What we can learn from VP vs Secret, KLM Grand Finals:

The classic post-TI period in which VP and Secret dominate the scene has come. Dota is an old game already, it’s nice that we are sticking to our traditions (it’s more fun when we break them that way).

In this article, we’ll try to extract a couple of valuable lessons from the epic 5-game series that we can use in our own games!

Game 1

Lesson 1: unconventional picks are risky

Game one was very interesting strategically because both teams used a couple of heroes in unusual positions.

Ramzes pos. 1 Brew: Bearing in mind pos. 1 and pos. 3 in this meta aren’t that different (at least in the lanes), it’s not that strange that the pos. 1 Brew worked out just fine. The early Radiance Ramzes managed to buy allowed him to have a very high impact in team fights both in terms of control and damage (the Brewlings inherit the Radiance burn aura). The obvious risk of this pick is that the Brew as a pos. 1 will fall-off in the super late game, but in this game, the risk didn’t materialize because VP secured the game quickly.

Solo support Centaur: Support Cent is viable because although Cent scales amazingly with items, he doesn’t necessarily need them. His ultimate gives great utility to his team, and just with a Blink Dagger, he can become a decent initiator. The risk is that after a very bad laning stage his Dagger will be delayed. This will reduce his impact only to his ultimate, which isn’t enough. In this game, however, Solo didn’t die too much, found his farm and got a respectable 16 minute Dagger timing.

MidOne mid Shadow Shaman: SS with high levels will be able to push towers from early on, and with enough farm, he’ll get Aghanim’s + Refresher much faster in order to break the enemy base with double Serpent Wards. The risk is that Rasta is a “one trick pony” and if things don’t go his way he’ll fall-off. MidOne had a great start – he pushed the T1 mid tower on the 5^th minute and on the 10^th had 70 creeps. Nonetheless, he wasn’t able to make use of this good start and his team lost the mid game engagements. The hero’s squishiness made it very difficult for him to stay alive against the mobile Storm and the huge AoE potential of the other enemy heroes (he ended the game with 9 deaths).

Lesson 2: team fight potential is king

The team fight potential of VP in this game is one of the best you could imagine in Dota.

They have great initiation: Storm, Cent with Stampede and Blink + Stomp, even Brew with his Blink & Split
Great counter-initiation: Enigma, Centaur, Phoenix Egg
Devastating AoE combo: Blackhole + Supernova
Great ongoing control in fights from various low CD stuns (Malifice, Stomp, Earth Brewling stun, Air Brewling Cyclone, El. Vortex)
Great AoE damage (Brewmaster Radiance, Enigma Midnight Pulse + BH, Supernova)

If you follow two simple rules in your pub drafts, you’ll find a lot of success:

Always pick strong lanes, Dota is a game of momentum.
Always pick enough team fight potential (initiation, control, and damage), Dota is a 5v5 game.

Even on the highest levels of play, it’s very hard to avoid 5-man clashes and often the team that has the stronger 5-man draft has a huge advantage in the mid game. It’s very hard to play around this especially in an uncoordinated pub.

Game 2

Lesson 3: don’t forget tactical counters and timings

The consensus amongst analysts was that Secret won the draft convincingly.

First, they had a last-pick Brood that forced Invoker to the offlane, pretty much ensuring a huge laning advantage for Secret.

Second, Secret also had Arc + Cent, who are the heroes with the highest win rate in the major out of all heroes with more than 5 games. Arc has 73.68% (19 games), Cent has 76.68% (38 games).

This seemed like it should be a stomp for Secret, but even though they won, the game wasn’t that easy. The reason for this is was how the tactics and timings of the two lineups interact.

Early Game:

As mentioned, Secret have a big advantage in this stage. Brood threw VP’s laning plan into disarray, while Yapzor’s Weaver capitalized on the situation and went on a killing rampage.

Mid Game:

Despite the bad start, in the mid Game VP had an advantage.

Looking at Secret’s draft, it’s easy to notice that their lineup doesn’t want to play as 5 in the mid game. Warden, Brood and even Weaver want to farm-up for a bit longer, avoid fights and take only skirmishes. This, however, makes them vulnerable to VP’s ganking potential because they will play far away from each other. Pasha on Tiny and even Ramzes on Slark were able to take advantage of this and find a decent amount of pick-offs.

Even if Secret wanted to avoid the ganks by grouping as 5, this wasn’t easy to do. Before they have enough farm on their cores, they are at a team fight disadvantage mainly because of the Black Hole + Supernova combo. This means that if they spread out, they will get ganked. If they group-up, they will lose a full-on team fight.

This showed at the minute 22 fight at Rosh, in which VP found a team-wipe, losing only Rodjer in return.

According to DotaPlus, VP even climbed above 50% WR probability after this fight:

Late Game: In the late game, the advantage goes back in Secret’s favor. They have cores that scale extremely well + a super greedy and well-scaling support Weaver. Once they had their core and some luxury items, they could comfortably use this to win fights and secure the game.

Game 3 & 4:

Lesson 4: even “imba” heroes are vulnerable to counters

The ongoing joke is that Puppey gave VP TB (in game 4 and 5) and in this way gave them the major. A forgotten detail is that TB was picked also in game 1 & 3 but lost (i.e. TB has a 50% win rate in the grand finals).

Even the “imba”, T1 meta picks have counters. For example, in game 3 the Zeus pick was brilliant versus TB + Axe:

TB is a hero with very high armor but low HP pool, which makes him vulnerable to the powerful magical nukes of Zeus. Moreover, he has no gap-closing ability, which makes him very vulnerable to the super long-range of Zeus.

Axe has gap-close, but reaching Zeus without having your Blink Dagger broken by the constant AoE damage of Static Field and Arc Lightning or the global reach of Thundergod’s Wrath or Nimbus is nearly impossible. Moreover, Axe also relies on high armor to stay alive. Zeus doesn’t care about armor and can nuke him down even through Berserker's Call.

MidOne managed to deal 52k total damage to enemy heroes without dying even once.

With this in mind, it’s a bit surprising that Zeus didn’t see more play vs TB – he had 71.43% WR out of the 7 games he was picked in the KLM.

Game 4 saw another T1 pick to struggle. Nisha’s Morphling got countered very hard by OD + plenty of nuke damage (Lion, Tiny) and disables (2 hexes and multiple stuns).

He found 39 last hits and three deaths in the lanes thanks to the bad lane matchup vs OD and the constant rotations by the enemy supps. The nuke damage VP’s draft had made it very hard for him to fully recover after the bad start.

Game 5:

Lesson 6: well-rounded drafts make things much easier

"Name a more iconic duo – Puppey and no stun drafts."

Jokes aside, Secret's draft does have decent control, but sadly it’s concentrated in one hero – ES. If Yapzor has difficulty finding initiations and counter-initiations, it’ll be hard for Secret to take favorable fights.

VP game 5 draft:

VP’s draft, on the other hand, is extremely well rounded:

They have very good fight initiation thanks to Noone’s Blink. In fact, he was able to play the role of the playmaker extremely well with DK.

They also have great counter-initiation. Once DK starts the fight, Magnus can wait behind ready to jump in with RP when the enemy team commits to the fight and clumps up.

One weakness DK + Mag have is that they lack damage. This is fully compensated by TB who has extremely high DPS with Metamorphosis. If needed, Tiny could also provide some spammable burst damage and lockdown to finish kills.

The draft has strong lanes and can fight from early on. In the late game it becomes even stronger – TB + Mag farm extremely fast and are a nightmare to face in the super-late game.

Last but not least, VP have the playmaking support in the face of Rodjer’s Tiny and the sacrificial support who can contribute without any resources in the face of Solo’s CM.

Lesson 6: builds matter a lot

On theory, MidOne’s Timbersaw looked like a very smart pick in this game. He is facing three melee STR heroes (DK, Mag, Tiny) as well as TB, who is vulnerable to Timber’s AoE pure damage (Timber doesn’t care about TB’s armor). Moreover, even though VK have some magic damage, they primarily rely on right-click DPS. This is great for Timber who has extremely high armor.

Nonetheless, the game turned out to be very difficult for MidOne. A big contributing factor was his skill-build choice. He went for four points in Whirling Death (4-1-1 build), which meant that he had only one point in Reactive Armor. Versus the extremely high DPS of TB, this wasn’t enough and lead to a couple of deaths.

Timber is one of the most momentum-based heroes in Dota, and a few deaths can easily prevent him from snowballing. Timber wants to lead in resources to feel immortal in fights. MidOne never managed to get to this point in this game.

Of course, Dota is more complicated than this – even if MidOne maxed Reactive Armor the game could still be very difficult for him for various reasons. Nonetheless, the build didn’t help him too much (he likely decided to go for it to try to pressure the enemy mid DK as much as possible, which didn't pay off).

Thank you for reading – I hope you enjoyed the content and found it useful. If you liked it you can check out our previous articles about what we can learn from NiP's win over EG and what we can learn from TNC vs VP.

If you’re interested in learning TB or Morph in-depth, we have a premium guides about the two top carries created together with CG.NikoBaby - the no. 1 Morph player in the world according to Dotabuff's player ranking. The guides are part of his hero guide bundle - Nikobaby's Book of Dota.