The new meta!

Welcome ladies and gentlemen to my first post on the new 7.00/01 patch so far. I've taken some time to evaluate the overall gameplay right now and felt like I want to get my thoughts out for the public. There is a straight forward development I've seen after gaining some experience in-game and collecting statistics overall. This post will provide some basic concepts and changes to the current style that is being played. I will rather focus on the overall state of the game so keep in mind that I won't provide data on the balancing of heroes (that naturally has to be achieved over this years' patches) or item strengths and item builds.

A five man fighting metagame

I think that from our overall game experience in 7.00/01 we can all agree that the biggest change to Dota 2 is the rise of five man movement and constant fighting throughout all stages of the game. Therefore, it's clear that heroes need to buy items that provide movement and kiting potential like Blink Dagger, Force Staff / Hurricane Pike etc. Also, this development moves the pool of valuable heroes towards those that come online really fast. This can either be due to a big ultimate like Omnislash or Reverse Polarity or because of deathball potential through Mekansm or Veil of Discord which enable to take big teamfights and shredder towers down really fast. Of course, these are just some examples and many other abilities, talent tree abilities or items could be mentioned here. Overall, the gameplan should be more focused on abusing those power spikes and claiming objectives as soon as your team reaches them by five-manning.

Drafting synergistic heroes is more important than ever

As a natural cause of a five man focused game, it has become more important than ever to pick heroes that synergize well with each other. Picking a Faceless Void without a combo partner like Witch Doctor or Invoker will lead to a hero with no place in your team that takes farm for little to no impact. Furthermore, providing a good balance of magical and physical damage aswell as durable heroes and glass-cannons proves to be game winning. Trying to play around a midlane Phantom Assassin and safelane Slark has become insanely hard, as both heroes don't provide a lot for a team as a whole. Chances are that your team loses the game before both of those heroes come online. Given you drafted more of a playmaker-oriented midlaner like Outworld Devourer, your safelane Slark looks a lot better though and is likely to get the time and space to become strong enough to hold. As most heroes are still viable right now, you should generally not be afraid to go out of the box with a niché pick that will provide the two or three aspects needed for your team draft to succeed.

The downfall of Roshan and a drift towards a radiant-favoured game

Since there is a lot of teamfighting, one might think that Roshan is a high value objective, maybe even higher value than he used to be. The introduction of shrines however completely negated any earlygame abuse of Roshan. There could be niché drafts that make early Roshan attempts work out, but overall it is too easy for the enemy team to contest it at all stages of the game - given they still have their Roshan shrine up. Since you need to kill all tier two towers to be able to kill the shrines, getting Roshan usually becomes a valid objective at the point of the game where either both teams hit a stalemate or one team was able to deathball all outer towers and is able to safely secure the Roshan shrine before claiming the Aegis of the Immortal.
In addition to this, I want to mention that Roshan's new placement has given Radiant a huge advantage since Radiant is naturally the stronger side of the map. Dire used to have the Roshan advantage to make up for that, but with Radiant being able to contest it equally well now, I feel like Dire needs a buff within the next patches.

Get as greedy as you can - but on which position?

One aspect of Dota 2 we should all have learned from puppey's successful career as a drafter is that you need to get as greedy as you can. Teams like Virtus.Pro constantly lose games because they fail to claim their enemies' highground after snowballing out of control, enabling huge comebacks for the greedier draft. With the addition of highground shrines aswell as the earlier addition of armor buffs through tier two and three towers in 6.87, destroying barracks has actually become really hard. While many argue that deathball is back, I certainly do not agree. Deathballing structures outside of the enemies' highground certainly is back, but one hasty attempt to destroy barracks can turn into a huge disaster for a fast-paced pushing line-up. These mechanics are the cause for a lot of games (even in the professional scene) to turn into a throw and counter-throw, where teams overestimate their momentum and sacrifice huge leads into a bottomless pit. It also causes the games' tempo to generally slow down after the first 20 minutes because it's more valuable to starve your opponent out and wait for a good moment to strike rather than just trying regardless of the odds.
This certain shift in the meta gameplay leads to an important question: On which role can you actually attempt to be greedier than before? It should be clear that the changes to the jungle heavily impacted even considering to play a jungle hero. Even fast junglers like Legion Commander (that will usually have a Blink Dagger at around 9 minutes into the game) will not be able to impact the game enough. The results generally are losing multiple lanes, leading to the aforementioned deathball push for your enemy team - and since that jungler didn't provide enough during those crucial first 10 minutes of the game, barracks might be lost before she could turn teamfights around by farming her next item (also leaving the safe-, mid- or offlaner crippled for the entirety of the match). We also see a clear movement away from farm-heavy core heroes in other lanes like safelane Naga Siren, midlane Alchemist or generally lategamers that basically don't provide anything for their team until they pick up at least two core items. I've made the conclusion for myself early in this patch and was seeing a clear shift towards the new greedy position in Dota 2 with a new style of playing position 4 heroes. I've mainly played this position for the entire patch so far and had a ton of success with it.

High impact role: the greedy position 4 roaming / dual offlane hero

Recently, dotabuff.com has provided an article that will statistically prove some of the ideas and arguments I've just provided. Players generally tend to have high success with heroes that want to move around the map stabilizing / snowballing their lanes to give their team the edge they need to enter the midgame and start pushing as a five man unit. A lot of the heroes listed are heroes that can be played as dual offlaners or roamers (denying the enemy teams' cores farm while scaling into scary cores themselves). Some of those involve the following (winrate in brackets): Abaddon (57%), Earth Spirit (42% - bare in mind that the high skill cap generally keeps the winrate lower than the heroes effective strength), Nyx Assassin (49%), Pudge (54%), Slardar (53%), Spirit Breaker (53%), Treant Protector (55%) or Underlord (55%). I am aware that some of the mentioned heroes generally are favoured as offlaners and I will come back to that shortly. Nevertheless, the idea should be clear. While some rather traditional position 4 heroes like Lion or Shadow Shaman did fall out of favour quite heavily, those beefy guys causing trouble all over the map have become a lot scarier with only one core item. Most of them just need something like a Blink Dagger or Guardian Greaves to have high impact in mid-to lategame while offering high kill potential from the get-go. Some of them can just straight up win the game (yes, I'm kinda exaggerating here) once they get a certain item like Nyx Assassin or Treant Protector with an Aghanim's Scepter. Also, while the enemy jungler that still plays 6.88 is not providing anything for their team except abusing their midlaners' shrine for themselves, your Pudge kills their carry, smokes and kills their midlaner and suddenly has enough to solo kill almost any hero on the map. Further prove for my theory is the shift in the current professional scene, as we can see more and more of those flexible position 4 heroes drifting into the current metagame (to list some of them: Clockwerk, Pudge, Slardar). Icefrog seems to indicate that we should emphasize a lot more towards roaming the map picking up bounty runes and contesting all enemy lanes instead of playing junglefarm simulator, so my general advice for 7.01: Pick greedy position 4 heroes!

A must have: the AoE control offlaner

I did say I want to come back to the point that many of the heroes listed above are indeed really good offlaners. You are completely right, and as you can see a lot of the strong playmaker heroes right now are those beefy frontliners that want to initiate skirmishes by gapclosing and offering huge AoE disables and crowd control. Therefore, we see a ton of offlaners like Centaur Warrunner, Axe, Slardar, Clockwerk, Dark Seer, Tidehunter etc. All those heroes can be insanely hard to handle in lane if played properly and might even want to commit to movements around the map pre level 6. Greedier offlaners like Nature's Prophet and those that tend to scale worse into lategame like Undying have fallen out of favour or have lately seen better success if paired with a good partner (like a greedy position 4 dual offlaner). In general, playmaker heroes like Centaur Warrunner or Axe tend to create the space that your team needs while being useful sometimes even before getting their first big item, often because they are kind of attention whores that make sure your enemy cannot leave their safelaner alone without sacrificing his early- to midgame.