LoL eSports Discussion

[zoraster]

how is xpeke the midlaner for the EU all star team? I understand All Stars is mostly a joke, but surely any of the actual midlaners should play.

[SleepyKrew]

the riot justification was "allstars is about what the fans want, and the fans don't want adc peke they want mid peke" which tbh I think is solid

[zoraster]

My argument is xpeke shouldn't be at any position, surely.

[zoraster]

I kinda love the new EU LCS format.

[pickemgenius]

BUMP FOR LCK

[SensFan]

Can someone give me (or point me to) a tl;dr of the major S7 changes? Haven't played since Worlds ended, and couldn't follow well when I tried to watch LCK this morning.

[Lycanfire]

Spoiler: LCK JAG vs SKT round 1

SKT's comms are a mess. Holy shit. Nobody should force you into sloppy fights 10k gold down.

[Lycanfire]

Can someone give me (or point me to) a tl;dr of the major S7 changes? Haven't played since Worlds ended, and couldn't follow well when I tried to watch LCK this morning.

1. smite now gives a burst of HP+(amount per lvl) when used on neutrals

2. plants. Ghostcrawler really wanted some buyable plant in the game to replace wards but it was scrapped because it was stupid. Instead the idea was reworked to replace smite buffs

3. The assassin class was reworked. Katarina now has real dual scaling, and with the new Gunblade scales pretty hard. Other honorable mentions are Khazix (new Q is crazy with CDR), Rengar was given a CC-break in place of resists, his HP gain was nerfed to a gray health system like TK. His ult was sidegraded while his burst with Q combos was removed, but given AoE/waveclear in Q to compensate. Riot wants Assassins to move towards winning any 1v1 over time opposed to instantly deleting someone and trying to get away with it.

4. Armorpen was gutted, replaced by lethality. Lethality works similarly to arpen, but scales with opponent level. Making it pretty useless. You'll find archetypical assassins like Khazix or Rengar skipping it and going Black Cleaver for the mix of survivability, armor pen and cooldown reduction. It gives far more damage.

5. ADC meta is yet to settle. LCK is being conservative and playing S6 adcs, utility picks. I think with the substantial nerfs to Jhin's itemization it allows Kalista to re-enter the meta as she is primary a laning/midgame ad, not too unlike Jhin, and while her mechanism is riskier, she can start fights like he does. We need to wait until EULCS and possibly the debut of the NALCS to see what everyone wants to play.

6. Ziggs is being played bot lane. This is actually something symptomatic of late S6 and rise of tanks, but the real change that made it boil over was the new tank mastery in the resolve tree. Ziggs takes towers and only needs levels 6, 9 to be effective. Typical ad carries have little in the way of damage until 7-8k gold.

7. Jungle gives much more experience (though not as much as preseason). This is allowing for carries to be played over the jungle tank meta.

8. Malzahar is drawing bans because he is being played as a support in scrims. His rework made it so W is a consistent form of damage + gains pushing priority not unlike Karma and Zyra and has superior tower taking power. He was played in the first game of the season (ROX vs KT) and every support thought to be able to play it has had it banned against them since.

9. Teams are failing to bust tanks (40% winrate, and 1 of those wasn't a bust.) As it stands with the new mastery Maokai is the best top in the game. I see teams continuing towards a centralized tank top meta and with a Maokai ban I think Alistar will replace Singed in pick priority and Shen/Lissandra flank comps to appear.

[Psyche]

noo plz every time lissandra sees play they nerf her leave liss alone

[Lycanfire]

i think she's the only solid roamer left with the fall of aurelion sol and taliyah. TF might come back, but i definitely see lissandra being played.

[pickemgenius]

ziggs was el botto last lck night; also taliyah is seeing a general uptick again(and was also played in LCK last night)

[Lycanfire]

some really uninspiring eu games this week. by that i mean i didn't bother watching them. i'd wager h2k vs uol was probably watchable. i think xerxe and exileh have a lot of potential to grow in general.

i feel vindicated after being wrong about taliyah after seeing Hai pick TF. i probably should have seen the resurgence of Corki, who was a great roamer before Aurelion Sol auto won lane against everyone.

we're seeing shen played but not necessarily played with flanking playmakers, instead he's more of a duelling enabler along with khazix. still have no idea why alistar isn't being played. i think his playmaking power is among the highest for tanks and he has a favorable matchup against shen and nautilus. i guess tank busting in scrims must be a real thing now, because we're seeing more top lane carry bans and less maokai ones. seeing nautilus into maokai makes more sense than alistar, because maokai shuts down alistar in lane and can stop his TP flanks instantly via point click root.

Spoiler: NALCS week 2

this meta is awful for clg. darshan has fallen behind other tops in relative playmaking ability and every top is on tanks even against their own will. stixxay can't carry the deadweight with utility picks while aphromoo forgot how to play league. zikz having no idea how to draft a bot lane matchup is pretty much guaranteeing every game should be an automatic loss

i feel better for instantly dying to a malzahar in the zyra matchup in the game i played with RC. see, even pros are bad like i am.

huhi is playing great. he and xmithie are probably the only redeeming part of this team.

IMT is a dumpster fire mechanically yet somehow managed to out macro C9 several times in game 2. however IMT are so bad individually that i have to believe that the LCS is scripted because nearly every single pick Sneaky made with an ECA was made on someone with an available flash. c9's holes in their macro game are making them look like a much worse team than they are. i agree with assessments saying that FQ is the best team in NA right now. stats don't matter when you have no idea how to close a game

[KaleiÐoscøpe]

Yeserday was probably the best day to watch eulcs considering the top4 teams battled it out

[SensFan]

Thanks for that, Lycanfire. Super helpful.

[Iecerint]

Akaddian is a babe probably based on 1-2 photographs and playing OK at least once.

[Lycanfire]

C9 White vs C9 Blue today! Probably within the hour

clg just took baron vs p1 and twitch chat erupted with C9 spam

[Lycanfire]

>Piglet is one of the best mids in NA

scripted

tomorrow:
TSM vs CLG, round robin match 2

sunday:

C9 White vs C9 Blue, round robin match 2.
SKT vs KT, round robin match 2, rematch of the bloodbath of thursday night.

thursday:
Origen vs Roccat. Who will be the worst team in any major region? Featuring xPeke in mid again. Naehyun to support.

anyone intending to go to the NA finals in april?

[SensFan]

If anyone is thinking of it, I highly recommend it. I went in Toronto last year to the Summer Finals and had an absolute blast.

[Papa Zito]

TSM

[RayFrost]

So I know it's not going to happen probably, but I really want to see trundle support come back in the professional arena.

His e pops malzahar passive / forces the reposition on his ult / slows voidlings and makes them less able to chase, his ult reduces the front line capabilities of maokai and really cuts the tree down to size, and his pillar seems like it'd be more relevant into a jhin meta than it would be into many other adcs because jhin actually has no real answer to it.

With team comps trying so hard to get that one engage or catch that one person off guard / prevent the same, combined with the fact most team comps are going "we want that ONE GUY to be our super tanky front line," I feel like trundle's kinda a great idea. I dunno.

[animorpherv1]

The problem with trundle support in this meta is he'll get obliterated in the lane phase. He has a lot of great toplane matchups, why are we putting him in a lane with zyra/malz/karma where he won't make it out?

He has a hard enough time laning vs. other melees, don't make him lane vs. ranged.

[Voidedmafia]

I'm kinda surprised this went dark since about the playoffs.

Although, to be fair this MSI is kinda shaping up as expected in some ways (SKT will win undefeated as usual against non-Korean teams; I personally write off any non-Korean team (or I suppose any team not named FW or EDG) as auto-losing any games against them since fluke victories are seldom, TSM fails internationally in general with only glimmers of actual teamplay such as in the win against WE, the WC/play-in team has strong and aggresive play but isn't really able to macro and win without mistakes from the opponent as far as I can tell, and G2 seems on the teetering verge of just not making the cut internationally, though this time around I think they're doing a lot better than what we've seen before..

I was surprised WE won in China (without stuff from Lolesports.com I don't really have much of a way to see anything that''s not NA/EU so I kinda expected EDG or someteam like that to make it given WE used to be really poor in recent years IIRC), though I can't tell if they're in a similar boat to TSM or if they may be chafing some from their first taste of international play since IEM Katowice 2015. The biggest surprise is that FW floundered day 1 and had to play two comeback games to be even at 2-2. I still kinda expect this final to be FW vs. SKT unless they're 1st and 4th, though. Other two are WE and honestly between GAM and G2.

TSM (and to me, NA by extension since only TSM and C9 seem able to play internationally) simply cannot contend anywhere outside their home turf, and I guess I don't understand how they can change this without having more international chances outside of IEM, MSI and Worlds. The game against WE was great, don't get me wrong, but TSM had a decisive game against SSG at Worlds last year, and their only other wins were narrow-ish victories against Splyce; with that in mind, I think I should only expect them to get maybe one or two more wins and bow out in 6th or maaaaybe 5th, and then fall to international irrelevance akin to the IWC at Worlds this year with probly another 1-5.

on the other hand, I can see GAM getting wins off of G2 and maybe WE or FW, possibly pushing themselves to contend for semis. They still seem like the typical IWC teams with aggressive starts and good to great early games, but not really able to close out without seemingly being thrown the game by the opponent (like TSM did day 1), but they can push really far if they keep the pressure going and look like they can get a win without needing to capitalize on mistakes and instead on their own terms. Both of their losses to G2 and FW could've easily been wins.

I probably sound way too salty, but at this point we in NA have pretty much been relegated to marginal trips to international scenes, only there for the sights and groups and then heading home with nothing to show but empty pride in hometown dominance. I still feel happy whenever TSM wins the NA playoffs, and I'm glad that they have the longest finals appearance streak of any team, Esports or non-esports), but it just doesn't mean anything since they can't even translate that to being consistently competitive on the world stage. Am I wrong for feeling this way?

[PJ.]

Yeah, but don't compare sports and esports especially when you wrong.

[zoraster]

Let's sanity check this.

0. They haven't even finished one round of a round robin. Best of 1s are a pretty terrible way to evaluate teams in LoL.
1. TSM has beaten WE, the top team from China
2. TSM has shown they can beat GAM in a best of 5. While "beat the Wildcard team" doesn't sound great, GAM has shown they are pretty darn tough competition.
3. They were in a position to beat FW.
4. They played SKT pretty tough at first but then were outclassed, which is as good as anyone can say.
5. They haven't played G2 yet.
6. Let's remember that these teams represent the top teams from each region. Although you might say that the two additional Korean teams at Worlds are likely to be better than the non-SKT teams at MSI, these are still likely to be in the top echelon.

Clearly TSM is outclassed by SKT, but then again clearly so is everyone else at the tournament. Getting an early lead is as good as anyone has done. TSM has looked flat, but they haven't really looked out-classed by the other teams they've played. I think it's probably more likely than not to not make the group stages of MSI given their 1-3 start. But if your complaint is that NA teams are just there to be participants, I think that probably comes from a place of either deep pessimism or unreasonable expectations -- as long as you accept nobody but a Korean team is likely to win MSI or Worlds this year.

Remember that Europe was in a similar position as TSM this year, lost a 1st seed at Worlds and had a team make it to the semis (although facing Albus Nox made that easier).

PS. For what it's worth, I think that C9 probably would have had the higher ceiling at this tournament than TSM. Not that they necessarily would have done better or "deserve" to be at MSI more than TSM. But TSM has to work around their bot lane being a weak point, which removes dimensions to their play. Getting DL back will be helpful to them even though I think some of the WT criticism has been overly harsh.

[Voidedmafia]

Yeah, but don't compare sports and esports especially when you wrong.

Sorry, I meant recently there. Unless kiem was wrong they have the longest finals streak in recent years, with only Lebron's six NBA finals being close.

Although, what

has

been the longest finals streak that we know of? Not of wins, just appearances. The Yankees? Celtics? A Soccer/football team? NFL team? Some other sport I'm not thinking of right now?

Let's sanity check this.

0. They haven't even finished one round of a round robin. Best of 1s are a pretty terrible way to evaluate teams in LoL.
1. TSM has beaten WE, the top team from China
2. TSM has shown they can beat GAM in a best of 5. While "beat the Wildcard team" doesn't sound great, GAM has shown they are pretty darn tough competition.
3. They were in a position to beat FW.
4. They played SKT pretty tough at first but then were outclassed, which is as good as anyone can say.
5. They haven't played G2 yet.
6. Let's remember that these teams represent the top teams from each region. Although you might say that the two additional Korean teams at Worlds are likely to be better than the non-SKT teams at MSI, these are still likely to be in the top echelon.

Clearly TSM is outclassed by SKT, but then again clearly so is everyone else at the tournament. Getting an early lead is as good as anyone has done. TSM has looked flat, but they haven't really looked out-classed by the other teams they've played. I think it's probably more likely than not to not make the group stages of MSI given their 1-3 start. But if your complaint is that NA teams are just there to be participants, I think that probably comes from a place of either deep pessimism or unreasonable expectations -- as long as you accept nobody but a Korean team is likely to win MSI or Worlds this year.

Remember that Europe was in a similar position as TSM this year, lost a 1st seed at Worlds and had a team make it to the semis (although facing Albus Nox made that easier).

PS. For what it's worth, I think that C9 probably would have had the higher ceiling at this tournament than TSM. Not that they necessarily would have done better or "deserve" to be at MSI more than TSM. But TSM has to work around their bot lane being a weak point, which removes dimensions to their play. Getting DL back will be helpful to them even though I think some of the WT criticism has been overly harsh.

0.) Fair enough (why else would you jump to Bo3s, then?), but given that the last time they did well in international Bo1s was Worlds 2014 (if they had gotten out of groups last Worlds I'd include that one, too) I kinda lean toward this being more typical than atypical. I think they would do well if put in Bo5s or Bo3's, and they've proven that so far, but they've gotta get there first.
1. I legit have no clue about the strength of China as a whole this year, especially since my last knowledge of WE was of a middling team not able to make playoffs. I did like that game from TSM, but I'm trying not to pin too much on it because them beating WE has no context behind it for me to understand where it lays. If you have a better grasp of China and WE, please tell me.
2. I feel like that doesn't really say much since TSM got trounced in G1 and G2 of that series.
3. So were GAM, but they still lost. Not sure if WE would've won or not if Kled hadn't gone off that game.
4. I'm actually very surprised that G2, GAM and TSM have actually had good to great early games against them. They all eventually get outclassed by SKT's starred lineup and better macro, though, hence why I believe they'll still go undefeated this tourney except maybe in a FW/SKT finals or semis. I really wish that any of them could've been able to close out, but it's a lot better than my initial belief that SKT would kinda just steamroll everyone from start to finish.
5. I suppose. If I had to base it just off their Finals, I'd kinda say G2 has the edge, but at the same time I feel like G2 has been...slightly more erratic this MSI. It's far better than their first one last year, at the very least (even if that G2 and this G2 are entirely different teams), and Worlds.

I expect NA teams (and TSM in particular) to be competitive as well as advance from groups. I want them to win MSI/Worlds. The latter I know is virtually impossible while SKT and Faker still play (and I do seriously question if Faker's eventual successor can maintain SKT's reputation). I did see competitiveness last Worlds, that first Royal Club game aside, but they didn't make quarters. I personally just don't feel satisfied if they don't advance because then it feels like what I said; and I kinda think C9 got in last year on a stroke of luck rather than them playing up to it like H2K did. And since I can't get an MSI/Worlds victory, I just want TSM here at MSI or TSM, C9 and whoever is the 3rd team to have that good Worlds like they did in 2014 where they have multiple strong to outright dominating wins and can go to quarters on their own, with maybe one or two flukes on the way.

Unless they get, like, SKT. Then I just hope for 2nd.