Welcome to our biggest update yet! If you want the full patch notes, visit here.

We've added a brand new mechanic that introduces items to the game. We hope you enjoy!

At the beginning of the game, 3 elements are randomly selected. On rounds 8, 16, and 24 a Pantheon Trial will occur. Every player will have a choice of 1 hero to send to the Pantheon where they will fight to the death. Players that have higher HP will spawn first. The elements will alter the game state in some way during these rounds, whether it be negative or positive effects for all units. If the round goes on too long, all units will take massive damage per second. Once the round ends, players will select an item that can be equipped to a hero. The order of selection is based on the results of the Pantheon round. The items available to pick are improved with each Trial. God abilities will NOT work during the Pantheon Trials. Gods will NOT take any damage from these trials.

Simply put, this is a way for us to not only introduce items to the game in a more organic way, but to also create a little bit of a comeback mechanic for those struggling. Of course, we didn't want to be like some other games where losing on purpose is incentivized. In general this is a very fine line to walk, but I'm not particuarly worried about that aspect at all.

You can rotate your items freely whenever you want as it does not cost any gold, but heroes can only equip 1 item at a time.

Overall, there are 13 unique Trials in the game (3 Tank, 3 DPS, 3 Spell Casting, and 4 Joker).

Tank Trials:

There are 3 of these types of trials and they are associated with the STR attribute icon. In these trials, all units will have -50% spell damage and -50% attack damage.

Fire Trial: Units take 10*(Hero Level) magic damage per second
Earth Trial: All units deal 6*(Hero Armor) DPS in Pure Damage in 600 AOE around them.
Nature Trial: Gain 10% your max HP in damage at the start of the trial. Passively gain 1 damage for every 5 you heal or regen throughout the round.

DPS Trials

There are 3 of these types of trials and they are associated with the AGI attribute icon. In these trials, all units will have -50% spell damage and -50% regen/healing (but lifesteal will work).

Storm Trial: +200 attack speed
Blood Trial: +50% lifesteal
Poison Trial: Your attack damage is doubled

Spell Casting Trials

There are 3 of these types of trials and they are associated with the INT attribute icon. In these trials, all units will have -50% attack damage and -50% regen/healing.

Ethereal Trial: 50% spell lifesteal
Arcane Trial: 50% spell amplification
Ice Trial: 50% cooldown reduction

Joker Trials

There are 4 of these types of trials and they are associated with the Joker icon. There is only a 20% chance for a Joker trial to be in a game and there can only be a maximum of 1 total. Joker trials are, in essence, a wildcard. They will do something completely crazy.

Joker Trial 1: Your unit's spells are all replaced with 4 random abilities from your other heroes
Joker Trial 2: All abilities become Gaben
Joker Trial 3: +10000 cast range, +10000 attack range on all units
Joker Trial 4: Combines 2 other random trials (non Joker)

While playing, if you click on an enemy hero, their equipped item will show up on the bottom right portrait.

Punch Out! Bundle

This exclusive bundle comes with a brand new Boxing themed Click FX, Arena, + 2 War Chests.

Click FX are global
Click FX have been changed so everyone can see you clicking. We thought this would be a fun little change to a really cool cosmetic. Opponents will be able to see all your clicks (but not hear them). Feel free to use this as a taunt of sorts.

Darkness Spawn FX

This is a brand new type of cosmetic that we're hoping you enjoy. We've added a very basic default spawn animation for each of your units. Once you equip this, you will upgrade that animation to actually look and sound cool!

Frost Arrows

We think this is a nice spell as it provides some damage (keeping in mind we benched a lot of other physical damage spells) along with a very valuable mechanic in anti-heal, which is built into the base spell.

Guardian Angel

This will provide some relief against physical damage burst builds.

Living Armor

We wanted some more healing buffs in the game, so we thought we'd try this one out.

Overgrowth

Another much needed spell immune piercing ultimate that should do quite well against Rolling Thunder.

Pierce the Veil

We had to add a Muerta ability and we thought this one would be the most interesting. It is very powerful, but has the main limitation of only lasting 8 seconds, which does not improve with upgrades.

Primal Roar

Yet another BKB piercing ultimate, this one more single target focused. The damage has been buffed quite a bit vs the regular dota counterpart.

Rebound

With Charge of Darkness being benched, we needed another backline jump. Rebound provides that along with some interesting buffs, including another spell immune Super upgrade.

Shadow Wave

A low cooldown heal that can deal some damage on the side. If you upgrade this enough then you can make use of this spell in some kind of minus armor strategy.

Spirit Siphon

A heal that (at Super) will deal tons of damage to tanky targets.

Redesign
We've polished up the God screen and made things a bit more compact.

Searching
Much like in regular Dota, you can now just start typing on the God pick screen in order to filter for a specific God.

Bonus Rewards:
You are now given an incentive to pick different Gods. At the God pick screen, a select number of random Gods are chosen. It is more likely that a God you do not pick often is selected. There will be a small indicator on the God and when you select it, it will provide you more details. These are the 3 types of rewards:

Gold: You will receive 50% more gold at the end of the game
XP: You will receive 50% more XP at the end of the game
MMR: You will recieve 50% more MMR at the end of the game

We've also added an incentive to use the Random button. If you use the Random God button, you will get 1-free shop re-roll at the start of the game. This re-roll does not need to be used right away.

Most items that came with spell upgrades have been removed and replaced with something else. Since this was such a large change, we didn't want to go crazy on effects. As a result, a good amount of the spell upgrade replacements ended up being similar to their previous effect. We would like to give these spells some time before making drastic changes to their upgrades.

As there were quite a number of these changes, feel free to read them in full here.

Special thank you to Gabe Newell for lending us his voice for the beginning of the game and Pantheon Rounds!