RD2L S29 Team Review
Zombies is too much of a coward to write anything remotely negative so I’m gonna do everyone a favor and try to tank their draft value next season, assuming they sign up*.
Zombies
The only thing Zombies put effort into this season was in competing for the worst captain I’ve ever had in RD2L award, which has some stiff competition (MOCA, who thinks “all of the green ones” is a diverse hero pool; Truck “I forgot to pick a 5th hero” Waffle; Tree “I just picked Pango without banning Bloodseeker for the 3rd time this season” Beard, etc.)
Zombies immediately quit DOTA as soon as the season started, which generally isn’t something desirable in a teammate. While this made his skill level fairly analogous to a beached whale, I think it was particularly bad considering his playstyle. Zombies basically has two modes — AFK hitting creeps, and tunnel visioning onto a single hero with a furious murder boner. This is good if you’re a competent player that always keeps up in farm and makes aggressive plays when opportunities arise. This is less than ideal if it means you spend entire games A-clicking down a lane as a 3, occasionally interrupted by diving a 5 player halfway across the map and failing to kill them.
Drafting is something that can generally be put on the team as a whole, I think this was an exceptionally hard team to draft for (for reasons that will be stated later). However, Zombies still managed to make this process harder by forgetting that it was our turn to ban heroes at least once per series, meaning we usually had about 30 seconds of reserve time by the time we got to our 3rd pick.
He also managed to fuck up the player draft by not getting Lucas as a last pick (he forgot to check my DMs to him mid-draft), which meant I could have actually played the role I’m decent at + we wouldn’t have had Dreamweaver.
FTS
Swarm is a very good player somewhat marred by an “oops, all offlaners” draft (for which I am partially responsible for). This is a flame review though, so I’m going to have to find something to bitch about — Swarm doesn’t speak enough ingame for RD2L I think, giving direction is a requirement when you’re one of like 3 players in the lobby with 2 brain cells to rub together.
He also never really felt that confident on any hero — I feel like in RD2L if you don’t have a really wide hero pool, you have to at least have 1–2 heroes where you can just say “pick me that” early in the draft. This could partially be because of swapping from 1 -> 3 halfway through the season though.
Also he fed in lane when I laned with him, which must have been his fault, because if it wasn’t that means it was my fault, and I don’t like that.
Princess
Princess is about as much as you could ask for in a 3k mid player. Unfortunately, 3k mid players in RD2L tend to pop off maybe 25% of the time, which wasn’t really enough to drag our washed asses across the finish line very often. It helped that he was pretty good at two meta heroes for half the season (QoP/Wind), but if they were bad picks or banned he struggled to come up with anything impactful.
Princess has a unique ability to know exactly where the enemy team is at very critical moments. Unfortunately, the reason he knew where they were is because they were all under a ward, and the critical moment was when he decided to ignore that information and walk into all 5 of them by himself anyways.
Dreamweaver
I used to be kinda baffled at how there’s such a range of lower MMR players — you play with 2k anchors in RD2L for years, and you figure, that MUST be the floor, how is there another 2k MMR below that?
Well, the answer is probably people like Dreamweaver. I’m going to preface this with this isn’t really flame - normally your floor player in RD2L has played enough with higher MMR players/played the game for long enough that they generally play the game correctly (buying wards, getting semi-reasonable items, etc.), but maybe they’re a bit slow or mechanically inconsistent.
Dreamweaver is the guy who picks Pudge and AFKs in the trees trying to land a hook every 30 seconds. He’s the guy whose itemization decision often boils down to “should I buy aghs first or dagon” regardless of what hero he’s playing. He’s also mostly a core player, which probably didn’t help (and he got picked to play 5 because Zombies ran out of money, which isn’t his fault).
What’s weird is I feel like this is a totally normal way to play like, pretty much every other video game I’ve ever played. People fuck around and just do casual shit because it’s a game, who cares. I feel like it’s only Dota where such a high percentage of the community more or less plays the game the “tryhard” way. Really, I think this guy plays Dota for fun, and we’re all just fucked in the head.
Tree
I don’t know how many seasons it’s gonna take for you guys to realize that I’m not a good pick. I’m washed, I don’t play that much Dota anymore, I don’t shotcall as well as I used to (mostly because I phrase things more as suggestions these days, dunno why). The only remotely impactful looking games I had this season were Bounty Hunter games, where I didn’t actually do anything, my presence just caused brainrot for our opponents and they lost. I think I only had 2 remotely decent looking scoreboards, and both were TERRIBLE games — in the SD game I was farmed as fuck because I had a small melty when Zombies threw our lane so I left to jungle ancients for 10 minutes. The Mirana game I accidentally bought a second mek, sold it for half price, bought an Aghs, and then stole kills for the rest of the game.
STOP PICKIGN ME
THANKS FOR READING
*They should not, under any circumstances.