All the way back in stage 1 week 3 Shanghai faced off against Philly and nerly secured their first win in a 5 map brawl. Two stages later a nearly identical match played out, but was this the same series with the same results or does this game tell a slightly different story? This week on Less Than Epic we're taking a look at the recent match between the Shanghai Dragons and Philadelphia Fusion and talking about what this means for the Dragons moving forward.
What's up everyone I'm your host Radical Edward and this week on League Analysis we're taking another look at the Shanghai Dragons. On paper their stage 3 match with Philly looked the same as their stage 1 match if you just looked at the map wins, however I think the Dragons made a much stronger statement this time and i'd like to explore with you why I think that.
First off, this is not the same Shanghai or Philly team that we saw in stage 1. Taking a look at the Dragons the only original players being fielded from stage 1 are Altering, Diya and Freefeel, with Sky, Geguri, Fearless and Ado being new additions to this lineup in Stage 3. On the side of Philly we only have have Carpe, Fragi and Neptuno from their originl starting lineup, though it's worth noting that in stage 1 Philly was swapping around their roster so much it was hard to get a handle on who was on their core team.
So it's not too far off-base to say that these were two different teams facing each-other and that's a very important distinction to make in my opinion. Philly was a mid-tier team in stage 1, and while the core of their strength was there they didn't really situate themselves as one of the major players in this league until stage 2 where they took New York Excelsior to 5 maps in the stage title match. So it's safe to say that the Dragons faced a much better Philly team in Stage 3 than they did in Stage 1.
Keeping this in mind, let's see how the roles on the Dragons compared to their stage 1 stats. In stage 1 the Dragons were running Diya & Undead on DPS and in stage 3 Undead was replaced by ADO. Diya played a nearly identical game to his stage 1 game, matching almost all of his stage 1 stats to negligable margins. Ado however played not just a better DPS than Undead did in stage 1, but an astoundingly better DPS. He had a +17 First Kill Differential and a +22 KDR as compared to Undead's First Kill Differential of 1 and a KDR of 2. There is no doubt that level of improvement for this team is probably the largest factor in them doing so well against an improved Philly. A few other high level notes I wanted to add are that Geguri on that off tank role played a slightly better game than MG and Xushu did in stage 1 and Fearless played a much better main tank than Roshan in stage 1 sporting +19 to Roshan's KDR, a pretty massive improvement.
It's wasn't all good for the Dragons however as there were some marked declines in performance over their stage 1 team. Most notably, the stage 3 Dragon support line died a whollaping 85 times in this match as compared to their already staggaringly high death count from stage 1 of 70. This is a pretty massive degredation in performance for the Dragons, and to put this into context, the highest support line death count i've tracked thus far was from the Boston Uprising totaling 79 in their match vs. London. I guarentee that if this single stat were lower that the Dragon's would have defeated the Fusion in this match.
So to sum this all much here's what I am tracking for the Stage 3 Dragons. Their support line is dying more though I must add that isn't necessarily the sole fault of the support players. Their DPS and Tanks are statistically doing much better, sometimes staggeringly so in the case of ADO. And finally they took a much improved Philly team to 5 maps this stage. Overall, no matter which way I slice this the Dragons look much improved compared to stage 1 and I think their performance against Philly clearly shows that. I truly believe that if the Shanghai Dragons can work out their support line issues they will not be going 0-40 in their first season. If they can't however, well, let's just hope they do because every other aspect of this team looks fantastic.
Anyway that's gonna do it for League Analysis this week. If you made it this far in the video i'd like to thank you for watching. We do 3 weekly series covering the Overwatch League here at Less Than Epic including Power Rankings, Game Predictions and League Analysis videos like the one you just watched. If you like that kind of content be sure to hit that like button, subscribe to the channel and hit the little bell icon so you get notified when our videos go live. Thanks for watching everyone and this is Radical Edward, signing out.
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