Cover image source: @wykrhm
Teams will have to break down yet another sub-patch as 7.20e was released just hours ago but fortunately, the DPC season is on a month-long break. The Bucharest Minor and Chongqing Major meta’s are bound to be affected as 7.20 sees some significant nerfs to heroes who have been dominating the meta in pubs and pro games of late.
PA has seen a meteoric rise in the current meta and currently sits at a 90% pick/ban rate in the Divine bracket. Especially when coupled with Magnus, the hero seems impossible to deal with farming at astonishing speeds and snowballing like no other hero. A significant change to Stifling Dagger means that it costs 30 mana at all levels and the Phantom strike duration has also been reduced to 2s. Additionally, Blur’s manacost has gone up to 50. Magnus receives a nerf on the damage of Empower with 10% decrement across all levels. Furthermore, the scaling of the cleave percentage and the cooldown of RP have been changed.
Dazzle was becoming quite the hero to deal with strong laning, pushing and low cooldowns and nerfs to the range and manacost of Poison Touch will definitely make him a bit more balanced.
Puck, SF and Lina get +1 armour to start with while Puck also gets a -1s cooldown reduction to Illusory Orb across all levels. But the biggest change in this sub-patch is the fact that early game stat items like the Bracer, Wraith Band and Null Talisman have all been nerfed to provide 6 strength/agility/intelligence respectively instead of 8 from earlier with only 25 gold slashed from its previous price. Hopefully, this does mean that the stacking of these items well into the midgame will be considered and alternative builds will pave their way into the meta.
sf will have 10 starting armor by 7.22
— Sumail (@SumaaaaiL) December 10, 2018
A lot more balance and scaling changes were introduced as well and the full patch notes can be found here.
