What you need to know about Dota 2’s 7.26b patch: Reliable gold nerfed, more farming, and yet more deathball nerfs

Valve dropped Patch 7.26b for Dota 2 today to slow down the game even further and make some immense changes to reliable and unreliable gold.

Dota 2 has been played at a breakneck pace, incentivizing brawling and punishing farming heroes unduly. Here’s everything you need to know about the latest patch.

Lots of changes to gold

Systemic changes abound in this patch, especially relating to gold. In general, there’s more gold to bound on the map now, with melee creeps and neutral creeps having increased bounties. AoE gold for hero kills has also been increased slightly.

The most important change of all will likely be the removal of all reliable gold except for passive income. 

There are three scenarios where the distinction between the two types matter: buybacks, buying items, and dying. Buybacks always draw from the reliable gold pool first, buying items always draw from unreliable gold first, and dying will only take away unreliable gold.

Previously, hero kills, tower kills, and Hand of Midas provided reliable gold, giving players the option to save a pool of reliable gold. This means that heroes generally lose less gold when dying and will thus spend less gold for a buyback.

The change means that in nearly all situations, player deaths will be punished heavily with gold loss. This also makes using one’s gold before dying much more important and further increases the importance and scarcity of late-game buybacks for core players. Early support buybacks will likely occur at the same rate, though, since passive gold still goes to reliable income.

Increased gold gain across the board, denies nerfed

One source of income has been removed, though: gold provided for denying creeps. Denied creeps also give 10 percent more experience to enemies. 

This reduces the potency of powerful laners into a deathball push, an extremely common strategy at the top levels of both the public and pro scene. The addition of a health regeneration aura to towers can also be read as a direct nerf to the deathball strategy, giving defenders more tools to fight around their structures.

All of these changes will reduce the bloated impact the laning stage had on the game, allowing for a wide breadth of drafts and hero rosters that, for example, focus more on a mid-game teamfight strategy than a paramount focus on winning the lanes. 

The boosts to farming and nerfs to denies might also see teams begin to experiment more with trilanes and solo offlanes, rather than the 2-1-2 laning that’s become the overwhelming norm.

Power spikes decreased due to later neutral item time drops and all talents becoming weaker

Neutral items drop timings have been rescaled, starting at seven minutes for tier one and increasing by 10 minutes thereafter. This means that tier two and three items drop later than before, while tier four items drop earlier. 

The changes mean that more late-game focused strategies will gain access to stronger items sooner when they want to fight, while the borderline reckless brawling strategy employed by most teams will have a reduced effect.

In a vague changelog, Valve said “all talents are now about 20 percent weaker.” It’s made for some weird numbers, but the blanket nerf serves as a reduction in most heroes’ power spikes. Talents have allowed for another avenue of hero balance and have introduced entirely new builds, like physical damage Puck. 

Reducing these spikes through talents and neutral items nerf help for a more even and accurate gauge of heroes’ prowess across the entire game. It’s hard to tell who this benefits at a glance, but it does look like a boon for more late-game oriented lineups.

Item changes

Five items received changes: Healing Salve, Gloves of Haste, Blades of Attack, Ring of Basilius, and Hood of Defiance. Except for the Salve, all of them received some minor gold cost increases.

Gloves of Haste and Blades of Attack serve as basic components for Power Treads and Phase Boots, making them more expensive.

Gloves have served as a cheap farm booster for most carries in the game. Likewise, Blades of Attack can be built into Crystalys or Armlet of Mordiggian, two extremely efficient carry items.

Ring of Basilius, as the second-most-popular cheap laning aura item, is the second one to be nerfed after Headdress was nerfed in the last patch. This also indirectly nerfs Vladimir’s Offering, one of the most-popular first items for offlaners in the patch.

Hood of Defiance now has a 200 gold recipe. Like the other items, this also serves as a nerf to its corresponding aura item, the Pipe of Insight. It also got cheaper through the ages as the gold cost for components Ring of Health and Ring of Regen were decreased, so this returns the item to older times.