What’s wrong with eUnited?

At the beginning of the spring split, eUnited was the team to beat. Riding the wave of their victory at the Smite World Championship, most people ranked them as the best team in the world. Over 80% of spectators predicted that eUnited would win their first match of the split against Luminosity Gaming.

But it didn’t go the way everyone expected. After their shocking loss against Luminosity, a team widely considered much weaker, most people called it a fluke. But two weeks and a couple Smite Pro League matches later, and eUnited has yet to find a single win. In fact, they haven’t managed to win a single game, let alone a whole match. It wasn’t a fluke; eUnited just isn’t playing well in season 5. Which leaves Smite Esports fans with a question: What’s wrong with eUnited?

Drafts

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A consistent error in eUnited’s play this season has been their poor drafts. They let powerful gods get picked by the enemy team, construct team compositions that lack synergy, and just make some strange picks. A good example of this is game two of their match against Luminosity gaming.

Looking at eUnited’s draft, they picked up both Athena and Cerberus. These gods form a strong set of initiations with Athena’s Taunt and Cerberus’s Ultimate. But they didn’t pick any gods with strong follow ups to those abilities. They picked The Morrigan without providing her any particularly powerful Gods to transform into. In the duo lane, eUnited let Luminosity take Sol, one of the most powerful gods in the ADC role. But their most questionable decision was picking up Bakasura for the Jungle role.

Bakasura is a weak character that hasn’t seen competitive play in years- and for good reason. And while many strong Jungle picks had been banned out, the powerful Assassin Camazotz was still available. EUnited’s Jungler Lucas “Screammmmm” Spracklin had shown he was capable of playing Camazotz well in the first game of the set. There was no apparent reason why eUnited chose Bakasura instead. This problem continues into most of their games, picking up bad compositions and letting powerful gods slip through the cracks and into the enemy team.

Metagame

Photo courtesy of smite-esports.gamepedia.com

Alternatively, eUnited could just be having trouble adapting to the new meta of season five. With the many item and jungle changes, along with the entirely new map, the season five Patch is one of the biggest changes to the smite metagame ever. And while eUnited has made an effort to pick Gods that mesh well with the changes of season 5, those Gods might not mesh well with eUnited’s playstyle. In addition to that, at times their objective play has been significantly weaker in season 5, which could be caused by the increased size of the map making it harder to respond to objective calls.

Spacestation Gaming’s ADC John “BaRRaCCuDDa” Salter predicted their performance would suffer for this reason before their Las Vegas Esports Arena Showmatch, saying “I think [eUnited are] still a little stuck in season 4.” The world champions could be having trouble finding their place in the new metagame, leading to poor performance in the early matches of the spring split.

Conclusion

I don’t know everything about eUnited. These are just theories from an outsider trying to explain their sudden drop after the World Championship. And while I’ve presented two likely problems, there are a slew of possible problems the team could have behind closed doors. But one thing is certain, eUnited needs to change something to start looking like the world champions again.

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Top Image courtesy of gamereactor.eu