What the heck is happening to PARIVISION in Dota 2?

After bursting onto the scene in the 2024-2025 Dota 2 season, PARIVISION now find themselves mired in mediocrity. Where they were easily the best team in the world for most of their debut season as a unit, they’ve since been on an alarming downward spiral in terms of results as of late.

Their 0-2 loss to Tundra Esports at DreamLeague Season 28 yesterday is just the latest example of this worrying trend. From placing third at The International 2025 (TI14) to regularly bombing out of tier 1 tournaments, there’s been very little for their fans to cheer about recently.

So, what gives?

Coach diff

To start with, there’s the most obvious difference between then and now: that being the absence of former coach Filipe “Astini” Ribiero. Astini and PARIVISION parted ways just a few weeks before the new year. Clement “Puppey” Ivanov came in afterwards to coach the team at DreamLeague Season 27, where they actually placed third.

Since then, however, they’ve been missing from a lot of important tournaments throughout the season. Their last appearance in any capacity before DreamLeague Season 28 was the qualifier for BLAST Slam 6 Malta, where they lost in the grand finals to Na’Vi.

To put it simply, Astini was perhaps the second biggest factor as to why they were so successful out of the gate last season. Naturally the first reason was the meteoric rise of Alan “Satanic” Gallyamov, but it takes a village to raise a child, so to speak. Astini was instrumental in the young gun’s rapid development, as well as in keeping the rest of the team on the same page.

While Puppey is undeniably one of the best players in Dota 2 history, he doesn’t have nearly the same amount of coaching experience as Astini. The Brazilian has been mentoring Dota squads this way since late 2016, giving him nearly 10 whole years of proficiency in this department.

Now that he’s gone, the guiding hand that PARIVISION previously relied on is no longer available. I am fairly confident that Puppey will eventually figure out how to get on with this roster, but it will take some time as they adjust to his specific coaching style. The teething problems have already shown themselves at DreamLeague, and it’s possible that they will continue on for most of the season.

SSSophomore slump

There’s also the issue of their most recent roster change, which saw newcomer Valery “SSS” Lazarev replace Dmitry “DM” Dorokhin at the offlane position. What I saw from their match against Tundra yesterday doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with SSS and his performances so far, but going away from what used to work almost always comes with a penalty to team chemistry.

That is to say that I am not blaming SSS for the fact that they got trounced. Rather, his arrival is just another spanner in the works when they need as much stability as possible right now.

There’s plenty more to point to regarding their loss yesterday. Satanic’s questionable targeting priority as Windranger helped lose them the first game. The second game was entirely on Volodymyr “No[o]ne” Minenko’s shoulders. I mean, how in the world do you only break even in the laning phase playing Huskar against Ember Spirit? That matchup is basically nine-to-one in Huskar’s favor, and it should have been completely unplayable for Bozhidar “bzm” Bogdanov.

Instead, bzm got away with what should have been a total stomp going in PARIVISION’s direction. Worse still, No[o]ne proceeded to farm neutral creeps for 30 minutes, instead of helping his teammates in the other lanes. Oh, and those other lanes also lost their matchups. It was kind of hard to watch.

I’m not going to sit here and let Edgar “9Class” Naltakian off the hook, either. Having a quirky hero pool from the soft support position is nice, but not when it ends up hurting your own team. It always seems like he just stops being effective as a player if he doesn’t get his hands on Slark or Monkey King.

Time’s a-wastin’

Sure, they may have survived the first group stage of DreamLeague Season 28. But their 0-4 record so far through the second tells me that they’re still not ready to get back to their winning ways. Maybe the fact that they had their contracts renewed by the PARIVISION organization after TI14 has them relaxing a little too much.

What I am really worried about though is the possibility that they might waste Satanic’s prime. He’s only been at the very top as a carry player for one or two years, but we all know that the shelf life of professional gamers is much shorter than that of traditional athletes. They’ve got an insanely skilled prodigy playing for them; it would be best not to squander what could be his best years.

To cap this all off: I better not see them getting swept by Xtreme Gaming later today.