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Observations and Suggestions for the 4 Relic Shield approach

Yaknose·11/22/2013, 3:37:02 PM·1 votes·371 views

I watched the NACL games yesterday, and you could see that the idea of everybody but mid going Relic Shield was spreading. In the first game, things were fairly normal, and in the second one team went for stacking Relic shields. They were basically even in gold at one point despite being down two kills and a dragon, but in the mid game they started repeatedly losing teamfights.

In the third game, one of the two teams went Relic Shields, and took a half jungler approach, where they'd clear part of the jungler and come back to top so they could both use both charges, and the cycle would repeat. The relic shield team had some big teamfight losses after pushing to the inhibitor turrets, which I think is a repeat of the earlier game, where there was a gap between where the gold advantage from the shields wasn't enough to buy combat items to stand up to the team that took a standard approach.

In game 4, everybody just bought Relic Shield in the long lanes, and there was basically no going outside your lane for a long time.

My biggest dislike about both teams going for the 2-1-2 approach is that it felt quite boring on the strategic level. There is a lot of choice and skill involved in choosing where to gank and when, and if duo Relic Shield lanes don't have a good counter by teams using a jungler, then the Relic Shield team can just win lane, and just keep pushing in.

They might not even want to group up, since they can stay in lane longer and more effectively, and the jungling team can't spare anybody to relieve pressure for any lane. The extremely small and early observations suggest that grouping up favors the standard team which has better synergy item-wise as a team, while Relic Shields have good synergy in pairs; having four people with Relic Shield group together isn't as efficient use of the item gold.

Suggestions The standard counter to sustain is dive/all-in, and I think that's a direction I'd suggest trying: get a jungler or top who can go all in to get a kill, or take Leona bot and go all-in at level 2 with Graves.

-- Use Heimer to push mid and take the tower since nobody is coming to gank you. Alternately, take a roaming mid. TF can kill minions, push to tower, and then gate down to bot if you can coordinate the all-in 3v2.

-- Maybe just concede you'll lose a tower and then group, since outer towers are worth less gold and no xp. If you take lane bully bot and shove them under tower, they'll use the Relic Shields to last hit under turret, but they'll still probably lose some gold/xp. If you bully bot and mid, you can put put money into damage items for your ad and ap carries, while the Relic Shields haven't generated enough profit to produce matching value in a teamfight. The whole idea of a carry came about because of exactly this: if they get money, they can itemize to do more in a teamfight than an enemy that hasn't focused the money toward an item power spike.

tl;dr Relic Shield is great for gold and sustain in duo lanes, but Face of the Mountain on four people isn't as good in teamfights. I suggest being more aggressive away from top lane and wanting more teamfights, especially at the power spike when the team with jungler has just gotten major combat items on the AD and AP carries while the Relic Shield team can't do do nearly as much damage.

1 Comments

EyeBlueNCider11/28/2013, 4:07:45 AM1 votes

I'm not exactly sure at what you're trying to "change". I understand that you feel like the relic shield over powers and of the other items that they added in, like the Ancient Coin, but i'm just not sure what your complaint is. You're basically saying, that while being down the relic team is even in gold/exp (lets just say). At that point it boils down to the point of out damaging and out lasting the enemy team in a fight. While the relic helps you get ahead early game, it shouldn't be used so dependently late game, because like you said. It isn't all that great.

I think for a duo lane, the relic shield is a great starting item, as it still lets you get some HP pots, and allows your support to get that early game gold that they so desperately need. Now i think this opens the possibility for more bot-lane combos, because you no longer have to pick a champion that isn't reliant on items. You could pick a (God forbid) Poppy, because the relic shield would be perfect for her, because it gives her the gold she needs to get her Sheen early, and allows her to be relevant late game.

I've tried out a couple games with a buddy of mine, going duo support bottom, and negating the need for a ADC, now when we did this, we did it in Norms, which don't relate. But we also did Taric and Leona because of the CC potential we had. Stacked Armor, and we won every game (around 5). This may have been a fluke, but it was all possible because of the relic. I think Riot implementing this item into the game, breaks the shackles that we previously had, and allows for a more diverse, and creative game play for the future.