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The easy way to check what's currently strong is to see what the pros have been picking incessantly on a given patch, since they tend to pick the most powerful/broken things available as often as possible. It's not a foolproof thing, there's some champs that are very good that don't see pro-play, (and some the pros clearly overvalue) but it's easily available data that will give you somewhere to start. Champions that have gotten recent updates tend to be fairly strong nowadays, like we just saw a big mid-lane mage patch and those mages are all doing quite well now. You can also look at higher tier/pro ban rates and see who's too annoying to play vs. lately, or who has an abnormally high win rate (anything about 52-53% is notable.) The one downside of pro-play scumming is that sometimes they're picking specific countermatches, like Irelia into Gnar. Basically what seems to be popular hasn't really changed all that much. Toplaner either needs to be a tanky teamfighter OR a champion who can snowball off solo kills and splitpushing. Popular tops right now are Irelia, Gnar, Shen, and Fiora. Midlaner is currently favoring the waveclear mage mids, but this will probably swing back to assassins once the assassin patch comes out (it's next on the schedule.) Seeing a lot of Anivia, Victor, Cassiopia, and Malzahar (who was very broken for a while.) Leblanc and Fizz occasionally, some Taliyah (new champ.) Jungler needs to either be able to gank early and often because Dragon control matters a lot more now, and ideally have a fast enough jungle clear to powerfarm while doing it. Gragas, Reksai, Elise, and Nidalee seem to be the pro-power-fecta, but in SoloQ there's some more good options like Hecarim and for some reason Volibear's had a really high win rate for ages that no one ever pays attention to. ADC is back to utility lane in Pro play. You can really pick what you like in SoloQ. Ashe, Sivir, Lucian, Caitlyn, and Jhin all see a lot of picks. Twitch sometimes, but he's risky. Support's been completely stifled in pro play since the Alistar nerfs and everyone is playing Braum or Karma and nothing else, at all, period, unless one gets banned and someone's forced to play Nami. Sona is broken currently but probably getting kneecapped for it. Zyra is extremely good post-mage update. Leona's getting some major buffs shortly. Morgana, Soraka, Janna, and Blitzcrank all work just fine. --- In case I misunderstood what you asked, since the waveclear mages are so strong now, pushing up mid to win doesn't work very well. So there's a lot of comps built around getting pick offs (which is why Gragas and Elise and stuff work really well, especially combo'd with say, Anivia or Malzahar) and poke is pretty powerful (which is why Braum is so stupidly overpicked.) The general idea seems to be a lot of focus on pushing sidelanes while either your ADC or Midlander just farms mid until someone loses an objective fight or gets picked off trying to ward or something. Turrets die INSANELY fast due to the new dragon buffs, so once defenders are down you usually get multiple objectives. mistaya fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Jul 25, 2016 |
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Jul 25, 2016 05:32
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mistaya posted:In case I misunderstood what you asked, Unfortunately, yeah. I have a general sense of what champions are strong, just in the sense of "I've seen this one a dozen times this week and it hasn't looked like an embarrassing and confusing pick in action", but the trickier part is understanding why the strong champions are strong, like, did they pick this one because they want a really strong split-pushing comp, or a really strong teamfighting comp, or a really strong pick comp, or a really strong siege comp, or so forth. When it's not multiple obvious indicators at once, like they've got Trundle top, Nidalee jungle, Varus mid, Caitlyn ADC and Braum support and I can say oh that's obviously meant to poke and disengage, I tend to have a hard time understanding what a team's "win conditions" are, to borrow the old Monte phrase
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Jul 25, 2016 06:23
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As someone in the same boat, it's hard to have that resource handy ever because the game has major shifts every two weeks. Any resource that would be current would have to be updated constantly. That said, Firebert had some good stuff to say for sure that can guide
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Jul 25, 2016 07:03
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To be fair I'm not 100% sure that most pro teams could give detailed analysis of a champ and team comps strengths and weaknesses. I'd really love to hear teams justify post nerf Lucian being the third most picked ADC.
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Jul 25, 2016 12:41
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Or top lane tank Ekko still being a thing in the LCK despite it never winning
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Jul 25, 2016 13:18
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the best example is probably the endless quinn into malphite games which we all enjoyed
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Jul 25, 2016 13:33
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Yeah, I think honestly that's a good reminder that helps me feel less dumb about the whole thing - when my own knowledge base is this limited, it's easy to feel like I'm missing a lot of the strategic richness of the drafting process, when realistically, most of these teams are going to be assembling their comps largely on the basis of "X is available? He's really strong, let's pick him"
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Jul 25, 2016 16:06
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At the end of the day most players have a max of like 4 champs they can play at a competitive level at any given point.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:25
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Jenny Angel posted:most of these teams are going to be assembling their comps largely on the basis of "X is available? He's really strong, let's pick him" That is pretty much exactly what's going on right now. Part of the issue is that every. single. game. is a top/bot tower trade so the laning phase is essentially voided outside of midlane, which is all farm-fest waveclear champions. That means the only junglers that are really viable are displacers like Gragas or divers like Elise/Olaf (I forgot how popular Olaf had gotten.) Riot's doing something  ish to stop those mindless tower swaps so really any information on current win conditions is going out the window as soon as that happens.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:36
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People should just pick team fight comps and go ham at level 2 in this poster's opinion.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:39
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Crazy Larry posted:To be fair I'm not 100% sure that most pro teams could give detailed analysis of a champ and team comps strengths and weaknesses. I'd really love to hear teams justify post nerf Lucian being the third most picked ADC. You ask my ADC why he picks it and he wouldn't have a great answer beyond dueling potential and lane pressure but if you think the teams with halfway competent support staffs don't think these things through then idk.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:41
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I think your best bet in a competitive draft is to try and get one of the power picks in your first rotation and then try to build a composition around it while also picking to deny enemy champions at your strongest or their weakest position. You also need at least one of your three lanes to be de-prioritized in the early game, so it's best to stash a utility pick there if you are trying to ramp up another lane. A good coach/analyst for a pro team should be able to immediately identify what the power picks are on any given patch and draft versatile compositions that can be adapted around it. Things I hate to see in a competitive draft: 1) Niche/non-power pick taken with priority in first rotation, especially if it concedes more power picks to other team 2) Picking into a counter for no discernible reason 3) Bunch of power picks with no synergy whatsoever drafted together on one team 4) No utility lane pick or alternatively a bunch of scaling champions with no one to shore them up 5) Too many carry champions or too many utility champions on one team, you can't protect the first, and you can't do enough with the second. Some of the things I really like to see in a competitive draft is when teams have strange (not common meta at the time) pocket picks that have high synergy with power champions and they bust them out late in a draft to totally mindfuck the other team or draw an overwhelming amount of their focus on that one weird niche pick. I like seeing drafts with 4 meta picks and 1 wild card, those are some of those most entertaining games and tend to really blow up on teams who get too soaked into the meta.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:41
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Yeah some of the major flaws in drafting right now are either 'pick a bunch of strong stuff who cares if it works together well' or 'pick 3 losing lanes and wonder why we lost all three lanes'. You can protect like one scaling carry at most currently. My pet peeve is picking champs who've eaten one major nerf too many and are pretty much garbage tier but they were really strong on the previous patch. AKA the "STOP PICKING AZIR" problem. (Which has happened like 5 times at various points now.) Or the 'putting Aphromoo on Soraka' problem where you put a player on a champion they obviously do not synergize with no matter how broken that champion currently is. mistaya fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Jul 25, 2016 |
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Jul 25, 2016 16:51
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Chris de Sperg posted:Still spikes extremely hard at Youmuu's, your laning style means you can apply so much early pressure to a lane (in terms of pushing in a 2v2) that you're likely to get the first tower and open up the map just as you hit said power spike, the mobility on his kit means he can be picked blind into any jungle or support matchup, he can provide something in any lane in a 1-4 or 1-3-1 setup. If anything, he was overrated BEFORE the nerf because most teams were playing compositions based on forcing and abusing range disparities in team fights with tank top laners and Azir or Viktor absolutely every game; his current pick rate (significantly behind Sivir and Ashe and about even with Jhin) in the current meta is about right. That's nice and all, but he's rocking an amazing 34% win rate professionally on patch 6.13 so pro teams aren't actually picking him based on his strengths so much as he's a champion that has been strong in the past and they're comfortable with.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:51
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Libertine posted:Some of the things I really like to see in a competitive draft is when teams have strange (not common meta at the time) pocket picks that have high synergy with power champions and they bust them out late in a draft to totally mindfuck the other team or draw an overwhelming amount of their focus on that one weird niche pick. I like seeing drafts with 4 meta picks and 1 wild card, those are some of those most entertaining games and tend to really blow up on teams who get too soaked into the meta. yeah for sure. i think my favourite thing to see in champ select is if there's one insanely op pick that red side leaves up, knowing they have an entire comp ready to shut it down. EDG vs SKT is a good example, but i really loved that TSM vs Gravity game where runeglaive ezreal was unreal busted. GV took maokai, sivir, shen, assassin jarvan and just smashed ezreal's stupid anime face in
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Jul 25, 2016 17:02
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Crazy Larry posted:That's nice and all, but he's rocking an amazing 34% win rate professionally on patch 6.13 so pro teams aren't actually picking him based on his strengths so much as he's a champion that has been strong in the past and they're comfortable with.
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Jul 25, 2016 17:03
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One big problem with pro drafts is that teams have little time to practice the near-infinite set of comps you could theoretically construct and, as as such, they default to playing around 3 or 4 picks that they see as the most OP and which they have had time to practice. I don't know how you fix that problem.
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Jul 25, 2016 17:11
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Sexpansion posted:One big problem with pro drafts is that teams have little time to practice the near-infinite set of comps you could theoretically construct and, as as such, they default to playing around 3 or 4 picks that they see as the most OP and which they have had time to practice. more bans
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Jul 25, 2016 17:15
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You fix it by not drastically rebalancing the game every 1-2 weeks, which forces pros to essentially spend all their time treading water.
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Jul 25, 2016 17:15
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Work Friend Keven posted:You fix it by not drastically rebalancing the game every 1-2 weeks, which forces pros to essentially spend all their time treading water. Also this, I feel like this would be ridiculously good at helping develop a better meta. There are so many times Riot goes off and buffs a champ because it's not seeing competitive play despite being a good counter to a strong pick, but pros will start playing it before the new patch goes live on competitive because it just takes some time to get the games in to feel confident playing the champion. Maokai is a great recent example of this. They had started to play him a bit more in LCK before Riot was just like "OH YEAH BTW MAOKAI WILL BE PLAYED DAMNIT"
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Jul 25, 2016 17:18
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I think Lucian is still good just that Ashe/Sivir/Jhin have been super broken for a long time (esp. the last two) and are very rarely banned.
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Jul 25, 2016 17:20
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strategic bans would also involve stuff like 'ok, we want to make a pick comp, so let's ban these champions that the enemy team can use to prevent death'. but you can't do that cause there's like 20 of them now lol. in fact they even got bored and started making them all aoe
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Jul 25, 2016 17:25
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Chris de Sperg posted:Alright, everyone in the pro scene is an idiot because of a low win-rate on a statistically suspect sample and because you said so, glad we had this talk. In any other sport continuously using a strategy or lineup that loses two thirds of the games you play will get people fired but I guess that's ok in LoL?
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Jul 25, 2016 17:33
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How about the other half of the question, the scaling part? Like, I know a few champions that scale really well and I get the stacking item rule of thumb, but there are so many points where the casters go "Well, blue team just have to keep things even until Sivir can hit her break points and start putting out massive crit damage" and I'm like... wait... doesn't the other team have hard scaling guys too? I think maybe a better way to ask the question is who doesn't scale well in the key carry roles? Like there are enough popular hard-scaling AP and AD carries that it seems like they can all pretty much blow everyone up late game if they get some good positioning and initiation and peel, but I know like... mid Karma, for example, is a kind of "get ahead by mid-game or you're in trouble" pick. And I know that comps with only 1 damage type are really easy to itemize against, so they also fall off as the game goes on. But like, who's like that among ADCs, because it seems like casters want to hype up the destructive power of everyone in the role? Lucian?
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Jul 25, 2016 17:34
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player: i want a champ that stops people dying riot: ok here you go. it's flava flav except he's old as gently caress lol. im mark merril subscribe to my blog player: i don't want to be some stupid old guy riot: ok he's a goat now player: uh riot: old studio ghibli drawing we found on a napkin player: but riot: catfish in a hat player: ... riot: fabio? player: fine
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Jul 25, 2016 17:35
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every night i break into riot tryndamere's house while he sleeps, whisper "captain's mode" into his ear and make a mess of his pots and pans
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Jul 25, 2016 17:45
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So I haven't really followed pro lol for a while, can somebody explain a few things for me? What happened to Team Piglet? What happened to Echo Fox? They went from "Can be relegated, could contest for 7th" to "Didn't win in 7 weeks" to "Getting 1v3'd by loving Huhi" and I'm pretty sure at least the last part was supposed to be impossible by the laws of nature, man and God alike.
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Jul 25, 2016 17:57
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1. Piglet has been benched because he's worse at league of legends than Faaaaabbbbyyyy 2. Echo Fox is losing all their games because froggen sucks.
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Jul 25, 2016 18:17
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Libertine posted:Some of the things I really like to see in a competitive draft is when teams have strange (not common meta at the time) pocket picks that have high synergy with power champions and they bust them out late in a draft to totally mindfuck the other team or draw an overwhelming amount of their focus on that one weird niche pick. I like seeing drafts with 4 meta picks and 1 wild card, those are some of those most entertaining games and tend to really blow up on teams who get too soaked into the meta. This is my favorite thing in esports, period. I go ham when players get their pocket picks and succeed. I mark when Froggen gets Anivia, or when Infiltration pulled out his Abel and Juri at EVO last year. Remember when GBM blew up TSM with Zilean last time? That's what I live for. League desperately needs ten bans instead of six. Captain's mode would be awesome too, but really just give everyone a ban and hopefully comps would open up more
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Jul 25, 2016 18:59
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unfortunately they've been balancing around 6 bans for the last 3 years otherwise i'd agree
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Jul 25, 2016 19:32
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5 bans would probably make their client and servers explode.
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Jul 25, 2016 19:46
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The proper way to make league exciting again is simply to force everyone to teamfight in midlane from level 2 onwards. None of this fancy "strategy" stuff.
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Jul 25, 2016 20:39
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Schnorkles posted:The proper way to make league exciting again is simply to force everyone to teamfight in midlane from level 2 onwards. 5man bot lane level 1 cheese is coming back. Wait for the level 1 blitz, kalista, shen (taking taunt), viktor, reksai combo that comes out, kills your bot lane at level 1 for first blood, then takes bot lane turret immediately for first turret blood. It'll happen. Riot posted:In case you were wondering, that does in fact include Corki buffs Kashuno posted:There are so many times Riot goes off and buffs a champ because it's not seeing competitive play despite being a good counter to a strong pick, but pros will start playing it before the new patch goes live on competitive because it just takes some time to get the games in to feel confident playing the champion. Corki was just played in the LCK last week Kashuno fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jul 25, 2016 |
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Jul 25, 2016 20:42
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Next patch is gonna have massive triforce and ezreal and lucian buffs, mark my words
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Jul 26, 2016 02:30
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Luna Was Here posted:Next patch is gonna have massive triforce and ezreal and lucian buffs, mark my words No, I think we still have one or two patches left before the annual patch that completely changes the meta but no one actually gets to play competitively pre-worlds.
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Jul 26, 2016 02:42
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Schnorkles posted:The proper way to make league exciting again is simply to force everyone to teamfight in midlane from level 2 onwards. Whenever teams do this riot fines them irl dollars. Make your minds up riot. Idiots!! Idiots
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Jul 26, 2016 03:05
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I'm going to be watching the world's groups in a month or two, but haven't been keeping up with competitive league very well. I pretty much know which takes I care about in NA, but outside of that I have no idea who's good/fun to watch in other leagues. Do y'all have any highlight matches that would be good to watch to get up to speed on how the various world's contenders are looking atm? I heard EU LCS teams kind of imploded, and I've got no idea what's going on in the LPL/who's good atm in the LCK. Esp. interested in games with good bards/Zyras, but I'm down for whoever is good and playing exciting matches.
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Jul 26, 2016 03:41
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RIP ZEEZ
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If you're willing to watch something without English casting, this game between JT and ahq is probably my favourite LMS game this season. Action-packed, and reasonably tight considering. In general, this season's LMS is great to watch if you enjoy: 1) aggressive jungling, and 2) Anivia. Lots of Anivia, played to great effect.
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Jul 26, 2016 05:29
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Afreeca is so fun to watch, and I love the fact that they're actually willing to play pick comps instead of wave clear after wave clear comp that we see so much now.
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Jul 26, 2016 13:10
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In the LCK I would watch Afreeca, KT, and MVP for fun. As for "good," there is really no team that is explicitly the best; SKT, ROX, Samsung, and KT are all over the board. If I had to choose, I would avoid Longzhu and CJ Entus because they are almost definitely going to relegations, but then again they can also take games off of the likes of SKT(or even entire sets) so it's all over the place. I think the greatest part of LCK is that everyone plays at such high skill levels that it's difficult to choose someone who is the team you absolutely have to watch Although I REALLY wish they would stop playing Ekko.
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Jul 26, 2016 13:37
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