This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

　　

Purpose

Events such as The International tend to change the metagame and change the heroes which teams are likely to pick highly, and as such there's little value in looking intently at the heroes that the teams have picked in the run-up to the event. Instead, this article will focus on looking for patterns across games in terms of how the teams draft and play, who is prioritized and who has to make do. These are properties which generally come about from extended periods of playing together and finding a common groove and are unlikely to change much at the event. In fact, these preferences and peculiarities of each team is likely to determine how they adapt the lessons that come out of the event into improving their own play through-out the event.

　　Previous articles in this series:

　　North American strategy and draft analysis.

　　South East Asian strategy and draft analysis.

　　Chinese strategy and draft analysis.

　　

Alliance

Everybody knows Alliance, and to some extent you’d think this section would be superfluous, as the reigning world champions are unlikely to yield much new insight. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, that Alliance have always played that one style, the so called “Rat Dota”. Unimaginative, scared of taking fights, unable to change in the face of adversity during the past year. Everyone knows. Mostly, because everyone has forgotten that they’ve been a lot more than that over the course of their year and a half together.

　　

Radiant

The common theme in Alliance’s draft is that they tend to pick for controlling abilities early on, while sometimes forgoing that for global presence in the form of Io and Nature’s Prophet for example. While AdmiralBulldog’s heroes are often picked fairly high up, it’s not clear that they are so because of being his signature heroes, although this may still well be part of the thinking, as he created the base upon which Alliance used to build their branching strategies.

　　Meanwhile Loda is the opposite of course, as he is still the original versatile carry player. His heroes get picked up in the last two of the draft and tend to be picked to fit whatever the gameplan is, as Alliance still heavily seems to favour picking for their own plan as opposed to risking a disjointed lineup in order to counter a bit of what their opponent does.

　　Akke still enjoys his Enchantress and Chen, but neither is picked too highly for. These heroes enable him to help win the mid and offlanes, and generally Alliance seems to like for their supports to be somewhat proactive in helping out these lanes, posting a surprising amount of aid at the mid lane given s4’s somewhat utility role on the team. He is actually allowed to play more semi-carry heroes again though, as Bulldog shoulders some of the burden of utility or the team picks into tricore strategies.

　　Overall the dominant strategies from Alliance right now seem to diverge into either the expect split-push or their older slow-rolling pushing style. This isn’t however nearly all, as there are elements of clear influence from their sister team EG, with certain lineups that look almost at home being played by the North Americans instead. This isn’t as much of an departure as one might think, as back when Alliance was playing Magnus quite a bit they always stressed the importance of multiple modes of initiation.

　　

Dire

The picking style and order really doesn’t change much at all. The most notable change is that s4 often gets his heroes last, while Loda gets moved up slightly. At this point it may however be worth noting that Alliance were allowing EGM to draft at ESL One as a means to hide some of the insight into their drafting, and that these Dire games are a lot more clumped up as Alliance has played more Dire than Radiant recently. Most the games I looked at were still drafted by s4, but they were the older games, and there might well be some surprises in store for TI4.

　　Alliance seems surprisingly fond of running offensive trilanes on the Dire side, something I almost remarked on regarding their Radiant play as well, but it’s more pronounced here. They also run a bit less junglers, and generally seem to end up in more static lanes, or moving between static lane states as opposed to have the supports truly roam and gank.

　　The strategies are also quite similar to their Radiant side play, with pushing strategies playing a big part. The interesting addition is the return of their old global ganking strategies in their various forms, although so far they haven’t quite seemed to figure out how to make these work as they take a while for the key players to get the levels they need to fully participate, which leaves more of an opening for the opponent to out-aggressive Alliance in the early game.

　　

Na`Vi.EU

With the recent announcement that Na`Vi has added Goblak as their Coach for TI4 and with Na`Vi’s manager stating that Goblak has in fact been helping out with the team for a while before all of this became public, it’s fair to suggest that we may not know as much as we think about Na`Vi at this time. On the other hand, Goblak won’t be allowed to talk to the team during games, so it will still be Puppey’s own thinking that has the greatest impact on the direction of the teams drafts and strategies, and in that sense he has had a fairly steady development over time.

　　

Radiant

Na`Vi’s drafts aren’t the easiest to read in hindsight, as they tend to make more sense when viewing them as an evolution over time. Certain heroes drift into their drafts, see play for a while, maybe change their role in the draft and then phase out in a rather smooth and flowing way. Between these flows we have the things Ppy value at the time, which in recent times has often been based on heroes that recently successful teams have valued highly. And then there are some constants, such as Na`Vi’s tendency to play junglers.

　　The order in which these elements are combined is mostly dynamic, but Na`Vi does seem to pick offlaners fairly highly. This may well simply be the result of a few key offlaner heroes being very popular right now, as in the past the team has also been willing to abuse Funn1k’s ability to play aggressive semi-carries in order to make opportunistic surprise picks late in the draft. This isn’t necessarily a problem however as many of the current offlaners can also be given to XBOCT as tanky cores or to Dendi as initiator-gankers.

　　In general however Na`Vi’s most recent games come across as very greedy, forcing them into relatively reactive laning styles which can be punished and can put them behind early due to weaker lanes. This strategy is somewhat reminiscent of NewBee actually, although NewBee are overall more concerned with still drafting winnable lanes when their support rotations are taking into account.

　　There are some interesting and fairly original ideas in between all of this as well, with some role swaps among the cores that come across as highly opportunistic. These aren’t quite polished enough however and the results haven’t been the best, but they give glimpses of what Na`Vi might be trying to work on behind closed doors, maybe with some influence from Goblak.

　　As a whole, Na`Vi’s play on the Radiant side brings to mind statements by Puppey after TI2 where he proclaimed that he was entirely focused on beating the Chinese, and did not care if his strategies did not work against the Western teams. The style of play that he emphasized at the time seemed resolute to make Na`Vi play for the lategame, often in a way that reminded of xiao8’s strategies when he was with LGD, or the previous incarnation of DK. Solid, safe and reactive, but early timings for taking control of the map can easily run you over.

　　

Dire

In the more recent Dire games Na`Vi seem to have been picking up Dendi’s heroes a bit earlier in the draft, with the clear intent to build their lineups more around him. This is more akin to the oldschool Na`Vi which used to heavily focus enabling Dendi to win his lane and snowball out of control, but which was conspicuously absent in their Radiant drafts. This also goes beyond just drafting, as the supports seem to be spending more time around the mid lane, trying to secure runes, farm and ganks for Dendi.

　　The downside here is that the heroes Na`Vi have been picking for Dendi aren’t quite the solo mid carries that for example Arteezy gets when EG run a similar laning setup. Instead, Dendi has played a good amount of his classic mobile ganking heroes, which while if he were to absolutely crush his lane would probably be decently able to snowball, even though they’d still have trouble with the abundance of tanky cores around these days.

　　But other teams have changed up their play around the mid lane, and now when Na`Vi invest into winning this lane what they get is most often a slight win or a draw, while the opposing team has the mid hero which better transitions into the lategame. This is somewhat problematic as Dendi can’t quite control the flow of the game as he used to while Na`Vi ends up being on a bit of an clock. It’s a bit of the opposite problem than what was discussed for their Radiant strategies.

　　Na`Vi still seems closer to being themselves when playing Dire than Radiant. There’s more action being initiated by the supports and there’s more of the old gank and push early game strategy in the picks. It’s not quite the old Na`Vi who relied on dominating lanes, ganking for objectives, farming the map efficiently in between movements and generally building up a massive lead with a midgame lineup. That’s actually iG’s thing now.

　　

Team Empire

Since adding Resolut1on to their ranks, Team Empire has been a devastating unit and largely been seen as the strongest CIS team. Their success was based on a fairly rigid set of drafts, which challenged their opponents to deal with both Silent and Resolut1on at the same time, as either player when given a good start would snowball hard and take over the game. Using these players volatility to their advantage, they were able to ensure that The Empire was able to Strike Back. Darth Vader = Mag. Join us. The dark side.

　　

Radiant

After suffering their defeat at StarLadder Empire said they wanted to diversify their draft, and for the Radiant side this apparently means prioritizing two teamfight heroes in the first pick phase more often than not. This often comes out to an offlaner such as Tidehunter or Brewmaster (which Mag runs quite a bit, but can also be a solo mid hero for Resolut1on) as well as Enigma if he’s not banned out. The last two picks are often reserved for Silent and Resolut1on, in order to ensure they have heroes which should be able to snowball as planned.

　　While Empire runs some dual lanes, the fact that they run a lot of Enigma on Radiant means they mostly end up with a standard laning setup. They generally rotate their supports in between the mid and safelane and focus on their two core players, while Mag is mostly left to fend for himself on something tanky and capable of initiating fight later on.

　　It’s a bit surprising to see Empire pick teamfight heroes so highly, since their overall strategies are more gank oriented. They run good enough initiation and certainly have enough pick-off potential, but their actual ability to initiate 5v5 fights often depends on burning those big teamfight ultimates up front and then controlling the flow of the fight without that much lockdown, as the team runs a fair amount of slows instead of reliable stuns.

　　The lineups can’t quite be called deathballs, which is how I’d have characterized Empires old strategies. Instead it feels much more dependent on getting ahead with strong ganking, which isn’t that common right now on the Radiant side.

　　

Dire

Effectively Empire seems to be picking similarly on the Dire side, although as they’ve played less Dire recently the games are more spread out, meaning that a number of them are before Enigma rose in popularity. Overall they seem to pick more teamfight heroes, with even some old favourites such as Ancient Apparition slipping into the older games.

　　Whereas the Radiant drafts felt like the teamfight picks were there to balance out things a bit, the Dire lineups feel more like teamfighting was a central objective, with most lineups coming online around the early midgame. The team also plays more deathball pushes, often anchored by one hard carry core instead of the more conventional dual semi-carry.

　　As a result of the slight shift in focus, Resolut1on plays more of an initiating role with Mag playing the heroes that control the flow of the teamfight or the aoe initiator. In turn this means that the supports are spending less time rotating into mid to support Resolut1on and frees them up to do a bit more dual hardlanes, or to focus on repelling any attempts at aggression against their hard carry.

　　

mousesports

At a time mouz looked well on their way to becoming one of the biggest teams in the West, but after suffering some difficult losses to Fnatic and showing a predilection to not respect their opponents early item timings during the TI qualifiers, the team faltered a bit in terms of their development. They’ve since grown perhaps even more aggressive and early game orientated, and while it can absolutely destroy games, it’s also walking a knifes edge in terms of not overcommitting and giving away streak gold.

　　

Radiant

mouz drafts have the feel of someone composing by ear. There are certain notes you need to hit, certain pieces of the overall puzzle that are needed and certain ways to get those aspects. You pick up a bit of initiation, a bit of tankyness, a bit of setup and something to follow it up. If you have the choice, try and get a numbers advantage. Maybe force them to fight you if you can.

　　mouz hasn't exactly played an overabundance of games in order for us to derive great big patterns, but it's clear that they have no qualms about going aggressive when playing Radiant. They draft heavily for the laning stage and on average it pays off, either by them getting ahead on lanes or by picking up kills, which in either case sets them up for the choice to get several Hand of Midas in order to snowball harder into the mid game. It's a very straight forward strategy and for the most part, it ensures they get off to a good start.

　　But the problem is that they need to hold that advantage through the early mid game in order for their Midases to pay off, and because of their more early game orientated drafts they'd often be at a disadvantage if they didn't pick up their Midases. And this is the point where the strategy may falter, because if they don't make it smoothly through and hit each target, they'll struggle to close out the game as they generally want to be the ones forcing action into their tanky cores, allowing them to dictate the pace of the fight through their counter-initiation.

　　

Dire

Again the drafts start out by ticking certain boxes, providing the teamfight initiation that the team needs to swing fights in the early mid game as well as the strong single target lockdown that a hero like MIrana can provide, while also being a flexible core pickup. mouz does seem to leave themselves a bit more room for surprises late in the draft when playing Dire, although there's not quite enough games to determine what really constitutes a surprise, but certainly carry Naga Siren isn't quite what some might expect from the team. It's also interesting to note that while Axe is a top pick for their aggressive trilanes on the Radiant side, they don't seem to value him quite as highly when playing Dire. Instead, mouz are one of the big proponents of the Dire Enigma and the ability to control lanes and acquire early towers that the hero gives you.

　　It should be noted that same as on Radiant, Misery generally functions as the engine for mouz early game, with his movement helping set up for the early kill leads they are known for. He also generally plays heroes which have an ability to initiate fights from early levels, with Bane and Vengeful Spirit or the jungle Enigma being among his weapons of choice. This is not to say that mouz simply relies on supports for their aggression, as they are one of the teams more likely to rotate cores early on in order to take fights with a numerical advantage. By drilling their aggression into their opponents hearts they often times can force them to group up early, at which point ideally mouz backs off and out-farms their opponents who aren't yet ready or able to hunt them down.

　　In terms of the Dire side, all of this leads to mostly what we'd consider deathball lineups, and in truth they aren't even that unconventional many times. A lot of the heroes that make up the core of mouz aggression are perfectly normal in this generally aggressive and teamfight orientated metagame, however mouz are willing to sacrifice more in order to gain those early advantages. If they can make those sacrifices pay off and hold on to their lead, they should be a very difficult team to contend with, as many Western teams have said they are in scrims.

　　

Fnatic

We all know this is going to be a hard one to dissect. The last official match the team had with Era was on the 21st of May, well outside of the purview of what I’ve been looking at for the other teams. The team has also changed in his absence, adapting to Excalibur and the changing meta. I could simply wave it off or just look at how the rest of the team plays as if Excaliburs addition did not affect how the team played, but we all know better than that. So I’ve got another solution, one that will hopefully give you at least an inkling of what should be attributed to the team adapting to Excalibur, and what might carry over, fingers crossed, when Era steps back into his old role.

　　

Fnatic with Era

I’ll start things off by taking a look at a sampling of both Radiant and Dire games that the team played with Era before his illness, and I’ll follow it up with an equal sampling of their games with Excalibur. It should be noted that because of Fnatic preferring the Dire side at the time, the games in question range over a 12 day period.

　　While it’s safe to say that Fnatic’s picks with Era have been a pretty varied sort, there are a few clear patterns. Most of the time, Fnatic used to pick up the core of their strategy first, be it two synergistic heroes or a well known combination like Mirana and Shadow Demon. Trixi also generally got his hero or a hero or another hero that he could have played on the offlane was often picked fairly early in the draft. The overlapping heropool of the core players on Fnatic makes it a bit hard to discern sometimes if some picks which ended up in the hands of H4nn1 may have originally been intended for Trixi.

　　Unless picking up a specific combination or being put on a hero which was vital to the strategy, Era and H4nn1 both tended to get their heroes late in the draft, with Era often coming in last. Also, over the course of my sample of 10 games, Era and H4nn1 played 7 and 8 different heroes respectively, while the rest of the team were all tied for 5 different heroes, which fits well in with their versatile strategies.

　　In terms of strategies, Fnatic ran everything from a near 4-protect-1 strategy to no-core midgame teamfight to hard push, split push and dual core facerush. Most strategies were dual cores, with a few tricores for good measure. Generally Trixi or H4nn1 played the initiating role with either H4nn1 or Era playing the tank for the team. While the sample in question did not particularly showcase wild laning from Fnatic, there were some instances of dual mids (around H4nn1 surprisingly), dual offlanes around both Trixi and Era and a varied distribution of farm.

　　The supports oscillated between protecting various lanes, ganking and farming up for themselves. The games included four instances of junglers being run, with three of those being Fly’s Enigma and one being the Enchantress for n0tail. Very few games featured actual safelane babysitting, and in some instances the team seemed to be perhaps a bit too callous with their cores, allowing H4nn1 to be chased out of his lane by an opposing dual mid lane in one case.

　　

Fnatic with Excalibur

The following stats are based on games selected in the same fashion as for Era, spanning just four days, in part as Fnatic seems to be valuing first pick over sides and averaging out their play on each side (this is just an assumption however, as it can’t be known who won the cointoss).

　　Funnily enough, while many of us probably hold an idea in our heads that Fnatic were always first picking Tinker, Meepo or Tiny for Excalibur, because the sample that I’m looking at is from the tail end of his time with the team what actually shows up is surprisingly similar to how Fnatic picked with Era on the team. Excalibur was actually the last or second last person to get his hero in 7 out of 10 games, and played 9 different heroes.

　　It’s true that Excalibur’s impact generally decreased when put in a more similar role to what Era played for the team, but it also allowed H4nn1 and Trixi to take on bigger roles again and be the playmakers they can be. As H4nn1 was moved on to the Tiny Io combo he actually became a consistent person to get his hero in the first two, especially as he also played a good amount of support games at this point, and as his support pool is not as big as his solo mid pool.

　　It’s also very obvious to state that Excalibur’s presence and his Tinker and Meepo picks did change how teams banned against Fnatic and opened them up for playing considerably more Tiny Io than when Era was still with them. This may be lost, but not necessarily, as H4nn1 is still an excellent Tinker player and n0tail is the “original” master Meepo. Having seen what these heroes can do, we may still see teams banning out both against Fnatic, regardless if the team actually has any plans to return to using these heroes.

　　In terms of the strategies employed, the first obvious point is that Fnatic were forced to work around things when playing with Excalibur and this is the source of the increased role rotations that we’ve been seeing. Unpredictable lanes and outlaning through unconventional means has certainly been in Fly’s drafting toolbox for years, but it’s something that comes and goes in their strategies, same with the role swaps between support and core for H4nn1 and n0tail, which in turn changes what kind of role Fly plays on the team as well (he’s much more sacrificing when playing with H4nn1 as support).

　　Most of the strategies from this period aren’t particularly fancy. They revolve around ganking and teamfighting, abusing good positioning and unconventional initiation in order to take and win fights. There’s a bit more of a 4-protect-1 feel in a few drafts than was common with Era and overall less push strats, even as they were picking Enigma highly for Fly. The diversity is still present, it’s just not as impactful in terms of the overall strategy of the team.

　　

Virtus.Pro

At first glance, it’s a bit of a stretch, but by including the Techlabs Cup games from the 31st of May VP has played just about enough games over the past month for a proper analysis to take place. There’s just one problem. Only five of these games had the full five man roster that was invited to TI4, with Ars-Art, arguably the architect of their Qualifier success, being the man who has been missing in action ever since Techlabs ended.

　　While it’s not ideal, an overview of their drafts shows that the team has been valuing split-push rather highly, with just about every draft including a Tinker, Nature’s Prophet or Io. This has the feel of a continuation of what worked for them during the Qualifiers, even in the absence of Ars-Art. This has also changed up the role of God a bit, as he used to play more high impact gankers, but now has to take his time before he can be fully impactful.

　　In general the strategies tend to fall into either heavy push or heavy ganking, which isn’t particularly surprising. There are elements of aura strats and probably the most intriguing thing is when they bring back some classic ganking combinations with some new flair, for example a farming Lina with Sven as support. Pushing heroes and the aforementioned trio of global mobility heroes seem to take up the top slots in the VP draft as well.

　　It’s anybodies guess if any of that will still hold true when Ars-Art is back in the fold.

　　

Final words about Europe and CIS

Europe and CIS has been the final region and at the end of it all, it seems clear that while the different regions all have their slight variations, the overall building blocks are not that different. It comes down to distinguishing between the roles certain heroes may take on within certain contexts. At a glance, Europe and CIS seem the most diverse however, with no real clear factor identifying them all as being part of the same family of thought. Further complicating matters in this regard is the fact that Europe has more than a few mad scientists, willing to throw all semblance of convention out the window at a moments notice in order to gain advantages during the laning phase.

　　There's also a lot of uncertainty about the European and CIS teams, as more than a few have publicly stated that they aren't showing off how they actually intend to play. This might simply be a perception issue however, as teams such as Alliance and Na`Vi have been public about it while Virtus.Pro and Fnatic just haven't been seen publicly playing with one of their members for some time. Indeed from the first day of scrimming in Seattle I've heard that DK were among the most active participants in scrims, while I've not heard of anyone having a chance to scrim against NewBee. Perhaps there are other teams as well which have surprises in store for us, and are valuing that surprise factor above the practice that they might get from these few days of scrims. It wouldn't be the first time.

　　Pictures courtesy of Valve, Mila Alieva and ESL One.