Spectral Lea: Stats

Wrapping up Competitive season of 2025

leamare — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 01:47:19 GMT

With the conclusion of The International 2025, it’s time to look back at the stats of the 2024-2025 competitive season.

I’m quite a bit late with this (by the time this blog post gets out, we’ll probably have two tier 1 events concluded in the new season already), but I would still like to reflect on the competitive year in terms of numbers and trends. And, well, nice and funny bits of trivia.

I will focus mostly on Tier 1 events and teams, but there will be mentions of the full competitive season report, too, especially when talking about meta.

Overview

Below I will be referencing three different reports:

Competitive ‘24 Tier 1 – includes only tier 1 and 2 Liquipedia events. This report will be referenced as T1 below for convenience. It will be the main source of data unless said otherwise.
Competitive ‘24 All – includes professional tier 1, 2 and 3 events (as per Liquipedia), as well as closed qualifiers to tier 1 events. This report will be referenced as CFull below for convenience.
- It doesn’t include showmatch or mixed teams leagues
The International 2025 – this report includes data for last The International event.

T1 report is starting with PGL Wallachia Season 2, right after last year’s The International. In the Tier 1 season report there were total of 2030 matches recorded (and 928 series), starting on patch 7.37d and ending on 7.39d. Most of the matches were played on Europe West servers. All matches were recorded and parsed successfully in T1 report. In CFull report there were 7017 matches, with 1 of them missing analysis.

The day with the most matches was the 4th of September (the first day of The International group stage). In CFull report the most games happened on the 28th of September of 2024.

Factions balance was rather close. Radiant vs Dire winrates were 50.83% vs 49.16% respectively. Radiant had second pick in 67.85% of matches. First pick winrate was 51.7%, and Second pick was 48.3%. Both Radiant and Dire had 4.49% winrate difference between first and second picks. In CFull, FP/SP balance are even closer together, getting down to 1.42% difference for each side. The total faction difference and Radiant First Pick ratio are about the same.

Total playtime was 56 days 22 hours 45 minutes and 56 seconds (and over 187 days in CFull). Cumulative time spent dead by all players was 42 days 13 hours 46 minutes and 28 seconds.

There were total of 51 unique teams (or more speficially, team tags spotted) with 221 unique players throughout the season (314 and 1028 respectively in CFull).

Median hero GPM was 482, median hero XPM was 598. Median match duration was 38:58. Median hero had 140 picks and 162 bans.

There were total of 67 rampages (most of them were made by BetBoom team), 1230 Godlike Sprees, 56874 neutral camps stacked, 75746 observer and 131344 sentry wards placed, 8276 buybacks made, 5597 Roshan kills, 5925 couriers killed, 146285 creep denies, 4967088 last hits (almost 5 million creeps!) and 400 707 363 damage dealt to heroes.

Seasonal records

This season also marked a small expansion in the number of records in my book.

Highest GPM: TeTi.shiro in a match vs FLCN as Medusa with 1,197 GPM
Highest XPM: Edge.Parker in a match vs Heroic as Sven with 1,429 XPM
Most kills: iG.Emo in a match vs GG as Ember Spirit with 28 kills
Most deaths: Rainy... in a match vs TALON as Lich with 20 deaths
Most assists: PLNTS.mm sprinter in a match vs Heroic as Rubick with 53 assists
Highest KDA in a game with 0 deaths: FLCN.skiter in a match vs Tundra as Dragon Knight with a KDA of 41
Highest KDA in a game with at least 1 death: TSpirit.Miposhka in a match vs GG as Zeus with a KDA of 42
Most gold earned: XG.Ame in a match vs nouns as Luna with 83,913 gold
Most last hits: TeTi.shiro in a match vs FLCN as Medusa with 1,783 last hits
Most last hits per minute: PV.Satanic in a match vs TSpirit as Medusa with 24.07 LH/min
Most creeps denied: PV.Satanic in a match vs Tundra as Templar Assassin with 55 denies
Most damage dealt to heroes: FLIPSTRTLN.Mikoto in a match vs AR as Puck with 121,309 hero damage
Highest hero damage per minute: PLNTS.dfaijklnosz in a match vs Heroic as Queen of Pain with 2,080.80 hero damage/min
Most building damage: AVULUS.Sunny... in a match vs iG as Bristleback with 36,755 building damage
Most hero healing: FLIPSTRTLN.Kuku^ in a match vs TALON as Tinker with 50,968 healing
Most damage taken from heroes: iG.flyfly in a match vs NGX as Terrorblade with 114,893 damage taken
Most neutral camps stacked: Liquid.Boxi in a match vs XG as Batrider with 25 stacks
Most observer wards placed: AR.皮球 in a match vs TALON as Tusk with 36 observer wards placed
Most sentry wards placed: Mood.Oli~ in a match vs GG as Elder Titan with 69 sentries placed
Most observer wards destroyed: FLIPSTRTLN.Jhocam in a match vs BetBoom as Slark with 22 wards destroyed
Most map pings: Aurora.Saika in a match vs GG as Doom with 629 pings
Most stun duration: NGX.GH in a match vs iG as Dark Willow with 448.44 seconds of stuns
Most couriers killed by a player: PV.9Class in a match vs NAVIj as Slark with 17 couriers killed

Players stuff

Most matches played by a player: Tundra.Saksa played 338 matches this season.
Rampage with the lowest team net worth difference: Aurora.kiyotaka pulled off a rampage as Invoker in a match against BOOM with only a 1,946 gold difference between the teams.
Rampage with the highest team net worth difference: FLCN.skiter got a rampage as Dragon Knight in a match versus Tundra when his team was ahead by 62,185 gold.
Widest hero pool of a player: BetBoom.Pure played 47 different heroes this season.
Smallest hero pool of a player: YeSu.QWE123 played just 2 different heroes this season.
Most Performance Points in a match: TY.Solo earned 682.00 performance points as Nature’s Prophet in a match against SR.
Least Performance Points in a match: GG.Quinn got 40.71 performance points playing Huskar in a match versus FLCN.
Most MVP awards: FLCN.Sneyking earned 143.80 MVP awards during the season.
Most LVP awards: PV.Dukalis and Tundra.Cristallis received 9 LVP awards this season.
Highest average Performance Points: Parker (233.6), followed by Sneyking (231.7)

Highest averages

(with 15+ matches)

Kills: Edge.ɹǝʞɹɐd (9.96), TSpirit.Raddan (8.41), PV.Satanic (8.08)
Lowest Deaths: BB.gpk~ (2.70), Kiritych~ (2.74), Mood.Abed (2.78)
Deaths: PLNTS.mm sprinter (8.94), Undyne (8.83), Ekki (7.95)
Assists: PV.Dukalis (15.54), BetBoom.Save- (15.47), Undyne (15.43)
K/D/A: BB.gpk~ (6.89), Kiritych~ (5.77), Aurora.Saika (5.72)
GPM: Edge.ɹǝʞɹɐd (809.66), PV.Satanic (777.67), TSpirit.Raddan (745.26)
XPM: Edge.ɹǝʞɹɐd (904.36), TSpirit.Raddan (895.19), PV.Satanic (890.94)
Lane Efficiency: Edge.ɹǝʞɹɐd (0.89), PV.Satanic (0.86), Miracle- (0.86)
Last Hits per Minute: Edge.ɹǝʞɹɐd (12.62), PV.Satanic (12.34), TeTi.shiro (11.67)
Last Hits: Edge.ɹǝʞɹɐd (520.64), PV.Satanic (511.31), Infinity.Costabile (506.89)
Creeps Denied: BOOM.JACKKY (19.07), TY.TA2000 (18.36), GG.医者watson` (15.73)
Hero Damage per Minute: Edge.ɹǝʞɹɐd (883.69), MOUZ.Ulnit (839.47), TSpirit.Raddan (729.17)
Tower Damage per Minute: PV.Satanic (283.39), yuragi (278.88), TeTi.shiro (244.44)
Damage Taken per Minute: OG.k1 hector tqmM (660.66), AR.Lou (647.42), BOOM (647.09)
Heal per Minute: GG.Maladych (138.76), NP.kidaro (126.47), Whitemon (117.17)
Stuns: Ari (81.03), PLNTS.mm sprinter (75.08), AVULUS.ok (66.08)
Courier Kills: tmm (1.03), PV.9Class (0.89), Tundra.Saksa (0.86)
Observer Wards Destroyed: TeTi.WhyouSm1Le (3.45), AR.皮球 (3.42), Waska.Tiger (3.09)
Killstreak: Edge.ɹǝʞɹɐd (6.43), PV.Satanic (5.57), Heroic.Yuma (5.42)
Neutral Camps Stacked: Liquid.Boxi (6.16), Infinity.n1ght (6.11), FLIPSTRTLN.Kuku^ (5.59)
Observer Wards Placed: Undyne (13.93), Infinity.Panda (13.47), XG.xNova (13.17)
Map Pings: Ekki (214.32), bc.Lumpy (165.53), Mood.Jabz (159.52)
Pings per Minute: Ekki (5.44), bc.Lumpy (4.09), Mood.Jabz (3.86)
Widest Hero Pool: BetBoom.Pure (47), PV.9Class (43), PV.Satanic (42)
Hero Diversity: Mood.Jabz (0.27), iG.BoBoKa (0.24), WC.помойка (0.24)
Performance Points: Edge.ɹǝʞɹɐd (233.57), FLCN.Sneyking (231.72), FLCN.AMMAR_THE_F (227.80)
Lowest Performance Points: Move.命運 reinprince (146.06), VP.Antares (147.58), WC.mode really having fun right now (148.82)
MVP Awards Rate: Mood.Abed (0.92), Fbz (0.90), BOOM.ljcute (0.89)
Lane winrate: FLCN.ATF (66.41%), FLCN.Cr1t- (65.17%), BB.gpk~ (64.59%)

Teams

Most kills by a team in a single match: Palianytsia (PLNTS) in a match vs Heroic with 70 kills
Most assists by a team in a single match: Palianytsia (PLNTS) in a match vs Heroic with 197 assists
Fewest deaths by a team in a single match: Invictus Gaming (iG) in a match vs AVULUS with only 1 death
Most deaths by a team in a single match: HEROIC (Heroic) in a match vs Palianytsia (PLNTS) with 71 deaths
Most matches played by a team: Tundra Esports (Tundra) played 338 matches this season.
Widest hero pool by a team: BetBoom Team (BetBoom) and Xtreme Gaming (XG) used 113 different heroes throughout the season.
Smallest hero pool by a team: One Move (Move) only picked 20 different heroes this season.
Roshan Kills by Team: BB Team (1.89), Team Falcons (1.83), PVISION (1.66)

Record matches

Most couriers killed in a match: 18 couriers died in this match between NAVIj and PARIVISION.
Most Roshan kills in a match: 10 Roshan kills happened in this match between nouns and L1.
Most buybacks in a single match: 33 buybacks were used in this match between NGX and iG.
Most total time dead in a single match: Heroes spent a combined 1:41:24 dead in this match between Heroic and PLNTS.
Biggest net worth stomp by a team: FLCN stomped TeTi by 98,922 net worth in this match.
Biggest net worth comeback by a team: this category was bugged for a couple of matches, but the highest standing non-bugged match is the same as for TI14 — XG recovered a 53,681 gold deficit to win against FLCN in this match
Biggest difference in gold earned: There was a 95,523 gold difference in total gold earned in this match between Tundra and FLCN.
Longest match: The game between GG and iG lasted 1:37:55 in this match.
Shortest match: GG vs FLCN ended in just 13:07 in this match.
Longest series: Tundra vs FLCN series at BB Dacha Belgrade 2024 with total delta being 6 hours 30 minutes and raw playtime of 4 hours and 7 minutes.
Most kills combined in a match: Heroic and PLNTS racked up 125 total kills in this match.
Bloodiest game (highest kills per minute): The match between BetBoom and Tundra hit an average of 2.58 kills per minute in this match.

The International 2025, in numbers

Overview

The International 2025 featured 144 matches across 16 teams with 80 players competing.

Faction balance at TI was notably skewed compared to the season average, with Dire achieving a 54.86% winrate against Radiant’s 45.14%. First pick advantage was more pronounced, with a 52.08% winrate compared to second pick’s 47.92%. Radiant had first pick in 52.78% of matches.

The tournament’s cumulative playtime was a total of 4 days 8 hours and 44 minutes of playtime. There were 431 Roshan kills, 410 369 last hits, 10 801 creep denies, 5 810 observer wards placed, 409 couriers killed, 645 buybacks, and 3 rampages recorded. The median match duration was 40:02, with the average being 43:38.

Meta at The International 2025 was practically the culmination of the trends, started way back at TI13, but with the teams perfecting the usage of controlled units for map pressure. Heroes like Naga and Earthshaker dominated (LUL) the tournament as answers to this meta, but also being the TI classics. They perfectly embodied the strategic shift toward precise timing windows, pressure and coordinated team execution that had been building throughout the season.

This sort of “explored” meta lead to a rather shallow pool of contested heroes, with 95 being picked and banned, 12 being only picked and 18 left uncontested. But that same reason led to the most insane and enjoyable to watch matches throughout this whole tournament.

Perhaps the most telling sign of this evolution was the sudden surge in Helm of the Dominator popularity during TI14. What started as an experimental item pick in pubs became a cornerstone of professional play, with teams using dominated creeps for everything from ancient stacking to vision control and teamfight disruption. This micro-heavy approach, combined with the emphasis on farming efficiency and map control, created a meta that rewarded the most disciplined and coordinated teams.

It’s that more notable, that teams who were able to perfect this approach, didn’t even need to utilize Helm of the Dominator that much.

Records

Player Records

Highest GPM: TT.shiro in a match vs FLCN as Medusa with 1,197 GPM
Highest XPM: PV.Satanic in a match vs BB as Templar Assassin with 1,332 XPM
Most kills: WC.RCY in a match vs NMSS as Leshrac with 21 kills
Most deaths: Tundra.Tobi in a match vs Heroic as Warlock with 16 deaths
Most assists: Heroic.KingJungles in a match vs Tundra as Abaddon with 33 assists
Highest KDA in a game with 0 deaths: Heroic.4nalog丶01 in a match vs YB as Earthshaker with a KDA of 30
Highest KDA in a game with at least 1 death: Heroic.Wisper in a match vs Tundra as Slardar with a KDA of 39
Most gold earned: XG.Ame in a match vs PV as Medusa with 64,125 gold
Most last hits: TT.shiro in a match vs FLCN as Medusa with 1,783 last hits
Highest last hits per minute: TT.shiro in a match vs FLCN as Medusa with 24.01 LH/min
Most creeps denied: PV.Satanic in a match vs XG as Lifestealer with 43 denies
Most damage to heroes: TT.shiro in a match vs FLCN as Medusa with 99,232 damage
Highest hero damage per minute: PV.Satanic in a match vs Heroic as Tinker with 1,480.16 damage/min
Most damage to buildings: TT.shiro in a match vs FLCN as Morphling with 36,290 damage
Most hero healing: FLCN.Sneyking in a match vs TSpirit as Chen with 41,536 healing
Most damage taken from heroes: NMSS.Akashi in a match vs FLCN as Razor with 85,335 damage taken
Most neutral camps stacked: Liquid.Boxi in a match vs BOOM as Batrider with 23 stacks
Most observer wards placed: XG.xNova in a match vs FLCN as Mirana with 29 wards
Most sentries placed: XG.xNova in a match vs FLCN as Mirana with 59 sentries
Most observer wards destroyed: PV.9Class in a match vs TSpirit as Slark with 12 wards destroyed
Most map pings: NAVI.gotthejuice in a match vs Tundra as Anti-Mage with 260 pings
Most stuns: FLCN.Malr1ne in a match vs TT as Earthshaker with 364.31 seconds of stuns
Most couriers killed by a player: PV.9Class in a match vs NGX as Slark with 9 couriers killed
Most Performance Points in a match: FLCN.Malr1ne in a match vs TT as Earthshaker with 562.00 points
Least Performance Points in a match: WC.Fayde in a match vs TSpirit as Magnus with 53.39 points
Rampage with lowest team networth difference: TSpirit.Yatoro in a match vs WC as Shadow Fiend with 1,956 networth difference
Rampage with highest team networth difference: BB.Pure in a match vs NAVI as Troll Warlord with 34,333 networth difference
Widest hero pool: XG.Ame with 14 different heroes
Smallest hero pool: NMSS.raven with 5 different heroes
Most MVP Awards: FLCN.Sneyking with 14.40 MVP points
Most LVP Awards: Tundra.Tobi with 3 LVP awards

Team Records

Most kills by a team in a match: Heroic scored 48 kills in a match vs Tundra
Most assists by a team in a match: Wildcard recorded 127 assists in a match vs BOOM
Fewest deaths of a team in a match: Team Spirit died only 1 time in a match vs WC
Most deaths of a team in a match: Tundra Esports died 48 times in a match vs Heroic
Team with most matches played: Team Falcons with 29 matches
Team with widest hero pool: Xtreme Gaming with 49 different heroes
Team with smallest hero pool: Team Nemesis with 31 different heroes
Team with longest streak of series without losses: Team Falcons with 5 series ending at this match vs XG
Team with longest streak of lost series: Team Nemesis with 4 series ending at this match vs BOOM
Team with longest streak of won matches: Heroic with 8 matches ending at this match vs YB
Team with longest streak of lost matches: Team Spirit with 6 matches ending at this match vs FLCN

Notable Matches

Most couriers killed in a match: 9 couriers died in this match between NGX and PV
Most Roshan kills in a match: 9 Roshan kills happened in this match between XG and FLCN
Most buybacks in a single match: 21 buybacks were used in this match between FLCN and TT
Most total time dead in a single match: Heroes spent a combined 60:30 dead in this match between FLCN and NMSS
Biggest net worth stomp by a team: FLCN stomped TT by 98,922 net worth in this match
Biggest net worth comeback by a team: XG recovered a 53,681 gold deficit to win against FLCN in this match
Closest match: The net worth difference was just 1,558 in this match between YB and NMSS
Biggest difference in gold earned: There was a 85,065 gold difference in total gold earned in this match between FLCN and TT
Longest match: The game between XG and FLCN lasted 1:18:13 in this match
Shortest match: TSpirit vs WC ended in just 22:31 in this match
Longest series by total playtime: XG vs FLCN series with total playtime of 3:41:39
Most kills combined in a match: FLCN and NMSS racked up 75 total kills in this match
Bloodiest game (highest kills per minute): The match between Tundra and YB hit an average of 1.69 kills per minute in this match

Trivia

Finishing things up with some trivia bits for this TI

Helm of the Dominator was purchased 189 times – 1.31 helm per game on average.
- Helm’s winrate when purchased was 53.44% (+3.96% compared to games when the hero didn’t purchase it)
- For reference, Midas was purchased 31 times, with -14.84% winrate diff
Natus Vincere was the youngest team with average player age of 20.6 years. Yakult was the oldest with the average age of 27.8 years.
About 70.87% of players predicted that Team Spirit will finish the group stage with 4 wins and 0 losses.
- Only 0.02% of players got 10/16 correct predictions for the Group Stage. Nobody got everything right.
Falcons purchased Helm in just 3 matches
There were only four times when Bristleback purchased Battle Fury in a tier 1 pro match, two of them happened this year.

Popularity Contest

As a finishing touch, here are some bits about popularity of various teams, players and heroes through this competitive year.

Most popular heroes

Tiny (0.82%)
Monkey King (0.76%)
Nature’s Prophet (0.74%)
Magnus (0.74%)
Batrider (0.72%)

Most popular hero builds

Nerd’s Visage (1.37%)
Stats Based Phantom Assassin (0.97%)
Stats Based Queen of Pain Mid (0.95%)
Stats Based Abaddon Offlane (0.87%)
Stats Based Earthshaker Offlane (0.79%)

Most popular reports

Immortal Ranked Meta – Last Week (1.16%)
Pre-TI14 (0.63%)
TI14 (0.47%)
ESL One Bangkok Qualifiers (0.44%)
Immortal Ranked Meta – 7.38c (0.40%)

Most popular players

33 (0.40%)
Sneyking (0.31%)
Cr1t- (0.30%)
Raddan (0.29%)
skiter (0.28%)

Most popular teams

Team Liquid (1.01%)
Team Spirit (0.78%)
Tundra (0.73%)
Shopify / Evil Geniuses 😭 (0.72%)
BB Team (0.68%)

Closing Words

This season sure was fun, and while games at The International were insanely entertaining, I guess it feels like it’s time for a major shakeup of the meta, which sure is coming.

And for the time being, it’s farewell. See ya!

Sources: Competitive T1 ‘24 hub, Competitive ‘24 hub and TI14 report at my blog

The International 2025 Teams, Meta and Features Overview

leamare — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 20:01:53 GMT

With The International 2025 starting soon, it's time to make a traditional review of Pre-TI teams stats and ranked meta.

This time there are only two major reports to look for, the most important one being Pre-TI2025 (which I will refer to in this overview). But you can also check TI Qualifiers and Tier 1 Events section for this season:

Pre-TI2025 Report
TI2025 Reports Hub, including TI Qualifiers
Competitive Tier 1 2024/25 Season

And while it's definitely harder to get a clean view of the ranked meta amongst the pros, there are still ways to get a general idea of it. Thus I won't provide the data to play around with, but will touch on some overall trends.

But first I'd like to talk about some new features, which were released with the Pre-TI report.

Русская версия

New Features

Fantasy points and MVP

First of all, the thing I ended up naming "Fantasy & MVP" in the reports, or "Performance Points". It's not related to Valve's Fantasy system in any way, but it was the shortest way to explain what it is.

Performance points is a metric I came up with back in 2023, but kept testing and tweaking it throughout the last two years. The general idea behind it was simple: create a formula that would take a diverse collection of parameters to evaluate performance of the players in a given match. This formula should also take roles into consideration (so it won't be biased too much for cores) and "scale" over time (so parameters which mattered more in the early game won't overpower everything else later).

These points are later used to assign rewards to players: MVP, Best Core, Best Support, MVP of Losing Team or even LVP (if the resulting performance is significantly lower than average in the match).

You can read more about the resulting formula here: https://spectral.gg/docs/mvp_formula

The result was available since a couple of months ago, but there wasn't a formal announcement as it was still in testing mode. It still relies on full replay parsing/analysis, so you won't be able to get MVP results for every match straight away probably, but I'm working on it.

In addition, this section works not just for players, but for heroes too. And it was also added to TI All-Time (players, heroes, matches) and Immortal Meta Trends (just heroes).

And needless to say, it also has nothing to do with Valve's in-game MVP system. It's just a small and fun bit to play around with.

Estimated Targeted bans

This is a feature I wanted to add for a very long time. The core idea is simple: every hero ban in a match was targeted against a specific enemy player, thus we can sort of measure priority of a player by these targeted bans.

At first I thought about separating "meta bans" as a separate category – basically heroes who were banned not because a certain player is good or is going to play this hero, but because the hero is a part of the event's meta. But the end result seemed more coherent when considering these meta bans as a part of the general player targeted bans logic.

A nice demo of it can be seen in Team Spirit's profile. If you watched Ceb's breakdown of Team Spirit's strategy, you might find this order of the players kind of familiar: it's basically the same "player priority", except for Larl (which is understandable, considering he was absent as of late, thus the numbers don't line up for him).

The overall number of bans is based on opponents' drafts against the team and either who usually plays the hero on this team, what role this hero is generally played on (if the team didn't pick this hero yet) or what draft stage the hero was banned at. For overall players draft stats the algorithm works the same way, prioritizing teams stats first.

A nice thing about this feature: it's a post-gen component, meaning it is retroactively enabled in every report that supports players draft section (so basically almost every report). And it also works with PvP reports (Spectral Scrims, FPL and such).

Match Series View

This is another post-gen section. For a while now I've been labeling matches with series number and match number within the series. At some point I even started collecting official Series IDs in my databases. But there was no way to view series stats and series history.

Well, there is now. On the Matches → Series section you can find the list of series played at the event (or within the report). If there was Series ID recorded, then you will be able to see the official Series ID (and it will also be combined with other "detached" matches within the same series, if it was recorded). If series ID is not available, it will generate series tags instead and use them. Either way, there will be some way to see the series.

In the same section you can also

See who won the series and its score (I was considering adding bo1/2/3/5/7 marker, but thought it might not be reliable enough)
Which heroes were present in all matches of the series: either in picks every time, in bans every time or were both picked and banned
Series duration: delta time, including pauses between matches, and playtime, including just the in-game durations
Start date of the series
Click the series number in the first row to see the matches played in this series on a separate page

In addition to that, the Teams → Profiles → Opponents page was also updated. It now includes series count and score, along with the link to see the series.

Smaller Changes

In addition, there were also new records added:

Most MVP/LVP awards,
Highest/Lowest performance points (aka fantasy or MVP points) in a match,
Longest series by total playtime (without shortest for now, but it could be added if needed),
Team's longest series win/loss streaks (ties count for win streaks technically, so it's named "series without losses", it's a bit of a confusing wording, but you've got the idea),
Team's longest matches win/loss streaks,

There were also some minor stability improvements and extensions of available API repeaters.

And of course there is a special custom style for The International 2025 reports section.

Ranked Meta

This section is a bit more speculative this year, as it is using incomplete data (collected through less automated means, streams, public views, private discussions and manually recording a comprehensive list of their matches), but still it might be interesting to peek at what's pros were practicing recently.

Going into TI there were two major themes discovered in the meta: how broken Helm of the Dominator actually is and how it can be abused. While many players experimented with building HotD on many carries (like Spectre, Monkey King, Drow Ranger and such), the main carry to make use of this item is Marci, turning her into the most picked hero (203 matches) amongst the TI players in the past two weeks and the highest ranked carry hero with 54% winrate.

Close to follow her in popularity are Earthshaker (175 matches, 57% winrate) and Queen of Pain (166 matches, 52% winrate). While QoP is usually occupying Midlane, players tend to try and make her work on different roles, so it wouldn't be surprising to see her be a flex pick. Similarly, carry/offlane Abaddon is also back (128 matches, 57.8% winrate). Other heroes to note, that might be contested a lot are Ursa, Juggernaut and Faceless Void.

At the same time heroes like Shadow Fiend, Batrider, Pudge, Puck and Beastmaster, while being practiced a lot, do not show particularly exciting numbers, all hovering around 46% winrate.

The scariest heroes, however, might come from the supports department: Disruptor (112 matches, 62.5% winrate), Snapfire (103 matches, 55.3% winrate) and Pugna (109 matches, 53.2% winrate) all show great success. Some teams even tried to make Silencer work again (unfortunately, the hero is still kind of bad).

And we should not forget about two heroes who were the most menacing parts of the meta before that: Leshrac (99 matches, 55.6% winrate) and Nature's Prophet (120 matches, 55% winrate). While they definitely seem to still be scary and meta forming in a way, it doesn't seem like they will continue to be the major focus of the meta down the road.

Teams

And to end this overview, I'd like to add the traditional teams infographics, based on Pre-TI competitive stats and graphs. But this time around I will write a short overview about all the teams, instead of going through each of them individually.

This time around we have a couple of established titans: Team Spirit (who are crushing ratings for any fan predictions), Team Liquid, Falcons and Tundra, along with BB Team and PVISION. This collection already forms the collection of formidable opponents and one of them is the most expected team to win the championship by many. That said, there are doubts regarding Spirit's form going into the event, considering Larl's recent absence and health condition. Similar doubts are floating around Tundra, thought they have a nice track record of winning with stand-ins.

This TI also marks China's somewhat of a comeback. With Tidebound being effectively "old IG" with NothingToSay and shiro, Xtreme being "old LGD" with Ame and XinQ and the most recent addition to the lineup Yakutou being another roster of stars. While Chinese teams are not seen as strong enough to win the international event, it's hard to deny that there sure is some potential.

Aside from the fan favorites, there are also Aurora and Nigma. Both teams came from Regional Qualifiers, and both of them have absolutely packed rosters with star players and TI winners. There even is legendary return of NaVi to TI — even though it’s not the same team, it’s still nice to see this legendary tag, which won the very first TI, come back with the new generation of players.

And there are also Team Nemesis, BOOM Esports, Wildcard and Heroic – all four of which showed surprising successes throughout the year. While not looking as strong as the "big boys", they might still have a trick up their sleeve. Besides, even getting to TI is a challenge of its own, as we learned just recently.

Team Liquid

PVISION

BB Team

Tidebound

Team Spirit

Team Falcons

Tundra Esports

Yakutou Brothers

Natus Vincere

Nigma Galaxy

Aurora Gaming

Xtreme Gaming

Team Nemesis

BOOM Esports

Wildcard

HEROIC

Closing Thoughts

I am also lucky enough to work at The International once again, so keep looking for some numbers and trivia coming from me on the English broadcast (Group Stage and Main Event). There might also be some on-site content in my Telegram channel or on Twitter, but no promises there.

Until the next time comes, you can follow me on Twitter, Bsky or join my Discord. You can also support my dota community projects, that would help a lot.

Also you can check out my overviews for older TIs

TI13 Teams Overview
TI12 Teams Overview
TI11 Teams Overview
TI10 Teams Overview
(there were similar overviews for TI8 and TI9, but only exist in my personal archives for now, but they might be back soon!)

P.S. And here are my final version of Group Stage predictions for whoever is concerned

The International 2024 Stats and Meta Wrap Up

leamare — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 18:23:07 GMT

The International 2024 concluded (and Competitive Season 2024 with it).

It’s time to look back at the meta of this TI, why it clicked, what was ignored (but is likely to be a part of meta soon enough), who performed how and so on.

As always, you can check all the stats in my TI13 reports section and Competitive Tier 1 events of 2024 section.

Russian version

How it went

Quick note from future me. After re-reading the blog post, it felt way more negative than I wanted it to be. The goal is make some TI highlights and point at some interesting findings in terms of data. While the event didn’t really shine in some regards and had technical issues, the event itself was still a blast and rather enjoyable to watch and experience.

This TI, while there definitely were some exciting games played, there weren’t many new All-Time TI records set this time. While there were some nominations (like 2nd most tower damage dealt by Pure), generally speaking most of them were pretty dull.

Every TI (at least since TI10) was showing off a rather big change, the nature of the changes was always different: be it economy or comeback mechanic changes, map changes or introduction of some other big change, and this had its impact on the economy and stats. Heroes got richer, games were more fast paced, there were more resources on the map and so on.

However, while there weren’t any economy changes, this TI was the first since Facets were introduced into the game. This effectively doubled the number of heroes in the game: while facets are pretty much meant to be different variants of the hero, they more often than not create completely different playstyles, but with an old and recognizable face.

And this alone is a good reason why the games were rather exciting. Yes, we saw Mirana before, and even saw Core Mirana, but we never saw her with a completely different ult (and a completely new playstyle born out of it). Same applies to Sand King, Monkey King, Lone Druid and many others. While we already saw most of these changes in action throughout the year, many people only come back for TI, which made this so important.

Tournament Stats

This TI had the lowest number of total matches (122) since TI1 (and yes, I am counting Group Stage, Seeding Deciders and Playoff as TI). Some of it can be explained by the differences in group stage structure and schedule, some of it can be explained by the fairly low number of participants (the last time we had 16 teams was at TI6). TI12 had a similar format and had 150 matches played, while TI6 also had 16 teams participating and it had 159 matches played.

Not everything went smoothly though. During the Tundra vs IG series 2 game 1 (which also took the longest too complete because of all the pauses) there were three lobby restarts using Replay Takeover feature to continue the game. This was caused by a bug with disappearing abilities (Mirana Leap). The original match (the beginning of the game) is not available in the game client, so it’s impossible to recover a full replay of this game.

In addition, there were also several cases of servers becoming unresponsive shortly after the game ended or losing the match data, resulting in replay availability delays (or match not being accessible using the game client). This happened twice during the group stage, but also became more of an issue during the last two days, affecting 7 matches for about 1.5–3 hours each.

Thankfully, all the technical difficulties were quickly addressed by PGL and Valve crew (thanks to them for their help in resolving the issues when they arised).

Games were generally shorter compared to TI12: median match duration being 37 minutes for TI13 and 41 minutes for TI12. Other parameters are also lower: median XPM being 574 vs 610, GPM being 469 vs 502, average kills per minute being 1.08 vs 1.22. All of these, though, can be explained by the current meta. But some of it might also be the byproduct of the same reason that led to low number of matches.

During this event I was testing my spin on an MVP system, which I wanted implement (first as a “fantasy” system back in 2018). I tried my best to adjust it to give more credit to core players and to be generally more or less fair.

I will write a more detailed blog post about this feature later, when it will be released to the public. But generally speaking I feel pretty good about the results.

Here is the total awards leaderboard. Some players who stand out:

Ace with the highest total score in general (and also the highest among cores)
Sneyking with the highest total score among supports
Insania with the highest total score in his team

I won’t dig deeper into the player and teams records, since there are cool looking images for this purpose.

State of Meta

So remember the part above where I mentioned short matches and low XPM/GPM? Let’s talk about meta now.

Total balance rank of the event was 57.2 (explained here). It was the lowest balance rank throughout all TIs, the closest event in this regard being TI4 (61.2). For context: TI12 had balance rank of 70.2.

And this balance rank similarity is not the only thing similar between TI13 and TI4. This TI was also extremely focused on tempo playstyles and fights, with strong aura items being the biggest focus. Essentially the games went to building auras and fight oriented items ASAP, then shifting to teamfights and objectives.

And the tempo part comes from the level-1 of this meta: Universal heroes as carries. Or rather “ranged carries who hit like a truck” would be more appropriate description (e.g. Solar facet Mirana, Whirlwind Windranger, Eclipse facet Luna, Lone Druid). It seems to be that looking for an answer to the healing meta led the players to gravitate towards the strong damage (that goes well with the heals and auras, but also works well against tank heroes who are usually the aura carriers to begin with).

Team Liquid team profile with all the same culprits

And level-2 of the meta focusing on initiation, fight reset, with a little big of burst on top of it. Sand King was highly contested even before TI, as well as Doom and Centaur. Same can be said about Naga Siren, though she didn’t really get too many picks to shine. Kunkka became a more surprising addition to this roster, but he fits well for this kind of role.

This was the trend already even before TI13 started, but the actual pool of heroes used quickly shrinked to the most effective ones for each of the tasks.

There were 103 heroes contested, 99 of them being picked (16 of them were not banned at all) and 4 only present in bans. There were 21 uncontested heroes: Arc Warden, Bloodseeker, Bounty Hunter, Dawnbreaker, Juggernaut, Legion Commander, Lich, Lifestealer, Necrophos, Ogre Magi, Outworld Destroyer, Phantom Lancer, Pudge, Shadow Shaman, Silencer, Techies, Tidehunter, Vengeful Spirit, Venomancer, Warlock, Witch Doctor.

Interestingly, Bounty Hunter and Bristleback looked generally great in this meta and still seem to be strong stats-wise at Immortal level, but they didn’t see much play at TI. It’s especially strange that BH was completely ignored, but the hero will probably get attention soon enough.

Same issues can be seen when looking at the best items at this event. Most of them are either good for grouping up and fighting, or very efficient in terms of stats for ranged cores (especially Universal).

As for the neutral items, there isn’t much to say about them. I just like looking at these pretty icons aligned as a big grid. Seeds of Serenity is still incredibly popular though, and Safety Bubble is still stupid strong.

Competitive Season Wrap-Up

And as an ending it would be nice to include some trivia about Tier 1 competitive events played during this season (since TI12 until the end ot TI13, counting only teams with more than 20 matches)

Team Falcons had the highest winrate of 68.04% over 219 matches, followed by Cloud9/Entity (65.74%, 108) and Xtreme Gaming (61.93%, 197)
Falcons also had the highest average number of kills (26.9), XPM (3246), GPM (2574)
The most diverse teams were Team Secret (78.49% hero diversity over 63 matches), BB Team (74.30%, 167) and G2.IG (73.76%, 151) // you can read about hero diversity metric here
Teams with the longest median match durations are Virtus.pro (44:12), Team Secret (42:50) and BB Team (42:46)
There were 48 rampages total
Shortest match: NaVi vs LGD game 2 at Clavison Snow Ruyi, 13:20 (match 7868764939)
Longest match: BB Team vs Liquid game 1 at BB Dacha Dubai, 1:20:26 (match 7589398098)
Match with the most average kills per minute: Aurora vs G2.IG game 2 at PGL Wallachia S1, 3.19 kpm (match 7741499600)
Biggest networth difference: BB Team vs G2.IG game 1 at DreamLeague S22, 90177 (match 7610924034)
Most total kills: OG vs Tundra game 2 at ESL One Birmingham, 108 (match 7699942711)

Closing words

And that’s about it!

While this is all I have for TI13, I hope to come back soon enough with some cool findings and features I was playing around with.

Until then, you can follow me on Twitter or join my Discord. You can also make a donation here if you like what I do and would like to help.

See ya around!

~Lea

P.S.:

The International 2024 Teams and Meta Overview

leamare — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:25:50 GMT

Not much time left until The International 2024 kicks off so it’s time to make a quick review of stats of the teams and overall meta going into this event. And it’s definitely not late because yours truly was playing Deadlock this whole time and could not catch a break.

Russian version

Reddit discussion

Update: I got so lost in preparations for The International this time, that I was not able to finish this blog post in time. At the time of writing this note, it’s 1am already and there’s only 25% of the blog post ready. So by my estimation, it should be finished by the end of the first day of Group Stage. And translated throughout the second day.

This time there are three reports worth looking into:

TI13 Regional Qualifiers Report
Pre-TI13 Teams Recap, covering last 4 months of Tier 1 competitive games played by TI13 attending teams
Pre-TI13 Ranked Recap, covering last 3 weeks of Ranked matches, played by TI13 players

There aren’t many new exciting features this time, since most of the focus this year went into stability improvements and quality of life features in the reports, so it will be easier to navigate. But there are still some experimental features available for Early Preview subscribers (on Patreon/Boosty).

And as always it’s worth checking out these great resources:

My TI13 reports hub — all reports for this TI will be there
Tsunami’s TI13 Team Guide — my favorite kind of breakdown, highly recommend to read it
TI13 Liquipedia page
Noxville’s blog post for BO3

This time around I don’t think there is much value in talking about qualifiers. The biggest focus below will be on the Ranked meta of 7.37c, going straight into the teams breakdown.

One thing to note is that this series of team previews were never about any sort of performance analytics and such, but rather a quick overview of how the teams performed prior to the event, what they are focusing on right now and what are the things to note about their playstyles. Given the tight schedule, this time there was even less time to do a deeper dive into the topic (I even considered not making such blog post at all!), so just keep this in mind.

What is going on in Ranked

The biggest thing about the Immortal Meta currently is the Heals Meta.

I like to think about the meta throughout Dota patches as “Meta Levels”. Level Zero is the most broken heroes, the origin of brokenness if you will. Level One are the heroes that are getting attention as an answer to the Level Zero meta, Level Two is the answer to Level One and so one. Essentially it’s the cycle of finding what works and what’s the answer to that.

And usually, as the meta develops, the focus of the meta slowly drifts from one level to another (and this go for a very long time).

This time the Level-0 of the meta are the healers. You know how broken was Wraith Pact two years ago? Well, Holy Locket is the same now. So as a result the strongest and probably the most popular heroes right now are the healers/savers kind: Omniknight, Tinker (his March of the Machines facet turns him into an incredible healer support), Abaddon, Treant, etc

Naturally, Level-1 of the meta are, naturally, heroes who can either focus quickly on the healer supports or shut them up: Night Stalker, Legion Commander, Clinkz, Puck, Marci, etc. Another kind of heroes that kind of belongs to this tier are heroes who benefit from enemies staying alive, like Visage, Ursa, Slark.

And Level-2 is essentially the answer to that: counter initiation and fight reset, as well as non-healing saves. Heroes like Wyvern, Weaver, Earthshaker, Axe, Naga Siren (both Core and Support, though leaning towards the latter more), Shadow Demon all look good here, while also having other benefits. With Level-3 maybe having a bigger focus on tankiness or long attack range carries.

One interesting thing about the Pre-TI13 ranked meta is that TI players seem to be at Level-2 or even Level-3 at this point, focusing more on fight reset and sustain, rather than on the heals. Heroes like Tusk, Enigma, Sand King, Omniknight (who is still great at fight reset) steal the show, while the popularity of heroes like Lina, Morphling, Carry Mirana, Windranger or even Sniper doesn’t seem to be as surprising.

Did you know:

- Talon.Akashi has the highest winrate compared to all other TI13 players in the last 3 weeks: 65.25% over 72 matches (not counting players with low number of matches and smurfs)
- Davai Lama had the biggest hero pool of 41 hero over 128 matches, followed by Topson, Yatoro, MoOz and xNova, all with 35 heroes
- Players with the highest Damage to Gold ratios are 7e (1.48), Topson (1.43) and Nine (1.41)
- Davail Lama is also the player with the highest number of average map pings per minute (3.52), followed by Lumpy (3.45) and Munkushi (2.89)
- Fishman had the highest average number of death, but also the most total buybacks in his 90 matches

Teams

A few explanations before we roll:

Diversity is a new metric, described here. It represents how diverse the team’s picks are each game
Special Heroes are heroes specific for this team, meaning this team picked these heroes more than most other teams

And, as usual, you can explore all the stats and full profiles here: https://stats.spectral.gg/lrg2/?league=pre_ti13

Also, don’t pay too much attention to the player photos, as some of them might be outdated or lacking. Not that I’m too lazy to update it, more like there weren’t any good sources to update/add the photos from, and the older ones still do the job.

G2.IG

G2.IG is one of the oldest orgs in Dota 2 and the current roster is keeping up with the task of continuing the legacy of such a legendary tag. This team pretty much consists of five young and promising Chinese legends (except not all of them are as young, they all already have a strong reputation, and not all of them are Chinese).

The signature card of this team is going against the meta with whacky and unorthodox drafts: BoBoKa and NothingToSay are famous for their unique playstyles and unique skill to make everything work. Throw some bulky (counter) initiators into the mix, early confidence, calculated aggression and some strong level-0 meta heroes in xNova’s pool and you already have a recipe for success.

While IG’s results this season were not as promising, they are a rather stable and potent team, which has all the chances to lift the Aegis this year. Or not, if they meme too close to Sun.

Team Liquid

It’s surprising to see a team hold on to a roster for so long (in this economy). And Team Liquid is still mostly the same as one, two, three years ago. Their performance was not as stable this year, however. Some would call it a rocky road, some would call it average. But it sure did get better closer to TI13.

Two things to know about Liquid: they play very “academic” Dota, cold and clean, and they are not like most other Dota teams. Other teams might try to mimic some of the cool things Liquid do, but some of this old Heroes of Newerth perspective and magic is still there.

Another thing to note about Liquid: their hero pools line up perfectly with the current meta at all levels. You might take a look at any of the strong heroes in this meta, and all of them will be strong staples of one of the players. Taking their respectably big hero pool into account, it seems like Liquid should feel right at home this TI.

Team Spirit

Team Spirit are the champs. Like, literally. And nobody was able to really replicate the magic of this team. While their track record was not impressive this year, this roster doesn’t really need to prove themselves on the competitive scene.

However, one important thing to note is that they have a lot of eyes on them as two time champions. On the other hand, while they seem to be rather effective in this meta and as flexible as Liquid, their hero pools don’t seem to line up with the meta as nicely. Their ranked matches seem to indicate that they are adapting to the patch and have some tricks up their sleeve, but we are yet to see how it will go.

The stronger sides of Team Spirit are their strong individual performance, ability to adapt, their strong, patient and methodical map control. Not to mention the team’s great supporting crew outside of the game, which sure makes it much easier to endure such a pressure.

beastcoast

Beastcoast always tend to be under the radar and then pop out of nowhere, bringing some of the South American chaos with them. This time they bringed some new faces to the pro scene, including Payk: a young, promicing and flexible (one of the widest hero pools this month in ranked, compared to other TI players) player.

Their main staples are wild ideas and “run them down” approach (and they actually know how to do it, which is the important part). And weirdly enough, in the current patch and current meta it’s exactly the kind of approach that might bring them success. The team still is relatively new, and the individual performances are lacking in comparison to other teams, but who knows: maybe they will finish the run at a decent place?

BB Team

BB Team is weird. It feels like they are trying harder and harder to kind of replicate this TI Winner magic of Spirit, while also being more akin to Virtus.pro. And in all fairness, I can’t really say they fail at that: with every month they start to look more ane more promising as a team, more mature and possibly ready to take over the world.

Unlike Spirit, however, they tend to rush more into things instead of a more calculated approach, and tend to suffer from it. And despite this approach working well enough in the current meta in particular, it feels like the players didn’t quite feel it yet and feel too uncomfortable to let their potential out.

Xtreme Gaming

Xtreme Gaming are my favorite team and it’s definitely not because I have a crush on competitive Genshin player Ame.

If you will take IG and replace all their players with retired Dota superstars you will get Xtreme. Which also kind of has the spirit of the old LGD roster, I guess?

The two biggest stars of the team are XinQ and Ame, both being very strong individual performers with quite unique vision of the game and playstyles. Xtreme as a team tend to generally play into the current meta, but with their own twist on it. They love to play fast and aggressive, but doing it in a more methodical way. Ame loves to play “slower” heroes, but has a superpower of adapting them to high tempo. So in the end of the day Xtreme might end up being the most unique team to follow.

Tundra Esports

New Tundra roster is peculiar, but faced a lot of challenges since last TI: completely new roster, with all the players but one leaving the org, rocky start, unreasonable demands, visa issues, Deadlock invites. Everything seemed to work against them this year.

The graphic above features 9Class instead of Saksa, and this kind of showcases the biggest issue the team is facing: sudden roster change. Not to mention, this roster generally feels like a cheap knockoff version of the old squad.

With all that said, all players on this team are strong individual performers, they are all flexible in terms of their hero pools, positions and playstyles. They adapt well to new patches and it seems like they feel rather comfortable playing right now, with their “jump and disrupt” approach. The team shines the most while playing their highly trained drafts and making unconventional strategies work (which is a bit disturbing, considering they don’t have much time to bring Saksa up to speed with their strategies), but there is a chance they will rise from the ashes and show as great performance as ever, or even come out stronger.

Coming into TI13, they looked like one of the strongest contenders for the Aegis, so let’s hope they won’t lose their momentum.

Talon

To be completely honest, I forgot about Talon as a team for a moment and was surprised to see them pass through TI Qualifiers. We didn’t really see much from this team throughout the year, thus there isn’t much to say about them.

The team is very fresh and full of young players, and their general playstyle feels a bit more akin to a ranked match rather than a competitive game. This leads to some suprise picks, but this also leads to them blindly repeating trends set by other teams, struggling to catch up.

Two staples of the team are Mikoto, the experienced mentor and a very good performer himself, and Akashi, a very young carry player, who seems to be very gifted as a player. It’s hard to say how well their run will go, but if it goes well, I’d bet it’s because of these two.

Gaimin Gladiators

Gaimin have this “almost-but-not-quite-champs” curse. They were the menace of DPC’22, but didn’t end up winning that year. They were the menace of DPC’23 and everyone expected them to win TI12, but they came 2nd. If anything, this reminds me of LGD at TI10 a lot: similar storyline and a very similar outcome.

They still ended up winning “the other TI” this year in Riyadh, which is great. But every Dota player wants to lift the Aegis at least once in their life. This time people seemed to let their guard down a bit about Gaimin, slightly lowering their expectations and making the pressure easier to endure for the players.

One thing to note about their performance: they have 2nd highest diversity of picks in the last 4 months of competitive games, they tend to place a strong emphasis on laning, to later use this momentum to carry forward and snowball. This might also be their weak spot: if their plans fall apart, it’s usually much harder for them to adapt, compared to other teams. However, their plans are usually well calculated and executed to be easily broken.

Cloud9

If it wasn’t for Xtreme, I would say Cloud9 are my favorites. And it’s also one of the strongest teams at TI13.

Cloud9 are hard workers, putting a strong emphasis on practice and analytics (with their brilliant analyst ChosenOne). This team is also one of the most diverse in terms of drafts (4th, with 70 heroes in the pool over 57 matches). And every player on the team is also famous for strong individual performance, not to mention the overall team chemistry, that ties everything together. This kind of roster is a great match to bring the glory to the legendary Cloud9 tag!

Their staples are creative drafts with strong preparation stage to every opponent, followed by early aggression, teamfights and strong emphasis on the fight flow control. This, too, works well enough with the current meta, but the team’s one of the stronger sides is their flexibility and ability to adapt, so I’m sure they won’t have any issues finding their jam.

nouns

For me personally Shopify Rebellion, Evil Geniuses and Nouns are sort of like spirits of Past, Present and Future of Christmas. Except it’s EG instead lf Christmas. And Nouns pretty much feels like a spiritual successor to the “original” EG, if it makes sense.

In part this feeling comes from the management, in part it comes from the latest addition of Fly. Some of it comes from the vibe. Honestly, it’s hard to put into words. But one thing is certain: nouns came a long way from “a random NA stack” to “wait they are actually pretty good”.

They are the most diverse team in my Pre-TI13 report (and also the team with 2nd widest hero pool: 87 over 100 matches). Their playstyle appears casual and slightly relaxed, but it’s just a mask for disciplined and efficient approach to the game. Before they were good at knowing their limits with aggression and having a good sense of time for objectives. Now, with Fly coming in with all his experience, as well as Yuma and Copy joining in as young stars, this roster seem capable enough to beat their own last year record.

Team Zero

Team Zero has a fun name, because it reflects how much I knew about them. Honestly, the only thing in my book was that I heard nickname Ponlo before, but that’s about it. And yet they appeared out of nowhere just to take over TI Qualifiers.

The only thing to note about them so far is that they are a formidable foe. They seemed to practice a lot right before TI13, and they also seem to have a very good sense of meta. But it’s hard to evaluate their playstyle based only on their qualifier games.

I would not get my hopes up about Tz, but who knows. There are definitely some Wings vibes going on.

Team Falcons

We already had Tundra team on the list, now it’s time for The Real Tundra: also known as Falcons. Or rather whatever remained of it. After the team parted ways with Tundra the org, the roster had some changes. But it seems like these changes turned out well for Falcons, as their performance was stellar throughout this year.

Just like Tundra before, Falcons are seen as trend setters and known for their great sense of meta. There is also some great team synergy going on between ATF and skiter, as well as skiter and Sneyking. They are good at map control, as well as slow and methodical play. This might still become their problem, along with the “strong team curse”, but I would be optimistic about Falcons.

1W Team

1W look like a young a promising squad, but there are only Elite League S2 and TI Qualifiers to back it up for now. But HOW they back it up, man! This squad sure has made a name for itself by playing five matches in the grand finals of ELS2 against Team Liquid no less.

Their staples are flexibility (their hero diversity is 2nd after nouns) and somewhat pub-like drafts and performance. They clearly manage to make it work, and they seem to be adapting to the meta well enough. But in a way this team still remains a mystery, and I would not be surprised if throughout the group stage they would have great success, until someone finds a “key” to defeating them.

Heroic

Heroic is a solid roster, collecting all South American stars (and Davai Lama). Their placements at Tier 1 events do not look great, but they attended almost every significant event this year.

At the same time, there are a lot of great performing players, and their ranked stats show that they were putting the effort to prepare and improve for this TI. One of their signature cards is either flexing the roles, or picking heroes that are fluid in their position throughout the game. Heroic tend to be a chaotic force of nature, brawling non-stop, while also dragging the game for a bit.

Aurora Gaming

Aurora is the last team on the list, and while it has all the stellar players of the region (and effectively being the previous Talon roster), this team kind of went under the radar for many.

Generally speaking Aurora’s hero pool seem to work well in the current meta, especially with heroes like Omniknight, Visage, Drow and QoP. Staples of the team are flawless early rotations and great early game execution, however they always struggled with keeping this momentum up and not throwing the game. This season they sort of slowed down a bit, while still keeping up the early pressure as their preferred playstyle.

Closing thoughts

And that’s about it. With DPC system going away it was quite a bit harder to follow and understand some of the teams, but generally speaking it feels like the scene changed quite a bit and the change brought quite a bit of openness.

As always, a reminder: this blog post is more of my perception of the teams and their playstyles. I would still advice you to watch the games and make your mind about the teams yourself. And look at some pretty pictures here in the meantime.

I am also lucky enough to work at The International once again, so keep looking for some numbers and trivia coming from me on the English brodcast (Group Stage and Main Event). There might also be some on-site content in my Telegram channel or on Twitter, but no promises there.

Until the next time comes, you can follow me on Twitter or join my Discord. You can also make a donation here to support my projects if you like what I do and would like to help, I really appreciate that.

Also you can check out my overviews for older TIs

TI12 Teams Overview
TI11 Teams Overview
TI10 Teams Overview
(there were similar overviews for TI8 and TI9, but only exist in my personal archives for now)

The International 2023 Teams Overview (kind of)

leamare — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 10:47:13 GMT

I started preparing this traditional piece right before TI12, but because of all the stuff happening I wasn’t able to finish it in time, so… I’ll just end up dumping all the graphics here.

TI Teams Overview posts is something I do every year, after all.

I would suggest you to check out Tsunami’s overview for this year though: https://howdoiplay.com/blog/2023/10/05/ti12-team-guide.html

You can still check out my Pre-TI12 reports, as well as TI12 reports here: https://stats.spectral.gg/lrg2/?cat=ti12

I think Pre-TI12 ranked recap is great if you want to understand how the meta evolved.

Will follow up with my post-TI12 thoughts later, as well as graphics for TI12 as a whole. And, well, thoughts on the Tundra incident, I guess.

Numbers of Competitive Dota: 2022 Edition

leamare — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 17:39:01 GMT

There were 8266 total matches played, 2860 of them are considered as Tier 1 events, while 3401 were played at the DPC and TI events. 17 matches were not analyzed. Radiant won 48% of games.

The report started on 29th of November, 2021 with the first match of DPC China Winter Tour game in Division 2 between Team Saiyan and Dawn Gaming (6297312683).

The last match of the report was game 5 of BTS Pro Series 13 grand finals between Evil Geniuses and TSM (6912325119), which happened on the 10th of December, 2022.

The report includes all Tier 3+ events listed on Liquipedia, not counting qualifiers (except for TI Qualis).

The report didn’t include one event (for now), which didn’t have stats publicly recorded: Gamers Galaxy Thailand.

There were total of 260 teams and 1239 unique players.

15th of October was the day with the highest number of matches played (total of 51).

Total playtime combined was 212 days 22 minutes and 55 seconds. Combined time dead for all players in these games was over 192 days.

Top-3 patches by the number of matches were 7.31d (2100 matches), 7.30e (2062 matches) and 7.31b (1534 matches).

During this time there were over 16 millions creeps murdered, almost 619 thousands of creeps denied, 16 755 Roshans slain, 23 889 couriers killed and 305 rampages made.

Players dealt over 1565 millions of damage to each other and 216 millions of damage to buildings, healed allies for 93 millions of health points, placed over 282 thousands of observer wards (108 thousands of which were destroyed by other players) and 502 thousands of sentry wards. They also stacked 139 thousands of neutral camps and bought back over 39 thousand times.

Median game duration was 35:43, while average was 36:56 (standard deviation was ~9:41).

Higher limiter was 241 matches. Median hero picks number was 573, while median hero bans number was 711.

Median XPM was 549, median GPM was 428.

There were 1.47 kills per minute on average.

Notable matches

Game with the highest number of average kills per minute (3.37) was Samba vs Eternity game 2 at TodayPay Season 2 (6730993708).

The highest number of kills happened in a single match was 132 in the second game between Ukumari and Infamous at BTS Pro Series 11 (6561604033).

The longest match was Yangon Galacticos vs Gorilla at Moon Studio November Mood (6883717393): it lasted for 2 hours 14 minutes.

The second longest match (and also the longest Tier 1 match) was Entity vs RNG at The International 2022 (6814073054), which lasted for 1 hour 47 minutes, which also was the game with the highest number of Roshan kills (8). It is also the second longest game in the history of TI.

The shortest match was Into The Breach vs EZ KATKA at 1x Series (6714290022), which lasted 10 minutes 28 seconds.

The biggest difference in gold earned was 73 thousands gold in the match between Brame and Ivy at DPC’22 Summer Tour Division 2 (6623713587).

This season also had the match with the biggest difference in gold earned in the history of The International, which is also the 5th record in this category in throughout the competitive year: 64.5k in the match between RNG and Entity at The International 2022 (6814073054).

The game with the most courier kills (14) was Ivy vs EZ KATKA at 1x Series (6724006530).

The matches with the biggest comebacks were Omega vs Ravens at Claro Apu League S5 (6881624478) with 46k gold swing, No Runes vs 5RATFORCESTAFF game 3 at BTS Pro Series 13 (6876503592) with 43.7k gold swing.

The biggest networth stomp was in a game between Geek Slate and TNC Predator at Predator League (6859231487) with 73k gold lead swing.

Players

Geek Slate player Kokz played the most matches: total of 313.

Execration.Bob took the second place (296 matches), while also being the first by the total number of kills (2704).

Monaspa.SsaSpartan took the third place (279 matches), but had the most wins (165).

Most matches on a single hero were played by Lilgun.Ace12 as Grimstroke (59 matches, 55.9% winrate) and Bane (59 matches, 54.2% winrate), as well as RISE.BLACKARXANGEL as Bane (57 matches, 61.4% winrate).

Player-hero pairs with the highest winrates (over 10+ games) were RSG.Raven^ as Luna (10 matches, 100% winrate) and Vincenzo^ as Pugna (10 matches, 100% winrate).

Pairs with the worst winrates were Dendi as Queen of Pain (10 matches, 0% winrate), Atlantis.Ws as Pangolier (11 matches, 0% winrate) and adzantick as Kunkka (11 matches, 0% winrate).

The squad that played the most matches together was Lilgun’s roster: khishka, Ace12, eleven, sanctity- and 423, who played total of 225 matches played together with 56.9% winrate. The second place goes to Team Liquid’s roster: Insania, MATUMBAMAN, zai, Boxi and m1CKe: they played 188 matches and won 59% of them.

AG.db- had the widest hero pool of 56 heroes.

Most popular player profiles in the reports were K1, Pakazs, C smile <, Ame, Wisper, skiter, Yuragi, Yatoro, Timado, Yopaj-.

Averages

With at least 40 matches played

Kills: highest are Citrus (10.2), Pakazs (10.0) and Nande (10.0), lowest are antoha (1.6), RedPanda (1.67), kazi (1.68)
Deaths: highest are NBH.flaSH (10.5), KBU.US.Chen (10.3) and DrE.SexyeYogye (9.94), lowest are Monet (2.47), Raven (2.5), Erika (2.53)
Assists: highest are YG.LuN (17.5), Overlord.Django (16.7), Matthew (16.5), lowest are SAG.Ms (6.24), S9.Paradise (6.51), Atomic.Marb (6.61)
GPM: highest are Parker (752), RAMZES666 (711), Pakazs (710), lowest are Overlom (240), empyreaN (242), kazi (248)
XPM: highest are Parker (794), Pakazs (779), SINFULSOUL- (774), lowest are Overlom (319), empyreaN (322), qyqx (327)
Healing per minute: kickeed (151), Seleri (148), antoha (130)
Hero Damage per minute: SMG.MooN (819), RCY (807), Nicky`Cool (801)
Tower Damage per minute: vtFaded (301), Parker (262), Pakazs (258)
Taken Damage per minute: SAMBA.Revenant (711), Tib (686), TheBloodySky (682)
Roshans with team: SoNNeikO (1.58), Larl (1.55), Noticed (1.54)
Stuns: xiaobonbon (65.5), Czy (60.3), kaka (60.2)
Map pings: iceiceice (194), YG.Skill lay (163), Rupido (146)
Damage to gold ratio: TC.B-TUNE (1.63), Tsunami.2 kub (1.63), BBS.RRL (1.49)

Game records

Highest GPM: 1255 by Ark as Medusa in match 6594451936
Highest XPM: 1193 by TGM as Templar Assassin in match 6730993708
Kills: 31 by hFn as Pudge in match 6786082402
Deaths: 26 by Eixn as Tusk in match 6594451936
Assists: 49 by pingu as Bane in match 6545781221
KDA with 0 deaths: 50 by bzm as Ember Spirit in match 6705745777 (Arlington Major OG vs bc g3)
KDA with 1+ deaths: 51 by Toshi as Keeper of the Light in match 6723646130
Gold Earned: 105 320 by Ghost as Terrorblade in match 6814073054 (TI11 Entity vs RNG)
Last Hits: 1574 by pp as Leshrac in match 6883717393
Last Hits per minute: 21.04 by RAMZES666 as Medusa in match 6387318540
Damage to heroes: 213 881 by Faith_bian as Venomancer in match 6380457853
Hero damage per minute: 2662.42 by Faith_bian as Venomancer in match 6380457853
Damage to buildings: 36 807 by Fonte as Medusa in match 6306382585
Hero healing: 59 249 by Bignum as Io in match 6368316183
Damage taken from heroes: 170 681 by Shad as Arc Warden in match 6792902862
Neutral camps stacked: 23 by KJ as Enigma in match 6513600185
Observer wards placed: 41 by xNova as Lich in match 6814073054 (TI11 Entity vs RNG)
Sentries placed: 84 by xNova as Lich in match 6814073054 (TI11 Entity vs RNG)
Observer wards destroyed: 22 by Husky as Chaos Knight in match 6593293195 (BTS Pro Series 11 AM Grand Finals)
Map pings: 390 by Lay as Monkey King in match 6784584812
Stuns: 362 seconds by Judy as Earthshaker in match 6775176152
Courier kills: 10 by Saksa as Weaver in match 6634676571
Rampage with the lowest team networth difference (1684) by alberkaaa as Shadow Fiend in match 6895751371
Rampage with the highest team networth difference (48 153) by Gabbi as Razor in match 6427820880 (DPC’22 Tour 1 Regional Finals)
Rampage with the lowest networth difference in a losing match (3416) by 12 as Ember Spirit 6358426214
Rampage with the highest networth difference in a losing match (20 033) by nattynarwhal_ as Keeper of the Light in match 6561100504

Heroes

Balance rank for the whole year was 73.5.

Heroes with the highest ranks were Bane, Beastmaster, Mirana, Medusa, Lycan, Marci, Death Prophet, Puck, Templar Assassin and Tiny.

The least contested heroes were Meepo, Bounty Hunter, Arc Warden, Clinkz, Elder Titan, Riki, Witch Doctor, Techies, Axe, Tinker, Oracle and Vengeful Spirit.

There were eight uncontested heroes during The International this year: Windranger, Meepo, Dragon Knight, Clinkz, Bounty Hunter, Treant Protector, Keeper of the Light and Techies (and Necrophos was only banned once).

The most contested heroes were Puck (4850), Mars (4773), Tiny (4273), Beastmaster (4233), Death Prophet (4106).

The most picked heroes were Tiny (2503), Mars (2297), Bane (1875), Snapfire (1777), Ember Spirit (1645). The most banned were Puck (3232), Batrider (3089), Beastmaster (3046), Monkey King (2664), Medusa (2586).

Most popular heroes in the reports were Tiny, Mars, Bane, Puck, Snapfire, Ember Spirit, Death Prophet, Pangolier (also 8th most picked), Razor (also 16th most picked).

Most popular spectral hero builds, however, were Stats Morphling Safelane, Stats Slark Safelane, Nerd’s Spectre (Core), Stats Necrophos Mid, Stats Faceless Void Safelane.

Averages

At least 550 matches played

Kills: Queen of Pain (9.1), Storm Spirit (8.93), Ember Spirit (8.87)
Deaths: highest are Clockwerk (8.83), Shadow Shaman (8.39), Crystal Maiden (8.27), lowest are Morphling (3.03), Wraith King (3.07), Medusa (3.15)
Assists: Mirana (16), Treant Protector (15.8), Disruptor (15.6)
GPM: Medusa (727), Terrorblade (726), Templar Assassin (687)
XPM: Templar Assassin (780), Medusa (729), Lina (724)
Healing per minute: Io (373), Keeper of the Light (153), Treant Protector (145)
Hero Damage per minute: Zeus (1069), Ember Spirit (858), Leshrac (763)
Taken Damage per minute: Wraith King (747), Timbersaw (690), Dragon Knight (648)
Tower Damage per minute: Terrorblade (260), Medusa (259), Luna (250)
Stuns: Spirit Breaker (113.7), Nyx Assassin (86.6), Bane (81.3)
Roshans with team: Shadow Shaman (1.33), Templar Assassin (1.32), Beastmaster (1.24)
Last hits per minute: Medusa (12.5), Terrorblade (12.1), Luna (10.9)
Damage to gold ratio: Zeus (2.18), Skywrath Mage (1.65), Ember Spirit (1.62)

Teams

The teams (tags, not rosters) with the most matches played were Execration (293), OB.Neon (291) and Lilgun (253).

The team with the most matches played at Tier 1 events was OG (194).

Teams with the highest hero diversity (Tier 1, 10+ matches) were KBU.US (79.8%) and Alliance (77.5%). But the team with the widest hero pool was PSG.LGD (116).

Most popular teams (by their profile requests in spectral reports) were OG, Tundra, BOOM, Team Liquid, beastcoast, Team Secret, Team Spirit, Thunder Awaken, Team Aster, Entity.

Team with the highest number of kills in a match was Our Way with 71 kill inmatch 6786082402 against Wolf Team during BTS Pro Series 12.

Team with the highest number of asissts in a match was Yangon Galacticos with 180 assists in match 6883717393 against Gorilla during Moon Studio November Mood.

Team with the lowest number of deaths in a match was Into The Breach with 0 deaths in match 6720958592 against Sigma.YNT during 1x Series. Team with the highest number of deaths in a match was Samba Team with 72 deaths in match 6734104276 against Ravens at TodayPay Invitational Season 2.

Other stuff

Medium items with the highest numbers of purchases were Blink Dagger (31 504), Aghanim’s Shard (28 555), Power Threads (20 934), while items with the lowest numbers of purchases were Meteor Hammer (409), Dagon (422), Blade Mail (442).

Maybe there are Boots of Travel somewhere at the bottom, but the numbers were affected by a bug sometime during the year, so it’s hard to say.

Medium items with the highest winrate shifts (and 4k+ number of purchases) were Blink Dagger (+22.25%), Aghanim’s Shard (+17.06%), Skull Basher (+12.08%). The lowest winrate shifts came from Maelstrom (-1.84%), Urn of Shadows (+0.97%), Dragon Lance (+2.51%).

Hand of Midas could be ahead of Maelstrom with -3.83% winrate shift, but it only had 2292 purchases.

Major items with the highest numbers of purchases (not counting medium items here) were Black King Bar (32 114), Aghanim’s Scepter (11 743), Kaya and Sange (5005) and Eye of Skadi (5002). Lowest numbers of purchases belong to Yasha and Kaya (76), Revenant’s Brooch (85) and Dagon 5 (159).

As for winrate shifts, the highest (min 1300 games) came from Abyssal Blade (+20.86%), Black King Bar (+20.35%), Satanic (+17.78%). The lowest were Battle Fury (-2.63%), Spirit Vessel (+1.96%), Heaven’s Halberd (+3.55%).

The International 2022 had the first game in the history of the event’s series with a rampage by a team that lost: by DarkMago as Ember Spirit in a match against Team Liquid (game 3, 6819203954). This series also had one of the three megacreeps comebacks in TI’s history (game 1, 6818958825).

The game with the most mangoes purchased at TI11 was Fnatic vs Aster game 2 (6809556554): Monet bought 34 mangoes, BoBoKa bought 8, 皮球 also bought 8 and Jaunuel bought 5. It averaged to 0.9538 mangoes per minute. Second game by this value had only 0.6923 mangoes per minute and it was Liquid vs Hokori game 1 (6810895741).

Delicious!

Reports

There were total of 177 reports made this year, including 10 ranked reports and 10 amateur event reports.

The most popular report this year was “Ranked Meta — Last Week”, followed by 7 ranked patch reports.

The most popular event report was The International 2022, followed by The International 2021, Gamers Galaxy Invitational and DPC reports.

The most popular amateur events reports were EVA League Summer Season, The Valkyrie Cup — Winter Edition and Into Valhalla.

The most popular sections were “Hero Counters”, “Hero Combos” and “Item Builds”.

Closing words

Match data was collected using awesome APIs provided by Stratz, OpenDota and Valve.

The public version of this report is currently missing some of the sections to reduce the load. But you can still find most of the information in the stats hub and Competitive 2021–2022 report.

I’m still salty about that one event missing, but I have some ideas on how to get the sats for it back and add it into the main report. But we’ll see how it goes.

That’s about it. Merry Christmas!

The International 2022 Teams and Stats Overview

leamare — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 20:37:24 GMT

The International 2022 starts in a couple of hours. It’s perfect time to review the stats for TI11 teams, as well as go through the TI meta and take a quick look at TI Qualifiers stats.

Русская версия

For this year I prepared three separate Pre-TI11 profiles:

Pre-TI11 Last Chance Qualifier (not really useful at this point)
Pre-TI11 Teams Stats Recap, covering teams’ stats during official matches starting with DPC 2022 Season 2
Pre-TI11 Teams Ranked, covering ranked stats of TI11 participants (not including smurfs, but including LCQ players)

This year’s reports have some new features, as well as focus on the teams and players specifically, so they are even better for making decisions regarding your precious compendium predictions. It also has a new and improved Diversity metric (I wrote about it here), which gives a much better representation of how diverse a team’s picks are.

In this blog post I will go through each of TI11 teams, covering their stats and playstyles. Every team also has its own Meta Graph, visually representing the team’s picks and bans.

Before that, I will take a look at TI11 Qualifiers stats, including Last Chance Qualifier.

As a side note, I would also advice you to check these things out:

Qualifiers Recap

It is important to take a look at the qualifiers stats first. While the meta already chaged throughout the qualifiers and is likely to change again, it’s important to look at for some context, especially since Pre-TI team profiles are using data for a much bigger period.

You can also explore the same data (and more) in the TI2022 Qualifiers report.

Total Stats

Marci quickly took the lead, being the most picked hero in general and the most banned (as well as most contested) during LCQ, but we’ll get to that.

Enigma, Batrider and Undying took the lead in bans. And the Outraged Dandelion wasn’t picked even once during all the qualis.

While there are many popular duos, two pairs are far from everybody else: Marci + Viper and Morph + Undying.

Interestingly, three of the most contested heroes (Marci, Undying, Primal Beast) ended up being among the most flexible heroes (and remaining two were rather popular as well).

One thing that interests me the most is the list of the best ranked heroes for each position. Pudge ends up being the best carry (Morph, SF, Faceless and Slark being in top-5), Enigma and Visage are the best offlaners, and Lina dominates the midlane.

While best supports are dominated by Marci, Undying, Nyx, Disruptor, Chen, Omniknight and Clockwerk (for both positions 4 and 5).

And as for records… Topson took the most of them. But it’s not as important for us right now (it’s just a fun bonus).

And to refresh the memory, here’s the grid of the regional meta we had before LCQ happened…

Last Chance Qualifier

…and now let’s take a look at the LCQ stats.

In a way LCQ can be seen as a mini-TI of sorts. It’s happening pretty close to TI in terms of timing, so naturally meta is going to be more similar to this event.

During LCQ Marci absolutely CRUSHED the event, having 100% contest rate. And, well, there are definitely a lot of tanky punching heroes at the top.

Undying and SF ended up being the most picked at LCQ. Marci, however, lost her spot as the most picked to get the most banned spot, moving Enigma to the 2nd place.

Thoughts about meta

However there are two things to keep in mind. First, these are Qualifiers stats, and the teams who already got to the event might have a different vision of the game. Second, the meta tends to evolve over time, even during the same event. So I would expect it to shift once more.

Pre-TI Ranked Stats

One thing that might come in handy is looking at what the players are playing in Ranked. High MMR meta tends to be pretty close to competitive: it’s also pretty high level of skill and coordination, and competitive players often tend to use their pubs to practice heroes they want to play at the tournament. Even their secret strategies, be it Carry Slardar, Marci, Leshrac or Chaos Knight.

For this I made a special Pre-TI11 Ranked Recap Report, covering the ranked stats of TI11 players and what they were practicing in pubs.

Some of the most intriguing heroes at the moment are Disruptor, Leshrac, Shadow Fiend, Clinkz and Doom. While at some point Marci was the most practiced hero in ranked, she quickly fell off in popularity after LCQ, as people started looking for a response which you can actually pick.

At the same time, Shadow Fiend and Leshrac were practiced a lot even before LCQ, and they really seem to be good candidates to become most picked heroes at TI. Morphling and Primal Beast also seem to be rather popular and they were picked a lot even during the qualifiers, but I’m not as sure in them as they are banned a lot as well.

Top-5 most banned in ranked are Batrider, Enigma, Marci, Undying and Faceless Void. And while Batrider and Enigma already kind of fell off in popularity and Marci took the spotlight during LCQ, I would expect either Undying or Enigma to take the most banned hero spot once again.

As a side note, you can also use the same report to look up average stats of the players in ranked matches (like kills, deaths, assists, pings, etc) and also there is an interactive party graph which shows what players tend to play together a lot.

You can play around with it here: https://stats.spectral.gg/lrg2/?league=pre_ti11_ranked&mod=players-party_graph

Did you know:

- The most diverse players are Faith_bian, Affliction and Whitemon

- CoLLapse has the highest winrate (71.6% over 67 matches, 19 different heroes), compared to other TI players with more than 10 matches played since the 19th of September

Teams

Now let’s get to the teams.

Team vs Team performance grid

A few explanations before we roll:

Diversity is a new metric, described here. It represents how diverse the team’s picks are each game
Special Heroes are heroes specific for this team, meaning this team picked these heroes more than most other teams

And, as usual, you can explore all the stats and full profiles here: https://stats.spectral.gg/lrg2/?league=pre_ti11

Team Liquid

Team Liquid is the most recent addition to TI11 teams lineup, as they are the last team to join the competition through Last Chance Qualifiers. They were pretty close to the invite twice: once during DPC season, taking 14th place in the ranking, and second time during WEU Qualifier, ending up with the 3rd place.

Team Liquid is famous for their farming duo (MATUMBAMAN and m1CKe) being flexible enough and also able to give more resources to each other. Before the team also used to prioritize better lineup for MATUMBAMAN, but now (judging by the players’ draft order) it’s no longer the case, since the last pick is pretty much equal split between all three cores.

Their drafts are usually based around teamfights, which might also be their weakest spot. However, they compensate it by having a strong emphasis on the map and vision control, having 2nd highest average number of wards placed and 6th highest average number of wards destroyed per game. While this might be a side effect of playing longer games on average (5th highest average duration), it still shows a lot.

Team Secret

Team Secret has a lot of similarities with Team Liquid. Both came from LCQ, both went through WEU Qualifier (Secret took 2nd place), but they also didn’t show any results at all during the DPC Season.

Even their hero pools with Liquid are pretty similar (even their special heroes), which is not as surprising, considering their playstyles. Secret also have a bigger emphasis on teamfights. However, Secret tend to give more attention to their star player Nisha, trying to secure the best matchups and leaving last picks to him. They also have very high diversity (3rd highest), which means they have a bigger variety of strategies at their disposal.

They also tend to play longer games (1st highest average game duration) and while not utilizing vision to the same extent, they seem to be more efficient with their farm and teamfights execution (1st highest average XPM and 4th highest average kills).

Talon

Talon is the first team on the list to successfully get through the regional qualifiers. They didn’t have much of a chance to compete during early DPC seasons to get their points, but quickly showed their all-star roster is capable of competing at the highest level.

Their drafts are heavily centered around 23savage, their main performer. And while they too love to play around good teamfights, they tend to pay more attention to vision (4th best wards and dewards) and generally play be more careful. They usually abuse lanes pressure and try to win some time until their core (who is usually rather greedy, but efficient) comes online. Only after that they will be able to show their true power, but this approach might also play against them.

Royal Never Give Up

Royal Never Give Up truly played up to their name. They had a rough time during this competitive season, often playing with standins or not being able to compete properly. And while this might have made them look weak on paper, they are a force to be reckoned with.

RNG prefer to have a strong start and establish their dominance on the map, denying enemies of any map control or vision when possible. While their hero pool is rather big, their diversity is not, which means they usually stick to what works and play the same heroes more often.

They are also quite reckless with their vision (1st highest average wards lost per game and low sentry usage efficiency). This might be a sign of their more aggressive playstyle (sentry usage and their 5th highest average Roshan kills also tell us about this), but also might be a sign of their weakness.

BetBoom

BetBoom (ex. Winstrike) went through the EEU Qualifier with a striking 80% winrate. And, well, the team quickly became the star roster of the region, even kicking Outsiders (who were seen as the strongest team of the region before) out of the competition. They are even praised (somewhat jokingly, somewhat serious) as godlike players, especially the team’s star player Daxak.

Their staple is playing fast. Like really fast. They love picking aggressive supports and strong pushers (usually for Daxak), while backing it up with a strong kill potential core (usually from Larl). Surprisingly, their draft aren’t as focused around Daxak as one would expect, splitting the last draft stage priority equally between all three cores. This usually shows high flexibility in terms of playstyles, as well as smooth teamplay.

Entity

Entity got some roster changes throughout the season, but managed to find their spark with the addition of Pure, and for many this roster is seen as one of the strongest teams at TI11 at the moment. This comes with no surprise, since aside from their carry, there are also three pub stars on the same team (Stormstormer, Tobi and Kataomi), as well as legendary captain (Fishman) and genius coach (MeTTruM), who did a lot for the team’s success and takes this very seriously.

Throughout the DPC they usually left the last pick priority to Tobi, making his hero choice and matchup the most important for the team. This also ends up shaping the team’s meta: they love to play fast and aggressive dota with high emphasis on pushing and “anti-carries” (core heroes who are best at shutting down the enemy core, while not being mediocre in general). They also tend to know their timings well, which allows them to play at their own pace.

While they have the 2nd highest average hero damage per minute, they (weirdly) are lacking in terms of average tower damage, being among the worst teams by this metric. They are also not very flexible, having 5th worst diversity, which might become a problem for them in the future.

Hokori

Hokori came through the SA Qualifier and became the second team from the region at the event.

There isn’t much to say about them in terms of outstanding performance. One thing about them is they tend to fight. A LOT. And also die a lot. Their games tend to turn into the real massacre, with constant teamfighting, midgame oriented cores and aggressive playstyle with emphasis on map control.

They also tend to play around their carry a lot. This and their overly aggressive playstyle might be both their strength and their weakness.

Soniqs

Soniqs (ex. Quincy Crew) is the team of the legendary players of North America. I can’t remember a TI without them since the team formed, and it was weird to think that they came from the regional qualifier, meaning they were close to losing this spot.

While all the players on the team are legendary and famous for their great performance, there are two players shaping the meta of the team. The first is Yawar, who is the center of attention and the priority player on the team. The second player is Quinn, who is famous for his outstanding skill on midlane.

Having a strong core player and a lane dominating mid already hint at the optimal playstyle for the team, with one of the team’s strongest sides is high diversity (2nd highest). And LESLAO, being among the most diverse players at this TI, along with supports, complete the picture by usually playing a teamfighting offlaner with a strong early to mid game and aggressive teamfighting supports.

Fnatic

Fnatic is the first team on the list who got here by DPC points, while also being another one of the staple orgs at the tournament.

While there are many famous and strong players on the team, J is the one, who takes the spotlight and ends up taking the biggest priority. They are also the most diverse team (1st highest diversity) and the team with high objective stats, but low to average kills and hero damage. This means they usually tend to avoid unnecessary fights, while winning time by controlling the map with creep waves.

Evil Geniuses

Evil Geniuses and Arteezy can also be seen as necessary for TI11. And with addition of Nightfall, as well as return of Fly, this team looks as strong as ever.

Their star player is, of course, Arteezy. Not only he gets better lineups, but the team plays around him, and not without a reason: he still remains one of the best performers at this level. On the other hand, there are Abed, a very strong midlane player, who excells at playing fast and aggressive early to mid game, as well as Nightfall, who is also great at this, but also tends to play heroes with a great lategame potential. This, along with the playstyle of their supports, creates a strong emphasis on 4+1 midgame, teamfights and eventually dual core lineups.

They might look weak on paper, since their average kills, assists, XPM and GPM are either worst or close to it. However there is a reason for this: they have everything under control. With a relatively high winrate, they have both 2nd shortest game and win durations. Another strong side of the team is their diversity (4th highest).

Gaimin Gladiators

Gaimin Gladiators are similar to EG in many ways. Both teams have a strong emphasis on their carry, both teams have pretty low average stats, but also low games duration (with a lower winrate, however).

They seem to pay a lot of attention to their safelane matchup as well, but to a lesser degree, since difference between all three cores in regards of last pick priority is much lower.

Tundra

Last year Tundra losing out on TI was upsetting. This time, however, they finally are able to show what they are capable of.

This is the third team on the list with pretty low averages, but also low game duration. In case of this team, however, the explanation is much more obvious: the team is famous for picking “zoo” heroes and pushing. Nine usually ends up getting the last pick priority, but generally speaking the team tends to efficiently manage all the resources, spreading them equally between all the cores.

TSM

TSM are known for their love for pushing (1st highest tower damage), which is also reflected in their hero choices: a lot of aggressive mid to late game heroes with illusions, summoned units and direct tower damage. They also among the teams, who tend to abuse Chen’s power.

TSM’s last pick priority is equally split between Timado and SabeRLighT-, depending on the strategy and lineups. And while generally they tend to play aggressively, their vision usage shows, that they are more thoughtful about it and prefer to accumulate resources first and play defensively.

BOOM

BOOM are among the more interesting teams. First, when investigating the parties graph I found out that BOOM players have the most matches played together in pubs compared to everybody else. Second, their hero choices, while still staying mostly true to meta, quite often might contain some exotic picks.

Their playstyle is mostly based around pushing and strong start. They also have a strong priority for the carry’s matchup and generally like picking aggressive core heroes for safelane to suit their invasive and fast playstyle.

Thunder Awaken

Thunder Awaken is another team that loves fighting. They have the highest kills and assists (and also pretty high average deaths and the highest average damage per minute), while also having pretty high tower damage per minute and taking a lot of objectives, while preferring shorter games.

Pakazs gets the highest priority in terms of drafts, and his playstyle defines the playstyle of the team. Thunder tend to wait until they are ready, while also playing strong utility-ish heroes with map control capabilities (and, naturally, good teamfight). However, their hero choices are quite limited, which leads to the worst hero diversity compared to other TI teams.

Aster

The player photos above are slightly outdated. Notably, photo used for 皮球 is wrong. Thanks to /u/vinzoo92 for pointing this out.

Team Aster seems weird on paper. While their favorite picks suggest midgame domination into long games, they generally prefer to play quickly and pressure opponents until their carry is ready, with midlaner taking the lead in the meantime. This is also reflected in their draft priorities: Monet usually gets a better matchup, with Ori on the second place.

This is all while their offlane heroes are great at teamfighting and map control, while also scaling well into the lategame. With all this, however, the team is losing out on objectives in the meantime, but compensates it by being able to efficiently accumulate critical mass of resources.

beastcoast

Beastcoast is the fan-favorite team with a quite unique playstyle. They might not be good at fighting, but they are strong at accumulating resources and efficient farming, as well as fast games. And they tend to utilize this to their advantage.

While K1 gets the highest priority and the most love, the rest of the team is busy with stacks (3rd highest by stacks), while also picking the most annoying and hard to deal with heroes and abusing this to create space for their carry, until everybody is online.

Team Spirit

Team Spirit are the defending champions. Their stellar performance was a surprise for many, but this time there is much more pressure on their shoulders, as people already know what they are capable of.

While TORONTOTOKYO is rather strong and aggressive on midlane, two players who equally share the last pick priority are Yatoro and CoLLapSe. This comes with no surprise, as these two players have the most impressive pub stats, while also being the team’s strongest core and the playmaker respectively.

They are quite efficient at applying pressure and winning time, while also denying enemies of any vision while being very efficient with their own. They also tend to play a lot around their strong teamfight (once again, thanks to CoLLapSe), while also being great at drafting and feeling the game tempo. On the weak side, they tend to play very long games (which might backfire on them), while also not being very flexible in terms of their drafts.

OG

Small note to clarify. During most of the recent matches Chu was playing for OG instead of Misha, which is why he is shown on the graphic. The stats of the team were affected by this, which is why I did not replace Chu with Misha. However, everything else still holds true.

While this OG lineup is not the same as the one that won TI, it’s still very similar in spirit and playstyle.

OG is one of the most diverse teams at the event (5th highest), while also preferring fast games and very aggressive fighting. Another staple of the team is very efficient farming (2nd highest XPM and 3rd highest GPM) and three farmed cores with great scaling and teamfight, as well as efficient vision and map control.

PSG.LGD

And the last team to talk about is PSG.LGD. This team was expected to win TI again and again and again. Year after year they were the strongest across the board, getting to the highest places, but still not able to get the Aegis. Nobody knows if this time is different, but their stats sure are stellar.

While having short average game duration, their average farm and damage stats are either highest or close to it. They are disciplined, everything they do has a purpose. Ame and especially Faith_bian are among the most versatile players at the event. Their drafting is also at the top, with the legendary xiao8 covering LGD’s back.

Closing thoughts

That’s about it.

This was a very hard (and sad) year to say the least. And while none of the teams I work with got to TI, there are still plenty of people I knew for a while, who finally got to compete at this level, and I am very happy for them.

Of course, my judgement of the teams and their playstyle is not the final truth you can find, but hopefully this blog post will guide you though the event and help you understand it better.

I am also happy to work at The International once again, so stay tuned on the English stream during Main Event for some numbers and storylines.

Until the next time comes, you can follow me on Twitter or join my Discord. You can also make a donation here to support my project if you like what I do and would like to help, I really appreciate that.

(or you can help by donating to humanitarian mission in Ukraine instead)

P.S. Oh, and here are my compendium predictions based on my Pre-TI reports. At the moment of writing they are almost locked, but maybe somebody will be interested.

The International 10 Stats Wrap Up

leamare — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 21:42:01 GMT

So… The International 10 ended about a week ago (at least it was less than a week since it concluded when I started making this post), and it’s time to wrap it up.

Russian version

Usually I make this kind of wrap up right after the event, but this time I was too busy working at the event itself, so I needed some time to rest afterwards. In case you missed it: I was working as a statistician at TI10, e.g. providing data for production team and helping out other talents with data support. Hope you liked it!

And, well, I’m going to use a lot of my leftover stats as a bonus to graphics here. Most of this post are pretty images with numbers, but I’d suggest you to stick until the very end.

Additionally, you can check my TI10 Stats Hub with all the data, my All-Time TI stats and Pre-TI10 teams overview. And, of course, you can check out Ben’s post about TI10 as well!

Also don’t forget about great guys at STRATZ: their amazing tools made it easier to work with data and also track all the matches live.

Let’s dive in!

Total stats

Let’s start with total stats for the event.

With total of 8 rampages done at the event, I think it’s the most rampageous TI so far with 27.6% of all-time TI rampages being done at TI10.

Radiant holds 54.12% wins, while Dire is only at 45.88%.

First pick win rate is 51.03%.

Signature heroes of this TI’s meta seem to be Monkey King (96.9% contest rate), Tiny (96.4% contest rate), Elder Titan (73.2% contest rate).

Three heroes with the highest winrates and 5+ matches are Tinker (10 matches, 80% winrate), Bane (32 matches, 78.1% winrate) and Winter Wyvern (18 matches, 72.2% winrate).

There were total of 104 heroes both picked and banned, 9 heroes were only picked, 1 hero was banned, but never picked (Huskar).

7 heroes were not contested: Zeus, Broodmother, Spirit Breaker, Outworld Destroyer, Lone Druid, Meepo, Techies.

Spirit Breaker is the only hero that wasn’t contested at TI10 qualifiers as well.

There are a couple of Io combos, but also there are some 100% winrate combos too. Undefeated pairs with 5+ games are Weaver + Doom (5 matches, 1 deviation), Lina + Spectre (5 matches, 2 deviation), Bane + Io (6 matches, 1 deviation), Bane + Magnus (5 matches, 1 deviation), Magnus + Terrorblade (5 matches, 2 deviation) and Mirana + Ember Spirit (6 matches, 5 deviation).

There should be some clever text about hero positions with some cool trivia, but I didn’t come up with it, so just enjoy some cool images and Mars with 32.3% winrate.

There were so many changes between TI9 and TI10, that there was a bunch of new all-time records set during the event (I will go into more detail about it below)

As a cool bonus: these are the strongest items by winrate increase with early average timing (compared to games, where the item wasn’t purchased). Aside from that, there are also the least purchased items: Dagon 5 was purchased only 3 times (2 wins), Meteor Hammer had only 4 purchases (2 wins, 2 losses) and 5 purchases for Mage Slayer and Battle Fury (2 wins, 3 losses both).

As a small addition, here are some of the most important bits for the Group Stage and Main Event separately.

Group Stage

Main Event

Compendium predictions

One thing most people care about are compendium predictions, so let’s take a look at what predictions were correct this time.

Heroes

Most picked hero: Elder Titan (73)
Most banned hero: Monkey King (140, my pick was Tiny, he took 2nd place with 132, while Monkey King was my most picked)
Highest winrate with 5+ games: Tinker (10 games, 80% winrate, my pick)
Most average kills with 5+ games: Sniper (10.8)
Most average assists with 5+ games: Bounty Hunter (20.6)
Lowest deaths avg with 5+ games: Naga Siren (2.2, my pick)
Highest last hits avg with 5+ games: Naga Siren (525)
Highest XPM avg with 5+ games: Clinkz (740)
Most kills in a game: Dawnbreaker (27)
Most last hits in a game: Luna (895)

Teams

Winning team: Team Spirit
Most kills in a game: IG (54, match 6219558229)
Most average kills: IG (28.52)
Least deaths in a game: VP (1, match 6216649464, my pick)
Most assists in a game: VP (144, match 6213067601)
Victory in the longest game: SG (match 6213685234)
Victory in the shortest game: PSG.LGD (match 6216526891)
Highest average game duration: Fnatic (42:26)
Biggest hero pool: Team Spirit (60)
Smallest hero pool (with 10+ games): EG (38)

Players

Most average kills: Karl (9.38)
Most kills in a match: Nightfall (27, match 6213067601)
Lowest avg deaths: Ame (1.86, my pick)
Highest assists avg: Puppey/Oli (16.64)
Most assists in a game: Save (38, match 6213067601)
Highest avg last hits: Yawar (460)
Most last hits in a game: Arteezy (895, match 6215226977, my pick)
Highest GPM in a game: Arteezy (973, match 6215226977)
Highest GPM avg: Ame (723, my pick)
Biggest hero pool: Yatoro (21)

Tournament

Total number of games played in the Main Event: 50 (my pick)
Heroes picked: 113 (my pick)
Heroes banned: 105 (my pick)
Most combined total kills in a game: 88 (match 6213067601)
Longest game: 64:42 (match 6213685234)
Shortest game: 17:04 (match 6216526891, my pick)
Most kills by a hero in a game: 27 (match 6213067601, my pick)
Most deaths by a hero in a game: 17 (match 6215317749)
Most assists by a hero in a game: 38 (match 6213067601, my pick)
Highest GPM by a hero in a game: 973 (match 6215226977)

Winning team: Team Spirit indeed

New All-Time Records

Highest XPM: 1067 by Nightfall as Medusa in match 6212765732
KDA with 0 deaths: 49.0 by flyfly as Spectre in match 6219558229
KDA with 1+ deaths: 40.0 by Ame as Spectre in match 6227305557
Last hits per minute: 16.04 by Arteezy as Luna in match 6215226977
Damage to buildings: 40709 by 23savage as Tiny in match 6215702671
Couriers killed by a player: 7 by Thiolicor as Weaver in match 6216545156
Couriers killed in match: 11 in match of PSG.LGD vs SG (6215346651)

Cool stuff

At TI10 (compared to pre-TI10 stats) most teams were stacking less on average than before the event (10.4 vs 9.2 on average). Two teams that were still stacking the most on average and more than before TI10 are Beastcoast and Team Spirit (12 and 12.5 respectively: it’s 1.2 and 1.4 higher than before)
There are 8 rampages total at TI10, 5 of them were made by Team Spirit players (3 by Yatoro, 2 by TORONTOTOKYO), other 3 by Sumail, Nikobaby and Wisper
With this Team Spirit also became the team with the most rampages at TI all-time (and Yatoro became the player with the most rampages), as well as being the team/player with the most rampages in TIs Main Event (3 by Yatoro vs 1 of every other team/player)
Meteor Hammer was purchased 23 times at TIs, 4 of them at TI10
Meanwhile, Aeon Disk has 162 purchases. For reference, Heart (which was in the game for much longer) has 290 total at TIs, Octarine is 189, Lotus is 305 (being an item with a similar purpose). Only Linkens stands out with 613 purchases
Earthshaker overtook Rubick during the last day of group stage as the all-time TI most picked hero
Ursa overtook Meepo with the most Kills/Match all-time TI with 8.99. Meepo 8.88
N0tail overtook Kuroky with the dubious honor of 10:08 total time spent dead at TIs (Kuro 9:26)
Based on Immortal Stats for Tier 1 neutral items this patch Pig Pole has 12.5% pickup rate (highest for tier 1 is 13.5%, lowest is 11.5%), 50% winrate, Average hold time is ~7:48, being 6th by this value. So it’s literally the most average neutral item, but it makes a funny noise

Even more cool stuff

The first Roshan kill in the Main Event (by Team Spirit in the match 6219447985) was Roshan kill number 666 across all TI main events (since TI3)
SumaiL and Yawar played together 108 competitive matches with 56.5% winrate, as well as 82 matches against with 54.87% winrate for Sumail (it’s tricky to find all the teams they played in though)
Top-3 teams by highest efficiency of sentry wards usage before min 20 (less sentries used to destroy one observer ward on average) are PSG.LGD (3.19), Team Spirit (4.11) and Vici Gaming (4.22), while the worst teams are Secret (6.06), Fnatic (6.14) and Invictus Gaming (6.2)
Sumail has the most kills total at all TIs (playoff only and in general), and he also holds the all-time kills record AND most kills records at three different TIs

And as a bonus: based on TI10 games, the most/least favorable neutral items (players tend to have these items in their inventories for longer periods of time) are:

Tier 1. Best by usage time: Arcane Ring, Keen Optic and Fairy’s Trinket (10:00 average hold time); worst: Chipped Vest (7:58), Possessed Mask (8:12), Pig Pole (8:26)
Tier 2. Best: Philosopher’s Stone (12:20), Grove Bow (9:18), Essence Ring (9: 08); worst: Vambrace (7:46), Brigand’s Blade (8:13), Ring of Aquila/Pupil’s Gift (8:23)
Tier 3. Best: Titan Sliver (8:32), Spider Legs (8:01), Paladin Sword (7:53); worst: Cloak of Flames (5:58), Mind Breaker (6:08), Elven Tunic (6:09)
Tier 4. Best: Spell Prism (9:19), Timeless Relic (7:07), Flicker (6:10); worst: Stormcrafter (2:03), Witchbane (3:16), The Leveller (4:00)

Closing words

And that’s about it!

You can check most of the data yourself in my stats hub, in TI10 section or TI All-Time section, and some additional data will be available through my discord. And, again, huge props to STRATZ for their help.

I hope you liked TI10 show (and my contribution to it, hehe). And for now I’m going to touch some grass.

But worry not! We’ll meet again in the new competitive season, and I’ll try to make more content. Until then, you can follow me on Twitter or join my Discord. You can also make a donation here if you like what I do and would like to help.

~Statsman Lea

The International 10 Teams Overview

leamare — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 03:18:04 GMT

Yes, it’s this time of the year. There are just about two weeks left until The International 10 finally happens, and it’s time for my Pre-TI teams recap, which became a tradition at this point.

Версия на русском

The rules are simple: for every TI-attending team there will be a small profile, covering their general stats and most important heroes, as well as “meta graphs” and the team’s general playstyle. It’s more like my own interpretation of what I noticed about the teams, so take it with a grain of salt.

Data used is based on the last 5 months of matches, starting with DPC Season 2. I won’t go into much details, but you can check stats in my Pre-TI10 report.

As said before, every team has a small profile (this time I decided to make some cool graphics instead of writing a lot of text about most played heroes and stats of the teams), as well as a “Meta Graph”: it’s a graphical representation of the most picked pairs of heroes of the team. Colors of edges and heroes represent winrate (blue is closer to 100%, orange is closer to 0%, grey is about 50%), while the size of a node or an edge represents the number of games (bigger node or thicker edge means more games).

Since there will be more graphical content this time, I would like to write less numbers (so there won’t be much about hero winrates and numbers of matches, since you will be able to see it yourself), but instead I’ll try to cover general playstyle of the teams.

There are some exciting things to talk about, too.

First of all, there were a lot of changes to the Stats Hub since TI9. Some of the coolest additions to the teams profiles are inclusion of lists of unique heroes played by every team member, as well as the list of team specific heroes aka “what this team picks more than everybody else” (most important bits of these will be used in this article, here I called this bit “special heroes”).

Aside from these features, teams profiles also have a more detailed version of Picks and Bans table, and the profile overview has the list of best and worst heroes of this team, as well as against it. I won’t go through it here, but you can explore it yourself.

Second, a great friend who’s working on Dota2ProTracker prepared his own TI10 related section. It has details about recent ranked performance of every TI attending team. I recommend you checking out his TI10 hub.

Aside from that, I will be mentioning TI10 Monte Carlo Simulations by Noxville. You can check them out here.

Third, I am very excited to announce that I will go to TI10 as a part of the English Broadcast Talent crew. It wasn’t mentioned in the initial announcement, but you could notice me tweeting about it (or saw a retweet about it from other talents).

And the last thing. I finished working on my Complete The International All-Time stats, starting with TI1. I covered some of it in my previous article, which I think you should check out too!

A note from future me. You might notice this “hero diversity” metric that often goes over 100%. Initially it’s supposed to represent the percentage of games with unique heroes on average (meaning how “diverse” picks of this team are). Percentage-based scale doesn’t really work that well here, and this metric in general seems a bit weird. But in general if a team has more than 100% diversity, then it gets more than one unique hero per game on average. Sort of. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the jist of it. I noticed it a bit too late when writing this text, so I decided to leave everything as is instead of thinking of a better solution.

Now, let’s go through every TI10 attending team!

Traditional winrates of the teams against each other

Vici Gaming

Vici Gaming are taking a lead with the highest number of games played, while also placing 7th in DPC ranking, securing their direct invite to TI10.

While it’s hard to call Vici Gaming a “slow” team (their average game duration is not even that high, compared to other teams on the list), they sure love to play the long game. They have 4th highest average GPM and 3rd highest average XPM among the TI10 attendees.

It can be noticed in their heroes list too: half of poyoyo’s most played heroes are famous for being traditionally “farm heavy”, and the other half can be played this way. Same applies to Ori, and even eLeVeN’s heroes seem to follow this trend, with Timbersaw and Doom taking first two places.

However, it doesn’t mean their playstyle is passive. While the team’s average tower damage per minute is one of the lowest (which might be because of the team’s love to play a longer game), their average timings for every early objective (first blood, first Roshan or tier 1 towers) is up to a minute earlier than average.

PSG.LGD

PSG.LGD are probably the team people expect to win at the moment. Placed 2nd at TI8 and 3rd at TI9, this team still stands strong, occupying the second place in DPC ranking.

During the last couple of events we weren’t able to see stellar performance of NothingToSay, since legendary xiao8 took his place as a temporary stand-in. And while the team has the third highest winrate among TI10 contestants and the highest chance to win in Noxville’s simulations, we are yet to see the team’s performance at TI10, and it might be different from what we expect.

PSG.LDG takes the second place by the total number of matches, having just 4 matches less than Vici. Their playstyle, however, is drastically different. LGD already have the 5th highest tower damage per minute and 4th highest hero damage per minute (with pretty average game duration), but the lists of special and favorite might say even more in this case.

While the list of most played carry heroes explains the average game duration (which one might expect to be lower than average with an active playstyle), but you might also notice a lot of position 5 Enchantress. All the team’s favorite heroes favor fast and action packed games, too. And pretty much every player, judging by their playstyle, favors a very aggressive fighter playstyle.

Team Aster

Team Aster is another strong team from China, who finished DPC season with the 9th place. This number looks like a curse for the team: they finished 9–12th during the Singapore Major, then during AniMajor, and now by Noxville’s simulation Aster is most likely to finish 9–12th.

This team often doesn’t get as much attention as other teams from the region. Their playstyle seem very similar to PSG.LGD, but Aster seem to be a bit more focused around brutal and straight forward manfighting and sustain (like Troll or Huskar).

But the essential part of Aster’s strategies is LaNm: it’s safe to say that whole team plays around his heroes.

Another thing to note: Aster’s picks are a bit more exotic. You don’t usually see a team pick Pudge or Pangolier so much, they get into the team’s favorite pairs.

Elephant

Elephant got to TI10 through regional qualifiers, and they are generally considered the weakest Chinese team at the event.

And in a way it shows through their drafts. Elephant like to play longer games an pick farm-heavy and scaling heroes, but at the same time they also tend to pick early fighters and like to play with heroes and strategies that are easier to execute (but also can’t be as strong).

It seems like Elephant’s general idea is to get enemy’s safelane tier 1 tower very early and invade enemy’s jungle, while also trying to get other tier 1 towers early enough to open up the map for farming. It’s not a special idea by itself, but the most important part is “very early”: mean time for getting enemy’s safelane tower is almost two minutes lower for Elephant than overall average.

Invictus Gaming

IG finished DPC season with the 5th place. While the team showed stellar performance at the Singapore Major this year and even got to AniMajor, they had a bit of a drop in their level of performance. Although, they’ve got 3rd places at i-League season 2 and OGA DotaPit season 5, and it might mean they are slowly getting back their form in preparation to TI10.

In terms of playstyle IG seem to favor flash farming heroes and early game damage dealers with burst. Considering the team has 3rd shortest average game duration, it’s clear IG favors faster games.

With their priority for flash farming, it’s not surprising to see huge teamfight potential as well. This can also be seen in IG’s tower damage per minute: they have the lowest value of this metric while having short games. This doesn’t mean IG don’t push, but rather shows their priority on winning fights first.

T1

T1 got to TI10 by securing 6th place in the DPC ranking. And while during the first DPC season their performance didn’t stand out as much, they started to shine later on, ending season 2 as the first place in SEA upper division, third place at AniMajor, 1st place at ESL One Summer 2021 and 4th places at BTS Pro Series 7, OGA DotaPit Invitational and ESL One Fall 2021. It’s also worth mentioning, that while they lost in the latter two events, they were able to hold their ground against Spirit and LGD.

T1 love to take it slow. They have the longest average game duration, and their favored heroes tend to be either lategame oriented or generally favor a slower and patient playstyle.

Another thing to note (and probably more important one) is their priority to play reactively, either by scouting opponents (Nyx, Enchantress), resetting fights (Warlock, Wyvern) or counter reacting, using enemy’s attack to their advantage (Kunkka, Lion, Axe, Magnus).

Fnatic

Fnatic got to TI10 through SEA qualifiers. Sadly, they were not able to get to AniMajor, getting 4th place in DPC Season 2, but showed results good performance afterwards (arguably even comparable to T1) during BTS Pro Season 7 (2nd place) and OGA DotaPit Invitational (5–6th place, lost to Spirit).

Fnatic, like T1, have very long games on average (second highest average game duration), but their playstyles are hard to call similar. Fnatic love to take initiative into their own hands, emphasizing map control and taking advantage over enemy’s movements to be the first to attack.

Fnatic love to play with heroes with flashy spells and initiators, and to make it easier for them to play, the team also tries to get all tier 1 towers as early as possible.

Evil Geniuses

EG ended the season with the 1st place in DPC ranking and didn’t get 3rd place (or lower) even once this year. EG in it’s current shape is expected to compete for the first place at TI10.

EG have two major themes going: very strong emphasis on push (with 4th lowest average game duration and 2nd highest tower damage per minute) and mobility. Although there still are plenty of heroes who aren’t exactly the most mobile, but this aspect tends to be compensated by somebody else on the team.

Quincy Crew

Quincy Crew finished DPC season with the 4th place. They ended Season 2 with the first place and played at AniMajor as well as ESL One Summer 2021, but sadly didn’t end up getting any impressive results.

Crew’s playstyle is similar to EG in terms of speed, but two things that stand out to me stats-wise are QC being first by first pick winrate (I’d like to think that it shows the power of their drafts) and 3rd highest hero damage per minute.

Generally Quincy Crew like to play with bulky cores with tons of survivability, as well as healing and any other kind of sustain. This also explains why they tend to ban Terrorblade and burst heavy heroes more than everything else.

Undying

And the last team from North America, Undying, secured its spot at TI10 through qualifiers. Aside from that, the team managed to get 2nd place at BTS Pro Series 5 and 1st places during Pro Series 6 and 7.

Despite having the highest winrate compared to other TI10 attending teams during the last 5 months, Undying’s TI slot was a surprise to many. And to this day the team is not generally favored due to lack of any experience against international teams. The only time we saw Undying playing against teams from other regions was OGA DotaPit Invitational, where the team got 7–8th place. However, Undying is often considered to be the same level as Quincy Crew.

Playstyle-wise UND seem to prefer action packed and aggressive Dota. Their healing per minute, hero damage and tower damage per minute values seem to be pretty high, too, but I expect it to be a side effect of them winning most of their matches.

Generally they prefer to play with a mix of sustain and high damage push, with a slightly more focus on sustain, as well as a tendency to prolong fights and either reset or counter initiate.

SG esports

SG esports got to TI10 through South American qualifiers, but sadly didn’t have much notable achievements aside from that.

Playstyle-wise they prefer what I would call a “controllable chaos”: a lot of initiation and forced non-stop action that helps them create their own way to victory.

Another important thing to note: SG is one of the teams that has a midlane playmaker, and their actions reflect that. They really like to take an early mid tier 1 tower generally play around midlane and leave more hero choices for 4dr, while often getting position 1 and 4 heroes during the first draft stage.

Thunder Predator

Thunder Predator, unlike SG esports, got 12th place in DPC ranking, thus securing their place at TI10. However, these two teams are often compared to each other because of their similar performance.

Their playstyles might look similar at the first glance too, but while SG’s game durations are mostly average, TP’s average game and win durations are the shortest compared to every other TI10 team. Adding more to that, Thunder Predator don’t seem to care about any specific objective early on (or care about objectives in general) or map control.

If SG’s playstyle I would call “controllable chaos”, in case of Thunder Predator it’s more like “brawl and madness”. They love to play with bulky brawlers and fight to the last breath.

Beastcoast

Beastcoast finished the DPC ride with the 11th place, but they sure got the first place in the hearts of the community.

That said, there isn’t much to point out about BC’s playstyle. They generally push slower than everybody else and are late with almost every objective on average.

But what I found the most interesting is the fact that Beastcoast tend to play “4+1” lineups, picking utility mid and playing around K1. This is also why we tend to see a lot of flashy spells and beautiful fights from the team. It’s part of the reason why their playstyle works so well against teams like Thunder Predator, but it becomes harder to win against teams who know how to play patiently and control the map, like VG or T1.

Alliance

Alliance finished 10th in DPC ranking, but didn’t really have much success at any major international event.

The team’s playstyle tends to have a strong emphasis on sustain and fight reset. But what I find more important is their midlane hero leaning more into utility direction.

It’s hard to say Alliance truly plays a “4+1” game, but LIMPP and s4 are definitely the playmakers of the team, creating space for Nikobaby to do his job.

OG

Just like with TI8, OG got to the event through qualifiers, while not showing much at any tournaments throughout the year. However, since last TI the team changed two players: Ana and JerAx were replaced with SumaiL and Saksa. It’s hard to expect anything from OG right now since we haven’t really seen this roster perform yet (not counting qualifiers).

With all the changes OG’s overall playstyle, strangely enough, remained generally the same. SumaiL gets the most flashy picks, while Saksa acts as the main playmaker (practically filling JerAx’s role).

The most notable thing about OG would be their picks. The team’s players are experimenting with different heroes in their ranked games, and even during TI qualifiers we have seen some unexpected strategies, like offlane Alchemist, carry Axe (after all the nerfs), offlane Monkey King.

Team Secret

Team Secret ended up with the 8th place in DPC ranking, while also showing worse performance than expected in the second half of the season. Despite that, Secret are still one of the main favorites of TI10, considering their great performance throughout last two years. One might even say they would’ve won TI10 if it happened in 2020.

However, Secret’s ranked stats (as well as the fact they skipped latest events) clearly show how hard they are preparing to TI10.

The main staple of Secret’s playstyle is “greedy” mid: Matumbaman might be the carry, but the true position 1 of the team is still Nisha.

One thing to note about Secret’s drafts: they love to pick gank-heavy lineups, looking for ways to pick a hero off and quickly burst them down.

Team Spirit

Team Spirit got their TI10 slot through qualifiers. And while they didn’t get quite enough points to get a direct invite, the team not only showed great performance throughout the year, but also improved a lot, and even ended up competing against PSG.LDG in finals of OGA DotaPit Invitational.

Despite longer games on average, Spirit loves to play with active drafts that are able to fight early. They also tend to give a lot of attention to Roshan. Aside from that, generally I would describe all of the trends noticeable in Spirit’s drafts with just two words: balanced draft.

Virtus.pro

Virtus.pro finished DPC season with the 3rd place in the ranking, while also being one of the favorites at TI10. However, it’s also the team many feel cautious about: this team, just like its players, is very young and lacks patience, experience and guidance.

But it didn’t stop VP from getting second highest winrate, while also having the second shortest average game duration compared to other TI10 teams.

Similar to Spirit, VP love to play active heroes with an early online, but they also have a stronger emphasis on gank potential and pickoffs. And it’s all while always having sources of consistent and fast tower damage.

Instead of taking it slow, VP prefer to take initiative and maintain their momentum, while also taking objectives. This, in turn, allows them to perform well against teams like PSG.LGD and taking a lead against them.

That’s pretty much what I had to say about the teams.

Does this mean the teams will play like this? No, they might adapt to the meta and perform differently. And in case of teams like Secret we barely even know how they will play.

Do I think I’m right? Hell no, my judgement of the teams’ playstyles is likely to be wrong in one way or another. However, you can still take a look at stats or graphics and make your own mind.

One thing is certain: there are a lot of strong Chinese teams this year, so there’s a high chance one of them might take the Aegis. But it doesn’t mean there’s no competition: every team is strong enough to compete at TI10 and win.

It would be great to take a look at the meta of 7.30c and make a prediction about what’s coming, but I don’t really think that’s going to work. Just like every time with TI, meta is going to evolve in unpredictable ways, and the only thing we can do right now is wait.

Some things can be noted in ranked stats of the players. There definitely is going to be a lot of Sven and carry Tiny, since these two heroes are generally considered strong. You can also notice a lot of experiments with Faceless Void, Void Spirit, Gyrocopter, Clinkz, Silencer, Monkey King and Queen of Pain. Some even expect to see a lot of Spectre, but personally I doubt it.

But in any case, that’s about it.

I guess the next time we meet is going to be after The International 10. But I’d suggest you to watch TI10 stream in the meantime ;)

Until then, you can follow me on Twitter or join my Discord. You can also make a donation here if you like what I do and would like to help, I really appreciate that.

Meta of the past The Internationals

leamare — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 10:56:27 GMT

So… Hey, it’s been a while. Initially I wanted to make a series of short posts about meta at different TIs starting with TI7, but then the idea evolved, and now it seems easier to make one big post about all TIs, starting with TI1.

Russian version

In this post I’ll go through every TI with infographics, then through all-time TI stats and some of the things I encountered while going back in time.

This post is massive, be aware of that.

Oh yeah, all of these stats are now available in my stats hub. I’ll link reports for every specific TI in its category below. Another thing to note: for every of these reports I manually edited player and team names, as well as updated team logos, to look more consistent (and better as a whole). If you want to check all the TI reports, you can check out my The Internationals section following this link.

The International 2011

The first TI, the one that started it all.

Bear with me here, it will be a long story.

Back when it happened, I just heard about DotA once and didn’t even follow the game, so naturally I didn’t even know what was happening there. For me, a “newbee”, TI1 was “the TI with fountain hooks and Free to Play movie”. In reality it was a bit different.

First of all, the game didn’t launch yet, and it was probably the first public appearance of Dota 2. The game was missing a lot of DotA heroes, and the players, while being the best and most famous in DotA All-Stars, were seeing the game for the first time.

The thing that surprised me the most was that the event didn’t have its own in-game ticket. And it kind of makes sense, the game didn’t have the tournament system, and it was kind of unpolished at the time. So not only it was using “The Internal”, a test ticket, but the players were using different accounts as well. The ones that were made specifically for TI1, it seems.

That’s why you can’t really find “The International 2011” on Dotabuff or TI1 matches in Dendi’s profile. They are in a different place, that’s all.

While I was looking for the matches, I tried every obvious approach, even checking out Liquipedia, but there were no mentions of the matches or their IDs.

But in the end I found this page. It’s the official page for TI1 made by Valve. It’s very old and it sometimes “breaks” (you need to manually replace HTTP with HTTPS every time in your address bar), but there I was able to find the match IDs.

That’s how I found the matches, and figured out they were missing information about teams/players. But (aside from “double” matches that weren’t actually played) there was another thing that required attention: the matches did not have draft data.

Early tournaments were using the “old Captain’s Mode” and it seems like draft order data wasn’t stored anywhere for these matches. In case of TI1, there were no replays to parse (and they wouldn’t be supported anyway).

So I did the next best thing I could think of: I manually edited team and player IDs and names (replacing them with the “real” IDs of these teams and players), as well as rewatching every single game at TI1 to insert the draft order data.

Most of the matches could be found on YouTube, in the official TI1 playlist, but one match was very elusive and didn’t have an official VOD. I managed to find it on some random Chinese website in the end, so every match has draft data now.

Fun fact: at TI1 and TI2 teams were not choosing side and first pick independently, but rather were swapping sides every match (or so it seems, I might be wrong)

And now I present to you: the TI1 meta.

It would look nicer with the old hero portraits and models, but oh well

One thing that I noticed immediately: the meta is very similar to what is commonly associated with “the competitive meta”.

Another thing that’s hard to miss: overall skill level in these games is much lower than it is today. It’s common to say that “the best players back in DotA/TI1/TI2 days were like 2–3k players today” and this is very noticeable when you are watching these games.

What’s interesting to me is that a lot of the most popular heroes at TI1 are more or less popular at 2–3k bracket even to this day. But, of course, TI2 meta is much closer to what’s popular among the players.

Another thing that I found fascinating: out of all the heroes that were available at TI1, every single hero was contested, but only one hero was banned once, but never picked: Axe.

And, yes, for every single TI report I manually updated the list of heroes available in Captain’s Mode.

And now I’ll leave you with some cool graphics about TI1, including the meta graph and records.

So many familiar faces were already there, back in 2011

That’s about it with TI1. You can check the stats yourself in The International 2011 report.

The International 2012

TI2 had much more heroes available, had a proper teams and tickets system, had a much higher skill level (since players were now more familiar with the game).

A lot of the moments that are commonly associated with “the first TI” are actually related to TI2. It was “THE” TI most people at least heard about.

For me personally it was TI I have some memory about. A friend of mine gave me an invite to Dota 2, back when it was relatively rare. I didn’t really stick to the game, but I remember playing occasionally during some events, and when TI2 happened, there was a custom loading screen (which was a big deal back then).

It was also the time a lot of new players started to show interest in the game. People were watching TI2, they heard about this new cool game, everyone wanted to play it.

In case of finding matches it was relatively more simple. Unlike TI1, it’s actually possible to download TI2 replays and even watch them using Source 1 version of Dota 2 client. However, it’s harder when it comes to parsing the replays: some of the additional features (including items purchase details) are not working properly, and TI2 was still using the “old” version of Captain’s Mode. It should be technically possible to at least get the draft order (and bans) data from the replays, but I only got to test this approach after I’ve got through VODs of all the 154 of TI2 matches to manually insert draft data (and recover hero/tower damage and healing numbers).

So as you might imagine, meta at TI2 was quite weird, with everything pretty much based around Lycan, Naga and Dark Seer. And Rubick. And Enigma.

You remember the famous Patience from Zhou moment, right?

Total of 24 uncontested heroes

Most of the games I watched had 5 heroes banned in some order: Lycan, Naga, Dark Seer (these three were usually first stage bans), Chen and Leshrac.

Surprisingly, there were 24 heroes uncontested and no heroes were only banned, which I find surprising.

One funny thing about hero pairs is the Tiny+Io combo. Just like Gyro+Io these days, those two heroes were together in all their games.

If you’re interested in checking out The International 2012 report, you can do it here. And there’s also TI2 Wild Cards report (although it’s missing draft data or additional damage numbers).

The International 2013

Ah, the legendary TI3. It was the year many started watching competitive Dota. And it was also the first TI ever to have a “compendium”. In terms of stats, it was also the first TI that would have a proper “analysis” for the matches, including lane roles and stuff like that, as well as having proper draft data.

For the “modern” Source 1 era (TI3/TI4/TI5) there weren’t many issues regarding draft data or player/team names. Although it was a bit tricky in terms of additional data (warding stats, roles, item purchases and stuff like that), but thanks to Dotabuff I was able to fill in most of the gaps.

One thing I’d like to point out is peculiar the list of most popular heroes is. In a way, this meta was truly a dream for Alliance, coiling into the first 5 games series in TI history and one-million-dollar-play.

It was also one of the most popular, most loved and memorable TIs in history. Aside from “the play” and the story of Alliance getting the victory, it was also the TI that was full of interesting highlights, like the infamous Fountain Hook.

There’s not much else to say, so I’ll just leave you with the graphics. And if you want to explore the reports, you can check TI3 event here or TI3 qualifiers here (qualifiers are missing players/teams data corrections and additional analysis).

What I find peculiar is how strong Chen is at every TI by this point. The hero was in top-10 by rank every single time by now.

I bet you didn’t expect Visage to be the most picked hero at TI3

Since I’m including these “Item Overviews”, to prevent further questions: winrate difference is based on the item’s winrate when purchased with an early to median timing, compared to games when this item wasn’t purchased at all. It works the same for cases with “item-hero” combos, but here items stats are even more skewed.

So “100% winrate difference” for Antimage with Power Treads means “this hero was never played without Power Treads, and early/median timing led to winning conditions”.

The International 2014

The International 2014 is commonly called “the worst”, but to me personally it was the first TI I watched. And it was TI that got me into the world Dota 2 (I only started playing the game actively after this).

While it’s common to say that TI4 “was not diverse” and “had short and boring games” (and it might be somewhat true for the finals, I admit), but surprisingly TI4 has less uncontested heroes, lower median of picks (practically meaning more diverse meta) and higher median game duration.

You can check TI4 stats here, and TI4 Qualifiers here.

Interestingly, TI4 meta looks a bit similar to a push-heavy TI2 in a way. But considering the popularity of Razor and Doom, it’s not surprising to see Weaver being one of the most effective heroes during the tournament, and Linken’s Sphere being one of the best items.

PieLieDie with the courier snipes monkaS

The International 2015

TI5 was the last one played on Source 1 engine. And it was the last TI with the number of uncontested heroes being that high.

It was also the TI that showed just how important map control and information are in Dota, leading EG to victory with Techies, Tusk and Bounty Hunter and shaking the meta around them, like a disaster. It was also the first TI to have bounty runes, introducing the roamer meta into the game.

Once again, TI5 report can be found here, and TI5 qualifiers are here.

The International 2016

Coming after the engine update, TI6 was the first one to be played on Source 2 (and my personal favorite). Engine change also led to increase in data available for analysis, especially with the update to ever-reliable Clarity parser by SkadiStats.

Because of that, every TI in the Source 2 era has a lot of accessible data to work with (and there weren’t really any challenges).

Because of the engine change, it became easier for the Dota 2 team to release new patches, which ultimately led to massive increase in the quality of balance in Dota 2, and diversity of the meta. Well, at least it’s the first time the number of uncontested heroes was below 10 (7, to be exact). Most people agree that it’s also one of the major reasons behind the stellar performance of Wings, the champions, and Digital Chaos, the runner-ups, at TI6.

You can explore the full report of TI6 here, and TI6 Qualifiers are here.

The International 2017

TI7 was the last one (since TI1) to be held in US. And aside from that, TI7 was an improvement in every aspect of TI6. Even the meta is just as diverse, but now there were only 5 heroes uncontested, 1 was only banned and only 6 heroes haven’t won a single match.

And the meta became really different (both in terms of heroes and playstyle), compared to TI6 (and the reason for this difference is, once again, happened mostly because of the engine change). One thing that makes this TI really special: it was the first one played after the 7.00 update, starting the new era in Dota (and even having the completely new hero available).

And it was also the first time I made a report for TI as it happened! TI7 full report link, TI7 Main Event link and TI7 Qualifiers.

The International 2018

And just like TI7 was the last one held in US, TI8 was the first one to move outside of it. This cavern-themed tournament felt very fresh and entertaining, making games more action-packed with the diverse set of heroes.

And similar to Wings, this kind of meta worked well with OG’s playstyle. It led them to victory and gave us a lot of memorable moments we commonly associate with THE International.

Meta-wise, it’s “just another TI after 2016”: diverse meta, completely different from the previous one. With TI8 came two new heroes (Pangolier and Dark Willow), and it also started the “2–1–2” era in Dota. Before patch 7.07 it was common to have either a trilane (on safe lane) or a dual lane with a roamer.

With the game being more action packed, laning stage being even more significant, while reducing the value of early jungle farming or bounty runes, it became natural for teams to have one support on each side of the map early on. Today it became an unwritten rule to have a duo of Safelane Support (position 5) and Offlane Support (position 4), who start roaming together later into the laning stage, while also securing laning for their respectable cores.

As a side note: while at the time it was very rare to see position 4 to be played outside of offlane, today it’s rather common to see “Offlane Support” being played as a “mid support”, roamer or a jungler (just like before). However, ever since TI8 the early laning became so important, that to this day it’s rare to see a hero alone on lane early on, even if position 4 is a roamer/jungler.

It was also the first time I expanded my reports and made a special category for TI8. It includes daily stats, separate stats for qualifiers, main event and group stage, as well as complete report and pre-TI8 stats. You can check all of it here. And you can also check my texts about TI8 here.

Say goodbye to Ring of Aquila, fellas. We won’t see it again until TI10.

The international 2019

And the last pre-COVID TI we had. What a journey the last two years were!

While TI8 gave us the “cinderellas” story of OG, TI9 expanded on it. While Liquid and OG in turn showed that in Dota everything can work.

This time every hero was either picked or banned, with only three heroes (Keeper of the Light, Ursa and Clockwerk) remaining unpicked throughout the tournament.

But it was not the only meta trend, going into TI9. After “The Aghanim’s Update” every hero got some kind of improvement. On the other side of things economic changes accumulated through the years (free wards, reduced cost for sentries, stacks bonus gold and more) made it easier to scale as a support. Both of these factors helped to create the most diverse TI meta, with heroes often being played on a completely new role. One such example would be the famous Carry Io by OG.

You can check all the TI9 reports here, and in this section you can check out all my text about TI9.

What now?

And now the only thing left is to wait for The International 10 to happen.

TI10 also the biggest one in terms of changes that happened since the last time. Including (but not limited to) Aghanim’s Shards, Neutral Items and personal couriers.

We already got through TI10 Qualifiers and DPC seasons of 2021, and I’m planning to publish a traditional “Pre-TI Meta” text, as well as DPC Season and Qualifiers combined report.

But since it’s the 10th event in the series, let’s look back at the history of TI as a whole.

You can take a look at all this data yourself, using my TI All-Time stats report, as well as TI All-Time only playoffs and TI All-Time only finals.

It’s impressive how all these heroes are still holding there, at the top by rank. Truly shows the power they had back then and still have in competitive environment

Rubick is the most picked hero of all TIs, along with Earthshaker, Mirana, Nature’s Prophet and Sand King, while Io remains the most banned. And none of the heroes who were available in Captain’s Mode didn’t get to shine at TI

PieLieDie still holding the courier murders record, while Topson’s rampage record is the only rampage happened in TI finals

And some notable milestones

I’d like to end this post with some notable milestones throughout all The Internationals.

There were total of 1435 matches played. 342 players played at TI, in 71 different teams. Duration of all the matches combined would be (almost) 941 hour. Combined time spent dead by all players is 575 hours.

The longest TIs happened in 2018 (195 matches) and 2019 (193 matches).

During these games there were 66255 kills, 2362129 last hits, 116299 creep denies, 566 courier kills, 2527 Roshan kills, 38800 observer wards placed (10034 destroyed).

Players dealt total of 149 million damage to heroes, 18.8 million damage to towers, healed for total of 9.6 million points, stunned other heroes for total of 58 hours (starting with TI6). They also made 476k map pings, 10.5k neutral camp stacks (starting with TI6), 5309 buybacks, 578 Godlike sprees and 21 Rampage.

Players who played the most matches at TIs: KuroKy (203), Puppey (198), ddc (154), s4 and LaNm (153).

Miracle- killed Roshan 69 times throughout all TIs. MinD_ContRoL killed 20 couriers total. Arteezy killed 39.3k creeps, while Dendi denied 2.3k creeps.

KuroKy participated in 2894 kills and placed 1983 observer wards.

Teams wise LGD played the most matches at TI (194), followed by EG (161) and Liquid (148). However, Natus Vincere played the most matches in TI Finals (12), followed by OG (9), then by Liquid and Newbee (7).

OG and LGD are the teams who did the most Rampages during TIs (3). However, only OG have the Rampage made during TI Finals by Topson.

And that’s about it!

Until I finish my Pre-TI10 teams report, there’s not much left to say. Let’s enjoy this TI together!

If you are new to my kind of content, you can follow me on Twitter or join my Discord. You can also make a donation here if you like what I do and would like to help, I really appreciate that.

The International 10 Qualifiers Recap

leamare — Sun, 11 Jul 2021 01:16:19 GMT

The International 10 is closer and closer, and now we finally have a final roster or participants. Here I’d like to compile all of my pretty images and go through stats of these qualifiers.

And, as always, there’s a full report available in my Stats Hub, which you can use to explore all the event stats in more detail: https://stats.spectral.gg/lrg2/?league=ti10_quali

You can also follow me on Twitter or join my Discord to get more dota stats stuff.

This time I’d like to take a more silent approach: just the images with numbers, with some minor notes along the way.

One thing to note about the most popular pairs is the Terrorblade + Mirana duo. While this pair didn’t quite get it to the top by deviation, this combo still has 100% over 14 matches

Yeah, yeah, most of “flex” heroes are supports who are switching between position 4 and 5. But there aren’t that many flexible heroes to look at this patch, really.\

A small bonus: best heroes by rank (high winrate with a meaningful number of games) for every role

Records

P.S.

Everybody’s talking about how broken Flicker is, but let’s take a moment to look at tier 4 of neutral items at Immortal rank. This whole tier of items is a joke.

WePlay AniMajor stats (and a bit of DPC Season 2)

leamare — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 13:41:45 GMT

Yo!

The second (and the last before TI) DPC Season just concluded with the awesome WePlay AniMajor. And, as usual, I’m here to give you some stats about the event.

Russian version (VK)

This time I tried a bit different approach. Usually I’m making a small Twitter thread full of pictures. This time I’d like to get all of the infographics here, while also adding some thoughts about the meta, additional records and stats, links to DPC Season wrap-ups and more.

You can check the full report for the AniMajor by following this link. And if you want to see stats for the full DPC Season 2 (regional leagues and the major), you can check the report here.

Let’s get it started!

WePlay AniMajor

Most of the Season 2 meta can be described as “heals meta”. And while most of the tanky heroes became less popular at the major, the most crazy of meta heroes still remain: most notably Winter Wyvern as both healer and an answer to heals, as well as Ancient Apparition, the ultimate answer to all heal strats.

Another notable hero in the top 10 by rank is Hoodwink. While not being as popular as others, she has relatively high winrate for her number of games. Main reason for that is a high damage nuke with Break mechanics (similar to Nyx), which allows to deal with some of the most annoying heroes of the meta, including Timbersaw and Dragon Knight (or heroes like Spectre). Similar reason made Doom more popular (although the hero is missing from the top-10 by rank).

But the king of the game is, once again, Terrorblade, being the most successful carry of the event.

Total of 17 heroes were uncontested (not picked or banned) during the tournament. And three more (Enigma, Necro, Riki) were only banned, but not picked.

While it may not look like a very flexible meta, keep in mind: all of the heroes were picked at least once during the DPC Season.

Combos

Most popular pairs list doesn’t seem to have any sort of obvious combos: most of the pairs in this list tend to look like a duo of generally good heroes. However, there are two general patterns to take note of: a bulky hero and a nuker (usually it’s either pos 3 and 4 or pos 4 and 5) or a bulky hero and a strong heal.

This doesn’t seem that surprising in the heals meta: while one team will try to go with the heals strategy, the other will try to counter heals with some burst or percentage based damage (where heroes like Lion, Phoenix and AA shine).

The most interconnected hero, however, seems to be Puck. The fairy dragon was already a nuisance during Season 1, and was the most contested hero in every region during Season 2. And even at the major he still remains the go-to hero.

Hero positions

While Season 2 meta looks generally more stable in terms of roles (the most flexible heroes are all mostly supports), there are still some things to take a look at.

For me the most notable thing about this meta is the carry pool. While every other role primarily mirrors trends of the whole season, safelane cores tend to have a slightly different approach at this stage. It seems that the most contested carries all were tanky frontline kind of type. Terrorblade and Faceless Void might not seem like tanky frontliners, but their spells and item builds usually turn make them comparably tanky or, on the other hand, allow them to deal with bulky enemies.

One thing to note about Spectre is the new Echo Sabre build (how D2Bowie put it, “The paradigm shift”). The main reason of this shift (and Spectre’s relative success as a result) is insane stats the item gives. Both Strength and Mana regen bonuses were buffed, which made the item too good to ignore, especially on a hero like Spectre, who needs both HP (Sabre gives around 300 HP through strength) and mana regen.

Records

In terms of records I won’t comment much, but rather I’d like to add some of the records I wrote about on twitter while the matches were live.

And, of course, if you need links to these matches, you can find them in the report, in the “Records” section.

Now, let’s go through some of the DPC Season 2 records:

Pyw with the most camps stacked (17) in VG vs Execration, Game 1
iLTW with the earliest Manta as Anti-mage (17:06, 2 minutes earlier than median in DPC Season 2 and 5 minutes earlier than median in 7.29d immortal ranked) and earliest Eye of Skadi on Anti-mage as well (22 min mark. 5/6 minutes earlier than median) in Nigma vs Execration, Game 2
YapzOr with the earliest Windranger Blink timing (15 min mark, 10 minutes earlier than median) in iG vs Secret, Game 2
Emo with the earliest Leshrac Eul’s timing (9:32, 3 minutes earlier than median) in iG vs Secret, Game 1
Nightfall and iceiceice were both competing for the most pings in a single game this whole season. Nightfall got the all-season record, iceiceice got the second place. Then at the major iceiceice took the first pings record of the event, followed by second one, after which Nightfall got it back. However, master iceiceice gets it all in the end, proving that he is the one and only pings master
The first rampage of the event by Arteezy as Terrorblade (not the last one though, and it was also the game with 12k gold comeback no less!) in TNC vs EG, Game 2
The second rampage of the event by poyoyo as Spectre in Liquid vs VG, Game 1
Four different heroes with records in a single game. K1 as Spectre got the earliest Power Treads (5:12, 2 mins earlier than median) and Skadi (22:17, 8 mins earlier) on this hero. Arteezy as Naga Siren got the earliest Butterfly (22:20, 7:30 earlier than median) on the hero. Abed as Windranger got the earliest WR Maelstrom (10:46) and Fly as Winter Wyvern got the earliest WW Arcane Boots (7:36, 6 mins earlier). All of this happened in EG vs Beastcoast, Game 2
VG.Ori with the earliest Templar Assassin Dragon Lance timing (8:27, 4 mins earlier) in Spirit vs VG, Game 2
iLTW with the most tower damage by a single player in a single game throughout both DPC seasons as Luna (30k) in Nigma vs EG, Game 2
Dy with the most HP healed this season (before the final day) as Winter Wyvern (34.6k) in VG vs Spirit, Game 1
And a whole bunch of season records in the same game again. 23savage with the most HP healed as Juggernaut (37.8k), most sentries placed by Whitemon as Grimstroke (52), most map pings by iceiceice as Dragon Knight (492) in T1 vs EG, Game 2

DPC Season 2 Wrap Up

And as a finishing touch, let’s look at the DPC Season 2 meta once again!

In case you missed it, I had full coverage of all the DPC Season 2 regional leagues on my twitter. You can check all the threads here:

Here’s my personal favorite: a table with the most contested heroes for every DPC region (pre-major).

In this post, however, I’d like to take a look at the final form of the meta, combining all regional leagues and the major into one package.

Records

Items

Some additional notes

I was so happy with so many shoutouts during the DPC Season and the major. Thank you all!
Is there a “Slacks factor”? Are teams who are picking Windranger in the second/third match of bo3 series are destined to lose? It seems like… it doesn’t matter
The secret ingredient of winning major tournaments by Aui: “just luck”. Jokes aside, English panel as a whole was entertaining and hilarious, and I was so happy to listen to Aui’s analysis, as well as Tsunami, Ephey, Cap, Jenkins (and everybody else, of course)
I want to write a big text about this, but as a quick insight: mid T1 tower, especially early one, is extremely important. And the second tower that’s rather important to get is enemy safelane T1 (which opens up space for your own safelane core). It was the case for a long time now, and during the major it became even more clear, as the best teams of the globe were fighting for these objectives. Here are some quick stats on this
Heals amplification is most likely to be nerfed, just like status resistance. I’d like to point out, that Echo Sabre deserves a nerf too (because of insane stats), but even more important would be a Strength HP bonus nerf

One of the main things everyone talked about this season was Aeon Disk. Here’s the list of the items with the highest ranks during DPC Season 2. While Aeon Disk is here (and it’s kind of expected), some other items to point out are Shiva’s and Skadi (healing counters), Satanic (morbid mask is affected by satanic’s stats) and Sange and Kaya (status resist, Sange and Yasha is just a bit lower on the list with 88.9 rank), Swift Blink (very swift and buffed a lot), Refresher and Octarine (win condition lategame items). I can’t find a good explanation for why is Assault Cuirass (and Buckler as its component) so high on the list (aside from it being broken).
I guess AC and Satanic are getting bonked in 7.30

And that’s about it! Now it’s time for The International 10 qualifiers and the event itself!

I’ll try to keep up with all the stuff I’ve done throughout the DPC seasons. Let’s get ready!