What the new Dota Patch 7.41a means for the meta at ESL One Birmingham

Dota 2 developer and publisher Valve Corporation dropped a new Dota patch last night after day 2 of the ESL One Birmingham playoffs, in the form of Patch 7.41a.

The letter patch has a rather short but highly impactful changelog, targeting some of the truly broken stuff that has come out of the new Dota patch.

Stop first picking Alchemist, says IceFrog

Alchemist is always at the top of any Dota changelog if he ever gets any buffs or nerfs, so scoping his nerfs in 7.41a out was real easy. He’s been extremely good at ESL One Birmingham and in general, thanks in no small part to the changes to his Greevil’s Greed innate ability in 7.41. In fact, he was so strong in the last three days that teams have been first picking him and getting away with it, even in games where he is reasonably countered.

Thus, it’s hardly surprising that he’s been knocked down a peg in the new Dota patch. Greevil’s Greed now gives less bonus gold per kill at max stacks, and the bonus damage that Alchemist gets per Aghanim’s Scepter given to his teammates is down from 25 to 15. That second bit is especially important moving forward, because now Alchemist can’t as easily recover the net worth he sacrifices by giving away Scepters.

He’s probably still going to be a good pick in the metagame, but I doubt that he’s going to be as unstoppable as he was in 7.41.

The disco is closed

Cheng “NothingToSay” Jin Xiang is probably solely responsible for getting Leshrac nerfed in the new Dota patch 7.41a. He crushed both MOUZ and Team Spirit with it yesterday, after all, and it might have been a little too effortless for him to win his lanes doing so.

Leshrac’s strength gain per level has therefore been decreased from 2.8 to 2.5, making him less durable overall as the game goes on. Diabolic Edict’s damage per explosion has also been toned down, to a maximum of 30 at level 4. All in all, though, I personally think these nerfs are too small to really take him out of the metagame, so we’ll probably see him some more at ESL One Birmingham.

Making bzm happy

On the other hand, Invoker received some love in Patch 7.41a. His base intelligence is now up from 20 to 22, which means that his attack damage at level one has also gone up from 39-45 to 41-47. His level 10 Tornado talent also now grants an extra second of cooldown reduction, up from four seconds to five.

Invoker’s laning has been very bad for a while now, so getting some extra damage to last hit creeps with is always welcome. Given that Bozhidar “bzm” Bogdanov is still in ESL One Birmingham (and looking poised to make the grand finals, at that), perhaps we’ll see him bust out his signature hero and do some damage with him once again.

As a former Invoker player myself, I’m always excited at the prospect of seeing bzm work his magic with Invoker, so hopefully these small buffs are enough to make the hero at least a semi-viable pick.