The Battle Pass 2022 Part 2 brings along the much-anticipated Diretide Collector’s Cache, featuring hundreds of workshop submissions following the Diretide theme.

While there are a whopping 128 sets up for voting till November 15, not all the sets make it into the voting phase. This begs the question of why some outstanding sets, such as the Mecha Venomancer set did not make the cut.

Glance value and Lore adherence

Valve seemingly decided that they are unbothered with glance value and lore adherence of hero sets in today’s standards. Plenty of sets this year, borrow themes from other games and pop culture. Marci is by far the most targeted “lore unfriendly” hero in most submissions. Some submissions, like the Dragon Knight set in blue tone, made the hero undistinguishable from the other blue-themed carry hero, Phantom Assassin. There is several examples of some outright silly submissions, but this year the devs simply don’t care.

In fact, the last time Valve made a big deal about maintaining lore in hero cosmetics was when they released the infamous Cowboy Ursa set back in the year 2012. During the early beta days of Dota 2, it seems like the player base complained about the set breaking lore and going too far. Thus, Valve made the decision to remove the $14 set from the store and made it immortal for those who bought it. Yet, after that incident, many fans were once again complaining to Valve to make it available again, probably because the remaining sets spiked to the value of thousands.

The Cowboy set released back in 2012 by Valve

Mecha Venomancer set is decently in line with what is acceptable for Dota 2 sets, considering it still maintains the hero’s default color, yellow. And there is no other robotic, slithering hero that we would mistake it for.

The Mechamancer Venomancy set on Dota 2 workshop

Too many sets for one hero

With 125 slots for sets, you would think that we could at least get a featured set for every hero just to appease the general audience. Well, that’s not the case when new heroes, such as Mars, Marci, and Primal Beast get up to six sets per hero.

These could be slots for other heroes, but we can’t be certain about how Valve picked the 125 sets out of the many more workshop submissions. Now, these sets are by no means, unqualified, but what’s the justification for having six Marci sets featured for voting?

Not to mention that this Diretide Collector’s Cache will likely have one set per hero in it unless Valve decides to break traditions again. Including more than one Marci set into the Collector’s Cache just because the Marci sets won the most votes, would be unreasonable, to say the least.

More in Diretide Collector’s Cache II?

Based on previous years, we have seen Valve release a second iteration of the Collector’s Cache because there are too many awesome sets. Hence, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the missing sets make the cut during second round of voting.

After all, the International just ended, and we are only at Week 11 of the Battle Pass 2022, with eight more weeks of Diretide fun. Perhaps around week 15 or 16, which should be just enough duration for the first Collector’s Cache run to end, leaving just enough duration for the second Diretide Collector’s Cache.

It’s your right to vote!

With all said and done, Valve has been rather generous this year by making the entry-level Battle Pass accessible. The Level 1 Battle Pass uses the respective players’ local currency, which is generally lower than the $10 USD default price. Additionally, Valve also gave every player a Swag Bag, containing an Arcana of our choice, a month’s Dota Plus submission, and a Level 1 Battle Pass.

That means everyone has a say on sets they like, which of course, is still based on final majority vote.