The Support That Broke Dota 

as a new dota player i wanna say that carry io is one of the most fascinating anomalies in all of competitive esports. coming from fighting games we say "save that shit for nationals" when talking about hidden op tech, and people in the past have hidden various pieces of tech to save for big stages, but never on the scale of the international and rarely something as strong as that. something like that is special and i doubt we will ever see something that strong come out of no where and dominate like that ever again... god speed team OG and Ana

Regarding IO's W being a single spell instead of having in and out separately. It was due to a bug regarding Rubick stealing Spirits then losing spell steal cause the three spells took over the slots. Valve probably did a Valve move and instead of fixing it, they reworked IO's Spirits

Valve must hire you for TI libraries. These videos are insane. Love the stories.

As a nonplaying DotA content consumer, every video I've ever watched about TI 9's final game has emphasized Gyro's Diffusal Blade as the difference maker. I have NEVER heard the story of Carry Io taking that tournament. I love this.

1:32:33 Not only Ana's Io was amazing, extremely well played and perfectly timed, Topson also had an insane game and deserves mention. He went for Diffusal Blade with Gyro, a completely out of the meta item for Gyro, only to destroy Miracle's Bristleback mana pool and it paid off so well. You can hear during the fight as the casters mention how Miracle has no mana as soon as the fight starts. Thanks to this, Miracle can't do anything basically and together with Ana's insane dmg they win the fight, the game and the 2nd International. I saw the game and i remember going nuts. What a game!

By the end of TI9, Ana was 20W 1L on Io. An absolute monster.

1:51:24 is one of the best lines yet. I laughed so hard at the bait and switch, especially if you are looking at the screen instead of podcasting

I love that at TI9 IO carry was a surprise, just shows how dominant and creative OG was in TI9

Ana’s IO build was godly. You didn’t need much practice with the hero the build just owns by itself I remember I was spamming and winning with ease using his build.

I really wanna hear about the story of rubick, the hero is frequently seen at TI's and had many plays where he was crazy strong. Still, great video as always.

It is a bit sad to end on a low for Io, it also feels unnecessary. If this video shows anything, it shows Io is extensively balanced and rebalanced. Io has always been hard to balance because it is so versatile, you take away one ability that makes Io powerful and pros find a new way to use a different ability. I hope that this weaker version of Io can allow the balancing team to buff Io, to fit all of the different roles it has had over the years, without making it overpowered or underpowered in any role.

Io's the epitome of "simple to understand, difficult to master"

I can't wait for the story of Axe, hes such a iconic hero in my opinion

10 points for guessing Pangolier.

Duuuuuuuuuuuuude - this was one of the best videos ive watched in my life. THank you so much for ALL the work that went into it. Grats on an amazing documentary

Thanks! I am a Io player and I am absolutely loving this video.

I really enjoyed remembering what you said before about Io on your other channel. I look forward to remembering whatever you said about Leshrak.

These videos are getting better and better, they're such a pleasure to watch and listen to.

Are you talking about Batrider at @38:48? I believe he was the second hero who got something like that - he could cast Oil without facing the target.

Ti 9 was so fun and exciting. A lot of really weird and wacky but impactful strats came out from og. And one of the most iconic moments in dota 2 history, gyrocopter diffusal

Fantastic video! I had no idea what past Io was like! Especially that TP tick nurf.. thats brutal that so many may have missed that!

Love how relaxing and well-paced these videos are. Thanks man.

Great video, looking forward for the next one.

Man I am loving these videos, such a nice treat at the begining of the month. keep it up!

And then Io reached lvl 15 - yup we all remember that one. Criminal however not to mention the genius Gryocopter Diffusal buy from Topson in that game - it changed everything! (Guess the commentators are mentioning it plenty lol)

thanks for your amazing effort to make this, Sir!🔥🔥🔥

ah very nice baumi well put together easy to understand and not to long. good video!

Amazing work here. This was incredible.

Another great video. i didn't know that io had such a huge impact on the internationals

These stories are great! Please keep making them, they bring back a lot of memories of the older days of Dota 2 😊

This video was simply amazing! Well done Baumi and team.

Great video baumi, this is the best one yet.

This was a hell of a journey, best one yet!

Awesome video as always

Thanks a lot for this incredible documentary.

Another incredible documentary, this series got me into installing the game again

Incredible series Baumi! Great to have another guest on as well. Can’t wait to see all the great things to come❤

I love these thanks for your work!

you put so much effort for this video bro

Stop. The Rock. Can't Stop The Rock. TI2 Io Tiny really is a throwback

cool videos bro. i could watch the whole roster 👍

One of the best video of the series so far !

Amazing as always! Still requesting one for shadow fiend please! 💜

Would have liked an "Honorable Mention for broken Duos" section devoted to Ace's carry WD paired with IO, which is hilarious.

I love this channel. I haven't even played Dota 2, but there was time when I enjoyed the original Dota map for WC3. When Dota2 appeared I kept tabs its pro scene, enjoyed videos about major events. But with time I lost interest in it and now I have no idea what's going on there. These series does a wonderful job at bridging the gap and bring a sweet feeling of nostalgia. The game balance talk and how different changes affected it is a second part of appeal for me. I love this topic and these vids are very good at covering it.

Great video!

I fucking LOVE the scary backing music when you get to ana's Io in TI9. Exactly how it must have felt to be on the recieving end of it. Horribly unnerving, like "what the hell is happening"

7:29 11:38 I know a script as big as this one propably isn't written in chronological order, but these statements as close to each other as they are is a bit of a whiplash haha. Amazing video though with tons of old history that must had to be dug up !

Your videos are amazing. First time considering "join"ing a channel in RU-vid. Even though I don't play dota. I would love a "history of the meta" kind of video, where you'd explain how stuff like the tower bounty influences which heroes are played, and in turn which heroes are picked to counter those. Good stuff here. Thanks.

I find this the best video so far! Good job, Baumi! I look forward for the Enigma, Magnus and Earthshaker videos as these are great wombo combos characters. I also like how your videos create a space for remembrance of epic moments of Dota in the comments. Thanks for this high quality material! ^^

Man, I don’t know what else would get you to be an analyst for TI tbh. This is crazy good!

I love these videos!! I play league of legends but have always been interested in DOTA. I love learning about the different heros DOTA has :))

In TI9 era, Valve nerfed support IO so hard that it became a carry.

Great video

This was a great video!

I might have missed it, but did you go over the Io spirit bomb? I stopped playing for a while so I'm not sure if it was removed, but it used to be that refreshing spirits would detonate the old ones immediately. That was another reason to run Io with Tiny, since if you time it so that Io has max spirits and the ability is off CD, you can toss Io and do a huge amount of aoe damage. You could get that online in lane pretty early and it was a menace.

It’s sad to see the slow nerfs to io over the years. As an io main, the excitement of a new patch was always offset by the fear of the nerf hammer again and again. 7.33’s sheer size, banner creep HP regen and lotuses do somewhat offset the number changes in isolation, and improvements to stacking for the support now provide io with more possibilities than before. Items like drums and solar crest offer alternative builds with the universal change not to mention early utility like pavise. Neutral item changes also benefited io as a 5 so things aren’t quite as dire as the situation might appear.

Keep it up bro. Do more !!

Just found this gem of a creator, well edited videos, plenty of information, well put together at that, as well as having the videos be as long as they are and still keep me entertained, I think that is a great accomplishment. If I could make a request it'd be for Broodmother, she was one of, if not my most favorite heroes in dota. I never kept track of the competitive scene but I'd love to know how well, or terribly, they worked out in that space.

Carry IO was such a cool strategy. Its why ti8/9 OG are my favourite team, they werent afraid to try the most absurd and random things (stuff that the competitive scene tends to scoff at as "herald nonsense") and they found some ingenious ways to make many of them work when needed. Carry IO is the most famous for this, but support gyro, support sniper, carry maiden and others were all things that shook up dota and created the current game we have today where the old roles are far less rigid.

love this!!

good stuff. keepem comin please

Great vidoe loved it

Have i just found a new Baumi channel out in the wild? Nice.

love this story brother

I'm looking forward to the history of Riki. The dagger era was INSANE! Had so much fun...

Its such a tragedy both instances of "orbiting dps" in both LoL and Dota 2 were reworked out of the games. I adored Asol's old playstyle, so i was really excited to see that maybe there would be something similar in dota. One day maybe 😅

Nice video!

I like the misdirect with the ugly beast thing and then talking about Marci.

I assume the hero that got the limited version of the attack and move without turning was Morphling. He’s the only other “formless” type hero that makes sense could do it by just morphing his body to face the other way instantly instead of having to turn.

tether fucking stunned for 2.5 ? ? ? that's bonkers!! also baumi this channel is some of the best dota content ever. love it to bits

Awesome content

carry IO was so glorious to witness, one of the best things ive ever seen.

great content... but how did you play and record old patches?

29:38 I still smile every time I see the loading screen with that team immortalized in stone, what an amazing TI to watch

I haven't played Dota 2 in many years, but I was still playing around the start of Io's rise to prominence. I was only a casual player, so I always found the discrepancy between it's competitive and public results to be amusing - it was showing incredible results in The International, but Io in a pub match almost felt like a preemptive forfeit. The most hilarious thing about this is how Ana turned Io into what Anti Mage was in the memes - a character who'd vanish for the entire match leaving the rest of the team to fend for itself, show up after it finished farming, and wipe out teams without breaking a sweat.

Keep making these bangers! 😊

nice one!

Oh man its the legend Ana IO! time to rewatch TI9!

Io is so much fun! Most played hero by far and still pick everyday, ask me anything about items or matchups i'm a doctor 🤓

Your voice and presentation style is amazing brother. Didn't feel like a long video at all. Great story telling and cheers 🥂

I would love to see some mentions of heroes you discussed before! Like did Drow Ranger and IO ever pair up? Bring the separate stories together!

i love these videos !!! Please do Crystal Maiden next

What OG did with IO in TI9 is one of the coolest stories about competitive dota.

Thank you bumi ❤

Io before his rework and before the aghanim change was fun and really, I mean really difficult to play with. The relocate safe especially, man I got a lot of tip just from that spell alone. Saving from chrono/bh/any locking spell, saving from gank, mekansm burst heal, relocate to kil. On top of that, when you were able to pull the TP trick before relocated back, that feeling was glorius. After they remove relocate must be in stand still or not stunned whatever, it removes the fun IMO. Of course it opens another path to play the hero but the original one is the best. Oh I almost forgot the tether stun..

Non dota player again, still watching these lmao. Im so glad to see that characters like yuumi and io are universal 😭

Ive legit just watched the first 6 minutes of ability description and i absolutely cant understand how nobody on the dev team saw how insanely broken his entire kit is in context of a MOBA.

Beautiful

io lesh is still a dominant combo at the bali major

Surprising and strange things like early Techies, Carry IO, and support Axe are why I still occasionally check in on Dota. Let's go.

after 2 min i alrdy subbed you

Wait is this baumi?

38:44 It's Pangolier. Also Kunkka, but only when casting his 1st skill Torrent.

Also to mention Alliance gambled and gave Navi both Io and Batrider in game 2 of Grand Final. It resulted in Navi snowballing Alliance. In game 3, Navi took Io again. But, Alliance wanted to counter it with aggressive tri lane of Ogre Magi, Lina and Carry Mirana. Navi was smart to make Dendi to play Io mid, which was very unconventional and risky. But they won game 3 too. Overall, Alliance deserved to be the champion but Puppey decision to ban Naga and Chen in the final really caught s4 by surprise. Puppey was mastermind in drafting as he somehow figured out how Alliance want to play safe during early laning with Naga/Chen. By realising that Akke and EGM has to play those defensive jungling supports and also Bulldog limited hero pool, Puppey forced Alliance to either play aggressive tri lane or give up their best heroes (Furion, Io, Puck). Kudos to s4 though because he was able to prioritise Io/ Furion over Alchemist/Batrider.

It's interesting to hear you say that the TP trick was considered inconsistent. I wanted to give some outside perspective from the fighting game community, so if you care to read, you might find it interesting. 1/30th of a second timings is what we call a 2 frame link in fighting games, because fighting game logic almost always runs at 60 fps, and link meaning the button links together a combo. 2 frame links are considered consistent, of course with the knowledge of it being max 10 or 20 frames since your last button press. That proximity makes it easy to build up a rhythm memory for it and land those regularly. Players at my level will still go for them in matches even if we drop them, but the pros almost never do. 1 frame links, or 1/60th of a second tick timings, exist in fighting games too, especially older ones, and were still considered doable by more than I can even believe. These days, fighting games have buffers letting you input your next move into the last 1 or 2 frames of the move before it, meaning some games have a minimum or 2 or 3 frame links for the majority of combos, but if we were to ever go back to the days of 2 or 1 frame links, we'd probably still go for them. Of course, the timing is harder here, because the reference point for your internal rhythm for the TP combo was 12 or 13 seconds before hand. I think that adds enough difficulty that even with the 1/30 timing, I would like a metronome to practice that to, and I might even macro something to start a 15 second metronome when I start the ult. I'm not sure how large of a portion of the DOTA playerbase are musicians, but there are definitely musicians who have trained themselves to have an internal metronome that can stay on time consistently for a solid minute because it's so important to timing when you play notes in music. I believe it was a trainable skill, and that if you could have guaranteed you were playing IO, you could have justified spending the time to practice and train up. All that being said, still a hard trick to pull off lol

yeah Ana's IO was crazy, there's also that one player that had the name of Carry Wisp, and I would watch their games occasionally, it was just so satisfying, that was before the nerf to the Spirits even, Carry IO was always a thing, until they nerfed the spirits, it became a bit harder to pull off, IOs jungle was pretty crazy.

The anna io while wild i can see it that wisp is basically a perma nuke. Especially with aganim. I read the upgrade and all of it makes sense

Doesn't batrider also not need to turn to cast napalm or does that not count? Excellent video

Also, IO aghanims makes spirits a passive ability, and if you use ilussions the also have unlimited spirits and full damage