MMR Match 3: Death, Death, Death, Death, Death, Death, Death

Enough stalling. The time to strap the big boy pants back on has come, ladies and gentlemen. My latest adventure into the abject horrors of solo ranked matchmaking is complete, and here I am but a poor, shaken vessel with a keyboard, typing things out if only to keep my sanity.

So you had a pizza burger for lunch?

No, actually, I had leftover frozen pizza and a Guinness. Why do you care?

Because last time... you said... never mind, just get on with it.

The first thing I noticed this time when queuing up was that one of the players are teammates had an MMR of 3170. Apparently, these random, come from behind victories are only serving to place me even MORE out of my league. Q freaking Q.

I was Radiant this time, and we picked first. Since I had an idea of who I wanted to play this time, I scrolled over and hovered over my hero. I waited for a bit for the time to dwindle down, and when nobody objected or selected a hero, I first-picked Undying.

Sweet, wonderful, gummy bear loving Undying <3. He's one of my favorites and I always enjoy games with him no matter what happens. I've played him as off lane (as is typical), as safelane support... hell, recently, I played a game where I got safe lane free farm, rushed a Radiance into Octarine Core, and ended up melting face all over. That game was... weird, man.

I figured picking him would help me de-stress about the fact that this was a ranked match with random people, and it worked surprisingly well. Somewhere, in the unpublished archives of my page, there's an Undying guide with nearly 400 views from constant edits, re-edits, and updates: I've been working on it through two or three patches now. Perhaps while I'm working up the courage to do MMR Match 4, I'll be able to put it out. Perhaps.

After a few picks back and forth, the combatants were set:


Crystal Maiden's arcana is so freaking adorable, btw. Just saying.

Our last pick is the Wraith King, because our Juggernaut wants to go offlane with me. Which is fine, I like offlane Jugg, and I think it can really work when done well. It works best with a stun though, and you know who doesn't have stuns? The guy with a giant hole ripped in his stomach, that's who. But it's still pretty ok, between Soul Rip and Healing Ward we can weather whatever harass the Queen of Pain Bane safelane throws at us.

All around though, it becomes immediately apparent that our laning situation is... not the greatest. The only lane we really have an advantage at is mid: Templar Assassin tramples Phantom Assassin 1v1 early game any day of the week. Our Wraith King Crystal Maiden against the Huskar Silencer and our offlane situation... not so much. The ranged harass is stronk, and while Crystal Maiden does manage to pull out first blood against the Huskar, both she and Wraith King die in the process. Interestingly enough, though, when looking at the fight recap the gold and XP swing is still dramatically in our favor. So that's pretty sweet.

6.84 did a lot to incentivize team fighting, ganking, and killing, but I was still caught off guard by how downright bloody the game immediately was. Crystal Maiden and Huskar seemed to have developed a rivalry and were constantly killing each other back and forth: they were 3-4 and 4-3 respectively in the first ten minutes of the game. During one of these scuffles I TP down to try and help, but CM finishes the job before I finish porting. The Templar Assassin rotates down from mid and helps pick off the Bane, and then we teamfight under tier 1 tower:


This ends with us killing the Huskar and the Phantom Assassin but being unable to finish off the tower, and makes the score 7-7, at 11 minutes in the game! More than a kill a minute, and only ONE of those was the Bane randomly dying to neutrals in the first minute! He... he had to have been lagging, in all fairness. I looked at his player perspective and it's the only thing that makes sense.

Not even a minute later, everybody is up and ANOTHER team fight breaks out, this time in our jungle. We trade four for tree and lose the courier, and Juggernaut dies within the minute in an unrelated gank by the QoP. This makes the score 10-12 at 13 minutes: the game is close to averaging two deaths a minute at this rate and not a single tower has fallen on EITHER SIDE. Then again, with a Queen of Pain, Huskar, and Templar Assassin in the mix, that's almost to be expected.

The fighting doesn't let up, there's a constant stream of murders from one side to the other. A tier 1 tower goes down on each side at around 16 minutes in, though Juggernaut and I both sacrifice ourselves to get theirs. He is able to pull out a pretty sick kill against the Phantom Assassin though. A twenty minutes in we trade mid t1 for top t1 and the kill score sits at 16-17. All in all, things are crazy balanced.

Throughout all of this, the Bane and Crystal Maiden are engaged in a constant battle for vision dominance: there was more warding and dewarding in this single game than in any other ten pub matches I've played, I swear. It was good to see, though it wasn't exactly great when it happened to us. A particularly good ward deep in our jungle allows the enemy to smoke up and catch our Wraith King by surprise... when we go to help him, we all end up dead, though we take three with us. Since it was a four on five engage, all chat trash talk from the dire team ensues, though only a little. Still grates me to see it.

In this fight, and a few fights afterwards, it's easy to see how good a skill Global Silence really is. As an Undying, I'm essentially a creep when silenced, and the skill also wrecks TA by preventing Meld and Refraction and Juggernaut by preventing Omnislash. The Silencer really did a bang-up job on the timing in quite a few engagements, and was key in swinging team fights to the Dire team's advantage.

One such teamfight occurs after Dire smokes in and takes Roshan while we're busy taking t1 bottom. We get jumped but manage to pop Aegis, then a well timed Global Silence gets four of us killed. The Juggernaut only escapes becaues he teleported top to push the lane away from t2. They push back and take both t1 and t2 mid, but we re-spawn in time to prevent them from breaking high ground, we even manage to take four of them down when they try it. The score is now 26-31 at thirty minutes. Around this time, Templar Assassin has managed to farm a Monkey King Bar.

The death rate begins to fall off a little, Juggernaut is picked off when we try to push t2 mid, and [{Wraith King]] falls due to another jungle ward, though he takes down Huskar with it. The Dire push down t2 bot and attempt to break high ground again, but back off. The Juggernaut respawns, farms a bit, grabs a haste rune, and gets a nice pick of on Bane, and then we decide to use that opporunity to rotate into their jungle to try and get a pick off: the Crystal Maiden has a ward that spotted out Huskar.

We find Silencer instead, at first. He goes down quickly to Templar Assassin. The Huskar jumps in to fight, feeling invincible, but goes down quickly as well. Queen of Pain and Phantom Assassin show up and jump on... Crystal Maiden, who gets blown up, but at the expense of QoP's ultimate. They're slowed when Wraith King dies and uses Reincarnation, and PA is cleaned up by TA. QoP tries to blink out, but gets caught in the trees and spotted out by... well...


TA walks away with an ultra kill and enough gold to finish off her Crystalys. With so many down and no buybacks in sight, we push down mid and take t2, t3, and barracks. Juggernaut solo ultis the Bane again, only a minute after he's respawned. That's the stuff recurring nightmares are made of. We back out once Dire fully respawns, and TA finishes Daedalus. The Dire attempt to do Roshan, but TA's wards spot them out and we charge in.

Templar Assassin kind of, sort of... one shots PA. Wraith King has an Assault Cuirass and a Desolator, she has Meld and MKB.. I have a Solar Crest... yeah. We all kind of had the same idea on how to proceed. We team wipe them completely and only lose one... and that's just because our Undying was too stupid to Soul Rip himself to heal. We take Roshan and Wraith King takes the Aegis beacause OF COURSE he does, and we push to end it. Dire spams 'report Silencer'. I think they were kidding, though, and if they weren't they pay for it by geting team wiped again inside their fountain. Score is now 43-36, and ancient falls. GG.



The Dotabuff page for the match can be found here, and you're all welcome to download the game and watch yourselves if you'd like. Post any comments you want, but I'd ask you to direct your focus on me, yeah? No reason to drag anyone else through the mud about this game. As for me, I'll chip in my own preemptive mud-dragging:

1) I'm bad about using Soul Rip. I used it in the early laning stage well enough, but once mid game rolled around I'd either forget to use it or panic cast it on myself. I don't know if this got anybody killed, but it's still something I need to work on.

2) I bought a Hood of Defiance, a solid go to item against teams with heavy magical damage. Looking back, though, I wonder if perhaps a Glimmer Cape would have been better, particularly against the Huskar.

7 matches to go and, superstitious idiot that I am, I just KNOW that my first loss is coming soon. It has to. Hot streaks don't last forever. YES THAT IS CLASSIC GAMBLER'S FALLACY BUT I DON'T CARE I'M RIGHT DANG IT.

Safecyn, signing out.

The Entire MMR Experience
Match 1: Grains in the Hourglass
Match 2: Defense of an Ancient