Dota 2 7.33 patch is live. Is this the biggest update the game has received? Anticipation was mounting before this massive update was released. The rumor mill was working tirelessly and people were already suspecting that 7.33 would be a big deal. And boy, is that an understatement. The gameplay update dubbed "New Frontiers" is described by Valve themselves as "a whole new world to explore". This is an update that promises to change a lot of what the game is, ushering a new meta into its fray. Let's take a look at the highlights.  

THE MAP

  Let's kick off the Dota 2 7.33 patch highlights with the map, which is much bigger. The MOBA layout remains the same,  and the three lanes are not further away from each other, but "with 40% more terrain, there’s plenty of room to reap new resources and discover new strategies. Both main jungles have also been fully reconfigured, shaking up vision placement, juke routes, farming and more."  

Courtesy of @wykrhm on Twitter

Roshan has two new pits at the edges of the map and changes positions according to the day/night cycle. There are two new twin gates that "connect the corners of the map near the safe lane towers, allowing players to teleport instantly from one edge of the map to the other." Two lotus pools sit by the two sidelanes. These spawn fruits that grant mana and HP. There are two new neutral creeps called Tormentors that "spawn near each base after 20 minutes, and both have a bellyful of Aghanim’s Shards. But there’s a catch, and the catch is that there’s two catches: 1) Tormentors are equipped with megashields, which reflect most of the damage you throw at them. 2) They grow stronger every time you kill them."  

Tormentors

There are new sources of vision in the jungle called Watchers. They "begin the game inactive and neutral, but once activated, grant vision over the Watcher’s area for seven minutes—or until your enemies sabotage it to temporarily disable it. When a team kills Roshan, all Watchers will turn to their side." Defender's gates have been added to both bases and work very similarly to the gates present in League of Legends. They're a door if its your base, but they're a wall if the enemy tries to go through them. The update also added two new rune types: Wisdom and Shield runes; 12 new creep camps; new outpost locations.  

GAMEPLAY CHANGES

  Six heroes have received major alterations: Muerta, Clinkz, Arc Warden, Ogre Magi, Medusa and Alchemist. All heroes have been balanced and 31 of them have been put into a new type of attribute: Universal heroes are "a new main stat group composed of existing heroes that now gain 0.6 damage from each stat, of any attribute." Back King Bar, one of the most iconic items in the game has been massively nerfed. Activating it "now applies a basic dispel, and grants 50% Magic resistance and Debuff Immunity. While it’s active, negative effects from debuffs don't affect you. Plus, you’ll have immunity from Pure and Reflected Damage."   Matchmaking in Dota 2 has a new algorithm in 7.33, called Glicko. It's here to make games more balanced, allow players to return to the game after long hiatus without being smashed by their opponents, and more. A description, as per Dota 2's official website:

• All players will be placed back into a short calibration mode, initially seeded by their previous rank.
• Calibration is no longer a fixed number of matches. Instead, a player is considered calibrated whenever their Rank Confidence is above a certain threshold.
• Upon calibration, it is likely that you will end up with a different medal than you had before. However, even if your medal changes significantly, you should expect to be matched with players of a similar skill level.
• Matches will no longer have a fixed MMR gain/loss. It will be variable based on a number of factors, including the Ranks and Rank Confidence of the participants. However, we will cap the gain/loss per match to prevent particularly negative outcomes.
• A player's Rank Confidence will slowly lower over time if the player does not play matches.

At the upper echelons, Immortal matchmaking has been entirely reworked:  

Immortal matchmaking reworked screenshot

"Matches in the Immortal ranks won’t use pre-made teams anymore. Instead, two captains will get to draft the other eight players onto each team, making your team more impactful than if you’d just relied on MMR to assign lineups. So if your match sucks now, you’ve got no one to blame but yourselves, Immortals."  

UI CHANGES

  User interface also received some love, with short but still important updates. Shields, which are now called barriers, will be easier to understand visually.  

New barriers and health bar pips

Specific units, like Sentries, which required a specific number of attacks and not a certain amount of damage to kill, will have segmented health-bars to accurately represent that fact. To finalize, abilities with health costs will show exactly how much health they consume when you used them. The Dota 2 7.33 patch is truly gargantuan, so it isn't feasible to include everything in article form. These are some the most relevant highlights of the seemingly endless list of changes. If you'd like to take a look at the full list, please do so here.

---

Images courtesy of Valve. If you enjoyed this article, take a look at our Dota 2 directory.