+6 Treants: but is it as good as +6 Treants?

Patch 7.00 and talent trees

On December 12, 2016, according to the Valve Developer Community, Dota 2 released patch 7.00, “The New Journey.” Among other things, it added talent trees: per the Dota 2 Wiki, every hero got talents at levels 10, 15, 20, and 25, and level 25 talents were generally very powerful.

Nature’s Prophet (Furion) stood out against that backdrop: his level 25 talent gave +6 Treants to his summon, and the Dota 2 Wiki calls it “abysmally weak.” The talent is gone from the hero’s current page, which now lists “+5 Treants” at level 15.

“But is it as good as +6 Treants?”

A sarcastic joke grew up around the weak talent. The question “But is it as good as +6 Treants?” gets asked about obviously strong talents and changes for other heroes, as if the treants were the gold standard of power. The Dota 2 Wiki and TV Tropes both cite the line, and according to the Dota 2 Wiki, AdmiralBulldog spearheaded the joke.

The link between the talent and patch 7.00 specifically comes mainly from the Dota 2 Wiki; it could not be checked against the patch notes themselves. The meme doesn’t depend on that, though. It rests on an inverted judgment in which the weakest bonus is jokingly declared unbeatable.

Gabe Newell’s Reddit AMA and “6 Treants!”

The meme locked in on January 17, 2017, when Gabe Newell held a Reddit question-and-answer session (AMA). He opened with “Hi. I’m Gabe Newell. AMA” and added that he was in a conference room with colleagues from VR, Dota, and Steam.

One user asked, “What was your favorite change in 7.00?” The answer was short: “6 Treants!”, one of several one-word replies in a row. The AMA transcript preserved it, and the Spanish site MásGamers mentioned it too; according to the transcript, the session had about forty question posts in all.

Valve’s head effectively picked up the community’s joke about the weak talent. In the same session he wrote that of Valve’s multiplayer games, he plays Dota 2 the most. The talent itself appeared in December 2016, but the card says 2017, the year of that answer.

Gabe Newell at TI2018 on the card

The meme card shows a photo of Gabe Newell at The International 2018: in profile, wearing glasses, with a gray beard. It is not a game screenshot or a treant, but a portrait of the man behind that “6 Treants!” answer.

The photo itself has nothing to do with the AMA: it comes from a different event, a year and a half after the answer.

Caption examples and neighboring memes

People use the phrase ironically whenever someone praises a strong buff, an update, or any improvement in life, comparing it to a “benchmark” that was actually weak. These examples are made up for illustration:

“The new phone is nice, sure, but is it as good as +6 Treants?” “Axe got five armor. Not bad. But it’s no +6 Treants,” “Favorite change in the patch? Obviously, 6 Treants!” “His ultimate got twice as strong. But is it as good as +6 Treants?”

Related memes include the patch-rating lines “Literally nothing / Literally something” and the OSFrog jokes about IceFrog’s idea of “balance.”