Category Archives: Analysis and Opinion

Analysis and Opinion

Harnessing Shelly: Rift Herald Usage and Timings in LCS, LEC, and LCK

I wrote previously about the effects of turret plating on the professional metagame in League of Legends. It’s been obvious that turret plates have shaped the priorities of pro teams as they try to get their hands on as much of that gold as possible before the plates disappear at 14:00. One of the key ways to pick up that gold is to take the Rift Herald and use it before the 14:00 mark. This has led to increased focus on killing Rift Herald, and especially killing it early.

In 2018 across LCS, LEC, and LCK, Rift Herald was killed in 89% of games. In 2019 to date, Rift Herald is being killed in 98% of games in those leagues, a dramatic increase.

The perceived value of Rift Herald has increased, but exactly how valuable has the early Herald kill become, and how is that playing out in leagues’ and teams’ priority levels?

How valuable is Rift Herald?

A Herald charge onto an outer tower is guaranteed to break two turret plates (worth 160 gold each), and it can lead to even more plates if the accompanying push isn’t well defended by the opposing team. Factor in the time the team gains in taking down the rest of the tower’s health in later pushes, and the Rift Herald’s value seems pretty high.

But you rarely get something for nothing. Objectives are frequently traded for something else cross-map. Anecdotally, the most common trade for Herald is a dragon.

According to the latest early-game rating (EGR) model, 320 gold at 15:00 is worth ~4.0 percentage points of win probability. Comparatively, holding one more dragon at 15:00 is worth ~7.5 points of win% — almost double!

If a team is looking to take the Herald pre-14:00 in trade for a dragon, they need to strongly believe either that a) the Herald is going to generate much more than two plates’ worth of value, or b) the dragon is less valuable than average due to its type and/or the two teams’ compositions and win conditions. Continue reading Harnessing Shelly: Rift Herald Usage and Timings in LCS, LEC, and LCK →

Analysis and Opinion

Golden Start: How GGS earned a 2-0 in the first week of the 2019 Summer Split

Golden Guardians finally did it. They started off their split with a 2-0, showing signs of promise without having to play catch-up for once. With their strong dragon control and constant movements to cover each other, they found themselves keeping the death count low while piling up the objectives.

These games were by no means perfect, but you can clearly tell they were thinking about how to push their game plan forward. This article will go over the specific aspects GGS executed on which showed a good sense of the fundamentals, while also highlighting areas for improvement in their vision game when executing a Baron Power Play. Continue reading Golden Start: How GGS earned a 2-0 in the first week of the 2019 Summer Split →

Analysis and Opinion

League of Legends’ Sustain Problem

There’s a pursuit that’s been going on in high level League of Legends for years. No one brings it up, no one talks about it, I’m not even sure most people realize what they’re doing when they’re looking for it, but it is constantly in play: it is the persistent search for the next great source of free or cheap early game sustain.

You could argue that this goes back to the days of Doran’s Blade, Crystalline Flask, or even Long Sword/Boots + Health Pots, but for the first half of League of Legends’ lifespan the options remained fairly stagnant. It was really the introduction of Warlord’s Bloodlust at the start of Season 6 that made people realize just how powerful early game sustain could be. And thus began a cycle: high-level players would discover a source of early game sustain, one that was cheap or free, and they would use it to bridge champions’ weak early games, or make their oppressive laning even stronger, by mitigating opponents’ ability to trade against them.

How Did We Get Here?

If sustain is such an early-game inhibitor and Riot wants to encourage early-game aggression and player-to-player engagements, why have meaningful early game sustain at all? Well, the answer is simple: sustain feels good. Continue reading League of Legends’ Sustain Problem →