The Next MetaGame?

[Atlas]

Well, i was under the impression that the current metagame is actually

Solo Tanky with Sustain Champion top
AP Mid
AD + Support bottom
Jungler.

I think you have captured the AD/Support metagame accurately. I am most interested in the next "metagame"-- personally i think double stun bot lane running Gp/10 items would best a AD/Support bot lane. I am thinking Pantheon/Annie or something like that, going all GP/10 items and splitting farm might be better.

Something like this is probably best discussed in another thread.

You got it Danski!!

One of the best things about LoL is the metagame shift over time.

My thoughts on the current one:

Junglers: 2 Key Factors are : 1) Jungle Clear Time 2) Ability to Gank Sucessfully. Abilitly to sucessfullly gank basically revovles around the amount of crowd control (slows, silences, and stuns) a jungler brings to the table. These key factors won't change unless jungling is effectively eliminated as possible role in LoL.

Top Lane: The most malleable of lanes in the current metagame. Champs with sustain like natural life/spell vamp or lots of magic resist/armor are currently highly prized. This lane is the most likely lane to change because there is not strongly fixed "type" for this lane. Basically this lane currently (and probably in the future) will continue to work as such : One team picks a champ (lee sin, gangplank, nasus, yorick) that is probably for top lane and the other team counter picks that champ.

Mid: A pretty malleable lane too, past metas have had AD carrys mid. This could be the case. The current meta of an AP mid is based on the notion (correct notion too) that AP champs benefit relatively more by levels than by items so solo XP is most useful for AP and AD champs benefit more by items than levels so they don't need solo XP in the same way an AP champ does. My thoughts are that is line of logic is correct, of course i can think of some boutique set ups like XP quints + Ziliean allowing for different set ups, but barring a redo of the XP in the game i can't see a different set up coming in. Caveat: Mid and Top Solo lanes are fungable and should be switched to allow for a more favorable champ v. champ becaue frankly it does not matter in which lane your AP champ gets his/her levels. Caveat on my Caveat: ganking is better in the top/bottom lane because the lane is so much longer-- unless you are hitting the first tower in mid lane a single flash gets you to safety that is not the case in top/bottom. This fact favors those with sustain/bruisers because they can flash + take some damage and still escape ganks, though i don't feel this fact is necesarilly determinative in lane setup.

Bot Lane : The current meta favor an AD and Support in bottom lane. This meta is replacing a rather sloppy (or at least not well thoughtout) previous meta of playing whoever and fighting for last hits and to kill the opposition. AD/Support meta is strong because it allows your team to create a "glass cannon" with someone to just keep throwing heals on the glass canon-- the support. The support's other duties are generally managing the clairvoyance and buy wards.

To my mind this meta is the most likely to change. It has a number of weaknesses. 1) you create a glass canon that needs a whole team to defend it. this is a setup that is highly suseptible to break downs in team communication. 2) 1 or 2 succesful ganks on the AD bot can be enough to push that AD carry out of the game effectively creating a win at the 10 minute mark-- a much less certain out come on solo lanes. 3) the support just does not do much late game-- he/she is running scared the whole time just using CV and putting down wards- these are roles that could be filled by anyone on the team not necesarrily a "helpless healer."

What is going to change the bot AD carry/Support meta:

1) Gold per 10 items-- these are strong I often see supports with more gold than junglers. As I quoted above I can imagine a meta where two hard stuns bottom buy gold per 10 items dominate an AD/Support set up in lane and have the gold later to buy real items and the wards necessary to win.

2) I understand heals-- but frankly all team fights are 4 v 4 these days, imagine a 4 v 5 team fight where one teams did not bring a support? In the current meta you can often scare or kill (if they don't run) 2 of the 4 champs (glass canon and support) away-- imagine a meta where all stand and fight- you win because scaring someone away is effectively a kill.

3) Health Pots--frankly they are OP, I just don't understand the current meta. Basically we have decided that 1 player is effectively going to carry lots of health pots for the whole team!? This is not optimal, in the early game just buy the health pots, the mid and late game just have some type of lifesteal/spell vamp-- problem solved and guess what you get to have a 5 player team too!

4) "Tankiness" frankly Stalin was right "Quantity has a Quality all its own." Health/Armor/Magic Resist are strong. There a number of champions that do quite well dealing damage early and mid game with Zero offensive items-- gangplank comes to mind, but there are others like Nasus/Ryze that don't need ANY offensive items to be highly effective dealing damge for the entire game. The community knows "this", but has not yet reached the full potential of its possibilities. The community is currently putting these types of champs top lane, but with the new jungle set up they can be there too (Skarner!)-- and these guys are effective. They can be more so, I have seen games where these types of champs finish the game with more AD than the AD carry from bottom lane. That is amazing (and further proof that that meta is not even close to optimal).


Fell free to critque my analysis or better yet post in the thread what you think the next meta will be or what is goint to change the current meta

Thanks for reading this long post have a Happy 2012

[Sullla]

Nice post, Atlas. I actually do think that League of Legends has reached the point of maturity in its competitive gameplay, which means we won't see major shifts in team comps unless there are significant rule changes. This is reflected in how standardized the different servers have become; a year ago, you would see totally different champions being picked and banned in North America, Europe, etc. Now all of the top teams are running similar lineups, with some variation of course (support jungle vs carry jungle, double AP vs AP + bruiser), but the basic structure of team composition is essentially the same. This means that the gameplay has matured, and we're seeing something approaching optimal setups, at least within the current game rules.

The current meta works because it's based upon basic rules integral to League of Legends:

* Champions farm minions for gold and experience.
* Champions with items are far, far, FAR more powerful than those without them. [This needs to be true or the gameplay falls apart.]
* There are three lanes and a jungle. This means only four champions can get solo farm. One champion gets left out.
* Splitting farm in a lane is far inferior to having one champion solo farm the lane, and another support them.

All of these basic rules dictate that there will be a support champion. Now, you can replace your defensive healing supports with an aggressive support like Leona, Blitzcrank, Gangplank, etc. But you haven't changed the metagame, you've just taken a more aggressive bottom lane. Whoever the support may be, you still want one champion getting solo lane farm, and the other champion running 0 CS and supporting the one doing the farming.

Having both bottom lane champions stack gold/10 items is also a bad idea, because the gold/10 items are all fairly weak, and rarely build into core items. If a bottom lane AD were to grab Heart of Golds and Philo Stones (or whatever), they will be completely worthless in any kind of dragon fight, and would be pushed out of lane by enemy laners who built damage. You can only get away with these items on supports because they generally don't focus on dealing damage. Building damage items on supports *CAN* actually work out, but it's an extreme gamble that relies on getting kills/assists for gold. It's far safer and more practical for supports to stack some passive gold instead, because kills go down drastically as the skill level of players increases.

Double stun kill lanes in bot have been tried before, and they can work sometimes. However, they have not really proven to be successful at the competitive level of play, because even if you score a bunch of early kills with a Sion/Xin Zhao lane in bot (or whatever), the other team just gives up their tower, has their AD keep farming, and the kill lane ends up vastly inferior lategame because they're splitting farm. And if they aren't splitting farm, one champ taking 0 CS... then aren't you right back in the support metagame again? We have yet to see any alternate setup beat the current metagame in consistent fashion since it emerged about 6-8 months ago. Barring major changes to the game rules, I think it's here to stay. It's simply the most effective way to divide up the limited gold farming available on the map.

Can we see more aggressive bottom lanes? Yes, of course! If you watch the top players, they rarely take CV on supports anymore. Heal and Exhaust are extremely common, and supports definitely do not sit in the bushes and passively heal their carries. (Well, they do that sometimes, but there is a lot of harassing and poking going on.) You don't see more Blitzes and Nunus as support because they are very high risk/high reward champ picks - especially in solo queue, a lot can go wrong.

Atlas, you are also completely wrong about the notion that a support doesn't have much value in lategame. Sona, Soraka, Alistar, Janna, etc. are all amazing champions with game-altering skills. I saw a Soraka player single-handedly win a game today by getting off a clutch silence on a Vladimir right when he wanted to use his pool during a teamfight (whoops!) Sona ult, Soraka ult, Janna ult can all swing games when used properly. The sustain from healers is also enormously valuable lategame when sieging towers, sustaining pushes, and for any kind of poke team composition. These champs are extremely useful long after the laning phase ends - teams are certainly not playing "4 vs 4" as the original post suggested.

Anyway, very nice post, but I have to disagree about those last points on the bottom lane. As long as teams are running some kind of 0 CS support - which they will unless the game rules change - it's almost always going to be a champ that adds utility/sustain to the team. That's due to the fact that a damage-dealer with no items is pretty useless. Seriously, a Ryze or Nasus with no farm or items are almost entirely useless. Support Gangplank works not because of his damage (negligible after the extreme early game) but because he has three skills with outstanding utility: a free Cleanse, a team movement/AD boost, and an amazing global ult. Without farming the bottom lane, a damage-dealer can't get items, and without items, they offer nothing to the team.

[Atlas]

Thank you for the thourough and thoughtful reply, now to the debate

I actually do think that League of Legends has reached the point of maturity in its competitive gameplay, which means we won't see major shifts in team comps unless there are significant rule changes.This is reflected in how standardized the different servers have become; a year ago, you would see totally different champions being picked and banned in North America, Europe, etc. Now all of the top teams are running similar lineups, with some variation of course (support jungle vs carry jungle, double AP vs AP + bruiser), but the basic structure of team composition is essentially the same.

I won't disagree that this could be, but I think it just as likely we are seeing a bit of "group think" as a result of the "internationalization" of LoL play from the tournaments. The current meta is no doubt strong, I believe there probably are stronger. Currently teams are competing within this meta, they accept it and try to play it better.

This means that the gameplay has matured, and we're seeing something approaching optimal setups, at least within the current game rules.

I have only ever played one other MP game (Civ4), so you could be right on the development of MP play in games as I don't have much experince, however my Civ 4MP experience tells me that game play can vary greatly over time with no rules changes (or patches :smoke )

Do you really think we won't see major changes to the meta without rule changes? I hope not that will stagnate the game much faster.

The current meta works because it's based upon basic rules integral to League of Legends:

* Champions farm minions for gold and experience.
* Champions with items are far, far, FAR more powerful than those without them. [This needs to be true or the gameplay falls apart.]
* There are three lanes and a jungle. This means only four champions can get solo farm. One champion gets left out.

Agreed

* Splitting farm in a lane is far inferior to having one champion solo farm the lane, and another support them.

I am not sure this true, I often (maybe majority of the time) see supports with 3 GP/10 itmes more gold than junglers. This tells that Gp/10 items are indeed VERY strong. And to my mind opens the door for two champs running 2-3 GP Items and splitting farm walking away from the lane with more total gold than the current meta.

All of these basic rules dictate that there will be a support champion. Now, you can replace your defensive healing supports with an aggressive support like Leona, Blitzcrank, Gangplank, etc. But you haven't changed the metagame, you've just taken a more aggressive bottom lane.

Agreed, this is just an evolution of the current meta.

Having both bottom lane champions stack gold/10 items is also a bad idea, because the gold/10 items are all fairly weak, and rarely build into core items. If a bottom lane AD were to grab Heart of Golds and Philo Stones (or whatever), they will be completely worthless in any kind of dragon fight, and would be pushed out of lane by enemy laners who built damage.

We have a serious disagreement here . Just imagine a Panth/Annie bottom lane. Both build Heart of Gold, Panth builds Avarice blade into Ghostblade and Annie builds Kage's into Deathfire. These are not troll builds and would provide real utility ALL game.

It's far safer and more practical for supports to stack some passive gold instead, because kills go down drastically as the skill level of players increases.

This is a good point, though i think i see it diffently. The "micro" of LoL is gold accumulation. This is why team objective like Dragon and tower are so strong because they benefit the whole team. To the degree that on an individual champ level you can earn more gold than your opponents you gain advantage (items, wards, etc.)

Atlas, you are also completely wrong about the notion that a support doesn't have much value in lategame. Sona, Soraka, Alistar, Janna, etc. are all amazing champions with game-altering skills. I saw a Soraka player single-handedly win a game today by getting off a clutch silence on a Vladimir right when he wanted to use his pool during a teamfight (whoops!) Sona ult, Soraka ult, Janna ult can all swing games when used properly. The sustain from healers is also enormously valuable lategame when sieging towers, sustaining pushes, and for any kind of poke team composition. These champs are extremely useful long after the laning phase ends - teams are certainly not playing "4 vs 4" as the original post suggested.

No doubt there are innumerable ways that supports have provided great value, even in late game. It is just that in the current meta the relative value of the different roles changes as the game goes on. The AD carry is typically not that great early game, but must be protected at all costs late game. Inversely the same is true of supports -- they have great value early (exactly) and keep that worthless early game AD carry alive. However as the game progress the ability to deal damage becomes more highly prized and the ability to heal falls off. As you stated earlier the more skill you introduce into a game the less kills there are, thus items must be generated from static rate of accumulation (via lanes and the clock).

Seriously, a Ryze or Nasus with no farm or items are almost entirely useless.

I probably misspoke. I just meant that these guys can do LOTS of damage with nothing but defensive items.

Thanks for the detailed reply

[Sullla]

And again, the whole argument just falls apart when you try to compare a bottom lane that splits farm to a bottom lane with a dedicated solo + 0 CS support. Splitting farm is far, FAR inferior under virtually all circumstances imaginable. You simply cannot have both champs in bottom lane splitting farm and trying to stack gold/10 items. They will get completely pasted in lane if they try to do that.

I'll take your hypothetical Annie/Pantheon lane (which is an awful laning combination). Both champions need farm very, very badly to be effective. An Annie player who's getting duo lane experience will be underleveled and underfarmed, which means she can't burst anyone down, which means she's useless, since her role on the team is to be a burst caster. Pantheon already scales poorly into lategame, and splitting farm would make him that much more ineffective. If I see that laning combo, I pick a very strong AD in lane (probably Caitlyn or Corki), play very defensively in lane, and just farm for the first 15 minutes. In any situation other than many crushing early game kills, the Pantheon/Annie lane loses. And even so, that lane still loses if the AD + support lane can farm once their tower goes down.

But here's the even more pertinent question: how does your Annie/Pantheon lane sustain itself? Buying endless amounts of health pots? With two champs already splitting farm, that's going to set back builds even further. Plus, someone's going to have to buy wards, and then there's the increased difficulty of last hitting when two people are attacking minions (not to be underestimated, this is a big deal). Again, the one and only situation where your suggested lane comes out ahead is if they can score multiple early kills and take control of the lane, which rarely happens.

And even if it does happen, where does your team put the AD carry? It can't be in bottom lane, so it must be somewhere else. Few ADs can win a solo lane, since they are weak in the early game. If you want to have Annie, Pantheon, and Vayne on your team, it makes infinitely more sense to have Annie in mid, Pantheon in top, and Vayne in a duo lane bottom. It makes very, very little sense to have Annie/Pantheon bottom, because then you will need to have two more solos elsewhere on the map. Another way of putting this is that you just don't NEED five solo champs in this game:

4 solo + support > 5 solos

Even if running Annie/Pantheon in bot was viable - which it really isn't - you don't gain anything by doing so. The effectiveness of Annie and Pantheon is killed by forcing them to lane together. They both need a solo lane to do their job properly. You waste both champs by putting them in the lane together. Conversely, there are other champs who are not wasted by laning with someone else, and these are the champs who are played as supports (always champs with utility of some kind).

If you want to try this as an experiment, come join us tomorrow night for the Tuesday custom game event. Varis and I can play AD/support bottom and demonstrate why an Annie/Pantheon game doesn't work very well.

[Deceptus]

And even if it does happen, where does your team put the AD carry? It can't be in bottom lane, so it must be somewhere else. Few ADs can win a solo lane, since they are weak in the early game. If you want to have Annie, Pantheon, and Vayne on your team, it makes infinitely more sense to have Annie in mid, Pantheon in top, and Vayne in a duo lane bottom. It makes very, very little sense to have Annie/Pantheon bottom, because then you will need to have two more solos elsewhere on the map.

I have a feeling that Atlas just put a fairly bad example of a "substandard" lane -- competitively, we've seen things like Karthus/Soraka, Jarvan/Leona and other lanes that have had much more success and synergy. Those lanes have proven to make standard lanes fairly problematic or at least force them to look for new solutions. You can switch things up, especially with melee laners being dominant in top lane - those tend to have issues with laners such as Vayne or Corki, at least those with lesser sustain.

I also remember Guardsman Bob saying something "you don't necessarily need a squishy AP mid", for instance -- the real reason to have one is because burst generally wins teamfights away from your turret - but you might as well have a great sustained magic damage dealer, such as Lanewick, and shut down quite a few laners while opening up new initiation purposes and other stuff. Granted, it takes a lot more effort to pull off. In general the meta is good because it allows people to have a decent grip on the game and how it should be played - it's pretty straightforward to what a team needs. Teams don't show us most of their scrims, but there is a lot of theorycrafting and metatwisting going on in the teams, I'm sure.

Just my three grosze here.

[Gustaran]

* Champions with items are far, far, FAR more powerful than those without them. [This needs to be true or the gameplay falls apart.]

That is true on most champions, but I believe another reason why the support meta is so strong is that certain champions actually don't need many items in comparison to do their job really well.

I think Sullla said it well: Pantheon & Annie need tons of gold so they can do their job.

But let's talk about a champion like Alistar: Even if he were to go into a teamfight with little more than boots, he can still reposition the enemy AD carry, knock up the whole enemy team and not die immediately due to his ult. Same with Janna: Sure it's great if she has 500 AP, but her ult can still win (or screw up ) any teamfight even if she has no items, and her tornado knockup is great without any additional damage.

So I believe in order to maximize the effectiveness of your team, it's mandatory that you have one champion on your team that has core abilities that are effective without many additional items and therefore is not hurt by getting no farm.

[Sullla]

I'm certainly not disputing that there are tons of unplayed bottom lanes that could be effective. Rather, I'm suggesting that a 0 CS support of some kind is practically demanded by the game's core ruleset. The AD role then normally best fits having a support champ to babysit them, since they are normally the weakest early game and strongest end game.

In Seyruun's examples, both Karthus/Soraka and Jarvan/Leona still have a champion taking farm (Karthus/Jarvan) and a 0 CS support (Soraka/Leon). This is therefore not really all that different from the current metagame. It's working within the current metagame and exploiting a perceived matchup advantage - the actual team comps are basically the same, only the lanes have been shifted around slightly, usually done if the AD choice can stomp on another team's mid or top lane choice.

Remember, Atlas was suggesting something else entirely: a bottom lane where both champions would split farm and make up the difference with gold/10 items. I don't think that's consistently viable. Alternate bottom lanes without AD and with unusual 0 CS supports? Absolutely viable, if not exactly commonplace.

[Atlas]

If you want to try this as an experiment, come join us tomorrow night for the Tuesday custom game event. Varis and I can play AD/support bottom and demonstrate why an Annie/Pantheon game doesn't work very well.

Excellent idea. However I would propose a few modifications

1) I would prefer for you and Varis to play from my perspective. Try and make my idea work. I and someone else will play the Traditional AD/Support Role.

2) No other players on the map, why subject them to what could be an abysmal idea

3) We play for a set period of time(20 minutes?). The combined Gold tally will determine the winner

Atlas was suggesting something else entirely: a bottom lane where both champions would split farm and make up the difference with gold/10 items. I don't think that's consistently viable.

Not sure how we determine if the idea is consistently viable though (outside of repeating the experiment 20x).

Challenge to the LoL RB Community:
Come up with a bot lane pair (or solo8-) ) that you think might be consistently better than AD/Support.

All deals to play on Tuesday are null and void if I am still laying floor at my house. Now on the fifth day and it currently looks I will be continuing the work when I get off tomorrow. I should be done for a possible Thursday or someother random time to give it a try.

[Atlas]

4) "Tankiness" frankly Stalin was right "Quantity has a Quality all its own." Health/Armor/Magic Resist are strong. There a number of champions that do quite well dealing damage early and mid game with Zero offensive items-- gangplank comes to mind, but there are others like Nasus/Ryze that don't need ANY offensive items to be highly effective dealing damge for the entire game. The community knows "this", but has not yet reached the full potential of its possibilities. The community is currently putting these types of champs top lane, but with the new jungle set up they can be there too (Skarner!)-- and these guys are effective. They can be more so, I have seen games where these types of champs finish the game with more AD than the AD carry from bottom lane. That is amazing (and further proof that that meta is not even close to optimal)

We have already really begun to tackle the AD/Support bot lane issue. I was wondering what some folks thought of my ideas on Tankiness being OP. Atama-Warmogs being a prime example

[v8mark]

Good thread!

Essentially I think Sulla and Gustaran are right -- in a game of LoL, you have three lanes and a jungle. Because the fact that having one single farmer with support is better than two people farming the same lane, this means you have three laners, a jungle, and someone else. That someone else must be someone who can do their job effectively without many items, which is pretty much the definition of a support champion.

The vast majority of supports go with an AD carry because AD carries are item-dependent rather than level-dependent. It doesn't really matter if your Ashe is level 9 or level 14; what really matters is whether or not she has her IE. But there's a world of difference between a level 9 and level 14 Annie, even if both have RoA, because the amount of damage they do directly depends on to what extent they've levelled their abilities. Hence, AD carries can afford to split experience with a support (and the support always needs *some* experience).

(As an aside, I disagree that AD carries are inherently weaker in solo lanes. There are some very strong solo lane AD carries; Caitlyn and Vayne are both examples, and they counter certain top lane melee champs very well -- Tryndamere or Garen, for example. But the reason they're not used much in competitive play is that you would rather have someone level-dependent there, and two AD carries can be countered much more easily than just one.)

The vast majority of supports are bottom for two reasons:

• Dragon is there; dragon is much more relevant than baron during the laning phase
  
• It's a lot easier to zone someone 2v1 in bottom lane than it is in mid lane. Therefore if you send AD/support mid, your bottom lane will be zoned out, whereas their mid may not be.

So that's the basic explanation of the current meta. That's not to say that certain team comps won't have counters that fall outside of this model; I'm thinking specifically of TSM moving their AD/support lane top to get a better 2v1 lane. But I agree with Sulla that outside of significant rule changes, the optimal meta has virtually been reached.

One thing I have seen in high-level streams is the return of the 'roaming' meta -- usually with Janna. But really I think this is an extension of a support; just one who ganks lanes with annoying abilities rather than babysits AD carries. They still use gp5, they still have no farm, and they are still underlevelled.