Understanding professional scene meta and the reasons behind particular picks is important for every single Dota player. It doesn’t matter whether you are Herald or Immortal — there is a lot to learn from the best players in the world and there is a lot to discuss when it comes to their preferences. Today we are going to look at the ESL One Berlin hero meta.

Each patch has its winners and losers and today we are concentrating on the latter. These are the heroes we recommend avoiding for now, as they suffered the most from the new patch. Don’t forget it is still Dota, though, and there is always a game where a particular hero can shine.

We had several days to get more acquainted with the patch and gather some stats and we are eager to share our findings with you. The shake up was massive and there are a lot of unbalanced heroes, and they are the ones we want to talk about today.

While our engineers are hard at work updating the full functionality of Dotabuff to the new patch, we have some time to awe at the amount of changes. This is, without a doubt, a patch we have all been waiting for and it is going to take a very long time before it starts making sense. So for now, here are our first, potentially very misguided impressions of the patch 7.33.

If the rumors are true, a new patch is supposed to come out very soon. This is supposed to be the big one, so all gloves are off and today we would love to discuss some of our most anticipated potential changes.

There are generally two types of heroes we all dread playing against. There are the ones we hate to play against because they are strong. There are also the ones we hate to play against because they are annoying. When stars align, these two characteristics come together and we get something absolutely abhorrent. Yeah, today is one of those blog posts.

Last time we alluded to one hard support hero who almost made the Top Tier list. Like many of you correctly guessed, we were talking about Disruptor — possibly one of the most fun position five heroes to play in the current patch. Today we would love to give players a quick primer on how to make the most out of this character.

The last role to discuss before we fully go into the patch waiting mode until the end of April. Position five in 7.32e is a very high impact role because the importance of the laning stage felt slightly diminished. As such, most Top Tier support heroes aren’t simply good laners with sustain, but rather strong teamfight characters who offer something at every stage of the game.

Position four or soft support is a very interesting role in the current patch. We’ve touched on the reasons for it in our offlaner discussion: independent offlaners are very popular and effective right now, allowing position four heroes to rotate around the map. This creates a very distinct gameplay loop that doesn’t necessarily conform to the ideas of a laning stage and this is directly reflected in the top tier fours in the current meta.