How Wings Changed the Game Part 1, A World of Archetypes
Wings remain one of the greatest and most mysterious teams to ever play Dota2. The lineup of: Che “shadow” Zeyu, Zhou “bLink” Yang, Zhang “Faith_bian” Ruida, Li “iceice” Peng, and Zhang “y`” Yiping only had a brief peak, which culminated in their International victory in 2016. It has been over three years since then and it is only now in retrospect that we can see how they have influenced the way teams now approach Dota2. But to understand how, we must first how teams approached Dota before the inception of Wings.
Bringing order to chaos
Dota2 is a complex game with a myriad of chaotic elements. There are currently 117 heroes, hundreds of items, and patches. The patches regularly introduce chaos as Icefrog’s fundamental philosophy has been to empower the players with as many tools as possible. In the midst of all this chaos, there is one value that all others must bow to. The winner is the one that kills the throne.
All value in the game is therefore derived from its relative value to helping you kill the enemies throne. It wasn’t much of a guidepost, but it was the start of everything and the end of everything. Players tread into the chaos, picked up heroes at random and played to win. Like prehistoric societies, players gained enough experience to realize that if you followed certain patterns of action, you became more likely to win the game.
These rules and ideas eventually became articulated and codified into structural thought. The most famous rule is the 1–5 position. This refers to the distribution of gold on the map and how the gold is allocated between the five players on a team. Players came to realize that there wasn’t enough resources for everyone, that they had to prioritize which players and heroes got the most amount of gold. This also led to a framework of what heroes worked in what roles and what items they could afford relative to the gold they had.
Other structures started to pop into place over time. Warding and positioning became a central theme as players started to realize that you could control games with superior intel. Warding itself evolved as players came to understand their inherent styles and tendencies. Aggressive teams went for more aggressive wards, while defensive teams placed reactionary wards. Other ideas popped up like item build order, item timings, hero synergies, comms, drafting, and so on.
In order to connect all of these ideas, archetypes or narratives were created. Archetypes have been used since the beginning of history to explain complex concepts to the individual, most often in myths or stories. It is no different in Dota2 and the world pre-Wings can be described as a world of archetypes.
What constitutes an archetype?
All of the great teams of Dota2-past had a core archetype they liked to play to. One of the most famous and earliest archetypes was the 4-protect-1. In this archetype, the entire team funnels gold to create a super carry. They will sacrifice position, lanes, and their lives in order to give the 1 position player the best possible game and if they hit their timing, the 1 position player becomes an unstoppable juggernaut that ends the game. This archetype is most often correlated with Xu “BurNIng” Zhilei teams.
An archetype is created through a combination of four factors: the patch, the players, the leader, and the combination of ideas therein. The patch gives the base foundation of what is possible in the game. Players are the second foundation of that. Each player has a certain amount of heroes they can play, a certain style, and a level of potential that they can add on top of that. When players combine into, they have to figure out how these personal characteristics interact both inside and outside the game.
On top of that, there are certain players who are so good that they can polarize a team. Good examples of this include players like Xu “fy” Linsen or Amer “Miracle-” Al-Barkawi. They are both so exceptional that teams often focus by building around their strength.
The leader is the one who brings it all together. Depending on the squad, they can be the social glue, the strategic leader, the GM, the tactician, the drafter, or all of the above. In Dota2 particularly, captains are often the most important role as they have the greatest depth of knowledge when it comes to both dota and social aspects. This allows them to navigate the chaos of creating a Dota team and building a coherent structure that can make the disparate parts greater than the sum of its whole.
The fourth aspect is the mix of ideas. The five players need to figure out what their hero pool is, how it interacts with each other, how it interacts with general Dota principles, and then come up with a cohesive game plan that takes all of those factors into account. This is usually done through pubs, scrims, and officials. Eventually, the team figures out what works best for them and a pattern eventually emerges. This pattern is the archetype or the style of the team. It is the story and narrative of what a distinct team thinks is the best way to play Dota with that specific combination of players.
I will now go into various examples of archetypes throughout Dota history. What’s important to keep in mind is that an archetype is a core identity of a team, but it cannot encompass everything that they have ever done. Late-game teams will sometimes play a face rush strategy and deathball squads will sometimes play a split-push game. All the great teams are willing to break those archetypes depending on the situation and meta, but these were often rare or unusual cases.
A World of Archetypes
The most notable example of an archetype is the 2013–2014 [A]lliance team: Jonathan “Loda” Berg, Gustav “s4” Magnusson, Henrik “AdmiralBulldog” Ahnberg, Jerry “EGM” Lundkvist, and Joakim “Akke” Akterhall. They dominated 2013, won TI3, and are considered one of the greatest teams of all-time.
Unlike the 4-protect-1, there is no obvious term that can encapsulate [A]lliance dota succinctly. While they largely played split-push, that doesn’t do the justice of what [A]lliance Dota actually was. In truth, none of the archetypes of the great teams can be encapsulated in just a few words. The players, drafts, strategies, synergies, and much more combine into a greater whole. It isn’t surprising that when people talk about the great teams of the age, they often use tautologies like “OG Dota”, “Wings Dota”, or “[A]lliance Dota”.
For those who witnessed those teams in action, it is a shorthand to explain something that is too complex to easily grasp or articulate, but is nonetheless real and potent. As for [A]lliance’s archetype, first we have to break down the players. The players were specialists. AdmiralBulldog specialized in hard-carry offlaners that could split the map. He along with Loda played the dual-carries for the squad. The team then used support rotations and farming to give extra gold to their supports, which let them get critical items like mekanism. This was crucial in a time where carries often rushed it to win early teamfights, but with [A]lliance’s economy management, they got it at a similar time, but on a support player. This made their own carries stronger in turn as they didn’t waste an item slot on it. Finally, S4 was the playmaker that made it all work as he was the playmaking initiator that let the [A]lliance system work.
EG is another example of a top team changing the world through their own archetype. The original lineup included: Clinton “Loomis” Fear, Artour “Arteezy” Babaev, Saahil “UNiVeRsE” Arora, Ludwig “zai” Wahlberg, and Peter “ppd” Dager. The core identity of this squad came from the initial partnership of ppd and Arteezy. At the time, mids were often the second star to the carry players, more tempo controllers like Super. Ppd realized that if Arteezy played mid-lane, they could build around him as the superstar carry and play with him as the position 1.
Whether by design or coincidence, the rest of the players naturally fit into the roles needed to make the move work. Fear was the sacrificial carry who was versatile and consistent enough to play any hero that ppd drafted. This created space and resources for UNiVeRsE to be an impactful initiation/team-fight oriented off-laner. Zai was the brilliant playmaking 4 and ppd played a defensive and sacrificial 6 position.
The idea of archetypes was stronger in China than it was in the West. They had taken a much more rigid stance towards Dota as many of their teams tried to create a rigid structure to play through. They liked to adhere to certain types of picks for their players. In overall strategy, they played around the core ideas like face-rush, teamfight, 4-protect-1, or late-game Dota with 2–3 cores. When you look at the Western teams, there were larger leaps in macro Dota ideas. In Chinese teams, different styles were more likely to come from execution or refinements. Those differences were usually based on player skill.
In iG’s 2012 TI run, they ran an aggressive face rush style. They tried to win early laning stage, transitioned into mid-game team fights, that was then levied into objectives. What set them apart from other Chinese teams was their skill, particularly their mid-laner Luo “Ferrari_430” Feichi. That combined with solving the Na`Vi puzzle let them win the aegis.
If you look at ViCi Gaming of 2014, the lineup with: Liu “Sylar”Jiajun, Xie “Super” Junhao, Bai “rOtK” Fan, Fy, and Lu “Fenrir” Chao. They played a similar aggressive style, but instead of being a lane-focused team, they were more gank-oriented. They relied on the Fy and fenrir combination to take control of the early and mid-stages of the game. Perhaps the best example of the mastery of Chinese archetypal Dota was the 2014 Newbee squad.
That lineup included: Chen “Hao” Zhihao, Zhang “Mu” Pan, Zhang “xiao8” Ning, Wang “Banana” Jiao, and Wang “SanSheng” Zhaohui. This squad could play all of the Chinese dota styles with verve. They had the five-mans of typical xiao8 squads, but powered with the laning prowess and aggression of Hao and Mu. Banana and SanSheng could play a gank-oriented style similar to VG or they could play the classic 4-protect-1.
The rigidity and focus on execution was probably why the TI4 finals ended with a showdown between ViCi Gaming and Newbee. ViCi came to the conclusion that deathball was the best possible answer for the patch. Newbee survived long enough to adopt that style and through their run, eventually became better masters of it than ViCi.
While there are plenty of other great teams running through Dota history, I hope these examples give a view of how Dota2 teams approached Dota in the pre-Wings era. They played to the strengths of their players, created structures of thought that helped them bring order to the chaos, and then refined those strategies.
There was one notable exception to this rule though and it in a way, they were the predecessors of Wings. The DK lineup of 2014.
DK of 2014
DK of 2014 is one of the most beloved lineups in Dota2 history. The team was filled with all-stars: BurNIng, Chai “Mushi” Yee Fung, Daryl “iceiceice” Koh Pei Xiang, Zhang “LaNm” Zhicheng, and Lei “MMY!” Zenrong. When they formed, each player was considered the best in their respective roles. What made the DK lineup all the more inspiring was the way they played Dota.
They were antithetical to Chinese Dota. They played way more loose than any Chinese team up until the advent of Wings. While they each had signature heroes, they were willing to experiment and this ended up with strange ideas like support Gyro or support Alchemist. What made all of this possible was the exceptional skill and versatility of their three core players. Mushi, BurNIng, and iceiceice could not only be the primary carry for the team, but they could also play whatever heroes or roles the team demanded.
In that sense, they felt like a foreshadowing of Wings. Even so, this team had an archetype. While DK an extremely versatile hero pool, they weren’t tactically diverse. They could get counter-picked or out-thought strategically. Instead they liked to win their games off their incredible individual skill and game sense. So while they technically could have played a Wings playstyle (in terms of hero pool and playstyle diversity on their players), it likely never occurred to them since they were so remarkably successful to begin with.
The Pre-Wings World and the coming of Wings
The final thing to note about the world of archetypes is the constant building of new ideas. As each championship team rose up, their ideas were studied, emulated, countered, and reinterpreted. While no one could emulate [A]lliance’s playstyle, teams could implement their gold management or drafting concepts. Once EG became a contender, teams eventually started to have their position 1 play from the mid-lane.
As time went on and the ideas increased, Dota2 competition started to demand more diversity and flexibility. To that end, all-star lineups like DK and Secret were formed. Squads that had the ascendant skill to play any hero at the highest level possible. Even so, archetypes ruled the day. EG and CDEC didn’t have the skills of those teams, but they gained a better understanding of Dota through the ordered structure and defined TI5.
At the time, Dota2 was considered a fairly open game with a lot of room for individual flair to show itself. However, in one year’s team, a team would blow open the doors. The only team rOtk ever claimed to be a fan of. Ppd called them the best Chinese team he ever played against in Duncan “Thorin” Shields Reflections. Sebastien “Ceb” Debs called Wings “his nightmare as a coach.” in a different Reflections video.
Unprecedented and unheralded, Wings challenged the inherent precepts and structures of Dota, ended the world of archetypes, and changed the game forever.
