esports
Grimstroke is out and 7.20 has reinvented professional Dota. See how things are crystallizing following the exciting events of The Chongqing Major.
The first Major of 2019 has wrapped, with Team Secret hoisting up the trophy after a comeback win over Virtus.Pro in the grand finals; the international roster rose up from the lower bracket after being knocked down by the Russian squad in the upper bracket finals, taking the trophy in a tantalising four game series.
With a Major and a Minor down in 2019, and 7.20 firmly in place, we take a look following these two big tournaments at how the meta has been shaken up – and where we can see the professional world of Dota going next.
Setting things in motion
The Bucharest Minor at the start of the year was essentially the wild wild west. It was the first minor to be played on 7.20 which completely upended every team’s ideas on how to play Dota. A third of the game’s cast of heroes were overhauled, the map received a facelift, nearly every hero received balance adjustments, and even core mechanics like denies were tweaked once again. Over the course of 47 games, 82 unique heroes were picked at the minor, and the ones emerging on top set the stage for what the early stages of The Chongqing Major would look like.
Tusk was contested in 100 percent of games. The snowballing walrus was picked 21 times and banned the other 26. Frozen Sigil being replaced with Tag Team which, when used, causes every enemy around you to take bonus physical damage every time they are hit. It’s an extremely potent ability that made Tusk out to be a laning monster, alongside his already reliable save and control mechanisms and a Black King Bar-piercing stun. The reality is that he didn’t quite underperform – a 47.62 percent win rate is not terrible – but for how prevalent he was, Tusk did not prove to be the strongest hero at the minor.
Lich, on the other hand, came shrieking back with a chilling effect on the early meta of 7.20. He lost his guaranteed deny, but gained an incredible new crowd control tool and procured an even more potent new take on his old Frost Armor. His litany of buffs and reworks resulted in Lich maintaining a 73 percent win rate over 15 games. Earth Spirit and support Tiny, likewise, boasted solid win rates. Io, too, has gone nowhere in this meta.
On the more disappointing side was Keeper of the Light and the newly added Grimstroke. Keeper of the Light’s new ultimate made him an appealing pick in the experimental phase of a new meta, but he ultimately did not produce results. Grimstroke was picked 11 times and won fewer than 40 percent of his games, signalling that perhaps the newest hero is yet to find his footing in this meta.
Overall, the top five most picked heroes in Bucharest were all either supports or heroes who could flex as supports, and that is also true when you run down the list of most contested heroes with the exception of Medusa and a few self-sufficient offlaners. Still, the stage was set for the upcoming Major – and the meta would continue to evolve.
The Chongqing Major picks up where The Bucharest Minor left off
After months of static 2-1-2 lanes, 7.20 graced the latest Major with dynamic lane setups. Some games still featured the old 2-1-2, certainly, but roaming supports made a comeback, dual mid lanes were rather common, and both defensive and offensive tri-lanes are now back in vogue. Part of the reason for this is the increased value of team utility items and aura items like Vladmir's Offering which are typically purchased by the offlaners. Shutting down the enemy offlaner has now become even more important than before, all to give your team the edge on hitting their timings for those team fighting aura items more quickly.
The Evil Geniuses vs. Vici Gaming series provides a good example of just how important shutting down the offlaner with aggro tri-lanes is now. People might flame Gustav 'S4' Magnusson for dying six times in six minutes, but Zhou 'Yang' Haiyang in the opposite offlane position was dying just as much to EG’s own tri-lane. It wasn’t a matter of either player being bad and chain feeding, but their teams recognized the importance of delaying the timing of the offlaners’ item progression.
That said, Dark Seer, Centaur, and especially Doom proved to be highly effective at catching up after a rough start which led to their prominence throughout the major. Beastmaster and Tidehunter were also hotly contested – both here and at the Minor – in this meta because of their ability to be self-sufficient in the face of being tri-laned.
The influence of a key handful of 4s and 5s in Bucharest and developments since then also made a few of these heroes abnormally influential during drafts. Shadow Shaman, Lich, Io, Tusk and Earth Spirit were among the most picked, most contested, and most winning (except for Tusk) heroes along with heroes who often flexed as 4s and 5s like Tiny. Flex Sven as either 4, 5, or hard carry was very successful early on in the tournament, but as it progressed, his win rate plummeted.
Grimstroke, however, saw an enormous surge of picks and hovered around a 45-55 percent win rate throughout the early goings of the tournament. By the end, however, he won only 37.5 percent of his 40 matches. He is still new, however, and far from figured out in a game as complex as Dota, so more experimentation will likely come whether he receives imminent buffs or not.
Dazzle was a beast all his own. In the current meta, Dazzle has proven to be incredibly flexible. Not only was he used as both a 4 and 5, but thanks to the cooldown reduction and offensive armour reduction provided by his new passive ultimate – and the enduring strength of his talents and poison touch – he was often utilised in the core role to great success, making him one of the most hotly contested heroes early on.
With so much more gold on the map now and with the new jungle camps, we also saw a return to 4-protect-1 and hyper carries. Phantom Assassin, Medusa, Juggernaut, Terrorblade, and Anti-Mage were the strongest carries by far heading into the Major, and each achieved a high degree of success leading up to it.
The evolution of 7.20
Speaking of hyper carries, Anti-Mage tumbled off of a cliff later on in the tournament with 16 picks and an abysmal 31 percent win rate. Despite the promising nature of his 7.20 reworks, including a spell shield that looked like it would be unbelievable in the late game, he simply failed to lane well, had little impact on the mid-game, and was often too far behind by the time games went late to do very much compared to the other carries of the patch.
After receiving a rework in 7.20 and a consistent string of buffs in the adjustment patches thereafter, Outworld Devourer roared back into the meta. He was prominent in the early stages of the Major, but he really shined in the last few days. Not only does his new Orb and Equilibrium give him flash farming and ancient farming potential he never had before, but he still hits like several trucks chained together – and the addition of the new Yasha and Kaya, which became popular recently, compounds that fact. He ended the tournament with a positive win rate and a boat load of appearances in game, making him a solid staple of the current meta.
Lich continued to dominate, tying Io for most contested hero and being featured in 96 percent of games as either a pick or ban. Dazzle ended the tournament being another highly picked and successful hero, but as the OD and limited supply of carries and self-sufficient offlaners became more high priority, the Dazzle picks fell off a bit toward the end.
The increased amount of farm on the map, early-to-mid-game aura item stacking, and reversion of denial XP changes has had the consequence of increasing the pace of the game. Fear not, though, because while some games were certainly snowballing stomps, we are still far from the TI4 deathball meta that put so many to sleep. The average game time during the Major hovered around the mid-30 minute mark, with plenty of exciting scrappy long games balancing out some snowbally 20-minute shallackings.
One negative aspect of the current meta is how shallow the hero pool has been relative to other Majors. For several days in the middle of the tournament, just 77 unique heroes had been picked, and then a small influx hit in the last few days that saw Leshrac, Phantom Lancer, Invoker, Arc Warden, Necrophos, Clockwork, and Nyx suddenly getting some play. Compared to the 82 heroes picked over 47 games at Bucharest, only 84 unique heroes were picked out of 96 games in Chongqing.
The current meta is giving fans and teams alike plenty of new things to learn, a new hero with new counter and new synergies, dynamic laning matchups, and varied games, but with 7.21 already looming, we can only hope the approximately 30 heroes who went unpicked here receive some love for an even more diverse meta.
