Solving the Vitality problem - how we can create contenders to stop them

Team Vitality look absolutely, utterly unbeatable at this moment in time. It’s getting to the point where even imagining a team that can beat them is becoming infeasible, a folly of the forum poster and delusional Brazilian Twitter poster.

History tells us, though, that invulnerability is not indefinite - and eventually, some day, someone will beat Vitality and take their throne. But how, and who, and what would that team look like?

We’re going to attempt to come up with a solution to the Vitality problem.

What makes Vitality so good is, obviously, quite a multi-faceted answer. It’s not just that they have probably the best player in the world (we’re split on donk vs ZywOo, but on current form, it’s ZywOo). It’s not just that they have the second best entry-fragger in the world. It’s not just that in ropz they have one of the most clutch, big game players of all time as a back-up plan. It’s not just that mezii decides to level up in grand finals. It’s not just their seemingly flawless system and counter-stratting. It’s literally all of those things, and more.

When you filter by role, it’s easy to see man-for-man why Vitality are the best team in the world. ZywOo is the highest rated AWPer in the world on our scale, and is known as ‘top right ZywOo’ for a reason. He’s the highest rated player in the world, straight up.

flameZ could profile as either a second star or a support player depending on how you see it, but our data actually has him as a pseudo-support more than a star. Unsurprisingly, he’s the highest rated support player in the world. He would also, unsurprisingly, be the highest rated second star in the world.

Starting to let the side down is ropz, who only finishes 2nd behind donk in the star rifle roles. Not good enough, really. mezii and apEX are much further down in their respective roles, but there are mitigating factors at play here.

apEX is traded often, very supportive with utility and sacrifices a lot of resources whilst being aggressive on the CT side. He’s not going to frag much, and though his duel swing is pretty awful, his round swing is pretty close to neutral.

mezii tracks as an underperformer, but his role is a bit of a weird one. While our data has him as a second star, like flameZ, he’s somewhere between the two and basically does a lot of ugly work. He’s classed as ‘mixed’ on most of the playstyle indicators, because he does a bit of everything, and is a glue player.

Also, in grand finals, he's money.

Starting to let the side down is ropz, who only finishes 2nd behind donk in the star rifle roles. Not good enough, really. mezii and apEX are much further down in their respective roles, but there are mitigating factors at play here.

apEX is traded often, very supportive with utility and sacrifices a lot of resources whilst being aggressive on the CT side. He’s not going to frag much, and though his duel swing is pretty awful, his round swing is pretty close to neutral.

mezii tracks as an underperformer, but his role is a bit of a weird one. While our data has him as a second star, like flameZ, he’s somewhere between the two and basically does a lot of ugly work. He’s classed as ‘mixed’ on most of the playstyle indicators, because he does a bit of everything, and is a glue player.

Also, in grand finals, he's money.

Basically, Vitality are far and away the best team in the world, and have the best player in two roles, the second best in another and about a billion trophies as proof that their system works. They’re good, basically.

So how on Earth do you beat them?

Fortunately, we do have some precedent that they can be beaten.

FURIA managed it more than once last year, and while their drop-off suggests they might have been a bit quicksilver and unsustainable, the point remains. molodoy and KSCERATO at their best are capable of dismantling Vitality, and the key is the AWPer.

While everyone else tries to be ZywOo, and ultimately will always fall short, molodoy is a throwback to a bygone era of aggressive, repeeking, high-risk sniping that was discarded in favour of safer, more reliable and, let’s face it, more boring AWPing that does more often get results.

molodoy gets away with it because he’s just a bit more mad, a bit quicker and a bit better than everyone else. Everybody expects him to play ‘properly’, and that’s just not his style. He’ll repeek when the numbers say he shouldn’t, but he’s off-meta enough - and quick enough - to get away with it. He makes the game very difficult to play because you can’t make any assumptions, and ZywOo is the king of soul reads. molodoy can offset that ability by just being unpredictable.

Everyone else does what they should and ends up as a poor copy of ZywOo, but molodoy carves his own path and that’s the only way to beat him. You can’t be better, just be different.

That’s the mantra, here - don’t play Vitality at their own game. It’s quite telling that the last team to beat Vita in a BO3 is Falcons with NucleonZ. Not because NucleonZ is great, but because it forces them to play differently and forces Vitality to react to something they’re not ready for.

It’s not a foolproof plan, mind. They haven’t prepared for me and my mates to play them, and they’d still probably beat us in a BO3.

A more conventional way to beat them would simply just to get better. Yes, I recognise that that runs contrary to what I just said, but maybe you really can just be better with enough practice. What I will say though, is nobody can do it without a pretty big change.

Everyone is at least one, if not two, roster moves from challenging, with the most obvious being Falcons. Everybody, including TeSeS, knows they want to get rid of TeSeS. It’s a shame, because he’s a legitimately good player who would improve a lot of teams and is being misused on this team, and it’s dragging on a bit.

We’ve got him ranking middle of the pack for support players, but obviously flameZ is miles ahead at the top, and mezii ranks above him too with a decent amount of overlap. You can’t get a better player than flameZ, but the data does suggest you might be able to get a better one than mezii, and a significant upgrade on TeSeS in that role specifically.

The two obvious fits are b1t, who was probably going to be easier to sign before NAVI started being good again, and Jimpphat, who has been rumoured to be joining for ages.

b1t would require minimal adjusting of roles; his T side style and CT positions are remarkably similar, with two straight plug-and-play swaps and three similar positions on the CT side. The only one that would be an issue is Ramp on Nuke, because that’s kyousuke’s position, and he likely won’t want to move into anchoring A.

b1t is also by our reckoning (and eye test) better than Jimpphat, who has gotten a bit worse since Spinx has joined. He’d require a bit more rejigging on the CT side, but is more used to having reduced resources than b1t is. MOUZ not playing Anubis means there’s one more map to worry about changing on for Jimpphat, and the duel swing change is less noticeable.

The real ceiling-raising, game-breaking move is HeavyGod, who shares three roles identically and another two similar ones, while playing nearly identically on the T side, except miles better. There’s just one problem; Falcons aren’t going to sign an Israeli player, most likely.

Spirit have donk, and so no matter what, will always be a contender if they can even remotely get their… faeces back together. tN1R is the obvious issue in the data, but given they speak Russian their options are limited. He’s an unusual case of a second star who doesn’t have loads of resources poured into him, which makes his role harder, and so for Spirit the easier fix might be a systemic one.

zont1x also comes off as a bit middling in our data, and you could argue that esenthial or BELCHONOKK would improve them, but neither are massive upgrades for one reason or another.

Instead, may I propose PARIVISION +donk?

PARIVISION have a system and a backbone to support a superstar that Spirit simply don’t have. They are the complete inverse - zweih is ranked in our data as the best hard support in the world, and BELCHONOKK is a pretty decent too as a support. Jame, we all know, is an excellent IGL who can do a lot with a little, and he’s had to with both a star and a second star who have negative round and duel swing.

The eye test plays this out too - though we like xiELO a lot more than the data, the pair are no fame and FL1T - and PARIVISION are still a top 8 team.

Just imagine donk instead of nota. It’s not a perfect fit, and you might have to change xiELO too (changing both would open up pretty much all of the space you’d want donk in), but it’s such an astronomical upgrade that you have to feel they’d just make it work. Please. I have to see it.

FURIA don’t need much other than YEKINDAR to be the same player he was last year, though yuurih hasn’t been great either. We can’t see them splitting up yuurih and KSCERATO, though, and getting rid of KSCERATO is never going to happen.

NAVI, similarly, are hard to find a winning move for. They’d need a straight superstar in the second star role, and the best fit seems to be someone like NertZ for iM, who has recently moved, and iM is quite an important secondary caller. They’re doing pretty well right now, and seem unlikely to drop big bucks.

Vitality are not an easy problem to solve, and even all of these changes could still lead to them being on top. What’s more likely is that they eventually fall off through winning fatigue or falling out, or apEX retiring or something. Their fall-off seems more likely than anyone else rising to meet them.

Still, we had to try. Our favourite move would be PARIVISION signing donk, though that would require an amount of money that even Manchester United might baulk at. FURIA don't need much of a push to beat them, as they've done it before, but they seem a way off that level right now, and Falcons are probably one move away from at least cementing a top two place if nobody else does.

It's not impossible to catch Vitality - but it's going to be bloody difficult.