When they drafted Venomancer, I knew it was all over. With the way VG drafted, it really does seem like VG just wants to lose, as if they are paid, hence a little community saying "conspiracy TI finals".
Lycan
Void
Clinkz
TA
This 4 heroes rarely have their stats or skills nerfed, but people started to find out about them. Before Panda got famous recently, I was thinking why haven't anyone picked them at all? Until the patch came out and some stats were changed, and then people started to practice the hero and try to include them. And then here comes the "trend" dota, VG follows trend a whole lot, they don't make their own draft, they copy draft. I remember looking at one of their draft, fnatic beat them using the SAME exact draft, same pick same ban. I even remember drafting for my team, picking Viper, Razor and DP constantly before they were even famous. Any 2 combination of these 3 easily wins in pushing and war.
Teams like EG, NaVi, and C9 plays their own draft. Yes they do pick the OP heroes or rather "trend" heroes like Lycan, Doom, Shadow Shaman, but they tend to pick something they are used to and make it to good use, and that's why no one figured out how to beat EG, because of their "weird" strategy. Whenever I look at EG play I just don't understand what they are doing, but they seems to do it perfectly. C9 has their own draft (Blink Clinkz/Drow anyone?"), and Na`Vi with their "I have the biggest balls of all" draft. I personally think Na`Vi and C9 has the mindset of "high risk high reward" draft, and that's why they would always entertain the audience.
Teams like VG, Newbee, and DK just loves to copy trend, and DK has the weakest draft among these 3 Chinese team. The problem with DK is that they are always drafting weakly, and they don't know what they want to do. When they picked AM last pick during the DK vs VG game, I pretty much went "wtf is going on?", if they wanted to push, Pugna would have been the better pick, but they picked AM instead, and then Pugna completely destroys Mushi. (5 minutes into the game I realize why DK was drafting like this, but it was already too late)
Same problem with Fnatic, they have all the potential, but they just don't know what they are doing and most of the games they lost when having a big lead is they somehow knew how to blow it up. (Most of the games) They don't know how to capitalize a lead compare to Na`Vi (xboct throwing occasionally).
I believe Alliance is still one of the best team out there, if they started drafting differently and stop depending on Bulldog so much. I believe Bulldog is one of the best offlaners out there, his movements and map sense is very good. I remember watching ESL C9 vs Alliance and watch his perspective, his movements really was mesmerizing. If only Alliance starts to draft differently, because to me.. Na`Vi and Alliance has the best war sequence of all the teams.
And people are gonna hate me.. but when is C9 going to kick PLD? He does nothing for the team, he's basically what his nickname says.. Pieliefeed.
The format of the tournament is pretty weird as well, I hope it returns to last year's format. It makes ESL look better than TI4.
These are pretty much what I think of the teams right now.
The finals were crap I think for three reasons.
- Firstly, because almost nobody wanted Newbee to win. The whole racism thing followed them like a dark cloud, and the fact that their strategy is so different from the Chinese Dota everyone is used to, which a lot of people hated. Which leads me to my next point...
- The fast push strats that Newbee put to good use, do not make for good viewing. The game Vici won was the best of the series, probably because it was the only one to go over 25 minutes. As much as people hated on 90 minute Chinese Dota, I think it would have made for a more enjoyable final. Games that go late, where one awesome team fight can result in the game being lost, rather than 20 minutes of towers falling, and one team resigning to the fact they are going to lose. People say it means there are more kills and more things happening. Their last game vs EG I think, ended 6-1 on kills. Objective based gaming.
- And finally, if you are losing based on your previous strategy, DON'T DRAFT THE SAME ****ING HEROES AGAIN. As soon as Vici drafted a Furion as first pick in the last game, I pretty much knew it was over. You can't beat an early game push strat with another early game push strat. It will never work. Newbee were just way better than Vici at pushing and rolling over them, and there was nothing Vici could do. I dont think I've ever seen a 15 minute gg call in a Grand Finals final game, but that's what happened.
I didn't even keep it on to watch the montage.
Also, I haven't yet watched the C9 Meepo game, but I think the EG vs DK matches were still the best series of the tournament.
