IceFrog reworks hero kill bounty and buyback formulas in latest biweekly patch

The third biweekly Dota 2 balance update just hit the live servers, in the form of Patch 7.11.

This week, the changes are focused on adjusting the way heroes give away gold upon death, how buyback costs are determined, and how punishing it is to buy back in the first place.

Before this patch, teams that were significantly behind in total net worth could catch up to their opponents by picking off easy to kill targets, such as under farmed cores and supports. The bounty for the winning team would scale for each hero, which meant that ignoring carries and bullying supports would allow losing teams to make a quick comeback.

Now, the scaling bounty is tied to the individual net worth of the dying hero. As a result of this change, heroes that are far ahead of everyone else will give away a massive amount of gold upon death should they get caught out somehow. This is great for heroes that don’t steal all the farm from their teammates, and stay relatively even in net worth with the rest of the squad.

However, this is bad news for heroes like Tinker, Alchemist, Medusa, Luna, and Anti-Mage. Dying now has much more dire consequences, considering these heroes tend to go from lane to lane taking most of the available resources on the map. Teams that have these heroes in their repertoire will have to be extra careful.

Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom for cores here. The bounty multiplier based on a hero’s net worth has been scaled down accordingly, with the lowest net worth ranking now having a multiplier of just 0.6. Previously, this value was set at 0.8.

The buyback formula has also been moved from being based on hero level and game time, to a direct function of a hero’s total net worth. Wealthy cores will find that buybacks now cost significantly more for them, while supports will certainly welcome this adjustment thanks to their low average net worth in the late game.

Fortunately for carries in particular, buying back no longer penalizes total gold earnings for a duration afterwards. This means that carries who buy back to defend their base can farm the gold they spent on buying back much faster than before. Alchemist comes to mind in this regard, as he can buy back in desperate yet winnable high ground defenses and still grab a key item a few minutes after.