The floor is lava. Well, it is when Rumble is around.
The team-fighting menace hadn’t been seen much during the regular season, but now that the 2014 World Championship has rolled around, he’s come out in full force. And with some of the best Rumble players in the world on the big stage, he’s been finding huge success.
Dropping the bombs
We could start slow and talk about how Rumble ramps up during the laning phase, but let’s be honest here. Rumble is all about team-fighting. And that power comes largely from his ultimate ability, The Equalizer.
One should never stand in The Equalizer. It does an absolutely enormous amount of damage -- to the tune of 1200 plus 150% AP damage over five seconds. And have fun escaping the thing, as standing within the fire applies a 35% slow. As such, it’s one of the best abilities in the game for directing opponents around a teamfight.
Dyrus’ play at dragon early in TSM’s win against Star Horn Royal Club showed off the ideal way to use The Equalizer in teamfights. As Amazing jumped into the pit to steal away the objective, Dyrus dropped the row of missiles directly in the middle of Royal, forcing them to make a choice: run through it and take a ton of damage, or wait and forsake their teammates on the other side.
Take a look at the minimap when the ultimate is dropped. One of TSM’s main damage dealers, WildTurtle’s Tristana, was down in the bottom lane shoving minions to the tower. That means, initially, the fight was a 4v5 in Royal Club’s favor. And yet, with The Equalizer splitting the team, TSM were able to quickly take down inSec before the rest of his team was able to get over the damage wall.
Welcome to the pain
If the opposing team does manage to make it past The Equalizer, Rumble has even more pain to dish out. Thanks to his passive Junkyard Titan, the more abilities he tosses out, the more damage he’ll do.
After dropping a spectacular Equalizer to cut off Edward Gaming’s escape path, Looper makes sure to keep his heat high. Once he finally catches up with the Chinese squad, his abilities are all doing 50% extra damage.
As soon as Koro1 and Clearlove jump in to try and engage on him, he overheats, adding bonus damage to his auto-attacks. Watch how much damage each punch does. Anyone without a serious amount of magic resist will want to stay as far away as possible from his powerful jabs.
Just as with The Equalizer, his damage output after he’s used a string of abilities is an excellent zoning tool. He discourages divey champions like Maokai and Jarvan IV from jumping in with the threat of serious close-range damage.
Finishing things off
Once ahead, Rumble is more than capable of supporting his sieging allies. The composition that LMQ put together in its first game against Fnatic was ideal for allowing him to force a victory. As NoName’s Lee Sin and XiaoWeiXiao’s Yasuo dive in, he immediately follows up, creating yet another wall of AoE damage to prevent Fnatic from running past him to the true damage threat -- Vasilii’s Kog’Maw.
In teamfights, a good Rumble dictates his opponents’ positioning to his whim. Whether it’s cutting off escape paths, punishing engages, or simply just causing havoc to keep opponents at bay, he’s become a premier team-fighting pick for players at Worlds.
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