We apologize in advance for referring to LOST as Blight, exceptionally for this match, in respect to the latest “Blight Gaming” issue. In addition, Hit0mi pointed out: “as a disclaimer I would like to state that when I am pointing out “mistakes” or make a critique of any sort, this is only my personal opinion, open to discussion and of course not meant in any derogatory sense. The people in these games are all great DotA players.”
This replay analysis focuses on the player’s thinking process around their overall game strategy as well as their decision makings. Hence the banning and picking phases, which we will see in a moment, defines their initial game plan. Their vision, their game strategy are important area of focus in this analysis. We will then see other equally important game choices such as lane assignments and heroes’ item choices.
Now let’s begin. Hope you enjoy yourselves.
Pick League XIII Division 1 Finals Game # 1 Analysis
The game starts to get interesting in the banning phase:
| Bans | |
 Blight |  DTS |
Sentinel    | Scourge     |
DTS has a clear agenda here; Banning what I will call “action farm heroes”. These are versatile ricers, with good lategame potential – ranking just below heroes like Medusa or Drow Ranger- and at the same time have the ability to nuke down, control a lane and gank. Most of them require no babysitting or guarding once the very early game ends.
These heroes are the ones top players can bring out to their full potential. I don’t know if they targeted Misery in particular with these bans, or just didn’t want a tri-lane with Misery, Pajkatt and Babyknight farming away with relatively ungankable and independent carries, but I’d imagine it’s a mix of both.
In my opinion, those are good bans by DTS as they set the scene for a very strategic game. It’s a statement saying that this will be a game about teamplay and not just a single player chaotic skillfest.
In contrast, there is less of a pattern to Blights bans. They ban what Starcraft players would refer to as “cheese”: Slightly imbalanced heroes with strong pushing ability. I don’t know if Ducky was trying to set the stage for a Medusa or Drow Ranger turtle strat, but these kind of bans would have been the perfect grounds for this.
Picking Phase
The picks however, progressed in a completely different, and slightly insane direction.
DTS first picks Slardar, which is a relatively versatile hero - they can go mass negative armor or just about anything from there.
Blight chooses Windrunner and Vengeful Spirit: Vengeful Spirit is an established annoying / babysitter / laner, nothing new here. On the other hand, Windrunner is a hero slowly growing in popularity and I think she will keep on getting more popular until she becomes a regular ban. She can’t be dominated in the lane and can barely be stopped from farming. Great hero killing potential with an escape mechanism, she even has good pushing potential. What she lacks is burst damage, but it can still be compensated with a good lineup.
DTS replicates with Witch Doctor and Phantom Lancer. This is where I think DTS messes up. The Witch Doctor is a great pick in that the hero is very flexible: a great laner, a great hero killer and can be used as heavy support or just as strong caster. He is the best ‘Support caster’ at the moment in my opinion mainly because his casks are incredibly annoying, he has interesting attack animation, and his skills stay useful all game - even when he doesn’t farm- as opposed to other casters who get weaker and weaker when faced against carry heroes as the game progresses.
The Phantom Lancer however is in my opinion a bad pick. Firstly, he has little synergy with Slardar: When you get Slardar, you usually want to back him up with another stunner and one or two ranged carries. Ranged carries are best at taking advantage of Slardars’s armor reduction ult, while Melee carries have a hard time focusing down specific targets. Secondly the Phantom Lancer pick reveals DTS strategy: they will go for 2 Melee+Range lanes plus a Ranged solo carry, making it a 3core. They will try to dominate lanes and farm up (anyone can see this at this point). Both Lancer and Slardar however are heroes with relatively low mobility and ganking potential, Slardar needs to farm up his core items of vanguard, treads, blink or whatever to be useful, so he can’t move around and roam. As for Lancer, well he just has to farm all game. So with this Lancer pick, DTS is setting themselves up for a static defensive game (Note that a Slardar + Lancer + 1 ranged carry combo will have no pushing potential either) which they will try to end with overfarmed carries at the 40+ minute mark.
Blight responds with a Furion + Nevermore pick. The Nevermore pick here is a solid pick: It denies DTS their best option for their solo hero pick (Nevermore has great synergy with Slardar and is a relatively independent solo) while it bolsters their lategame + pushing power.
Furion is a slightly ambitious pick, but not a bad one. He’s their third ranged carry hero (and 3 ranged carry lineup at this point is deadly). He defines Blights lanes as this will put SF solo mid, Windrunner solo bot, Furion jungle / ganking and VS top with most likely a melee initiator / stunner. He has the potential to dominate DTS lanes with his ganks, and if he succeeds with this, to completely ruin any chance DTS has at winning since their strategy relies on lane domination and the farm resulting from it.
DTS)Light picks Crystal Maiden, and reacts with a Rhasta pick. CM is standard here, she is the best choice to lane with PL, and has decent synergy with the rest of the lineup, no qualms here. Rhasta also works with the lineup and gives DTS some much needed AoE along with pushing potential. Rhasta is not countered heavily by any of Blights picks and adds some much needed versatility in that they can finally push towers. The only problem with him is that he can’t really do well in any lane. He will lose mid to SF with Furion ganks, definitely lose to VS + stunner, and can’t solo Bot vs Windrunner either. This is where, at least pickwise, DTS early game crumbles.
Blight finishes off with a Sven pick. I would have expected Sand King / Tidehunter / Earth Shaker, but with his new AoE Stun, Sven has a similar ability and is just far stronger in the lane than any of the aforementioned.
Blight essentially has 4 carries now, which works since it allows its players to play to a greater extent their individual skills. On the other hand, DTS is rather outpicked here since its lineup is not particularly flexible and has a weakness since Rhasta is not able to hold any lane solo.
| Picks and Lanes | |
| Blight | DTS |
| Sentinel blight|Quack (Top) Blight|Pajkatt^ (Bot) blight|MiSeRy (Roaming) OK|13abyKnight (Mid) blight|Mirakel (Top) | Scourge DTS|ArtStyle- (Bot) DTS|Dread (Bot) DTS|Dendi^ (Mid) DTS^NS (Mid) DTS)Light (Top) |
Lane Assignment
Blight goes with the lanes described above. DTS decides to put Rhasta top, Phantom Lancer & Crystal Maiden mid and Witch Doctor & Slardar bottom. This is a mistake by DTS in my opinion: Blight’s lanes are completely predictable; there’s no other way of laning Blights heroes. So DTS)Light must have expected to see Vengeful and Sven top.
Will Rhasta get crushed by Vengeful + Sven? Of course! Is there going to be a Furion ganking him top as well plus Vengeful, Sven dominating him? Yup. So top is going to be a living hell for him. Would he lose mid as well to solo Shadow Fiend + Furion ganks? Yes probably but he wouldn’t do as bad as the position he’s putting himself in at top.
DTS’s logic here is probably that it wants to keep the Shadow Fiend down early, and that LightofHeaven has seen it through well in advance. He is an Indigo Child who knows every last one of his opponents thoughts, but even the ability to read their minds and see ahead can’t get you out of a situation as damned as solo Rhasta against Vengeful, Sven plus Furion ganks.
Early Game
DTS^Dread’s Witch Doctor gets a haste at bottom river and Shadow Fiend is First Blooded mid.
Meanwhile, DTS)Light Rhasta can’t even get XP anymore at top and so DTS reacts by first sending Crystal Maiden and then Witch Doctor top, letting Lancer solo mid for a while against Shadow Fiend. This is the beginning of the end for DTS: Instead of swapping mid and top, they take apart their lanes, make their melee carries solo against ranged carries without support / babysitting, and lose a lot of farm / domination.
Further, Furion’s ganks forces Witch Doctor & Slardar to lane top and Rhasta laning bottom at the 15 minute mark. This leaves Rhasta just as open to ganks and getting killed from an overleveled Windrunner + Furion ganks, but at least he can get some XP.
Around the end of the early game Pajkatt Windrunner has had freefarm for a long time, Misery has defined his role as a heavy ganker / support Furion, and Babyknight has committed suicide once or twice to kill Maiden, too often, ending up slightly underfarmed. Miracle Sven has been doing well since he hasn’t had anything but free frags and free creep kills at top so far. Blight also takes top tower with relative ease.
On DTS side, Dendi is having a good time middle, being 4-0 plus red HP heroes all over the place just begging to be lanced. DTS|ArtStyle is doing terrible for a second carry hero with 0-2 k/d ratio plus low Creep Score. This is no big surprise though since he was left alone by Dread’s Witch Doctor to solo against Windrunner and was up against the Vengeful, Sven & Furion of death the rest of the time.
Rhasta did a good job early however of not feeding (he’s only 0-1) and actually having level 6 and medium CS.
| Creep Scores | |
| Blight | DTS |
| Sentinel Blight|Pajkatt^: 31/8 OK|13abyKnight: 29/14 blight|Mirakel: 33/8 | Scourge DTS|Dendi^: 23/4 DTS|ArtStyle-: 21/2 DTS)Light: 11/2 |
Remarkable is DTS^NS’s Crytal Maiden ult from a cliff killing Vengeful in the river . DTS is in bad overall shape here though with Windrunner and Sven both farming great and Slardar being way behind. Blight is in control of the game as dictacted by picks, and all DTS can do is react to Blights ganks and try to farm up.
Midgame
DTS attempts to push mid with 4 heroes while letting Slardar freefarm at top and time to recover from early game. Shadow Fiend dies a couple more times due to being overly aggressive. A ward from Blight on the Scourge ramp would have really helped here so that Babyknight’s Shadow Fiend wouldn’t keep running into the face of death.
Around the 22 minutes mark, BabyKnight gets Dagger which he seems to get on Shadow Fiend most of the time. I think a better item choice here might have been a straight Black King Bar for survivability and team fights, but it’s a close call here.
The Vengeful, Sven & WR dominance continues as they make the logical move to middle lane, picking up a Dendi on the way and taking Tier 1 and Tier 2 mid towers. This is 4-0 in tower kills for Sentinel and that puts them at a nearly winning game advantage.
Sentinel then take the fight into Scourge woods. And although it doesn’t go terrible for DTS, Dendi is forced to participate in the fight and loses crucial farming time, while Pajkatts Windrunner picks up some more kills. Worth noticing here is the Helm of Dominator + Battle Fury build. Bfury is becoming a rather popular item on Windrunner, as it’s a cheap way of getting damage plus regen, and none of the base items are particularly costly. I find HoD Bfury to be a slightly extravagant choice here though. Pajkatt’s Windrunner is completely dominating this game; he would have no further trouble getting a Guinsoo for a disable + similar damage or a Desolater for better damage, yet he chooses to go for 2 regen / damage items. HoD + Sheep would have been optimal here in my opinion with all the other damage dealers in the game.
On the other side, Babyknight starts coming to his senses and starts working on a BKB. The game is basically over by that point (33 minute mark) though: Blight has a slight kill lead, a huge tower advantage and a huge farm lead. Dendi only hitting Sacred Relic at that point and Slardar having Vanguard & Treads with no sign of a Blink, its only a matter of ganking / pushing one last time for Blight now.
This is exactly what happens when Blight picks off Slardar along with everyone that comes in to help him. Babyknights SF once again finds his way into deaths sweet embrace in this battle but his team takes mid after taking down all of DTS heroes besides Dendi’s PL.
After this, the game turns into a complete stomp with Blight picking off some more of DTS heroes, killing Roshan and eventually ending the game with completely superior items.
Final Notes
One conclusion we can pull from this game is that a dual melee carry strategy is really hard to execute these days. Blights carries were completely outfarming DTS team and even though Dendi was doing great, he was barely able to farm, even with Shadow Fiend. This is mainly because of ranged carries ability to farm unbabysitted, push towers, and a generally better ability to throw any kind of damage. Blight was able to do exactly that: farm up quickly, push towers, dominate, and end the game fast.
I would also like to see Dread play more carry for DTS in the future, maybe at ESWC. ArtStyle is most definitely a solid and strong player but at this point I think the more active and versatile of the two is Dread. ArtStyle played fine of course though, and no one could have turned that game around playing Slardar.
Overall it was a nice outpick by Blight, with strong execution of their strategy, and a swift and effective ending of the game after their early domination. I hope we will see more strategies like this one in the future by them.
Links
GosuGamers - Replay Section
