Speeed on 7.41d: “Overall, my top pick for this patch is Vengeful Spirit.”

Alright. If you look at DotaBuff, the heroes that received the biggest buffs in this patch are Treant Protector, Dark Seer, Chaos Knight, Abaddon, Muerta, Sven, Arc Warden, and Bounty Hunter.

What stands out most to me is that I didn’t mention Wraith King. This hero’s win rate has increased by about 2%, and historically, he’s been one of the best heroes across all tiers. He currently has a win rate of about 56%, so he’ll likely be very strong in regular pub games. He’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Snapfire is a pretty controversial hero. She was just too strong in the lane. Now, the Boomstick ability, which used to grant up to a 35% damage increase if you were close to the target, no longer works on last hits and structures. Before, this was a pretty dirty mechanic: you had about 80–90 damage already at level one for last-hits, and because of that, the lane became almost impossible for the opponent. Essentially, you either had to actually fight this hero or have a nuke with a very short cooldown like Storm Spirit’s; otherwise, you’d just lose the lane. So this is a good nerf. They also slightly weakened Aghanim’s Shard and reduced the cooldown reduction from Firesnap Cookie—and that’s actually important; you can really feel it.

But even with these changes, I still think the hero will remain quite decent. It’s just that now you can’t win the lane so easily by finishing off enemies—and that matters.

Dagon’s recipe cost has been reduced by 50 gold, which is interesting because this change applies to every upgrade level. That means the item is now 250 gold cheaper at max level: the cost has dropped from 7,650 to 7,400 gold. That’s a pretty noticeable change.

The item itself is still one of the craziest in the game, simply because it’s so expensive. Its stats are truly impressive—it now grants additional spell range, but at level one, that’s only 60. And yet, it’s still very hard to justify the cost. I don’t know, maybe this item is underrated. It deals about 400 damage, but ultimately costs around 3,000 gold—and that’s just not cheap. Yeah, maybe it is underrated.

Overall, my top pick for this patch is Vengeful Spirit. She was already a very solid hero, especially in mid-tier pubs, and now her lane is even stronger. +15 damage with stun and +0.5 regen—these kinds of things really make a difference: the difference between killing yourself or getting killed.