[Diamond Design] What Designs Are Played Competitively?
Hello everyone! I should come up with something other than that as my greeting.
Anyway, first off I want to say that yes, I see you guys voting for the Lore vs Gameplay article, and I promise that it is coming! I want to be able to have better content for that topic because of how important I think it is. It just won’t be this week. Hopefully next week! Fingers crossed.
Other things, if you missed our last discussion about silences, go check it out here. If you’re just joining us for the first time, go check out the Central Hub for information about what else I’ve written.
I think that’s all the logistics, so let’s see what the magic conch wanted us to talk about today…
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Welp. See you guys next week.
Just kidding.
#What Makes a Pick Valuable in Competitive Play?
We’re going to be taking a bit of vacation from our more theoretical discussions and look more at real world applications of ideas. First though, a few things to say. I will NOT be discussing champion diversity in this thread. There are many other threads for you to go comment on that, please do not discuss that here. Yes, I agree, having more champions in competitive would be more interesting, but for reasons I hope to spell out below, that is unlikely to happen without an overhaul of competitive rules.
I will NOT be discussing the balance of these champions, except when specifically relevant to the point I’m making. I don’t know the best way to balance these champions, and for the purposes of this article, the numbers are typically not going to be important. This article, like all that I have written thus far, are focused on design, not balance.
This article will also differ from other articles I've written in the number of sources I am going to be citing a lot more sources in this one. While I hope this article will be informative, there isn’t a whole lot I can uniquely add to this discussion. Instead, we'll be looking at different values that professional players, analysts, and fans have identified that many competitive picks still have. Hope you guys enjoy.
#Lack of Counterplay
This is one of the simplest things that determines whether a champion sees competitive play. To paraphrase Phreak, professional players are playing League of Legends to win, and having fun is usually a secondary goal in competitive matches. When you’re truly playing to win, you will look for strategies that your opponent has no reasonable response to, because when your opponent has no options, the theory goes that a relatively unskilled player can beat a more skilled player. This is why pre-rework Soraka, AP Tryndamere, and Warwick have seen competitive play at different points. However, these champions tend to only see competitive play for brief periods, as they are generally patched in some way within a couple of weeks. Similarly, to go back to my last discussion, Kassadin, LeBlanc, and Talon all did excessive amounts of damage while your opponent could do nothing in return.
This also includes champions that are “overpowered” for whatever reason. If a champion is truly overpowered, then there is rarely a reason to not pick them, because there isn’t really a way to outplay that champion.
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#Versatility
Versatility is a very valuable aspect of champions that comes and goes. Champions that can do different things within a team composition are important. Champions like Lulu, who can be played top, mid, and support, are valuable because they can be played in a variety of positions. Champions like Jarvan and Ezreal, who have multiple viable builds, are also valuable because they can fill a variety of roles within a team. Instead of being locked into a tank role like Mundo, if Jarvan does well, he can build damage items and become a fighter assassin. Ezreal can tailor his build to be more aggressive or more defensive based on how he’s doing. These champions are valuable at the competitive level because they do not tell your opponent much, if anything, about your intentions for composition you’re going to be building, and become common first picks.
These champions are also useful in somewhat relation to the first article I wrote. Since I’m using the term versatility loosely here, these champions also tend to have a lot of options in their kit, which allows them to “make plays.” You don’t see “Yorick’s Great Escape” because his kit isn’t very versatile, it basically just does one thing. Champions that see montages made of them like Zed and Lee Sin have many options available to them, and can perform many ‘micro-roles’ where they waveclear briefly, or go after the carry, or provide peel and kiting aid for their teammates.
#Consistency, Reliability
These two concepts are important and related, and largely prevents the play of champions that Riot often refers to as “feast or famine” characters. Characters like Fiora, Shaco, and Katarina do not see a lot of competitive play because of how little they do when behind. If they don’t win the early game, or have a powerful mid game where they happen to pick up a lot of kills and end up getting pretty far ahead, these champions are often relegated to a mediocre position. Similarly, competitive teams will often play in ways that prevent these champions from going off by camping them or playing safe against them. When contrasted to champions like Mao’kai, Lissandra, or Morgana, the previous champions become even more obviously risky. Champions who have utility will be able to be useful even when they are behind, as they can lock up the enemy champions even if they aren’t doing damage. Champions who strictly do damage and don’t have strong fallback patterns when behind are risks that professionals prefer not to take.
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#Unique Strengths
Another important thing that champions can have which make them useful at the competitive level is something that only they can do. Champions like Azir, Twisted Fate, and Thresh all have aspects of their kit that isn’t replicated by any other champion, giving your team access to options that you know the enemy team can’t copy. In Season 2, Shen was one of the most common top laners because he could split push and teleport to your carry, something no one could replicate even with teleport. Braum and Yasuo offered defensive tools (walls/shields) that were never introduced into the game before. Zilean used to provide a global experience boost, incalculable in terms of actual power.
The obvious inverse to this is champions that do the same thing as another champion but worse are never played. This is why Akali is picked over Diana at varying points, they fulfill very similar roles with similar playstyles. There was a discussion a long time ago where the common thought was that of Amumu, Nautilus, and Sejuani, only one of them was going to be played at any given time, because of how similarly they fulfilled their role as CC initiator tank.
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#Personal Playstyles and Preferences
This is probably the single most important factor in this entire article.
Thorin, regardless of your personal opinion of him as an individual (I personally think he’s kind of a pretentious ass hat), raises important points related to playing to your own, or your team’s, individual strengths. Different players would play different champions in positions. A general example of this includes champions like Lissandra and Aatrox in Europe, Yorick jungle in China, and Twitch ADC in Korea. These champions, while not as common in North America, showed that local metas have an effect on what champions are played. Other picks, like Elise, even after repeated nerfs, were and are still played by different players as comfort champions. Players like Soaz will also kind of just play whatever they feel like, to varying degrees of success.
At the same time, professionals will tend to copy what other professionals are playing at that time, providing they are winning. Phreak, paraphrasing Hai, said that C9’s thought process was “"We chose to drop our old playstyle. We should play like SKT. They won the world championship. Let's be like them." It’s not a significant jump in logic to assume that this is a common form of thought amongst professional teams and players. In a sense, what this means, is that the personal preferences and playstyles of the top team will end up becoming the new meta. We often see this very strongly at Worlds, where in Season 3, Tabe popularized support Annie, something basically no one else played until they saw it there. At Season 4, NJWS Gorilla reminded everyone that Janna was also quite strong and since then has been one of the most common picks.
As a brief aside, doesn’t this sound familiar? Solo queue does this exact same thing! The popularity of champions in LCS or your local professional circuit can and do cause the pick rates of different champions to shift over time, if for no other reason than they give visibility to champions that people often don’t know about.
Other examples of this include the Ashe/Zyra bot lane that Cloud 9 pioneered. As the top team in the region, they innovated a new bot lane and did well with it, and other teams ended up copying what they did because it worked well. Recently, Hecarim as a solo laner was popularized by Gravity’s Keane, who described the pick as “his preferred champion against melee ADs.”
Beyond simple innovation to try and find the best characters, people also play what they find to be fun. Lee Sin and Thresh, and even Yasuo, are definitively not the strongest characters in the game. There are other champions who have better winrates, and stronger impact on games. Janna is numerically one of the strongest champion in the game in terms of winrates and has been in the top winrates (for solo queue) for a long time. However, most players find Thresh more fun to play despite being definitively a weaker champion.
#Practice Time
Of course, all of these other factors are dependent on this last criterion. Professional players in the current league system have matches every week, during which time most of the information regarding what they play is fairly common knowledge from solo queue and other sources. In order for professional players to play a champion at a level which they feel comfortable playing at a competitive level, they need a considerable amount of time to learn a champion. When your opponents learn that you are spending so much time practicing a given champion, and your opponent doesn’t know how to play against that champion, they are likely to simply ban that champion, and then all the time you spent practicing strategies and team comps related to that champion is now wasted.
This, again, leads towards players playing the same champions as each other. When players both play a given champion, then it becomes more dangerous to ban out your opponent, because then you are also banning that champion from your own team.
#Lack of Innovation?
Due to the nature of professional picks building upon each other and often just copying each other, a side topic I think is interesting to talk about is that innovation isn’t seen a lot in the competitive scene by most teams. This is unfortunate and I think the league format further reduces the incentive for players to innovate and bring new champions and strategies to the table. By spending time finding new things, professional players lose chances to practice the dominant strategies, and can easily lose their entire innovation to a simple ban. Now that each individual game in the NA/EU LCS matters more (since there are 18 games rather than 28) taking risks on strategies that aren’t necessarily proven is more dangerous.
It was fantastic to see Kikis from Unicorns of Love playing unusual junglers (Twisted Fate anyone?) during IEM against TSM. There are more champions viable now (while there is still a top tier) than at almost any other point in my experience playing this game. This means that more strategies are available for players to experiment with, and I guarantee there are a number of picks that the professionals haven’t experimented with in a competitive environment for the reasons explained above.
While there are a variety of ways to force innovation, (changing pick/ban phase, having rules relating to playing champions in a series) I don’t agree that forcing all champions to be played would necessarily be productive. It would reduce the level of competition somewhat as individual strategies are going to be less practiced, and we will see somewhat of a return to stronger individual focus as individual general knowledge will take more priority than it does right now, where practiced team comps and strategies promote more team play.
#Closing Thoughts
While not completely arbitrary, a significant amount of the champions played professionally are determined by the preferences of the top team at any given time. Moscow Five often determined what champions were playing back in the day by being innovative and winning. People would copy what the top teams were doing and either just try to play like the best players or try and adapt what was strong to their own style.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: What champions do you think should be played in competitive but aren’t? Why do you think they aren’t played?
Hey guys hope you enjoyed reading this once again. Hopefully this time we’ll get a Rioter to comment? fingers crossed Unfortunately I probably won’t be available to discuss this topic in the next couple of days with you guys, but hopefully there will be plenty of good discussion amongst you all.
Oh yeah, and I promise Lore vs Gameplay is coming, so I'm not gonna put that in the poll below. And again, if you guys have ideas for topics, please let me know!
, and I think he could be an incredibly good competitive pick in the hands of a good player. He does a lot of cool things no other champion can do, like plow through the enemy team and pull out the carry, and has a lot of power and consistency on the side that lets him do well in lots of other situations. I feel like competitive play has sort of regressed to an increasingly conservative mentality, where few changes happen unless they're forced upon the competitive scene, and that's mainly because pro play rewards victory and not originality: breaking the meta isn't as important as playing a safe and powerful comfort pick unless it brings better results, and balancing during season play is often toned down or held back until preseason specifically so as to not destabilize the pro scene.
Pre nerf Leblanc says hi.
If she hit you with ONE ability, she could immediately follow up with her ulti while you were silenced, unleashing a killer combo that you had no answer to because, well , YOU WERE SILENCED.
Didn't help that she could also SNARE (usually snare+silence is called a stun, but Riot didn't want to admit that they gave LB a powerful CC on top of an assassin kit because they should had learned the lesson with Evelynn).
Because of that, the (non) interaction of LB was as follow.
I stay behind my minion wave cs'ing, while dodging skillshots and trying to hit you.
If I do manage to hit you, I kill you.
If I don't kill you, I go back without retaliation(because silence).
My ult is on a low cooldown, so either you try to attack me while you're on low health, or I'll ult you again in less than a minute.
Of course, LB had counterplay, but most of the counterplay consisted of shoving her lane and getting ganked by the jungler.
It's not really counterplay if It means that I allow the enemy to take no risks while I expose myself just not to die horribly.
