How the Most Hated Dota Hero Won $6 Million

it's 2014. you've got all your daughter playing friends over and you're watching The International four together newbie just beat Evil Geniuses to make it into the grand finals you grab a snack for everybody and you turn up the volume on the TV the All-Star match is about to begin and the banter is always good I missed his ass [Applause] well it does have a beautiful ass [Applause] that's awkward oh no we already have a casualty hi they just said they don't get me so I just sleep a while they kind of need you buddy but if you wanna it's a good spot he's not joking puppy you want to get down there with him take a nappy nap all right [Applause] [Music] I didn't think we'd see spooning all right let's move down the line are cheesy oh I just have one thing to say here this will be explosive you rarely have just one thing to say anything else you'll see just one sec the art of the tease you having fun you ready no Legion Commander because everybody picked I can't see on the outside it's fine sniper khakis [Applause] now that's how you do a hero announcement techies was released into the world of Dota 2 shortly after The International four from the very beginning he stirred controversy half the player base was excited to finally see one of the most unique DOTA characters adapted into the new game the avaha shivered in fear knowing what playing on a map scattered full of Mines felt like techies changed how Doda was played no longer was it 5 vs 5 but 9 versus 1. techies versus fun matakis has always been a terror in matchmaking did that extend to success in the competitive Dota 2 scene today we're going to investigate how techies changed over the years and how those changes affected his performance at the most important dodo events the International Tournament series so how good with screen spleen and Spoon the techies demolition Squad before we get started I would like to clarify some language techies is a group of characters it would be correct to refer to them in the plural despite that I'll be referring to techies in the singular that's for the ease of understanding as otherwise it could be difficult to follow along when talking about teams and the hero at the same time techies was a ranged intelligence hero and was implemented into Dota 2 on the 9th of September 2014 in the dedicated techies update his first ability was landmines when U.S landmines planted an invisible mine on the floor that would explode when an enemy steps on top of it deeding significant damage to them and any enemy units in the area this mine had two separate delays an activation delay and a detonation delay the activation delay described the moment after placing a mine during which it can't be triggered yet the detonation delay only came into play after that it meant that the mines didn't explode immediately when something stepped on top of them but instead after 1.75 seconds the mines only dealt their full damage when an enemy unit was right on top of them while dealing half damage to units further away up to 20 mines could be active at the same time with no time limitation and they could be stacked right on top of each other landmines had a very low cooldown of only 10 seconds at maximum level but they consumed a ton of Mana to be cast the mines had some funky properties the damage was incredibly High starting at 300 and going up to 600 while that may sound overpowered the damage was a unique type that wound up getting completely removed from DOTA composite damage composite damage was a mixture of physical and Magic damage meaning it was reduced by both armor and Magic resistance abilities that did composite damage usually had very high damage numbers to make up for that double reduction the mines could also be used to deal damage to buildings and provide a tiny amount of vision not enough to act as warts but enough to scout out Rune spawns finally landmines could be destroyed by an attack but would explode when they die this left melee Heroes with no good options to deal with them since even if they managed to destroy them they would still get hit by the explosion Stacy strap was take his second ability Stacy strap was another type of mine it is still invisible and still have both an activation and detonation delay however for the stasis trap both of these delays were very long at two full seconds each this meant it was actually possible to move across a stasis drop without triggering it when triggered the stasis strap would stun all enemy units in a 450 radius for up to 6 seconds unlike landmines stasis trap did not have a maximum number that could be placed and instead each trap had a time limit this ability had a fairly low cooldown and used a lot of Mana again both landmines and stasis trap could be used to block neutral camps from spawning there was a lot of strategy involved in finding good spots to block the camps with both of them also had very low cast ranges Suicide Squad attack was techy's third and most bizarre ability tekkies would kill himself to deal a massive amount of AOE damage to all nearby enemies Suicide Squad attack had a fairly small radius in which it did its full damage and a larger radius in which it did significantly less it also dealt composite damage this spell did an absolutely ridiculous 1550 damage at level 4 which made it the largest single instance of damage in the game however it had some downsides the very low cost range of only 100 made it incredibly difficult to hit with it and it had a very long cooldown of three minutes at level 1. most curiously Suicide Squad attack killed you while the ability did reduce your respawn time for their death by 50 you still died this could actually be useful at points though as it gave tekkies the option of denying himself whenever he wanted to when techies killed himself that way he also denied all Gordon experience opponents might have gotten from his death turkey's ultimate was another set of Mines remote mines this ultimate shared a lot of similarities with techie's other abilities they were invisible mines that could be placed on the ground and had an activation delay before they could be triggered the cooldown was low and the damage in Mana cost high they had no limit on how many could be placed and each of them lasted up to 8 minutes however remote Minds worked a tad differently from the other mines in a few ways first they wouldn't trigger automatically and instead had to be used manually for this you had an additional ability that lets you pop multiple mines at once but you could also select each individual mind to explode them one at a time second remote mines had a fairly big explosion radius and cast range this was very beneficial as they were the only ability tekkies could use from a distance third remote mines gave some Vision which offered additional utility as they could act as a sort of poor man's Ward finally remote Minds did Magic damage this made them much more powerful in sheer damage output than any of the other abilities remote mines also had an acronym scepter upgrade that increased their damage and cast range techies was a weird hero but not just because of his abilities his course starts with just as bizarre he had the highest attack range in the game more also having by far the lowest attack damage and he had one of the highest starting armor values while his movement speed was the lowest in the game immediately after adding techies Ralph realized he wasn't quite working the way they wanted him to he was really bad so they changed a bunch of his abilities around nand mines and Suicide Squad attack were changed to deal physical damage instead of composite damage and they also adjusted their damage values to be lower this may sound like a Nerf but it definitely wasn't an ability dealing physical damage was much better than dealing composite damage stasis trap also had its trigger radius increase significantly which made it easier to hit since players couldn't just walk straight through it anymore to make up for this ease of use its Thunder ration was nerfed to 4 seconds Max finally remote mines had their Vision radius reduced making them worse at being Wards but their duration was increased to 10 minutes despite those changes techies was still pretty bad a problem the hero had was that when he got a kill with his minds and he wasn't an experience range he wouldn't get experience this was actually unusual as normally the killer always got experienced no matter where they were on the map techies was accepted due to a quirk of mechanics the mines were considered to be their own units and so they would get the experience for kills not the hero this changed in 6.84 and now techies will get experience for kills he got with his Minds even if he was Far Away landmines and stasis trap also had the activation delay reduced and stasis trap had its detonation delay reduced this made it much easier to use both abilities during fights this change was incredibly important as landmines now had less than a third of their previous activation delay something that became possible as a result was techies using landmines offensively and in the middle of fights on top of that Suicide Squad attack had its cooldown significantly reduced and could now hit ancient creeps and warshan wherever techies goes controversy follows along with the hero wealth released an Arcana Cosmetic Skin for him this Arcana gave the additional ability to place a purely cosmetic Minefield sign to be clear the Minefield sign didn't have any actual effects it was just a cute little thing you could put down while playing despite that the community was outraged claiming that even having the Minefield sign at all was some sort of competitive Advantage which made the Arcana pay to win it seems that Ivo valve agreed or they didn't want to deal with the backlash so they decided to incorporate the ability into techies as a whole now even players without the Arcana could use it since at this point it became a proper hero ability they also gave it some added functionality the Minefield sign didn't do anything by itself but it could be upgraded with Arginine scepter at which point it turned all of tekki's Minds in a 175 radius around itself immune to any sort of detection mines protected by a Minefield sign couldn't be seen no matter what which made it an excellent tool for protecting your minds there were also always the Mind Games of it as the pawns had no way of knowing whether or not a Minefield sign was dangerous until they died to it although generally it would be safe to assume that it is dangerous as it had a very long cooldown the early years of Dota 2 were quite different from the way things are today back then not every character was considered a competitively viable option I understand this sounds like I'm saying that some characters were bad and while that is what I'm saying there was a bit of a different scale of Badness today we generally consider every hero to have some kind of Merit and if they don't get drafted often then that's because their numbers are subpar or they don't fit into the metagame back then the game was split into two different tiers of Heroes competitively viable Heroes and not competitively viable Heroes this port of not competitively viable Heroes consisted of characters that you wouldn't ever want to pick in a tournament because the abilities were bad on a fundamental conceptual level these are the heroes that would eventually end up getting reworks matakis had only recently been added to Dota 2 back in Warcraft 3 Delta he had always been one of the unfortunately unviable Heroes because of this players assume tekkies would see no play in a competitive Dota 2 scene however techies received a significant number of Buffs right after being added to Dota 2 and a few teams realized just how insane his numbers were landmines did 300 physical damage at level 1 and Suicide Squad attack did 500 physical damage at level 1. physical damage spells are generally worse than magic damage ones that's because Heroes naturally build up armor and quickly surpass magic resistances damage reduction however this also means that during the very early stages of a game physical damage spells can often be more powerful than magic damage equivalence at level 2 tekkies was nuking for 800 total physical damage if attackies had the second level of his ultimate and an agonym scepter remote mines became an 800 cast range 425 radius 600 damage nuke on an 8 second cooldown and that's assuming techies didn't Place multiple mines down at which point you might be taking significantly more damage of course this damage came with the limitation of needing enemies to get close enough to the mines but these numbers were worth the effort at the international five techies surprised viewers casters and players alike many proved himself to not only be competitively viable but one of the most dangerous heroes in the entire game before we can discuss techies we have to talk about his partner in crime tusk tusk was an excellent Hero at the time and we'll talk about that in more detail in the task video for now we're going to focus on how he related to techies task had two abilities that allowed for incredible interhero synergies ice shards could be cast from a long range a damaged and trapped enemies inside of a wall that they could only leave in One Direction snowball turned Tusk into a snowball which would then chase down his Target once it connected it would deal damage and a stun importantly while inside a snowball Tusk could pull his allies inside of it as well which would allow him to reposition his teammates here's the combo Tuscan techies traveled the map as a pair when they find an enemy Tusk traps them in the ice shards and use a snowball to get techies on top of them at this point the enemies are stunned and can only live in One Direction the now reposition techies then places a landmine right on top of them which is now guaranteed to explode for full damage and if that isn't enough by itself he'll use Suicide Squad attack to secure the kill this made Tuscan turkey's incredibly dangerous as soon as the game started and gave them a guaranteed kill at level 2. additionally tusk was a Great Hero by himself this meant that teams could pick Tusk early in the drafting stage and then decide if they wanted to play techies based on how the rest of the draft went as a result the combo came at no opportunity cost if the game was a good techies game a game where you're going up against a lot of Heroes that have a short attack range that want to establish early control around the map and had struggle against High burst damage in a game like that you pick tekkies otherwise you will just have a task on your team who was very good by himself and could slot into many lineups this gave teams a lot of flexibility during drafting finally tusks didn't need much money but he could use it as we're going to see soon techies could make a dollar game a bit unpredictable thus didn't mind that as he was a hero that could adjust to the pace of the game on the fly during the international five tekkies was picked eight times total out of those eight picks the first five were all Takis and tasks TNT if you will as an example of how this strategy worked out in practice we're going to have a look at game 2 of the group stages match between IG and complexity complexity first pick Tusk and last pick techies after seeing three major Heroes on the enemy Team all of which struggled against the hero undying could have his Tombstone blown up blood Seeker had no way of interacting with the minds and the only way to kill a brewmaster through his ultimate was high physical damage that's the drafting flexibility of the TNT combo in action you can wait until the last moment to see if techies is good techis opens the game by teleporting into the Top Lane and throwing down multiple landmines setting up a trap unfortunately bloodseka arised just a few seconds too early triggering one too few minds and surviving with 10 Health this kind of early game trap was very common then laning begins and Tusk Kentucky's player dual offlane which was a bit unusual at that time the most common approach was trilaning but with her support that was a bit more open in their movement and focused on stacking the jungle however techies forced his team into playing dual Lanes his damage was too low to control a lane on his own especially in a meta during which Poor Man's Shield existed PMS was a 500 gold item that gave melee Heroes a 100 chance to block 20 damage which was a lot for any hero to deal with but for techies that was all of his attack damage his abilities were also too difficult to hit without assistance especially when playing against Heroes that are fast like a blood Seeker or queen of pain at least for the early stages Tusk had to be in the lane with him otherwise he wouldn't be able to apply any pressure this was not ideal restricting one of your support's movements was actually a fairly big deal at the time the question then remains was techy's worth that sacrifice as soon as TNT hit Level 2 they go for common blood seeker and easily secure the kill even underneath the tower this makes the Radeon rotate the alliance and blood Seeker moves to the top while queen of pain comes bottom rotations like this always come with a bit of shakiness in the team's Landing structure and complexity exploits this immediately with a quick combo kill on crystal Maiden Tusk then starts roaming on his own 4-bit while techie stays in the bottom Lane doing his best farming impression Tusk moving top puts enough pressure on the blood Seeker that he gives up on that lane as well and he starts jungling instead this in turn frees up the dire supports even more at 8 minutes TNT kill queen of pain bottom and then take an early Tower in the meantime Rafe King has been enjoying free farm and has also taken the top tier one the radiant simply couldn't find a good laning setup and now the game is already slipping out of their control they decide they need to be more careful and start spending most of their time grouped up in the meantime techies are sitting in the bottom Lane pushing and farming one of the most frustrating elements of going up against techies was that he was impossible to kill I know that sounds a bit weird since the hero spends a lot of time dead but we need to make a distinction between getting killed and being denied when techies used Suicide Squad attack he couldn't be killed as he was killing himself attackies that denied himself this way would also have his respawn time cut in half and he gave out no gold or experience Bounty none not even his kill streak would end this made techies a very effective split Pusher since he didn't need to worry about retreating instead of trying to escape a gank tekkies were just kill himself and completely deny the encounter that's exactly what we see in this game whenever sea frigg runs into danger of dying he uses Suicide Squad attack to deny the kill his skill and item build is centered entirely around the split pushing idea maxing out landmines and Suicide Squad attack before even getting a single point into stasis trap while building Mana pool increasing items and soul ring straight into an agonal SEPTA the idea here is that it doesn't matter if soldering drains your health pool as you'll end up denying yourself sooner rather than later anyways and that effectively heals you back to four IG is now fully trapped in techy's hell Brew Masters out of position for just a few seconds and immediately dies to the TNT combo techies then pushes top on his own and when the radiant comes to gank him he infuriatingly denies himself instead of changing strategy techies continues pushing top and just denies himself again when the radiant is forced to defend he needs to be dealt with else he Farms too much and does too much Tower damage but IG doesn't get any reward for doing so worse than that they are wasting their time and resources fighting a hero that doesn't care about dying this style continues he moves Lanes pushes gets caught denies himself in between he plays his Minds in various spots around the map when the day goes for Roshan the pit is already reinforced by mines making it impossible to contest Takis isn't even there he doesn't have to be the dyer uses the Roshan momentum to push and the radian comes to defend as soon as the fight starts tekis runs right into the middle of it soaks a ton of abilities and then denies himself again while the dire Retreats while complexity technically lost two heroes in the fight techies has already respawned and now Radiance ultimates are on cooldown complexity continues pushing and IG have to give up the tower techies continues haunting the radiant as he gets a double kill while sitting in his base just using the minds he has scattered around the map he is now on a god-like streak nying kills in a Rome IG manages to repel complexity for a while then complexity forces a fight through the Top Lane which they win decisively techies was low on Mana going into it and only managed to throw free of his ultimate Minds into the fight but he still did a huge amount of damage because he now has his agonym scepter the diadent takes the top barracks and moves for Roshan again tekis doesn't join instead going back to the base to heal this is fine because he already has mines down so he assists despite not being there complexity then mounts a bottom push Takis has full Mana this time and has reached level 16 giving him his level 3 Ultimate he throws down a Minefield sign before the push begins and starts placing remote Minds on it this creates a zone that the radiant can't enter as each remote mind does 750 damage let's do some counting how many remote mines did techies plays and how much potential damage is that one two three four five five remote mines totaling 3750 potential AOE damage that IG can't interact with because they can't detect the mines the entire team is here in position on full health and mana and with all of their ultimates ready to go despite that the bottom Barracks Force to the dire without the fight because they are too afraid to initiate and cross into that mine territory while sieging techies occasionally moves into the primary pushing area and assists by placing landmines for building damage he doesn't have to worry about dying because even if he be able to get caught he can still activate the remote mines while dead complexity Retreats after taking the bottom barracks and moves into the mid setting up for another push Minefield sign has an extremely long cooldown because of that techies can't use it in this final push instead of mining in the radiant space techies creates a safe zone for his team outside of ig's Base remote mines are placed behind the dire Frontline giving them a guaranteed space to retreat to again the Radion is forced to engage in a heavily space restricted fight and after they fail to do so they concede what we saw in this game was the main strategy for techies across the tournament start by applying heavy pressure on the laning stage using Tusk as your enabler then transition into a farming split Pusher that is impossible to interact with and finally secure your team's push with remote Minds this last aspect was incredibly important and is what I would describe as the hero's main contribution to any game take his early and mid-game presence was still significant but it was all building towards their pushing power towards getting enough money for the agonym scepter have a look at how team secret was using techies to push in their game against Cloud9 Chen and gyrocopt are sieging the tower but techies is setting up remote mines outside of the base while pushing like this Secret Gets a little greedy and dies a bit too deep so they're forced to retreat Cloud9 Strand and Darkseid Chase but they realize they can't go too far because of the techies mines secret wins the following fight and continues their push after the top Barracks Force Cloud9 is desperate to take another fight but as secret Retreats they can't chase them techies made your Porsche safe in a way that no other hero could it's now time for what a lot of you have probably been waiting for let's talk about Evil Geniuses in Sea deck gaming EG was one of the teams that favored techies however they were the only team that would pick him without an early game enabler instead of using techies to actively apply pressure on the enemy team they relied on him as a song controlling support for the early game if they were given an opportunity to use Suicide Squad attack for a kill they would take it but it wasn't the primary game plan like it was for the other teams aui 2000 EG's position 4 was the perfect player for post-laning techies he played an incredibly greedy style of support which was almost more akin to having a fourth core this made him uniquely suited to playing tekkies as he always managed to somehow find enough money for agnem scepter at which point the hero enabled this team to close out the match aui 2000 was also excellent at using the landmines to create space for his team something that most other techies players put less emphasis on Cedar gaming was the Wild Card surprise team of ti5 they were one of those teams that put a lot of emphasis on a single player in this case that was accuracyve their position won Kerry aggressive surprisingly was an incredibly aggressive carry player as an example of this his Phantom Lancer item build consisted of multiple early start items into boots of travel this allowed him to be active around the map immediately and where other carry players would be farming aggressive was leading the charge unfortunately for him that was a difficult playstyle to make work against aui 2000 on techies who put a lot of emphasis on controlling space this showed in their group stages match raichi beat sidak to Zero by picking techies twice and limiting cedex movement they couldn't play in their natural style and so EG eventually overwhelmed them the two teams met again in the upper bracket finals but this time c-deck had learned their lesson they first faced banned techies for both games seadag won game Bond but it was still difficult largely because of aui 2000's Naga siren which was another hero that could be used to control space and discourage aggression so for game 2 C deck band Naga siren and techies in the first Banning phase and one convincingly in only 20 minutes they finally figured out how to deal with eg this is where we need to talk about the Shrek during the international Main Event Le shark had a 100 contest rate the hero was widely considered to be blatantly overpowered if a team had the opportunity to pick the shock they would always take it consequently the hero was banned most of the time usually by the team that had second pick since if they didn't ban him the opponents would pick him before they got an opportunity to do so themselves it's also worth mentioning that sumail EG's mid player was incredible so Maya could seemingly win games on his own the Shrek being primarily a mid Hero at the time meant that if sumail got his hands on him the game was practically over weirdly sea deck wasn't even remotely in the same situation so someone just tweeted I mean instead that Shiki has 16 pop games with less track over four years okay do not like he does not play less truck with yeah but CDX mid player had no le shark practice and see deck hadn't picked the hero a single time for the entire tournament this is all compounded into a bizarre Perfect Storm when seadag and EG met for the third time in the grand finals of the international five Ichi realized that cedar didn't know how to use the shark properly and so they changed one important aspect of their game plan they stopped Banning the shock even when going second in the draft as I already mentioned cdeck had two mandatory bands against EG Naga siren and techies however they also couldn't let them have le shock and they were only two first phase bands this resulted in them first picking the hero in the first three matches of the grand finals they basically had to surrender their first pick and used it as another ban a ban that would also force them to play a hero they didn't want on their team maltekis didn't get picked during the grand finals EG won the international five because the hero had such a presence that cedar couldn't allow him to be picked pressuring them into a situation where they had no way to win the drafting stage turkey's performance at the international five was spectacular the teams that used them did so with great success as the hero won seven out of the eight games that he played on top of that techies was bound 13 times including all of the upper bracket final and Grand Final games tekkies filled a unique and Powerful role I'm certain that if more teams had given the hero a chance he would only have seen even more success his low pick rate didn't stem from a lack of power but instead from a lack of teams that took the hero seriously before the tournament turkey's undeniably played a major role in Evil Geniuses victory at the international five and he can hold that crown with pride you can't just get by I was just saying we just decided to pick some turkeys no big deal you hate techies I do hate techies like before this tournament I asked some Dota 2 people to remove the hero or Nerf him with the petition and also like behind the scenes and like I tried to get the hero of Nerf because I thought he was going to like ruin TI when that heroes in the game uh only he's having fun that's how I feel about it and did you have fun playing of course he's super fun okay so you want to ban him for everybody else but you were happy to use him in game two I mean I'd be done if you just removed from the game but like if he's in the game we're gonna use it right yeah thank you very much for watching the video so far I hope you've enjoyed it if you have please don't forget to give it a thumbs up that would be absolutely fantastic and subscribe to our Channel there are more videos coming like for example the Juggernaut video in two weeks from now also you can become a channel member that is the best way to support us directly by becoming a channel member you will not only gain access to a bunch of bonus material like for example the full versions of the interviews that we conducted but also you gain access to the next two videos in the series which are currently Juggernaut as already mentioned and then a really really big and exciting one IO I really I'm really looking forward to the i o video becoming a channel member is really the best way to support us directly anyway let's get back to techies in patch 6.85 techies received a set of devastating changes to land mines they damage Mana cost and cooldown was all cut in half this kept their minds Effectiveness the same and placed in Stacks but completely ruined them as individuals spellcast the techies and Tusk combo result ti-5 disappeared immediately as techies no longer did enough damage to justify it additionally all of tekki's Minds no longer exploded when destroyed while he used to be able to shut out melee heroes from interacting with certain spots on the map this was no longer possible especially because quellingblade could now be used to destroy mines and most melee Heroes carried quelling blades finally landmines and stasis traps no longer blocked neutral creep camps 6.85 ruined techies that may sound harsh but ultimately that was the truth of it the hero completely vanished from any competitive play but he still had access to some of the strategies that made him good before he could still deny kills and he could still protect his team while sieging unfortunately none of that was enough to make up for his complete lack of early game the new landmines were better getting stacks of them down but in competitive play you wouldn't really want to be doing that in the first place aui 2000's powerful early game zoning at ti5 relied heavily on a single mind being a threat that half the cast couldn't deal with even if they saw it techie's pushing potential was also heavily reduced here's what aui 2000 had to say on the matter we got techies what do we got here your favorite here on the game yeah this is probably the biggest Nordstrom out of all of these so they're no longer triggered when destroyed so you can literally stand within not range of obviously land mines but to a point where you can just kill them and it will not blow up the 50 reduction is sort of big because you can't push towers as well because like if you only have to go up to a tower a place of mine every once every 10 seconds you're a lot safer you do a lot like whatever you're more clear right also like it's easier to do a sewing because you plant one mind and you're good now you have to like make sure you get two because one mine's not enough or so but it makes them better for ta and tia was the biggest egg so that's sort of interesting yeah unfortunately techies was not set up for Success at the international six he was picked in exactly one game by Bing's gaming versus digital chaos in the upper bracket round one game two during game one Wings decidedly beat DC using an aggressive drow Ranger lineup they felt Untouchable and so for game two Winx decided to have some fun they picked techies and Patch both of which were considered completely unplayable you might think they had some sort of secret strategy planned like using purchase me talk to pull enemies into the landmines but no Mings had seemingly no idea what to do with both Heroes and the game was an absolute disaster the most interesting strategy we saw in the game was techie setting up a bunch of landmines in a large neutral Camp before any of the Creeps spawned in when they did tekkies instantly killed the camp and effectively started the game at level 2. from here techies was used as a core But Wings didn't have anyone to enable him he kept being chased out of lanes and had nowhere to form after laning techie strike the split pushing strategy again but his pushing power was nowhere near the same level it was a year ago and so DC simply ignored him the only noteworthy play take his managed to pull the entire game was when patch hook Timber saw into a set of Mines killing him unfortunately Timber saw had a high stack Bloodstone which reduced respawn times and it was back in the fight immediately Wings lost this game without being able to put up much of a fight they were effectively playing 3 vs 5 as naivetechies nor Pudge were able to contribute in any significant way after this game Wing started playing seriously again and destroyed DC in game 3 and then proceeded to win the entire tournament clearly the current iteration of techies wasn't working nav decided that it was time for a larger rework in 7.0 techies had three of his abilities changed significantly landmines were removed and replaced with proximity mounts proximity mines were still self-triggering Minds so the core idea of stepping into an area and then a mine explodes and you take damage remained however the specifics were quite different proximity Minds dealt significantly more damage up to 750 magic damage the amount of costs and cooldowns were also increased again while this much damage output may sound amazing it came with some caveats proximity mines could not be placed within the radius of another proximity mine this meant that the era of clusters of landmines was over and it limited how much damage could be dealt at once these mines were not able to one shot enemies as even in the early game all heroes would be able to tank 750 damage although just barely don't get too excited about pushing either as proximity mines only did 25 damage to buildings proximity mines also had a much longer activation and detonation delay combined it took over three seconds to go from placing a mine to having it explode finally proximity mites couldn't be detected by true sight but would always be visible if a hero was in their trigger radius any hero could easily deal with a proximity mine if they ran into it as it became visible for 1.6 seconds of detonation delay before activating and required only one attack to be killed 7.05 also added a loud noise that would be played after Heroes stepped into a proximity mine making it even easier to react the really weird thing about this was how much they were worth when you destroyed them initially they had a bounty of 30 gold which was then raised to 50 in 7.02 this was a lot of money it meant that using the mind's carelessly would not only be useless but actively helping the enemy team avoid proximity Minds were much more powerful in the damage output than previous iterations had been but they were also much easier to deal with this wasn't part because stasis trap was also reworked instead of stunning they would now root their targets stasis traps no longer had a detonation delay and were triggered instantly if an enemy entered their radius their trigger radius was also reduced to small amount but the effect radius was increased significantly this allowed stasis trap to hit multiple units in a fairly big range the combo here was clear High proximity mines where opponents can't see them then use staser straps to keep them in the range of proximity mines for long enough for the mines to explode then use either remote mines or techies final new ability to finish off the opponent Suicide Squad attack was completely removed from the game and replaced with blastoff blastoff was a long-range ability that allowed tekkies to literally throw himself at the opponents when he landed he dealt significant damage in an AOE and applied the silence while also dealing 50 of his own maximum health in damage to himself this ability had a fairly short cooldown and could be used to deny himself remote mines were also slightly adjusted gaining a detonation delay and reduced cast time in 7.06 techies also received a plus 250 attack damage town at level 25. this was never competitively relevant but it was very funny this new skill set further pushed tekkies into a defensive and controlling play Star proximity mines were completely impossible to use aggressively the delays were way too long and in all likelihood you just gave the opponent 50 gold every time you attempted it proximity Minds also couldn't be used effectively during laning as they required setup Mana levels and stasis trap his best Duty game tool was blast off which dealt a lot of damage at level 1 and was fairly easy to use the strategy was straightforward trade hits with the Enemy support until you're low Health then use blastoff to deal a huge burst of damage and deny yourself while this strategy was reasonably good at applying pressure it still meant that techies wasn't really laning as he spent a lot of time dead keep in mind what made Tech is powerful rti5 it was his argument scepter that allowed him to 3D push lanes and support his team in sieging turns out it's very hard to form an agonium scepter and get level 2 ultimate if you spend your entire early game killing yourself this may sound very similar to what we have seen before but it's ultimately a difference of scale Suicide Squad attack pretty much guaranteed a kill when it was used which was once every 2 minutes or so Blast Off on the other hand had no such guarantee and only a 35 second cooldown tekkies would come into a lane and die over and over and over again leaving him completely starved for gold and experience sometimes when DOTA Heroes received large-scale reworks they also got removed from Captain's mode for a buyer Captain's mode is the game mode used for tournaments and so removing the hero from Captain's mod effectively prohibited them from participating in competitive DotA 2. usually wealth made an effort to bring those Heroes back by the time the international came around but this wasn't the case here with his new reworks Takis was also removed from Captain's mode and wasn't added back in in time for the international 7. as a result the hero couldn't be played although realistically speaking he probably wouldn't have seen much action anyway after ti7 techies received a variety of smaller Buffs his health and Mana regeneration were increased proximity mines had their damage buffed and Bounty reduced and his talents were made stronger the most significant change during this period came because tight Hunter outrageously also received a plus 250 damage Talent at level 25. to assure that techies continued his dominance as the highest attack damage Talent Harbor his level 25 Talent was buffed to give plus 251 damage turns out this was actually what he had needed all along sometimes it's the last straw that spills a metagame's bucket tekki switched over to a Hand of Midas farming base carry build that I aimed to rush level 25 as quickly as possible and then took over the game through sheer right-click power even the strongest scary struggled to compete with a free Divine Rapier backed up by defensive Minds protecting the longest attack range in the game all he needed was some attack speed and he could break down buildings like it was nobody's business with hurricane Pike and two to three Moon shards techies became an unbeatable killing machine players in all skill brackets from the lowest MMR trenches to the highest professional echelons were calling for nurse but their God had forsaken them the Frog abandoned his most faithful Believers in his final creation continued its path of Destruction all the way to the international being the first hero with a 1 100 ban rate nothing could stop techies nothing could stand in his way and all anyone could do is grovel At His Feet begging for mercy and a swift death nah I'm lying these changes were nowhere near enough to push the euro into competitive viability as they didn't address any of the problems he had Takis went unpicked again at the international eight however he was banned once but the sincerity of the span is questionable look at that mean bat is that a meme because they need admit they're not playing techie Smith you never know man they're they're just that's VP you know that that clip of them laughing um well I think it was epicenter one of the tournaments where it's just like they bang on the desk They're laughing they're doing that right now they're just like these guys these guys are picking the same four Heroes against each other look at that icon he's looking right at us you know he's just smiling we haven't talked much about items so far that's because techy's item build has remained the same ever since he was first added Mana into aguino septum the only reason why I'm bringing items up at all is so that you don't think I forgot about them it's just that none of the new implementations were relevant to the hero going into ti9 techies received some minor number changes again the most important was in Mana cost and cooldown reduction for remote mines more importantly at this point DOTA 2's overall game structure had changed and put more emphasis on course leading to dual lines as techies already function best in dual line setups he appreciated this change techies was picked twice at the international nine the first pick came from Team Secret in their second game against chaos Esports club during the group stages this game didn't matter that may sound like I'm being judgmental but it objectively didn't matter both teams had already secured their placements for the main event team secret was guaranteed second in their group and kocc was knocked out as a result it was a bit of a weird game that felt like neighbor team was trying particularly hard techies performed very poorly in this match but so did the rest of secret they just didn't play well ultimately there isn't much to talk about here instead I want to focus on the other techies gamer tr9 played by Og versus Richie gaming in their first game during the group stages ultimately the outcome here was also irrelevant as OGE was already guaranteed first in their group and VG guaranteed second however it was a tremendously entertaining game and I will be doing you a disservice if we didn't dive into it at the time OG could do no wrong they won the previous International and we are playing incredibly well at this one already having secured first in their group their style was very strange it felt like an uncoordinated mess of players simply running at their opponents and then outplaying them in thousands of tiny micro interactions it was individualistic they aimed to make all their players shine if anyone could make techies work it was going to be OG tekki starts the game by buying a lot of Health regeneration blastoff deals a huge 300 damage at level 1 with a relatively low Mana cost and cooldown Xerox immediately starts spamming the ability whenever he gets an opportunity while using consumables to keep his health high enough to stay in Lane when he eventually reaches a point of Health where regeneration would take too long he resets his Resources by killing himself OG plays the bottom Lane very aggressively Slaughter and takis are always looking for a fight their main goal is to shut down The Alchemist as much as possible this works so fine Alchemist struggles for a short while but then manages to stabilize quickly while techies was able to apply a lot of pressure during the very early moments as the Heroes level up 300 damage stops being impressive particularly after Alchemist gets his ultimate jarax becomes unable to significantly hinder him part of this stems from techie's skill build instead of leveling up blast off he has to get points into proximity mines and stasis trap to enable his primary combo blastoff doesn't even scale that nicely and he is a support so all of his skill points are precious de will be staying at level 1 proximity minds are the priority this is where the game starts being fun as Landing concludes jarax moves into the jungle take favorable fights what's the next move then they have to play techie's Donuts his mind is like things up and play from there like kind of play around the mines he's what's going on oh the ring around the rosie of death jerix he's gonna try and go for the suicide but fortunately d y in the meantime Alchemist finishes up a Radiance and Mirana keeps finding good kills around the map Richie gaming is looking strong and OG realizes they have to slow down The Alchemist techie sets up a trap in the Top Lane and OG moves to chase Alchemist into the mines doing a public service I don't think they should remove I don't think so either I think he's a funny hero look at this he's really funny hero you know dude look at this they're gonna sandwich Vichy gaming right now they're actually gonna chase him into the mines that jerks is laid out by the tower if they try and go back to the tower they're dead paparazzi's just running straight left but instead he runs into a stasis strap he does manage to bring himself away he thinks the euphonic shield a fast blink out and now an arrow nail said Paparazzi says it's time to come back the reinforcements are here the call has been made beachy gaming could have just kite out Annie he'll slowly take away just making it to the mine seriously please no Derek save us anything but Fiji gaming [Applause] oh gee they got wipes but at least they brought beachy King down what a pain you saw no tell he had right on top of them yeah gerox is now the highest level in the game but can't leverage his newly acquired Agnew scepter to push and the game slows down to a crawl despite the dice best efforts the rating continues to get further and further ahead techies is doing his best to buy his team space placing remote mines in various spots around the map interestingly he puts a lot of effort into controlling Lanes with the mines always pushing the creep base back before they get near any Towers unfortunately that's not how you win the game that's how you delay losing additional farming time is not in OG's favor Alchemist continues getting richer and richer and richer soon he has twice the net worth of the top Dyer farmer Richie gaming decides to force the issue Anna take a lot of damage no tail doesn't have a forcep or anything I feel like this is kind of obvious as they do have the detection down Thomas is going to jump right in though he does have the wukongs man gets it out before the table concoction but Paparazzi he does so much damage he's gonna be pulled back into the Wukong Commando and Thompson getting all that life seal is actually healing up same as they're both dead they survived through all of those middle near shots until Yang and fade recommend with the freezing field it's good one they do have the silence going out as well as the crush Seb healing up inside of his River got him he finally pulled him into the mines he knew it was there another one they're gonna jump on top of Yang who has to grow he just gets one shot that's a team wipe for OG this fight may seem like a big deal because OG just team wiped their opponents you have to keep in mind though that a lot of that money landed on attackies Luigi spends another 5 minutes farming up and then finishes the game jirax really put up a fight but ultimately wasn't able to transform that into an active presence techies wasn't like most Heroes he couldn't just throw out a magic Missile on an ultimate during a team fight and be happy about his contribution techies required time time that became more and more scarce and started developed to be more about team fighting zinder and summed it up pretty nicely here what's happening right now to me is the perfect Showcase of techies biggest weakness is if you're not set up the hero sucks after the international 9 techies received some nice Buffs right away proximity mines now had free charges instead of a simple cooldown this allowed for much greater efficiency than placing them his argument scepter was also reworked to increase the cost range of all his Minds instead of just his ultimates then a series of minor changes followed until 7.28 when tekkies got an agonym's Shard that increased blasto's cast range and made it stun in addition to its other effects this was a very powerful effect and was made even stronger when they increased the stun AOE shortly after much more importantly his level 25 tone was buffed from plus 251 damage to plus 252. this time it truly made techies a powerful attacker so much so that they even had to Nerf his base attack speed from 100 to 90. I'm obviously lying again except they did actually Nerf his attack speed and I have no idea why I'm guessing for flavor reasons but there was no sensible balance justification a few patches ago techies received a level 25 Talon that gave his Minds a tiny amount of movement speed unfortunately at the time the movement speed bonus was too small to do anything with which is why I hadn't brought it up 7.25 tripled that movement speed bonus to 75 and now techies could actually reasonably move his Minds across the map this was very silly and led to many many ancients being blown up out of nowhere and many teams traumatized by a horde of Mines slowly approaching them was this used in competitive play no absolutely not but it was still hilarious right before ti-10 valve increased the tower damage of proximity mines and then unleash techies onto the tournament for the third time techies went unpicked unbanned as well this iteration of techies wasn't working the main problem was really conceptual what exactly was his purpose ti-5 techies was good at applying pressure early split pushing making enemies terrified to move around the map because they might die instantly to a stack of landmines and reinforcing his team while they are sieging but the changes we have implemented over the years took away nearly all of that he could still apply some pressure early but nowhere near as much and any traditional support would do more damage in the long run simply because they actually have attack damage that they can use to harass a number of his strong suits split pushing was gun blastoff wasn't a reliable way to deny yourself limiting enemy movement was still possible but nowhere near as much landmines could kill at any point in the game out of nowhere which was terrifying on the other hand proximity mines would at most deal a lot of damage but couldn't kill if somebody bought a hood of defiance to get magic resistance and health regeneration they wouldn't have to worry about them at all the only thing techies had left was reinforcing his team while sieging sadly DOTA as a whole had moved away from that the game used to have a lot of fights around objectives now you had fights and took objectives afterwards your team didn't need reinforcement during a push because you already killed the opponents but you did need help getting those kills in the first place and that's something techies just couldn't do reliably it was time for another rework techies had his stats normalized meaning he actually had some attack damage now proximity Minds replaced remote Minds as his new Ultimate they had their numbers adjusted and now reduced affected enemies magic resistance the new proximity mines also regained the old property of landmines where they dealt less damage if you were too far away remote mines were completely removed techie's New Q ability was sticky bomb sticky bomb let tekkies throw a projectile to a Target location if it landed near an enemy hero it would stick to and slow them after a few seconds the sticky bomb would explode dealing damage in an AOE and applying a short slow this ability had a fairly low cooldown and reasonable Mana cost it was a spammable easy to use spell stasis trap was also completely removed in its place techies gained reactive taser reactive taser was a self buff that increased techie's movement speed for a short while if techis was attacked during this period he would apply a disarm to his attacker at the end of the buff duration reactive taser would explode applying the disarm to any enemy in an AOE his agonym scepter was reworked to allow him to cast reactive taser on allies and made it deal some damage with the explosion this rework of the agendum SEPTA also removed Minefield sign from the game however Minefield sign may never be touched without outrage and the community complained loudly and aggressively about its removal balf immediately caved and added it back into the game as a purely cosmetic ability finally blastoff could no longer be used to deny yourself and had its numbers adjusted as with any rework the following patches included a lot of minor adjustments in summary blastoff had its self damage reduced significantly it used to deal 50 of techy's maximum health at all levels but now it went down all the way to 20 of his current health the ability also had its damage scaled down meaning it was much more important to level up now reactive taser was changed to include an offensive dispel on targets that attack into it its argument scepter was also buffed to deal its damage to enemies that attack into it as well finally Minefield sign was made a real ability again it's cooled down on duration where significantly reduced and it gained a lengthy cast point the effect remained essentially the same giving invulnerability to proximity mines placed underneath it these changes didn't come without controversy while many players were delighted I'd no longer having to deal with techies mining the entire map others argued that they turned an interesting and unique hero into something generic I sat down with regular TI talent and techies Aficionado sir action slacks and had a chat with him about the changes techies received over the years hi everybody I am sir action slacks uh techies is my hero 1597 official games on the hero uh with a almost 60 win rate uh this hero represents me this is the hero that made me fall in love with DOTA to me the quintessential representation of DOTA and DOTA players are sickles they're masochists they could play any game they want and they choose to play the most brutal nightmarish game available and techies is very much that a hero that is designed only with the passion to win winning means everything if it takes four hours to win that game you are going to win and that's though the players in a nutshell baby or at least it used to be Pro players don't know how to play techies all right alley 2000 hated techies now let me actually get this on the record here because he has told me many times that uh Audi 2000 does know the strength of techies but he legitimately hated them and this is not a joke but owie hated techies a lot he had always hated techies because he thought that it was a different kind of playstyle that did not belong in Dota and I can attest that this is true because I literally argued with him before ti5 there are interviews out there where Ali does say that he watched my techies content to figure out how to play techies along with uh uh ppd's brother uh robovise and he understood the power of the burst damage but what he hated was techy's meta gameplay he despised the uh having to sit back and lure people in the traps he only saw them for their worst quality which was burst Damage Big magical burst damage however he also did pay huge attention to their abilities to manipulate the lane uh one of the best things about techies is being able to put red mines in the lane and counter any kind of split pushing or any kind of like pushing at all even if you lose a team fight those were the good things to do back in the day sneak in mine up the lane all the way and no creeps can push no back door protection Ali took such advantage of massive burst damage in that Ti from the explosions and all he would do was put some mines in the lanes to prevent pushing but uh he despised the hero in general he's everything about the hero but besides magical burst you know inefficient stupid and just only for sickles here he'd understand and yet he was our earlier and that's such a dark thing for techies players all around we looked up to him we said techies can be good look at this man however our leader he was The Manchurian techie The Manchurian Candidate he went in there and he ruined it in a way that he said that he wanted to he said he wanted to play Tech he's a TI so that it got deleted from the game absolutely detestable human being uh very good friend detestable human being uh horrible man yeah the reason why he wasn't good in pro games is because Pro Gamers have zero imagination when it comes to macro that's what they're coaches for that's what their manager is for me going here to last hit and that's why they hated him so it's because they didn't want to think about what their enemies wanted to do they just wanted to think about the numbers the Money Ball barring okay he's a pub hero because the real sick freaks that's what we like we play the RTS we want to think about breaking the enemy more than you know our tiny little numbers that is my theory I've seen fear try to play techies the dude doesn't get it they don't get it they just think he's about magical burst damage that's all they ever thought they didn't understand the nuances of economy draining sanity draining map control awareness they just didn't understand bro Dota 2 is about finding something that is broken that no one else knows is broken and then showing the world Ali did it at ti-5 he knew techies was good I and just because artesi plays Razer in a pub and then everyone else plays Razer in a pub and then they go to TI those guys all lose it's about finding the genius the gems the hidden diamonds understanding their strengths seeing the potential and making them real that is the heart of DOTA is to find what everyone considers garbage and making it gold you don't just delete it you don't just put it in it into a furnace yeah sure techies was garbage since ti5 incompetitive because I didn't want to learn how to play the hero when's the last time you saw uh hey it doesn't matter right he's garbage now but he'll be good later once somebody has the knowledge the problem was my friend is that only the smartest people could be good at techies only the coaches the managers there's a reason why alloy 2000 was the one who spammed techies because he was the genius he just won another TI as a coach man the guy thinks about DOTA he knows human psychology that's it we could have had a Heyday with techies he couldn't come back he was in a fine spot people were experimenting and then they nuked them just because people didn't like him all right because people didn't like him because they didn't understand them that is my theory so what could have been done with techies just let him be a piece of garbage let him have his 42 win rate that he used to have pre-rework in the pubs I just let him exist because the people that loved him loved them and we haven't loved anything since the question remains where these changes worth it did techies see competitive play no techies yet again rents unpicked and Unbound for the entirety of the international 11. even if we include the 360 qualifier games techies only got picked in five of them and none of the teams that played him made it to the international techies is a weirdmon his story starts out a huge success underrated underestimated he showed up to the international five and all of the few teams that took him seriously and practiced how to play him were rewarded for their efforts Eva Geniuses won because of it he wasn't just good he was terrifying however it seemed like valve didn't like how the hero saw his success and so they changed him they changed him over and over again and none of those iterations worked even though he technically saw player ta-609 those games weren't the most sincere two of them didn't matter and the final one came from wings techies may be one of the rare cases where all of the reworks did more harm than good what remains our questions what do we want from techies what do we expect of him unfortunately I don't think valve currently has a good answer now you might expect me to say that techies is the worst total hero of all time but I do believe that a good argument can be made for that I disagree yes he effectively only saw play at one tournament but he crushed that tournament he had a performance that most can only dream of a performance so good that his overall win rate at the international is still the highest out of all DOTA Heroes Our Heroes May have been picked more often and they may have a more optimistic future but at the very least techies had won tournament where all of us had our minds alone foreign thank you very much for watching this video I appreciate it and thank you very much everybody today overwhelming response to our new channel here I mean at the time of recording this the patch video has 125 000 views which is kind of crazy considering it's only been out there for two weeks on a brand new channel so thank you very much for all of the support we really appreciate it and we hope that you enjoyed the techies video as we already said the Juggernaut video is coming in only two weeks from now and then after that we've got the IO video a month later and I kind of want to be clear about this we're gonna have a monthly schedule going forward we just prepared a bunch of early materials so we can fill up the channel a little bit but I hope you enjoyed the video today as always thank you very much to spectral.gg for being fantastic and being a great service of all of the stats something just incredibly helpful and then I also wanted to give a shout out to metaphy we have partnered with metaphy to put our video series on their service as well so if you're curious to see it on their website metaphy.gg you can also find it there there's a link in the description that you can check out anyway I'll see you guys next time [Music]

Channel: Stories of Dota

Views: 409,722

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Id: mmgE6hB4Dag

Length: 72min 34sec (4354 seconds)

Published: Thu May 18 2023