There’s arguably no purer expression of mechanical skill in League of Legends than the ability to generate early CS leads as a mid laner, unless you want to talk about solo kills. While there’s more to mid lane than just an isolated 1v1, it is the role best captured by the CS difference at 10 minutes (CSD10) statistic.
Here’s how the NA and EU LCS mid lanes are falling out so far this split. Continue reading Ryu and Febiven top the LCS mid lane CSD10 leaderboards
Behind every carry there are helpful teammates; behind most kills, there are assists.
The tables below show where the assists came from for the three AD carries and three mid laners who had the most kills in the NA LCS 2016 summer regular season.
Doublelift received more help than the other two players from his support, Biofrost, with Bio helping on 85% of Doublelift’s kills. Surprisingly, Bjergsen only assisted on 62% of Doublelift’s kills. Part of that is because the TSM duo lane created lots of kills all on their own (Doublelift had 14 kills where Biofrost was the only assist, compared to 9 each for the other two ADC/support pairings in this graphic).
By comparison, WildTurtle and Sneaky both received more help from their junglers and top laners. In particular, Impact was very helpful in providing assists on Sneaky’s kills, while Pobelter did a lot to help WildTurtle.
Jensen was the overall kill leader of the NA LCS this split, and also had the highest ratio of solo kills among the three mid lane kill leaders. He synced with Sneaky on a lot of kills, getting more assists from Sneaky than the other two mid laners got from their ADCs.
Pobelter’s jungler and support stacked up a lot of assists on his kills, with Reignover’s support of Pobelter being much higher than the help Meteos, and especially Svenskeren, gave to Jensen and Bjergsen, respectively.
Across the board, Bjergsen had low assist rates from his teammates, relative to Jensen and Pobelter. This suggests that Bjergsen did more of his own work, and that more of his kills came from smaller engagements, where his kills would come with only one or two assists rather than three or four.
At the center of the map, two isolated 1v1 duelists square off in a battle for lane dominance, probing for openings to either all-in for the glorious solo kill, or shove the wave and disappear into the fog of war to roam to their side laners’ aid. The Mid lane is a crucial battleground on Summoner’s Rift, and has always been the home of some of the world’s most talented LoL players.
This split the North American LCS has fielded perhaps its strongest ever crop of Mids, with the addition of big-name imports like Froggen and GBM and the growth of holdovers like Jensen, Fenix, and Pobelter. Who’s really the best Mid in NA, though? And how does everyone else stack up behind them? That’s what we’re going to explore here, in a full 1 to 10 ranking of NA LCS Mids.
