First day in the main event at ESL One Berlin Major meant a day off for OG, who have been dropped to the playoffs lower bracket by Gaimin Gladiators.
But, despite having a huge new patch to work out and two stand-ins to accommodate in, OG still managed to reach top 8 at the major. ”Playing with stand-ins is something we are used to by now,“ said Artem "Yuragi" Golubiev to us. We had the chance to sit and talk with OG’s carry about the new patch and how the team's preparation for the Major has been impacted by having to bring in Ivan "MinD_ContRoL" Ivanov and Kartik "Kitrak" Rathi at the last moment.
From what went wrong for OG in the upper bracket semifinals against Gaimin Gladiators, what seems broken in the new patch and how Medusa could be fixed after the Major, to how Yuragi likes the New Frontiers patch, find out in the interview below.
What's your overall feeling about the 7.33 patch, do you like it?
I like the changes quite a lot. There are a lot of new objectives to think about, the game overall just feels fresh and there are a lot of heroes that are worth playing now. The map change is really smart.
To be honest, no one would have gotten excited if they would have changed some cliffs and repositioned the camps again, and no one really expected this kind of change either. So, it's great, it's a very nice patch. I think this is a very big step forward for Dota 2 and a welcomed change.
We've seen what happened to Medusa in 7.33 and then what happened to her in the small update right before Berlin. And now, at the Major, we see what is the effect of those buffs in 7.33b. What do you think of her, is she truly OP now, does she need to be patched again immediately?
She definitely got overbuffed with her numbers. Her Mana Shield numbers are just too much. She gets to 6k HP at minute 20, that's just too big. But the hero itself, it's not too hard to play around, so if they fix the numbers, she should be just fine.
Unfortunately, it happened a lot to OG this year to have to play a big tournament with a stand-in. This time around you have two of them. How has that impacted your preparation for the Major?
To be honest, playing with stand-ins is something we are used to by now. Having a stand-in at a Major actually takes some pressure off you already and in some ways, it is easier.
For this tournament, the fact that we had the patch released so soon is an important factor. For instance, in the series against Gaimin Gladiators, we came with some ideas that turned out to be not good enough.
We had things built for this Major with DM and Chu, with our full roster, and now all those things are gone and we have to figure out new things from scratch, so getting this far in the tournament with two stand-ins is not that bad.
The meta right now seems to be very centered around the offlane player, the aura items that he needs to build in order to get the fights going. With that in mind, do you draft to accommodate MC, or he is the one adapting to you?
MC is a great player, he himself brings a lot of ideas regarding the heroes and item builds and he is also a great person. So, it's easy to build strategies with him and to play together, it's a great experience.
Do you like this aura meta?
No, I don't think anyone likes it. It's also very similar to the previous patch. Sometimes you see some crazy Batrider strats, which is cool.
Ok, then I'll let you go back to the practice and wish you guys the best of luck further in the tournament.
Thank you!
OG will return to the Velodrom Arena from Berlin, Germany on Saturday, May 6 for a survival battle against Evil Geniuses. The elimination series is scheduled to begin at noon, so make sure you catch all the action live on ESL One Twitch.tv channel and check our tournament HUB for the latest updates from the ESL One Berlin Major.
