Dota 2 patch 7.00 detailed, adds Monkey King, talents, HUD changes and more

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The long-teased Monkey King finally makes his debut.

Update: the site is live and available in English. The patch will arrive sometime tomorrow.

Valve has been teasing a huge patch for Dota 2 all day, and the countdown finally counted down to reveal...the site crashing, somewhat predictably. However, when it eventually came back online, update 7.00 was revealed to contain a simian royal, character talents, HUD changes and lots of other tweaks.

Well, I say revealed; at the time of writing, Valve has forgotten to put in any of the text, leaving only images and placeholder writing including "U700_HUB_KEYART". (Update: OK now it's all in Chinese.) However, it's easy enough to get the gist of what's been added, not least thanks to a leaked set of patch notes that now appear to be accurate.

Dota 2 patch 7.00 adds the Monkey King, finally, and if you're lucky you'll be able to read all about his various abilities here. It also makes big changes to the HUD, tinkers about with the pregame, and makes big changes to the way the game plays as a whole. (You'll find another section detailing miscellaneous changes to Dota 2 here, including the addition of "community-authored bots".)

People are currently losing their shit over the fact that characters now have talents and talent trees, so that appears to be the biggest change, monkey monarchs aside.

I'm a bit bored of refreshing the Dota 2 site now, and I need to go chop some vegetables, so I'll leave the rest with you. But: Monkey King! Talents! HUD! Are these brilliant or terrible changes? And did I really just spend the last hour and a bit waiting for some damned patch notes to appear? Feel free to answer these questions in the comments.

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.