EPT<h1 style="line-height: 1.1em;">What We Learned from the MSI Masters Gaming Arena Global Finals
</br></h1><h2 style="text-align: center; margin-top: -5px;"></h2><div id="author">by Xingua </div>
<div class="text">It’s time once again for a “WWL!” This time we’re focusing on the first ever international tournament for Heroes of the Storm: MSI’s Masters Gaming Arena! Teams from North America, Europe and Asia were pitted against each other for a prize pool of $50,000, with first place taking $30,000.
We last covered the North American August Open in our last WWL, so I won’t talk too much about the similar strategies we saw from the three American teams since it was only a week prior to this tournament. This was our first opportunity to see how each region’s unique Meta fared against the others, and it did not disappoint. A lot of buzz had been building about EU vs NA but, as it turned out, Korea didn’t get that message. MVP Black swept through the tournament only losing one game to Team Liquid.
For the EU vs NA debate, NA can point to Cloud9 (the second best NA team) looking dominant against Team Liquid (the best EU team). But it’s not all bad for the EU, as TeamLiquid was the only team to take a game off of MVP Black, who then made Tempo Storm look bad in the Grand Finals.
As with the August Open, the stats used in this article were compiled by Dthehunter and can be found here.
The tournament was broadcast on MSI Gaming's Twitch channel. Unfortunately the first day had a lot of streaming issues, so you'll have to scan through past broadcasts. Luckily, you can watch the full VOD of the second day of the tournament right here.
There weren’t as many games in this tournament due to it being single elimination, so this article will be a bit shorter than the last few. If I’ve missed anything, feel free to post about it below to help us all out. Now let’s take a look at some of the interesting strategy and drafting we saw over the weekend:
<h2>The 100% Involved</h2>
As always, we start with the heroes that were either picked or banned in every single game, as that tends to indicate who is at the top of the Meta. During the August Open, Zeratul and Kael’thas were involved in 100% of the drafts, while former top picks Zagara and Nazeebo fell out of favor. Nazeebo, Zagara (100% involved in the August Open) and Jaina (100% involved in the July Open) are still excellent damage dealers, but due to team compositions they just weren’t getting used as often. Instead we saw Uther, Johanna, and Leoric getting 100% pick/ban rates, most likely due to other regions’ comp preferences. Both EU and Asia prefer double Warrior compositions, and Leoric and Johanna (as mentioned in the WWL August Open) are the top 2 in that regard. MVP Black especially favored Leoric, even getting teams to ban him out because of how deadly he was in their hands. Johanna, meanwhile, seems to be taking a slight step back as Leoric often eats her alive. As far as Uther goes…
<h2>Press Pause</h2>
One of the recurring points of the casters during the tournament were just how strong Uther’s Divine Shield and Zeratul’s Void Prison were at letting teams control team fights. Void Prison is great at setting up team fights, or isolating players in order to focus fire on another. If the enemy catches you out of position, you can use it to get out of the area before you lose the fight. If you engage in a team fight, both Heroics allow you a pause button that can give your healer a chance to catch up or your DPS cooldowns to reset. Teams with Uther and Zeratul together were 4-0 in the tournament. In fact, MVP Black’s one loss was against this comp when Team Liquid rolled it out on Dragon Shire.
Divine Shield is further bolstered by the recent nerf to Cleanse, as it is now the only way to counteract a stun train when your teammate dives too far or is jumped on by your enemy. Overall it seems like Uther has clearly taken the spot of number one Support internationally now. As for other Supports…
<h2>Kharazim Is Not the Support We Are Looking For</h2>
In his first tournament foray, Kharazim was extremely underwhelming going 0-3, and always being picked as a solo Support. Tempo Storm’s Dreadnaught has publically said he thinks the monk healer has a high ceiling, but it has yet to be demonstrated. MVP Black especially showed how professional micro makes Divine Palm almost useless as they just stopped all damage whenever they saw it. At this point I think teams need to come up with new ways to use Kharazim, as he does still have a benefit as a melee healer, just not the lone healer on a team. Unfortunately to run him with a second healer doesn’t seem viable because of his relatively low damage, and the plethora of better heroes to choose from. Why take Kharazim when you could have a Tyrande who brings a stun and vulnerability debuff, plus great map vision? The only teams to play Kharazim were Tempo Storm and Team Liquid, considered the top two teams in the world prior to this tournament, and neither was able to make headway with him. I guess we will need to look on to the Medic instead.
<h2>Forget Triple Specialist, Try Triple Warrior!</h2>
In their final game against Team Liquid, MVP Black brought out a triple Warrior composition, adding one more tank to their usual strategy. They used Valla as their sole Assassin, combined with Uther as the Support, and then Leoric, Anub’arak, and ETC to win the match and head to the Grand Finals. The Korean team was able to completely dominate the map and objectives on Cursed Hollow, roaming and bullying their way through the more traditional line-up of Team Liquid (Tyrael, Malfurion, Nazeebo, Zeratul, and Kael’thas). The triple tanks managed to keep their lone damage dealer alive while putting out enough damage of their own to win long team fights. I wouldn’t recommend trying this strategy very often, as I think these players could make almost any comp work, but it is worth noting that even though Kael, Zeratul and Nazeebo are top damage dealers, they can be beaten by a coordinated group with much less damage.
Excluding the triple Warrior comp in one game, MVP Black really put on a clinic for how and why to run double Warrior, a style that North America has flirted with but hasn’t bought into fully since the early Beta. Most NA drafts focus on locking down the top damage dealers first and then grabbing an appropriate tank when you can later on, but in Korea they often use first picks and bans on top Warriors like Leoric and Johanna. Leoric looked especially deadly throughout the tournament and MVP showed the power of March of the Black King, compared to North America’s recent preference for Entomb. In the Grand Finals against Tempo Storm, MVP’s player Sign swung a team fight single-handedly by Marching through his enemies, grabbing three quick kills.
The two primary reasons MVP Black was able to dominate so thoroughly with double Warrior compositions were their insanely high micro and their patience in setting up ganks. Throughout the tournament the Koreans demonstrated how insanely coordinated they were by body-blocking enemies out of position to secure kills and knowing exactly when to pop stuns or snares. These skills paid even more dividends when they would leave Warriors waiting in bushes or around corners for opponents to take one step too far, and then jump on them with the rest of the team following through on the kill. While I think double Warrior definitely had a good tournament, I don’t know how many other teams can replicate the extremely skilled control that MVP Black, so despite their dominant showing, it still might not catch on in the West.
<h2>An Interesting Try</h2>
Team Liquid continues to be the most successful and innovative team in the world when it comes to their hero pool and drafts. They ran an interesting composition on Sky Temple against MVP Black when they took a heavy dive composition with Illidan, Abathur, and Kharazim, and they supplemented them with Johanna and The Lost Vikings. The intention was to have a team strong enough to smash into MVP’s team, and possibly allow The Lost Vikings and Abathur to soak lanes while they fought over temples. Unfortunately, the comp didn’t work as Team Liquid actually never gained the experience advantage you would expect in an Abathur/The Lost Vikings game, and while their dive potential was strong, the pause button of Divine Shield and Void Prison (see above) was able to put fights on hold and delay the Ultimate Evolutions and Viking Long Boats from being used until it was too late.
<h2>Stray Observations:</h2>
- Sylvanas was banned from this tournament due to a bug with her Wailing Arrow cooldown. I think this did affect the drafts because she’s picked frequently in North America, and her AOE silence is always useful. I don’t think she would have made the difference for any losing teams, but it’s always sad to not get a full picture of what teams want to do. The bug has now been fixed.
- We saw a bit of the Support ban draft Meta sneak back in during the Grand Finals between Tempo Storm and MVP Black, but I think this was just how that draft was developing and may have played into MVP’s hands. The game ended up with Kharazim vs Brightwing, and as they did all tournament, MVP showed amazing technique, using the faerie dragon to zip in and out of fights with Leoric’s Wrath Walk, and taking the Unstable Anomaly talent for a bit more damage. Kharazim, even in the hands of one of North Americas top Support players Dreadnaught, felt underpowered in the game and MVP regularly stopped damage on his Divine Palm target thus rendering it useless.
- Unfortunately the top Heroes team from China, eStar, wasn’t able to compete because they couldn’t get into the US due to visa issues. They were a dark horse contender and may have disrupted Tempo Storm or Cloud9 going as far as they did. This also denied us a few more matches of analysis as Cloud9 got a bye in the first round.
- Sgt Hammer made a few appearances with Team Liquid (1-2 with her) and seems to be hover-sieging her way slowly back into the Meta. Oddly enough, it seems like the prefered talent at 16 is now Stoneskin because of the changes to how easily she can siege up.
- Cloud9 ran an aggressive double melee Assassin team against Team Liquid in the Third Place Game, and made it look pretty dangerous. It did feature Zeratul and Uther though, so maybe that’s just them carrying the Illidan, but they made Team Liquid look bad. It may have also been the unusual no Assassin, Abathur and Sgt Hammer comp TL was using.
- This really can’t be said enough, but MVP Black looked so polished in almost every game. I thought Tempo Storm’s rotations were clean, but the Koreans were on a whole other level and made the top American team look completely out of sorts. I can’t wait to see how Tempo Storm adjusts, as their hero pool seemed to be lacking something against the Koreans. MVP Black definitely did their homework and seemed to outdraft them every game too.
- Unfortunately the stream on the first day of the tournament was constantly breaking, so the Past Broadcasts on MSI’s Twitch channel are broken down into nine minute chunks. If you’re looking for specific matches, you can browse through those, but a lot of the action was cut out during the outages. The second day went off without a hitch though.
- Congratulations to the winner of our MSI MGA bracket tournament, DelHospital! The winning bracket earned a MSI Z97 Gaming PC, and 12 other runners-up received prizes as well. I lost. Stay tuned for future TeamLiquid.net bracket contests, as we are likely to do one for BlizzCon.
- As always, make sure to check out Dthehunter on twitter @Dthehunter2510 for more statistics on these tournaments. He does this all on his own just to give us something to talk about. If you organize a tournament, he would love it if you could make the replays available, as it makes his job a lot easier and allows him to track more neat stuff (like builds).
- Let me know if I missed anything from the MGA down in the comments below, or follow and tweet me @Xingua. And don’t forget my esteemed editor @Vaalia_, who edits like an angry wombat (in a good way).
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<div class="snippetwrap"></div><div id="footer">Writer: Xingua
Graphics & Format: shiroiusagi, Vaalia
Art Credit: Blizzard
Editor(s): Vaalia</div></div>
have to check out the VODs next week when Im on vacation :D
