Before You Buy: TI 9 Battle Pass Feature Breakdown and Analysis

This feature allows you to create a list of Dota 2 friends without actually having to add those players to your Steam friends list. This comes in quite handy while playing the game, as it allows you to keep track of all of those great teammates that you encounter while solo queueing and add them to a special friends list. Then, when you want to play again, you can signal to that list that you’re looking for party members.

This is probably the most practical feature of the TI 9 Battle Pass. Everyone who has ever played Dota, especially at a reasonably high level, knows that encountering a toxic or really bad player more than once will instantly make you want to abandon a match. Past a certain point, you know ahead of the game that your chances of winning are considerably worse under these conditions.

Usually, people mute such players and report them. However, because it’s a team game, Dota 2 requires communication and cooperation if you want to succeed. So muting someone, while it does come with a few perks such as peace of mind, will often make it even harder for you to win.

The Avoid Player feature is designed to make the match-making system behave more friendly towards you and guarantee that you won’t encounter unwanted teammates again. By adding them to a blacklist of unwelcome guests, they will never show up in your teams. This can really boost your morale when searching for your next game.

Thanks to this feature, less MMR will be lost due to in-fighting and account buyers. However, the Avoid Player feature tends to be truly useful only above a certain skill bracket and the players who will experience the best results will probably be the ones who are Ancient+. That’s because, below the Ancient division, there are so many players on each server that getting rid of one or two or even one hundred won’t be enough. You’ll always encounter other griefers that are just as bad.

The system still guarantees that you won’t meet the blacklisted player again (at least, not in your team), but the effectiveness of that will be reduced by the large number of possibilities that are available overall.

These are features that actually offer you some valuable in-game information. For example, how strong each of your lineup heroes is relative to what the other team has drafted. Any advantage is highlighted with green using percentages and any disadvantage is highlighted with red in the same way. So if you have a handicap of 3%, you know that your hero is at a slight disadvantage within the current matchup.

Another assistant feature is the camp-stacking one. This allows you to stack camps more easily thanks to the timer it shows as well as the camp boxes.

A third assistant feature is the ward suggester. This is extremely valuable for newer players, as it allows them to see what their options are in terms of warding.

And finally, there’s the damage summary assistant, which gives you a summary of the damage you’ve received. It also tells you how much of it was physical and how much was magical. This will allow you to start noticing patterns as an inexperienced player and figure out what builds you should use against each lineup, what mistakes you are making when playing various roles and so on.

For example, if you’re playing the carry role and you’re taking a lot of damage, you know that your positioning in team fights is poor. Or maybe your movement around the map isn’t very good and as a result, you get ganked and killed more often than you should. In that sense, the TI 9 Battle Pass can provide excellent feedback and serve as a coach thanks to the information it provides you with.

This feature is available for all those who use Dota Plus but now, it will also be available for TI 9 Battle Pass owners. If you’re not familiar with it, it basically allows you to pick your desired role before queueing for a match, so that you may play that role for certain instead of having to roll for it or argue with your teammates.

These are features that don’t interfere with gameplay in a concrete way but still improve your playing experience in a significant way.

The MVP vote allows each person to vote for the best player of the winning team at the end of the game. This player will be featured in the post-game screen and will receive a mention on his friend feed. Furthermore, during the pre-game of his next match, he will receive recognition for his MVP award from the previous match. This way, you will know if you’re playing with or against someone who was the MVP of their previous game. Winning enough MVP awards will unlock special achievements within the TI 9 Battle Pass.

From a practical standpoint, the MVP Vote feature doesn’t change anything. And yet it still gives players a huge motivation boost to keep playing and keep improving. For those who are good at the game and are used to carrying their teams to victory, it can create momentum and increase their next team’s morale before the fight. Noticing that you have an MVP in your team is likely to make you think: “Surely, we have an excellent chance of winning this one, since I have strong players fighting beside me.”

This TI 9 Battle Pass feature is similar to the MVP Vote but in a way, it’s more impressive and more highlighted. At the start of the match, one player from each team gets featured with one of their impressive Dota 2 achievements. Dota Plus Hero stats, excellent recent performances and other things of this nature increase a player’s chance of being put in the spotlight, where everyone can see one of his achievements.

This is one of the best in-game features offered by the TI 9 Battle Pass and it consists of famous caster lines from the past 9 years of Dota. The lines come from English, Russian, Chinese and other language-speaking casters from all around the professional circuit. However, you do need a fairly high Battle Pass level to unlock them. A total of 12 packs are available. The first one is unlocked at level 44 while the last one is unlocked at level 1205.

As usual, the TI 9 Battle Pass comes with many visual features, from living towers to item effects. It also comes with an Earthshaker arcana, a Tiny prestige item, a young invoker persona, an Axe bare-knuckle set and a lot of other immortals and special visual effects. If you’re a fan of beautiful visuals and eye candy enhancements, you will absolutely love this year’s TI compendium.

The extra playable content offered by the TI 9 Battle Pass is called Wrath of the Mo’Rokai. What this custom game mode will offer is yet to be revealed.