A quick list of 6 interesting 7.20 mechanics you might not know about – I hope it’s useful!

This means that you can use it to farm Ancients without taking any damage (as shown in the screenshot). The duration is fairly long. This means that if you don’t intend to use Blur to gank it’s a great idea to use it for farming. This is especially useful early on when you don’t have a lot of HP and HP sustain and would otherwise take significant damage from the Ancient camp.

With some preparation, with the help of a BF or/and the Cleave talent, you can use this mechanic to easily farm a big Ancient stack.

On max level Devour has 40 sec CD and 80 sec duration. This means that after you eat a second creep, you’ll have 40 health regeneration bonus. This, of course, stacks with your own HP regen from other spells/items/str. On the screenshot Doom has a Satyr Tormentor’s regen aura (5.5) + his own regen, which nets him 52 HP per second.

Needless to say, having close to 50 HP regen on lvl7 makes you extremely hard to kill and could allow you to play very aggressively – e.g. to dive towers in order to secure a kill.

Some fun with WTF mode:

This means that after your 4^th hit, every ally hero attacking the tower gets a 100 AS bonus as shown on the screenshot.

This, coupled with the fact that he is one of the hardest heroes to kill in the game, automatically makes Abaddon one of the strongest tower pushers in 5-man pushing strategies. Core Abaddon (pos. 1 and especially pos. 3) could easily become one of the most valuable picks in the game and a great pub stomper.

Another interesting mechanic is that Curse of Avernus gets applied by Manta illusions as well. With the two Illusions + Echo Sabre, you can get 4 hits almost instantly (remember that it also silences the target). This is strong, but we are not confident it will stay in the game for long.

50% CDR on max level is amazing. With Dazzle’s short CD spells it almost feels as if you are playing WTF mode. The CDR on items, however, is even more powerful: 12 sec CD on Hex, 20 sec on Guardian Greaves, 15 sec on Shiva’s, 3.5 sec on Solar Crest, 35 sec on Midas, 14 sec on Meteor Hammer, etc.

This, combined with Dazzle’s lvl10 75 damage talent makes a very strong case for a core (usually on the mid lane) Dazzle. 30% CDR on a fast Midas will help a lot for Dazzle’s resource growth. Nonetheless, the CDR shouldn’t be underestimated on a support as well.

Battle Trance’s “can’t die” mechanic works similarly to Shallow Grave. This means that when Troll is on low enough HP, Axe can instantly kill him. Axe is already a very good hero against Troll. This mechanic makes him even better. Since Troll (and some other AGI carries like AM, PA, etc.) will increase in popularity after the new patch, learning to play Axe well enough could give you great win rate in 7.20.

Status Resistance is a controversial mechanic – many people believe it makes skill combos (e.g. Invoker’s Tornado into Meteor/EMP/Sunstrike) too hard to pull off because the disable duration would constantly vary. Since the mechanic is in the game, however, it could be valuable to learn to use it to your advantage. Stacking status resistance (especially as a STR hero) against heavy disable lineups is obvious. However, you can use this offensively as well:

Bane’s Enfeeble (60% negative Status Resistance) and Rubick’s new Arcane Supremacy (44% longer debuff duration of Rubick’s spells) stack. This means that picking Rubick + Bane versus teams with powerful disables (especially single-target) is a great idea. For example, Beastmaster's Roar stolen from Rubick, cast on a target with Enfeeble makes it a ~8-second stun, which is ridiculously long. Even in case you cannot steal the right spell at the right time, Enfeeble makes Rubick’s own Telekinesis a powerful 3.5 second disable. Bear in mind that Telekinesis has 7 sec CD with the lvl25 Talent, which means with Enfeeble it has 50% uptime (on a stun + repositioning spell!).