There's been a flood in the Wandering Waters update for Dota 2

While Valve continue building up their next MOBA with Deadlock, their current Dota 2 is still as popular as ever and the Wandering Waters update for Dota 2 sounds pretty awesome.

As expected from a major update the patch notes are ridiculously long, as it seems to touch on so many different areas of the game. If you haven't played for quite some time (like me), prepare to re-learn a whole lot of it. From a changed map to gameplay features, there's a lot that's new.

The biggest change being the map which is a lot wetter. There's been a bit of a flood and so the water that was a sort of diving-line in the map has expanded and reshaped the battlefield. This comes with new gameplay features like faster movement when running with the current, slowing you if you run against it and a new amphibious creep type that evolves during the match.

Dota 2 has also introduced Madstone, a new resource to craft specialised Neutral Items. Clearing out a Neutral Camp will you give 2 and 1 to a random ally. Saving them up for a while and you can then use them to craft your fully personalized items: an Artifact that gives your item new abilities, and an Enchantment that gives it passive stat/attribute bonuses.

There's various other quality of life additions like a timer to see when Roshan will return, marking items to sell as soon as you're alive again, new item effects to help you see which hero is the source of it, a backpack grace period giving you six seconds to pull newly acquired items out and more.

Other gameplay features were also tweaked like Lifesteal. It no longer has various ways of working, instead Valve made it a much more standard ability making it easier to understand:

• Lifesteal applies to physical damage from attacks and is reduced by 40% when damaging non-heroes.
• Spell Lifesteal now applies to physical damage from spells and magical damage from spells or attacks and is reduced by 80% when damaging non-heroes.
• Neither Lifesteal nor Spell Lifesteal applies to pure damage.

I genuinely think I'm going to have to get back into Dota 2, for real this time, it all sounds awesome.

Check out everything on the update page.