RD's Replay of the Month - October

World Dota Cup (WDC) is fast approaching, with more and more qualifier games being played. Among others, LGD and EHOME met each other in WDC China Qualifier (robin round, top 4 out of 8 teams will qualify to grand final), a historic match played on the historic days of 10/10/10 that tells 1001 stories about the strength of Chinese DotA. PURE EPICNESS!

Events: World Dota Cup China Qualifiers
Maps/version: Dota-allstars 6.68c, version 1.24B
GameMode: -cm
Length: 109:55 minutes

replay download: [gosugamers]

rating: ********** (intense)

One sentence for me to summarize this game - LENGTHY BUT EPIC! Although you might see the outcome, you really can't tell which team is going to win even in the last 5 minutes of the game. Watching the game live on Neotv, I have to say that the intensity of the game really got through me, and even the people at gosugamers went madness over the streamed game. So intense and epic, that's all I could say.

The tide of the game kept on swinging from one side to another. LGD started the game convincingly, gaining 10-1 kill advantage by 25th minute mark while getting 5 of scourge's outer tower. EHOME however maintained their composure to get quick roshan kills and get their asses back into the game. EHOME finally got their advantage when they managed to push and get LGD's mid rax, and by that point it looks like EHOME will make a comeback and win this. But a few KEY buybacks from YYF's Storm (more of this below) kept LGD in the game and they eventually managed to get EHOME's mid rax, nullifying the opponent's rax advantage. But in the end on this epic game, Burning's Shadow Fiend and Dai's Sniper get overly fed, and with virtually no pure dps hero on sentinel, LGD can only watch helplessly as EHOME pounced their Tree...

Some interesting points about this game:

• MVP: YYF's Storm, despite being on the losing side. "THAT" moments in 57 and 76 minutes are totally youtube-material. Died, buybacks, killed 1 heroes, died, BUYBACK again, killed another 1, died, then BUYBACK again, killed another 2 heroes, ULTRA KILL. I jizz in my pants.

• The power of KingJ. Who would have thought that a venomancer can out-cs ZSMJ's Necrolyte 1v1? 5 minutes in, veno had 25 cs compared to zsmj's 13. 12 minutes, veno had 63 compared with zsmj's 35. But in the end, ZSMJ is ZSMJ. By 16 minutes, zsmj's cs skyrocket to almost 80 (veno had stopped farming at this point), and almost reach 100 by 20 min =.=

• Dai's knowledge about Dwarven Sniper, and dota mechanic in general...questionable? I can't understand why he didn't turn off MKB's true strike because it totally renders his Headshot useless. In fact, none in sentinel had any sort of Evasion skill, even more reason to turn True Strike off.
  

Overall it was ohe heck of a game, and in my opinion it really deserved to be the replay of the month. Some people complained about the sheer farming that this game had, but hey, what can you expect when two of arguably the best DotA team in the world met? I find this game more fun to watch when the game was broadcasted live (along with shoutcast), but certainly a bit boring when watching the replay. To think this is just the qualifier, I wonder how will the real WDC going to be. Hopefully more epic games to come.

Don't get confused with the displayed game length, the game actually last only around 82 mins (which is also fairly long by today's standard). For those who wish to watch the replay, it's better to watch at 3-4x speed, then back to 1x when teamclashes happened, and most importantly, don't miss YYF's epic moments in minute 57 and 76 minutes.
If you value intense game with epic teamfights and skill demonstration, then this is the game for you.