Dota 2: The plebs point of view Chapter 3: Thoughts on 6.83 meta
I thought I should talk a bit about this. I will mainly talk about competitive Dota rather than pubs, cause we all know, pubs have their own meta, with Witch Doctors carrying a butterfly and Assault Cuirass, people telling you that Enchantress is a hard carry etc. Jokes aside, I will talk about couple aspects of this topic.
Hero pool. Ever since the Dota was created, the creators goal was to balance the game to a point where every hero is viable. Most of people agree that we are currently approaching that state of the game where everything seems so balanced. This creates a perfect environment for imbalanced things (heroes, items, skills, etc etc.) to start the meta. A hero gets a slight buff, and it immiedietly becomes the flavour of the month. First it was Puppeys Chen, then Admiral Bulldogs Natures Prophet, now we see heroes that were never picked before become the top priority- Sniper is a great example. For some reason I alwas saw the potential in this hero, it always seemed to be so good on paper but just couldn’t perform well against other heroes that were popular back then. We can easily make a conclusion that competitive Dota is all about broken heroes. But is it?
I see a lot of forum posts talking about how this current meta is not as interesting as it was back in the golden Na’Vi days, when the big plays happened, massive 5 man black holes, million dollar coils, all these fancy things. While I do agree that visual aspect is not as entertaining, the tension that is being created during the games is so much bigger. It seems that everything matters so much more now. Exact timers, super accurate understanding of economy during and outside the game, psychological state of the players etc. This leads me to one thing - this game is starting to get really mature and should be taken more serious that it was before. While the big plays still matter, they are just a one part of this massive list of things you need to take care of. For this reason I respect teams like Cloud9 the most. Even though Aui_2000 is not a part of the team any more, I think his approach to the game is the prime example of this current meta - everything matters! The broken heroes I was taking about earlier are also just one part of the list. I’ll give you an example. A well farmed Chaos Knight paired with a experienced Pudge player might sound really good on paper and could destroy everything - pick off one hero, destroy towers, move on, win the game. But that sounds well just when given the best possible circumstances. For this reason, Pro players pick heroes that are reliable in any situation, that can farm efficiently or can pick off heroes solo without much of risk. This is why Axe, Troll Warlord, Juggernaut, Sniper are the top priority heroes in this meta.
So that’s pretty much what I think about the issue.
Cheers,
Noumenon
