River rapids and evolving frog-men can't quite shake up the meta, even if a hard-earned victory feels as sweet as ever.
There was a time when a slight tweak to a forest path would send my Dota 2 clan’s heads into a collective spin. Valve’s venerable MOBA used to be much more conservative with map changes, and big ones are still rare—but they happen, now. In 2023 the map got 40% bigger, and Roshan relocated to the edges of the map. As of last week’s Wandering Waters update, Dota 2 has more rivers, frogs and crafting than ever before, plus Roshan has returned from the suburbs.
They’re welcome changes! Dota is still Dota, though, which means that when it’s not making me feel triumphant, it’s often making me feel miserable.
I’m a lapsed player with 4,500 hours under my belt, and while my days of booting up Dota every night with the gang in tow now belong to a distant halcyon youth, I do pop back in for every big update. This is undoubtedly one of those, boasting a river that’s burst its banks and brought a bunch of evolving frogmen with it, introducing a sort of middleground camp between the weaklings in the regular jungle and the beefy ancients.
Middleground in terms of how tough they are to tackle, that is. In terms of actual ground most of them are tucked away at the very bottom and top of the map, which means I hardly ever go and visit them (and by visit I mean murder). At least the tadpoles they start as are cute.
The rivers are another neat idea I foresee being fiddled with, potentially speeding them up to be a bit more impactful. The central stream is unchanged, but you can now gain a speed boost by jogging down the new rapids that stretch across both jungles and alongside each safelane. Rapids might be an overstatement: the current currents improve your move speed by 100 or 150, depending on which stream you’re jogging through. Perhaps I haven’t yet learnt how to spot good opportunities to use them, but so far I haven’t had a game where they’ve made a noticeable difference to a gank or a getaway. At the moment they add a welcome splash of visual variety, but little more.
Those headline rivers may be a bit of a damp squib, but I’m pleased to see Roshan back where he belongs, near the centre of the map. I liked how 2023’s New Frontiers update gave him a commute, but didn’t like how far away he was from the action. This new iteration brings the best of both worlds, where you still get the dynamism of him moving about, but not on the fringes of the map where he’s less likely to be fought over. The best part is that when he moves house at the start of every day or night, he now comes stomping right down the central river, picking up and yeeting any hero he bumps into along the way. I’ve had a few giggles when he’s interrupted a brewing teamfight, and Reddit has many more. It’s a lovely injection of slapstick.
I’m also enamoured with one specific quality of life update: being able to swap over an item from your courier to your active slots without waiting for a brief cooldown. Having to prepare an empty slot was a boring and fiddly consideration that tripped me up more times than I care to admit — now, as Valve put it, a vital item delivered at the last second is more likely to turn a teamfight. It’s one of those tiny changes with an outsized impact on play.
The new way neutral items work is also much less of a faff, despite also being more complicated and interesting. They’re now crafted using a resource you get from clearing jungle camps, and they let you combine a familiar (or newly added) neutral item with a buff like improved attack range, spell damage, or just straight up health or mana. It’s a tasty pick and mix, giving you more flexibility to cover your hero’s weaknesses or embrace an advantage.
Highs and lows
That’s about it for the big changes, apart from tweaks to the Tormentors (only one now!) that I won’t go into, because my team has only been coordinated enough to take it down in a couple of my games so it’s largely been irrelevant. And there’s the rub.
Dota’s a team game, but it’s luck of the draw whether the people you’re playing with will see it that way — and it’s a near certainty they’re going to be dicks. Toxicity isn’t a Dota-specific problem, but it’s exacerbated by long, often gruelling games where mistakes are very visible. The defending high ground advantage, combined with immunity glyphs, turn games into drawn out battles that make the siege of Ceuta look like a school child’s time out. They are exhausting.
Comebacks are vanishingly rare in that situation, albeit magical when they do happen, but the lows make me question whether they’re worth the tradeoff… and long for Deadlock’s relatively breezy matches. No game can match the high of a glorious Dota 2 comeback, but nor has any game ever felt as grim as a drawn out loss alongside four teammates who are somehow even more toxic than the arseholes from the last round. It doesn’t help that the meta, at my level at least, seems stuck in the same place it was years ago, i.e dominated by fat Phantom Assasins. I’ve had precisely one game where anyone has picked either of the new heroes added since I last played.
Nevertheless, those highs are Everest high, especially when you feel you were the lynchpin to success. I’d forgotten about the background thrum of satisfying sound design, too, every plink of gold adding oomph to a last hit. Most importantly, there’s that constant churn of considerations, busying your mind with attempts to gain a strategic overview or execute a tricksy play.
I think I’m also seeing some benefit from the 500 something hours of Deadlock I’ve played since my last Dota stint. The cut and thrust feels sharper in my mind: the importance of a split push, of dancing around a teamfight and only committing when a vital spell is off cooldown, or else the importance of just scarpering. There’s something about seeing a similar struggle play out in three dimensions that clarifies the concepts, perhaps.
Still. The misery of solo queuing puts me off playing more, with an overwhelming lack of teamwork combined with constant dickwaddery. Dota is still Dota — but of course, all of that doesn’t apply if you’ve got some pals to play with. The map changes might not be as big of a shake up as they first seem, but if the gang got back together, I’d happily join them for many more evenings of mildly-faster river running fun. Maybe it’s time to round up yours.
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