DOTA 2 GUIDE | TI3 – Key Points

 DOTA 2 GUIDE | TI3 – Key Points

Unlike the majority of the community, TI3 is

almost the last tournament I follow.

I got into the game, probably, around TI3

of last year and even though my skills

have got nowhere since then, I don’t want

to stop giving it my attention just yet. I decided to write this before and after

analysis of the qualifier format as it is

arguably the most important part of

the event for fans of the Chinese teams.

I’ll touch up on teams and their rosters

before moving onto the actual topic

of this article – the format of the qualifiers. The teams participating are: S5 OG LFY MUFC TI3 Champions Titan Vici Gaming Astralis

No team in the Dota 2 world can claim to be

treated better than

Vici Gaming. The team that won TI2, that did

a couple of major revisions and started again

this year, now on TI3 champions Titan, looks

like the team to beat. In the draft stage of the Dota 2 Proleague,

VG won a near majority of their matches.

Vici lost a few maps against LGD, but in the rest

they won almost everything. Even those games,

where they lost, usually resulted in LGD going 7-10

and VG winning by a comfortable margin. VG may have been one of the best teams in

the world in the past year or so, but they

have not been the strongest on the basis of

overall teams’ performances. Other than TI2,

VG has not participated in a single premier LAN.

Therefore, their invite to TI3 will, more or

less, be a complete surprise. Going by their Dota 2 performance, only two

out of the nine teams attending TI3 are sure

of their spots on the podium. LFY is not a name

that gets mentioned amongst top tier teams often.

After TI2, they played only a couple of games

in the Main Event of the Season 3 Qualifiers.

However, they’ve had a great year, more than

they have had any year before, and are

now one of the strongest teams in China. LFY, with a core of MVP.sOAZ, Milkman, and

AnD, has turned into a team with a very rigidly

defined roles. They are considered a huge

threat on the premiership stage, and are expected

to make it to the Grand Finals this year. OG is the other Chinese team with a strong

Dota 2 resume, though their resume is still

quite limited. As with LFY, the team’s TI2 success

was the last time OG was seen at a premier event,

though their results in the Main Event of Season 3

were more than enough to let them make it to TI3. Their first round of qualifiers looked like a debacle,

going 1-2 and getting demoted to the lower

brackets, but they completely turned things

around, beating Vici Gaming, DK and VG,

to make it through to the Main Event in

the Main Event proper. They will face

LGD in the Main Event’s Quarterfinals

this year, and if they beat the East Asian

juggernaut, a first Grand Finals appearance

in TI3 will be within reach. OG and LFY are also the two teams in the

Dota 2 world that have proved themselves

as very hard opponents to defeat.

The question that remains, though, is whether

they can produce that same level of performance at TI3.