DOTA 2

P

Pinch_sl

shitlord
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0
Great back and forth game so far between alliance and liquid. Alliance looked ready to take rosh and a lane or two of rax but loda overextended a couple times and got killed at the beginning of fights. Now after a 15k gold swing for liquid alliance is starting to even things out again. Liquids sustained push looks like too much to handle unless alliance can get a fast kill or two on some cores and turn that into raxes.

Edit: right after I post that, alliance executed a perfect smoke gank. It's fun to watch alliance play like a top team again!
 
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Luthair

Lord Nagafen Raider
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Guess the groups weren't balanced, all of Group B is eliminated in their first play-off match.

Secret seemed to be the best team at dealing with Lone Druid, in their games they repeatedly killed the bear. LD himself feels like he has too much defensive power with ultimate & roar, the hero himself rarely every seems to die.

Slightly surprised that Philippines were awarded the major, they do love dota but given the org partnerships I expected Starladder or Dreamhack would have been thrown a bone. (MLG seems like a non-starter now that Bliz has bought it.)
 
Zaphid

Zaphid

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While seeing Alliance on top once again is nice, there's something off about being shit until the game gets patched again to fit your playstyle/signature heroes.
 
Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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lol How do you solve a problem like Maria.

Sucks for other teams the patch is so balanced. Do you ban LD, NP, Chen, Rubick, Puck, Bat, Jugg, Oracle, Brood, Dazzle, QoP, ES, Dark Seer, IO, Death Prophet? Etc...
 
L

Luthair

Lord Nagafen Raider
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I don't think the game is all that balanced. LD and DP both seem broken.

The patch timing to me is odd, to me the best time would be in the post-major lull to introduce big changes. That would allow players to adjust and learn through the other tournaments making the major the culmination of the patch.
 
Zaphid

Zaphid

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Yeah, I'm fairly confident that DP definitely needs a slap, Siphon is broken. LD might as well too, but I'm less sure about what to target. The fact that bat with Aether Lens has like 6.82 Lasso also doesn't help things. Due to his mechanics being extremely conductive to getting kills out of nowhere in the early game, he will always be picked, since there are like 3 people who can play him 110% and get those kills. Guaranteed safe intiation is just a cherry on top, since the other team has to draft a support to break the lasso or suffer terribly. Honestly at this point I'd make force staff break lasso to see what happens.

The patch was really heavy, which comes down to 6.85 being rather light patch and 6.86 coming out a bit later than people wanted. I know it's Valve and Icefrog, but when you have huge tournament every ~4 months, you need to schedule your work accordingly. The Major schedule also seemingly killed any cosmetic sales outside them, which makes me worry about the scene. Valve could also add some for the last few heroes - Undying has been meta forever, yet he has only that one mausoleum, that's it.
 
Cyni

Cyni

Lord Nagafen Raider
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DP has looked terrible in this tourney though. Awful win rate from what i've seen.

Her mana costs are really high early too... Dunno, hasn't been a problem in pubs from what i've seen, especially considering how much of a scourge invoker has been for the past few weeks/months.
 
Nite1

Nite1

<WoW Guild Officer>
786
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I don't think I agree that lone druid is overpowered right now.he's a strong hero that's back in the meta after a long time being out of it. I think if you wait a little while longer and give it more time people are going to figure out how to play and beat it and it won't seem op. Honestly the only thing that seems a little over powered is how tanky the heroes seems to get when he gets his ult at level 6. Bats interesting because on one hand your right he's almost back to ti3 levels but it needs 2 items and one of 3 or 4 people to show case it. Interestingly I think there's a couple more heros now that are in the game that weren't back then that are actually capable of countering him. I think the patch while it came out late still came out early enough for people to be ready for the next major I'm also really enjoying it because playmaking mids are back in vogue.. all that aside best part about this game is you don't like this play style wait till the next big patch and theyll probably buff other play styles
 
Genjiro

Genjiro

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DP was like 4-11 or maybe 4-12 now in this tourney, teams are learning to deal with her or draft stuff like Puck etc who can just get away from her. FATA was especially terrible on her letting Rubick steal his exorcism multiple times this tourney
 
Pyros

Pyros

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DP is stronger, but I don't feel she's really that good still, her ultimate still has a stupid long cd and has very different results in teamfights depending on wether or not you can actually sit in the middle of everyone or have to run/the enemy team runs so it's best at roshan/towers but for these the cooldown is detrimental quite often(if you push a tower with ult, you can't fight on roshan/take a teamfight, if you take rosh with it, you have to wait a few minutes for it to come back up before you can actually push etc).

And more importantly she still needs a fuckton of items to be viable cause she needs both a good mana pool and to be tanky, but her base stats offer none of these so you do need the eul AND like 2 tank items and you probably want a lens too for the siphon, so in the end you're looking at 35-40mins to be combat ready(even though she farms quite fast). And the hero is still shit if her ultimate is down at any point in the game, which makes her buybacks in general complete garbage(siphon also sucks for that same reason, cd is 45secs).

LD on the other hand is boss. Giving him a hard CC, that also doubles as an efficient escape mechanic and can be used at proxy range with the bear is massive. Meanwhile the hero wasn't that bad really to begin with, and the addition of the claw thing and the offlane jungle camp makes him way way more viable than before in offlane.

Also Alliance showing that the invite wasn't completely bullshit either. They probably will get crushed in the finals, but they're back to tier1 I'd say, or at least dominating tier2. That's the best they've been since the TI they won tbh. Funny that it's with basically the same team.
 
Dandain

Dandain

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All heroes have gone through viability cycles, its just Dota. I believe Alliance is better for one main reason. They have a mid who never was a farming mid. S4's best skill is he is a decisive initiator, it just so happens that for the last year and a half midlane initiators were basically a no-no. His signature heroes have finally become playable out of mid again. Likewise bulldog is a pretty shit initiator comparatively to his other skills. He's a hard farming offlaner who excels in 1v1, offlane meta was exclusively the realm of the poor initiators for the last stretch of time as well. Yes Alliance are patched back in. But they basically got patched the fuck out. Their game mechanic abuse got us to the buyback mechanics we have today. Also, the amount of tools to catch and murder the split push bullshit is drastically increased, along with an efficiency nerf directed at the playstyle.

My two least favorite patch times in Dota 2. When Centaur was so fucking broken his ult stunned globally, and TI3 era shadowblade split push buyout spamming Nature's Prophet.
 
Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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Yeah, that is disappointing. SL messed up on their webpage and listed it as a Bo5 but then v1lat confirmed on Twitter yesterday or the day before that it was in fact just Bo3.
 
Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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I'd have to watch the replay but I think one big mistake EG made was backing off that T1 topnwhen Bulldog pulled the creep wave with his trees. T1s have no backdoor and I'm pretty sure they could have downed the tower and backed off rather than sitting around and waiting for Alliance to rotate and get kills.
 
Genjiro

Genjiro

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Ugh, thanks for this bullshit dota again IF.....fuck Alliance and this gay shit. Zerg with bear, trees, chen creeps etc. Bleh

Bad flashacks to a couple TIs ago ;/
 
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