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After weeks (or is it months?) of innovation and weirdness, the League of Legends meta-game is finally starting to settle somewhat.
AD Carries are back, albeit not in the same ubiquity we were once used to, and gold funnelling is getting a pretty big nerf. We might be back to standard 1-1-2 lanes, at last, even if the champions in those lanes are a bit different.
Which is a pity, in some ways. This has been the greatest period of diversity League of Legends has known since the old standard was figured out. Even the ill-fated juggernaut patch, released weeks before Worlds 2015, didn’t come close to mixing things up the same amount the mid-season changes of 2018 did.
I have enjoyed it, but mostly as a fan. As a gold-level solo queue player I have only come across gold funnelling twice, and both times the opposition didn’t really know what they were doing so my team won easily.
Bottom lane diversity has been great for all levels of play, in my opinion, but I realise that is a very divisive opinion. It’s League of Legends Marmite – you love it or you loathe it.
There is no middle ground. Maybe I just like it because my AD Carry mechanics are bad and I can play Morgana in every lane.
But as the gold funnelling era potentially draws to a close (it’s still not clear if the nerfs will eliminate the strategy entirely, or just bring it down a notch), I find myself learning about League of Legends in general because of it.
SK Telecom might be struggling, but watching Game 1 of their recent series against Hanwa Life Esports really shone a light on strategical depth in this great game.
They ran a pretty standard looking composition in that game, with an AD Carry (Ashe) in the bottom lane, Galio middle and a tanky top laner in Cho’Gath.
Apart from Vladimir in the bottom lane, HLE were also doing nothing that would have looked out of place six months ago.
The way the game played out, though, was a great example of the thought process pro teams go through during picks and bans. SKT gave up Nocturne and Shen, which is a huge risk in the current game.
The synergy is obvious to anyone and the strength has been shown by various teams on the rare occasion these two champions are allowed to be on the same team.
Who says esports aren’t for spectators? (Photo by Josh Lefkowitz/Getty Images)
SKT, playing with Pirean instead Faker, had the perfect answer. Galio is a soft counter to Paranoia/Stand United shenanigans, but having three teleports is an obvious answer to the multiple global abilities on the opposing team.
The three-time world champions had a much subtler counter to the Nocturne, to go with all those teleports: Ashe.
Historically, Ashe has been best friends with Nocturne. A successful Ashe ult means almost certain death for all but the tankiest of targets when The Eternal Nightmare comes flying across screen to slap a stunned target. But SKT deployed her as a scout, using Hawk Shot to keep tabs on SeongHwan’s jungle pathing.
How effective was it? Well, the HLE jungler ended a 33-minute game with zero kills and a single, paltry assist. He was never able to make use of Paranoia without SKT seeing it coming a mile away, which sort of eliminates the point of Nocturne in the first place.
Obviously, there was a lot more going on in the game. HLE were just awful across the board and SKT won in pretty much every lane. Still, this one champion pick – in context – illuminated just how much goes on under the surface of a professional game.
Picking the best individual champions doesn’t guarantee you a win at any level, least of all at the very top.
If the changes in 8.14 bring us back to an AD Carry-centred world, we will look back on this period as an odd quirk. “Remember when Vlad was a bot laner lol?!” If nothing else, though, it has served to educate players on some of the facets of League that lie beneath the surface.
I only focused on one of those facets today, but so many more were brought to the fore by the current meta: why AD bottom lanes were so ubiquitous in the first place, why game balance is constantly on a knife’s edge, and so on.
Maybe for some of us this is just revision, but it has been a fun learning experience, regardless.