Northern Arena and The Summit Set The Stage For The Boston Major
With two premier tournaments ending, the Northern Arena BEAT Invitational and The Summit 6, pro teams are shaping up for the Boston Major. It has been more than five months since a major patch, making it the longest time Dota has gone without an update since 6.72 in 2011 (8 months before 6.73, where four new heroes were released). Still, patch 6.88 has remained fresh with minor iterations, and the most recent tournaments showing what the patch still has to offer.
Wings Gaming Contend For Greatest Dota Team
Wings Gaming is the prototype for what a perfect Dota team might look like. Each of their players are individually skilled, they play every hero, and they’re adaptable to the meta at hand. They’re confident but humble, focused but still having fun, which all contributes to how well they work together. Plus, they live and breathe Dota, sometimes to the detriment of their health, as one interview revealed that wings.shadow had a slipped disc at 16 years old, from extended periods of sitting.
After their dominant TI6 run, casters Black and Winter were musing about whether this was the greatest Dota team they had ever seen. It sounds like a hyperbolic statement, something that is too soon to declare after one TI6 win, but Dota 2 is a relatively young esport. It’s easier to say “greatest of all time,” when there have only been 6 TI winners we can really compare.
At the Northern Arena Invitational, Wings Gaming ran through the competition, dropping only one game in the tournament.
Shadow again was the highlight of the tournament, replaying his stellar TI6 performance. He singlehandedly took over teamfights in Wings’ grand finals match against NP, leading his team back from a 20k net worth deficit in game 1.
But then weeks later at the Summit 6, Wings Gaming exited early, knocked down by eventual champions Virtus.Pro, and eliminated in the lower bracket by Evil Geniuses.
In terms of best Dota team of all time, EG does have an edge over Wings, with one TI win and two top three TI finishes. The issue here is that the roster was different, albeit slightly, from year to year. It’s easier to talk about how great EG’s players are in Dota’s hall of fame. Wings.gaming has retained the same TI6 championship roster entering the Boston Major, where they’ll have another chance to be one of Dota’s greatest teams.
Virtus.Pro Sweeps The Summit 6 Grand Finals
Virtus.Pro’s championship win at The Summit 6 marks the first time a Russian or CIS team has won the event. Their sweep over OG in the grand finals was an anti-climactic finish to a smooth, entertaining week of Dota, but it did have 111 kills over 90 minutes.
VP sealed off their final two wins in 22 and 24 minutes, and it was a testament to how their aggressive play paid off throughout the tournament. Over the past few patches, buffs to towers and nerfs to the advantage a team gains for destroying them have indirectly impacted the headhunting, offensive style of Russian and CIS teams. But for The Summit 6, VP muscled through the competition, and they were doing it with heroes few other teams used, such as Chen and Enchantress.
VP also veered into some unorthodox, but successful picks, with wins on Sniper and Bloodseeker. They also played and won with support Weaver, a Dota "hipster" strategy that VP.Lil has been pioneering for awhile.
VP’s challenge going into the Boston Major will be that the spotlight is on them now. In the last two years of Valve events, Russian and CIS teams have typically underperformed. The sentiment here is that though they can execute well, their narrower breadth of strategies limits them from adapting to the meta and exposes them to being outdrafted through the course of a longer tournament.
With the Boston Major being single elimination, Virtus.Pro stands to benefit from the shorter format. Virtus.Pro has shown to be more flexible in their Summit 6 run. They do have a signature style, but they also have a handful of strategies that are outside the box.
first bitch
2nd, Wings for the Major
3rd affff
forf yay
Woohhow 5th
6th kiss a kid.
you guys above me are retarded, the ones below me are scrubs
good read though
^ no u
Also, Currently the Enchanted Mango has but a 40.93% win rate. Please help. It is our duty as fellow gamers to give this magnificent item the glory it deserves.
Nerf Juggernaut's Blade Fury cooldown from 42/34/26/18 to 44/36/28/20 please, IceFraud xd Escape Gaming Juggernaut safely slow siege-d all 3 towers/ranged barracks with Blade Fury (like illusion/illusion Centaur safe siege towers) :/ https://www.dotabuff.com/matches/2802978280 haHAA
baby grind on me
im 12 btw
dondo 8k mmr still in this
Not sure how far VP can go. Back before TI6 there was Navi seemingly invincible in SLi, but then they got bashed in Seattle.
So it will be like one shot one kill during the Boston Major then.
Exciting!
resident evil 4 ?? :3