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Help me understand something about Kog Maw.

LoliKnight·8/10/2017, 10:59:22 AM·2 votes·1,069 views
[S7] ADC Kog'Maw Champion Analytics - League of Legends

Wall of text incoming. TL;DR at bottom .

Before I begin, let me get a few of things out of the way.
First off,I am not an ADC main even though Ezreal is one of my favourite champions. I consider myself to be a jack of all trades master of none . Second, I haven't played vs a Kog Maw in the recent past and the only game I've played as Kog Maw in a meaningful timespan is one where I had a first time ranked TP teemo support and a J4 who forgot smite so I refuse to be opinionated in any way by said game. Bottom line being ; No I havent been stomped by a Kog Maw, nor have I been demolished as a Kog Maw. And I possess no personal bias toward or against said champion. This is definitely not a post about Kog Maw being weak or needing changes. Now coming to the matter at hand.

In v5.22 , Kog Maw received some sweeping changes that I actually thought were very novel and unique. I'm sure everyone here knows about the changes I'm talking about ( the W bonus attack speed, 5.0 attacks per second and what not) However, in patch 6.19, Kog's changes got reverted ( At least the W changes) .

Some of the reasons given for this were the fact that as he was unable to move in between autos lategame unless you use unique keybinds or worse, scripts, it created a feast or famine interaction, the kind Riot is averse to supporting . And also the fact that all the items he made catered towards his early/mid game ( Wits , Guinsoos) , hence warping his power curve towards the mid game rather than the late game as was intended by RIot.

Fast forward almost a single patching cycle from the Kog Maw revert and he is still making Wits end, Guinsoos, and has a solid early to mid game winrate, and yet is outclassed by 9 ADCs post the 40 minute mark : Twitch, Vayne, Corki, Sivir, Xayah, Ashe, Tristana, Jinx and Caitlyn, in decreasing order of winrate post 40 mins in. Now eliminating Corki from the mix due to relatively small sample size, and Sivir as her lategame strength I believe, comes more from the utility of that ultimate than her natural scaling; Kog Maw still gets "outcarried" during the time frame he's expected to rule the roost .

I feel this is due to his items . He still builds wits end guinsoos and I do believe these make him strong in the early to mid game. Now what I want help in understanding, is why revert the rework if the intention was to move him away from building on hit and actually fit into late game compositions? I understand he's in a good spot right now and that's good and all, but what was the point of reverting the rework if his power curve stays the same and he still builds the same items?

And is building crit still viable on him, and will it have any bearing on his late game or is the early/mid given by on hit too powerful to ignore?

TL:DR; Kog Revert feels like it changed nothing in terms of his item choices and his power curve. Why? And are any other item choices viable on him or obsolete? And is his falling off late game to do with items made or meta favouring crit, in which case will building crit make him strong in the late game? No I'm not crying for changes, as someone who MIGHT play more of the champ in the near future, I just need some help understanding his pattern as a whole.

4 Comments

Fondling Gems8/10/2017, 11:38:45 AM2 votes

From what I understand kogmaw is still meant to be an on hit ADC. He was pre rework, he was during the rework, and he still is post nerf. The reason the rework was reverted did not have to do with the attack move binding trick or anything like that, it was because it became almost impossible to balance on hit items around both him and every other on hit champion.

He was singlehandedly breaking an entire statline for every champion in the game due to his double AS cap. It was to the point where players would jungle him at the time because the AS jungle item was the best on hit item in the game. Then at 30ish minutes he would pop out of the jungle with his finished jungle item, Rageblade, and runaans and melt 3 targets, with AOE damage around each of them, for very high % health damage + decent base damage that was a pretty even spit between magic and physical damage which was very hard to itemize vs.

A DPS champion would show up with some of the longest range in the game and melt entire teams before they could reach him. We are talking tanks, squishies, everything all dying in 2-3ish seconds tops.

The only thing in his kit he was really abusing was his double AS cap, his damage was perfectly fine in his kit. This meant the only way to nerf him was to balance every on his item around Kog maw, which in turn would completely kill off everything from Yi to Shyvana.

So the rework was basically viewed as a failure and he got partially reverted, not because Kog couldn't be put in a balanced state with 5.0 AS, but because he couldn't be put in that state without ruining on-hit items for every other champion in the game.

Fast forward to now: Kog maw is roughly the same powerlevel he was pre rework. However the reason he is now a better mid game compared to the late game hypercarry that had an entire playstyle named after him (Protect the Kog comp) is because of a couple outside factors.

First of all items: On hit items used to be very late game, and in theory they still mostly are. However a couple core on hit items like rageblade were completely changed from the form they had back in the old kog days. The item has been much more heavily geared towards the mid game now. That in itself helps shift on hit champions towards a mid game powerspike.

To add onto that Crit builds scale far better now than before. The raw damage output is quite a bit higher than before, and combined with armour changes this means a few things: Crit builds do EVEN MORE damage to squishies than they used to, meaning the burst they provide will often beat an On hit Champion late game, and crit builds + the new tank shred items are (while not quite as good as on hits) still strong enough to kill tanks. This means that late game a Crit ADC will beat an On hit ADC in a fight, and does the job of an On hit ADC almost as well as one.

So do to heavy item changes on hit items are just stronger in the mid game and get more heavily outclassed late game by crit than before. In the current meta immobile ADC's aren't doing great either, and protect the ADC comps have fallen to the wayside a bit. For a champion like Kog that means that he can't afford to hit lategame anymore because the meta has shifted for him, even if the champ is still designed to be a late game hypercarry.

To summarize: Revert happened because On hit 5.0 AS Kog wasn't compatible with other On hit champions in the game. He is still just as late game geared in terms of kit as pre rework. It is changes to the current meta as well as On hit item changes that have moved his powerspike from late to mid game.

You have to keep in mind that the kog changes happened in with changes to every ADC in the game and all their items. The very role of ADC shifted substantially in that time. Even though kog got partially reverted he is in a very different game than he was pre ADC update.

As for CRIT Kog I couldn't say, I am not a big kog player either, I just know some of the reasoning behind the changes and like to look at the full scope of the game.