Let’s talk about Dom.
Christian “IWillDominate” Rivera is Team Liquid’s jungler and also their shotcaller, directing the team’s strategy and movement throughout the game. This puts IWD in a pivotal position to affect the outcome of every game: as Hai’s ups and downs with Cloud 9 this split have demonstrated, the individual performance of the shotcaller can make a massive difference to the team’s overall performance.
So how have the back-and-forth substitutions of Keith and Piglet affected IWD’s individual performance and playstyle?
In a scene from the first episode of HTC’s TL documentary, Re|Birth, Team Liquid head coach Peter Zhang tells jungler IWillDominate that for the good of the team, he may need IWD to accept a smaller share of the team’s gold. That gold would go to Piglet, instead, to fit his hard-farm, hard-carry playstyle.
Zhang explains that Piglet’s playstyle means he’ll be most successful if he is grabbing up as much farm as possible. This contrasts with Keith’s relatively secondary playstyle, where he can “follow push”, picking up what farm is presented to him and hitting safe targets in team fights, rather than separating from the team to hunt creeps in the side lanes and making aggressive plays.
IWD understandably tries to defend his piece of the pie. “My whole career I’ve been a more carry-oriented jungler,” he says. That implies early playmaking, picking up kills with successful ganks and carrying that lead through to the rest of the game. For example, in 2014 IWD picked up plenty of first bloods with his Pantheon.
For the most part, this is the route IWD has taken in 2015. The meta has suited him, skewing towards high-damage gankers (like it has for what seems like forever). Dom has been heavily picking Rek’Sai and Jarvan IV, with one game of Vi for flavour. However, he has not limited himself to only carry junglers: he’s put in two games on Nunu, with one win.
Dom has shown in the past that he can be versatile, using weak early gankers with strong post-level-6 playmaking, like Fiddlesticks and even Skarner. But while coach Zhang is unlikely to encourage his jungler towards many off-meta picks like those, he is encouraging IWD to shift his play pattern somewhat while Piglet is in the lineup. Zhang asks Dom to play more cerebrally, winning strategically, “not from the gold difference”.
How has this played out in Team Liquid’s games? Statistics from Team Liquid’s matches through the first five weeks give some insight. Through the first 10 games, IWD’s KDA has been almost three times as high with Keith, and he has earned 18% more gold per minute alongside the American.
IWillDominate’s Individual Statistics With Keith Vs. Piglet
| KDA Ratio | Gold Per Minute | Share of Total Gold | |
| With Keith | 7.0 | 325.2 | |
| With Piglet | 2.5 | 274.8 |
The numbers also show that IWD was given a 1.6% higher share of the team’s overall gold when playing with Keith. What’s surprising is that this didn’t come out of the AD Carry’s share: it was actually Fenix who took a smaller piece of the pie in Piglet’s games. Keith and Piglet have so far averaged the same gold share in their games (24.0% and 24.1%, respectively).
Of course, this is a small number of games, and there are a lot of other factors at play, such as the strength of the opponents, the champions being drafted for Keith and Piglet, and so on. The “Protect the Kog Maw” composition the team used in Game 2 fed a larger gold share to Keith, for example, inflating his numbers. But then again, Piglet put in a couple of games on a split-pushing Vayne, grabbing side-lane farm and potentially “inflating” his own numbers, too. Statistics are imperfect, after all.
Those caveats in mind, the early evidence suggests that when Keith is playing, IWD gets more gold, and that has translated into team success.*
It will be interesting to see how these numbers change over time, especially if Piglet gets back onto the starting roster later in the season. In the meantime, we can be sure that IWillDominate is more concerned about his Win-Loss ratio than his KDA ratio, regardless of whether he chases those Ws on a gank-heavy carry jungler or backs off his gold share, playing with his brain more than his wallet.
* What it hasn’t translated into is higher kill participation, interestingly enough. IWillDominate had a phenomenal 85% kill participation in his MVP performances in Week 1, but in Week 5 he was only in on 50% of the team’s kills.