The Weird Tier 6 Meta in 7.06e (Battle Cup)

Special treat, we have a vod with comms.

I spent the week in Buffalo at a client site, a pretty under-the-radar city that has a lot of great venues for kids (and parents that want to get their drink on). Nice place, but I didn’t have Dota there, so it’s good to be back on the button.

Last night we notched our second Battle Cup win of the summer under the moniker Enjoy your vacation (kotlguy pictured). The bracket was easier than usual, no 5k stacks to block us from the trophy, and in the drafts opposing captains did us some favors as well. But you can’t choose who you draft against, you can only try to beat the captain across from you.

Anyway let’s talk meta a little bit and then look at some drafts.

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Draft Quickie: The SD-Mirana opener

My Echo League team Five Potatoes played a seeding tiebreaker Thursday night against the Cinderella squad Daft Gank. We drew a series 1-1 with them during the group stage, so both teams were itching to finish the pseudo bo3, especially with coveted seeding positions at stake.

The cast wasn’t streamed, but the replay is available under match id 3311906298. Dotabuff link.

I think there are a lot of interesting things going on in this draft, so I want to highlight the high-impact choices:

7.06e Lane and Let Lane

A quick look at how the new patch will influence the way we draft:

Neutral small camps gold bounty increased by 10%

Small changes have a big impact in Dota – this boosts the camp from I think 60g to 66g on average, or 120g to 132g if you’ve stacked it once. Combined with a nerf to mid-lane dominators and tempo offlaners, there is definitely added incentive to stack-pull the safe lane, rather than trilane mid, to help your supports come online faster. Early-focus pos 2-3 won’t be snowballing nearly as hard.

A Week in League Matches: Style is Everything

I played three series in the past week, so we have a nice half dozen drafts to look at.

• Sunday Evening Amateur League
  • Batman Forever (soundtrack) vs Burg Blarg Blam
• Echo League Season 2
  • Five Potatoes vs Daft Gank
  • Five Potatoes vs Jungle Legion Commander with vod

Let’s check out these drafts right off the bat, then talk about style and how we can develop it a little afterward.

A Week in Pubs 7.06d

7.06d has been out for nine days now, so I thought it would be cool to do a draft dump, look at what we’ve been picking up in pubs and hopefully see if there are any patterns or trends forming.

Not going to analyze these matches very deeply, but happy to answer any questions. Here’s a link to all these matches on Dotabuff. There are two drafts on the list that I did not screen below, one of a 3-stack, the other just my buddy on the button. Is that why I skipped them? Or because we lost? Either way, let’s look at some drafts:

7.06d and Sunday Evening Amateur League

The release of 7.06d marked the start of Sunday Evening Amateur League or SEAL, a new US-West player-draft league that takes the RD2L formula and adds exclusivity and stability to what was the flaky PST-SUN division.

Week 1 is in the books for my new team, Batman Forever (soundtrack). Establishing contact with the new posse was difficult, but we were able to bring everyone together by the end of the night. So, not much in the way of preparation for our match against CRAP’s Mein Covfefe, but let’s take a quick look at these ad hoc drafts anyway, then brainstorm how we’ll prep for the rest of the season.

7.06c Tier 6 Battle Cup, Step by Step

It took us five attempts, but we finally notched our first Tier 6 Battle Cup victory of the TI7 battle pass, under the intimidating moniker How Many Yams in a Netherdrake? 

We employed a good mix of strategies, but in an effort to present our thought process in a way that helps fellow captains apply the same concepts, let’s try to homogenize the draft breakdowns in a sort of step-by-step format. Off we go:

Scrim Time! Judging new picks

(pictured above: epic rampage-deny kill-steal with a single gyro auto by yours truly)

Last week we ran a couple super fun, high octane scrims against the up-and-coming Echo League NA-B team, Majestic Space Bees, and their star mid player, Dihy. Echo League’s group stage starts this week, and it turns out MSB was assigned to the same group as us, so the below drafts are potentially a preview to our contest in week 4.

We experimented with a number of new picks and set to work evaluating the heroes as potential candidates for future drafts. It’s easy to look at it as it’s-good-we-won or it’s-bad-we-lost, and sometimes that is all the assessment needed (eg. offlane Winter Wyvern), but here are a few considerations that often come up in the chats after our matches:

7.06c Answer Lancer

We’ve been experimenting with Phantom Lancer lately.

Kimahri got some really substantial buffs in the big 7.06 release, which has seen his winrate rise almost three points to a now serviceable 45.7%.

Pinktops from my Echo League stack, Five Potatoes, inexplicably plays this hero very well, and holds it in high regard. So he may not be pleased that I’m disrobing the cat’s pajamas here, but I’ll throw him a bone and offer this caveat: PL is probably not worth drafting outside pretty favorable conditions.

I felt similarly about Viper in 7.05, and now the hero is top tier (somehow buffed again in 7.06c). Just happened to be a good meta for the drake. Maybe in a patch or two PL will shine, but for now I think we’re just seeing great PL games; teams just aren’t drafting much AOE and leave themselves vulnerable to getting marched over.

Let’s take a look at some drafts: