A Big Strength of Asian Teams is How They Handle Subs

Limrick·10/9/2016, 8:34:56 AM·4 votes·452 views

In the West, substitute players are for emergencies, just a backup in case your star players get sick or something. Asian teams will often gather 2 equally skillful players for a certain role, but with different playstyles and champion pools. Take SKT at last year's Worlds. Faker and Easyhoon are both incredibly skillful players, but they both have wildly differing playstyles, Faker preferring fast paced brute force champs, while Easyhoon was famous for his control mages. Depending on the strength of the opponent, they could choose the better mid lamer for that matchup. Western teams will not be able to beat Eastern ones until they too adopt this style of substitutions.

2 Comments

B00B0010/9/2016, 9:56:35 AM1 votes

They have started, C9 regularly subs supports in and out depending on opponent and style, fanatic have two top lancers for subbing in and out against certain people and roles.

The biggest adopter is Origen, they had a difficult split this summer that's very true and they could sub properly as xpeke had to adc now take a step back from that and when they had a full roster both power of evil and xpeke would play regularly, origin have now recently acquire two new starting ADCs to sub in and out as required while they are doing the same In the mid lane.

As far as I know everyone except C9 in NA have yet to adopt the sin strat in some shape or form.

On the flip side this isn't the main reason why the east is still slightly better, the main reason is for those ability to analyise in game and adapt on the fly

Draqone10/9/2016, 4:10:45 PM1 votes

To be honest I don't think subs are the biggest problem.

The problem is that western team scrims are not taken seriously enough to perfect objective control. This means in sieges and Baron fights western teams suffer greatly.

Many casters voiced concerns with western scrims, saying they are clown fiestas or that they end with a quick surrender once a team gets lane advantages.

This is totally apparent when you look at the way ROX or SKT played their games. ROX lost lane in nearly every game but still finished the group in first place because of baron steals, flawless defences and being able to drag the game out. Around objectives, when they get a lead they rarely make even small blunders and when they are behind they ruthlessly exploit every small mistake western teams frequently make.

IMHO, the only western team that has good sieges is H2K, but then their barons are still abysmal.