Team 4 Temtems and a Tamer — Season Review
Roster: Madsen © (1), Boelens (2), GrimR (3), ColNilsOlav (4), Ben1 (5), Dazza (Coach)
Was hoping I wouldn’t need to write this so soon, to be completely honest.
…part 2.
I really liked this team as well, which makes it really hard to write a retrospective review since I’m (even more so than in WED) largely responsible for such an early loss.
For what it’s worth, I did genuinely think we were a lock for finals for a long time, but I think we lost a lot of the wind in our sails when we didn’t manage to get a game in for like 2 weeks, which in hindsight was made worse by the fact that I made the call to not take the last couple group stage games too seriously — a decision largely influenced by my S18 WED team (yes, the one with Nils) sweeping with ease through the groups, only to be faced with the reality that doing a lot of the same things meant teams would sort of figure us out eventually. I wouldn’t exactly say that’s what happened this time around, though it may have felt like that for a bit — I think it was less about other teams figuring us out than me as the drafter not being good enough to figure us out, if that makes sense.
(Most of the following paragraph is just me rambling a bit about my drafting mistakes — especially in the playoff series, but I think it was a really crucial shortcoming for the team as a whole, and while I did learn a lot from my mistakes, going through it one more time might help give me some peace of mind.)
This was highlighted in some questionable drafts here and there throughout the groups, but more than ever in the playoff game, where I think I was entirely too set on a certain idea — give Nils something he can bully a lower MMR safelane duo with and then transition into a 4th core, get a fairly safe matchup for myself so the enemy offlane can’t get an advantage to set the tempo with, and then just let Boelens do whatever. The idea is still I think a fundamentally sound one, but my execution didn’t do it justice; if I could replay that series, I’d pick my own hero earlier (probably first phase) and revisit the concept of letting Nils have his hero at the 4th or 5th pick. What I ended up doing really gimped both Nils and myself, since I picked his hero too early and then had very few high-confidence options for myself by the time the second ban phase was over. All of this meant that I didn’t really enable my very capable team, and I’m fairly confident that a more capable and experienced drafter would’ve been able to get this team to the finals no sweat. I’ll also use this wall of text to air the grievance that I made it fairly clear that I’m not a good drafter very early on, but with Nils and Boelens both unwilling to do it, I took up the mantle. Having said that, I think I expected a bit more help in prepping the drafts and developing how my plans could branch out, but I didn’t really get much of that from my teammates, despite asking for help once or twice. Our lovely, lovely coach Dazza helped a lot in that regard, but even when I came into a series fairly confident after prepping with Dazza, I still often struggled to actually put ideas into practice, and this is where having someone who’s there during the drafts and can contribute actively — which Dazza couldn’t (or, well, wasn’t allowed to, rather, despite admins saying an actual ruling — one which would likely allow it — on this would be discussed fairly soon and implemented) — would’ve come in clutch. With that said, don’t take this as me blaming any of my teammates for this; it’s a bit of an unfair expectation for them to solve issues my peabrain had.
As with my WED review, I’ll talk about the team as a whole first, the draft second, and then get to the individual player reviews.
On the team overall
Huh.
Turns out I don’t actually have that much to say in this section.
I don’t think we had any standout teamwide issues; the only thing that comes perhaps to mind is a general tendency to chainfeed in some of the games we were behind, but that’s about it.
Overall, it was a genuinely lovely team to captain; the atmosphere was great, everyone got along. I personally enjoyed playing with everyone on the team and would pick ’em all again in a heartbeat — speaking of which…
On the draft
Would I, in hindsight, draft a different team?
No. Not even something I had to think about while opening the sheet as I write this, but looking back at it just in case, that opinion just gets reaffirmed.
Could I, in hindsight, drafted a better team?
Also no. I’m confident that I picked the best possible option I had the chance to. The one “gamble” was picking Ben since I knew the least about him, but as it turns out, he was possibly my best pick relative to the round.
I’ll just leave it at that. If I redrafted SUN 10 times, I’d pick the same team 10 times.
Player Reviews
2 | Boelens
I’ll get my flame out of the way before I do anything else, since, well, “everything else” is a lot longer.
Having captained both Mikel and Boelens, I appreciate Holy Harry all the more for managing to wrangle both of them in the same team. Boelens is no stranger to being either late or completely MIA (though admittedly mostly for scrims) — something that made Crispy Bacon a quasi team staff member, since I had to hit him up many times to ask if he could try to contact Boelens, and he would, without any hesitation or delay, drop whatever he’s doing and do it. Every single time — even in the middle of streaming. Crispy Bacon is a beautiful human being.
Past that, Boelens also isn’t super high effort about RD2L as a whole; the Hero Pool channel in our team Discord still, to this day, has only 4 messages in it — and you get no prizes for guessing who didn’t post anything. I’m pretty sure I even asked her two or three times to put something up for reasons that I’ll get to in a bit, but this was a bit annoying. She generally didn’t really care to stick around for my postgame monologues (admittedly understandable) or participate much in the prep process — but she’s hardly alone in this.
Alright, with that out of the way, anyone who knows me knows also that I’ve been absolutely clamoring, for seasons now, to get a team with Boelens. After half a dozen failures, I finally got my chance, and I was absolutely ecstatic — still am, to be honest, just disappointed I squandered my Boelens team, waah.
If there’s one thing to say about playing with Boelens on a team, it’s that (ingame, at least) I never really doubted her. If she asks for an off-kilter hero, chances are I’ll trust her with it. If she’s having a rough time early on, I’m at worst ambivalent about it since it’s like, whatever, it’s Boelens, she’ll still have impact and catch up. Dota with Boelens just generally feels pretty nice; I think she just has an innate understanding of the game that manifests in a way where it doesn’t take all too much communication to play a certain way, know how strong she is at any given time, what she thinks should be done, etc. Shit just tends to naturally fall into place. Admittedly, your mileage may vary; I think Boelens and myself (and, to be fair, this entire team) was sort of on the same page, and while we have different ideas about individual heroes or whatever, on an overarching level, Boelens fit really neatly into the team. She has a massive hero pool that people understate significantly; I’d say this has a lot to do with just how hard she’ll stomp on her very best, most comfortable heroes — to the point where people disregard everything else. Calling back to the bit about her not posting anything about her hero pool in Discord, though, I can’t say I’m too comfortable in my understanding of her hero pool (though I could’ve probably dug a bit deeper), which I feel did have an influence in our drafts, especially when tasked with finding the perfect hero for her as last pick. This is largely offset by her ability to play just about anything, but I do sometimes feel like I could’ve done a better job of enabling her game if I had a better read on her comforts.
Worth mentioning that she is, like myself, back to actually playing a bit of Dota past just RD2L, which I think might uh, be a bit mistimed, but oh well. Boelens is a great player, but a teammate that requires leashing outside of games — do that and you’re probably set.
3 | GrimR
I guess I should start by saying that Grim is, technically, a mid player, albeit one in the unfortunate position of never getting to play it in RD2L. The man’s a master tier Invoker for fuck sake — I’m fairly sure he’d shred in division 4/5 if he got to play his role.
As far as his hero pool, Grim plays a great Underlord, and most of the rest of his offlane hero pool is a solid step below that. I think this ties back again into not being a natural offlane player; this role conundrum was also reflected in the games where Grim asked for perhaps slightly less traditional offlane heroes that he felt comfortable on, like Puck or the occasional Furion or QoP. I feel that he was, for the most part, leaning on his experience playing them mid or just offlane in his own pubs being transferrable — it wasn’t, unfortunately.
That said, I think Grim all throughout the season felt like a very stable offlaner for his MMR, and while I don’t think it’s unfair to say he maybe struggled more than the rest of us game to game, I also don’t think that really means very much in the grand scheme of things, and he performed about as well or even better than I would’ve wanted or needed from a lower MMR 3rd round offlaner. He does a better job than most at his skill level of asking questions and prompting the team to help him with decision making when he’s not confident, though the situations in which there wasn’t space in the channels of communication to do that did show a lack of experience. I think a lot of my criticisms of Grim, at the end of the day, stem from unwarranted confidence issues that I assume stem partly from rough games and partly from a rough WED season; a confident Grim is very independent in taking initiative and making things happen, and that was, I think, when he was at his utter best.
Overall, Grim is a lovely person, with an excellent attitude and approach to playing in a team — aforementioned confidence issues aside — and he has the excellent quality of being a great listener, which will undoubtedly help him go a long way in RD2L.
4 | ColNilsOlav
Why do I feel like it’s going to get tougher to grab Nils mid second round in the future?
Nils did a LOT in the team overall, despite being off role; he took up a much more active and consistent shotcalling role which helped the team massively considering that we’d otherwise have issues in that regard, and he really impressed me with that when comparing this to our last season together.
Despite struggling with his position 4 hero pool at the start, I think we quickly found a niche for him in scaling, high damage heroes such as Sky or Veno — heroes he’d often end up carrying the game on — as well as the occasional Clock game, in which he did a great job of ticking the “Catch” box in our drafts. I think a big part of the reason he can perform on these kinds of heroes is because he has an excellent eye for openings to make something happen, which I believe also contributed to his ability to shotcall and set the tempo for our team (something I’d say we as a team were pretty good about, and is what I’d attribute a lot of our cleaner wins to). I do regret, as mentioned at the start, not saving his pick for the later stages in our last couple of games, since I think we found that that’d often work wonders, which is something that I felt was unexpected, since in theory, a limited hero pool shouldn’t allow for that.
There’s not that much to say about Nils that most people don’t know, honestly — he’s relentlessly positive, experienced and knowledgable, and I think just about like…80%? of this league could get something good out of playing with Nils. Lovely person, great Dota player, and if he maintains the motivation to shotcall and develops that further in the context of RD2L, he’s easily one of the most valuable supports in the league.
That said, NilsOlav is utter garbage and you’re better off leaving his deadweight ass to me in the second round of the draft — you’re welcome.
5 | Ben1
The prodigal son, the shining star — if you’re allergic to PMA drivel, skip to the next section right now.
Ben is easily the biggest revelation of the season for me, and a 1.1k MMR climb during our (sadly too short) season speaks to that in a big way.
Ben is one of the most committed teammates I’ve had the pleasure of drafting in my three years of RD2L. He came into the season very comfortable on Lich, then went on to grind the fuck out of Ogre when I told him that I liked the hero and explained why I think it’s strong. He then went on to expand his pool further by playing a shitload of Bane as well — he’d play more matches on a hero we’d ask him to practice than some of us would in total over the course of the season.
Ben is an absolute, undeniable gem, and someone who I think can serve as a great building block for very tryhard teams focused on improving and practicing. He’s also a MASSIVE information sponge; you teach him a concept, he’ll be applying it within 20 minutes, I kid you not.
I’d say Ben plays probably on a level higher than even his current MMR would suggest, and I have 0 doubt he’ll keep climbing very very easily if he sustains the effort; he’s just a very innately talented Dota player I feel. He would solo zone enemy offlanes consisting of 2 players, both higher MMR than him, on the regular, no big deal. Playwise, at least with me, he's a very good laner for his MMR, he just clicks buttons very well overall, and that meant he’d pull out clutch ass plays constantly.
I’d agree with Nils and Boelens in their evaluation that he might lack some initiative and could work to improve his warding, but with how committed he is to getting better (between grinding a fuckload, asking questions and getting coached), I'm sure he’ll be much better at these things sooner rather than later.
Coach | Dazza
After the massively positive impact Dazza had in our mini team in terms of preparing and improving our drafts, I asked him very early on to join this team as a coach, since I had lots of doubts about my own drafting (for now obvious reasons!), and oh my lord, I love this man.
Past being essentially the only person I could reliable bounce ideas off of between matchdays — which in and of itself is something I appreciated a lot and was invaluable — Dazza went a lot further and ended up watching the majority of our games, giving us all feedback and helping us improve. But, with all of that, he also ended up massively contributing to our team atmosphere — unsurprising considering just how lovely he is, but it still helped keep morale up — especially for me personally, since I thrive off positive reinforcement, and Dazza was always ready to provide it. I’m a sensitive boy, so when I’d fuck up, he’d also be fairly gentle yet constructive in breaking things down for us.
If I genuinely had the option of having Dazza as a coach for every single team I’m on, I’d take it in a heartbeat every single time — especially if having coaches in for the draft were to become a thing in RD2L. But even beyond that, I think having Dazza showed me just a glimpse of the potential having a coach for teams can have, and I’m fairly resolute in bringing one on for every team going forward.
Shoutout to Thunderdyne and RobMyst as well, first for casting our games — and often leaving loads of constructive criticism that I should’ve done a better job of taking to heart, as well as individually to Thunderdyne for coaching Ben a bit and Myst for standing in and subsequently helping me analyze the games and chatting about drafting. A final shoutout as well to Moonchild for standing in for Boelens.
1 | Madsen
I was genuinely about to publish this, and in doing one final sweep over everything realized I didn’t have a bit for myself. Back in the day my own section would wind up being the lengthiest bit of the season review, but I’ve spread out the general retrospection I’d cram in there throughout the entire review this time, and so am not left with much to say.
I was a bad drafter, a mediocre player and an okay captain. This season — or specifically this team and how underwhelming I was on it — has made me sit down and practice and watch replays a lot lately, trying to improve on the parts of my game that I’m worst at; my farming, my discipline, my decision making — and the biggest reason I’ve committed to it that I don’t want to cut my season with teams I enjoy short due to my own shortcomings in the future.
Thanks for the lovely season everyone — unfortunate to not get further into the playoffs, but I enjoyed it thoroughly nonetheless.
Thanks for reading, good luck to all the teams still in the running.
