A look at the teams for ESL One Cologne: Part 7 – Luminosity Gaming.

A look at the teams for ESL One Cologne: Part 7 – Luminosity Gaming.

Part 1 – Cloud9
Part 2 – Immunity
Part 3 – mousesports
Part 4 – Virtus.pro
Part 5 – FlipSid3 Tactics
Part 6 – Kinguin

Luminosity Gaming is one of the legend teams, as they placed 5-8^th at ESL One Katowice 2015, however, at that time they were known as KaBuM.TD when they won the qualifier, and then they got picked up by Keyd Stars, and on July 28th Luminosity Gaming swapped their NA roster for the Brazilians.

 
After their good performances at ESL One Katowice the Brazilians decided to move into a gaming house in North America in order to compete in the upcoming ESL ESEA Pro League. In NA the showed that they could compete with the NA teams as when they won iBUYPOWER Invitational 2015 – Summer, by beating eLevate 16:13 (Inferno), 16:10 (Train), and Luminosity Gaming 13:16 (Dust2), 16:5 (Inferno), 16:14 (Train) and in the final beat Liquid 16:10 (Inferno), 19:17 (Cache). However, two weeks prior they had lost to the little known affNity team in the HTC Reborn Invitational, but that was somewhat due to the issue of DDOSing which have plagued the Brazilians since the move to NA.

At ESL ESEA Pro League Season 1 Finals they upset one of the favorites Team SoloMid in the group stage by beating them on one of the Danes best maps 16:12 (Inferno), which was a fairly impressive display from the Brazilians as well as a lackluster performances from Team SoloMid. Their second match was against Counter Logic Gaming where the Americans won 16:9 (Cache). This meant that they would be facing FNATIC in a Bo3 which they Swedes won 16:5 (Inferno), 19:16 (Train). While this was the end them in the league it was by no means a poor display by beating on of the best teams, and almost forcing FNATIC to a third map.

Their next event ESWC 2015 was not an impressive performance from the Brazilian team, with them losing 16:13 (Cobblestone) to FlipSid3 who was playing with Hiko as a stand-in, and losing 16:6 (Overpass) to Cloud9 before winning their last match against the Candian mix-team Boreal 16:3 (Mirage), however, at that stage Keyd Stars was out of the tournament.

In addition to not having played a lot of matches to gauge their capabilities, the team also switched zqk with cold or coldzera, who aside from a few matches from the World Championships 2015 South American Qualifier is difficult to find any data about.

Thoughts
The Brazilians did make it to their placing at Katowice in some way due to the group draws where they got the by far easiest group with Ninjas in Pyjamas, Counter Logic Gaming and HellRaisers, and they did take a map of Virtus.pro, however, they got decimated on the other two. There is no doubt that they are by far the weakest Legend team, and their somewhat lackluster performances at the last couple of events does not bode well, while they just recently have changed an underperforming zqk with the unknown quantity of cold, then is a month plenty of time to get him adjusted to the team. Furthermore, with zqk being their dedicated AWPer they either move FalleN into his role and cold takes FalleN’s roles or they rework their approaches, however, this takes time and I sincerely doubt that they will be able to make it work across more than a couple of their core maps, and while the player swap might give the team more firepower then they are still one of the weakest teams in term of rawr skill. They have previously shown that they know how to anti-strat and read their opponent, but as their first opponent at Cologne will be Kinguin I doubt they will be able to find many tendencies to exploit as the Kinguin lineup relies quite a bit on their firepower, and while fer might equal some of the players the overall lineup of Kinguin is better than the Brazilian.
In terms of maps I think their best maps would be Inferno and Train, with Mirage, Overpass and Cobblestone as their somewhat decent maps with Cache and Dust2 as their weakest maps, however, it is quite difficult to get a decent picture of the Brazilians as they have attended few lans, and as their online games while in NA was heavily affected by DDOS, and that there is no information available in regards to matches with their new player.
I do not think that Luminosity will be able to get very far in this tournament, and I expect them to finish in the murky ranks of 9-16.

Links taken from HLTV.org and Liquipedia.