Dota Meta Games - Changes in strat and items throughout time

Its interesting to see how the game constantly evolve from version to version of dota. Here is kind of a deja vu back in time. Its fun to think about how much the game constantly changes, just because of small changes.

Nuke heavy - QoP, Zeus, and other int nukers were heavily favored. This was back in the very early days of competitive dota.

Blink Dagger / Gank heavy - Back in the days where there was no 3 second CD on blink dagger after being damaged. 6.3X to early 4X ish. (Approximately the same time as above)

Hard-carries, 4protect1, trilane heavy - More conservative playstyles emerged following nerfs to Blink Dagger and various other changes. Some notable carries of this period not seen often today are Kunkka, Doombringer, and Terrorblade. Notable supports include vengeful spirit (aura), crystal maiden, Visage (extremely good in trilanes), and Earthshaker. These were also the glory days of Shadow Fiend. (Late 4X - 6.5X)

Hard Carries, 4Protect1 - Similar to above, but some heavy nerfs to doombringer (0 armor) made him fall out of favor and kunkka became unused in favor of more reliable carries. Medusa was popular during this period. Spectre enjoyed some amount of play following the success of global strat by Loda's Team_Team. Venge was still picked fairly often although a lot less useful (stun rescaled, wave no longer cancels consumables). (late 6.5X, early 6.6X)

Push heavy / teamfight centric - This phase came about in later 6.6x to now. You can subdivide this into multiple distinct phases (as done in the original post) but this is the general description. In my mind the turning point for the push heavy strat began when DTS, led by Artstyle, placed 3rd in WDC in Wuhan, China with heavy push strats against various heavily favored 4protect1 hard carry farming Chinese teams.

Some interesting notes on stable heroes:

Windrunner and Venomancer come to mind as the most stable heroes that were consistently popular through the ages and had very little changes through the versions.

Item change the metagame.. Several times - 

A couple of things I initially neglected to touch on

• In the early days push strats (or PUSHING in general) were extremely difficult because of the TP mechanism.

Using a TP scroll on a tower would cause it to gain a metric craptonne of armour while your TP is channeling. What players would do to defend against a push is to team TP into the tower 1 at a time and cancel it at the last second. This was effectively a 10 second glyph that stopped most pushes cold in their tracks.

This was effectively solved when new TP mechanisms were worked in (I forget the version).

• 5 minute buyback cooldowns

This was a big change to the game. I saw a lot of complaints about Chinese farming dota in TI2 but you have to realize this is already severely toned down. Before the introduction buyback cooldowns 2 hour Chinese farm fests were not uncommon (more like it was the norm) as both teams would try to save for buybacks and refuse to engage without the money. I vividly remember a Chinese storm player singlehandedly repelling an enemy push by buying back 3 times when they were breaching high ground (was it YYF? I forget who exactly.)

• The introduction of smoke of deceit

The introduction of smoke of deceit made ganking-centric strats actually viable again. Pro players already have excellent map awareness and coupled with the omnipresence of wards ganking was not viable for quite a while.

You may still gank and you may still succeed, but (credit to SCLegend for mentioning this) as 2009 proved with his multiple carry strats - the payoff you gain from a successful gank was less than the extra farm the enemy carry would have gained from a free lane.

One way around this was shown by Artstyle-led DTS (and later, Na'Vi) who began to engage deep in enemy territory so each successful gank would translate into a tower, which saw some moderate success.

The recent gold buff to hero kills has already begun to shift the meta back in gank-heavy favour.