Tag Archives: WildTurtle

Analysis and Opinion

TSM vs DIG: NA LCS week 2 Win Conditions

The most anticipated match of NA LCS week 2 is TSM vs Dignitas, taking place tonight. TSM need to regain some of their confidence after a disheartening 0-2 loss to Cloud9, while Dignitas have been exceeding expectations so far and can prove themselves as a top contender if they beat TSM.

Here are three keys to the series for each team.

Team SoloMid

Push the pace early.
Chaser has always played a slower, more methodical game out of the jungle, picking and choosing his moments with care. Svenskeren is at his best when he’s moving more quickly and pressuring the enemy’s jungle, ideally with Bjergsen available for backup. A faster pace could help keep Chaser off balance.

Get WildTurtle more involved.
TSM’s AD carry has the lowest kill participation on the team (59.5%) and has yet to be involved in a First Blood kill, but he’s actually been winning his lane, slashing +100/+3.6 GD/CSD@10. WildTurtle can be explosive when he’s given the chance, but TSM have been leaving him and Biofrost to their own devices most of the time. I want to see TSM give some more resources to their bottom lane to help WildTurtle break out.

Give Bjergsen counterpicks.
TSM are really going to struggle if they don’t make good use of their strongest player. We know Bjergsen can carry in the late game on scaling champions if the team lasts long enough to get there. (Just look at game 1 against the Immortals.) But TSM’s struggles so far have been losing too hard too early: they have the league’s worst GD@15, at -1,571. TSM should help Bjergsen get the upper hand by saving their mid lane pick for later in the draft and choosing a winning matchup against Keane.

Dignitas

Spill first blood.
In week 1, Dignitas earned First Blood in five of their six games. Chaser and Keane were each involved in four of those five kills. Mid and bot are both good targets: Keane could use the help against Bjergsen, though WildTurtle may be a slightly easier target to hit.

Ride Ssumday hard.
When you’ve just imported one of the very best top laners in the entire world, and when his first week in North America has gone this well, you’d better appreciate what you have. Ssumday’s impeccable team fighting and Teleports haven’t slipped at all. Whether Dignitas put Ssumday on a playmaking tank or another carry like Fiora, the rest of the team needs to be ready to take advantage of his strength.

Keep killing wards.
Dignitas are averaging a 23.9% invisible ward clear rate, which is good because TSM are leading the league in wards per minute. The more vision Dignitas can clear, the more risks Svenskeren and Biofrost will need to take when roaming and invading to refresh that vision. With players like Chaser and Keane ready to jump on enemy mistakes, and Ssumday available with his strong Teleports, vision denial could create some key opportunities for Dignitas to take control of the series.

Photo courtesy of flickr.com/lolesports

Check the Data

Assist Support for NA LCS Kill Leaders

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.

ADCs

ad carry kill leaders teammate participation

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.

Mids

mid lane kill leaders teammate participation

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.

Analysis and Opinion

Top 6 LCS AD Carries

We’ve just arrived in the Year of the Monkey, but for League of Legends, 2016 has felt more like the Year of the Marksman. We’ve seen AD Carry-type champions popping up all over the place, from Top to Jungle to Mid, spurred into action by sweeping itemization changes, champion reworks, and a meta game that promotes Tower destruction.

But you can keep your Graves, your Quinn, your Kindred; we know that the real AD Carries still play in the Bot lane.

Here are the six LCS players—three from North America and three from Europe—who I think have represented the ADC position best during the first four weeks of the 2016 Spring split.

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