Worlds 2017 Mechanics Roundup

It's subtle things that you might notice on first glance--the way Jensen times his abilities and passive and Thunderlords to all hit at once so that the damage comes in a huge spike at once that can't be reacted to with heal/barrier/flash etcetera. I don't know if any reaction ability was even available, but it's how to perfectly burst someone as Leblanc regardless. If they have any shields or flashes or anything they have to activate them way before they are below half health or they die. By the time they've dropped to half health they are dead. There is zero time to react after dropping. It may not matter on a squishy Kog'Maw, but it matters against other targets and is the correct way to burst someone regardless. It's the example of the correct mechanical play, not the example of "This guy is so hard kill watch how amazing it is that he dies!"

Also, doing so with exact precision on the speed and animations. It's actually nearly impossible to perfectly animation cancel and cast all those spells that quickly. Even on zero latency. Try it. You can't. You literally can't get the spells to come out as fast as Jensen had them come out. It doesn't seem amazing because we are used to pros very quickly chaining their spells. Much faster than even diamond level players will chain them properly. Part of it is due to the zero latency environment. Part of it is due to perfect animation cancelling. Part of it is just insane witchcraft. It seems simple, but it's actually an example of perfect mechanical play. Flawless.

It's very small, almost unnoticeable mechanical differences like this that made Jensen so hard for the other pos to match in the mid lane. All of them are way better than 99.99% of players out there. It's not the big mechanics that separate them--they have all of those down set. It's tiny things, like a spell coming out 0.027 seconds faster than average, that set the great mechanics from the amazing mechanics. Indiscernible to the average viewer. And of course decision making and timing of when to go in/when not to go in is even more important, but that's not mechanics it's a different skill. In the upcoming games it will be different for Cloud9 because players like Faker also have millisecond perfect timings, so it won't be this big mechanical outmatch for Jensen. They'll have to make better decision gameplay, even if they match them mechanically, which is extremely difficult vs. teams like SKT.