The Dominational 2025: Why Helm of the Dominator is so popular at TI14

The group stage of The International 2025 has come to an end. The teams surprised everyone with a huge number of unique and unusual strategies. However, many teams followed one trend — buying Helm of the Dominator for 3-4 heroes in the team at once. Why did the popularity of the "Domi" increase so sharply at TI? At the recent FISSURE Universe: Episode 6 and EWC, the item was purchased only 26 and 23 times respectively for the entire tournament, while during the group stage of The International, it has already appeared more than a hundred times with a win rate of 61%.

The Helm of the Dominator is primarily purchased for farming — it is a kind of replacement for the Hand of Midas (a summoned creep instantly gives the hero gold and experience equal to the reward for killing it), but with some advantages:

• Dominator recharges much faster than the Hand of Midas and provides a significant boost to armor, health regeneration, and stats, which will allow you to feel much more comfortable in the early stages of the game.
• With summon, you can tank jungle creeps while farming and safely push lanes (creep from the Helm of the Dominator cannot be quickly killed with Dagon or Hand of Midas).
• The abilities of summoned creeps are no less useful and can be helpful in team fights, such as stun, mana burn, or dispel.

In addition to all of the above, another factor allows the Helm of the Dominator to fit perfectly into the meta of The International — a significant part of the matches at TI lasted 50+ minutes or more than an hour, and the average duration of games at TI is 43 minutes. Here, as in the case of the Hand of Midas, the longer the game lasts, the more the "Domi" will give. It is noteworthy that the item is not only taken on core heroes: due to the long games, the Dominator also looks good on supports, who also increase their survivability, speed up farming, and perform important macro functions with the help of summon.

A striking example is the match between PARIVISION and Wildcard. Last picking Anti-Mage for Satanic, the No[o]ne- team understood that they just needed to give their carry enough time against the aggressive pick of Wildcard, which, after a few slots at AM, would be unable to do anything. So, after buying four Helm of the Dominator items, PARIVISION safely pushed the lanes and farmed, not allowing Wildcard to apply pressure and force mistakes, and when Anti-Mage reached his power spike, they simply went to finish the game.

Many compare the Helm of the Dominator to the Wraith Pact at TI11 and would like Valve to remove or rework the item before the start of The International 2025 playoffs, but it looks like there will be no hotfix. "Domi" has completely replaced any fast-push strategies from the meta, but it allows Anti-Mage, Faceless Void, and other characters who enjoy protracted games to make a full comeback.

Will creep wars become even more prevalent in the main stage of TI14, or will players surprise us again? We'll find out on September 11, but in the meantime, we invite you to check out the detailed final statistics for the first stage of TI.