In a somewhat surprise blog post, Valve has announced some major changes to Dota 2 are coming, and they're quite soon on the horizon. Previously, people had datamined updates to Dota 2, which many (rightfully) took as a sign that major content updates were coming. Now, with these upcoming changes, let's break down what has been covered.

Here are all of the changes, condensed:

• New Dashboard UI: as seen in the video above, the dashboard has been redesigned, allowing for access to the “play” button at all times, and is built entirely on a new framework that steps away from web pages
• Playing with Friends: players can now invite their friends instantly, chat in lobbies, merge parties, find a friend who's looking for a party, or search for a lobby by type, or more
• Friend Profiles: mousing over a friend icon offers up a mini profile with featured items, friends can now share replay highlights and other achievements on an activity feed, you can see your friends' MMR by hero, and now can look at your play style via a new graph
• Chat Improvements: whisper your friends instantly, group chat room sizes have been increased to 5000 users, and you can customize your chat rooms to show messages from all rooms on all tabs
• Updated Hero Browser: multiple filters allow players to find their preferred heroes quickly, you can now view all cosmetics in the hero browser (and buy them from either the Dota 2 Store or Steam Marketplace), and you can test the hero quickly via a button, allowing you to try abilities or last hits without starting a custom game, with the option to view any cosmetics in the test room, even if you don't own them
• Improved Viewing Experience: DotaTV is expanding to include a variety of stats while also supporting tournament video production, an improved “watch” tab to see featured games, or games your friends are playing or watching, featured tournaments are now much easier to access, you can set bookmarks in replays to quickly view an event again, and replays are easier to share, and now support comments
• Learn to Play: improved tutorial experience and specific mechanical tutorials have been added to the game for all players

And that's not all, of course. The post also promises a custom game workshop, and enhancements to the engine itself, clearly implying the support of Source 2. The custom game support is particularly intriguing, as Dota itself was spawned out of a custom game created in Warcraft 3, becoming wildly popular. Open beta support is promised to come out at the end of this week, so we'll be back with fresh news about how that's going to work when it comes out.