First Blood is a compelling storyline in any game, and I find myself drawn back to exploring it constantly. A while ago, I looked at which players were most active in securing and giving up First Blood. Today I’m exploring the teams angle: which World Championships teams were best at picking up First Blood, how important was it to their success, and what are some other patterns we can spot in what their FBs looked like?
We’ll start by assessing overall First Blood rates and win rates, then move on to FB timings and how many players were usually involved in each team’s FB kills and deaths.
For a TL;DR of these findings with some “top 5” lists, scroll to the bottom of the post!
Note: The tables below contain all Worlds attendees, and span the entire 2015 Summer split, unless otherwise specified. International Wildcard teams only include data from the IWC tournaments, since this is all that I had available, so interpret the IWC team data with caution. Shoutout to Kelsey Moser of theScore esports for compiling the LPL data!
Excluding paiN Gaming’s numbers, which are based on only 7 games, Counter Logic Gaming has the most impressive First Blood rate across the full Summer split, taking First Blood in 18 of their 25 games. KT Rolster‘s 68% is arguably more impressive, given the different levels of competition CLG and KT faced in their domestic leagues, but CLG used its First Bloods more effectively, winning 89% of the time compared to KT’s 74%.
LGD, Origen, and KT Rolster stand out for some negative reasons, only winning 69%, 71%, and 74% of the games where they secured First Blood, respectively. But Origen was able to win more than half of their non-First Blood games, as well, which was very important to their overall success, since their overall First Blood rate was middle of the pack for Worlds attendees. (The Bangkok Titans have the lowest win rate with First Blood, but that’s based on just a 10-game sample size from the IWC Turkey tournament, so interpret with caution.)
Comparing win rates with and without First Blood, a few teams stand out. Cloud9 and H2k both saw their win rates drop by more than 50 percentage points when they gave up First Blood. CLG, KOO Tigers, and KT Rolster all look very First Blood-dependent, as well.
As we saw above, Origen‘s outcomes didn’t change all that much whether they earned or gave up First Blood, with their win rate dropping just 14 percentage points. EDG, SKT, and Fnatic were right on their heels with drops of less than 20 percentage points, though we should note that Fnatic only lost two games (both to Origen!) and gave up First Blood in both of those.
Bangkok Titans and paiN Gaming are at or near the bottom of this list, but again small sample sizes are a caution, especially since paiN Gaming won their IWC tournament undefeated.
Leaving paiN’s 7-0 IWC victory aside, both ahq and Fnatic dominated their leagues, winning 100% of the games where they nabbed First Blood. SKT weren’t far behind. All three LPL teams had relatively low conversion rates for turning First Blood into victory.
First Blood Times
The fastest First Blood timings came from H2k and the Bangkok Titans, both of whom tended to grab their FB kills less than four-and-a-half minutes into games. SKT and the Flash Wolves were also quite quick on the First Blood trigger.
The slowest First Bloods belonged to Cloud9, with KT Rolster and the KOO Tigers also taking their time to make that first successful play.
First Blood Assists
Looking at First Blood assist counts, Team SoloMid stands out as requiring the most team effort, with 3.3 players (killer plus 2.3 assists) involved in their FB kills, on average. Compare that to paiN Gaming, Origen, KT Rolster, and ahq, who averaged just 2.2, 2.4, and 2.6 players involved in their FB kills. Lower assist counts per First Blood may suggest more ganking for solo lanes and/or more solo kills in lane, while higher assist counts suggest that the team did more grouped-up Tower diving, or waited for larger skirmishes to get their first kills.
The top of the “win rate without First Blood” list is mostly made up of 1st seeds, including the strongest IWC team, paiN Gaming, and the dominant teams from Europe (Fnatic), Taiwan (ahq), and Korea (SKT). EDG‘s win rate lags behind the leaders, but still shows how well they performed across the full Summer split, up until they bowed out of the playoffs.
The impressive names topping the list cause CLG and LGD to stand out pretty clearly. For LGD, the standard “excuse” will be how much they tanked the middle of their season, producing a lot of unrepresentative losses. It’s been thoroughly discussed how little effort they put into their regular season until the LPL changed its ruleset to reward regular season placements more strongly. But CLG has no such excuse: it’s pretty noticeable that they won fewer than half of their games when giving up First Blood. CLG’s opponents grabbed First Blood just before the 6-minute mark, on average, which is middle of the road, but they required 3.3 people involved (killer plus 2.3 assists) to make it happen. That implies that CLG was pretty resistant to straightforward ganks on solo lanes, and didn’t give up any/many FB solo kills.
On the other side of the FB assists scale, the LMS teams (ahq and FW) gave up FBs with the lowest assist counts.
TL;DR Lists
We’ve looked at a lot of data that can interact to produce a lot of different interpretations. Here’s a quick list of takeaways to help you get started on digging deeper on your own.
Bear in mind that these lists are based on domestic results, so while the cross-regional comparisons are interesting, they aren’t necessarily predictive.
I’ve excluded the IWC teams from these lists because of the small sample sizes.
Highest First Blood Rates
- CLG
- KT Rolster
- EDG
- Flash Wolves
- SKT
Best at Converting FB Into Victory
- ahq
- Fnatic
- SKT
- CLG
- H2k
Most FB-Reliant
- Cloud9
- H2k
- CLG
- KOO Tigers
- KT Rolster
What other trends, patterns, comparisons, and takeaways can you find in this data? Leave a comment with your interpretations!
I think this just shows that there is more parody in Korea, China, and NA…. the other regions have 1 or 2 good teams while the rest are shitters, meaning first blood is less important in these regions because most of the teams are too weak to capitalize on it
Yeah to some extent, though in EU’s case I’d suggest that Fnatic is way ahead but that doesn’t mean the rest are necessarily bad. I think the average EU level is ahead of the average NA level. :)
Really interesting to see KOO on the list of FB reliant teams.
Also interesting to see Origen at the bottom of that list.
Seems to contradict conventional opinions of both squads.
Yeah, in some ways. Points to other factors that would need to be explored for those teams, like FD/FT, ability to snowball gold leads, preferred team comps…