Dota 2 has had a firecracker few years, consistently remaking the game and shaking things up when players least expect it with map and hero changes coming fast and furious. The developers have, frankly, slipped the leash. Valve's got no control of them anymore. They can't, as evinced by the latest update: 7.38, Wandering Waters.
They just added a bunch of water. For decades there's been a fixed amount of water on that Dota map, one little river in the center and honestly it's just aesthetic gloss for the lowest point on the map. Now the map's river is no longer alone. Two new waterways traverse Dota 2's jungles, each flowing toward a low wetland on the map's north and south.
The new waterways give you a speed boost when running with the current toward the "safe" lanes, changing how fast you can escape the middle or get behind your foes—though they don't slow you down going the opposite way. The wetlands at the bottom are inhabited by new frog-fish bog creatures that go from tadpole to scaly croaker over the course of a match.
- As a lapsed 4,500 hour veteran of Dota 2, the big new Wandering Waters update has lured me back—but despite the changes, the game still feels stuck in its ways
- Deadlock gets a massive map overhaul that shrinks its map from four lanes to three: 'This has a large range of accompanying map-wide changes'
In addition to the watery twists, wisdom runes are now shrines that require you to stand inside the circle for a moment, uncontested, to get that XP boost. The same rule now applies to Lotus Pools, which require you to be taking a dip with no enemies around to pluck the flower. Additionally, big nasty beast Roshan's pits are back in the river—and he'll now patrol between the two manually, smashing aside anybody he meets along the way.
Finally, a new currency called Madstone can now be earned for fully clearing neutral creep camps. Madstone can be used to craft new, personalized neutral items made of separate physical artifact and magical enchantment components.
The announcement was made this week in a characteristically rambling, entertaining Steam announcement.
"Much like the galactic water miners in the movie and possibly the book Dune Part 2, Dota has always been the only game in any genre that believes water is the most valuable resource in both the Dune-iverse and our universe, the universe. It's kind of crazy, then, that it's taken more than a decade for us to finally prove that bold claim by saying it out loud in print," it said.
"And if that was all we did, it would be enough. But we didn't stop there. We've re-made the river that runs through the Dota map. Not only is it wider, its current can speed your movement. Conversely, the new river's new evolving, amphibious creeps can drastically slow your movement by killing you," it continued.
You can read more about the update on dota2.com/wanderingwaters.
