Notorious Dota 2 pub hero Tinker has seen his win rate plummet following Patch 7.36 on May 23. This was due to drastic changes to the hero’s abilities, which saw a key part of Tinker’s playstyle disappear overnight.
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As with all major patches, we saw a major shake-up in the metagame. The latest patch saw the addition of Facets and Innate abilities to all heroes. However, Tinker stands out as the one with the biggest change in win rate. According to stats site Dotabuff, the hero currently has a meager 35.18 percent win rate. Before the patch, it was a respectable 49.40 percent.
Tinker saw the bulk of his kit reworked in Patch 7.36. There is, however, one major change that fundamentally alters how the Dota 2 hero has been played throughout his entire existence: Rearm no longer refreshes item cooldowns. This means no more Soul Ring for the hero to spam his spells or other items forever, no more non-stop Blinking across the map, no more late-game perma-Hex, and no more constant Wind Wakers as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
While Tinker was undoubtedly a notoriously difficult hero to deal with, especially in an uncoordinated pub, even the hero's biggest detractors are surprised at the neutralization of the hero's unique playstyle. "By removing the ability to refresh ANY item, they killed the hero and his flavor. Slowly but surely, every hero is being dulled into a bland version of themselves," one player said in a May 24 thread on the Dota 2 subreddit.
