2016 has been a great year for all the Dota 2 players with The International coming up and Kiev Major already being announced. People are very excited for the next competitive year of Dota 2. Dota Pit Season 5 and ESL One Genting are two LAN events that will take place in January and witness some of the top teams in the world in the brand new patch while the game enters a new era.
A lot of players have left a mark on the professional scene, and people are sure that there are plenty more from where that came from, in 2017. Let’s take a look at some of the best rising newcomers who have the potential to make some noise this year.
A lot has been discussed the surprise package in Boston Major which took place in December, Ad Finem. The team was highly charismatic and introduced a different kind of Dota 2 to the event, and other teams found it quite difficult to cope with that.
The team eventually fell to Major specialists OG, but that didn’t happen till the Grand Final. It ensured 500,000 dollars from a tournament in spite of many people believing that they wouldn’t make it past the first round. There has been a lot of talks about Giorgos ‘SsaSpartan’ Giannakopoulos along with his support partner Verros ‘Maybe Next Time’ Apostolos for the great performances.
However, everyone knows that the person who will be attracting a lot of interest from the best teams all over the world is Madara. The player is fast approaching 8500 MMR. The number one position player for Ad Finem enchanted us with amazing heroes, varying from Morphling to Timbersaw. It is pretty clear that when Madara is in the carry role, Ad Finem has every chance of establishing that they are a lot more than just one-hit wonders.
Meanwhile, Team Liquid hasn’t confirmed GH as their new support player, but he was there throughout the Season 6 Tournament of Dream League and finally emerged a champion.
The Lebanese player barely managed to scrape the surface of what is professional Dota 2, but you wouldn’t understand that seeing how he was playing.
He gained fame after reaching 9000MMR and at one point in Europe, he was the highest rated player. When grinding MMR, he usually played mid, but while playing support for Team Liquid, he looked pretty great at what he was doing.
A small Dota 2 patch went live on 2nd and 3rd January. It introduced supplementary tweaking several new systems which were added with the patch 7.00 which came out at the end of 2016. It included the usual sweep of various kind of bug fixes and turning off the Fall Battle Pass.
On 2nd January, a Dota 2 update was released, and it came with Weaver’s Swarm, and this provides the vision of Monkey King when in a tree. On top of that, it also fixed control clicking on units so as to perform Select All of a given category. It also fixed a bug which blocks clicks of hero portraits in the chat.
On 2nd January, a Dota 2 update fixed the bug where some hero models don’t animate in the versus screen and a visual bug with Mjolnir’s static charge effects and another extra bug where the usual cosmetic items failed to apply to the heroes. On 3rd January, another update was issued for Dota 2.