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How to win a Championship - Playoff teams adapt to Cinderhulk

Riot·4/18/2015, 1:15:17 AM·2 votes·22,947 views
The last two competitive patches for League of Legends (Patch 5.5 and 5.6) have prompted gigantic shifts across all of League of Legends. Sejuani and Urgot are ban or first pick worthy. Nautilus and Kennen are considered viable and even strong supports. We’ve seen Udyr and Gragas in the jungle. Hell, top laners are even taking Smite half the time and nobody is batting an eye. One thing is for certain -- the game has changed. The version of League of Legends that teams formed their identity on during the Spring Split has dramatically shifted. It’s time to adapt. This patch isn’t for everyone. Players and teams spend years crafting their identities. Not every team has the capacity to slot in the proper tank picks and initiation champions to have it work with the individuals as well as the team environment. First, let’s take a look at what is strong on the 5.6 Patch.

League of Tanks

Tanks are in; Cinderhulk made sure of that. The passive damage aura as well as the percent max health scaling have allowed tank champions a better way of creating map pressure by farming/pushing, as well as a significantly stronger teamfight presence through straight up tankiness. Outside of just the jungle champion pool switching over to tank champions like Sejuani, Gragas, and Nunu, having an extra super-tank in the game has some far reaching implications on the champion pools of other lanes. When tanks are in vogue, assassins are going to be less effective. Having more tanks diminishes the number of viable targets for an assassin to target. When an assassin becomes predictable, they become far more punishable. Taking that one step further, it is now possible to construct a team composition where there are no ideal targets for an assassin to target. Urgot can play in the AD carry position, the support can be a tank, and the mid-laner can be resilient. It’s not an easy world for assassins. When burst damage becomes devalued (see assassins) sustained damage becomes more valuable. Enter Vladimir. This guy had hardly existed in the meta before the 5.5 Patch, and now he is banned or picked in nearly every game. Vlad shows weakness in the early laning phase, as well as a weakness to burst damage that can make him burn his pool of blood in suboptimal situations. With tanks everywhere, damage is lower and Vladimir can sustain an immense amount of damage throughout a teamfight. Additionally when Vlad gets several rounds of cooldowns out in a teamfight he can end up healing for some insane numbers. Unless Vlad is the primary focus of the enemy, he can leave a team-fight completely unscathed. The same theory is true for champions like Kog’maw, who is normally a sitting duck for assassins. If those assassins aren’t being played, it becomes an easier task to protect the Kog’maw. Lulu shields and Janna shields become far more effective when overall damage is lower. Additionally, Kog has one of the best tank-killing kits in the game with armor shreds and percent max health damage loaded into his kit. With more tanks in the game, the ability to start teamfights increases as well. A team with Sejuani, Maokai, and Nautilus has three huge teamfight starters and is incredibly difficult to disengage. Righteous Glory helps with this as well, and is being purchased more after it was buffed to give 650 health in the 5.5 Patch. No longer can you dissuade a team from initiating by landing some poke, especially when it hardly makes a dent in the tanks. It's also harder to disengage when a team can constantly re-initiate with the next major tank CC. Even if Janna ults away Maokai, a Sejuani ultimate could already be flying through the air to lock a team down. Overall, burst damage is down. Shields and heals are heavily valued due to lower damage. Crowd control is more prevalent with more tanks in the game. Initiation comes from multiple angles. Sustained damage is paramount. Team-fighting is king. Here comes the adaptation part. We don’t need to look far to find examples of players and teams who have struggled to adapt to the rules of this patch.

Struggling to adapt

The Jin Air Green Wings are the most recent example of a team that couldn’t adapt. During the regular season, Jin Air was a great poke and disengage team. The most memorable game displaying this skill was during Week 3 of the regular season where they won a 64 minute game while only suffering a single death. Jin Air were masters of poke, disengage, and only taking the proper fights. That game was before all the patch changes: Righteous Glory gave less health, Cinderhulk didn’t exist, and tanks/initiation in general were not a dominant strategy. Fast forward to the 5.5 and 5.6 Patches. Jin Air lost 0-2 in Week 11 to CJ Entus, a team they had 2-0’d in their first meeting. Jin Air even lost to KT Rolster 0-2 in Week 12, a team below them in the standings. When you combine Jin Air’s Week 11, Week 12, and Playoff results, they are a 0-7 in their last 7 games on the Cinderhulk patches. Jin Air just doesn’t play well in the current version of League of Legends. GBM can’t successfully poke down opponents and dissuade them from fighting on his Xerath. Chei can’t disengage as successfully on Janna to allow them to continue to rotate around and push lanes in typical Jin Air fashion. To Jin Air’s credit, they realized that their old style of play wasn’t going to cut it in their playoff series against CJ and adapted their champion picks to the current style. Throughout the series Chaser played Sejuani in the jungle all three games. GBM played either a protection champion (Lulu) or a sustained damage dealer (Cassiopeia). Pilot or Cpt Jack (the ADCs of Jin Air) stuck to teamfighting AD carries like Jinx and Sivir the entire time. Champion pick wise, Jin Air was no longer going for their poke and disengage style. Unfortunately for Jin Air, they couldn’t adapt their playstyle to match the champions they played. The series was a complete landslide in favor of CJ Entus, with the combined kill score of all 3 games being 28 to 5. Jin Air was on champions who could initiate, but after playing an entire season of figuring out how to avoid fights, starting fights proved difficult. They were consistently outclassed by CJ Entus in every team-fight element of the game. Whether it was from a missed Sejuani ultimate or a poorly timed Sivir ult, Jin Air showed that they couldn’t play well on this patch of tanks and teamfights.

Patching to a Championship

Over in the LMS, AHQ e-Sports Club made a miraculous run through the playoffs because they understood the rules of the patch. AHQ was the fourth seeded team coming into the playoffs and needed to defeat the No. 3, No. 2, and No. 1 seeds from the regular season in order to win their Championship -- and they did it. AHQ ran 3-5 tanks per game and crushed through the playoffs 3-0, 3-0, and 3-1 to win the LMS spring split and qualify for MSI. It was an unlikely story but it was made possible in part due to their willingness to adapt to the patch. Quarterfinals | Semifinals | Finals AHQ was the best team on the patch; the regular season results meant nothing. The current strengths on the patch matched up extremely well with the player and team strengths of AHQ and they were able to take the LMS by storm. With the finals approaching in both LCS regions, we have to remember that the entire LCS playoffs have been played on the 5.6 Patch. FNC, UOL, TSM, and C9 have all shown an ability to adapt to the patch. What’s fascinating is all four of those teams have managed to maintain a portion of their own identity while morphing to fit the patch style.

Fnatic

Rather than playing 3-5 tanks like AHQ did over in the LMS, Fnatic did their best to play things that could succeed against tanks and still provide early game pressure, as fits with their teamfighting style throughout the year. In FNC’s series vs. H2K, Huni eventually found massive success on Vladimir, while it was ultimately Reignover who carried them with early game pressure on Reksai. Huni’s champion pool will continue to be tested at finals and we’ll see if his Vladimir pick is denied. Fnatics’ ability to apply early game pressure will remain paramount.

Unicorns of Love

UoL played some absolutely crazy stuff like jungle Gnar, but it all fit in with the overall team comp during the series. They found the majority of their success with PowerOfEvil on Orianna due to his ability to shield as well as pressure in important teamfights. Remember, shields become more effective when placed on top of tanks that already possess a large amount of Armor and MR. Look for Orianna to be a key pick for UoL in finals.

Cloud9

Cloud9 struggled heavily in their first two games of the series vs. TL in part because both teams had adapted well to the patch. In a hard fought series C9 built team compositions with very distinct battle lines. Balls was always on a champion who could dive. Sneaky and Hai were generally providing large amounts of sustained damage from the backline. Meteos and LemonNation were on versatile midline champions who were able to adapt to the fight at hand. In the Finals it’s not so much the champion picks that we need to track for C9 but their consistency, as they took many strange fights in their 2 defeats to TL.

Team SoloMid

The only team who made the finals in fewer than five games. TSM maintained their mid-lane focused strategy but slotted in the rest of their champion picks to fit the meta. Dyrus on Lulu is a big win for TSM because it allows enough protection for WildTurtle to shred through tanks. Santorin’s versatility has also been a massive win for TSM this season, as he appeared to be the best Gragas player in North America, playing it in all three of TSMs victories. The versatility that TSM has devoted their entire year to creating is paying off, and makes them the favorites in the finals. The teams that win the championships in the LCS will be teams that can adapt to the 5.6 patch. This means not only playing and picking the tanks who benefitted most from the Cinderhulk changes, but also playing the champions who thrive in an environment where these tanks exist. The final factor is making sure that it still fits with the teams overall style. As always, the meta is dead. Long live the meta.

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14 Comments

KSHarrison4/18/2015, 2:38:14 AM24 votes

I'm not sure the engage potential has increased in the "tank meta." We can look to IEM Katowice for this. Typically an international competition features a variety of regional metas meeting, and the winning team, it can be argued, plays the most optimal variation of the contemporary meta-style.

TSM won all of their matches at IEM with hard engage comps using a single tank or less. They ran Vi jungle, Lissandra mid, Maokai top, Sivir ADC, and Annie support. TSM's alternative picks (not necessarily at IEM) were Rek'Sai, J4, Lulu, Kennen, Sion, Zed, LeBlanc, Viktor, Jinx, Lucian, Morgana and Thresh. Some here have less engage potential/CC than others, but I do think the optimal representation of the pre-5.5 meta involved assassins and big engage to force favorable fights and delete the enemy team quickly. It was TSM's clearly most-favored style. Even though TSM didn't play it, Hecarim was also becoming possibly the top lane power pick at this time, who fits perfectly in with this mid game engage snowball style.

Fast forward to the tank meta, we still have high engage and CC, but we are seeing some teams trend more towards disengage with these powerful front lines. With lower damage and fewer assassins abusing the map against passive scaling champions, Karthus, Vlad, Orianna and Azir have returned. The late game meta shifting bursty ADC like Graves/Corki/Lucian out for autoattack ADC's like Kog'Maw and Jinx favor sustain supports like Nami. Urgot and Kallista are in. These make great ranged anti-dive or kiting team comps, especially with a Lulu or Trundle top or any frontline tank, as well as Nunu, Nidalee, or Grags jungle. There are plenty of kiting picks in the scene.

Disengage notwithstanding, power picks like Sejuani, Zac, Shyvana, Hecarim, Nautilus, support Kennen are all real. Even though Kennen's ult doesn't do much against beefier targets, as a support you don't miss out on damage picking him over a Morgana, but you have a much more brutal engage, burst, and lane trading. As expected, having more diversity in viable champions results in more diverse play styles.

Overall, is it really a tank meta? Lulu, Kennen, Nami, Janna, Morgana, Karthus, Vlad, Azir, Rumble, Leblanc, Zed, Nidalee, AP Kog'Maw are all viable picks. Bjergsen said on stream 2 weeks ago that if Viktor weren't disabled, everyone would be playing him. We even see Smite/TP Lee S...ok I can't go that far. At any rate, it just doesn't seem the picks are entirely one-sided in favor of tanks, perhaps the tank picks are barely surpassing 50%-60% of all viable picks.

Was this just a result of Cinderhulk? Cinderhulk heralded in tankier junglers, but actually the old jungle was dying anyways. Sure, Nidalee and Rek'Sai were good, but they're still good now. After J4 was bodyslammed with nerfs, the only jungle pick lost from the old meta was Vi, in exchange for a handful of tank junglers. Good deal for us, but the previous jungle meta had been progressively pushed to its most fragile state in years. Cinderhulk was the final Jenga block. At the same time, Cho'Gath was gaining popularity even before 5.5 as an assassin response, and Urgot received a major buff, both picks critically successful lane choices against the dominant Zed. Xiaoweixiao broke out Karthus before 5.5. Lanes everywhere were already burgeoning with ways to slow down the lane phase.

Back to the meta. I think we currently find ourselves in a fluctuating meta where mid game snowball comps are struggling to maintain the traction they once had against immutable beefy opponents. This leads to a meta whose definition encompasses more than tanks; it includes a variety of late game picks. It's a scaling meta. Just an appeal to semantics? Probably, but labels carry a lot of implications in their superficial interpretation.

While a mid-game win condition comp has relatively few potential picks (Hecarim perma ban) and is fairly unreliable at bullying more passive lanes to provide a consistently successful early snowball strategy, we still see some of them having success. Double AD comps can be run. You can with some effort scrounge together an early game comp roster -- albeit at your own risk. Still, most teams seem to be finding a way to incorporate at least one or more scaling picks into their rosters, whether or not they are tanky.

One interesting existing powerful scaling strategy that nevertheless has early snowball potential is the double smite comp, which especially in conjunction with a lane swap, can allow a team to secure a sub-5 minute dragon and start stacking them with incredible efficiency and a limited ability to contest from the enemy team. In standard lanes you end up with a massively farmed top laner, whose Smite is higher level than the other jungler, to bully dragons for your team. By 25-30 minutes, you can be threatening 5th dragon, a relatively early win condition.

How long will this diversity last? Who knows. With this many picks and potential comps vying against each other, as well as the inevitable innovations in pocket picks that erupt in an unstable meta landscape, it could take several weeks before players discover the most optimal play style, the most viable 2-3 picks per lane. Or maybe, just maybe, Riot has finally struck gold, the gold mine of diversity, where a variety of play styles each supported by a mutually exclusive cast of champions can coexist without collapsing into a single default choice.

Boy do I feel bad for whichever Rioter will be blamed for the patch that knocks us out of this sublime state.

Troll Pool4/18/2015, 2:21:12 PM4 votes

There's no such thing as a double smite comp, or a toplaner smite meta. There's only OP as fuck cinderhulk. You don't see them running any other enchant do you?

Returning league of tanks was the worst idea ever. Tanks are already far easier to play then carry style junglers. They have little risk and are always effective due too their cc and now they have insane damage too.

Can't wait till this dumb item gets burned to the ground.

AIRB0RNE4/19/2015, 10:48:17 AM4 votes

This is Cinderhulk meta. It's not like names really matter but the largest change from the previus meta is cinderhulk. I did a little research and in the NA and EU LCS playoffs 75% of the smite upgrades were cinderhulk. But cinderhulk is not equal to win, in fact a lot of double smite, double cinderhulk team comps lost against single cinderhulk or warrior enchant teams (sorry i didnt made statistics about this). ** Some data: number of games : 38 number of smites : 110 (76 jungler smites + 34 toplane smites) cinderhulk upgrades: 83 - 75.5% warrior upgrades: 24 - 21.8% magus upgrades: 3 - 2.7% devourer upgrades: 0 (this REALLY needs to change)**

I dont think Riot hit the gold mine of diversity, I belive this diversity is coused by the amount of change. Cinderhulk affected a lot of champions and not only jungler and the teams had little time (so far) to analyse and prepare for these changes. The cinderhulk meta is not better (or worse) than any other. It has erorrs, like the situation of ADCs (see FORG1VENGRE for example. He carried his team in the regular season and now struggles.)

The other big change in the play style could be summerised by one line: more macro less micro. Being more tanky means that your mistakes cost less (and a successful skill shot means less) and it means that most of the games are decided by teamplays and overall team decisions, and much less by individual mistakes or outplays. To some people this is bad becouse there are less "big plays" and explosive teamfights, but this also means that the victorius team is really better than their opponent, they didnt win just becouse the ADC had more critical hits in an important team fight (:

Sorry for my bad english i am not a native speaker.

ScareyCarey4/19/2015, 4:07:14 AM2 votes

Yes, it is a tank meta, that's not a question. Tank meta doesn't mean you list off mids and supports and go "Look, these champions aren't tanks." Of course you're still going to have AP/AD carries, you need people to do damage. It's about top lane suddenly being tanky, jungle is tanky, and supports are often tanky. It's also about top laners/junglers who used to go damage focus that now build tank-oriented instead. Like Vi going tank, Gragas going tank, Shyvana being more tank-focused. It's a tanky meta because most games now feature teams with 2, possibly even 3 tanks when previously you were up against Rengar jungles and Kennen/Lissandra tops. It's the constant Sejuani picks because her CC is enough and all she needs to do is survive. It's the fact that now even tankier mids take the spotlight sometimes with Cho'Gaths and Urgots gracing the lane. Nautilus support suddenly being viable because he can finally survive long enough to consistently pull off all that CC is a factor. Non-tanky champions being picked (seriously, you're still gonna need an AD and an AP carry) don't refute that.

Look past the LCS and into the LPL and LCK and it's the same story. Tank Gragas jungle picked up over there before it did here. And when in the history of the LCS have we ever, ever seen as much turret diving as we have these past couple months with these changes? A single numbers advantage can now spell death for a lane going even with its opponent because the turret damage can be so easily survived and juggled. Cinderhulk's running rampant and, while these patches have heralded in a long-unseen period of plentiful champion diversity, some of the most interesting things to note lie in its flaws.

This patch is one of the worst times in League to be an ADC. Entire comps have been built around keeping them alive (increasing the tank meta by adding shields onto health) because even with BotRKs and Last Whispers few ADCs can survive fighting the swarming, tanky top laners and junglers, even if they're a little bit ahead. And if the support peels for long enough, an ADC often won't be able to solo them before back-up arrives. The LCS has seen the introduction of so many champions we haven't seen played in ages, which is truly a benefit, but champions like Kha'Zix, Rengar, Nidalee (for the most part), Lissandra are falling more and more to the wayside because fights don't end anymore and these champions can't kill the tanks and certainly can't sustain through them. Even ADC's are changing to things that do huge amounts of burst damage or shred through people super quickly late game...because of the tanks. And if you look at the mid changes, because you need the damage and they're still good, you'll still often see a Zed or a Leblanc. But the Orianna is coming back because she can shield ADCs, Azir and other mid laners like him are relevant because they can sustain damage through long, drawn-out teamfights and because the utility and 'protection' they bring is sometimes more important than the damage. These changes all reflect the adapting that's been having to be made around a meta that sometimes doesn't see first blood until 23 minutes into the game. And that's insane.

On the whole I love what the new changes brought, and it's as close to hitting gold as Riot has ever come...but now comes the very, very hard task (made so hard now that they've come so close) of balancing that, too. The changes still favor tanks a little too much, Cinderhulk is likely still a little too strong, and being able to run Smite top without an escape (and still do well) is immensely entertaining, but troubling. I'm actually finding myself wishing a little bit for the old meta to come back, just to make the games more exciting. Because while long, sustained teamfights are awesome, every teamfight playing that way becomes almost...tedious. But like I said, it's so close to almost-perfect. Maybe the tank stats need to be peeled just a bit, the damage brought back just a little, the poor AD Carries finding their place again after being more fragile and risky than ever. I don't know exactly what the change needs to be, but I'm glad Riot's done well enough that this conversation can even be had in the first place.

BlackJaws4/22/2015, 6:02:05 PM1 votes

So... (just thinking about possibilities here...) What about a overall damage nerf for the the damage on the Cinderhulk, except to monsters. damage like a Sunfire Cape, maybe less, to champs and higher to monsters for the tank clear time. Cinderhulk is a great idea for an item, but i think that smite top is a bit too strong for solo-queue because of it in its current state. Thanks!