My Yearbeast experience and the cosmetic blessing I received

It’s the last day of the yearbeast brawl! No, it’s almost the last hours of the yearbeast brawl and there are probably quite some people out there who are glad it will be gone and hope its gone for good. I am not one of them.

To be totally honest: I loved the yearbeast brawl and all that came with it. It was a nice change of pace in the dota games. It made the games more clash focused, faster paced in general and quicker to end most of the times. It all felt more casual in a possitive way. It had some downs to it though. Picking “phase” was extremly important. End up with the wrong lineup and you had 20 – 30 minutes of hard game ahead of you. It was insta-pick and gogogo for the most days of the event, Valve changed the picking phase to a more settled manner only the last week or so.

If you wanted a good chance on a cosmetic drop at the end you had to be quick and roll with one of the following heroes: Zeus, Sniper, Viper, Undying, Warlock, Omniknight, Axe, Troll Warlord, Razor, Necrophos, Bristleback. Of course it was possible to win with any other team composition, but ultimately alot harder since the game ramped up on speed and clashes right after the 5 minute mark when the first beasts would spawn.

Picking a late game hero was risky but depending on playstyle and strategy could also work, in case you could stall the game and get your carries space to farm. Defending against an enraged yearbeast wasn’t all that easy though. Having a Razor in the team could be extremly helpful in this particular case, linking the yearbeast would buff Razor to an insane amount of damage and render the enemy beast almost useless.

Still, common dota rules and mechanics still applied and thus some people were matched and mixed with people way out of their league. I noticed that matchmaking in no way applied. I was matched against helpless teams which were thrown together 2 man teams with a solo queuer against my 5 man stack and the other way round. I had people on my team which just started playing dota, at least it appeared like that, and the enemy team was a 5 man stack experienced to roflstomp us in mere minutes.

The whole event, like any other, does not count towards your ingame win/lose statistic even though dotabuff stats show different, they made an announcement about the issue.

Now to the awesome part of cosmetics. I enjoyed the drops of the games which i enjoyed even more was the trading/exchanging of sets. That felt like childhood schoolyard card gamesto me and I think this is an aspect of the game worth supporting and pushing even more. Forget trading cards and the like, we exchange dota sets! Here’s a little graphic of what I received from the whole event.

da cosmetic blessing madness

Update: @gameremixx asked on twitter, if I had no opinion on the whole pay2win, refresher aura and what not part of the game. I do, but I didnt really mention it due to the fact that I barely, very rarely encountered it at all. I am all against pay2win, and I think encouraging it to make a profit is just poor style. I played all games just for free as the whole event came. We picked, we tried to pick certain heroes and rolled from there. I played in premade teams most of the time and we had quite a winning streak. I might have been lucky not to see much abuse but I certainly read quite some comments on twitter that the whole event was rather not enjoyable for alot of people. I hope this game mode gets an overhaul and sees a return in a fair manner.