And then, there was Zet

What? He’s even an agility Hero. (Art by phsueh.deviantart.com)

So. About this guy.

Let’s use a quote from his Bio now, shall we?

“Before the beginning of all, there existed a presence: a primordial mind, infinite, awesome, and set to inscrutable purpose.”

Inscrutable purpose. I couldn’t have phrased it better in a thousand years.

“Generally”, Heroes in Dota have concepts, according to which they’re made, and roles in the game, which they fill. Those are determined mostly by their skillset. And after this elementary lesson, let’s ask ourselves.

How the HECK did this make it through the development stage.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying he’s overpowered. Broken doesn’t necessarily equal overpowered; it can mean a lot of things, like being game winning in certain scenarios and utterly useless in others, or being sort of irrelevant to the game itself (I can hear you complaining, Techies pickers!).

Seeing Zet’s first 3 skills, we’d think we’re dealing with a crowd controller over here. Despite being agility, his highest stat is intelligence, followed by strength. Flux is a spell that forces an opponent to either take good damage and slow, or stand near an ally, which can provide some good setup. Magnetic Field is his OPWTF stuff, being an AoE Windrun that also boosts your team’s DPS (it even works on Towers, but MKB doesn’t). Spark Wraith may seem a bit underwhelming, but with its low cooldown and high cast range it can be used in a variety of ways, as in provide vision along with its damage or even work like poor man’s mines.

But then, there’s he’s ult.

All that I described above? They don’t matter in the least.

If Arc Warden is played as a crowd controller, he’s pretty average. I’d say he’d never be able to stand in a real game nowadays. With Tempest Double, he doesn’t have to.

All he needs is to farm with his double Midas and Boots of Travel around the map, until he gets big.

And by big, of course, I mean you could go Dagon+Ethereal and 1-shot people, maybe throw in a Hex, and be annoying.

But that would be sort of acceptable, since we have Tinker as well, who fills a similar role.

No, there’s bigger than that. See, normally illusions don’t benefit from raw damage. Apparently, Tempest Double is not considered an illusion for any purpose though.

Zet is the ONLY Hero in the game that can win from his fountain. Double Rapier + BKB (which doesn’t lose duration if you don’t activate it on the main Hero) + Necronomicon and maybe an AC, and you’re practically a natural disaster. You can destroy anything, yet nobody can do anything about you. You can change the build around, we’ve seen Mask of Madness etc, but that’s the main idea.

Flux and Spark Wraith don’t even matter. You might as well get stats. Frankly, I’m surprised people don’t just do that. You can sit in the fountain and right-click buildings with 1000 damage, never losing the Rapiers or BKB duration.

People will argue that it can be hard to reach that point in the game. I say, name one other Hero that can win from their fountain, not 40 or 50 minutes, but 120,180,240 minutes in.

Nobody, of course. And this shouldn’t happen at all.  I don’t care how farmed a Hero is, they shouldn’t be able to win by AFKing. It doesn’t even have to do with being overpowered, I’m very well aware he can easily lose, especially in this meta, where carries should be active. It reminds me a bit of two patches back, when one guy picked Techies and the game itself changed. For the worse.

I’d like to see some remakes on Zet, so he can just be the nuker/crowd controller he was meant to be. It’s obvious that was the initial intent, but something went horribly wrong along the way.