First Impressions of 6.65! A New Metagame?

The wait is finally over with an awesome update by Icefrog. (6.65 Changelog) The version came out with two major updates, one was the xp and gold change on creeps after destroying barracks and the other one was the reworked mechanics of Town Portal.

Both these changes indicate a clear green signal by Icefrog to push strategies. The benefits of destroying barracks are too good to ignore. What this means? The game has turned into a push competition, whoever pushes enemy rax first wins! The turtling era has been replaced by the push era (Yipeee!). Length of games will go down considerably. Pick a summoner,  an AoE whore, an AoE healer, a tower demolisher & a carry jungler and you're bound to have a great time crushing your opponents. The carry spends most of his time jungling while the rest of the team goes out pushing everything to the rax. You don't even need to care much once you push rax. Push a lane or two and then farm in jungle as hell coz the other team is losing experience and gold relatively as the game goes longer.

Talking about the changes to teleport mechanics, it looks like Icefrog took Kuroky's excerpt on Mass teleport seriously. The changes are somewhat complex at first looks. People in organized games will need to teleport selectively. Mass teleporting to save carry and towers is a broken concept now. Other professionals should take a lesson from this and start posting their own views on the map. ;)

The other strat Icefrog seems to promote in this map is Ganking. The TP nerf promotes ganking and the new item Urn of Shadows is totally awesome for aggressive support heroes.

Defending base will be a pain in the ass and single target heroes like Viper will need to make AoE damage items else they might fade away from the Competitive Scene completely, while AoE whores like Puck will be used more frequently. Pit Lord is likely to make a comeback here with his mass-teleport ulti and the ability to kill creeps in a matter of seconds. The same concept applies to other global teleport heroes like Furion, Spectre and KotL. Some might say Spectre has got useless after the nerf to dispersion but she will continue to appear in higher level games in my opinion.

These were basically my first thoughts on the meta-game changes I expect in 6.65. I will continue to express my views on the new version, so subscribe and keep in touch with me. Thanks for reading. :)

Boots of speed are now available in side shops! <--- TOTALLY UNEXPECTED :D