Sunday, February 26, 2012

Counter-Pick: Rules of Thumb --5555--

Now this is only a theory that I am still in the process of developing, and I would appreciate it if I can get some constructive criticism and comments.

Secondly, there is a difference between counter-picking against a team comp, and counter-picking your enemy laner/jungler. Yes, I know Janna beat AoE team comps, but I will being talking about LANE/JUNGLE counterpicking, and not team-fight counter picking today.

With 93 different champions currently available and more coming every month, it would take a considerable amount of work to compile a chart with every match-up, and
favor-ability statistics of each one, (though some may try to examine the most common match-ups, which is easier because of the cookie cutter meta that is present in most games nowadays.) especially considering that each match-up is completely different at different skill levels in the game.

However, excluding obvious counters to the fundamental mechanics of each champion (ones that should be no-brainers to counter-pick against) and match-ups that you already have experience with(which could be misleading if you have played only against mediocre players and didn't recognize), how are you supposed to counter-pick?

By recognizing the enemy role's base laning/jungling characteristics of course!

What exactly do I mean by this? Well every champion has characteristics and mechanics in each of their kits and it would be rather difficult to judge them all by each mechanic: damage, utility, CC, mobility, range, health regen. I've narrowed it down a little further into a simple rock, paper, scissors for both laners and junglers.

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Laners:

Kill < Sustain < Poke < Kill

Champions that are pure poke tend to be able to stop the killers at a range from being at an acceptable health to initiate upon, and in turn killing them.

Champions that are pure sustain tend to be able to to stop pokers from doing their job(typically early lane domination) so that they can do their job(typically farm passively and become a later lane winner / monster late game.)

Champions that are pure kill tend to not care about how much the sustainer can keep that health bar from 75% to 100% every couple of seconds, because they usually like to take the whole health bar away from them in those seconds if a fight is initiated.

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Junglers:

Lane Gankers < Jungle Controllers < Farmers < Gankers

Shyvanna- I mean, excuse me, Pure farmers, tend to be able to either resist enemy control efforts or duel and come on top, but more often than not are flexible enough to recover and become more useful to their team than the jungler(a pure controller) who's primary job was to make the enemy jungler's life shitty.

Pure controllers tend to make the pure ganker's life so shitty that they can't gank. Ever. I would know.

Pure gankers make the enemy pure farmer's team's lives so shitty that the farmer gets reported for not ganking and is banned at the end of the game.

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Now the biggest problem is that each champion possesses EACH of these characteristics to some degree, and one last important thing to consider is that some champions possess a CUMULATIVE advantage in these characteristics across the board. This usually (obviously the infallible riot has created League of Legends and therefore it does not contain ANY overpowered champions!) means that these champions are MUCH stronger EARLY GAME than the other champions, while the other champions provide many more benefits to the team later in the game. Early game oriented champions should press their laning advantages and stop the late game oriented from farming. Likewise, the Late gamer should do everything they can(excluding dying) to farm to strengthen their late game domination.

This site will be dedicated to gauging the early game characteristics of these champions, and will be a much more informative alternative to simply looking at a tier list when picking or counterpicking. :))