A first look at the new Faceless Void

In the latest patch, Faceless Void underwent a reasonably heavy rework, replacing his Backtrack passive with a new active spell. From glass cannon to Saahil 'Universe' Arora offlane, we will take a look at the hero and the statistics on what's making the new Faceless Void work.

First let's take a look at the win rate of the hero since the changes have been made.

Graph courtesy of Dotabuff.com

Since the patch was released, the hero suffered an incredible drop in win rate. As shown by the graph on the right, before the changes were made, Faceless Void had only a 45% win rate, and had only been picked in 2 professional games in 6.85. The hero's win rate dropped to 40% after the patch was released.

However, the hero's pick rate in games increased from 9.5% to 12%, going 1% above the average pick rate of all heroes. However, this trend didn't last long, as only 11 days after the patch the hero's pick rate went down to an even lower 7.5%.

As of now, Faceless Void is the 61st most picked hero in 6.86c.



These statistics suggest that the old build is no longer the most efficient. When Void was a favourable carry, most players would build one or two items that increased the hero's farming potential, most commonly Battle Fury and Mask of Madness. However we can see the largely unsuccessful 42% win rate when the hero has a Mask of Madness.


Interestingly the win rate of Faceless Void finishing the game with a Daedelus is 62.10%, whilst a non-upgraded Crystalis only has a win rate of 31.04%. Other traditional safe-lane carries such as Drow (22.32%), Phantom Lancer (18.08%) and Phantom Assassin (21.81%) all have a roughly 20% difference between win rates with Crystalis and Daedalus. When looking at the average GPM of all heroes, Faceless Void fares quite nicely, sitting just underneath Phantom Lancer and Invoker with a GPM of 434.1.

Professional games
The new Faceless Void has made 4 appearances in professional games, all of which were in the Chinese scene. In the Radiant Dire Cup, Vici Gaming's offlaner, Daryl 'iceiceice' Koh reinvented Universe's offlane Void, winning 3/3 games when taking the hero to the hard lane. The only other time the hero has been picked competitively was by Invictus Gaming, where safelane carry player Luo 'Luo / Xi' Yinqi went 1/9/7 in a 64 minute game.





Looking at the previously mentioned statistics from professional games, is Void's new place in the offlane? It's far too early to tell, but there are some other statistics we can look at. When laning, Faceless void in the offlane has a marginal 0.28% higher win rate. Whilst this could quite possibly be down to chance, the professional statistics back it up. Iceiceice has won all three games on Void, building an interesting Vlads, Blink and Aghs each game.

 Whilst Void might have the highest last hits, gold and kills when put in the safelane, this isn't necessarily representative how how the hero excels. It is more likely that these statistics don't show the impact of the hero in the safelane, but rather how the safelane affects the hero. Despite these statisics, the hero still has a higher win rate in the offlane, however marginal that may be.

Source : Joindota