Dota 2 Discussion (~Boston Majors & Road to TI7~)

[Mr. Pink]

TEAM SECRET IN FLAMES

 

[Great Deceiver]

2 morbid masks

 

[Great Deceiver]

Drow drafts are always so lame. I don't think Na'Vi has this game at all.

edit: nevermind, EE is being a fucking retard.

re-edit: yep, EE lost the game.

 

[Mr. Pink]

This Secret team is a joke. Fuck rtz. Fuck Envy. Fuck PUPPEY. These guys are the most popular players in the west and they just show up to collect their checks and live in a mansion

EE was the fucking worst player on this series by a large margin. Both terrible games, I can seriously tell that if you had put me in there (4,5k player), the outcome would be the same

i hate people saying bad stuff to Pro player but right now i feel like my Clinkz is better with what envy showed. please stop breaking my heart secret

BabyRage OVERRATED PLAYER BabyRage NEVER WINS ANYTHING BabyRage RUINS EVERY TEAM HE JOINS BabyRage ALWAYS RAGES BabyRage SMALL DICK BabyRage ALWAYS WRONG BabyRage MUST BE ARTEEZY BabyRage

me drinking secret fangay tears

 

[Great Deceiver]

Seems the go-to way to beat Secret is to sit on rtz mid and just let EE do EE things.

Poor Universe.

 

[you know what time it is]

EE is bottom 10. His decision making is undeniably retarded. He threw so many games, I can't even count. Just getting carried. As much as I hate to admit, w33 is pretty good. Puppan, Pie and Misery are all veterans and have a pretty big pool of heroes couple all of that with good drafts and any 5k carry will do a better job than EE.

Called it. DC (w33, Misery) beat Wings, while SEcrEt can't even get a map of off Navi, rofl.

Poor Universe.

Indeed

 

[you know what time it is]

me drinking secret fangay tears

Weren't you choking on EE's balls last time i checked?

 

[Great Deceiver]

Alright, Navi vs DC game 2 was one of the better games I've seen in a long time.

 

[Mr. Pink]

https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/4mnn8n/team_secret_please_read_this_i_know_how_you_can/

I started writing this as a response to melonzz https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/4mjhg9/advice_to_team_secret_from_navi/d3wi2ht in the other thread, but as I went on I thought it best to make this a post in itself because of its length. So sorry for the format and wording, I guess this was originally addressed to him but I started to direct it right at you guys, since I sincerely hope at least one of you can get the message to the rest of you. It's at your own discretion if you think it's a worthwhile read.


It's tactless, yes, but it is also a worthwhile read, and something the secret players need to acknowledge. I won't go over your team unless you want me to, but I will explain in short why current Secret is failing.


If we go back to EG and watch games from RTZ's perspective we can see that PPD is the one directing earlygame movement on the map. As the game goes to later mid and lategame it transitions to RTZ dictating the gameflow. This makes sense as RTZ has some of the best gamesense of how to utilize his team around him to take objectives. We see how he knows exactly when to pressure opponents with an aegis on him for example, countless games where he baits opponents into bad fights at odd angles by pretending to be out of position while sieging highground etc. His team always deferred to his pings and the little lines he would draw that showed the clear movement paths and objectives that were important at the moment. That much is clear.


As much as I would like to I don't have the privilege of listening to their ingame comms, so I can only study what is shown in replays and on the provided stream cameras that show players in the booth or rooms.


I'll get to the other players and how they mesh in a moment, but for now let's talk about team dynamics and mental fortitude and attitude. Confidence is one of the biggest requirements to play at the highest level. Trust is absolutely, 200% necessary to play well as a team. If you are not in sync at the most basic level of "Do I trust this guy?" then your entire game will be thrown off and you have no psychological ground or reason to have full confidence in your teammates' play and decision making. It flows both ways. You need to give your teammates a reason to trust you, and your trust needs to be earned and fought for in good play and judgement. Doubt destroys players and teams. Doubt in oneself destroys personal play, doubt in others destroys cohesion, and this creates a deadly cycle that modern teams with poor support structures cannot readily recover from.


You proved this yourself by having a phenomenal run at the last TI with a team no one thought would make it so far by taking the important step of bringing in someone who would help your team's communication. This simple step undoubtedly improved your chances and against all odds you had a great run. I'm not about to keep sucking your dick, and I know everyone might just meme on you for being that eul's dropper guy who got slammed, but your drafting was excellent and you managed to, if I were to be honest, compensate for your mid play by serving as an excellent team captain. Hypothetically, if your other players didn't trust you because of, say, instances where you failed in mid, then they would be much more reluctant to listen to you even if you were ultimately right. I think a lot of this was avoided by the communications training your team received.


Now let's get back to the subject at hand. Universe is someone whose playmaking in the lategame has saved his team's ass countless times. Now that his play isn't as pristine we have to wonder what has happened. He always struck me as, from what I've gathered from replays and the few games I've had the pleasure of pubbing with him on the same team, the type of guy who will give a silent vote to a team. He won't get all ragey or flamey, he won't boss people around unnecessarily, he just identifies plays and executes them if he knows he can trust his teammates. He was clutch in the lategame because he was always handed a hero with a game-influencing tool that could bring lost games back from the abyss. Hell, in his hands, looking at his own hero and how it could impact the game, he probably always had confidence that a game was never truly lost, barring a complete breakdown in the team dynamic. He probably was honestly very pissed that he didn't play void in TI4. Sorry Mason, you played great, but Universe void is just a comfort hero for a reason.


Maybe I'm completely wrong about this, but I think that he's probably as much of a silent voter in person as he is in the game. I'm sure you've seen the recent gif of his reaction to the kunkka pick. If only he had ever told drafters throughout the ages, "Trust me, I know you mean well, but you must understand this one thing. The hero you are picking for me, while meta-relevant, does not capitalize on my personal strength. Give me bat if we need a pickoff hero, give me void if we need teamfight or combo potential. Give me the right tool for the job and I will see this game to its completion as best as I can."


It's not the captain's fault, they draft as they see the draft in their heads, but if a guy silently mulls over his dissension in his head then how are they to know that the game wasn't in his hands the moment he was given a flaccid hero choice? So we see the improper use of his biggest strength, he loses confidence in his ability to win games for his team and have the impact that he should, and doubt starts to grow in his ability to continue performing at a high level. I want to see a confident Universe return, one who is willing to add his two cents in from the drafting stage, one who is impervious to tilt in games that go awry in the earlygame, a Universe who can continue to receive accolades for his game-turning movement throughout the game and is feared for the threat he puts on the map. He is the silent, deceptively smart player that teams fear roshing or highgrounding against and he should know that teams were afraid of him and his hero pool for good reason.


On to Puppey. His understanding of the earlygame is unparalleled. Theoretically a team with the lategame, objective-minded focus of RTZ, the playmaking kingship of Universe, the innovation and risk-taking of Eternal Envy, the space-making sacrificial and others-minded pieliedie, and early-game lane disruption domination of Puppey should be one of the best teams ever assembled. Why has it fallen flat? What is interfering with this team's ability to perform?


Throwback. VG starts to have internal issues, Hao starts drafting. C9 starts to have internal issues (I'll touch on this later), bone7 starts drafting. The list is endless. Team having problems? Maybe a new drafter will fix things. Historically I don't see much basis for success when this occurs. A large part of it might be purely due to the fact that your team is sort of already doomed if the dynamic has decomposed that much to where your drafter, a hugely important role and component of any dota team, has drafting duties pulled. A team on the outs in such a fashion rarely recovers regardless of if the new drafter is actually a better drafter for a given patch because of how bad the team environment has already gotten.


And what did Secret do? They let envy draft, and we can see the rest of the team mentally checked out, clearly anxious, and basically looking in no shape to perform at their peaks. Part of it may have been Envy suggesting he draft, but part of it is possibly largely coming from the deflation of Puppey's own confidence in drafting and leading. A series of hard losses will do that to anyone, and especially so if it would appear that, on paper at least, you should be winning games handily. Such results must be confounding, frustrating, and heart-breaking at a fundamental level.


I know that you yourself have player shopped countless times and it's always a hard decision. I could go for a cheap joke but I won't. If things are going well then the decision is probably even harder to let go of players who have been playing well for you if you know there are players with higher perceived potential performance you know are willing to come on board with you. Would you be willing to let go of Misery and w33 if they had just won you a major through fierce play and fluid, coordinated pressure applied at just the right times to seemingly unstoppable opponents? What if their replacements would be RTZ and Universe? I could go on about this but this issue is one that may have been influenced at a business level given their star power, and as a business picking up two of the most popular players in the game never sounds like a bad idea.


That team worked because w33 was the fresh face and probably deferred to established figures while also playing amazingly, misery was given aggressive offlaners and knew how to punish complacent farmers, EE's aggressiveness was meted and backed up by two other cores who were always on the same page as him, pld was always there for his teammates and is a natural roamer, Puppey knew how to cater to a team that put early pressure on an opponent and could depend on and keep confidence in EE and w33 in the lategame, so on and so forth. Everyone meshed well and there was little to no overlap in the mindsets of the players as far as how the game was approached.


EE and w33 were on the same page on that team. Let's take a step back and look at c9 with FATA on it during I believe The Summit 3. There was a game, I'm not sure which, but in this game C9 is radiant and is on thin ice. Maybe confidence was already lost before, but in my opinion what confidence between EE and FATA that remained was shattered when EE indicates to his team (I believe this was justified as the only possible play) they needed to punish the other team hard. The enemy team was right above top lane outside radiant base and EE's QOP blinks forward aggressively only to see that FATA withheld confidence and continued backing up. This is where the entire team fell through but in reality this is an example of where the strategic mind of EE is most brilliant. Given any bullshit circumstance his brain fires fastest when under extreme pressure and he delivers some of the craziest fucking ideas this side of the Milky Way. It's just unfortunate that the pair didn't understand each others' approaches to the game well enough to justify their own actions ingame in a reasonable enough manner to recover from the permatilt that this iteration of C9 died from thereon out.


FATA is a more measured player who finds his farm, plays well in lane, and plays reasonable dota. Nothing wrong with that. The shortcoming of that approach is the attitude that there is a such thing as a lost game, and the inability to become unconventional enough or insane enough (are they not the same thing sometimes?) to see how a win can be netted.


EE on the other hand is a player who can do something like face EG (I think it was EG? Wait I think it was, I'm tired as fuck.) with a supposedly shitty hand (no offense former C9ers, though different than the C9 I was just talking about) at I think the previous Summit (Or was it an international...) and come out with things like (I don't know if he's the one that suggested it) a pressure roaming tiny to invade enemy territory against a team that was supposed to demolish you at every stage of the game and be in the weirdest times at the weirdest places to come out with wins, or in EE's case, enough 2nd places to drive any normal human being insane. EE's main problem is that he is literally fucking uncomfortable playing a normal fucking game of dota where he's in an otherwise great position and there is little realistic threat from the enemy team. He literally plays dota from the perspective of someone so insane that he believes everyone is as fucking bonkers as he is, and his actions reflect a mindset that he is fearful of plays and comebacks from enemies as insane as he is.


And in a weird, fucked up way he ends up being right, because this poltergeist crawling 6 feet up his ass and destroying him in games he should have won ends up being his own fear of being out mindgamed by an opponent who never knows when to sit down and see that a game clearly should be over. Throws aren't accidents, they're the frantic, desperate thoughts and actions of someone so scared of brilliance that they fail to see their own brilliant mind has paved for themselves a nice, stable pathway to victory. He's so busy building these roads that he forgets to trot on them happily once they've been built, because he never. Stops. Fucking. Building Them.


EE, if you read this, I'm not saying you should take meds to kill your brilliance, I'm not saying don't fear a brilliant opponent. I'm saying that you are what Secret needs now more than ever in a dota world where so many other geniuses will also come to fruition. You need to lay a path for you and your teammates to tread upon, but only when conventional means of dota will fail you.


If you see a scary pocket play developing at the draft screen, calmly inform your team. Run pocket plays in scrims against opponents you know you won't be facing in upcoming, large tournaments. Don't reveal your anti-meta trends before they're absolutely necessary, and make sure your team is prepared to perform them. Your draft wasn't bad, but you need to have the team practice them to know what you envision the goals and methods necessary with the drafts will be. This way there will be no confusion when this is occurring. And don't visibly show a swap in drafting roles when you do so, as opponents will see the tell of you drafting quite clearly. Show as little change in your own input between normal drafts and pocket drafts. But run the strats beforehand and have a playbook with options for variations, have this be memorized between you and puppey and whoever else has input at the drafting stage, and be able to silently pivot to the pocket strat during the last few pick or ban phases. Never pick weird shit too early in the draft.


And take your wins calmly, keep your cool and know that your team has your back, but also learn to respect when you don't need to dive, or don't need to sneak rosh, or don't need to push highground. Basically contain your craziness to when it's needed both ingame and in the draft, because when all your team needs to do is play safe, regular, hey look I'm winning maybe I don't need to suicide for a rax we don't need type of dota, good ole fashioned dota then that's all your team needs you to be.


You aren't playing on an old C9 with mechanically inferior players who only win because you tell them some crazy shit and you run around like maniacs for an hour and win a game no one in a million years but you and the team you convinced to drink your crazy punch thought you could win, you're playing on a team that can fucking win their lanes and win games if you just contribute what carries on other good tier 1 teams have to do sometimes. If a team looks godlike and impervious to prevailing meta strategies, however... you know what to unleash.


Back to Puppey. Puppey, you have these guys on your team now so don't regret your decision. Stop regretting it. I know you're full of it. I can't even quantify in my head the raw level of regret you must have had every time you led Navi to a second place International finish. Stop thinking about it like that. You managed to persevere through so much to get where you are and stay relevant while so much changed around you. Dota changes from patch to patch but a core concept always remains unchanged. It is subdivided by time, level progression, and itemization into stages of the game. You are the king of fucking up other people's earliest laning phase and helping push your team to the stage where you are able to collectively shove outer towers and establish map control. Others can't see the nuance in how you manage to do this time and again, and I'm not saying I know all of the magic that makes this possible, but it's clear to me that you know exactly how, when and where to poke holes in the comfort bubbles of the other guys to the point where they don't even feel comfortable defending their tier 1 towers. But you have a problem on your team and it will crumble under you if you do not staunch the bleeding now.


Do not fall inwards into yourself once again. Do not on the other hand think you are infallible or unassailable as a way to artificially recover your ego and confidence. Shoulder an equal, not outsized, part of the blame for your team's failings. But make them see their own and offer up a solution.


Immediately force your management to muster up a strong backbone of support. Immediately hire a sports psychologist and someone skilled in communication under duress. You have coaches, but they clearly aren't addressing the non-dota, yet very dota related issues eating away at your team. The Meta-level of it is that your team misunderstands each other now because of the false premise that seeing someone play dota for long enough makes you understand where they are coming from. It doesn't, unless you are able to fully understand why that person thinks and plays the way they do. And that doesn't come until people start truly seeing that they are just as capable as they always were, and remembering and relearning why past success in each instance was obtained and the uniqueness of each moment.


Have your team give more input at the drafting stage, but keep within the threshold of the overall strategy you envision. Know why your players are best at what they do. Have them start to understand themselves better. This process will all be easier to deal with if you hire the right people. Get people with proven track records, your team can afford it.


Things that immediately come to mind is that the current patch does favor strong early teamfighting and pushing. You know how to win, but you and your team forgot that they're winners. In my opinion this is how things should go ingame. Save destructive input for post-games only. Everyone should abide by this rule. You cannot recover from tilt ingame if someone is actively tilting everyone during it. Destructive criticism is necessary. You should get everyone used to receiving it. Destruction is the only thing that can allow for the rebuilding of a thing.


Everyone does not need to completely forget what they know, but they must know that they are playing on a completely new team, even you. Faith, confidence, trust, everything core to what makes a team win must be reconstructed from the ground level. This process may be fast if you and your players are willing to understand that they cannot hold dear to how they think games should play out, because they aren't on the same ships anymore.


In an average game you or pld should lead earlygame movements across the map, ganks etc. You should be more willing to sacrifice farm to keep your players alive. Let me simplify this for you if I think about it some more. This team is a shitload like the Navi you played on for years.


Let's say you're Puppey, Dendi is RTZ, EE is xbox, pld is funnik, and Universe is kuroky.


"Wtf retard?" is what I imagine you're thinking right now. Bear with me bro, I've played enough dota with you to know that you'll think about this for a split second and understand what I'm saying.


I know Puppey understands by now, but I'll spell it out for anyone who is confused. Puppey is still Puppey. That's what makes Puppey great. If your team doesn't have a Puppey, then you're going to get fucked early, and you're going to get fucked hard.


RTZ and Dendi both win lanes and know that objectives are fucking important. They can farm, sure, but they don't farm excessively. They know when they can throw down a tower or two. They know when it's safest to rosh. They know exactly the moment when you can highground safely. They make an advantage and enjoy it within reason. They're the kind of guys that see the safest route to making sure those red blips on the map are taken out when it's needed.


They also check out mentally if they think their captain is in the wrong on a draft. They get pissed is someone makes a bad call. Don't let rtz fall into this pattern. Don't let your team fall into opposing camps again. Try to bridge the gap. Don't sit on separate couches like you allowed yourselves to do at the summit. Don't let anyone fall into a spiraling depression of silence or uncaring and don't let anyone quietly whisper your team to shreds, you say, to shreds, including yourself.


EE is xbox. Good ole xbox. Good ole EE. There's one key difference. When pressure mounts xbox increases his performance exponentially. When pressure mounts on EE, however, things get... weird. Xbox puts tremendous pressure on his lane opponent and is okay with having an unsafe or weird lane matchup. He's not a fucking quitter when games get ugly. He just buys more rapiers. He knows that every inventory slot can be turned into a rapier if it has to, and he'll be damned if he lets the throne die without giving the enemy a fuckton of a hard time. But he can buy rapiers and do all this crazy shit because he knows the upper echelon of the safety range of what he can withstand in terms of damage whereas EE... perhaps not so much doesn't, but simply doesn't receive the same protection that xbox receives when he becomes the sole carry in a game.


Or, importantly at least in the games I'm thinking about, he doesn't have a team with enough of both pure defensive support I keep you alive please don't ever die ability in at least one of the supports, and doesn't have a draft that allows his team to win a huge teamfight against an overfarmed opponent. And he certainly doesn't have a team that understands when it's necessary to take such risks and back the bold decision to do so up with confidence. Don't let EE start distrusting his team so much that he buys rapiers every game when it's not needed, and don't let him undervalue any players like xbox did.


Universe and kuroky both understand positioning so fucking well that teams are foolish to think they can be safe clustered together. Huge teamfight starting plays or teamfight saving counterplays at key times underpinned by a team willing to follow this up with an onslaught of destruction or make a safe as fuck narrow escape are what make these guys fun to watch. I'm on the fence about even suggesting that your team swap EE and Universe and you and PLD on roles because of how good your potential is as things stand. But I feel like your team could be much more dynamic if you sometimes drafted around the concept of a farmed Universe on a playmaking aoe hero and a dual laned EE on a hard carry with early and mid or even roaming potential. This would be great if you run a lineup with RTZ as the pushing power because imo that's one of the things he's best at. Don't let Universe get all quiet and emo and only trust one other person on the team like kuro did.


And not to insult you too deeply, as no insult is intended, but maybe you and PLD should swap roles more often. You're both great at ganking, but you should determine which games call for you to be the true 5 and pld given a hero that both roams and scales incrementally with incidental farm. I'm not saying that you're bad at what you do, but given their history (pld and EE's) it might be an immediate short-term boon if you were to allow pld and universe more farm to work in conjunction with each other and EE/RTZ to smooth out the early and midgame. At the least this gives them time to calibrate to each other's ingame dota body language, because you've already played defensive support for RTZ and EE enough to know how to keep them safe while underfarmed.


This also avoids the kuroky/notail/everyone ever problem of an extremely underfarmed player growing resentment and the, "I can player core better than this retard, fuck him" attitude that players like xbox also developed in reverse of, "fuck this support, so useless rofl why I carry him". This is because a lot of the resentment stems from seeing players absorb farm and appear ineffectual even if more factors were at play than were visible to the 5. This occurs naturally because you're literally staring at your core's ass for half the goddamned game babysitting them all and wondering if you could have won if you had been able to farm some fucking items. You should shoulder this burden for a lot of games for now until your team starts to develop trust.


I also suggest this because I know pld the least from a dota standpoint aside from the beautiful time-wasting buffoonery he would lead people on to spare his team precious seconds on the map, and I feel like his antics could only be enhanced by having him have a few items in this current meta. Oh, and importantly, give him a hero that can fucking do something.


I know it's old, and I know it's simplistic to even bring up the example, but I want to see a pld that identifies the pick for his new boner7s and slap some skywrath ults in cogs or chronos. Don't tie his hands by not giving the guy a hero that can piss off his enemies, or at the least obliterate them every minute. Pld and universe clearly need time to adjust before they can get familiar, they haven't played with each other like pld and misery have before. I know it's weird to suggest, but I think pld and universe should pub together sometimes.


Or, you know, you're the goddamned king of the jungle. LC's ult into skywrath ult ain't bad, right? Just kidding man. Sort of...


Don't let pld doubt himself just because people mock him because his impact seems indeterminable like funnik did. Funnik spiraled into the positive feedback loop of having a bad game, fearing getting cut, having a worse game, fearing getting axed, and so on and so forth fucking infinitely. You just cut two people when you won, dude. You need to let pld and the rest of your team know that you're going to make this shit work. You need to applaud him loudly for his successes. You need to give him space to grow and reasons to be optimistic, not plant and nurture seeds of doubt that will make him afraid of taking the big risks in game that might see him feed a few times yet prevents a hugely farmed core from eating a smoke gank.


Hey, I'm getting tired and I'm sure I've written enough of a sampler for you to chew on. I hope you all fare well in coming months.


TL;DR


Team cohesion is weak because of lack of trust. Trust must come from understanding. Everyone doesn't understand what their strong points are. Old Navi was great because of how they complimented each other. Puppey=puppey, jungle/earlygame and defensive support master with tendency to let go of control if confidence is lost. Rtz=dendi, mid lane winner and objective taking masters with tendency to resent drafter/captain if things go bad because they feel they could do better at that. Universe=kuroky, clutch teamfight outcome shapers and positioning gods with tendency to be overly quiet and emo if things go bad. EE=xbox, crazy motherfuckers who win impossible games by buying a bunch of rapiers, and doing innovative or risky shit even if it's not necessary. Pld=funnik, underappreciated roamers and space-creators who are at their best when they don't fear dying for the team, but stop doing so when they fear getting cut. Pld also has drafting potential, as /u/n113 pointed out.


They need to hire a support team of specialists to help them work on their issues and work on themselves. Secret has the funds to do so. There should be no dispute from management on this, so it should be easy. They need more help on the interpersonal and personal level and battle-tested personnel to help them achieve the cohesion and stability they need to win. They need to avoid the past pitfalls of other storied teams and players and learn from mistakes without letting them gnaw at them.


Edit: I don't mean to say new Secret should be more like old Navi, I'm saying that they should avoid what each player fell victim to in their decline.

Have you ever been so desperate you wrote a novel because your team is about to disband?

 

[Mr. Pink]

me drinking secret fangay tears

Weren't you choking on EE's balls last time i checked?

my opinion is unchanged that EE is a top tier carry. Every player in Secret is top tier, they didn't suddenly turn shit in one month. individual skill isn't the problem here, but cohesion. Look at how flat their farm distribution is, or how they can juke and gank like madmen but lose every teamfight and keep putting themselves in positions where they HAVE to outskill their enemy. Reminds me of 2014 DK.

team secret is a team with two 1s, two 2s and a 6

 

[Orma]

They are just being spoiled too much, have you seen team secret villa?

 

[Saark]

Team Secret will never be as good as they were during shanghai as long as rtz is unable to have any game impact unless he has a significant gold/xp advantage. EE has become quite the decent carry, even though his lategame decision making is still lacking he has proven that he can carry a game all by himself if need be. The biggest issue they currently have is that puppey simply cannot keep up when playing a regular support. He is on the other hand an exceptional, maybe even the worlds best jungler. His enigma/doom basically won them shanghai, but that was thanks to the meta allowing for a greedier draft and w33 being able to withstand pressure on the midlane much better than rtz. Secret had a decent game in the groupstages with puppeys position 4 beastmaster being highest networth in the team while EE and rtz struggled to not feed. PLD is about as useful as ever if he doesn't play bounty/lion, and even then he pales in comparison to players like jerax, cr1t, mmy or kaka. The struggle during the draft has become apparent now that they have switched to EE doing the drafting because so far they have not found a way to overcome their individual weaknesses by having a good draft, and I dare say as long as puppey and rtz are in the same team they probably never will. Doesn't help that the meta doesn't approve of farming 4 positions right now which is why people like fy or fear are struggling as well, the latter being especially interesting since he only started playing a more farm oriented playstyle when they picked up aui.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

I really like Liquid's teamfights, much stronger than most teams this major

 

[Inspectah]

Funny when you stop watching for 6 months and when you come back EG and secret are kinda shit

 

[Mr. Pink]

Funny when you stop watching for 6 months and when you come back EG and secret are kinda shit

 

[Great Deceiver]

Liquid vs MVP, get watching you maggots

 

[Ninjerk]

wtf is this map

 

[Great Deceiver]

yeah, I don't like it either. ez juke paths though

 

[Great Deceiver]

Pretty crazy game 3 between Liquid and MVP. Coming back from a 2 rax disadvantage against furion krob and beastmaster is ridiculous.

 

[Mr. Pink]

MVP proving once again that they are LAN kings.


edit: Although Matumbaman couldnt stop feeding, I don't think it's his fault that Liquid lost. Even though Liquid had such a huge gold advantage, it was spread too evenly (4 players in the top 5). If Kuro on BM hadn't took so much farm from Gyro, he could have maxed out a lot sooner, which would have stopped MVP from making a comeback.

Also, MVP using 4 force staffs really fucked up Liquids positioning in teamfights. It's just way too much for a person to keep track of.

 

[Mr. Pink]

MVP minimap during the pause

 

[Great Deceiver]

Na'vi has no chance in this first game. What a shitty draft, and the panel was drooling over it for some reason.

 

[Mr. Pink]

Na'vi has no chance in this first game. What a shitty draft, and the panel was drooling over it for some reason.

i dont understand what navi want to do with the axe. after axe calls someone, there's no hero that can provide any kind of follow up. it worked for MVP because their lineup was very bursty, but here it's just underwhelming.

 

[Great Deceiver]

There's no way axe would ever work against OG's draft, which is basically 100% counterinitiation with stomp, chrono and RP. It was just an awful fucking draft that expected a miracle from Dendi (heh). All OG had to do was sit on him for 10 minutes and steamroll through to victory.

edit: Has to be said Miracle outplayed the shit out of Dendi with that first skewer mid. I don't understand how a Tinker gets skewered into tower 1v1 3 minutes into the game.

 

[Jasede]

At this point it's impossible not to be a Miracle- fangay, even if I like Na'vi. The man just executes every goddamn hero he plays (which are many) perfectly. 10K MMR when?
Would you say he is the best mid player the game has ever seen?