General DiscussionWe lost again to LEBRON JAMES

For game one, "First game (we had 2 substitutes)"

Your line up is good, theirs weird. BH should have been a very good counter against NP but NP still seemed to do reasonably well. Your lineup's weakness would be the teamfights, but you had pickoff heroes in exchange. I can only say losing was due to bad play because your lineup > theirs. Alchemist's score is absolutely horrible in comparison with the supports. Either the supports were ksers or your Alche sucked balls. (or, your supports didn't protect Alche well)

So, for the second game, "Last night's game (w/ substitute)"

Both lineups... seem bad? I'm not watching the replays so I don't really know but I can already see the laning phases being weird. Their picks are completely stupid and I'm not going into too much detail why, but more about your own lineup. I'm assuming LD was offlane, Nyx mid and Bane, Naga, PL as a tri. LD as offlane is perfectly fine considering their weak and retarded tri.

But the rest is weird. Nyx loses to a TA or Puck mid, so its bad. And lets just say you had Bane mid instead, then a three melee tri is equally as bad. Especially one like Naga, Nyx and PL.

You needed a stronger mid against theirs, and your supports for PL were completely wrong.

The 2nd game you did pretty well.
http://dotabuff.com/matches/299405936

What you were lacking was a way to break them. Your team didn't seem to know how to use Siren Song to attack...and its not that good against NP+Kotl anyway because they spread out so far across the fight and across the map...but there is another way.

Certain heroes are really vulnerable to mass blademail and they had two of them (kotl and NP). Your team tanked wrath of nature and illuminates over and over in the course of trying to push. If you had hit mass blade mail correctly on any one of those you take a rax.
Even if you don't hit the timing right all the time...the fear of mass blademail will change how they defend allowing your bear to get up there and take down the tower.

It doesn't matter about how many hp your heroes have. What matters is the coordination. If Kotl hits ever 2 of you with illuminated blademails he dies from full health way back in his base. If NP does that double aghs ult he loved so much into mass blademail he instantly dies wherever he is on the map. Most likely a single ult would kill him if even 3 of you hit blademail in time.

Mass blademail is extremely effective against Tinker as well...although he was not in this game. Even at the pro level tinkers get destroyed by mass blademails.

Yo Xargon,

I'll just comment on the game we lost yesterday cause I'm bored at work and didn't manage to talk to you after the match yesterday.

We did good early game, top lane was winning (TA offlane vs PL, naga, bane), although should have killed more, mid was doing alright (Puck vs NA), btm was also good (Alchem, KOTL vs LD).

Because of the strong lanes, we had early game advantage, PL could be left alone to farm while naga/bane roamed. I'd say we played okay, but we couldn't win team fights, I think because:

1. No proper initiator. Naga is a good initiator, but our heroes have 0 synergy with song of the siren. After sleep, what can we do? only NA have some sort of AOE stun that can benefit from song. We used naga more to run away than to initiate. Once they had gem, NA lost the power to initiate.

2. In team fights, we dont have AOE presence. Again, only NA had anything that can catch stun more than 1 hero.

3. The power of alchem farm. Our PL and bear farmed good, however you can't fight alchem farming. PL had more CS, Kills, but still lost out on farm. We should have pushed together as 5 earlier. However vs KOTL this is harder to do. And with NP split pushing, we're screwed.

So I think, if we want to first pick naga, we should make the team around her, because her song is too good for initiation.