So after orthodontist and optometrist appointments I finally got around to playing a bunch of games of DotA. Some impressions:
-razor isn't nearly as imba as the changelog made him look. The changelog made it seem as if his passive was triggered every time he took damage, but that just isn't the case. Only targeted spells will trigger the effect. Everything else (damage, aoe, etc) will not. Static field has maximum power of 350 (before reduction), which is fine but not all that impressive. Static link is nice but it isn't the holyshit nonsense people are making it out to be; fights with razor don't generally last all that long one way or the other. Eye of the storm is really quite nice though, it's definitely a gigantic improvement over static field. The fact of the matter remains though: against a good lane razor simply is way too fucking weak (at 17 base str) to survive. He'll be fine for -em, but that's about all.
-Sven has returned! I don't know if he'll see competitive play again, but I love this guy again. Storm Bolt becoming an AoE (targetting like toss) is fantastic. I ran him with Leshrac and got all nostalgic for .47b... He's still pretty dependent on God's Strength, and still vulnerable to a well-placed purge, but he's definitely at least viable again with the AoE stun and global Warcry. Sven & Lesh lane is amazing again :)
-TC is pretty cool! I think he would be a lot cooler if you could actually control the ancestor, however. A lot a lot a lot cooler. You could chain stomps, you could make sure he's actually really where you want him to be, etc. Echo stomp is amazing...it's essentially an AoE nightmare which is pretty rigged, and having an extra echo stomp in an area which may or may not be helpful is just a (sometimes) added bonus. I sure have seen a lot of missed ultis with him already. In team fights with poor coordination: he Echo Stomps, casts ult, allies attack, wake the victims, and they run out of the ult. Oops.
-Batrider: good projectile speed and base damage make him annoying to try to last hit against. Flying over anything is obviously really cool. Napalm stacking means you can (in essence) orb walk runners down to a crawl. Flamebreak is a standard bread and butter nuke. Overall, though, I don't think he's very good at all. With ulti, napalm slow stacking, and the ability to take shortcuts flying where others go around, he'll be fine at tracking down stragglers. But that's pretty much all he can do. In team fights, he's essential worthless. He's got a fair nuke (but nothing to distuinguish him), a shitty disable (napalm) which he won't be able to stack to any meaningful level, and poor dps. His ulti, while sounding pretty awesome, becomes pretty much useless due to its tiny cast range and short duration. I've heard dagger floated around for him with the idea of dagger in drag somebody out, but it's a lot of trouble (and pretty ineffective) just to make a shitty venge.
-Stone gaze is good, split shot still is the worst thing ever. Magic snake max power ~450 (good) but in all likelihood not even close (bad). I still hate Medusa.
I will have more impressions as I play more games in the new version. It's way too soon to tell for me whether this version will actually be an overall improvement on .59, which I must say is one of the best I'd ever seen. Also, I'm happy to say at least it's not a clear fiasco like .50 was.
Oh, and finally I looked around at the new playdota.com site (nice) and the new playdota.com forums (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh my eyes). It really does seem that everybody that made the transition is fucking retarded. Just look at their comp. dota forum.
Wheeeee...looks like my power supply has died. I may be dotaless for the next while.