After Team Falcons’ DreamLeague Season 22 win, we take a look at what they are doing right.
Team Falcons have quickly emerged as the team to beat in the initial parts of the 2023-2024 Dota 2 season. The MENA team has won two successive tournaments – BetBoom Dacha Dubai 2024 and DreamLeague Season 22 – and are looking quite unstoppable! Here, we try to see if any patterns emerge from the stats from their recent win.
All data has been taken from datDota.
Team Falcons beat BetBoom Team 3-0 in the grand final of DreamLeague Season 22, maintaining a win rate of 80% throughout the tournament (35 games played, 28 wins). In the first step of looking at what they are doing right, we take a look at the team statistics for the top eight teams in the tournament for Group Stage 2. The big thing that is visible is that they have the fewest unique heroes, and by some margin. They also have the highest GPM and XPM, which is expected considering their win rate, and they have one of the lowest average game times.
Further delving into these stats for the top four teams at the tournament, the same conclusions can be drawn. Throughout the tournament, Team Falcons picked only 44 heroes, while at the other extreme, Xtreme Gaming picked 66 heroes (pun intended)! Falcons knew what worked best for them and they kept churning things within their hero pool.
Game time doesn’t say a lot about Team Falcons. They win quick, but they also lose quick in the few games that they do. Team Spirit, on the other hand, are quick winners, but defeating them is an ordeal. The faster game times in winning causes are possibly an indicator of strong laning stages that end up giving the team control.
But coming back to the heroes, Team Falcons found hero pairings that worked really well for them. This is why they didn’t have to experiment a lot.
A perfect example of this is looking at the most played heroes for the top two teams – Team Falcons and BetBoom Team. Falcons played six games less than BetBoom, but they have five heroes with 10 or more picks, while BetBoom only have three. Even as the list tapers off, BetBoom’s numbers are lower. Now, this can also go a completely different way! A team with less versatility can get punished. But Team Falcons seem to have found a good balance of a reasonable number of heroes to play amongst. And it’s not like they have a lot of unusual heroes – most of their most picked heroes were highly picked throughout the tournament. However, they weren’t afraid to pick the odd hero once in a while. In the grand final, they picked Gyrocopter and Primal Beast, which were heroes they had picked only twice before in the tournament. That is bound to throw your opponents off while drafting.
Another important piece of the puzzle might be how Ammar “ATF” Assaf has changed his playstyle to suit this team. In his OG days, Ammar was typically a secondary carry from the offlane. It used to be the mid laner and sometimes even the carry who went the more sacrificial route to enable ATF. But in Falcons, he has altered his playstyle to actually be a position 3 player, rather than a position 1 or position 2 player from the offlane. This is evident while looking at the farm distribution for the top four teams based on the average GPM of each player. While ATF is higher than the others, it isn’t by much. And he isn’t higher than his mid, although he possesses the traits to pick up the slack if the game requires it.
Team Falcons have definitely found a good formula in their new five man roster along with coach Kurtis “Aui_2000” Ling. There is bound to be a new patch soon and there are a lot of tournaments on the horizon. Time will tell if Team Falcons can keep up the domination or if any other teams can step up to match them.
