titan is unpopular :( he is one my favorite since dota 1 :)
Pa requires a huge amount of concentration on both global awareness(when to kill, when to run, when to get in and etc.) and individual skill ( harass, speed, reflex and etc.)
PA should be nerfed
ET is a pretty good hero he's just unpopular because people don't get the deal about astral spirit
dont trust dota