Hot off their win at the WEC LAN Finals, Team EG looks stronger than ever. Their current roster, EG.UniVeRsE, EG.Arteezy, EG.Fear, EG.ppd and EG.zai, boast versatile lineups and role distribution. In an interview published on their website, EG.Fear details the prominent feature their success: versatility.

The Kings have returned.

Dota 2 as a game is evolving beyond the traditional one-role per player meta, to emphasizing hero efficiency, the signature heroes each player excels at.

EG was not the first team to adapt to a more versatile role/lane assignment. Team DK (Not an abbreviation) employed this strategy to huge success, coming back from a 0-3 deficit to win 4-3 against iG (Invictus Gaming) at WPC ACE 2013.

The theory supporting this kind of play style seems to be very sound: The drafting stage of each game becomes more open if players are able to excel at more heroes, even if there are targeted bans, the enemy can only target ban 2 heroes at the start.

Two picks one after another can catch your opponent off-guard in the draft.

Allowing the picks in-between the bans to acquire heroes that the 3 other players can play comfortably or even quickly taking the off-heroes for the player whose “main” heroes have been banned.

This meta shift started with the decreasing relevance of the late-game carry due to the abundance of early to mid game push-to-win strategies amongst teams. The late-game carry that needs to farm a lot of gold no longer has the time to do so, and mid-game heroes who rely heavily on their ultimate skills to push the lanes and destroy buildings far outclass the late-game carry in the mid-game.

Damage output has always been the focus of Dota 2: how to position to deal most damage without taking much damage, getting disables to ensure your damage hits the enemy, stopping the enemies from dealing damage to you, etc.

The mid-game peaking heroes are often difficult to shut down once they obtain a decent amount of farm as they become quite tanky and snowball quickly when they get the advantage against unprepared teams.

The draft nowadays is the same-same, with signature heroes saving the viewing experience.

With players like UNiVeRsE having a wide array of heroes like Faceless Void, Axe and more recently Sven (played in WEC), EG has no problems in draft limitations. In the past, teams would early ban signature heroes that the team’s carry uses, like Anti-Mage/Naga Siren for BurNing, Alchemist for XBOCT and so on.

Now, with the game becoming more fast-paced, drafts are centred on executing the team’s game plan faster than the opponent can, with bans used to slow down the enemy counters to the draft rather than to cut off the enemy’s resources.

You can quickly see which team is on the back foot of the draft when either team loses out on the important mid-game heroes like Razor, Death Prophet, Enigma, Shadow Shaman, Pandaren Brewmaster, Centaur Warrunner, Batrider, Skywrath Mage… or even when the other team has drafts too “greedily” and has too much late-game heroes.

Great, Another Brewmaster game.

The meta will definitely change with the new patch, but with the current patch (6.81), expect the meta to stalemate as there are very, very few alternatives to the mid-game oriented draft due to its speed in coming online. With fast-farm heroes like Doom, Meepo and Tinker being the popular carry picks, it’s easy to know that speed is the name of the game in this patch.

Versatility in capturing this speed, then, is why EG is so successful right now.

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