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Location of power in the top lane's big three

Calderweiss·2/24/2014, 10:42:37 PM·5 votes·626 views

What makes the top lane bruiser metagame so strong? You’ve seen it all before. Top lane locks in Dr. Mundo, Shyvana, or Renekton, and you groan, “Not this again.” DrMundo Renekton Shyvana

Why is that? What makes these champions so strong in this metagame?

Let’s look at what people have been saying. Just wander over to the forums for a minute, and look at the patch history. What is getting hit? What are people complaining about? Auras.

To clarify, I am going to touch on 3 specific abilities. Burnout, Burning Agony, and Dominus.

The bruisers themselves don’t necessarily have a lot of hard cc. They’re fighters by nature. They stay in a fight, and they force their way through. They are able to do this because of a power trade off that their kits have. Full on tanks are meant to use their cc in a teamfight to hold down the enemy team. They do their thing, and wait for their ultimates to come back up so they can lock everyone down.

It is precisely Shyvana, Renekton, and Dr. Mundo’s lack of hard crowd control that makes them so strong. Being melee champions, they have to be able to close the gap to even be useful. If you can’t touch the enemy, what good is all the AD in the world? This is why they have chasing tools and gap closers, and precisely where the rest of their kit becomes a problem. With the tools to be able to enter a fight, they don’t necessarily have to lock things down.

The strength of the 3 kings of top lane is in their consistent damage. Now, why is this a bad thing? Shouldn’t they have a reward for being able to avoid kiting from the enemy disengage? Of course! The game should be an interactive model, which prompts skillful decisions, such as dodging a skillshot to be able to enter a teamfight (i.e., Lux’s light binding.)

Where game health comes into play is where the power in a certain champion’s kit is located. Put too much power into one skill, and they only have to use that one thing to interact with you, and it is what they will focus on building around to maximize their potential. With interactive abilities, this isn’t usually a large problem. However, let’s take a look at how it plays out with the 3 abilities I listed earlier.

The main concern with burnout, burning agony, and dominus is that you just turn them on, and then they do their thing. They’re going to just keep on doing what they do. The enemy can’t shut them off, and they don’t always cost anything to activate.

Since sunfire cape is such a strong pick right now, it encourages you to be in the middle of fights, and to just build to survive hits. You’re doing all of your damage through auras and items, and you have other skills that are just going to make you tankier anyway (Sadism, Dominus). Items such as deathfire grasp are built for a specific purpose, and they serve their use against a specific target.

All the tanks have to build at this point, are items that allow them to survive and catch up to things. Since they already have tools for this that are very strong (see burnout or Mundo cleavers), once they get in range, getting away is hard. Mundo doesn’t have to try very hard to land those fast as light cleavers from 500 units away, and all Shyvana has to do is walk on you with w up if she wants to stay close. Since they have to be able to compensate for not being ranged, their capability to stick to targets is increased. Items like blade of the ruined king also maximize this chasing potential. They are tankier, and their sustained damage is where their strength lies because of this.

Why is building this way so advantageous? Well, if you survive the fight, you can push or defend towers, take dragon or baron, or farm up gold. You’re also tankier, which means that you may not necessarily have to back right away after a fight like a ranged caster would if they lost half of their health.

You can see why this is so lucrative for professional teams. Mundo has an ad boost. Shyvana’s twin bite adds extra ad to her next attack. You get the point. With hydra, visage, botrk, and sunfire being popular right now, waveclearing was never easier when most of your damage comes from an aoe surrounding your champion. Healing back up isn’t so hard as Mundo or Renekton with visage and lifesteal, along with natural abilities.

That extra presence and strength they add just by existing are incredibly valuable, especially when they can just flat out duel most things in the game. Mundo and Shyvana also scale hard into the late game.

These champions are not bad in and of themselves, but when most of their power comes from items and a presence based damage, you can see firsthand the kind of problems it can create. item 3065 item 3068 item 3074 item 3143 item 3153item 3102

Those are just my thoughts on the big three right now, so I’d be happy to hear counter arguments or feedback!

3 Comments

Sir ArmaMalum2/24/2014, 11:15:41 PM2 votes

First off, very well said. I love reading posts like this, thank you for that!

On to the counter theory.....

You are completely right in the fact that these 3 champs are easily defined by their AoE abilities. It defines their effective range and reinforces their playstyle of being in the middle of the team. The enemy can kite, sure but as you said they have gapclosers like fighters should. Now, you have to wonder why this wasn't a problem before then. Renekton hasn't been touched at all for quite awhile, same with mundo, and shyv's light rework didn't get to Burnout save for a slight ms nerf if I remember correctly. If this is the case then what changed? I will point the finger at two things, the s4 defense tree and......drumroll........Vi .

The defense tree is a bit obvious. Perseverance was like a missive from Riot heaven for every Mundo player in the world, and there was much rejoicing.....when it was halved recently. But other areas like the amount of free stats and tenacity-esq numbers you can get going 30 in defense was (and still is) ridiculous. As such any tank and fighters even more so have gotten a huge boost there.

Now the reason I blame Vi, and to a point Zac and Lissandra as well, is that their introduction did what new champs do often once they are stabilized. They change the meta. I can't speak for every Elo range, but people have been peeling a hell of a lot less, more in favor for damage and mobility, simply because a peel-heavy team comp or peel-heavy champ can very easily be countered by Vi. Now I'm not saying she's broken, and I'm not saying she should be nerfed, but the very presence of her ult, along with Zac's leap, Lissandra's claw and other "Hellooooooooo backline" abilities that have cropped up recently have made peeling (while just as effective) a much less favored strategy. This means fighter like Renekton, Shyvana and Mundo who have the capacity to simply walk through a team's damage and still kill a carry do horrendously well.

Now I'm not saying these auras are not at least partially to blame, but I think they do well for a separate reason: all of these problem auras do magic damage. This brings an interesting conundrum of itemizing against the aura....or against every other part of the kit (xept Cleavers of course), which leads to the simple fact that it's hard to itemize against these champions because of these auras. Not necessarily due to their nature as auras, but because it provides a respectable amount of magic damage against target that will probably be building armor. This has always been a problem for these three even before they were popular, but is just now coming to a head for the above reasons.

All that being said you still hit upon very good points that Riot has or is in the process of addressing. Sunfire was moved from flat->level based, Mundo cleavers are having their width decreased, Renekton is getting a light rework (largely nerfs) and shyv received some simple number nerfs earlier. As well as Doran's shield getting nerfed and perseverance getting sliced in half, the point of most top laners in general benefiting way too much off of the s4 changes still stands. (-cough Teemo -cough-)

I still come to the same end conclusion though, so I'm less arguing the end-result and more the origin of the problem, which isn't nearly as productive, but #shrug. Like I said, love the post and gj :)

Edit: whoa this was a lot bigger than I expected, sry!

Knight Devout2/25/2014, 3:35:12 PM2 votes

I don't 100% agree with what you said, but you exposed it really well and there are a lot of things worthy to being discussed. +1 .

Spartarior2/25/2014, 1:22:11 AM1 votes

And then there is the annoying little Teemo