Some Dota 2 heroes find ways to stay relevant longer than others, but Pangolier recently caught on Quinn Callahan’s radar after dodging one too many nerf hammers in 2023.
In a DreamLeague Season 21 interview yesterday, Neal “Tsunami” Khandheria asked Quinn how many nerfs it would take for people to stop picking Ember Spirit and Pangolier, two characters that have been the crown jewels of his hero pool.
“People stopped picking Ember, this hero is garbage, he’s maybe pickable,” Quinn said before moving on to Pangolier. The three-time major winner believed that Pangolier wasn’t getting nerfed in ways that would actually matter.
All the minor nerfs that Pangolier received in the last couple of patches were only able to bring down his win rate by 0.5 or one percent, showcasing that Valve has been going easy on the hero, prompting Quinn to beg for a real Pangolier nerf.
Gaimin Gladiator’s star mid-laner also gave an example of the nerfs that Pangolier has been receiving and why they have yet to be successful. Instead of nerfing the Swashbuckle-Diffusal Blade interaction, one of Pangolier’s talents got tweaked in a minor way in patch 7.34c.
While Pangolier boasts a modest 51 percent win rate in ranked matches, according to Dotabuff, he’s been the go-to pick for mid-laners in competitive matches. This has been mainly because of the popular mid-lane matchups in the current meta, where Pangolier stands tall as one of the few heroes that don’t get hard-countered in the lane.
Once Pangolier is combined with a team that can secure the early-to-mid game portion of a match, he can start snowballing and become the most annoying Dota 2 hero with the help of Aghanim’s Scepter. Despite picking Pangoiler quite often himself, Quinn asking for a nerf speaks volumes since even the players who abuse the hero’s true potential look to be tired of seeing him in the meta.
