DOTA 2’s 7.26 meta had a poor reception from players of all levels. In particular, two-time The International champion Sebastien “Ceb” Debs had a lot to say and gave a lengthy explanation for it.

“I’m not enjoying the meta at all. I think it’s really noob-friendly and I hate it,” said Ceb. “Parts of the game are being broken down as something simpler and I don’t enjoy that.”

Ceb is not pleased with the dynamics of the 7.26 DOTA patch, where less value has been placed in securing kills.

This made him state that it is “noob-friendly” as it rewarded players who stay in their lanes and kept farming. He explained it further by elaborating as to how this dynamic hurt pros or high-level players, especially the midlaners. His example is that if a midlaner leaves his lane for 2-3 minutes at level 5 to gank at around the 4-minute mark and gets four kills, the moment he comes back to the lane his net worth and exp will be significantly lower than the enemy midlaner who stayed in the lane and kept last hitting creeps and farming a couple of neutrals.

He expressed his dislike for the patch as it seemed unfair that a player who’s got a good read of the game and was able to get four kills did not get the same reward. This is in spite of the fact that his roaming, angles, participation, and spell casting were on point while the opponent just stayed in his lane auto-attacking creeps like a bot. He said that it seems like the patch says “the guy who stayed in the lane is the better player” since he is rewarded with more gold and exp.

He told his viewers how it personally affected his game saying that “even if I get opportunity to kill the enemy carry, sometimes I won’t leave the lane because I will lose the lane and it will affect me in the long run and it really hurt my game a lot much more than it would have if I didn’t.”

The 7.26 patch turned the game into a significantly slower and longer game and also gave way to the “zoo meta” which made split pushing the most effective game strategy. Heroes that produce controllable units or more commonly known as “zookeepers” enjoyed really high win rates.

The patch’s highlighted item was the Necronomicon, which gave any hero the abilty to be a zookeeper as players kept building it on heroes who would have not considered it in the past.

Ceb had something to say about the item too: “The problem about Necro book isn’t about the cost, it’s the mana regen…it’s one of the only items that will fix your mana issues. It gives you strength and farming potential, meaning it’s good for carries, strength heroes, intelligence heroes. Necro is very broken.”

With the latest DOTA 2 7.27 patch being released, stay tuned to find out about the most notable meta changes and if the issues stated above have been fixed.