Team Secret’s captain Clement "Puppey" Ivanov shared with GosuGamers his first impressions on the 7.35 patch.
ESL One Kuala Lumpur marked the first big international LAN event appearance for Team Secret since Ryiadh Masters 2023. The tournament also marks the debut of the new Team Secret line-up, but after a good start in the group stage matches, Secret were one of the teams who had to play with elimination on the line on the newly released 7.35 gameplay update.
The patch went live Thursday night when everyone was asleep in Kuala Lumpur. The two teams that opened the playoffs lower bracket rounds at ESL One Kuala Lumpur had literally a couple of hours to go through all the patch notes and figure out what would be good enough to keep them alive in the tournament. Team Secret and Team Liquid were perhaps the most impacted by the quite large 7.35 patch, so we asked Clement "Puppey" Ivanov how the patch changed things for his team.
What are your thoughts on the release of a patch during a tournament, does it make it more fun, or stressful?
Puppey: “Everything you just said. Yes, it's stressful, but also fun. To be honest it did screw us much more than it helped us because we already had set plans for us and I think we were establishing a lot of things during the last patch. Then we woke up to a new patch and we had to start improvising and I think Team Liquid improvised much better. To be fair, the games were pretty close but I feel like they already had an upper hand with some ideas.”
More than 115 heroes had their spells and stats tinkered with in the 7.35 update, but a few do truly stand out as being either overpowered right now or nerfed to the ground. One that stands out as being OP is Chen, Puppey's signature hero. However, a bit more than 48 hours after the patch had dropped, Puppey still hasn’t gotten the chance to play the hero in either a pub or official match as it’s instantly banned.
“I haven't played it yet because there is no way to play it,” said Puppey to us. “If I start a pub game, it's banned, if I play official matches, it's banned. But, it looks strong, it looks way too strong.”
Puppey also pointed out Abaddon as being too strong. “I think Abaddon's third spell, Curse of Avernus is pretty broken,” he said.
7.35 has also introduced a lot of Neutral Items. A few of them are actually retired ones that have been revamped and brought back. Royal Jelly is one example of a returning item, which Puppey highlighted as being a pretty good Tier I Neutral Item now, along with the brand-new Safety Bubble.
“From all the neutral items, I feel like they are much stronger than the regular, old ones. I would consider that they are all pretty good right now and I think that they will all going to get nerfed, obviously. All of them seem to have too broken of statistics.”
Team Secret is also one of the two teams who had to play a 1v1 solo mid duel to solve a tie for an upper bracket spot. With that in mind, we asked Puppey what are his thoughts on solving tiebreaker situations with 1v1 solo mid matchups.
How do you like this format of solving the tiebreakers with 1v1 matchups as opposed to an extra bo1 or bo3 series?
Puppey: “I think, if the tie is between just two teams, then it should be an extra series because you have enough time to do so. While I do feel like if it's between three teams you might get into a loop of infinite tiebreaker and therefore, I feel like a 1v1 mid will resolve it faster.”
As we spoke about Yeik "MidOne" Nai Zheng’s 1v1 duel for a potential upper bracket spot in the ESL One Kuala Lumpur playoffs, we also asked Puppey how he got the Malaysian player to return to Europe after three years.
It's very nice to see you back on LAN and to see MidOne back to Team Secret. Now, I remember that when he left, four years ago, he did it because he was missing home after all the time spent in Europe with you. How did you convince him to come back?
Puppey: “So, before TI12 I did play with SMG because I was thinking that I would go to Seattle with them, but their position 5 did end up getting the VISA, so I did not need to play with them. But, I scrimmed with them for two weeks and I learned a lot from that team. Even though they bombed out of TI, I understood that they had some good ideas and therefore I felt like there was a chance to just make it a reality somehow.”
Team Secret had been eliminated in the top 8 at ESL One Kuala Lumpur. Team Liquid, who took them out, made a full lower bracket run and are set to open the finals day at Malaysia International Trade and Exhibition Centre with the lower bracket final against Azure Ray. The grand finals are scheduled to commence at 16:00 local time, 09:00 CET with Gaimin Gladiators versus the winner of Azure Ray vs Team Liquid.
