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Thursday, August 19, 2010

[DotA] RD's replay of the month - July & August

Finally a post after almost a month, after a few "minor" things happened to prevent me to spare time on this blog.

Nevertheless, I only just realize that I forgot to put a post of my favorite DotA replay for July, partly because so many huge things happened in those month (ESWC, G-League, WCG ASIA etc), which made selecting good replay partially difficult. And even this month there are also some great tournaments being held in China, including Intel Extreme Masters and National Electronic Sports Open 2010. So many great replays, in the end I can only pick a few as my choice for these 2 months.


Starting with my favorite replay for July:


[WCG ASIA 2010] Grand Final: Nirvana.my vs Starboba



Events: World Cyber Games 2010 - Asia
Maps/version: Dota-allstars 6.67c, version 1.24e
GameMode: -cmoi
Length: 63:38 minutes

Replay download: [gosugamers]

The reason I like this replay is Starboba's unorthodox draft of picking a combination of mass heal+armor debuff strategy, which worked really well in this game. Their strength truly shine in teamfight when SP's ultimate, Warlock's mass slow and WD's bouncing stun combined to disrupt Nirvana's coordination, then added with Slardar's armor penalty and Jugger's menacing Spin and Omnislash (don't forget his Healing Ward too). It was clear that Starboba intended to do this strat for the grand final right from the start, evident by the very short time taken by Soso.on to pick each heroes (less than 10 secs for each pick).

Nevertheless, SB's way to victory was also helped partially by some of Nirvana's uncharacteristic mistake. Mushi's doesn't seem to be at the top of his game, and at one point when teamfight ensued near Roshan, he opted to continue hitting Roshan (almost died) rather than focusing on SB's heroes, and as a result, Nirvana lost the teamfight.

Overall it was a really nice game to watch, action packed, great execution of strategy and good team clashes. The only downside of the game is that Nirvana made too many mistake that cost them the game.

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Now, to the replay of August. I had a hard time deciding for this one, because as I mentioned before, there are many great replay coming from the recent Chinese tournament, but not many of them actually have a distinct feature, or something that made them a memorable replay (eg 2 rapier medusa/mass push strat etc). Hence, my pick for replay of the month, August:


[NESO 2010] Playoff - LGD.SGTY vs GD



Events: National Electronic Sports Open 2010
Maps/version: Dota-allstars 6.67c, version 1.24e
GameMode: -cm
Length: 82:49 minutes

Replay download: [gosugamers]

Long game. This game is played in best of 3 format in the last 16 round of NESO, held in China 2 weeks ago. An event which saw the return of Chinese powerhouse CityHunter, the crack in LGD's domination, as well as the exposure of pub star like Ckk and Nada to competitive dota. With ckk on SF and ZSMJ on Medusa, you really would expect something awesome to happen in this game. As I said previously, the game probably didn't have anything spectacular in term of innovation in strategy, or a gamebreaking teamfight that triggers a comeback. But it was full of actions and imo worth the watch if you want to see some great kunkka/shadow fiend play.

LGD themselves played a part in their defeat as Ch's venomancer and 2009's Rhasta was caught so many times, giving GD the opportunity to gain the upper hand in many team clashes. On a note, at one point ZSMJ's medusa had over 10k gold due to some insane farming, unfortunately it was not enough to save LGD. This time he decided not to go for double Rapier (as he did against EHOME), which IMO is the right thing to do because the rest of LGD heroes can be taken down easily by GD, making it almost impossible for Medusa to wield Rapier safely. LGD eventually lost the game 2:1 and was knocked out to the loser bracket, but for some undisclosed reason the decided to forfeit their loser bracket game...a sad end to LGD's journey in NESO 2010.

p/s: the other 2 games of LGD vs GD are also nice to watch.

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