Dota Patch 7.31c Released: Primal Beast and Tiny Hit With Nerfs

Right after the Dota 2 Pro Circuit (DPC) Eastern Europe 2021/2022 Tour 2: Playoffs wrapped up, Valve released the much-needed Patch 7.31c for Dota 2 to further balance the game before the ESL One Stockholm 2022 Major. Patch 7.31c addresses some of the glaring imbalances in the game by nerfing overwhelmingly strong heroes like Tiny, Primal Beast and Death Prophet while also giving some love to heroes like Sven and Zeus who have been out of the meta picks for quite a while.

Dota 2’s Patch 7.31c also comes at a time where pro players were beginning to complain about the stale meta, which saw a surge in the pick and win rate for some overbuffed heroes. It is not expansive enough to truly address the problems, but is a stop-fix solution that should tide us over till the upcoming major.

Patch 7.31C: The Biggest Losers

Tiny

Tiny has become an overwhelming terror in both the competitive scene and regular matchmaking in pubs, primarily thanks to the ridiculous amount of damage that he could deal to buildings and heroes in the mid-later portions of the game. A strong kit that allowed him to dominate lanes and scale in net-worth and farm, his ridiculous stat-gains, and versatility added to the problems. The hero had a 25.38% pick rate and whooping 53.11% win rate in the Divine+ brackets in the last 30 days.

The hero has finally received some heavy nerfs which have reduced his damaged output numbers significantly in the early stages, which will make it a little harder for the hero to ramp up his farming speed.

Primal Beast

Playing against this hero in pub games just made us wonder about one thing. What was Valve thinking when they thought that Primal Beast was weak and gave it some ridiculous buffs in Patch 7.31b.

The hero has not been enabled in Captain’s Mode at the moment and hence is absent from the competitive scene. But that has not stopped it from causing havoc in Dota 2 pubs. The hero’s laning presence is as broken as Earth Spirit was upon his release all those years ago. It is almost impossible to bully out the hero from lane (thanks to his Uproar spell) while the hero itself can almost solo kill enemy carries when it hits Level 3.

The only weakness that the hero possessed was seemingly in the later stages of the game, against multiple BKBs where its spells eventually became ineffective. But more often than not, you were not getting there. According to Dotabuff, Primal Beast has a 56.32% win rate in the Divine+ brackets, the highest amongst all the heroes.

All aspects of the hero have received significant nerfs which could help reduce its win-rate in pub games.

Death Prophet

Death Prophet was the most banned hero of the DPC 2021/22 Tour 2 with the hero being banned in 63.69% of the games, and for good reason. An unannounced change to the hero caused her Exorcism to effectively deal double its damage on buildings. This change single handedly caused an immense spike in her win-rate in pub games and made her a de facto ban in most professional games.

That change has effectively been reversed in Patch 7.31c. Other nerfs to her Spirit Siphon ability will also affect her effectiveness in sustaining through teamfights with minimal items, hopefully nerfing her into a much more balanced hero.

These changes seem to have been made with an eye on the Stockholm Major 2022. It will be interesting to see if there is a significant switch in the playstyles and strategies that teams have showcased so far, when we get to the tournament.

The Major kicks off on May 12th and features a $500K prize pool.