As the Sith emperor is making plans to conquer the world busy, in the meantime I’ll do some blogging in his stead. As some of you know, I have a personal dotablog at What Matters in Dota. So my style of blogging is exactly going to be the same here.
I think it’s no secret how the new map is going to look like, thanks to the beta-testers who leaked it. 2 totally new heroes, some old ones that are practically new, and some tweaked a bit. If you have read my blog before I said that I feel (emphasis on that personal note) all these changes are meant for only one purpose - to merge the pub and league worlds into one.
The trend of rushing changes and churning out new versions like there’s no tomorrow is not without reason. For some reason, the frog wishes leaguers to be more comfortable with using more heroes. To a certain degree he has already succeeded. You can check out all the “competitive” dota news to verify what I say. In another way, he also wants the style of pub players to be better incorporated into the league gaming style. In this aspect he may still have a long way to go.
The Tauren Chieftain is, plainly put, nothing more than another hero that fits quite nicely into the 1st purpose, while still lacking in the 2nd. This is perhaps the third such hero that the frog has introduced to Dota already, the first being Clockwerk Goblin and the second Admiral. However, unlike the two, the frog has learned some lessons about not giving too much power to a single hero, to the point of being burdened with too much nerfs in the later versions.
Hence, if you notice, the 1-second delay in the Great Stomp skill, the immense difficulty of getting that Ancestor to where you want it to be, and an even greater delay in the execution of Earth Splitter. Natural Order is perhaps what makes the TC a bit more special, reducing armor and spell resistance. In the world of leaguers where spell damage is predominant, giving even more spell damage can be intriguing. Combine that with a flawless execution of Earth Splitter and Great Stomp, and you have quite the punch that can make it into leagues.
Pub-wise, perhaps this hero in the initial periods after the introduction of 6.60 would command quite a lot of attention for a while, because people would need to get used to it. Standard operating procedure. After that while? Hopefully your ancestors would guide you.
(more…)
