Dota2 Leipzig Major

On January 26, the second major of the Dota Pro Circuit 2019/2020 season ended in the non-esports city of Leipzig. Champion DreamLeague Leipzig Major has become Team secretwho beat in a protracted match Evil geniuses with a score of 3: 2. Despite the fact that there are still three pairs of rating competitions waiting for us, we can confidently say that now we already know at least seven participants of the upcoming The International 2023. Other material on DreamLeague Leipzig Major is in the article.

Team Secret is the best team in the world right now …

… But hardly anyone doubted it, right? The most successful team of the previous season started a new one belatedly, but anyway they won another major on the move. She did this in a traditional manner for herself – she confidently and very methodically went through all her rivals, stumbling into real resistance only in the grand final.

It is significant that Vici gaming, which before the start of the tournament seemed to be the main competitor of Team Secret, played against the team twice Clement Puppey Ivanovbut both times could not oppose her. The Chinese won only on one map – the one on which the opponent for some reason gave them all the signature characters. However, Puppey fans had to get used to this for a long time.

Care Zheng MidOne Yek Naya didn’t affect Team Secret’s fighting ability, or maybe even increased it. Michal Nisha Jankowski very organically replaced the former teammate in the mid, and Lasse MATUMBAMAN Urpalainen quickly got used to his beloved first position. When the Finn ended up in Chaos, his career became alarming – didn’t many wonderful players disappear from the radar after they were overtaken by an unexpected kick from the top club? However, Puppey did not allow Urpalainen to get lost – and he fully repaid the captain. If on ONE Esports Dota 2 World Pro Invitational Singapore a beginner just learned to play under the dictation of Ivanov, then in Leipzig the Team Secret system has already become a single mechanism.

Of course, MidOne is a terrific esportsman who invented a new style of play for the midliner, but this has repeatedly played a trick on Secret. Due to how often Yek Nai hit playmaking and started participating in all the fights on the map, Nisha had too much responsibility. The Pole proved to be an excellent carry and often justified his confidence, but sometimes – for example, at TI9 – his efforts were still lacking. Now, Puppey has patched up a hole: Nisha has not been so active on the map since the beginning of the game, but it has the ability to farm. With him, Team Secret gained great tactical flexibility – if MATUMBAMAN lining is not going according to plan, the leader can always cover it.

Victory at Leipzig Major was enough for Team Secret to almost guarantee itself an invite to The International 2023. The team approached the previous championship of the series as a favorite, but this was not enough to climb above fourth place. It is absolutely obvious that it is TI that is the main goal of Puppey, who immediately after the major victory joked about the fact that his team was not at the peak time. However, now we can confidently state the fact: with the departure of MidOne, the team only added, and now the competitors will have to try very hard to get in line with it.

RAMZEs leads Arteezy to the finals

Bye fans Virtus.pro miss you Roman RAMZEs KushnaryovHe has a great time in the finals. Despite all the doubts that I and other skeptics had after Kushnaryov joined EG, he quickly got used to the new club and almost certainly guaranteed himself a place on TI10. But this is not important now.

With the advent of RAMZEs, the gaming style of the EG has undergone major changes. First of all, the third position in the club ceased to openly feed opponents during the lining stage. It is not for me to judge the TI3 champion, but s4 has made controversial decisions more than once in the last months of playing for Evil Geniuses and often just dropped out of the team’s game, which probably caused the subsequent reshuffle.

RAMZEs have yet to play many tournaments offline in order to fully master the new role, but now he has given EG some stability. Interestingly, Kushnaryov immediately became a traditional “troika”, which does not compete with other core players in pharmacy, takes a hit and creates a space for Arthur Arteezy Babaev and Abad Azal Abed Yusop.

When offlane briefly hit Saeed Samail SumaiL Hassan, he still took on this line Ember Spirit and other characters familiar to him by the mid. RAMZEs immediately moved to the traditional Doom, Enchantress, Timbersaw and Abaddon. Kushnaryov did not immediately “feel” each of the heroes – for example, his play on Batrider in the final was criticized, but there is no need to doubt that RAMZEs quickly got used to the new role.

It is also significant how the game Arteezy has changed with the advent of two newcomers to EG. If earlier Babaev showed miracles of mechanical skill in the group stage, and was stably lost in the playoffs, now it will not be an exaggeration to say that he became the leader of the team around whom the rest build the game. These are just speculations, but I want to connect these changes with the influence of RAMZEs, which in the position of Kerry achieved no less serious successes than his Uzbek-Canadian counterpart.

It has long been known that Kushnaryov gravitates to the duties of a captain and loves to dictate team members what they should do in a given situation. Fly, on the other hand, is inclined to give freedom to its players and focuses more on drafts and off-game team building. It is possible that this alloy of two very dissimilar leaders turned out to be exactly what Arteezy was so lacking. Now, at important moments, he does not need to make decisions alone – he always has the voice of RAMZEs in his ear, which reminds: “Guys, we can!”.

Of course, it is worth noting Abed, which on reddit has already been nicknamed the “improved version of SumaiL.” In those matches where Arteezy was experiencing difficulties, the Mead steadily took over the game and exceeded all expectations, reminding everyone that he was the first in the world to score 10 thousand MMR. After an ambiguous performance at the MDL Chengdu Major, the team seems to have found their game and was able to impose a fight even on Team Secret. Perhaps if Puppey hadn’t trapped his opponent with Meepo, now we would have celebrated Arteezy’s first major victory. But even such an EG result deserves praise – the team showed tremendous progress compared to the start of the season and already at the ESL home tournament it will clearly be one of the contenders for the championship.

On the Eastern Front unchanged

CIS teams in Leipzig again disappointed. You can joke that now we have four teams applying for participation in majors, or notice that there is still progress – after all Natus vincere took not the last place. But more – albeit solely on emotions – I want to tighten the tirade that Dota is simply not our game.

The only bright spot in this situation is the group stage in which Bakyt’s team Zayac Emilzhanova showed that she can impose a struggle on top clubs from other regions. Another question is that this stage can hardly serve as an objective reflection of the real strength of collectives. Could NAVI reach the top grid if Arteezy hadn’t played two cards in a row on Riki? Judging by the results of the playoffs, it is unlikely.

It is interesting that both NAVI and Virtus.pro eventually knocked out Team Liquid from the tournament – a team that absolutely everyone scolded for cowardice and slurred play. The Swedish squad had a good laning stage in all matches, but then spent 40 minutes each time to enter the high ground, and it is not clear that it was more painful in this situation to watch the progress of these matches or see their results. There are pluses: at least, based on the results of these games, fans productively discussed how strong neutral objects are, and, apparently, achieved the removal of Fusion Rune. But the disadvantages here outweigh: perhaps, if the teams were more serious in the place of Liquid, the total time of the presence of NAVI and VP in the major would have been reduced by another hour.

What does this result mean for our region? It seems that we are waiting for a new series of reshuffles in which NAVI managers, Gambit esports and Virtus.pro will try to assemble new e-sports frankenstein. Already rumored that VP will leave Egor epileptick1d Grigorenko and Vitaliy Save- Miller, and the place of the latter may take Zayac. Perhaps in the long run this will bring benefits to the teams, but now it seems that by the beginning of ESL One Los Angeles 2023 our region will come up with no rosters played at all. If only Artyom Fng Barshak during the holidays did not have time to come up with something.

Perhaps the best major of the DPC era

Despite the fact that the organizers have already held 13 championships in the DreamLeague series, I did not remember any of them in due measure. I remember that on the eleventh I won Vici Gaming, and on the eighth Puppey beat Kuro KuroKy Salehi Tahasomi, but what kind of matches were there – a mystery that I no longer want to solve. The major in Leipzig struggled to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors – DreamHack even reproduced the scene in detail, despite moving to a new city – however, the participants did not allow this to happen and arranged perhaps the best major of the Dota Pro Circuit era.

Qualitative “Dota” is a subjective concept. Fans are still arguing about which match was cooler: NAVI – Alliance on TI3 or OG – PSG.LGD on TI8. The end of this battle is not visible, but it cannot be argued that over the five years between these games the general level of understanding of Dota 2 has grown by several orders of magnitude, and therefore the level of participants in the eighth Inta for the Alliance and NAVI gold rosters would simply be unattainable. Only a few months have passed between the MDL Chengdu Major and DreamLeague Leipzig Major finals, but it seems that the difference between them is just as great. Commentators in the course of the decisive game said that Team Secret and Evil Geniuses showed “Tier-0.5 Dota” in the final, and this is hard to argue with. Perhaps in Leipzig there was no such emotional tension as on TI, but the games themselves were so high-class, but at the same time smooth, that this match was simply obliged to enter the pantheon of the best in the history of discipline.

For this, it is worth praising not only Secret and EG, but also the developers, since patch 7.23 – with all the criticism that he received after the release, really revived the game. One-way matches, where already after the lining stage one of the teams always turned out to be an outsider, were replaced by long and equal games with upheavals, epic battles at all points of the map and, of course, a charming element of randomness that brought neutral artifacts.

One can argue about the role played by Apex and Fusion Rune for a long time. However, this match is the only one for the tournament that caused such heated debate, and therefore it is rather an exception, confirming that in fact neutral drops did not break the game, but made it more interesting. Immediately upon completion of the major, a patch was released in Dota 2 that added a long-awaited showcase for these artifacts, allocated them a special slot in the players’ inventories, and also made balanced changes. This means that artifacts will remain with us at least until the next major update.

In the meantime, the system has not changed again, we will be able to enjoy the stunning “Dota”, which has not turned into a battle of “snowball” strategies, which viewers were so afraid of after the first reading of patchouts for version 7.23. On the contrary, following the results of the DreamLeague Leipzig Major, I can advise my friends with good conscience to watch absolutely all the matches of the final days of the tournament: from the grand final to the fourth round of the lower bracket. Because these games are the triumph of Dota at its best. I want to believe that 7.24 will not hit hard on the current balance.