New Patch Wishlist
If the rumors are true, a new patch is supposed to come out very soon. This is supposed to be the big one, so all gloves are off and today we would love to discuss some of our most anticipated potential changes.
Map changes — solving Dire advantage
Last time we did a patch wishlist, we talked about how the map doesn’t really need change for the sake of change. Back then it felt good and balanced enough, but right now some of the issues are clear.
Dire has a massive advantage at the higher levels of play. Between better map control, better Roshan setup and a seemingly better protected Ancient creeps area, playing Dire is objectively easier, leading to very high discrepancies between factions winrate.
There are many ways to solve this issue and we’ve heard rumors of a potential second Roshan pit or another, mirrored objective on the map. Alternatively, some form of new structures could be introduced to the game.
At the very least they can be used as a teleport point. We feel like the problem with Shrines back in the day wasn’t that they gave a TP spot, but rather they provided too strong of a burst heal. Some limited utility building could be an interesting addition.
Wasting gold on sentries
The laning stage in Dota right now consists of constant brawling between supports for the ability to pull creeps to the neutral camps. As it has such a strong and pronounced impact on the lane equilibrium, playing and counterplaying around it is what 70%+ of support laning consists of. And it’s just not fun.
Fighting and trading against enemies is great. Pulling off well-coordinated moves with your lane partner is awesome. Spending 150g+ on Sentries to constantly block or deward the block in the neutral camp isn’t. At some points it turned into a necessary tedium and it doesn’t feel good at all.
Perhaps the mechanics of blocking camps could be changed somehow, or the interaction between the spawn box and sentry wards could be more interesting or meaningful: maybe neutral camp would still be blocked, but in doing so it would damage or reduce the remaining duration of the Ward.
Right now the whole dance around the neutral area is limiting the pool of viable supports at the higher levels of play and it also makes playing support different from what it used to be. In many cases it is a 1v1 against enemy support at a time when supports are supposed to shine the brightest.
Black King Bar alternatives
BKB is a cornerstone of Dota. At least it was for the last several years, once players got really good at the game. Second item BKB is getting stale though and we would love to see some changes to defensive options.
If 
Muerta release is any indication, we might see a return of the “transformation = disjoint” mechanic. For heroes like 
Terrorblade, 
Lycan, 
Alchemist and 
Lone Druid it could be a way to play without BKB for a bit longer in certain matchups. Or play without BKB at all.
There are also multiple Status Resistance items, but they don’t really combine into anything meaningful. We don’t want to see the return of triple 
Satanic, but getting to a higher level of status mitigation should be possible.
Maybe it could also work with the applied effect in some cases. For example, with slows it could not only reduce the duration of the debuff, but also its strength. With a 50% status resistance, turning a 40% slow into a 20% slow won’t really break the game, but it could provide a way to play certain matchups without hard-committing to a BKB early on.
different types of amplification
Right now we have amplification for pretty much every single stat in the ability descriptions. Cast range, damage and debuff duration can be altered with items, effects and talents. There are no ways to increase their AoE outside of specific talents, and it could be the new, big mechanic of the patch.
Truthfully, we are not sure if it is a good idea. Imagine a bigger than usual Black Hole or Tornado from 
Invoker being wider. The adjustment period alone would take ages. The thing is: after playing the same patch for the last year and a half, it might be fun to be clueless and confused for a long period of time, when Dota is at its wackiest.
Sooner or later pattern recognition and learned instincts will once again get into a close relationship with muscle memory and we will get back to complaining about the game feeling stale, so hoping for something potentially game-changing is only natural.
Or do you disagree with us and think we might be going too far? Share your thoughts and your own wishlist in the comment section below.
I mean....remove neutral items? I'll keep banging that drum.
I'd honestly also drop shards. They're just not interesting to me. Either the hero buys the shard every game as soon as it's available or it's never purchased because it's not useful EVER. That's an unfair blanket statement, of course, but it's true more times than I care to have in the game.
I'd like to see more variability in hero positions. Been too long since we had mid naga, support gyro, carry VS, offlane Weaver.
yep, everything can be good additions except for the AOE spell increase which will be really problematic balance-wise. There's a reason why certain spells can only be augmented with a fixed ranged thru talents. It will really be a long long list if we go through each one.
If they remove neutral items and remove the outposts it will do a lot to make balancing easier. The outposts are there in theory to make snowball line ups weaker but in practice it just makes Rosh more dire favoured. I'd also like to see BKB degrade more once again; doing that would reduce the prevalence of early BKBs as you'd be punished more for picking them up earlier.
I'd like to see Buyback be more punishing again. The old mechanic of reducing income after buyback made it feel like a real last resort, now it feels like everyone buys back if theres a vaguely important fight. Another suggestion would be to increase the cooldown to more like 10 minutes.
Techies remote mines as shard would be cool.
Tinker should have his march of the machines back.
Im a fan of unbalanced maps, so Im not really in favor of mirroing a second objective pit and in my opinion, allowing Dire to have an advantage over rosh after years of Radiant better winrate isnt necessaeily bad.
About Roshan, I think Aghs Blessing should be removed as a potential pickup or be a one time only. At the highest level of play, teams are routinely playing game where they decide a 15k networth advantage isnt enough and decide to get as many Roshs as possible to increase that advantage even further. The intended idea was to shorten games but teams can play safer by dragging game.
I agree with other wishlist.
the same wish we all had years ago : remove neutral items
Neutral items will never be removed, and there is no reason to remove them. They, just like runes, add that additional balance modifiers that can help or prevent some heroes to shine.
I always thought that *Radiant* has more winrate historically than Dire. I have like 5%+ more on Radiant. But I haven't check pro-scene in that regard.
New buildings and map changes would be definitely welcome. I miss jungle roles and the fact that you can't jungle from lvl 1 doesn't help anyone or make game more fun. It's often that offlane/offlane support goes roaming/jungle anyway after lost lane, weaker jungle could help with more strategies and more possibilities to comeback if lane is lost hard.
> I always thought that *Radiant* has more winrate historically than Dire. I have like 5%+ more on Radiant. But I haven't check pro-scene in that regard.
(Does markdown not work on this site?)
Dire has an egregiously better winrate than Radiant in the pro scene, something like 59% winrate on Dire. Randomly being on Dire should not increase the chances of winning that dramatically, it’s ridiculous.
One thing that the article author didn’t mention is the quality of the jungle. Radiant jungle camps are much farther apart that the Dire jungle camps, meaning that it’s much harder for supports to double or triple stack on Radiant, and it’s also slightly faster to farm in Dire jungle.
There’s also something to be said about much more trees in the Radiant jungle than Dire jungle. Supports should not have to spend their time cutting down groves of trees so their PA can have a sight line to blink to the next camp, rather than walking.
better fix matchmaking and ban all RUS!
Bkb needs to be nerfed. Either by giving it shorter duration (like 5 seconds no matter how many times you used it already) or by adding more bkb-piercing skills both in terms of control and damage. It already is trash-tier in terms of stats but in every game 7 out of 10 people eventually buy it which just makes games boring, predictable and long because everyone has to farm their bkbs before moving on to real items and no one can kill each other because if you give your opponent even the slightest window he'll press his bkb and run away. Games need to be more chaotic, fights need to be more decisive and deadly.