
Ilya “Illidan” Pivtsaev, a coach for professional Dota 2 teams, spoke out on his personal Telegram channel about the current state of game balance in Dota 2.
The quote is reproduced with the source’s spelling and punctuation preserved
The latest patches in Dota have been pretty good, but what personally concerns me is that Valve has cut the rewards from objectives such as the Rune of Experience and the Tormentor. The fact that all objectives pay off before the second Roshan without the need to force fights is simply a cancerous tumor on the body of modern Dota. The vast majority of teams just run around avoiding each other on the giant map, and the losses in the form of Roshan kills, Tormentors, and EXP Runes before the second Roshan are so insignificant that if four players band together tofive to kill the Tormentor, five players spread out across the map will farm just as much in practically the same amount of time—not to mention the lost experience, since the Tormentor doesn’t seem to grant much of it anyway. Why has this problem become so blatantly apparent only on Int? Well, because the stakes are high for any team, and the testing and risky plays are a thing of the past—for the entire season. Obviously, it’s extremely difficult to find a balance in all of this, and Dota is still infinitely better now than it was, say, 10 years ago. Of course, I don’t want everything to boil down to the meta of some 4th or 11th Int, where teams bought into teamfight auras and by the 15th minute you’re already getting your ass *** [crush] the side, but the fact that the map has become less conducive to forcing fights over objectives turns a good portion of the games into a coin flip—albeit a skill-based one—which doesn’t exactly evoke positive emotions.
Earlier, Ilya “Illidan” Pivtsaev, a coach for professional Dota 2 teams, discussed his move to Team Spirit Academy on a stream, as well as the appointment of Daniil “MeTTpuM” Gilyov as the coach of Yellow Submarine.
Photo by Patrick Strack, ESL.