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:
TI2025 Reports Hub, including TI Qualifiers
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.
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
(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
