While our engineers are hard at work updating the full functionality of Dotabuff to the new patch, we have some time to awe at the amount of changes. This is, without a doubt, a patch we have all been waiting for and it is going to take a very long time before it starts making sense. So for now, here are our first, potentially very misguided impressions of the patch 7.33.

If the rumors are true, a new patch is supposed to come out very soon. This is supposed to be the big one, so all gloves are off and today we would love to discuss some of our most anticipated potential changes.

There are generally two types of heroes we all dread playing against. There are the ones we hate to play against because they are strong. There are also the ones we hate to play against because they are annoying. When stars align, these two characteristics come together and we get something absolutely abhorrent. Yeah, today is one of those blog posts.

Last time we alluded to one hard support hero who almost made the Top Tier list. Like many of you correctly guessed, we were talking about Disruptor — possibly one of the most fun position five heroes to play in the current patch. Today we would love to give players a quick primer on how to make the most out of this character.

The last role to discuss before we fully go into the patch waiting mode until the end of April. Position five in 7.32e is a very high impact role because the importance of the laning stage felt slightly diminished. As such, most Top Tier support heroes aren’t simply good laners with sustain, but rather strong teamfight characters who offer something at every stage of the game.

Position four or soft support is a very interesting role in the current patch. We’ve touched on the reasons for it in our offlaner discussion: independent offlaners are very popular and effective right now, allowing position four heroes to rotate around the map. This creates a very distinct gameplay loop that doesn’t necessarily conform to the ideas of a laning stage and this is directly reflected in the top tier fours in the current meta.

We are slowly moving towards more utility-based roles in our meta overview posts and today we are concentrating on the Offlane. Position three is probably the most demanding role when it comes to flexibility, both within a patch, and between patches. Players in this role need to adapt their whole playstyle, depending on what is needed from their position and 7.32e has a very wide variety of very different viable heroes.

Our initial impression for the hero was that she is almost definitely a carry, but this impression was wrong. For a couple of weeks a lot of players were finding more success with the hero in a support role, with core Muerta being a sub-45% win rate hero. Slightly less than a week ago, Valve released a small Muerta-specific changelog which addressed the issue by making the hero more appealing as a core. Today we would like to discuss whether it worked as intended.

The mid lane is going through some changes in the new patch. Most notably, we are seeing a decrease in popularity and effectiveness of several important setup heroes from the previous patch. Their place is taken by some of the cheesiest, most annoying characters in the game, so if you are a good mid player with no conscience, now is your time to gain some free MMR.