League of Documentary - Why These Champions are Garbage in Pro Play

this is a game of league of legends that was played in season 2. if you look at this game many of the champions that were picked are still champions that are heavily valued in today's meta nocturne corki janna irelia orianna ezreal and of course old seraphine this game has constant balance updates new changes new mechanics and new things come into the game all the time there are so many differences in the game at this point the runes are different the items are different even the game itself looks completely different so why do the champions that the professional players choose to play never seem to be different in this video we will be going over the least played champions in professional play of all time we'll be discussing exactly why they're not being played what strengths and weaknesses many of these champions lack what some stronger champions provide over them and of course the instances in which these champions were played in professional play this is league of documentary nasus yorick and tryndamere what do all these champions have in common they're hard to kill they're hard to play with and they feel absolutely awful to play against when you fall behind these champions are some of the biggest terrors in solo queue when you come into the game of league of legends pretty much every single new player will complain about how broken tryndamere feels i mean a champion that doesn't die for 5 seconds that sounds very useful in any single scenario yet tryndamere has the absolute lowest pick man rate of any champion in the game he has a total of two picks and two bands his pick rate is roughly point zero zero zero four percent split pushing isn't exactly anything new to league of legends it has existed since the game's inception but split pushing is not as an effective strategy as it was in previous times as a game gets older the player base becomes more skilled at it in the past champions like nasus could actually be viable and be played in the same way that they were played in solo queue this was because other teams hadn't developed the coordination that they needed in order to be able to effectively shut down split pushers in the past nowadays nasus york and tryndamere are pretty much never played if a nasa's player was playing him in pro play for the majority of his games it would be an e-max nasus meaning that the nasus player would build a little bit of ability power and just constantly shove the wave now here's the thing there are split push champions that are viable jax irelia camille are all very consistent picks in the top lane so what do these champions have that the other split pushers don't have a strong top laner should be like a strong shot of semen it needs to be aggressive thick but most importantly it needs to be sticky top laners need to be sticky in order to stay on an 80 carries face carry champions need to feel panic and worried when you are on their face and you need to be sticky enough that one of their teammates has to help them wipe you off their face jacks camille and fiora all have great mobility in their basic kits this means they can focus solely on building their core items rather than movement speed items in order to stay on their target during a team fight but if stickiness was the only factor why isn't tryndamere played more in pro play his e can become a rather short cooldown especially if you build the right items this should go without saying but pro play is extremely different from solo queue certain roles feel completely foreign from the experience of playing by yourself if you're in the top lane and you're picking a losing match up you could be dealing with something called the dyrus treatment basically the enemy top laner will take advantage of the fact that he's stronger than you at level one zone you off from a few minions slow push a massive minion wave to your tower and then his jungler will come in and dive you at level 3. there is no counter play to this other than just leaving your tower it doesn't matter how good or how mechanically gifted the enemy top laner is there is no potential for him to even be able to outplay the point of professional league of legends is to make sure that your opponent doesn't get to play league of legends if you take a look at jax fiora and camille's basic kits they all have some sort of early game strength or survivability all three of these champions have passives and basic abilities that are very valuable under a tower dive tryndamere nasus and yorick's passives all do essentially nothing for them at level 1. because of the fact that you cannot survive this type of early game aggression you cannot pick any of these three champions early on anytime these champions are picked they have to essentially wait until the entire enemy composition is revealed so that they don't get counterpicked with an early game juggler that could potentially dive them at level 3. this is one of the most important factors when picking a top laner your champion has to be self-sufficient generally speaking junglers don't want to pass up for the top lane there are more champions and more game-winning objectives in the bot lane it is not to say that junglers will never come to the top lane but if you're playing a split pusher that needs to be babysat in the early game the other pros on your team are not going to be very happy about that counterpicks if you've ever played a game and you've been hard counter picked you know exactly how bad it feels to be completely useless for the first 15 minutes of the game even the best professional players would have a hard time going up against certain matchups singed illaoi quinn and teemo these four champions while not good enough to be played by themselves have often been taken out for very specific matchups because they hard countered them so well teemo's pick ban rate is extremely low he's got about nine picks and three bands the majority of which were troll games but there was a single instance where teemo was actually played as a serious hard counter pick he only got it off in two games but he did win both of them and that was by lck's viper instead of picking teemo at the top lane he picked teemo as an ad carry the point was simple if you pick teemo into lanes with low sustain you can constantly trade with the enemy 80 carry and force them out of lane teemo's blind naturally makes him stronger than most 80 carries at the early game so essentially he played it as a denial pick to make sure that his bot laners would always win although he didn't have any crazy stats or insane things on teemo technically he still does have a 100 win rate unfortunately for teemo the rest of his pick history has only been in troll instances most players are playing end of the season games where the game result doesn't have any actual consequences on whether or not the team makes it to worlds so usually by popular demand a teemo pick will come out unsurprisingly in most of these cases teemo gets absolutely destroyed ranged champions in the top lane are less effective than they are in solo queue pro players are more willing to give up cs so long as they don't die they are better at being patient and giving up their lane because they have faith that their teammates will eventually carry them even though they'll still lose out on a ton of minions in their lane pro players are not as impatient to all in when they know they've been hard counterpicked unfortunately there are some counterpicks in which if you do nothing you'll still lose even harder and the best example of that is quinn quinn was briefly played in the mid lane for a season because of her fast wave clear and ability to just press r and run to any lane for a skirmish she was extremely ideal at abusing slow wave clear mages but the main bulk of quinn picks has always been to counter renekton renekton has one of the highest pick ban rates in professional play renekton will generally show up in one in every four professional games in league of legends he has great sustain great early game and most importantly he is very very strong in those level 3 dives we talked about before renekton does not need a lot of help by himself and he does not need a ton of items in order to be a threat the crocodile is considered to be one of the most safest and consistent picks in professional play until players started to play quinn quinn players did not need to take teleport her ultimate simply allowed her to wave clear and then fly towards whatever skirmish or objective that was going to be fought for quinn players would additionally then take cleanse instead she would then rush blade of the ruin king so that renekton could never catch up to her in this matchup even the best players would go down 50 cs at the end of laning phase while certain matchups make champions feel completely useless in a 1v1 other matchups will make other champions feel useless in a team fight or later on in the game the only times that alawi and singed have been picked up in professional play is when they were used as hard counterpicks against orn and maokai alawi was used because the rune kleptomancy made her extremely broken kleptomancy would give you a two-hit spellblade passive that gave you gold or small items in your inventory you could also take these items and sell them at the shop on release kleptomancy used to proc off of the ghost of test of spirit that means you could just sit here and farm the enemy champion when you pull them in tanks can't out trade illaoi so they just have to sit there and watch as alawi just gets richer and richer from just taking one skill shot singed on the other hand countered these champions in different ways crowd control is the core of strong tank champions orn's most consistent cc is his ultimate but what most players don't realize is the second part of his ultimate the headbutt activation is actually a short dash this means that singed players simply have to press w on horn when he's casting his alts and then he'll just lose the second portion of this ability now there are a handful of other great counterpick champions vygar into azir annie intellusion rammus into a.d compositions but all of these champions usually suffer from the same problems how useful are you afterwards are you going to destroy your laners so hard that they can't even play the game if that's not the case then usually it's not worth picking these champions they are only good for that one scenario how much time is a pro team supposed to devote for every single niche counter pick why spend time learning a single champion for a single scenario when you can just learn a meta champion who's good into most scenarios counter pick champions usually come out because pros themselves really just enjoy playing these champions they've played a bunch of them because they feel like they're cool or they look flashy and so they have enough personal experience that it makes up for it but pro teams and their coaches are not going to start pushing their players to start learning rammus top just because it counters a specific champion what makes a good jungler in professional play in the words of many great junglers being a pro jungler is exactly like being a slave for your team pro junglers are exactly like slaves if your team is calling for an objective you have no right to refuse you're supposed to stay outside in the jungle for the majority of the game don't come into the lane with these other champions unless they ask you to laners will never give you any of the money that's in their lane and even if you're doing all this work they're never going to feed you very much if you look at the most picked junglers in professional play they all have very common themes rek'sai elise olaf lee sin these champions are all very strong individually without items because slaves never get any real money for themselves they have to rely on their basic kits slaves need to be strong without being fed the job of a professional jungler is almost always to cover for his team's weakness let's say your win condition is to get azir strong if you pick a jungler like master yi whose early game is significantly weaker than everyone else's if you gank the mid lane and you're up against one of those other junglers you're almost always going to lose the 2v2 this is why historically speaking you cannot play around the jungler champions like shyvana master yi kane amumu they all do different things really well but all of them require a certain level of resources if you die even once you are just going to be permanently bullied out by the enemy jungler and so if you want to be able to take your buff safely you have to call your own laners over which means they miss minions and they miss exp by the factor of your own selfishness to play one of these champions you are going to set your players behind the only time in which master yi was ever played in professional play was when tarik yi funneling was so powerful that pro players were doing it basically your mid laner would just play taric get master yi to farm jungle camps and then also get him to farm the mid lane as well even with this strategy it was not perfect for professional players master yi players usually went double cs up on their enemy junglers and even though they were basically guaranteed to get ahead and get fed even this strategy was not a foolproof win for pro teams and that was because the enemy teams would just simply gank the other lanes for pro players who cares if the master yi has 300 cs the rest of their team is completely useless their top laner and support aren't tanky and their 80 carry does no damage exhaust cc blow up mass g and the whole team falls quickly afterwards although rengar amumu shyvana and kane all do different things for master yi they essentially all have the same weakness maintaining a good professional draft is a lot like maintaining a good lawn for a boomer it has to have synergy they have to fit into very neat lines but most importantly they need to be consistent consistency is the most important trait for pro players if you put one of the best riven players in the world on that champion will he be able to get ahead and carry every single game the answer is probably no when a professional player puts a new champion into his champion pool he will have to have a certain number of games on that champion professional players have a limited amount of practice time every single day with the meta ever constantly shifting it is very difficult to justify picking up fad champions that could be potentially nerfed in the next patch take the current meta for example morgana and diana recently just became the number one and number two junglers in the game historically how often have you seen morgana and diana jungle dominating this is why a lot of pro teams are hesitant to pick up these champions even though they know they're good if you put 50 games into a champion and then riot immediately nurse this champion right afterwards all of that practice time immediately becomes worthless many other teams will simply learn how to play against these picks rather than pick them up themselves oh and if you're wondering how long it took for morgana and diana jungle to get nerfed the answer is exactly one patch pro players also don't necessarily play on every single patch there are breaks between certain weeks of the game and there are msi and world patches one of the most common times that you'll actually see off meta picks coming into games is during worlds worlds patch lasts for months for these pro players here players know that they have more time to experiment with their picks instead of having to catch up with the meta every single week they can start inventing their own meta and playtest whatever they want but no pro player in the world has enough time to be a god at every single champion in the game when i put up the list of champions that i was going to be doing for this video in the community polls a lot of people were questioning as to why i put udyr in this list in the current meta udyr is pretty much a permanently picked or banned champion if you played with or against an udyr any time in the last few months you probably aren't too surprised but if anyone deserves to be on this list it is definitely oodier the number of times that udyr was played in season 10 was zero the number of times that udyr was played in season nine was zero the number of times that udyr was played in season seven was zero the number of times that udi was played in season eight was one that was a loss throughout the history of this champion he has not really been picked up in fact 99 of all udyr games played in professional play have just been in the last few months so let's examine exactly what made udyr the best jungler in the game udyr has two clear consistent weaknesses when it comes to professional play he is not as useful in a team fight and he is very easily kited because of the overwhelming value of scuttle crab the champions that are viable in the jungle meta are determined by who can clear the camps quickly and who can win early game skirmishes udyr is perhaps the best at doing both and that's why he became the number one jungler in the meta with the addition of items such as force of nature and turbo chem tech udyr players were able to be tanky be a threat and be able to get onto whatever champion they wanted in a team fight if udyr didn't have these two factors he would still be one of the least played junglers in the game some champions kits are designed not to be difficult because they're designed to be appealing to new players udyr rammus vi and warwick all fit this category when you have simplistic champions that just do one thing really well it's not very appealing for professional players when it comes to vi and warwick yes they're very good at locking down one person but a champion like jarvan is good at locking down entire teams these champions are basically just jungle training wheels the jungle rule is arguably the most difficult role in the game it's definitely the role that takes the most abuse from his own teammates these extremely basic champions are designed for new players to ease into this harsh role pro players aren't going to pick them up because they can make better use out of more complex champions these guys are not meant for the big leagues udyr is the only lucky one out of this bunch because he had both of his major weaknesses covered thanks to these item and jungle changes but once the meta starts shifting again it'll probably be a very long time before you see him in another professional game cheese junglers are perhaps the most fun junglers to play in the game whatever chi strat you're running if you can get it off it feels well like you're cheating at the game there are several very fun cheese junglers in league of legends fiddlesticks nunu and shaco are among the most popular but cheese strategies just tend not to work for professional players and this is due to the fact that professional players actually go through every single one of their replays while it might not be the professional players themselves doing each and every one pro teams have analysts that go through all of the vods that they play and if you're playing a champion with a chi strategy that analyst will simply look at what your route is and then tell the pro players next game exactly what you're gonna do chi strategies don't last very long in professional league of legends and they only ever tend to work for a single game as discussed before pros like consistency they don't really want to play games where their jungler could be completely useless just because they made one mistake when it comes to champions like nunu and shaco they do the same thing they do level 2 cheese ganks in order to get a lead for a certain lane one of the reasons that junglers are considered slaves to their teams is because the jungle roll overall is weaker in a fives comp when you're in a team of five you can immediately communicate with each other pro players are very familiar with each and every champion's ideal jungle pathing they also make sure to get good level 1 invades in order to get vision on which buff the enemy jungler will be starting they figure out exactly which camps the jungler has taken and they can make a very good educated guess as to which side of the map the jungler is going to be on when it comes to ganks there's not many surprises after cheese ganking one lane on nunu or shaco the other members know exactly where you are they can very easily figure out what lane you're going to cheese gank next what's worse about these types of junglers is that even when you get extremely far ahead it doesn't actually really do anything in this game shaco was up 5 kills on the enemy team he was by far the most fed member but in a straight up team fight he doesn't contribute anything other than damage in solo queue players get tilted players get upset if you're gonna get ganked five times and die five times to an enemy shaco when your jungler hasn't touched your lane a single time you might tilt and go afk but pro players aren't gonna go afk on stage they understand i'm playing the weak side of the map they understand that even if they're down two kills three kills or 50 cs the other side of the map is prospering meanwhile my jungler is farming and when it comes to late game team fights he will carry me later on make no mistake pro players do tilt they get upset they get irrational and they play worse because of these feelings but they're pros this is their profession they're still gonna show up to work even if they're upset so what are the qualities that make a mid laner viable for pro play a good mid laner should be like a good pan gender person you have to be able to identify as more than one role take azir for example azir identifies as a burst mage combo mage long range mage control mage and dps mage in pro play you're going to be going up against a lot of different people and you don't have a lot of choice in who you get to [ __ ] lane you can't be picky you have to be able to [ __ ] everyone or you're going to get [ __ ] yourself azir's early game might be a little bit weak but as time goes on the team will play with him and around him and he'll be able to adapt and fit into whatever gender role his team needs him to be if they need a manly engage for their combo he can go in with the sharima shuffle if they need him to be a huge [ __ ] then he can play his max range and just sit back and hit stuff whichever role you need azir for he is able to do it that cannot be said for most other mid laners velkas xerath lux ziggs assassin's mid have to get ahead otherwise they start falling off as the game progresses short-range burst mages need flash to be able to engage whatever the case may be specialties are generally not very valuable in pro draft if your champion is specifically good at one thing then there's likely another champion that's specifically good at shutting you down champions like azir syndra and orianna are all very safe picks but this isn't the only reason that these champions are so valuable the biggest reason that a lot of artillery mages are generally avoided in pro play is because artillery mages have a lot of skill shots and you might be thinking wait pro players are good at hitting skill shots so shouldn't they be playing them more yes pro players are generally better at hitting skill shots but they're also better at dodging them as well azir orianna and syndra all have sort of aoe abilities they are skill shots in a sense but they're not really skill shots when it comes to azir you can't really just sidestep all of his damage you can dodge it with things that are similar to flash but the thing is is that you have to burn flash if you're good enough artillery mages will never be able to hit a single skill shot on you pro players don't want their main source of magic damage to be side-steppable this is why when you pick an artillery mage you have to draft around that mage all of these guys need some sort of setup from the rest of their team in the form of crowd control in order to be able to get the maximum amount of damage off champion reliance on single skill shots is also another big reason as to why other champions are not played in the bottom lane as well if mage supports are played in the bot lane it's generally going to be champions like annie or zyra they have a lot of aoe and a lot of their damage isn't avoidable champions like pike and blitzcrank suffer from the same problem if your entire champion is based off of the hope that you're able to hit a single straight line skill shot well pro players are not going to let you be able to get away with that you have to work so much harder in order for your champion to be able to be strong alistar is picked in one in every three professional games one of the biggest reasons that is is because his wq combo isn't something that you can just sidestep the more skillful your opponents the less consistent skill shots become in other words if you're going to play something like blitzcrank in a professional game then you have to be a god at hitting gods with one of the most telegraphed abilities in the entire game faker versus ryu's z1v1 is probably the most well-known outplay in league of legends history assassins are fun to watch fun to play and extremely unfun to play against this is the main reason as to why riot usually doesn't make assassins broken enough to be viable in professional play assassins unfortunately have all the weaknesses that we have discussed so far in the video consistency need for resources and inability to fit into a lot of different roles this outplay also took place in season 3 when plating wasn't a thing before if you left your lane for a roam you would only be giving up one wave for a kill now you could potentially be giving up two plates and a wave which makes the goal difference pretty much even in theory assassins should never be viable in pro play unless they're so broken that they can one shot someone with their basic combo yet the most played champion in professional league of legends is an assassin and that champion is leblanc let's take a look at what leblanc has that other assassins don't at first glance leblanc has something very different about her she has 525 range she is a ranged assassin leblanc is the only ranged assassin in the mid lane every other assassin in the game is a melee ranged champion this is a huge difference for her it means she doesn't get bullied in the early stage by mages if you trade with leblanc at level 1 she will trade back with you if you want to make any champion in the game instantly more broken just add 200 or 300 range on their auto attacks leblanc's kit used to have waveclear in it as well her q would proc on most of the minions in lane and you could then detonate them in order to clear the way faster this meant that leblanc could take away the mage's only real advantage against an assassin in this matchup which was waveclear if you want to roam as an assassin you're supposed to shove your wave in first most assassins don't have safe wave clear where they won't be taking harass from a ranged mage these days mid lane is just about who's managing the wave better and who's going to roam first to a fight if your champion doesn't have waveclear then you can never really choose when you can go back to base when you want to roam or when your jungler can go for a crab pro games usually focus around farming more than fighting this means that carries will have more gold to spend which means they'll get their core items faster so that they'll be able to get safety items afterwards to be able to shut assassins down if you're a champion like talon for instance who's got a lot of damage packed into their ultimate and you only blow up a zhonyas or ga during a fight that's not good enough to win the team fight leblanc's ultimate on the other hand is only 30 seconds at level 16. she has the very real possibility of using her full combo more than once during a team fight and of course on top of all of that most of leblanc's abilities are not dodgeable by sidestepping the main reason that faker was able to outplay ryu was because he dodged ryu's shurikens you can't dodge the first two cues of leblanc's combo and you can't really dodge her w either assassins thrive off of low vision isolated targets and uncoordinated team fighting all of which don't really happen as much in professional play even though most viewers including myself would love to see assassins return to pro play if riot ever intends to do that then assassins would be absolutely disgusting in solo queue some champions don't fit into any of the categories that we've talked about so far there are a handful of champions that are viable but just not the best meta picks in pro play when they do get picked up it's not because players always think their champion is the strongest it's not because they saw it in another region and it's definitely not because their team requested that they play it these unique pocket picks come out because the player simply loves the champion a lot of people seem to forget this but professional players are human too they don't necessarily want to play their 10 000th game on azir even if it's the most safe pick they want to try something different they want to show the world their own personality through their own unique play style my favorite instance of a great pro pocket pick was clg's huhi on aurelion soul no one plays this champion not in solo queue or in pro play but who he brought it out against the coup tigers in the 2015 world championship coup tigers ended up second place overall in the tournament losing to skt and clg was quickly written off because they lost the game against one of the wild card regions but during this game who he absolutely went off and this disgusting performance decimated coup tiger so hard that aurelian soul was permanently banned against clg for the remainder of their games at worlds so at the end of the day what really decides what comes out in the draft is how much the player enjoys playing that champion thanks for watching big thanks to fly diamond and liquid coach hacks defender for taking the time to answer all of my questions about professional drafts you can find their twitter's in the description below if you guys want more updates on my videos you can hit the bell button to get notifications on when i'm posting community polls to my audience you can follow me on discord and twitter as well for more updates like share and subscribe and that's it bye

Channel: DongHuaP

Views: 1,625,075

Keywords: league of legends, dong huap, MSI, mid season invitational 2021, LCS, Pro play, lol esports, na lcs, lol montage, league of legends documentary, league of legends history, team solomid

Id: QUdMOiwpXqI

Length: 30min 15sec (1815 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021