The Lina Curse

my deaths (23)
my kills (5)
Roshan taken
first blood

Act One · 0:00–4:49

A clean enough start

Nobody drew blood for almost five minutes — a slow, patient laning phase by Dota standards. When it finally broke, it wasn’t my lane: at 4:49, Dire’s Undying caught Weaver on our side of the map for the game’s first kill.

My own lane held up fine. By the ten-minute mark I’d landed 22 last hits — second on the team behind only Weaver’s carry farm, and comfortably ahead of every other support on the field. Whatever went wrong in this game, it wasn’t the laning phase. Pudge was doing Pudge things: sitting on creep equity, waiting for a hook.

Act Two · 8:39–18:42

The Lina curse begins

Then Lina found me. And found me again. And again.

Starting at 8:39, six of my next seven deaths were the same hero: C1oper’s Lina, landing kill after kill in a ten-minute stretch that ran 8:39 → 10:31 → 12:49 → 16:15 → 17:18 → 18:42. The only interruption was Witch Doctor’s Death Ward catching me at 13:46 — which, if anything, made it worse: it meant even when Lina wasn’t personally closing, her team was still finding me.

Six deaths to one hero inside ten minutes isn’t bad luck, it’s a pattern: either she had eyes on me every time I rotated, or the same read on my hook engage kept paying off for her. Either way, this is the single most fixable thing in the whole match — more on that at the end.

Every death this game came from Dire’s four damage-dealing heroes — Legion Commander, notably, never once got me.

Act Three · 19:36–41:26

A grind, not a collapse

The rest of the mid-game was messier but more even. Deaths spread out across Undying (19:36, 41:26, plus his zombie at 34:43), Crystal Maiden (21:50), and Witch Doctor (23:27). I got a kill back on Undying at 23:20 and another at 33:30 — proof the hook was still landing, even if the trades kept going the other way. First towers fell on both sides through this stretch (our mid and bot T1s at 16:48 and 19:39; Dire’s top and mid T1s at 17:43 and 20:10) — a normal, even lane-trading phase, not a sign of what was coming.

Act Four · 43:23–55:33

Dire’s siege

This is the twenty minutes where the game nearly got away from our team.

Lina took Roshan for Dire at 43:23. From there, Dire went on the single biggest structural run of the match: between 48:06 and 55:33 they tore down our entire bottom lane — both barracks, both towers — plus mid’s third tower, in barely seven minutes. I died twice more in this window, to Witch Doctor at 48:06 and again at 51:35, both credited with three or more Dire heroes assisting — full five-man collapses, not solo picks.

Act Five · 55:10–72:42

The turn

And then, just as fast as it opened, the game closed the other way.

Starting almost the moment Dire’s push ran out of steam, Radiant methodically took back the map — and never stopped. Weaver reclaimed Roshan at 65:41. I closed my own scoreline with two more kills, Crystal Maiden at 51:27 and Legion Commander at 65:05. From 55:10 onward it was almost entirely one-way traffic: every remaining Dire tower, both remaining sets of barracks, and finally the Dire Ancient itself at 72:42, in a demolition run that lasted barely seventeen minutes.

The engine behind it was obvious in the box score: Weaver finished 43/12/14 with 469 last hits and 132k hero damage — a farm advantage big enough to answer everything Dire had built in the siege, and then some.

My final line

Strip away the death count and there’s a genuinely useful game in here: 104,199 hero damage is second on my own team, ahead of every Dire player except Lina. My hook was connecting and my damage was landing — I just paid for every kill I helped get with a death of my own, finishing with more damage taken (107,295) than dealt. A 41% teamfight participation rate, the lowest of any Radiant player, tells the same story from a different angle: I wasn’t around for three out of every five fights the team had.

Good hands, bad habits. The Lina matchup is the whole story — everything else about this game was closer to fine.

One thing to fix

If there’s a single, concrete takeaway: whatever I was doing against Lina in the 8:39–18:42 window, I need to stop doing it. Six deaths to one hero in ten minutes almost always means the same read is getting punished on repeat — a hook thrown from the same angle, a rotation timed the same way, or simply no ward covering the space she was appearing from. Buy the sentry, change the angle, or just give that particular fight a wider berth next time I see her missing from lane.

Full scoreboard

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Reconstructed from the match replay with dotabuff/manta · combat log + entity snapshot analysis. Match 8988204281 · 10 players · 75:07 · Radiant victory.