TI News: Livestreams, Viewing Parties, and The Secret Shop
October 12, 2023

The Road to The International is literally right around the metaphorical corner, and that means a lot of cool and exciting stuff is revving to life. There are more ways than ever to enjoy the matches, meet new people, and show off your fandom, so we've put it all together in a single post so you don't miss out on any of the fun.
Event Livestreaming
The start of Group Stage will be, let's be honest, barely controlled Dota chaos, with five simultaneous streams during the opening two days of Group Stage weekend to seed the tournament. But, starting this year, by this Saturday we'll be down to a single stream — which should make the back half of Group Stage weekend a lot easier to watch online.
And if you're planning to watch online, we've got options for you. From Twitch to YouTube to SteamTV, The Road to the International and The International will be streamed on multiple platforms in multiple languages, making it easier than ever to follow the journeys of all your favorite teams as they vie for the Aegis of Champions.
English
Twitch | YouTube | SteamTV Stream A Stream B Stream C Stream D Stream E
Chinese
Twitch | Bilibili | SteamTV Stream A Stream B Stream C Stream D Stream E
Russian
Twitch | YouTube | SteamTV Stream A Stream B Stream C Stream D Stream E Stream F
Spanish
Twitch | YouTube | Facebook | SteamTV Stream A Stream B Stream C Stream D Stream E
Not seeing your language represented? Don't worry! While the above links represent the official broadcasts, we understand Dota is played by folks everywhere around the world, and we've also handed out 15 broadcast licenses for other languages, so check in with your local communities to find out the best way to get online and watch.
Lastly, everyone in the Dota community is of course welcome to join in on the streaming fun if you're able and interested. We only ask that you follow our community streaming guidelines.
Viewing Party Signups
From bars, LAN cafes, movie theaters and even private homes, there's gonna be plenty of opportunities to get in on a "pubstomp" viewing party starting with the Playoffs weekend and throughout The International itself. We're even planning to include viewing party footage live during the final weekend of the event, so if you want to connect with other fans, experience amazing matches in a fun group atmosphere, and be momentarily famous, the time to sign up is now.
If you're feeling ambitious and want to throw your own viewing party, here's a list of organizer guides from Barcraft on how to host an event:
- English - Viewing Party Organizer's Guide
- Spanish - Guía para organizadores de fiestas de visualización
- Russian - Руководство для организаторов Пабстомпов
- Polish - Przewodnik Organizatora Pubstompów
- Portuguese - Guia do Organizador de festas de exibição
The Secret Shop is Open for Business
The International 2023 Secret Shop has a little something for everybody interested in showing off their TI fandom. Looking to measure your mouse movement more accurately? We've got mousepads. Feeling cold and thirsty? We've got hoodies and tumblers. In the market for some mousepads, hoodies and tumblers but not sure how to carry it all around? Unfortunately, science has yet to invent a method of — no, just kidding. We've even got tote bags. Check out the shop here.
Get Ready For Group Stage
October 11, 2023

The Road to The International's Group Stage weekend officially starts this Thursday at 10am PST. Players have been arriving in Seattle all week, preparing themselves for what promises to be an exciting — and with Group Stage eliminations now on the table, especially tense — round of match-ups.
In this year's Group Stage format, four groups of five teams will play round-robin games over two days, with the bottom team in each group getting eliminated. Then, the second half of Group Stage begins, with head-to-head matches between the remaining 16 teams. Victory in these final matches determine placement for Playoffs weekend: The winning teams will enter Playoffs in the Upper Bracket, the losing teams in the Lower Bracket.
Here are this year's groups:

The International 2023 Talent Bundles
October 10, 2023

This year’s talent has officially been announced. Where? In the “Talent” tab of the Compendium.
Are you back? Great. We’re assuming you went and stared at the portraits for a while and eventually thought to yourself “Staring is great, but I wish there were even more I could do to support the talent.” Well, here’s more good news: Talent sticker bundles are now available with 50% of the proceeds going directly to the talent.
There are 4 types of bundles (which sounds complicated, but really isn’t when you take the extra effort to break it all down into bullet points):
- Standard Bundle: Standard Sticker = $0.99
- Glitter Bundle: Glitter Sticker + Voiceline = $4.99
- Holo Bundle: Holo Sticker + Voiceline + Autograph Rune = $9.99
- Gold Bundle: Gold Sticker + Voiceline + Autograph Rune + Voiceline 2 = $19.99
In the past, one complicating factor would be figuring out when the voice lines would go away. The answer this year is simple: Never. Voice lines are now permanent, making them quite possibly the only thing in this fragile, fleeting life that lasts forever.
7.34d Gameplay Patch
October 06, 2023
Patch 7.34d is out now. You can check the notes here.
Over the last few days we've addressed several gameplay issues:
Over the last few days we've addressed several gameplay issues:
- Fixed an area above the Radiant fountain that heroes could get stuck in
- Fixed Player Perspective not sometimes working correctly when spectating
- Fixed several issues with Illusions and hotkeys and control groups
- Fixed Quick Attack not working correctly when clicking on the top bar of the HUD
- Fixed clicking the Lotus Pool multiple times in quick succession interrupting the channeling of the lotus pool
- Fixed inconsistent channel bar updates when interacting with the Lotus Pool
- Fixed Scan button not showing remaining charges if it is not full
- Fixed the cooldown of duplicate items in inventory like Faerie Fire sometimes getting stuck.
- Fixed Twin Gates particle effects sometimes revealing usage to the enemy by playing a particle on the last known hero position
- Fixed Blade Mail not working correctly on Nyx Assassin
- Fixed Lotus Orb reflect interaction with Channeled spells if it was applied by an ally
- Fixed Specialist Array applying bonus Crackshot damage when there is only one target
- Fixed Giant's Ring effects being visible to enemies when the wearer is invisible. Added a debuff icon when receiving damage from an enemy Giant's Ring
- Fixed using Eul's Scepter on a Debuff Immune unit leading them to get stuck
- Fixed Arc Warden Tempest Double not preserving both charges of Hand of Midas when re-summoned
- Fixed Arc Warden Tempest Double receiving experience from creeps denied by enemies
- Fixed Bounty Hunter Friendly Shadow Shard upgrade costing too much mana
- Fixed Dawnbreaker Starbreaker not putting Harpoon on cooldown whereas it did for Echo Sabre
- Fixed Dawnbreaker Solar Guardian sometimes getting cancelled if the target ally goes out of world
- Fixed Death Prophet fear interrupting channeling spells through Debuff Immunity
- Fixed Ember Spirit only able to cast Sleight of Fist to the right side while traveling in Fire Remnant
- Fixed Enchantress Little Friends not being blocked by Linkens Sphere
- Fixed Invoker's EMP shard effect ignoring collisions and allowing to get units stuck to each other
- Fixed Kunkka Torrent overriding the target's animations, even if they are debuff immune
- Fixed Lich Chain Frost On Death talent display on HUD - the buff icon will now only display when you have the talent, and now has a tooltip
- Fixed Lone Druid Spirit Bear Owner not being able to disassemble items on the Bear
- Fixed the interaction of Luna's Aghanim's Shard with Silver Edge and Shadow Blade.
- Fixed Mars Spear of Mars skewering Lone Druid's Spirit Bear
- Fixed a crash caused by Monkey King mischief which occured when revealing a Monkey King Tree Disguise along with other units at same time
- Fixed Monkey King Level 25 Jingu Mastery required hits talent not applying to summoned soldiers
- Fixed Monkey King Wukong's Command Aghanim's Scepter upgrade not working when Fur Army is off cooldown
- Fixed Muerta Parting Shot's target's physical form being able to act if it receives debuff immunity
- Fixed Puck Dream Coil being affected by Status Resistance
- Fixed Puck Dream Coil effect being removed early if an enemy was affected by two separate dream coils
- Fixed Queen of Pain Sonic Wave damage not being applied fully if cast on a target affected by Pulverize
- Fixed Queen of Pain Sonic Wave sometimes dealing an extra instance of damage, and incorrectly rounding when duration is affected by Status Resistance
- Fixed Sand King Sand Storm Blind/Slow effect staying in the location of the initial cast instead of moving
- Fixed Slark Pounce applying to Lone Druid's Spirit Bear
- Fixed Templar Assassin sometimes getting stuck in Meld invisibility if the attack target was destroyed
- Fixed Treant Protector losing Nature's Guise buff when taking damage while walking on Nature's Grasp. Now has same behavior as when walking in trees
- Fixed Troll Warlord being sometimes being controllable during Battle Trance
- Fixed Vengeful Spirit receiving Fountain Invulnerability if she swaps places with her Aghanim's Scepter illusion outside of the Fountain
- Fixed the interaction of Vengeful Spirit's Magic Missile shard with Refreshing and Reflection
- Fixed Warlock Chaotic Offering Aghanims Scepter upgrade creating golems with non-reduced stats if Warlock moves his scepter into the backpack mid-cast
- Fixed Shard sometimes causing Weaver Shukuchi invisibility to be dispelled, in particular with the Level 25 +1 Geminate Attack talent
- Fixed Windrunner sometimes canceling attacks when casting windrun after Focus Fire with Aghanim's Scepter
- Fixing Wraith King getting bombarded with "Can't Attack" messages if one of his skeletons gets disarmed
- Fixed Zeus Lightning Hands being affected by dispels
- Fixed Mirana Level 25 talent listing incorrect value for Starstorm bonus damage
The International 2023 Celebration Update
September 28, 2023

We're excited to release the International Compendium for The International 2023. Because this is a new shape to previous years’ Compendiums, we wanted to walk you through what it is, how it works, and why we built it.
As we described a few months back, looking at Dota's history made it clear that Battle Passes had steadily grown to consume all the content in a given year, and were inhibiting our ability to ship creative things throughout the year. We wanted to fix this, and so made a deliberate choice several months ago to ship new things more often in a wider variety of forms. This year has been full of experiments: We released a brand new player behavior system, free items to celebrate the 10th Anniversary, a number of gameplay patches, a collection of community sets, and more. This Compendium is another example of something new.
Event-Focused Features, Event-Focused Rewards
Every Dota update has a variety of goals and part of the work of designing and building an update is choosing where to put the emphasis. An update can be focused on delivering cosmetic content or refining balance. An update can try to generate the largest prize pool possible. Instead of these goals, we chose to focus this update more narrowly: To elevate the players, the teams, and the artistry that is high-level Dota played at The International. We focused entirely on creating a set of activities to make TI more fun while games were going on, and another set of activities to make TI more fun when games weren't going on.
And so that's what this year's Compendium is: a collection of challenges that we've built around the pro players and the event itself. We've brought back and improved some old favorites like Fantasy and Predictions. We're also introducing some new activities, ranging from the light-hearted (Bingo) to the seriously formidable (The Road to the International Challenge).
Everything you'll accomplish through the Compendium earns you progress towards rewards. Like the Compendium challenges, all the rewards this year are built around the players and the event. There's an International 2023 HUD, permanent chatwheel lines, and a physical collector's Aegis, along with lots of new content for your Profile Showcase (see below), including team and player stickers.
Something For Everyone
In line with the goals we established earlier this year, we've been intentional about ensuring that every update we ship has something for all Dota players, whether that's new gameplay or new features. This update is no different: If, like many, you're a huge fan of watching the spectacle of the International but aren't familiar with the old legends of Arteezy on a cliff, or Emo's research into the deep lore and many varied uses of the question mark, that's alright, too — we've got stuff in this update for you as well.
This update also includes the Profile Showcase, free and available now to all players. Whether you're proud of your record, your in-game fashion sense, or that one time you won a game on Invoker, we've created a canvas where you can show off the parts of your Dota experience you value the most. We could describe how cool it is all day, but since a picture is worth a thousand words, we've put together a whole update page: go take a look at the pictures.
Onward
We're already working on future updates with different focuses and we know you're excited to learn more about the next big patch, and the next set of arcanas, and everything else we're working on — but that's for after the champions claim the Aegis. For now, Seattle welcomes a return of the finest players in the world, and we can't wait. We'll see you on the Road to the International.
Community Events at The International
September 24, 2023

Invitations have been sent, plane tickets have been reserved, and our old friends the soundproof booths are undergoing their final maintenance and inspections: In just a few short weeks the first teams arrive in Seattle for The International.
Most of the tickets have been sold: Tickets for the Road to the International (Oct 20-22) are completely sold out, and only about a thousand remain for The International (Oct 27-29).
As TI approaches, we have a couple announcements (and reminders of past announcements):
- Pubstomps: For as long as there have been Dota tournaments, there have been Dota pubstomps: opportunities to gather with friends and fans and watch together. This year, for the first time, we're planning on including some of the pubstomps from around the world live in the TI broadcast. We'll be back closer to the event to talk more about how this will work and ask interested pubstomps to register.
- Short Film Contest: We had a record number of entries this year. We've narrowed the ninety submitted films down to about twenty that will be available for viewing and voting in the client from 9/29 through 10/9. The top ten entries selected by the community will be shown during The International, where we'll also announce the overall winners.
- Cosplay Contest: Sign-ups for this year's cosplay contest are open until midnight CST on Sunday, 10/1. SteelSeries is sponsoring this year's contest, so in addition to $20,000 USD of cash prizes, winners also get a variety of SteelSeries gear. (And, as a reminder, you don't need to be a ticket holder to enter: If you're selected as a top-ten finalist, you automatically get three-day passes for yourself and one guest.)
For those of you joining us: We can't wait to welcome you to the Seattle Convention Center's Summit Building and Climate Pledge Arena as we once again follow the best Dota team in the world on their path to the Aegis. For everyone who'll be following along from home, we're looking forward to releasing the new International Compendium next week.
Dota 2 Workshop Fall Call-to-Arms
September 23, 2023
Between emoji-encoded patch notes, our 10-Year Anniversary celebration, and massive updates to Dota's Armory and behavior system — and of course The International rapidly approaching — there's a lot happening both in and out of the lanes. Plus, we're already hard at work on more updates to come, which means we're thinking about new community treasures to help fill out that aforementioned Armory.
To that end, the Dota team would like to invite all workshop contributors to dream up some new sets for any of your favorite heroes. Submissions are already open, and we're looking forward to seeing your full craft on display. This round of submissions also welcomes designs for Muerta, Crystal Maiden's Conduit of the Blueheart Persona and the Exile Unveiled Phantom Assassin Persona, which are all now included in the workshop.
We request that all submissions be on the Dota 2 Workshop by the end of the day on November 26th, 2023 PDT. Please make sure to mark your work with the "Fall 2023" tag when tendering items to the Workshop to ensure they aren't overlooked. Please note that any unreleased "Spring 2023" submissions already on the workshop will also be considered for this round of selections.
As always, please avoid concepts involving human skulls, blood, and gore. We'd like to remind all Dota fans to regularly visit the Workshop and vote through the Queue to ensure your voices are heard in the polling process.
To that end, the Dota team would like to invite all workshop contributors to dream up some new sets for any of your favorite heroes. Submissions are already open, and we're looking forward to seeing your full craft on display. This round of submissions also welcomes designs for Muerta, Crystal Maiden's Conduit of the Blueheart Persona and the Exile Unveiled Phantom Assassin Persona, which are all now included in the workshop.
We request that all submissions be on the Dota 2 Workshop by the end of the day on November 26th, 2023 PDT. Please make sure to mark your work with the "Fall 2023" tag when tendering items to the Workshop to ensure they aren't overlooked. Please note that any unreleased "Spring 2023" submissions already on the workshop will also be considered for this round of selections.
As always, please avoid concepts involving human skulls, blood, and gore. We'd like to remind all Dota fans to regularly visit the Workshop and vote through the Queue to ensure your voices are heard in the polling process.
The Dota Pro Circuit
September 14, 2023

We started the Dota Pro Circuit in 2017 to answer a question that was coming up more and more frequently: How do you earn an invite to The International? Up until then, invitations were driven by a handful of regional qualifiers and “golden ticket” invites from Valve. Distribution of these invitations created an exciting moment every year for fans, but it was hard for pro players (and their fans) to know the exact path to The International. Understanding that every invitation system has trade-offs, we set out to create a system with more clarity and transparency.
When it came to that one limited goal, we succeeded. The DPC demystified the invitation criteria, and made it easier for pros to understand their path to The International. Unfortunately, the DPC brought with it a set of rules and regulations, and those have come with a cost that’s become clearer to us over time: The world of competitive Dota has grown less exciting, less varied, and ultimately much less fun.
By existing as the only official league, the DPC has a stranglehold on the event calendar for the year and what it's filled with. Event organizers are innovating less, because that's effectively what we've been asking them to do: Instead of competing for viewers and players by producing compelling and inventive tournaments, organizers now compete for compliance with Valve’s long list of rigid requirements (team count, broadcast languages, event format, and more).
Relaxing those requirements doesn't help. No matter how well-intentioned our event specifications, or the actions of the event organizers in meeting them, it distracts from what the goals of these events used to be: showcasing Dota in the most entertaining way possible, enticing players to participate and the audience to watch. The best world is the one where event organizers aren’t competing for our attention, but for yours.
Before we introduced these constraints, the world of competitive Dota was healthier, more robust and more varied than the one we have now. Events used to be less rote and more creative, and there was more room in the calendar for them. Everything was open for exploration: event length and themed venues and team participation and even the basic assumptions of tournament design. There was a beautiful unregulated insanity to it all — casual house parties and oyster prize pools coexisted alongside the Dota Asia Championships and one-off invitationals. It would be too simplistic to say that the slow drift of the Dota competitive scene away from this focus on fun and creativity towards the sterile, near-monoculture of today is entirely the fault of the DPC, but the DPC has generated significant pressure and incentives that led us here. The Dota community has decades of grassroots experience coming up with innovative and entertaining events, and right now the DPC is getting in the way.
With that in mind, we're ending the Dota Pro Circuit: 2023 will be the final DPC season.
Competitive Dota predates the DPC by many years and will continue long after. The International will continue as well — we're already working on The International 2024, and next year we'll be talking more about how invitations to that event will work. But for now, we're going to return our focus to this year's event — which, unbelievably, is only four short weeks away.
Between the Lanes: The Sound (Proof Booths) of Silence
September 12, 2023

Welcome back to Between the Lanes, a blog feature where we let members of our development team walk through some of the challenges, bugfixes, and occasional happy accidents we encounter while working on a game as unique as Dota, and an event as unique as The International.
The International is an unbelievably huge endeavor, watched by millions of people around the world. It’s easy to forget that the first ever TI was a modest, honestly pretty unrecognizable event held at Gamescom 2011 in Cologne, Germany, and took place in a trade show booth. In honor of TI’s humble beginnings, we decided to dedicate this installment of Between the Lanes to an often forgotten, rarely celebrated (and occasionally very poorly ventilated) piece of equipment that’s been with us since the very beginning, and ever since (except last year): the soundproof booth.

From TI1, we knew we’d need booths with sufficient insulation so the players wouldn't overhear anything from the crowd or casters that’d give them an unfair advantage during the match. Back then, that was the only requirement of the soundproof booths: They needed to be soundproof. And because the first TI was so small, there wasn’t that much audio slamming the booth at any given time. But those early booths fulfilled their one requirement: none of the pros could hear anything. Of course, they failed utterly in every other area, which meant that, by the time future TIs rolled around, we needed them to do a lot more.

The first TI was a real learning experience in general for us. The desks the pros were playing on ended up being too narrow and too high. So the players had to sit on stools with their elbows hanging off the edge of the desk, which it turns out is just about the worst way to play DOTA. We also had these enormous PCs that Nvidia had lent us, and we’d placed them into a series of cabinets under the players. These cabinets, it turned out, were unventilated. The Nvidia PCs ran unventilated for seven days straight. It was so hot in those cabinets, when you opened the doors you could smell the insulation on the wires melting. Amazingly, they never stopped working all week. (It's entirely possible the only reason they didn't overheat was because one of the players accidentally spilled some ice water into the cabinets.)

So now we had a second booth requirement for subsequent TIs: Air conditioning. It turned out that five PCs, five monitors, five humans and various lighting rigs, all sealed in an insulated unventilated box, generates a LOT of heat. Being able to reduce that heat was both essential and non-trivial.

Another new requirement we’d never considered: Reflection. The very original booths were rectangular pods that abutted each other, face-to-face. The glass surfaces were flat on the front and the back. So when players were sitting in the playing position, their screens would reflect off of the glass behind them, and the opponent directly opposite them could pretty clearly see the reflection of their screen. We discovered that problem very quickly. Our immediate high tech solution: tape a bunch of promotional T-shirts to the glass between the players to block the reflections.

Going forward into the next decade of TIs, we abandoned the T-Shirt solution and fixed the problem with booth design and positioning.
By the time TI5 rolled around, and with no false modesty, we’d gotten pretty good at the basics. Sound-dampening: check. Better lighting: check. Ventilation: check. Pink noise in the booth: check. Solving the dozen or so immediate problems that kept cropping up during the first few TIs meant we could finally stop putting out fires and focus on making the booth better. It was finally time to tackle a long-standing problem: the booths were a huge pain in the ass to assemble. The TI2-4 booths took a really long time to put together. They were ungodly heavy and hard to manage. It took a small crane to put the roof on, not to mention 12-15 hours of build time.

TI2

TI3

TI4
For an event as big as TI, with so many moving pieces, that can be a problem. Everything’s on a pretty tight schedule. The second the stage is ready for them, those booths need to be moved up onstage and put together, fast. Once they’re assembled, you have to very quickly get the lighting in them, the PCs, the chairs, booth cameras, microphones and team communications set before any testing can begin. The faster you get the booths up and running, the more time you have to test the setup. So the biggest innovation between the TI4 and TI5 booths was how speedily the TI5 version could be assembled onstage with the clock ticking.


Composed of seven sections, each one is mounted on wheels for easy positioning once forklifted onto the stage, attached to the one another via a coffin lock system. With these innovations, the booths were able to be fully assembled in under five hours.
As the events got more elaborate, so did the challenges, and that meant more advanced techniques in booth design. The TI2-4 booths only had a single glass wall. But the fifth TI was going to take place “in the round”, on a circular stage with 360 views; so now the booths needed to be transparent on all sides, so the audience could see the action.

With the audiences getting larger and louder, and the booth walls now being entirely made of glass, sound-proofing became a legitimate challenge. The new walls would now be constructed of multiple layers of glass, with argon gas in between the layers. The glass layers were different thicknesses, and not exactly parallel to each other, which helped dampen the sound waves. (We also upgraded to optically transparent museum quality glass, which is much better for filming through. It has so few imperfections that it’s essentially transparent to the lens.)

By the time we’d perfected the booths for TI5, the total price tag for each one was over $200,000. (All that argon wasn’t cheap.) The irony is that, over the course of six Internationals, we’d managed to engineer an essentially perfect sound booth… which we then had to put in dry dock, because it turns out they couldn't be shipped internationally.
How did we learn this? By shipping them internationally to the Frankfurt Major in 2015 and destroying them in the process. We had to repair and rebuild them on-site in Germany. It was a huge hassle. The booths are capable of a lot, but they’re just not designed for long haul travel.

We continued to iterate over the next several years, doing gradual but significant improvements to player comfort, booth lighting and other incremental changes. By the time we arrived at last year’s TI in Singapore, we had accumulated a decade of experience with sound dampening, and this gave us the confidence to try a new approach. We decided to eliminate the booths entirely, and solve the sound problem with noise-canceling headphones, earbuds, and the acoustic design of the arena. This meant we could maintain the competitive integrity that the booths provided, while optimizing for all the things that the booths historically made difficult.
Something a lot of people don't realize is that pro Dota players don't simply wake up and walk onto an event stage. They have to warm up just like any athlete. They also prefer their tools of the trade — keyboard, mouse, headset — worn out just the way they like them, in just the right spot. With booths, this meant a challenging set of steps where player equipment was constantly being stripped out of the play area so new gear could be carried in and set up at the last second. This made it difficult for players to enjoy a pre-game warm-up with their equipment when a TI event coordinator was trying to pry their keyboards from them to race it over for a booth setup. A boothless set-up with four rotating sets of PCs completely removed these issues, which resulted in a streamlined set-up, takedown and speed of play — an improvement appreciated by the pro players.

But sound-dampening is simply too important a trade-off. And despite our efforts put into the acoustic design of the arena, we underestimated the difficulty in bringing the sound-dampening up to our standards. Do we think a boothless event is an experiment worth pursuing again? Absolutely. There were real advantages, for the players and the spectators. But not until we have absolute confidence in our success. What matters is that we’re heading in the right direction: Towards something better, faster, more enjoyable for the pros competing, and more exciting for us watching.
Until then, we’re happy to bring back the “classic” TI5 soundproof booths out of storage in Kent, WA, to once again grace the main stage at The International 2023.
7.34c Gameplay Patch
September 09, 2023
Patch 7.34c is out now. You can check the notes here.
Oracle saw too far into the future. That is now fixed.
Over the last few days we've addressed several gameplay issues:
Oracle saw too far into the future. That is now fixed.
Over the last few days we've addressed several gameplay issues:
- Fixed an issue where using Armlet could lead to double death bounties
- Fixed Soul Ring not removing temporary mana at the end of its buff duration
- Fixed enemy flagbearer creeps sometimes not showing their banners
- Fixed shield rune not being visible on enemy units until they attack or get attacked
- Fixed Ion Shell sometimes not being visible
- Fixed Terrorblade illusions appearing the same as the real Terrorblade
- Fixed buffs like Haste, God's Strength, and Fire Remnant not showing on the status bar of heroes
- Fixed backdoor protection not being shown as a buff on towers nor the shield icon next to their health
- Fixed the invisibility effect not showing on enemy heroes under a friendly Sentry Ward
- Fixed Haste rune not showing as a buff on the status bar or being shown visually on the hero
- Fixed Pudge Rot being invisible
- Fixed an issue where Rubick stole Death Pact for free when stealing Skeleton Walk from Clinkz
- Fixed Lone Druid's Spirit Bear counting towards Monkey King's Jinggu Mastery stacks
- Fixed Lone Druid's Spirit Bear death counting towards permanent stacks for Axe, Necrophos, Slark, Lion, and Tidehunter
- Fixed Desolator gaining damage when killing Spirit Bear
- Fixed Spirit Bear attacks counting as Hero attacks when attacking Clinkz Skeletons, Lich Ice Spire, Phoenix Supernova, Pugna Nether Ward, Tidehunter Dead in the Water anchor, Undying Tombstone, Zeus Nimbus.
- Fixed Spirit Bear death refreshing Axe Culling Blade and lowering Windranger Focus Fire cooldown with Level 25 talent
- Fixed Lone Druid Spirit Bear displayed as the unit name on the Minimap
- Fixed Tormentor not granting Spirit Bear a Shard if Lone Druid already has one, and not allowing allies to get Tormentor gold bounty if all allies already have the Shard
- Fixed Tormentor particles sometimes showing in fog of war
- Fixed a bug where inventory item icons would sometimes disappear when dragging them
- Fixed a number of items' ability effects failing to equip in the Armory/Loadout
- Fixed some free event reward items not showing up in the Armory
- Fixed an issue saving the Taunt slot on custom sets
- Fixed the default global light and shadow colors on the Autumn terrain
- Fixed a display-only bug where certain magic resistance and physical resistance percentage values were being incorrectly rounded down a point below their actual values
- Fixed a display-only bug where units with zero health or mana regeneration values would display as negative zero due to network-encoding quantization effects
- Fixed a crash in Workshop Tools