原文：http://goo.gl/VpYFbU With the playoffs now over, we have a decent idea of the meta going into TI4 proper. Only 10 heroes weren't picked at all during the playoffs: Lina Crystal Maiden Huskar Bounty Hunter Night Stalker Keeper of the Light Phantom Lancer Bloodseeker Slardar Spirit Breaker With such a low number of characters not making the cut for such a wide variety of play we've seen, it's worth taking a look at each hero individually and trying to understand why. For now, let's look at the first 5 heroes who failed to be picked: Lina Competitive Record this patch: 3-2 Notable players: Illidan Lina is a hero who always seems to be pushed in weird directions when she gets a change. For a while, it looked like Icefrog was determined to make her into Sniper with range buffs. However, she has slowly been receiving minor buffs to her skills: Light Strike Array now scales, at least a little - going up to 1.9 seconds at max level Fiery Soul's movement speed boost is a bit higher, representing +3% speed at max stacks, along with a duration increase to let her reach maximum stacks off of only Dragon Slave Dragon Slave's reverse-cone effect is no longer as prominent, allowing her to aim long-range waves easier The Aghanim's upgrade to Laguna Blade is an incredible asset to her late game power That said, she's still not being picked. The biggest reason is that Lina no longer fits well into the support role important to the 6.81 meta. Supports need to roam earlier and longer. Their mana supply needs to last for several ganks, and they need the range and speed to pull it off early - Blink Dagger needs to empower them, not enable them. Lina doesn't fit this because she's actually a Core. If you look at her few but incredible sucesses, core Lina can be a surprisngly devastating role, and allow her to pick up the important items she needs to stay relevant - Aghanim's Scepter being the biggest of them. With Aghanims she can act as a powerful disruption to "safe" late game carries in BKB, paired with her ability to flash down larger pushes (though not as well as more popular picks). What does Lina need to make the cut? Speed. Either in the form of a base speed increase, or rescaling one of her nukes to be a friendlier single-point investment so that Fiery Soul can be on display sooner. Without it, Lina is doomed to always be overlooked for cores that can do more earlier. Crystal Maiden Competitive Record this patch: 4-3 Notable players: j4 CM has had some rough patches. While she was enjoying a bit of popularity a few months ago, 6.80 shoved her right back down to obscurity with a harsh intelligence nerf. Paired with the one she received not long before in 6.79c, she lost a total of 5 int, 3 base damage, and 65 starting mana. On a hero whose base stats and stat gains were already very mediocre, this was enough to make sure her pick rate plummeted (CM is now tied for the lowest Base Int, with Enchantress). Her issues revolve more around team configuration than her individual nerfs, however. Always being a very low starting strength and gain, her base move speed of 280 has been a limiting factor for a long time. Once the meta began shifting heavily to minute-0 roams, boots first became a near requirement if she wanted to keep up. Whereas her most successful plays are often found as a strictly lane support (Datdota measures almost all her recent wins at over 95% In-Lane time), Crystal Nova and Frostbite are both very strong skills to roam with another stun. But roaming for CM requires that initial investment into either her speed or her survivability - meaning the team needs another hard support to fuel the team with shared tangos, wards, sentries, the courier, etc. While some teams have attempted strategies that start one of their supports with literally 0 net worth - 625 gold worth of consumables and shares - the success stories are few and far between. What does CM need right now to make the cut? Less gold reliance. For a support, she requires far too much investment to meet the same risk:reward other supports offer in this core-heavy gameplay. A few base points of Int returned, or even a minor boost to her starting strength would go a long way to her returning to the pick screen. Huskar Competitive Record this patch: 0-2 Notable players: None really (one-offs) Huskar is an odd one. If you look through his stat gains and the raw amount of buffs he's received, you would think he'd be a solid choice for pocket strats, or even a fringe pickup to fight bulky lineups. But he's unpopular and unsuccessful. The most obvious reason for this is the riskiness of his playstyle: aggression without options. He goes in deep on a core, has to hurt himself to enable his steroid, and rarely-if-ever has an escape route. The obvious reward is that you can take an enemy core to half right as the fight starts, potentially buying you space to deal with the others. In reality however, this plan fails in a lot of ways. Most importantly, Huskar has no options once BKBs are out in force. Unlike a lot of other BKB-limited heroes however, he can't even reliably get his initiation off: the slow cast time and travel time of his ultimate give professional players more than enough time to BKB, Disrupt, or any other variety of options that counteract all the gain he offers. Past that, his once-orb damage steroid works against him in two ways; not only is it blocked by BKB, it's damage is a DoT investment. While that is not always bad, it means that compared to direct-damage add steroids, it buys more time for the target to fight back (and possibly win) or be saved, prolonging the time your "gank" in a fight takes. Huskar also has a somewhat unique problem: he has to do a lot of math. When you're going into a fight as most heroes, a team can figure out what they need to invest on a given target. X attacks will kill them in a gank, Y spells will bring them low enough to finish, etc. Huskar needs to figure that his ult will do 50% (before magic resist) to both parties, then 20 damage/second/spear he gets off. While this may not seem like a big problem (and it isn't in pickoffs), in a fight this means it's harder for him to break away and switch targets. While a regular core can invest a certain amount of attacks to a target and then switch, Huskar needs to figure out when the target will die from his stacked DoTs, and then switch; otherwise, he's essentially wasting DPS in a fight, which is already very limited by his forced item selection. Add in the fact that he's burning down his own HP and probably trading it off for a regen factor that scales directly with his farm, and that makes him almost an anti-snowball - early sacrifices for the team will give a temporary lead, but reduce his usefulness later. What does Huskar need to make the cut? That's a hard question. He's already seen several reworks, a few big buffs, and a solid Aghanim's boost. Outside of a drastic change (his ult partially working through BKB? Spears working through BKB?) or another rework, Huskar might be doomed to obscurity for quite a while. Bounty Hunter Competitive Record this patch: 2-5 Notable players: mouz in general For a hero that wasn't particularly unpopular just a month or two ago, Bounty dropped off the map right around the time 6.81 hit. Which is odd, considering for the last 6 months all he's received are (relatively minor) buffs with no nerfs since 6.77. What happened? In two words: Blink Dagger. The removal of blink daggers mana cost enabled a lot of heroes that deal with Bounty Hunter in a variety of ways to become more popular. This, paired with his innately low mobility (Track being his only real boost there, when you consider that competitive teams are often highly aware of invisible movement), pushed him out of the meta even as he got more buffs to his core skills. Another factor is in play though. Bounty Hunter is a great pick for a big reason: Track Gold. It can keep your team ahead, or help you catch up from behind. The issue is that playing from behind, one of Bounty Hunter's best traits, has become a harder and harder position to work from. As the metagame cycled to its current state, where you have much more equal cores compared to the classic 1-5 farm configuration, it become evident that Bounty Hunter has a hard time keeping up, and can be a hindrance to the team. Pair this with the fact that some of his favorite partners/supports have also fallen from popularity (more on that later), and he disappears. What does BH need to make the cut? Being at the whim of items to the extent that Bounty is makes it hard to say that the hero needs to thrive. My guess is that if we see some fairly innocent looking buffs to things like Urn, Drum, or Desolator, Bounty could make some minor appearances again. The issue there is that none of those items really need looking at, and would buff just as many other, better heroes as they would Bounty. Night Stalker Competitive Record this patch: 4-4 Notable players: none (one-offs) Night Stalker is another hero firmly in Huskar territory: looks great on paper, fails in the field. Receiving nothing but buffs for almost 5 years (though often simply left out of patch notes, which can be seen as a nerf in its own respect), he's starting to feel like a left-behind memory who was never updated to the current meta, and never can without serious changes. His biggest issue is the raw investment you need to make just to become useful. He requires good farm and good exp to reach the kind of power that someone like Dragon Knight can do even if he's being stopped from farming by roamers or aggressive support play. While he has good stat gains, his base stats aren't enough to give him lane presence without investing in items that don't operate well in the current meta - Vanguard namely, but reliance on being the Urn carrier as well hurts him. The biggest change to Nightstalker actually rolled in recently though, and isn't officially a change to him - but it is in every way. The Day/Night cycle was changed from 6 minutes to 4 minutes. While on an immediate level, this seems like it would buff Night Stalker - who when the change occurred, was often already using the first night as a "farm night", not getting aggressive until the second night at 18 minutes - it seems to have actually hurt him. This cycle change means that he will very rarely be Level 6 by the first night. What this means is that he will get maybe one night extension in. While previously you did not want to extend the first "farm night" more than once or twice, it still means that he hits his supposed early game power point - Lv7-8 - right as the first night is ending, instead of near the start/middle of the first night. This makes him more susceptible to ganks during this time, meaning he wastes more of the first night than previously. It also means that by the second night - 12 to 16 minutes, slightly adjusted for the ult usage he may have gotten off - he's potentially not Lv11, as he didn't have consistent night to operate in from Lv7-11, while before it was not uncommon for a Night Stalker to end the first night at Lv11 with some aggressive play. This means the second night may not be as long, hurting him even more. When you add in how aggressive a Night Stalker has to be, and the amount of relatively poor item choices required to keep up, he becomes a highly situational pick with a lot of risk. What does Night Stalker need to make the cut? A direct buff to his ultimate would be my first guess. However, seeing as he's already received that - with his enemies getting less vision in his ult, a powerful tool - he may be up for some base stat increases. Some additional strength, or even intelligence to buy some space for silencing escape artists like Naga and Tinker, might be enough to get him back to the mid lane. This concludes part 1, the first 5 heroes who didn't get selected. I'll work on writing up some information on the last 5 after some sleep. --

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