As of the 1.16b update, it appears that the trend here is weakening heroes that have built-in AoE or other scaling mechanics. While most of the strong heroes right now could be justifiably nerfed without making them useless, I personally feel that this type of balancing would be better offset by buffing weaker heroes (ones that are weak because of the effects of their skills, not numbers), and subsequent buffing of creeps that would create a more challenging, engaging environment.

I am somewhat concerned that the current overpicked/strong heroes are being looked at too much, at the expense of weaker caster heroes that do not have a built in AoE spell. I believe that this disparity exists primarily due to a lack of AI in creeps.

Creeps and bosses follow very simple logic: They will attack-move towards your throne, unless they encounter a hostile unit. If they have a castable spell, they will cast it immediately when an enemy hero comes into range. They tend to ball up and funnel into small chokes, and will blindly attack until their death.

Difficulty in the game-mode, then, basically boils down to two-and-a-half factors: damage, sustain, and mobility. Creeps get harder by getting more health and doing more damage per hit. Heroes attempt to win the game by last-hitting creeps fast enough so that they can get items that will allow them to get more health and do more damage per hit. I say that mobility is only half a factor because, generally, the only time it concerns you is if you're farming jungle camps, trying to help a lane that is losing, or desperately pushing when you know your team is new/bad and won't win.

This, in turn, has caused heroes with reliable AoE DAMAGE as part of their kit/role from normal DotA to become stronger, more frequently picked, and given more attention. Heroes who specialize in roaming, single target damage, and ESPECIALLY disables/utility, suffer in turn. Addition of better scaling for Bloodstone and Aether Lens has now given intelligence heroes a way of contributing late game, but it has molded their roles together into 1: do lots of AoE damage and sustain yourself, and push the super towers when you can.

The nerfs to 1.16 were virtually ALL melee carries with a built-in splash mechanism, because they're low-risk, high-reward, and they remain useful throughout the game. On the other hand, we have heroes that have weaker AoE that don't scale well with damage items that have gone unnoticed for some time now. I don't know if there's an API for pick-rate, but I would feel confident that some of these heroes might be much less popular than Sven/Drow/Axe/Troll.

- Ancient Apparition
- Enigma
- Warlock
- Ogre Magi
- Enchantress
- Nyx Assassin
- Razor
- Weaver
- Brewmaster
- Treant Protector
- Spirit Breaker
- Earth Spirit

My first instinct upon seeing the patch notes was to thank the development team for their hard work in this custom game mode, and to complain about my favorite heroes not being buffed. But I think that if there was a way to diversify bosses/spawns in a way that at least 1 person on your team would have to play a non-traditional "wave clearer," that many of these weaker heroes could be given niches that don't require buffing them to do stupid AoE damage on a short cooldown.

While not quite a "support," changing creeps to require some thinking outside the box to deal with would be a great way to add an additional element of cooperation and extra involvement to the map, as right now there is very little reason to leave your lane unless it's to kill the Rapier Ogre. Adding bosses or creeps with abilities like Winter's Curse, Dispersion, or Doom would be a simple way to shake things up, while creating enemies that run away from you, debuff, or summon would be something else good.

It would be nice if there was an early creep wave/boss archetype that heroes with no methods of debuffing struggled against, or a new mechanism added that focused very heavily on single-target CC to give those heroes a role, such as chasing down X target or moving to Y points on the map in rapid succession to give gold to your team.