Team Spirit captain say, what patch 7.41 meant for the team

Nikita “panto” Balaganin, captain of Team Spirit, said that after patch 7.41 the team was kinda confused because players didn’t really know which heroes in their pool were still strong and which got weaker, and this negatively affected them during ESL One Birmingham 2026.

He shared this in the team’s YouTube vlog

“There was this feeling that you either take a risk and pick heroes that seem strong to you, or you pick heroes that were strong before and hope they didn’t get much worse. After all these games it became clear that Jakiro isn’t that strong anymore and Warlock is very weak. There are also questions about cores. Some heroes looked obviously strong to us, like Alchemist and Pangolier. Yeah, other teams adapted faster, so it was a bit easier for them to play”

Panto noted that the team miscalculated some heroes, the ones that looked strong turned out weak, and the ones that seemed stable ended up even worse

According to him, players will need to seriously rethink their drafts for tournaments and carefully study the new meta after the big update