Season whatever team review
Been awhile since I’ve done one of these, but reminder that I judge players based on their MMR, not their overall performance. Everyone was a pleasure to play with, and surprisingly flexible.
MOCA:
Pros: Plays a mean TA.
Cons: Got TA once this season.
For how inbred MOCA is as a player hero/role wise, he did try to be flexible this season, offering to play different lanes and heroes where he thought it could fill in issues we were having. It had mixed results, but gotta give the man credit for trying. Played about as well as you’d expect for a player at his MMR, but should really learn how to play dota in ways that don’t involve idiotproof static farming mids. Solid 7/10.
Reckless:
Pros: Switched roles mid season for the sake of the team.
Cons: This reduced his hero pool from 4 heroes to 2.
For the most part, your typical 4k core player — all mechanics, no brains. Him switching from 1 to 3 definitely salvaged the team, but it put us in some tough spots draft wise when he could only really play Axe and NS, and didn’t really have the offlane games to know how to play from behind. When he had a free game though he pretty much solo carried, which was pretty dope. THINK BEFORE YOU CALL PLEASE. 8/10.
Lee:
Pros: Picked up new heroes like Phoenix when he was unceremoniously tossed into the 4 role as the lowest MMR player.
Cons: His eggs were magnetically attracted to the enemy melee core about 50% of the time.
The only possible draft advantage MOCA could have had by first picking a 5 player was that you can maybe end the draft by picking some lowish MMR core player that other captains were dodging. Of course, he threw that out the window by last picking another 5, leaving us with no 4 player. It sort of ended up working out, as Lee couldn’t overcome his 5 habits and habitually bought a bunch of wards, while I kept absorbing farm around the map that no one else was taking and regularly forgot I was supposed to be playing support. 8/10.
Mantis:
Pros: Generally played above his medal.
Cons: I don’t know how to assign the way he plays Dota a medal.
You can tell Mantis has played Dota for a long time. Give him a decent game, especially on a caster, and he’ll run around, farm, cast spells, and carry games like a 4k player. The problem was between his unusual style of play + Reckless/MOCA’s nonexistent hero pools, one of them would almost always get shafted, or we’d just have a completely nonfunctional draft. I think the safelane DP/Lesh type heroes would work a lot more reliably on a team with a high mmr mid player that plays scaling mids + a more typical 3 player, but we made do with what we had, and did fairly well, all things considered. 8/10.
Tree:
Pros: Picked whatever the team needed to enable their game.
Cons: For every 5 DP, there was a 5 Tide.
I thought the biggest thing I could bring to the table was ingame shotcalling that wasn’t held down by the constant demands of a core role, but I don’t feel like it worked out that well. No one ever argued or anything in game, a lot of the time it just felt like what I was saying went in one ear and out the other. Not that it was just the team — I haven’t played RD2L in a long time, so I definitely had some communication errors where I thought I was making a call in a way that everyone understood, only to watch a complete trainwreck happen 30 seconds later. That kinda burnt me out more than anything this season, plus just the constant feeling that I was relatively powerless to translate how free of a game I was having into an actual win due to lack of natural gold/xp. Shouldbe2ndrounded/10.
Overall, pretty fun season, great bunch of guys. Not sure if I’ll play again, but its not because of this team specifically. Highly recommend drafting all of them (separately).