Week 7 LPL Review

by Michael "Tribble" Godani

After a week of upsets, the LPL returned with twelve magnificent matches containing even more surprises. Let’s take a look at the most interesting matches of the weekend:

March 6th

As mentioned in the preview that we released earlier this week, the first match of the week would be Master3 against King. Both teams played against each other in the Damacia cup - where M3 took the win after a fifth and deciding match in the Bo5 series.

This match-up could best be put into one word as “botlane.” The series ended in a tie with two very one-sided matches, something we've been seeing more and more in the LPL lately.

Both teams in their wins started out strong, only the M3 botlane stuck to Corki/Annie while King switched over to Graves/Thresh after not having too much success with the Kalista/Morgana combo. A series like many others, yet still undecided as both teams had to do with a single point.

Next, we had upcoming IEM contenders Team WE facing off against Snake Esports. For those who have seen the two matches, incredible! You will surely find a few plays of there in our new weekly LPL Top 5.

As said, this match-up was one of the best ones of the weekend due to the highly unpredictable outcome of both matches. Along with the revived Team WE, Ninja came out guns blazing, ending game one carrying on his Kassadin with an amazing 11-0-3, participating in 14 of the teams 18 kills.

But what a game this was! Let’s take it towards the 20ish minute mark; dragon had respawned and both teams wanted a piece of it while not having great vision control in the river. Team WE beat Snake to it and took control over the dragon area only a few seconds before the spawn. Team WE did pick it up without any real fight, but this wouldn't be LPL if there wouldn't be a fight after all.

Team WE pick up their second dragon and right after Snake tries to engage onto Team WE but before the engage is a real engage, Ninja already used his Null Sphere on Baka to take away 50% of his HP after which Spirit uses his Flag and Drag to jump into the frontline of Snake. Team WE retreats as Snake chases them down towards the bottom lane where Flandre uses his Twisted Advance onto Styz and YuZhe his Dark Binding hits Beast, unable to follow up on his sonic wave. As Kryst4l takes out three members of Team WE, Ninja goes ahead and cashes in on the shut down gold from Kryst4l.

Team We might have gotten the dragon but lose the fight 4-2 and the worst thing there is that all the gold, or most of it, went to Kryst4l, which meant a even stronger Corki for the next teamfight. After an intense game, that, after 36 minutes was only in favor of Snake who had a 800 gold lead and 3v2 dragons, it could have been anybody’s game. It could have been, but it appeared that Snake pulled off a Scarra. What seemed to be a teamfight going in favor of Snake, got turned by Gnar’s Gnar! A triple stun onto the side of the baron pit sealed the faith for Snake.

Game 2 wasn't much of a difference from Game 1. That’s what made this series so good,both teams continued where they ended in game one. A four men gank on Ninja’s Ezreal gets turned into a first blood for spirit. That play set the whole game around after only 2 minutes and 40 seconds. Team WE was in the lead and decided that it was time for a early dragon, low enough to be smited, but Beast takes it away with his Prey Seeker on the so popular Rek’Sai. What a steal!

Ninja continued his carry performance with the Ezreal just the same way he did with the Kassadin only now he had more kills earlier in the game. Around the early midgame there was a fight for the tier two turret from Snake where Ninja in a skillful fashion picks up a couple of kills and survives with 30% of his life remaining as if it was nothing.

It was nothing, Team WE continued to take a bigger lead throughout the game and even had a 10k gold lead. The only problem was Flandre’s Mundo who at some point was unkillable, the total opposite of Aluka’s Maokai who seemed to try to equal his deaths to the amount of towers that his team had taken.

After some bad focus in teamfights and a few picks here and there, the gold lead from Team WE wasn't that big of an issue anymore. It came to a point where gold didn't really matter all that much anymore and the immortal Mundo and ghoul shooting Kogmaw were dictating the teamfights despite the fed Ezreal from Ninja.

Snake had a huge advantage throughout the game and that was that they managed to pick up four dragons and one minute before their fifth would spawn the game-deciding teamfight broke out. Ezreal being focused and the major tank Maokai, Snake had a free passage into the base of Team WE to secure the split.

These are the endgame results for Friday, March 6th:

March 7th

Energy Pacemaker took on Invictus Gaming on the second day and took yet another point of a well respected team in China. After getting humiliated by Vici Gaming, EP stepped up their game and have been taking points of LGD and even VG (in the game on the 8th of March).

After a somewhat close match, EP decided to finish the game off the back of a beautiful outplay in a teamfight in the midlane. They took Game 1 and forced IG to step up their game for the second game.

IG didn’t really impress this second game, but with some beautiful rotations and picks, IG managed to at least splitting with the last seat in the LPL.

OMG took on Gamtee in the last game of the day. As mentioned in the preview, Hu1 was one of players we should keep an eye out for. His Rek’Sai was taken away in the first game and he was not looking impressive with his Lee Sin. OMG came to the rift with their “Running Man” botlane (San&Xiyang) who played the Corki/Morgana combo. The most interesting aspect of this game was Cool playing Xerath to almost perfection. His first blood on Hu1 showed some nice skillshot mechanics and also his teamfighting presence was really out of this world. No wonder this man is being seen as one of the top midlaners in the world.

Gogoing went back to his Maokai and made sure that the Gamtee line-up was not able to reach the backline of OMG, great Twisted Advances and smartly dodged the Righteous Fury/RoA to just build straight into tank stats for the teamfights.

It wasn't even the gold lead that made OMG win, but the way they used their champions to the fullest of their abilities.

Game 2 was moderately different. OMG appeared onto the rift without a tank and havd nothing work out with Xiyang. His Veigar and Gogoing got pressured too hard by LetMe really sealing the game. The teamfights that OMG wanted didn’t appear and Gamtee forced them onto their playstyle by jumping onto the carries. Gamtee splits with OMG and this face-off ended in another draw.

These are the endgame results for Saturday, March 8th:

March 9th

The final day of the week was all about EDG vs Snake and OMG facing SHRC.

EDG vs Snake was the third match of the day and EDG was seeking revenge for the only defeat that they suffered this Spring Split against Snake.

EDG showed up big time although they did swap out Clearlove for Firel0li. The disrespect towards Snake showed really after Pawn locked in Riven as last pick in the draft. What seemed to be a difficult start for EDG and some might say that Snake did win the early game, really turned the moment that Deft’s Corki picked up a double kill in the toplane after making sure that Flandre’s Gnar was useless and 2+ levels behind most of the EDG members.

EDG continued from here on to step up their game and turn on the pressure by out-rotating and out-teamfighting Snake. “Get Corki fed” that seemed to be the mission here and that mission was accomplished after a 29 minute win. 

Game 2 was all about the “Juggermaw” for Snake, who had a Maokai, Jarvan, Lulu, Kogmaw, Janna comp. The whole idea was to stall the game until 35+ minutes so that this lategame scaling team can get to work and let the Kogmaw go where he pleases.

EDG responded to this comp in a very good way, picking them off, exploiting their weaknesses early and taking turrets as fast as possible including the dragons. They were on the right track but just didn't seem to be able to finish the game or to take an inhibitor even.

Snake took their advantage from this weakness and continued to get bigger to even an extent where Kryst4l sold his boots and picked up a 6th damage item. He had enough movement speed from the Lulu and Janna and with their shields, Kryst4l and his companions picked up Game 2 to split the series.

I highly recommend that you do watch this series on YouTube, it was a joy to watch!

The final game of the week was between OMG and Uzi’s former team, Star Horn Royal Club.

OMG showed up today with their Uzi/Cloud botlane and came out with a lot of force and energy! SHRC’s Wei showed up again with his Graves, God knows why because this fella is clearly not suited for this level of gameplay - again showing a bad performance and trailing by 45cs after 10 minutes.

A wonderful 1v3 outplay by Uzi on his Kalista really said everything about this match. OMG had no equal, they were not tested, the only aspect of their game that was tested was to not fall into the trolling behavior that they often do show in games. They did need a win to secure the second spot and so did they finish off SHRC in just 23 minutes.

Game 2 didn't differ that much, the game took a bit longer and forcing their way to playing 5v3 by camping Koro1 non-stop and zoning him leaving him with only 91 CS after 32 minutes and not taking the likes of Wei too serious.

For OMG, Cloud was the real MVP this game, beautiful Flash+Hook combo’s with a lantern to drag a teammate in and on point flails.

OMG take a very convincing 2-0 victory over SHRC who really need to hope that Namei, who is coming back next week, will jump into the Gogoing carry mode and carry them towards the play offs.

Later this week the LPL Top 5 will be released, a LCS FanZone special, keep an eye out on the timelines of Jodi and Tribble.

Standings after Week 7:

Schedule for Week 8:

Day 1:
Star Horn Royal Club vs Gamtee
Invictus Gaming vs Vici Gaming
Edward Gaming vs LGD Gaming
King vs Energy Pacemaker

Day 2:
LGD Gaming vs Snake
Energy Pacemaker vs Gamtee
Edward Gaming vs Invictus Gaming
Master3 vs OMG

Day 3:
Star Horn Royal Club vs King
Invictus Gaming vs Gamtee
OMG vs Snake
LGD Gaming vs Master3

The Evolution of the Meta

by Jerrod "Thousand Eyes" Steis

So let’s talk about how the meta has evolved from the “standard” lane match-ups. We've seen a huge change from what we started with. The game has grown into a much more strategic, albeit predictable early phase until mid game. This is actually really limiting picks in some aspects. We’re going to look at everything from mid S3 until the most recent popular strategies. Following that I’ll give a bit of an opinion on each.

Originally, the pro scene followed what is usually seen in solo-queue. Top laners and bottom laners matching up against each other. The strengths of this rely almost solely on your ability to lane. If you had a strong lane ability you loved it, if you lost lane every game you were screwed. If we go way back, sustain lanes were really popular. They were safe and let teams focus on farming and getting champs that needed farm to their insane late game status. In this meta we saw the likes of Anivia, Ryze, Jax, Singed, Tristana and Vayne. All of these champs had insane late game scaling.

In the jungle and support, however, we had the exact opposite. In order to try and counter these champs you had to strike early and hard. Lee sin, Xin Zhao, and Jarvan IV were popular at the time. They could gank easily level 2, which was so popular it became routine to do. They hit lanes early and gave their laner an advantage that they could use to snowball faster and once one of the lanes got ahead they were usually able to take control and bully the other lanes out.

If we look at bottom lane synergy, we had supports who were usually champs with great utility and bad scaling, i.e. Sona, Thresh, Lulu (who had bad scaling at the time), Alistar. These champs had great base damage skills and little to no ability to scale. They were used to protect the late game scaling ADC. Late game these guys usually turned into CC bots, and because there were no support specific items at this time they usually built cheap tanky items that had some kind of active in order to help their team. And wards. Pretty much all of their income was spent on wards.

Pros/Cons

So what are the pros and cons of this meta? Let's look at a few different areas of it. The game usually started off with everyone going to their respective lanes. We had actual match-ups, and in-lane play was extremely important. Your ability to duel was key and usually determined how far ahead you were or how much you had to come back from. This was great for rewarding you, but it was a bit too steep, to the point that any small advantage you gave was almost impossible to come back from - and don't even start on a successful invade and what that would give you. 

Next, the meta was very team fight oriented. This made awesome dragon fights, and a lot of strategy focused around forcing the enemy into fighting for objectives. There seemed to be a lot of strategic positioning that had to be done here to compete.

Finally, late game saw some awesome plays because we saw a clear transition from early game power champs to champs that scale. We saw huge emphasis on protecting carries like Vayne and Tristana. This basically meant late game was a test of who could kill the other team's ADC first. ADC was the end-all be-all once they had two or three items and they became almost impossible to stop. For an ADC main, this was awesome. Anyone that played a tank usually hated this and teams came up with two ways to fight this. Assassins, and early-engage burst supports. Enter late Season 3 and Worlds.

Worlds 

When we got to later in Season 3 we saw a huge change in the picks of support and mid lane. Zed and Ahri were hotly contested picks because of their ability to bypass bulky tanks and deal huge burst damage to ADCs. Supports started swapping as well. From motherly protection supports that healed and buffed ADCs until they got items, to engage heavy CC machines that punished the enemy at any wrong step. This brought a more action packed early game as we saw kill lanes become the norm. Leona, Annie, and Thresh were the holy trio of supports all through Worlds.

A small note to make as well is that the increase in aggressive laning and assassins forced ADC players on to more mobile carries. This, in addition to buffs to Trinity Force, made Ezreal and Corki go-to picks. They had reliable abilities to reposition themselves and could still put out damage while they moved. All throughout this time the top lane meta shifted marginally. Jax and Singed were still notable picks with more late game carry types being favored over tanks, but this change was much more gradual.

Now let's look at the game health at this time. In my opinion, the most notable thing of this meta was the power assassins and ADCs. The mid to late game team fights still revolved around killing the other team's carry, but now it was all about bursting them down before a fight really broke out or when they moved to a favorable position. Battles were won and lost based on single missteps. Even some supports had potential to knock people out of fights. This combined with how wards and gold income worked. As soon as a team got first blood or first dragon it was transitioned into complete vision control and instant burst kills on any team member that attempted to get it back.

Teams that knew how to play aggressive early waltzed over traditional late game teams. While games could last over forty minutes, you could easily see who was going to win as early as ten minutes in. Unless the team made massive mistakes, they just had to sit on their lead as soon as they earned it. Riot realized they had a lot of changes to make during the off-season.

Offseason/Vision Changes

Off-season started after Worlds ended, and Riot decided to take this time to make sweeping changes to vision and supports, as well as take a hit on the amount of damage ADCs could put out. Ever since it became part of the meta to have a player that relied on no definite gold income, they were immediately relegated to spending almost any money they earned on warding the map. Support was basically ward duty with some CC protection late game. Sightstone was a welcome change, but that alone wasn't enough. As long as it was possible, teams would funnel all warding onto whoever functioned best with little to no gold (read support).

Finally we get huge vision changes. Each champion can now only have up to three regular wards on the map at one time and one pink ward. Pink wards were no longer stealthed and took five hits to take out as opposed to three. Oracle's also was removed from the game. Riot just had no way to balance it. If they made it last until death, supports just played a bit safer or bought an extra one with their money. If it lasted for a specified amount of time they just fell straight back to buying an extra. With Oracle's in the game, there was no way to keep one team from completely controlling vision and, consequently, the game.

With this change, they also gave every summoner a specified slot for a trinket which was free and could be swapped at any point invoking a cooldown on the activated ability. The three trinkets made vision a bit easier for the team to spread out. There was no point in not using a free ward when it was up. This is huge because it was an indirect nerf to early gankers and assassins. Everyone had the ability to protect themselves now with some extra vision. Junglers were forced to stay in the jungle for a little longer, as was the intention. Masteries were also reworked to make penetration and other offensive-oriented abilities much further down the tree and considerably weaker, and defense got huge buffs.

Tower Pushing

For a little while things worked out as intended. Soon enough though players realized that with extra safety, they could play more aggressive. The best person to funnel gold into was still the ADC because they had more item dependency than any other position, and teams realized that with champions that could push early the best way to get a big spike of gold was to take towers fast.

What's the best way to shove? Run your ADC and support into the tanky melee champ that has no way to take on a ranged character at the start of the game. It forced them to try and get as much farm and experience under the tower as they could while trying not to die. The teams that prepared best for this had a top laner that was innately tanky with the new masteries, and could either sustain a lot of harass or clear waves quickly at early levels. Shyvana, Renekton and Dr. Mundo topped this list because of AoE damage early on and the ability to put out damage without building a lot of damage items. Sunfire Cape and Spirit Visage were extremely gold-efficient items that were key on these champs and were almost always first and second buys. Since hyper-tanks gained popularity, a new champ grew with them as well. Trundle.

Trundle has a kit that is made to counter tanks. Rushing a Blade of the Ruined King on him made his increased attack speed from his Frozen Domain insanely good at shredding HP-stacking top laners. Throw this on top of his Ultimate skill, Subjugate, which stole a percentage of health, armor and magic resist, and you had a perfect tank-buster to counter and split push any hyper-tank.

Riot saw the huge strength in the two previously mentioned items and nerfed them appropriately. Sunfire Cape had its passive scale with level rather than do a flat amount of damage, weakening its power spike when bought, and Spirit Visage had part of its cooldown reduction taken off and its price was increased. Sunfire fell out of favor in exchange for Randuin's Omen, and Spirit Visage became the niche item it was supposed to be on people who had a lot of self heal.

Mid lane saw new picks as well, since vision was no longer dominated by who was ahead. Players had to dominate the map rather than their opponent in order to get vision. Champs like Nidalee and Ziggs started seeing more play now. They used their immense range and damage to control minion waves and force the enemy away from objectives. Anyone who was seen making a rotation was poked out as they roamed.

Junglers realized that the only actual gank that was open because of the lane swaps was mid. Mid laners started warding harder and just generally playing safer. Jungling didn't gain enough gold to warrant just trying to farm, so the next best decision was to join their ADC and support and force the other team’s tower down as fast as possible. Eventually, the top laners joined in on this as well. They'd force down two towers and then back off.

After this, the top laner would go back to the lane that was shoved and freeze the wave while they caught up, after giving up their farm to shove. This stagnated the game for about 10 minutes or so and the team that had stayed bot lane would usually get a free dragon at this time. It’s important to note that dragon’s gold value was changed from a static value to a growing value as the game progressed, relative to the average level of each player. So an early dragon’s value dropped significantly from its previous value, but it was still worth grabbing.

Carry Top Laners

Riot attempted to fix the lane swaps that were happening at the pro level. In fact, they were only happening at the pro level. They gave buffs to the defenses of the top turrets. This is the first time that they really enforced a meta. Before they had always claimed that any team strategy was viable and never claimed that one way was the correct way to play. But this was a direct attempt to force ADCs back into the bottom lane. It took Riot a few patches before they were able to get a number that they were comfortable with. Even now it’s pretty easy to say that they were unsuccessful in their attempts to fix the problem because while they may have stopped fast pushes on towers, teams still lane swap almost every game.

Since lanes were getting frozen deep in enemy territory, champions had the ability to free farm for an extended time. Any team that tried to still pressure that deep into their enemies lane would be promptly taken out as soon as they showed themselves. This was actually the end of Dr.Mundo as a meta champion. He was played mostly because of his decent wave clear and ability to scale off the strength of the strong items of the time. With nerfs to his items and the strength of his early wave clear no longer needed, he faded out of picks.

Since top laners could free farm for a long time, top lane players started picking up champions that scaled well with gold. Shyvana still worked well, but some new picks were Jax, Ryze, etc. Defensive masteries were still substantial at this point, so anyone who could put at least nine points into defense was strong. Plus, getting free farm to scale meant later on in the game they’d be more impactful in objective fights. Also, mobility was usually a must on these champs to get in and get out of sticky situations.

Summoner Spell Changes

Amidst all of this, the summoner spell Heal was bolstered to give more health and a move speed buff. This became the preferred summoner spell of safe mid lane players and ADCs over Barrier, because of the ability to reposition in addition to the extra effective health it brought. It was also a nerf to assassins because they no longer had an easy way to burst down ADCs. Barrier was already starting this and heal buffs were a final nail in the coffin. Since assassins fell off, ADCs that had fewer escapes but consequently more damage could be played. Twitch saw a rise to popularity due to his hard carry team fight role and the strength and synergy he had with Blade of the Ruined King. After Twitch, we saw Kog'Maw start being selected as well.

Alongside the heal buffs was a buff to Teleport - lowering the cooldown significantly when it was used on turrets. This meant weak, early laners now had a way to handle their weakest point in the game. If you got chunked out, you could just back to base, buy and teleport back. For a little while we went back to a standard meta. Then teams began trying to funnel whatever gold they could into their ADC because of how hard these popular ADCs would scale. Lane swaps were back, and there was little to no reason not to do them. Dragon wasn't worth as much gold, and that was the reason that you kept your bottom lane near it - so you could have more players to contest it.

ADCs started freezing the lanes rather than pushing early because of the changes to how towers took damage. They took as long as possible to take the tower in order to keep the top laner starved for farm. Top laners started roaming with the jungler in order to actually gain experience until they could safely farm. This led to three-man ganks on mid laners because of supports roaming as well. Since the early game has become so much less intense and more strategic, we've seen much more late game oriented compositions, including many "protect the carry" teams. Mids are choosing higher utility champions that can give their team buffs and either peel or put out sustained damage. 

Conclusion

In a way, we've come full circle back to early to mid Season 3. In all honesty, this is the kind of meta that I prefer - mages and late game tanks and ADCs. It’s a very strategic game compared to mid Season 3 though. Rather than trying to get ahead and snowball, you take your time to get guaranteed gold by farming. Once you’re able to get some gold onto your carrys, you move down to force objectives and use your sieging-power or team fight potential to take them or force them off. The game has evolved in ways, but it’s always been somewhat related to the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Squishy constant damage beats tanks who beat assassins who beat squishy constant damage. This isn't an end-all be-all, but it’s a great way to try and predict counters and how the meta will evolve. I think eventually we’ll see more assassins come back that can take out ADCs like Kog'Maw and Twitch, or maybe a way to counter their freeze in the top lane with another ranged character like Kennen. Teams will always find ways to counter what’s popular and that, in turn, will become popular. That’s how metas work.

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Riot Plz - The ARAM Conspiracy.

As of this second, I have 307 wins and 307 losses in ARAMS.

No one really contemplates these things, which is part of why it works, but all thirty-eight of my closest ARAM friends come within ten points of a 50-50 win / loss record, and that is far too perfect a percentage to be by chance alone. While keeping a player interested, motivated and challenged requires losses, player satisfaction requires wins, and 50/50 appears to be Riot's golden ratio of happiness...but how exactly do they do this if an ARAM is 'All Random?'

The answer is...it isn't all random. There's nothing random about it at all. It's all carefully planned and orchestrated to create the illusion of randomness. In truth, outside algorithmic forces are at work. The deck is always stacked in favor of one team over another, and you've all seen it happen plenty of times. Certain characters have a very high win rate in ARAMs and you can be sure there will be several of them on the opposing team when it's your turn to lose. Of course, skill level can still prevail in these match ups, but skill level is measurable as well, and ELO clearly is taken into account and calculated into the equation.     

But, the conspiracy goes deeper still!

Once I was made aware of Riot's sneaky manipulation, I began to discover just how far they will go to prevent me from getting a win. Yesterday's glorious losing streak is a prime example. I was subject to suspicious problem after suspicious problem, and Riot was clearly at the core!

For starters, I went 'bug splat' link dead at the start of three games, severely crippling my team. Then I was bugged in game and unable to buy, and had to completely reboot. During one particularly difficult game where we were coming back against all odds, the transformer on my street blew, plunging us into darkness. The lengths that our unscrupulous Riot will go to are beyond belief! This morning, my cat turned my computer off mid-game...under Riot's silent feline directive. In the next game, they made Kaspersky bring up an override screen in the middle of a team fight.

Know those games where someone goes afk at the start and never leaves base? Those are evil Riot agents, added to even out the playing field when a game cannot be run without you winning. Likewise, those people who just stand behind your tower and run in circles are also Riot bots! And they're programmed to heckle your build, no matter what direction you go in. 'AP Ezreal is stupid, he does like no damage!' or 'AD Ezreal? Why? In an ARAM?' simply to make you waste a minute in base while you type back an explanation. (Or in my case, a few expletives.) And on those rare occasions when the system glitches and gives you an amazing line up, Riot will quickly fix the problem with a fake 'summoner has quit' message.

They're probably watching me right now with their high-powered satellite surveillance, just waiting for any attempt on my part to breech the 50/50 ceiling. They have full control the power grid, the internets and the government. This is why most of our lives also seem to fit the 50/50 mold. Not to blow your mind, but the phrase 'you win some, you lose some,' has been around for a very a long time.

This is because Riot is behind it all.

And now you know the truth.