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Despite Team Secret having the best average team GPM for the first thirty minutes of the game, Arteezy wasn't even in the top five average GPMs until after minute ten.

We have no reason to think the economic strategies used by Secret to achieve this sudden rise in winrate were the sole (or even majority) reason for said success because these strategies were not new.

Between December 23rd, the last day Secret Team played before DAC, and the group stages, their core heroes changed drastically,

Secret hadn't developed a reputation for running any of these heroes as core to their strategies prior to DAC

On average, in games Secret lost 50% of their opponents' bans were spent on those six heroes, whereas in games Secret won only one of those heroes was banned.

Why focus on the Group Stages?

why did Secret open the group stages with Puppey on these key heroes in 70% of games, including the first five in a row? Why was Zai on Broodmother for two of their first five games, and Arteezy on Lycan for 50% of the first ten?

Even though the team had limited strategies prepared, the proved in the main even that they could still win half their games without relying on the top-tier prepared drafting strategies... and that was against the best teams of the tournament.

why did Secret Team execute this highly effective drafting and playstyle pattern against much lower ranked teams from whom they had little to fear?

If they only had three or four strategies prepared, would they have had greater success relying on less-prepared strategies for the group stage and risking losing more matches early... when elimination was (most likely) not a serious threat for them?

Juggernaut

That's an increase of incoming physical damage of 4% at this level only

Because Juggernaut has been highly survivable and functional with minimal skill levels, he's become extremely strong with early levels in stat boosting. These changes should reduce Juggernaut's core and low-level lane sustain

In short, these changes further reduce his mid-game damage output.

The Ancients

vision of the camp can be granted from that Eastern high ground and any ranged hero with at least 500 range can stack up to four camps

This could be a significant boost to Bristleback, who can not only stack camps without leaving lane, but also knock them down quickly using quill sprays.

Tweet me any responses or suggestions you have @TheWonderCow.

What heroes came out winners in DAC? Could the secret to Secret Team's fall from undefeated in the group stage to third place in the tournament come down to the metagame decisions rather than execution? And what do the 6.83C changes mean for masked madman spinning near the top of the picks? Thanks for stopping by--in two weeks, I have some newly designed metrics of metagame measurement that I hope to unveil, so be sure to stop in and read the next edition as well! As always, tweet me any questions you have or inquiries you'd like to see me tackle, and thanks for reading.[align=right]- Gorgon the Wonder Cow[/align]This is, of course, in addition to the numerous already mentioned accolades my predicted heroes achieved. Any hero I predicted to grow is marked with a pair of glasses.Slark turned out to be a bad call, although the first four days after my prediction he did show significant (if unstable) growth: the problem comes down to the unpredictability of tournaments like DAC, where teams who rarely play against each other build a new meta and typically a few individual players (such as Puppey on Chen or Arteezy and Sumail on Shadow Fiend) create huge scene-wide boosts in heroes from completely out of left field.Ancient Apparition did not get into top 8 most played as I anticipated, but this is because his banrate did rise unexpectedly choked him in the second ban phase (preventing him from rising into a tier-1 pick slot). In the cases where teams did pick him in the first phase (as a second hero choice) he won more than 2 of 3 games, which I think does demonstrate his strength and potential as a tier 1 pick in the current meta.Batrider obviously did very well as did Troll Warlord. I would have liked to see Troll perform a bit better, but there was a lot of stagnation at the top of the hero chain during DAC, with 3/5 of the top pick/ban slots remaining completely stable. I always try to predict heroes who are not currently on the top 5, which means some fortnights (if the draft does remain relatively stable) there isn't room for all my predictions to knock it out of the park.[align=center]Did Secret shoot itself with success?[/align]At this point, even Martians have heard how Secret Team went from winning seventeen consecutive games to only securing third place in the main event at DAC. A lot of fans and commentators have chocked this quick flip of a script to teams simply "figuring out" Secret Team and their radical mid-game strategies. But these mid-game strategies aren't anything new for Team Secret: for one, they seem to have more or less continued their relatively unique farm distribution strategies in which their early game advantages are spread more evenly amongst the team than other teams, who pile advantage directly onto their first and second positions.This more even distribution of wealth is rarely employed by teams other than Secret, but it was by no means new for them in the DAC. The point? This playstyle is not directly what caught teams off guard during the group stages (at least not the Western teams who had played Secret prior to Arteezy and Zai's joining), which means "figuring out" this playstyle probably was not why Secret took losses in the main event.VG, in contrast, had one of the lowest average GPMs of the main event and managed to secure second place. It seems safe to say that farm was also not, at least on average, the issue that Secret ran into.There is, however, something to be said about Secret's approach to DAC: their drafts.and their opponents noticed. In the following figures, I used the average percentage a hero was banned against all other teams and subtracted it from the average percentage of games in which heroes were banned against Secret Team. The result is the percentage of games where the hero was "respect banned."The respect ban percentage tells us the heroes that teams were disproportionately afraid of giving to Secret (as opposed to heroes teams are just afraid of in anybody's hands, such as Batrider, Io, Axe, or Troll Warlord). But there's an interesting discrepancy here:; with Enigma and Dazzle the most played out of any of the six, both being drafted in fewer than one in five games. In fact, not a single one of the heroes was played in a greater percentage of Secret's games prior to DAC than the percentage of games in which they were respect bannedDAC.So how did teams know that these heroes, none of whom had more than one loss with Secret Team at DAC, were a core part of Secret's success? Why is it that inSecret suffered, at least two of those six heroes were banned (in one case, four out of five of their opponents' bans were spent among those six heroes).Teams seem to have been correct in breaking down Secret's drafting patterns and asserting that those six heroes were crucial to reliable success (with exception of Enchantress, who was being banned as a failsafe against Chen-like heroes but wasn't all that key to Secret's drafting success). Even so, Secret Team only lost six games in all of DAC.The question this begs isLosses in the groupstage would have been much less harsh to their tournament chances than losses in the main event, assuming Secret could win about 50% of their games without using those pocket drafts.Did they think that their success on those heroes would go unnoticed and unpunished later on, when wins were more important? Did they lack confidence in executing less specific draft strategies? Were they too confident in their ability to execute other draft types equally well when the main stage came around? Were they afraid that they couldn't execute in the group stage without their most effective strategies?For example, in the group stages, they drafted Visage, Dazzle, and Lycan together three times (twice against teams who would take at least one game from them in the main event) with a 100% winrate. However, when the group stages ended and the main event started, they were not able to secure this combination againThe other question isBy running these drafts against teams they would likely beat regardless, they are simply giving their stronger opponents more opportunity to see the way that type of draft is designed and executed, helping the top teams inoculate themselves.The tournament may have had a completely different outcome if Secret had let themselves run middle-of-the-pack through the groupstages, drafting their more traditional heroes and more in-meta strategies, only to turn on their serious drafts when the main event began. Teams would have had much less opportunity to disect, understand, and counteract these drafting patterns.The question lingers, especially on Secret fans: did they show their hand too soon?[align=center]6.83C: Juggernaut and Hero Changes[/align]Alright, let's take a quick look at the 6.83c hero tweaks and discuss some of the impacts.is having some nerfs and some rebalances which will seriously impact his viability for less-skilled pub players and should impact his prevalence in the pro meta as well. The first change is a reduction of his agility gain from 2.85 to 2.4.This has minor armor implications (less than one armor reduction at level 25) which won't notably impact the game at all except at level four, where Juggernaut will now have a rounded armor of 3 instead of his previous armor of 4.However,agility from items will fix this (even just an Iron Branch).The impact on Jugg's damage output is two-fold, in that it reduces his base damage and it reduces his Increased Attack Speed: in lamens terms, your Juggernaut will have his damage output reduced by about 2% in the midgame and between 4-6% in the late game.Remembering that Juggernaut recieved a bonus 6 base agility in 6.83, what this subpatch means is that Jugg will hit a tipping point at level 14 before which he has more agility than pre-6.83 and after which he has less agility. The subpatch as a whole seems to be geared toward reducing Jugg's sustain in the early game while making sure he maintains his increased early game damage output.The changes to Healing Ward, which now costs more early game but negligibly less when maxed, and Bladefury, which now costs more at level one but less at levels three and four, are all geared toward reducing the viability of a stats-priority Juggernaut.; this will likely force him to level his Healing Ward and/or his Blade Fury more and reduce his level focus on stats and crit in the early game.These changes look to be enough to significantly reduce Jugg's pro-gaming prevalence within a few weeks, but I'm not sure that he'll drop below 70% pick/ban. I think if he does, it is likely overly reactionary from the drafting community (which does happen from time to time and has killed perfectly viable heroes for months, as in the case with the Lycan changes in 6.82).As far as I'm concerned for the Axe and Vengeful Spirit changes, this is nothing to write home about: two changes to Axe to reduce exploitation of niche situations and one which gives him a smaller Culling Blade margin in the late game. I also don't think that the 25% duration reduction for Wave of Terror will impact Vengeful Spirit's draft rate whatsoever.[align=center][/align]Here (in green) is the new spawn box for the ancients and (in red) the old one. The key to note is that ancients can now be easily stacked up to three times from the Eastern high ground, meaning heroes like Bristleback or Alchemist can stack ancients from the offlane by standing next to the camp. In fact, by cutting down 2-3 trees (two from inside the pit and one from the highground outside of it),(three is much more reliable). Preliminary testing implies that 0:55 is the stack time the first set and take away about one second per stack. Because the stairs that the Ancients walk up are a choke point, they bunch up on each other quickly (after two or three stacks) reducing the number of stacks you can achieve from this side.During testing, I was able to get stacks with Razor from the side, but unreliably--there were very specific trees which needed to be cut down--which tells us that the minimum range of a spell or attack which can stack in this way is going to be 475 but reliable stacking requires approximately a 500 range.Little known fact: a level five Bristleback with three levels in Quill Spray can kill almost any Ancient stack during the duration of a single smoke of deceit without taking any damage (because he is invisible to the Ancients).I took note of many of your suggestions from the first installment of the metagame fortnight and will continue to do so, and I appreciate all the feedback!This article was written byGorgon the Wonder Cow, joinDOTA's Elder writer.Gorgon is an analyst and freelance caster for joinDOTA, CEVO, and anywhere needing a fast tongue with top insight. He is jD's resident "new patch" guy, and has a weekly segment on Defense of the Patience podcast.Location: Ann Arbor, MIFollow him on @TheWonderCow.Edit: fixed a typo in text which said Jugg's pre-6.83C agility gain was 2.65. All of the data was created using the correct respective agility gains of 2.85 and 2.4. Apologies for any confusion. Also fixed a small typo which had Batrider's winrate the same as his pickrate in one of the infographics.