Dota 2 pro players have had nearly four months to experiment with patch 7.29, and the competitive metagame can be generously described as overdeveloped.
Mid-lane Winter Wyvern almost won the Western Europe TI10 qualifier. The same team’s off-laner started three games with zero items. Major champions PSG.LGD just lost to hard support Faceless Void. Patch 7.29 is getting out of hand, and a big patch is exactly what’s needed before The International 10.
7.30 will have the difficult task of reassembling Dota 2 for the biggest stage in history. The winner of TI10’s $40 million prize pool could be determined by the upcoming patch notes. These are the most needed changes for the Dota 2 pro scene in 7.30.
Ancient camp gold is too high
The prevalence of ancient stacks has helped fast farmers like Templar Assassin, Luna, and Terrorblade dominate the 7.29 meta. The process of stacking ancient camps in the early game and protecting them with vision has become repetitive. A mid-laner or carry who lost their lane can spring right back up the net worth charts with a triple or quadruple ancient stack.
Ancient creeps will likely get a significant cut to their gold bounties in 7.30. That gold could be redistributed somewhere else. More lucrative lanes would spread the farm evenly while boosting non-ancient creeps would make stacks more difficult to defend.
Sentry wards are getting ridiculous
Lowering the cost of sentry wards to just 50 gold in 7.29 was supposed to be a quality of life change for supports. After getting a cooldown reduction to 75 seconds in 7.29d, the importance of sentry wards in the early game is getting stale. Both side lanes need sentries to block or unblock nearby jungle camps. That cheap price can also result in never-ending mid lane vision wars.
Making early pulls less important would also shift attention away from blue wards. Making the jungle creeps spawn later would have drastic implications, but would also help balance the utility of early camp blocks. The astronomical de-ward bounty added in 7.22 might also need some tweaking.
Aghanim’s changes needed in 7.30
A ton of heroes have gotten new Aghanim’s Scepters in addition to the reworked Aghanim’s Shard. Many of these are balanced as situational options, but some are so good that they’re almost necessary in a hero’s build. As the newest Dota 2 mechanic, Shard changes are a great way to tune some out-of-line heroes.
The biggest offender is probably Templar Assassin, whose Scepter lets her teleport to any of her traps on a 10-second cooldown. This cooldown should be doubled, if not tripled. Medusa’s Shard and Scepter combo make her an absolute raid boss halfway through the mid-game and should see big number cuts or an outright rework. Lion needs a nerf somewhere, so his Shard’s Mana Drain spell immunity could be reworked to damage resistance or increased slow.
