Timings Decide Games: What we can learn from Game 2 of Na’Vi’s surprise victory against LGD

MATCH ID 4262769848

Naturally, a new patch would bring a few upsets in the pro scene and Na’Vi’s great performance at the Megafon Winterclash seems to be the best example so far - they managed to beat both VP and LGD quite convincingly.

We decided to analyze one of their more 1-sided games to try to see what they’re doing right and to learn from it!

Game 2 in their series vs LGD is an interesting game to look into because:

• They beat the no. 1 carry nowadays: PA. It would be interesting to learn how they countered her.

• They managed to achieve a 22-minute victory with Tinker, who is usually thought of as a slow hero.

• The lanes weren’t one-sided: Na’Vi had a 544 gold lead on the 12th-minute, yet they managed to snowball hard in the early-mid game.

According to Dotabuff’s pub stats, Gyro is the best counter to PA, while Io is the 4^th best. (The disclaimer is that PA still has ~ 60% win rate against both heroes, but this is because they have a terrible win rate in pubs anyway.)

This is a very timing-specific matchup. In the early & mid game, PA is very durable against physical damage thanks to her evasion. Na'Vi’s cores, however (Gyro & Tinker), deal very high magical damage. This means that before PA gets her BKB, they can evaporate her and don’t care too much about her evasion.

Once she gets the BKB, however, killing her becomes much more problematic. She can use her BKB duration to nuke down Gyro and/or Tinker without much they can do to fight back. (This is where the saves from Io and Bane come into play.)

Na’Vi used this timing window very successfully. The first big team fight at minute 12 and the secondary fight at minute 14 are a great example. LGD initiate (even over-commit) on Bane, and pay with their lives from the engagement that follows. PA tries to focus down IO, but Gyro kills her off, while Tinker cleans up the rest of LGD.

This was certainly a tactical mistake on LGD’s part – in the ideal situation they should avoid 5v5 team-fights until PA has her BKB. With Battle Fury, she should be able to farm it relatively quickly – she was farming the bottom lane at that time, where there were no enemy heroes, so rotating to join the fight had a big opportunity cost, to begin with.

What led to this fight was mainly Na’Vi’s control of the enemy jungle. They had positioned themselves there, and LGD likely felt they need to push them out to create space for PA to farm.

When LGD lost the fight, however, this created an even bigger map control problem – Na’Vi had control over the Rosh pit area and enough time to kill Rosh even though their cores (Gyro and Tinker) are generally terrible at killing Rosh fast – they probably wouldn’t dare to do if it wasn’t for the min-12 fight.

To make a bad situation even worse, LGD decided to challenge the Rosh attempt without their big CD ultimates (and still without BKB on PA), which lead to another team-wipe and an ultra kill for Crystallize. 

Those two team-wipes + Rosh pretty much decided the outcome of the game even though it was relatively even up to that point.

A snowballing Gyro + Io is very hard to overcome – they flash-farm very fast and can use the setup from Nightmare, Fiend’s Grip and Roar to Relocate to ganks and even fights. The won engagements also give Na’Vi’s supports a great opportunity to place aggressive Observer wards in the enemy territory. With this vision, setting up Relocate kills becomes much easier.

Moreover, Gyro’s item advantage (and Io’s protection) makes it less and less likely that PA would be able to nuke him down fast enough even if she manages to scrape together a BKB:

It could be argued that if LGD made tactically different decisions (to avoid 5-man fights until PA has BKB in order to survive the early-mid game successfully), the outcome of the game could theoretically be different.

• Countering PA: Na’Vi did it with very high magic damage in the early-mid game and won fights before PA got her BKB. Against magic damage, PA is quite squishy.

• 22-minute victory with Tinker: Tinker doesn’t need a lot of items to stay at the back of fights and spam his Rockets. His job was made easy by the frontline tankiness of IO + Gyro and the control from Bane + Beastmaster.

• The lanes weren’t one-sided, how did Na’VI snowball? By winning decisively two team-fights in the early-mid game and securing map control and a Roshan kill
  

The highest level of pro Dota aside, this concept of lineup fight timings is very important to grasp in your pub games as well. Understanding when you have the advantage and when your opponents have it could very well win or lose you the game.

The BKB timing on right-click carries is probably the most obvious and common example of such a timing. As a pos. 1 or 2 player (especially in the lower MMR brackets), you would very often have to make the decision to avoid team-fights before you get the item even at the cost of deaths of your teammates and the loss of some map control. 

Even more importantly, it’s possible to avoid such bad situations by communicating with your team when you want and when you don’t want to fight. Getting everyone on the same page will give you a huge advantage in pubs – it’s not a coincidence that in higher brackets most players use mics.

Thanks for reading! If you liked the article, don't forget to check out the other pro game analyses we have in our blog.

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