Understanding Your Champion

By Jerrod "Thousand Eyes" Steis

So you’ve heard casters and other people talk about what a champion is good at, what certain team comps are good at, and finally, champion power curves. This is some complex stuff that I find a lot of people grasp, but do not truly understand. Everyone knows that Tristana has a strange power curve, and it has to do with her passive, but do you know what specifically about her kit makes this true?

This kind of logic applies to all champs and teams, and I feel a huge part of trying to climb the ladder comes from understanding what you and the rest of your team are good at. Now, many people try and memorize things like match-ups or where a champion's strengths lie, but that takes a lot of time. Time that could be better spent putting a plan together for the game. The better thing to do is apply logic and draw conclusions from that.

First of all, this requires understanding champions. I’m not saying you need to memorize every skill and every cooldown, although the more you do, the easier it is and more precise you can be. It’s important to look at what the basic champs skills are. Let’s take an example, since that’s the best way to get a handle on these types of things.

We’ll take Caitlyn as a first example. Caitlyn’s known as a lane bully ADC that dominates in lane and falls off in comparison to other ADCs as the game continues. I’ve seen a lot of people take this to mean she doesn't do damage late game, and that’s not true. First, what makes her strong in lane?

·         Her 650 range is the highest base range in the game.

·         She has a very easy time pushing the lane at level 1 with her Q

·         Her Q also is a great way to farm and poke at the same time because it passes through targets

·         Her E lets her escape ganks on the off chance she gets her range closed in on.

·         She can self ward with W

·         Her Ult is guaranteed damage and can be impactful in non-sustain lanes

Some of this is pretty obvious stuff, some of it not as much. The more you’re able to piece together from experience, the more you can strategize. Now, since we know what her strengths are; what are her weaknesses?

·         Ultimate can be blocked, and forces her to stand still and cast

·         Only one basic skill does meaningful damage

·         She has no built-in steroids

·         Her only self peel is slow and has a long CD

           

            So how do these points lead to Cait having a lackluster late game? First, her ultimate can be intercepted by other champs. The cast time is long and the target is obvious. Using this in a teamfight can not only mean death if used at the wrong time, but lowers your DPS because you’re no longer attacking the enemy. It’s best used in between fights, but once late game comes around, ADCs are known for constant DPS in teamfights which means her Ult has little to no use in that aspect. Add in the fact that the long and obvious cast time means someone else has a long time to jump in front of the bullet and tank the shot. Late in the game people are almost always moving in groups, which means the tankiest person can usually take the shot and you’ll get the least out of your skill.

            Next, her W and E come into account. When you compare Caitlyn to other ADCs, most other ADCs have more damaging skills. Kog has his W Q and ult(which I’m counting because it can be used multiple times in a fight), Draven has everything except his E, etc. Caitlyn has one basic skill that can be used in a teamfight outside of her auto attacks. Not only that, but it loses damage as it passes through targets and forces her to stay still to cast it. Her W and E are of no use to her in teamfights outside of trying to get away from people.

Finally, and in relation to the last point, she has nothing in her kit that boosts her damage output. Think of every ADC that is known for late game power: Kog Maw, Twitch, Vayne, Tristana. What do all of these champs has in common? They all have something in their kit that inherently boosts their damage output. Whether it’s percentage health damage, attack speed boosts, or a range increase. Caitlyn has nothing of the sort that can give her more damage other than building items, which means her possible damage is inherently lower.

Now I went into a lot of detail, but as long as you can understand the bullet points, you can apply this to any champ. Look at where they are strong and where they aren’t strong and you can piece together what you as a player and team need to avoid and what you need to exploit.

The common things you need to look at are:

·         Range

·         CD length

·         What Abilities do

·         How well they scale (do they do % damage/have high ratios or fall flat)

·         Where does power spike and where does it die

            You don’t have to know specifics, but have a general idea. I’ll use Shaco this time to demonstrate my point since he’s a champ I don’t know as well.

Strengths:

·         Mobile from Q which is a flash with invis

·         Great at setting traps and bursting with surprise while feared

·         Very slippery

·         Passive and E give a lot of damage

·         Ult creates clone for confusion and procs all on-hit and can attack on its own

            Weaknesses:

·         No immediate CC on command

·         Dangerous/Slow early clear

·         Very squishy and revealing in wrong location means death

·         Usually needs to gank because he will not clear well until he gets items

·         Teamfight potential is weak because invis time is low and W needs to be pre-set to be of much use.

·         All single target damage

These are the reasons why Shaco is known for devastating early ganks, but can’t teamfight well unless he gets far enough ahead to burst people. His dueling potential is also great especially if he puts a trap down in advance when the game is still running as planned. As you can see even though I’ve never played Shaco, my experience and understanding of the fundamentals of his kit let me know what he does and what I should do in response.

Now if you’re trying to find what a team as a whole is built upon, you apply the same process times 5. You’ll look at the positives and weaknesses of each champ on your team and the other team. Compare the similarities and you’ll see what both teams compositions are built for and are weak against. You can look and see where each player gets their power spike in terms of levels and items once you get really good at it.

This is a massive part of becoming a successful jungler more than any other role. It lets you know who’s weak and when, and that’s huge when you’re affecting every lane and contemplating invading the other jungler.

So let’s take it all full circle and look back at Trist and how her power curve works. She’s got a good early game, poor mid game, and a disgustingly strong late game. Her good early game comes from the fact that her base damage on her E skill is pretty good, and it’s magic damage on top of that, which most bot lanes don’t itemize for early. Her E also gives grievous wounds, meaning that she should regen from the trade better. Once you get to mid game, the damage from that falls off because it scales off AP which you won’t build. In fact, all of her skills have AP scaling, which is why she falls off very hard past early game. Her saving grace, actually, has nothing to do with her early game power and is why she has a strange curve. It’s actually a combo of her passive and Q. Her passive gives her range per level and her range gets to be higher than anyone in the game late besides an ulting Twitch. Throw in a whopping 90% attack speed boost on her Q and you've got a lot of damage hitting from very far away. The Q attack speed means she can build more AD and hit harder. The final part of her kit that makes her unstoppable late game is the safety she gets. Her ultimate is low cooldown and blows people away from her as well as having a long range jump that resets on a kill or assist.

Analyzing champions is a huge skill of League of Legends that takes some time to fully understand on its own. However, you don’t have to start memorizing everything about every champ. With 119 champions in the game that is nearly impossible. The important thing is to understand the basic idea of what each champ does and plan around everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. If you apply this to your own games, you can look past the idea of just trying to CS and following a similar pattern every game, and start strategizing on how to pull an advantage through logically understanding strengths and weaknesses.

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.