Dire Straits:
Dota on the Clock

The Dire advantage has been a controversial topic in the Dota 2 professional scene. During the recently concluded Summit LAN event, we observed a 60% win rate coming from the Dire, but as a whole, it’s actually the Radiant side holding the net advantage with a 53% win rate in 6.81. We take a look at the Grand Finals series where the Dire took all 5 games to try to dissect this mystery.

The first topic that’s usually brought up when comparing sides is Roshan positioning. Out of the 10 Roshan kills during the Grand Finals, an astonishing 90% of the kills were attributed to the Dire side.



What's easy to miss about the balance between sides is that it’s not necessarily an absolute advantage determined from the start, but a "sliding window" depending on the length of the match. Looking at the entire Summit LAN event as a small sample, we can start to see a pattern on when the Dire advantage starts to come into effect:



Longer games tended to favor Dire victories with an average game time of 45 minutes, while shorter games were usually taken by the Radiant, with an average game time of 32 minutes. For the 5 games in the Grand Finals, each match ran an average of 37 minutes.

This intriguing fact was perhaps not a secret to DK and EG, and likely was the basis behind some of the unorthodox decisions from both teams. In trying to win as fast as possible, we saw some uncommon heroes being drafted, along with unconventional item and skill builds.

Game 1: Venomancer and Abaddon

Just by looking at the heroes, we can see that EG was leaning towards a pushing lineup, with obvious push heroes such as Dragon Knight and Nature’s Prophet. Digging deeper, we can see that EG was trying to end the game early. The unconventional core Venomancer maxed out his Plague Wards first, with Jakiro opting to skill Liquid Fire as soon as possible. This was further supplemented by an early Mek build coming out from Prophet.

Abaddon, although being the odd one out in this lineup, complemented their strategy by providing strong healing and shielding spells during the phase they wanted to end the game in.

EG’s strategy did seem to fare well in the early game, with EG starting to build up a significant lead into the mid game. Unfortunately they were not able to break high ground, and after a couple of failed attempts, DK was able to turn it around in their favor and take the game.

Game 2: The Surprise Strategy

Although most people were surprised by the mid Axe played by BurNing and the core Leshrac by Mushi, the strategy was similar to that of EG’s. Leshrac, being a naturally strong push hero and Axe, a hero that excels at early skirmishes, led the helm as DK made their attempt at an early victory.

With a role reversal of what happened in game 1, DK was able to take a very large lead going into mid-game (With a 10k gold lead at 20 minutes). But after failing one high-ground attempt, EG turned it around, equalizing the gold lead and eventually securing the game.

Game 3: A Cunning Facade

At first glance, this may seem like an attempt from EG to build up an extremely strong team fight lineup with Faceless Void being the safety net in case the game goes to late game. Although correct, this was also a very crafty way drafting yet again a push-oriented lineup.

First we look at Razor. With mason behind the controls, we see that his item choices were an Aghanim’s Scepter along with a Refresher Orb. This build is usually known to tear down structures, and was complemented with a BKB pick up, it was probably the case that mason’s job was to make sure he lives long enough to make sure his ult does as much damage to buildings as possible.

Next, we saw Arteezy playing the Windranger in the middle lane. Although becoming less popular in the more recent patches, we saw an even more obscure decision as Arteezy chose to skill Focused Fire at level 6. Out of 961 professional Windranger games, this has only ever happened 5 times. Looking at the reasoning behind this, it’s important to note that Focused Fire has received 4 separate buffs since 6.79. The latest 6.81b patch, which was released days before the event, drastically lowered the mana cost and gave EG another avenue of tower damage.

Continuing with the trend of the first two games, the early game looked extremely good for EG with Arteezy completely outlaning BurNing’s Lycan in the middle lane. But as EG was not able to breach high ground, DK eventually turned it around with a farmed OD and Lycan in the late game.

Game 4/5: The Pattern Breaks

The last two games had DK playing on the Radiant side. Although we were able to see some cool picks from DK, notably BurNing playing on a Silencer and a support Bounty Hunter, the pattern did not hold as strongly as it did before. DK seemed to have given up on the push-heavy strategy in favor of a gank-heavy lineup where they hoped to snowball off the early lead to finish the game early. Unfortunately, this also did not work out for DK as they lost the final two games, giving a 3-2 victory to EG.

One cool thing to note is the consistent trend of the delegation of non-conventional heroes to the typical carry players when on Radiant. Over the 5 games, we saw BurNing playing Axe and Silencer, and mason take up Venomancer and Razor.

Connecting the Dots

At a quick glance, The Summit Grand Finals may have been just an interesting series with a diverse hero pool (since we saw a staggering 39 heroes being drafted over the 5 games). But there was a recurring pattern suggesting that the “ticking time bomb” Dire advantage was what affected the Radiant drafter the most. With this late game disadvantage hanging over them, the Radiant side consistently drafted with early domination in mind. While some of the lineups could have been successful with slight adjustments, the Radiant drafts as a whole were too experimental and unrefined. They failed to take rax early, and with a lack of carry potential they collapsed in the late game.

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