So I was working on a guide about hero roles. I had a snazzy name picked out and everything "Dota 2 Class Warfare" I was going to call it, and maybe insert bad jokes and pictures of the Occupy X movement.
Then I had an awesome discussion with Snoopy from Absolute Legends. It was incredibly enlightening and yet also extremely frustrating. The gist of it is there's a metagame shift in the works and with it mostly invalidates the stuff I've done and was working on at the time. Gah. At least we get to explore new topics though. The next video guide will mostly be concerning what's happening right now.
Basically Na'Vi are to blame. Those of you who've seen the Ukranian (mostly) juggernaught in action know exactly how successful they are and how damn scary they look when they play. Naturally they're extremely talented players with incredible coordination but that's not the whole of it. For a long time I've put down their ability to pub stomp even the strongest teams (and I do mean stomp, not just win) down to their hive mind level coordination. But I was told to look at how their extremely aggressive push strats completely countered the standard picks.
It's not uncommon to see Na'Vi blitz a weak short lane and tear down both outer towers by about the 4 minute mark with the aid of a jungler like Chen or Enchantress. They try and drop as many towers as they can as fast as they can and build a huge gold lead off it. This heavy pushing is important. Against level dependant heroes like Invoker, Zeus or Night Stalker this quick hard push on the shortlane is hard to stop. These solos are not going to be particularly effective at holding off a 3 man push at this earlier in the game. And if they do leave their mid lane to try and defend they'll come back to scary solo like Rhasta that now has a level advantage and farm advantage against them. This early in the game it's also hard to justify dragging a hard carry or even the support away from another lane, or even a jungling hero. Pulling any of these heroes out of position is going to screw up the lineup and the team's early game.
The downside is of course, an enemy carry is freefarming. But in this strategy teams just don't care. I watched it again this morning with Quantic vs EG. Quantic threw Windrunner to suicide solo against Broodmother. Naturally Broodmother farmed like crazy, she was sitting on approx 420 GPM at 12 minutes. But it didn't matter. The point of this push strat is to end the game before Broodmother/carry can ever become a problem. In this case Quantic just stormed into EG's base and took raxes. By this point Broodmother had a BKB, but it didn't matter, EG as a team couldn't defend against it. That comes to the next point.
The other thing I was told to watch for was that Na'Vi are not selfish when it comes to farming. Snoopy specifically directed me to watch about the 10 minute mark where Na'Vi start giving farm to their supports. I haven't had a chance to see this myself but I hope to confirm it this weekend with The Defense finals against Quantic. Why is this important? Well traditionally at least one support gets no farm and is busy doing nothing but roaming, babysitting, buying consumeables like wards or dust, and stacking creep camps.
On the other hand two massive gamechanging items early on are Pipe and Mek. That's effective +650 HP for 5 heroes, so it's another 3250 HP you need to cut through. With all of this extra tower gold, and supports who've had at least a little bit of farm a push team is likely to have these up and running way ahead of the enemy team. So it seems like the days of a ward ***** running around with boots and a magic wand at 20 minutes are numbered. Even if a hero like Crystal Maiden isn't required to grab Mek because Chen has it, and her Tide hunter is already carrying a pipe. Taking a bit of farm and stacking it into pure HP survivability like bracers (which can be turned into drums, also a great item) appears to be more favourable (I'm still not really sure about Na'Vi running Vanguard/SnY Crystal Maiden against Complexity though).
When Na'Vi are engaging during their early rax attempts they engage as 5 heroes with their core items that don't need all of their skills maxxed to be effective. On the other hand their opponents frequently engage as 1 solo, 1 hard carry who may still not have enough farm. 2 guys from the shortlane that got stomped early and are behind, and a ward***** support with no items. This is a generalisation, sometimes the other team has roamers, or a jungler. But the point remains the same. They aren't engaging as 5 heroes with all their core items done. And this gives Na'Vi a huge advantage to work with.
Simply being able to keep yourself alive during teamfights is important. Push teams are often very reliant on attrition. They push up against a tower, do some damage, then come back with the next creep wave. Being able to stay alive during the period is important as support heroes generally pack important disables. Getting off lots of Crystal Novas and Frostbites is important rather than having CM getting focussed dead during the first push attempt or even trading a kill for it, tower needs to die. This is why Mek is important, and why heroes like Enchantress and Chen are so popular. Armed with a few Arcane boots they can keep the team topped up as they continually push lanes. If you don't have any healing abilities when you engage the defenders can spray nukes. Even if they don't kill you, now it's very hard to justify tower diving or even sitting in the vicinity for a second wave of spells.
The reverse situation is also true. If a couple of heroes don't have very much survivability it's very easy to spray them with nukes and force them to go back to base and heal, giving your team a wide open window to destroy the tower with.
Alright, so hard carries aren't as viable any more? And now supports need to get their rice on? Well, no that's not really it. What's happening is a metagame shift. How teams play those hard carries and supports needs to change. A great example again from Quantic vs EG. Quantic picked antimage, EG took Void. Two of the hardest Agility carries in the game. So what gives? It's how they used them.
EG did a standard Void/Lich babysit combo in mid. Quantic on the other hand took advantage of a weak sidelane, aided by Enchantress tore down both Dire shortlane towers before five and half minutes into the game. Where was the support from EG? This earlier in the game there isn't much. Void's got nothing, Lich can't leave Void alone. Vengeful isn't going to be much use at 5 minutes into the game when she's been hard supporting top and giving levels to Beastmaster.
Beastmaster is the only option, but if he goes he wastes time and the levels EG has been trying to feed him, and then he'll lose his safe lane towers to the Quantic Enigma. It's a catch 22, either way EG is losing towers, and in the end they choose to keep the more valuable safe longlane towers.
Skip forward to the 7 minute mark (yes, that early!) Quantic are now pushing as four against Dire top lane. What's there to stop them? Windrunner is underleveled with no items, and Void's still got nothing. So it's 4v3 in Quantic's favour and they've already got extra tower gold under their belt and all this while Anti Mage is freefarming.
Anti Mage is freefarming. I say it again because this is important.
What are Quantic's support heroes doing? They're not babysitting, they're not stacking neuts. They're providing a huge *** distraction for EG to deal with by putting pressure on the opposite side of the map. Either EG responds or they lose more towers, which means they're not annoying antimage who's free to last hit every creep he wants to and farm his own jungle with no interruptions.
Meanwhile Void isn't underfarmed. He's sitting on a very respectable GPM and has Power Treads and Battlefury done before 20 minutes. The issue is he's just constantly behind Anti Mage and it comes down to the map control that Quantic provide for their carry plus all the early towers. When Quantic have 6 towers EG have none, that's a big gold boost for Anti Mage to carry over Void. And the deal is they're giving Antimage all of this money while not running the traditional babysitter support role.
It's all about the pushing. You might ask how is the stupid farmed AM any different from EG's stupid farmed Broodmother game? It's all about the pushing. Quantic pushed against the farmed Broodmother, EG did not push with Brood nor did they push against Antimage. In neither game did EG's lineup favour pushing.
So what's next, what counters this? How do teams deal with it? I honestly don't know but I'm sure we'll find out soon. Snoopy says Absolute Legends have a plan, but it's untested and naturally he didn't want to spill the beans on it.
Killing other heroes and killing towers gives gold but also has a direct impact on how powerful your creep are, and how deeply your team can safely push a lane (remember our equation: creep = xp and gold = items = metagame), thus influencing how much you can further push and harass (thus acquiring further gold). Killing creep alone is only a partial measure and therefore can only be partially successful.
I'm surprised it actually took this long for people to realize the greater value of heroes which are stronger "now" rather than "later," and of putting pressure on your enemy "now" rather than "later." Of course it's impossible to do well yourself with an aggressive strategy and a hero more suited to pushing when your team wishes to drag everything out and count on late game battles.
Hopefully we'll see a large enough shift in enough of the playerbase that a much-needed rebalancing of the heroes takes place and the game will overall see more exciting and faster paced play that's driven more by player action than the timing of creep waves.
@Atlas - Dazzle only has 1 relevant skill for pushing, while his other 3 skills are important for engagements and aren't hard disables. The current push metagame requires avoiding engagements and dishing out damage to towers, where other heroes outclass him. He is only truly effective with Brood's spiders in such strategies, but it's a bit unnecessary.
As the post stated though, it's not entirely about the damage to the tower. It's the ability to keep your allies alive during a pushing phase. Enchantress is good because her sprites offer a strong heal. Chen can heal his team in instant. Their creeps can offer more in a push of course, but Dazzle seems like the best hero for killing a creep wave fast and keeping his allies up. He has better short term consistency than most pushing heroes, as long as he can manage his mana pool.
I've been seeing these strategies in my games for a while now, even before Na'Vi used them, just not to the same degree or level of play. The only counter I've seen is to pick similar heroes that can push and/or stop pushes and have similar sustaining abilities. I like Sand King with max Sandstorm as an early counter to some pushes, while Devour, Midas, and Enchantress can counter Chen/Enchantress creeps.
I can't wait to see how this "push push push" mentality will effect my future games.
I'm interested to see how things develop over the next year, and what new strategies may be conceived.
Hard pushing setups, are in opinion, harder to deal with than a farmed carry. It just feels like no matter which course of action you take against a team that has superior lane setups/pushing power, you lose something.
The only thing holding pub play back from this is awareness and discipline really. As long as people can understand that they need to get their early item and then they must push. Once players get over the mentality of "hang on, let me just farm this this and this" I think it's a real possibility.
Simplified it's get towers, get mek, get pipe, stick together and end the game.