6.84c and Efficiency

You know one reason core heroes fall behind? By being inefficient with there time. I'm sure you can agree with that idea, if you can't then you kinda need to learn that. It can probably raise your MMR if you learn and put that idea into practice

Do you want to know something that's inefficient? Wasting time moving about the map in the hope of getting kills.

That sounds counter-intuitive surely? Getting kills is good, gives you gold, takes gold away from the enemy, and gives a window of time where they aren't farming. Well yeah, getting kills is good. Crossing the map to get kills isn't, it is time where you aren't actively increasing the gold you are getting. Especially if you are commiting multiple heroes to it. That's multiple heroes who are only getting tick gold.

Meanwhile, the rest of the enemy team can be farming away happily, getting creep gold, or say stacking/farming camps. So Statement number 1)

S1) When you rotate heroes, you are probably being less efficient than the enemy team (I say probably, because as with everything in DOTA, it's situational).

Statement number 2)

S2) The more heroes you commit to a gank, the less efficient that gank becomes, and the more you are reliant on getting a meaningful kill.

S3) Rotating with a core is less efficient than rotating with supports only.

Statement Number 2&3 aren't exactly that shocking, but it's still worth keeping in mind for latter in the game.

So the big Statement I wish to make here, Statement Number 4;

S3) 6.84c, more than any other patch in recent history, is a patch where efficiency rules.

This one is a little harder to grasp, but all you have to do is look at Secret. Secret, who despite not winning the two largest events of the patch, DAC and TI (It is worth reminding people that Secret still performed incredibly well at DAC), were the most successful team of the patch, winning 3 back to back lans were a team of efficiency. They would consitently out farm there opponents (Not through kills, they were a very low kill team), not just on the 1 position, but on every single team member. There entire team would be out farming the respective of the opponents.

Simply because Secret would be more efficient across the map, with both time and farming. They would almost never over-commit to a gank, sending the minimum number of heroes needed to achieve it. They would anticipate obvious rotations, and would force lanes out with supports whilst the cores farmed the jungle, or ancients, or the enemy jungle. They would constantly make good trades, and when they themselves made rotations, they would be unexpected ones. Heroes who you'd expect to fall back to the jungle instead rotate, catching people off guard, and getting the important kills off of rotations.

And because they were more efficient, they would be playing against opponents who were not only behind, but probably worse in terms of skill (Given you know, it was an all star team).

Furthmore, I'd ask you all to look at the heroes popular right now;
Defensive supports such as ES, Naga Siren, Dazzle and WW, sitting mid usually stacking for mids that can flash farm, but respond to gank attempts, forcing the opponents to waste time, or turn over extensions on there head, again punishing gank attempts.

Bounty Hunter, a hero who turns pick-offs into massive gold swings, forces early gold to be spent on Sentries, applies passive pressure on mid, and dissuades team-fights. As well as giving vision. All things that make your teams to gain more gold.

Flash farming mids, who can all fall back to the jungle when the lane is risky, farm stacks, and farm as they move across the map. Also heroes who can catch-up from behind.

Bursty active cores; Lina, QoP, Lesh, SF, Gyro, TA. Heroes who bring massive amounts of damage to ganks, arguably not needing a partner to help them get kills in early rotations, and a lot of them even itemise to not need them in mid-late game.

A large tendacy for dual offlanes, allowing you to get more out of the lane on your end, and force more pressure on the opponent.

Likewise the offlaners generally have ways to get stuff out of the lane irregardless of the enemy actions; Dark Seer, ES, Tusk and Clock can all farm from range, 3 of them all actively influence the creep momentum heavily to let them get more from the lane.

Finally, a lot of safe-laners you see (I guess PL, Ember and Anti-Mage are the two biggest ones worth mentioning, ignoring any other reasonings like AM being good against a lot of heroes, and Ember being a PL counter), have the ability to aggresively farm without worrying. PL's build BoTs, AM is AM, and Ember has remnant. They can push out lanes, and farm the enemy jungle, and do it safely. (As can a lot of the mids), which lets them move across the map quickly, and farm efficiently as they do so.

Like look at those heroes; There are an extremely small number of 'feast or famine' heroes, they are heroes that can catch up well, or require very little, or make an efficient usage of time around the map. They are safe heroes. If that's not the sign of an efficiency meta, I don't know what is.

Now onto the important bit, using the statements made earlier to draw a conclusion about ganking;

S1 - In a meta where every common hero has the ability to incredibly efficient, this means that your time spent rotating means you fall behind more than you would in say 6.82. Because of the prevalence for defensive supports in the meta game, you often have to commit more heroes to a gank than one would wish, or use a bursty core like a Lina. Either of these things is less efficient than you would desire, or less efficient than the enemy team. Even if say you force an enemy core to miss a wave or two of CS by hugging the tower, you aren't directly getting anything on the heroes you rotate unless you get the kill.

Finally - Even if you get the kill, and slow the progression of one hero, that's nothing to say compared to what's happened on the rest of the map. If the rest of the other teams heroes are being efficient across the map, then you probably still have lost out on the exchange - Because you spent the time moving heroes across the map and the enemy didn't, the raw gold value from the gank is lessened, especially when you can't convert it into a tower afterwards. This is primarily because if you move a core, if they don't take the tower, then the core has to waste time going back to there lane.

Now that's not to say that ganks in general have been made bad, they will still be important. But not for the raw gold, but for the in game momentum they provide instead. So ganking to relieve pressure on a hero, give a lane an advantage instead ect ect.

The conclusion of all that is; attempting to snowball through constant rotations around in the attempt to get kills is just not worth it in 6.84c, especially on heroes and players where it is expected. Because teams have gotten extremely good at reading the map, and thus the odds of those kinds of moves working lessen.

Or a better way of putting it; A lot of teams embraced the mantra of low risk high reward plays with map movements in this patch, started by Secret, but embraced by most teams. In fact, the most notorious team to not adopt this idea, and go for something completely different and opposing were CDEC. And CDEC crushed people for the longest time because it was unexpected, like Aggresif's rotations of Gyro, rotating and ganking on a Gyro at level 7, when all the other Gyro's would be farming stacks instead.

I think this is a ramble that's kinda lost track of it's point now... Hmmm.

Anyway, as to why this started in a patch that arguably encouraged fighting (And even had fighting heroes in) I do not know. I've seen a couple ideas in some Liquidpedia articles (Which formed a lot of the basis for these ideas, and I can link them if you so wish. They are pretty interesting to read, made me think about the patch in a lot more depth). But I can at least talk about my observation of the effects.

A final note about solo kills in mid; That really doesn't happen anymore. There's only one player who really can consistently kill his laning opponent in situations where it's not expected, and that's Sumail. Part of the reason why the kid is terrifying