Dota 2 fans have not seen Danil “Dendi” Ishutin on the professional stage for a long time, but now the time for his comeback to competitive mode has come. However, it’s not about Dota 2, but about Warcraft III. For those who missed it, here’s the story of how Dendi decided to conquer the ancestor of Dota.
Ishutin’s organization, B8 Esports, has been outside the professional Dota 2 scene for about nine months. Their last match was played on June 6, 2024. Back then, Dendi and the team tried to qualify for The International, but the roster could not get past the quarter-finals of the open qualifiers for the CIS region. The match against SIBE Team, in which B8 lost with a score of 1:2, became the last official match of the club at the time of publication.
After that, rumors appeared that B8 might freeze its Dota 2 roster and redirect all efforts to the development and support of the CS2 team. This decision is related to certain financial problems that the organization is experiencing. There is logic in it, because the B8 CS2 roster performs more successfully than the Dota team – the team is in the top-30 HLTV.org and performs quite well at tier-2 tournaments like CCT.
Assembling a боеспособный (battle-ready) roster in Dota 2 that could compete in closed qualifiers in Eastern or Western Europe without any serious funding is an impossible task. So, Dota 2 B8 has retired for now.
Taking a pause on the professional Dota 2 scene, Dendi did not abandon Dota 2, but at the same time began to look at other games. For example, starting in November 2024, he actively streamed World of Warcraft for several months after Blizzard launched fresh Classic servers. During this period, he spent over 300 hours broadcasting WoW. But as soon as all the content available at that time was completed, he switched to another Blizzard title – Warcraft III.
Since February 23rd, Ishutin has regularly streamed the cult RTS. However, he still mixes Warcraft streams with Dota 2. But Dendi did not go to play the campaign for nostalgia, but started to tryhard in matchmaking. And so far, he is doing quite well.
Currently, Dendi plays exclusively as Humans. Although, according to his personal statistics, he also has matches playing as Night Elves.
At the same time, Dendi is not just mindlessly queuing, but is trying to understand the game: he watches replays, studies statistics and other useful features.
Dendi cannot yet boast of crazy APM like professional players, but he has already honed the key patterns of development and actions for his race. And the skill of body blocking from Dota 2 has not disappeared, so Ishutin is quite capable of surrounding and blocking the movement of enemy heroes with his units. And all this training is for a reason.
Of course, tier-1 scene is not yet in question. But Ishutin has already gathered for a media tournament in Warcraft III: on March 14th, he will participate in the OnlyFangs Invitational for streamers. The tournament is organized by Manuel “Grubby” Schenkhuizen — a former professional Warcraft and StarCraft player.
It is noteworthy that the tournament received official support from Blizzard Entertainment. Among the participants will be quite famous personalities, such as Tyler “Tyler1” Steinkamp and Chance “sodapoppin” Morris. The event even acquired a decent (by Warcraft III standards) prize pool of $10,000. By the way, if Dendi suddenly wins, he will earn twice as much as B8 earned in 2024 (last year, after leaving the DPC, the Dota 2 roster received only $2,500 in prize money).
So, we are waiting for Dendi’s breakthrough into the professional scene and the opening of the B8 roster in Warcraft III. And then, you look, NS will retrain as a caster of a “young and promising” discipline.