Sando's 6.85 Patch

You mean Pounce, right?

You know I meant Pounce :)

I did actually propose a rework on Techies a while back, it's on the forum somewhere.

EDIT: Napalm Death Techies

Thanks for all the feedback Tim - I think you missed the point slightly in some areas though - I'm not removing stacking completely, just limiting it to 1 instance per camp at a time. So no trebles/quads. It limits the amount you can build up the jungle at once.

TI5 actually had really bad levels of action - sure it wasn't the 6.83 rice fest, but kills per minute were actually really low. Cores sat in the jungle farming stacks, offlane and supports pushed the lanes, stacked, and occasionally ganked.

Remember with the limited nerfs to the likes of QoP/Storm/SF that they're being essentially nerfed by the meta change to stacks - they're not going to be able to accelerate as hard early-mid unless they gank more. Hence why I didn't hit them harder. Not, that I wouldn't be open to tweaks...

Remember the likes of Slark and other snowballers could gain heavily from the new meta - they're not going to be left behind like by the flash farmers anymore...

Undying I was trying to scale out a little - but sure, I'll go with the majority here. I think getting Soul Rip under control at level 2 is important.

On Naga Siren, I guess I could live with fewer changes for just that channelling change on her ult. It's ridiculous how easy it is for her to reset a fight even if her positioning is terrible.

That doesn't explain the lack of a BH nerf tho. Nerfing him actually goes a long way to encourage the game state you want, since no way in hell do you want to skirmish or really take close fights when there's a BH on the other team.

Didn't think of everything...yeah some kind of Track nerf seems in order, maybe with some compensating combat buffs.

I'd also think a Phantom Lancer nerf is in order, specially to his charge/escape skill, which is kinda OP at present.

This is just SO so wrong. (except the midas enchantress part)
Every decent TA player stacks ancients. TA peaks when she has blink+deso at anywhere from 15-22 mins. Everyone is food for you if you have that at a decent timing.
TA needs some farm to wreck stuff.
Just watch waga...

Refraction level 4
Meld level 4
Psi Blades level 1
Psionic Trap level 1
Total : level 10.
Blink Dagger + bottle/wand + treads or phase

TA doesn't get any stronger than that. Her skills don't scale beyond this. And the way refraction and meld work means that she doesn't need items to deal heavy physical damage. She has non-scaling bursty skills, her skills deal the damage not her items. That's why you rush blink because that's the only item she needs.

By the way you just said Dendi is not a decent TA player, because he rushes phase blink and wrecks the game. Sure...

So? That doesn't mean farming Ancients stacks is as game losing as you say it is, because it's not like the hero legitimately has to hit that timing window and that window alone, because every single timing window in the game is situational.

Just because your hero might have a peak at X minute doesn't mean that you'll have a team that hits X minute, or that the enemy team won't be at a peak at that minute and can punish you trying to get active then. Hell, sometimes there just won't be opportunities to get active on the map, and thus farming the stacks is more efficient than wandering across the map.

Or you can be like RTZ, feel confident in your ability to out farm the enemy team by a wide margin, and thus decide to have Desolator + Blink Dagger by the time your opponent is only have way to there first item through sheer efficincy, and blow people up even easier, and abuse that and your deso to take objectives more quickly, and still snowball super hard and dominate the game.

It's DOTA, there's very few things set in stone. You have to take things game by game, and in some games, ganking as TA when you hit a certaiN window just not efficient or the right call.

She does have to hit that window, especially in this kind of patch with constant pressure/fighting and low comeback potential.

Between 6 to 15 minutes is not only the time when TA is at the peak of her skills' power, it's also the time when the enemy team doesn't have a Mekansm and isn't 5-manning.

TA needs to find kills and start her snowball before the enemy team starts grouping up. She's a purely single target hero and she is at her most effective when the enemy team is split up. She can tower dive and solo kill almost any hero, but her teamfight presence is never that strong unless she's really ahead. And how do you get ahead as TA? By killing the enemy mid player and getting a fast blink.

So what happens if you stack ancients and farm for even only 15 minutes? The enemy team groups up and start pushing/teamfighting and deathballing you after you missed your window and before your safe lane carry hits his. You can't do anything against this, and TA is pretty useless from behind. GG.
This is especially true with heroes like Undying and Leshrac being in literally every game these days.

Seriously I've seen countless TA's fall into this trap. As one of my favorite streamers puts it, there are space creators, space takers, and space wasters. A TA farming for 15-20 minutes is a space waster.

Doesn't mean you have to gank early as TA in every game, of course sometimes there are no opportunities whatsoever, but you have to apply pressure in some way, even if it means pushing the mid tower, 5-manning a tower early, or roaming for kills in the enemy jungle. not farm. TA is a space creating hero in the 6->20 min window, that's all I'm saying.

So unless you feel like you need to stack ancients to farm your blink (probably costs you an entire creep wave of time to clear the stack so I'm not even sure you gain anything from it)...why just why.


EDIT : yes sure, please make a thread about TA ancient stacking, better than go off-topic on this one.

I have a reply for this, but it's really long, and I think it's more deserving of it's own thread than putting it in Sando's one. Not because my ego is so inflated that I feel it needs it's own thread, but because it's technically an analysis and discussion about one of the biggest things in competitive 6.84c; efficiency.

And I don't think that discussion is really relevent in a discussion of Sando's patch log.

also it doesnt really deserve on because its clearly great.


im still a bit confused by the more then double stack removal, i got what you meant but i dont see why such a clear part of the game should be removed just because a relative small portion of heroes can farm them well, farming speed is a part of the hero balance, and if a hero that can farm stacks well is too strong then the hero should be nerfed, not stacking as a whole, because as hamster said, you are tinkering with other heroes too that dont require tinkering. that brings me to a good example, when tinker got nerfed they did it by removing his ability to farm stacks of ancients, but they didnt remove the ability to do so for every hero because it isnt needed.

TL;DR making the game less complex, baaaad.
nerfing the heroes more directly, gooood.