Dota Underlords releases the last update before Season 1

Valve have unveiled an update this Thursday, which will introduce a plethora of changes to the Dota-themed auto battler game Dota Underlord, including a new ranged hero with an exciting arsenal of abilities, named Enno.

The announcement of the Dota Underlords update surfaced on Dota Underlords official Twitter account, where Valve unveiled the heavily anticipated auto battler game will come out of the Early Access on February 25, 2020, making it fully accessible by anyone.

The announcement on Steam read:

"As mentioned a few weeks ago, this will be our last major update before we come out of Early Access and ship Season 1. The team is now heads down adding features, creating content, and polishing UI. With Season 1, Underlords will introduce new content with City Crawl, new rewards with a full Battlepass, and a new meta with a Hero / Item rotation."

Introduction of Enno

Enno is a small rodent-like hero who resides in White Spire. The people of White Spire are known for scavenging and stealing to get by, however, Enno "believes his destiny is to lead his people out of the shadows into greatness and will employ every underhanded tactic he can think of in order to make that dream into a reality."

Enno, the Scavenger King, was introduced to the game as a furry jerk with a chip on his shoulders that uses every dirty trick in the book if it means he can run White Spire. Although he might look cute, his looks should fool no one. Enno, who will become a new hero of Dota Underlords will be one of the most exciting, yet one of the evilest and cunning additions to the hero lineup, partly due to his intriguing spells and abilities.

The newly added ranged hero will have two builds, which will be randomly presented. Depending on your luck, Enno will sometimes steal items from the enemy crew, while healing his own team, other times he'll amp up his own damage and pull the enemy crew in an all-out attack.

ABILITIES:

Passive (Escape Artist): once per combat, when Enno drops below a certain % of health (25/50/75), he will escape in a could of smoke, reappearing elsewhere on the board, stunning adjacent enemies for 1.5 seconds.

Build 1 – Rabid Furball; Enno lassos the enemy team and poisons them.

Death spin: Enno leaps into the air and shoots a furry of poison darts, dealing damage and applying poison to his enemies.

All out attack: Enno lassos his enemies and launches an All Out Attack, dealing damage and displacing his targets back onto random cells.

Build 2 – Healin' n' Stealin': Enno heals his crew and steals items from the enemy.

Dr. Enno's Soothing Balm: Enno leaps in the air and shoots a flurry of poison darts, healing his allies and applying poison to enemies.

Yoink: Enno steals and equips the lowest tier item from the enemy crew. When an enemy dies in Eno's attack range, he loots them if they have a better item equipped.

According to the announcement, the leaping, poison-damage dealing hero will be one of the four Underlord options that will become available at the end of Round 1 in Knockout and later at the end of the ninth round in Standard and Duos game modes.

With the arrival of Enno, Underlords will also be introduced to a new status effect – poison. Poisoned units will take 15 physical damage per second while reducing their healing by 10% for five seconds. Poison effects can stack up to five times.

GENERAL CHANGES:

Improved lighting in Dota Underlords.

Fixed low-resolution textures issues on Underlords mobile.

Further fixes to an issue where the map was not loading properly at the start of the match.

Fixed a bug which would display a wrong rank icon on the post-match screen.

Fixed more places, where an Underlord's base ability icon or name would be shown rather than the version of that ability used by the Underlords build.

UNDERLORDS CHANGES:

Jull: fixed an issue where Barrels of Fun ballers would hit Spiderlings.

Hogben: fixed an issue where enemy Spiderlings would cause other enemies to take decreased damage from Implosion and Shockwave.

UNIT CHANGES:

There will be only one change in this directory and it will be directed towards Venomancer's Venomous Gale, which will now apply poisons to its targets.

ITEM CHANGES

Blade Mail: Fixed bonus armour error in the description.

Orb of Venom: Instead of applying damage, Orb of Venom now applies poison to go along with its name.

ALLIANCE CHANGES

Brute will no longer be able to switch targets mid-swing, which fixes an old bug, that has been infuriating Dota Underlords players for a while now.

The official launch of Dota Underlords Season 1 is now less than a month away and while there was a lot of hype about this game at its launch, it was just recently reported it has lost over 90% of its initial player base, which is a concerning number, to say the least. As reported, there were approximately 200,000 people who checked out the game at its launch back in June 2019, while the numbers at the start of January showed that there were less than 20,000 people playing the game at its peak, meaning the number did not even reach 10% of the first month's score. Dota 2 has been battling the same issue recently and while the player base in the Valve's MOBA game title has not seen such a significant drop as in Dota Underlords, it's obvious players are leaving Dota 2 as well.

Nonetheless, we can safely assume the player base of Underlords is bound to increase, especially if Season 1 ends up being good. While we can hardly expect all 200,000 people to return, even if half of the player base decides to give Underlords another try, Dota Underlords can become one of the most popular games of its genre.