It’s the year of the offlaners in Dota 2, and the search for the perfect one is a race in Europe. Yesterday, PSG.Quest signed Malik to the position as Entity announced DM for its offlane and Noone to its mid-lane.
While PSG.Quest made it to The International 2023, the team has been an offlaner graveyard since Malik marks the fourth offlaner to sign for Quest this year, and the player briefly stood in for the team at Riyadh Masters 2023. Quest’s offlaner sage started with Faruk “Wuiter” Terci, continued with Ammar “ATF” Al-Assaf and Tobias “Tobi” Buchner.
Regardless of the constant changes, Quest felt like they could beat anyone, mostly because the team always switched up its gameplay to accommodate its new offlaners, according to TA2000 in an interview with Dot Esports.
Entity, on the other hand, moved on from its academy-style recruiting by adding two established players to its roster, Dmitry “DM” Dorokhin and Volodymyr “No[o]ne-” Minenko. Both DM and Noone had unimpressive seasons in 2023, but the latter found a way to make it to TI 2023 at the last second with Team SMG.
In previous seasons, Entity usually prioritized picking up new players from the ranked leaderboards, introducing them to the professional scene in the process. While this approach worked for the team, it also created roster instabilities, as some talents would later get snatched by bigger organizations.
The two teams completed their rosters just in time for the ESL One Kuala Lumpur 2023 tournament. The qualification spots for this $1 million tournament are somewhat limited for almost all regions, meaning it’ll be a challenging ride for rosters who just got together as they won’t have enough time to work on their chemistry.
