GG. Ace: “Synergy with your teammates outside the game, that’s kind of a rare thing”

Gaimin Gladiators have become one of the most consistent and dominant teams in the world over the past year. Marcus "Ace" Christensen, the offlaner and backbone of the Gladiators has proven himself to be one of the best in the world. Prior to Dreamleague Season 22, we got a chance to sit down with Ace to talk about the current state of Dota 2, his team, and Dreamleague S22.

In your opinion, what makes a good offlaner? And who would you rate as some of the top Offlaners in the world right now?

"It's quite a lot of different things. But above all, you need to have good laning. That's typically the big difference. Somebody who messes with your last hits and denies a lot or just really good and solid laners make good offlaners.

You can be two ways in terms of heroes, you can be an expert on a few heroes, or you can just be versatile. I feel like both styles work, but you have to you have to be on one or the other. To give an example, we have Amar (ATF), his hero pool is pretty specialized. Right? On the other hand, there's Faith Bian. He's like, very versatile. That's the cool thing about Dota, a lot of things can work.

Think Collapse is definitely one of them. He (Collapse), in terms of laning skills, is super top tier. Then I think my personal favorite for me will probably be 33. He's just really smart and always comes up with cool stuff.

And if I was gonna say a third one I'd say Faith Bian. I think he's just cool in the way he sees the game."

Is there a specific hero or meta you miss playing or would like to see buffed? 

"I mean, I'd like to play some Broodmother. This hero has just been nerfed so many times now. But still, I'm gonna try to make it work at this tournament. We'll see."

Besides that, I liked the meta where you could solo offlane with Vanguard. But that has also just been nerfed to the ground. It's just really hard. In general, it is really hard to solo offlane now. There are just no good regen items right now, so you just lose all your gold if you lose HP in the lane. You need help in lane, and you also don't really have camps to farm next to you. You'll have to go to the Ancients if you want to farm and that's pretty rough. Whereas the carry, he can just go behind the tower and chill."

"I feel in general the offlane right now, you're very reliant on your team. Not only you pos 4 but, your other support too to have a good lane. If he doesn't do correct things for you, you're really f**ked. And then also you are reliant on your mid and your carry, to take the tower and they can gank for you. But for you (as the offlaner), you can't really do much. It's really bad to gate from the offlane to the safelane. It's just a really long road. So it's just so reliant on your team right now."

How do you think Valve could make the offlane a little bit better? What if you could change one or two things? What would you change?

"I was thinking, you know you have the tower, and to the left of the tower, there's a big dip area. There was this ward spot on the hill. But what does this ward even see? There are no camps there, right? So it would make sense to have a camp on the ward spot or something like that.

It's just the offlane in pubs. You're so reliant on team. I feel like it's actually hard to just go in a pub and carry the game from the offlane nowadays. "

In general, why do you think it's so hard to balance the items? At TI it was blademail and Heart of Tarrasque? Now it's Mage Slayer and Shivas. What do you think seems to be the issue? Is it just over-tuning?

"I think, definitely the balance currently is not that good. When I read patches, I'm gonna read, for example, the first thing I read was Shivas and then, okay, the game is done, the game is broken now. Because their (Valve's) understanding of the items is just not good enough. I feel like because sometimes they change something, and you can already see it's way too broken, and then it breaks the game. That's one thing. "

"But I also think another thing is that no matter what you do, and how balanced it is, the way the human brain is, it's still gonna go to some Meta, and some items are gonna be used more (than others). And then those items will be seen OP and then they will get balanced again. So no matter what, just the way the human brain works, it's impossible to fully balance the game in a way where everything is giga viable or anything. Even if the game was fully balanced like that, I feel like it will still not be played like that.

There's also this thing that one team really likes specific heroes, and they have specific strengths, and they build specific items. And these items don't necessarily have to be broken or anything. But because the team is winning tournaments, and the team is really good, and they like these heroes. So now these heroes just get targeted and nerfed, even though they're not broken, it's just the guy who's good with the hero. Yeah, and that's just that's just the way of Dota is. "

You've been playing with Seleri, Tofu, and Dyrachio for a while now. Despite hardships or post-TI roster shuffles, why do you guys work so well together?

"I think the same reason that some people would be friends and hang out together with basically, we have a good time together, we synergize well together. We're not like clashing personalities or something, everything is just chill. We all like to nerd Dota a lot, like talking about nerd stuff in Dota.

And outside the game, we all like to do things like for example playing some sports. But we don't all like the exact same things, right? Like, we go pretty well together, like a group of friends.

I've been on a lot of teams and I know that it's not the standard to have really good synergy. Synergy with your teammates outside the game, that's kind of a rare thing. I really appreciate this team, because this team is as as good as you can get in terms of personalities, and stuff."

At BetBoom, Liquid seemed to have found the recipe to finally beat you. Can you share with us what happened then? Is Liquid still GG's true rival? Or do you have other teams in mind you want to beat at Dream League Season 22?

"At this point in my mind, it's more a little bit of a meme. I wouldn't say that they're our true rivals or anything right now. But I'm not sure exactly what happened but I just think we played the tournament overall not very good I watch the replays as well like from our last series when we got out and holy f*ck. We played so bad like, I don't know. We just were not really on the same page that much right now.

But we are just trying to work on it. Because it feels like a lot of the things that we usually did and our strategies, there's been just been so many patches now. And it's just changed you know, those things just don't work anymore. So it's kind of chaos for us in terms of what we want to do and stuff, like what areas to play and what rotations and all this small Dota stuff that really matters."

With the patch 7.35c just dropping before the tournament, do you have any early impressions on the patch? Have you got time to really look over the patch?

GG.Ace: "I have two impressions of the patch. One of them is that it seems like a pretty small patch, like not much honestly. And the other one is that there was a lot of stuff where I'm like, how did this not get a nerf? And then there's a lot of stuff like how did this get nerf? You know? It's just weird to me. For example, Timbersaw didn't get touched, but Lone Druid did.

I don't know, I feel like I was maybe the only one playing Lone Druid but he got pretty giga nerfed. But then at the same time, yes, like timber that's been permabanned or perma-first picked forever now got a nerf. I mean, it got a nerf but the nerf is like nothing because it's not really how people are playing him. There are more of these things, but I don't know it's just a bit weird but I guess they're also really trying to nerf it in terms of pubs and low-rank pubs or something. Because you see Witch Doctor got nerfed and, literally nobody ever played him in the pro scene for like 10 years, you know?

That's why it's weird. I don't know it's hard to balance because you have to balance on the pro scene and the bottom as well. You know, also Abaddon, like the first thing I read is the yearly elected, the normal Abaddon nerf. He always gets nerfed but he never gets played in my games, but he always gets nerfed and it's just weird to read."

DreamLeague Season 22 is currently underway and will continue till March 10, 2024. Dota 2 fans can catch all the action live on Twitch. Check out other interviews from DreamLeague Season 22 below:

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