The poster heroes for taking towers are Pugna, Death Prophet (DP), Shadow Shaman (SS), Nature's Prophet (NP) and the big bad wolf (Lycan). Since the nerf stick hit the DP and Lycan directly, they haven't been first pick/first ban in pro games like they were during The International 2014 but are making appearances in the hands of capable teams and players, like EG's Arteezy and Cloud 9's Eternal Envy. Pugna and the SS have fallen out of favor as a direct result of the meta shift even though they are still viable picks although more niche. The NP is a bit of an oddity here because he's picked to globally gank and fight early, evident by the popularity of the Null Talisman and Blademail build.
The strategy was too oppressive, limiting the number of viable strategies and heroes. Teams with a death ball could take two towers in quick succession by winning a team fight at a tower, executing a successful gank, or slow sieging a tower with a counter initiation edge (think Dark Seer) giving them a huge lead. This lead gave more map control the the death ball leading to Roshan, more towers, securing the enemy jungle, et al. While the lead wasn't always insurmountable, it gave significant percentage points to teams who could reliably leverage it into a win.
Why doesn't the death ball bring all the boys to the yard like it used to? Mostly it's the nerf stick, let's say 50% can be attributed to direct nerfing; Lycan, DP, and NP see play, but NP has evolved so he only counts as half leading to 2.5 out of my 5 poster children.. What about the remaining 50%? I have a few theories, and they go as such:
- Team theory - certain teams do better at certain strategies because of their competent hero pool (who they pick and can play at a professional level) and decision making processes (why they pick certain heroes and how they use them). For tier 1 teams, on an average day, they are all within a few percentage points of each other and a few more percentage points above tier 1.5 and more yet over tier 2 teams. As the meta shifts, these percentages also shift in favor of the team which can leverage those shifts into wins. The examples of this are Alliance and Navi who were so dominant up to the last International, but derailed and haven't found much success since. Thus, because there are narrow margins separating pro teams, shifts in the meta create an environment for teams to capitalize on them based on who they are, dooming teams who relied on strategies which have been pushed out.
- Power Curve theory - with each update and introduction of new heroes, it shifts the aggregate power of all heroes and re-balances the relative power level of all heroes. All you have to do is watch the Beyond the Summit 2 game between Team Tinker and C9 where Lifestealer went up against Terrorblase and it was ugly. TB raised the power curve, pushing comparable heroes out - sorry, naix - and raising the stock of counter picks. A similar phenomena happens with an update, but the aggregate power level may not grow or might even shrink. Since the international, the updates and introduction of more heroes lowered the stock of most death balling heroes or pushed them out of the meta completely; Pugna, Dragon Knight, SS, Enchatress, Chen, Clockwerk, and Lone Druid see basically no play as attributed to the Powe Curve. As one commentator put it, Chen creeps run toward TB and die before they get there.
