Winter Treasure IV & The Shanghai Major Compendium

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The fourth and final Winter Treasure arrives. Available to Battle Pass owners as a level reward or treasure purchase, Winter Treasure IV features item sets for Magnus, Broodmother, Brewmaster, Naga Siren, Luna, and a rare Legion Commander set. Also included is the Ultra Rare Darkclaw Emissary item set for Dazzle—as before, each of these treasures you open increases your chances of receiving the Ultra Rare set.

With the first matches of the Shanghai Major event drawing near, the Shanghai Major Compendium features are now active. Along with the addition of Group Stage Brackets and Team Profile information, you now have more chances to earn Battle Points by correctly making Hero, Team, Player, and Tournament Predictions riding upon the outcomes of the matches in Shanghai. Check out the finalized brackets and lock in your predictions prior to the start of Group Stage play to use your skills of premonition to push your Battle Pass to the next level. The Group Stage will run February 25–28, with the Main Event to follow March 2–6.

This update also sees a variety of fixes and the addition of several heroes to the Workshop, details of which can be found here.

Just me or does this one look more like it should be a tier one or two treasure minus the dazzle and legion. I mean the Naga and Brood sets really dont contribute anything, and Brew looks like omniknight.

Like CLQ would say, who cares about compendiums and weaboo items.

Only thing that's relevant :

* Deafening Blast's knockback is no longer a hard disable (affected units can cast abilities and items)
* Deafening Blast's disarm portion rebalanced to keep same overall effectiveness as before (it previously applied disarm only after the knockback disable, numbers rescaled to keep same overall duration where they cannot attack)

So if I understand it right, it means that YOU CAN BKB OFF Deafening Blast.

If that's it, then it is an actual Invoker nerf. Finally. Not some insignificant stat changes.

BKB fully stops his euls combo because there's no longer a stun. And you can BKB in response to blast in teamfights.

Invoker no longer has double Ravage boys. Thank god.

Note that still only BKB can get rid of it. Other sources of dispel still don't. However you can cast spells now. So you counter it by BKBing defensively on your cores and by abusing counterinitiation spells/items during blast on your supports.

You realise you can also Eul's yourself mid combo, and Glimmer Cape yourself to survive it right? Those are just as relevant as the BKB, if not a little more so. Hell, from the wording you can even kill Invoker with spells during it which is bizarre.

Speaking of bizzare, what is up with IF lately? A balance patch 4 days before the major, and an f patch while we are at it. He's been so jumpy at making changes this patch it's worrying me.

Tsunami's Observation:

https://twitter.com/tsunami643/status/701535717298601984

tl;dr: It also no longer stops TPs or easily stops channeling of deadly skills like Epicenter, Freezing Field, and Death Ward.

Fair point for glimmer. Not stopping channels is pretty insignificant though, he still has two ultra-long range skills that do it. If you ask me tornado needs a nerf too.

I'm sure we'll end up making a "**** you" build against Invoker where you go Blink Dagger, Ghost Scepter and Blade Mail on a hero, and blink inside the Chaos Meteor to reliably kill him everytime.
Pudge comes to mind, they're more or less his core items anyways. Abaddon or Centaur Warrunner can also work. Legion Commander also, kind of. Reminds me of the old Tinker meta.

How is Icefrog making tons of balance patches worrying? It's great! It means he actually acknowledges that his game is broken and tries to balance it out on the fly when he sees meta abuse.

The issue is speed. At least towards the start of this patch, he patched waaay too frequently. We hit like a d patch within a month of release. In which he heavily buffed OD and DP to arguably broken levels before really seeing how they could settle in things.

Which means really we could be on like a d patch, but have a significantly healthier game state than the current one if he had waited a little. And that just struck me as being out of character. f patches are basically unheard of in modern DOTA.

Hell he even did this without addressing other seriously broken heroes in the game right now. Which is again weird for a sub patch before this patch.