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Did that really just happen or did I just hallucinate it?
Did that really just happen or did I just hallucinate it?
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League of Legends General Discussion Thread
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Krill Wrote:... CLG's late game weakness finally exposed: all you have to do, after killing all their towers and inhibitors, is not screw up. ps - does anyone know if replays of these games are available? -- not the cast, but a recording that replayed in spectator mode?
The 2nd game was really amazing. It felt to me like they was just a lack of agression from CLG when they had Dignitas stuck in their own base, at that point the momentum was with them and they just did not push it home.
Even after going back to heal instead of pushing the lanes back and going on the offensive again they just backed to their base to defended and simply got slowly poked to death. Every inhib was poked to death. I couldn`t understand how they just sat there not seeing that if they let all the inhibs die the game would be over anyway. They had an incredibly fed kog and sona ult but nothing came out of it. It was like watching a slow painful death. I still think that backing when they had complete control of the map and Dignitas , with baron, was forced to just defend, was a bad decision. Also, practicing in Korea? WEAK!!!!! Today, I was impressed with how strong Curse looked, even though i didn`t want them to win anything after that stupid move last week, it really seems they improved a lot as a team and I felt like their series could have turned out differently with just a bit more focus in game 3 or luck in game 1. Sullla should do those tournaments recaps like he did for IEM. Interesting to watch and I`d like to see what he thinks about some of these innovations that we are seeing now. Tons of lane swaps, everyone rushing turrets, promote being used in competitive play and some heavy use of champs that we weren`t seeing before. It seems a game without Gragas is almost impossible now and we even saw a Cait there.
I didn't get too much interest from the tournament videos, which is why I stopped doing them. Still, here are a few thoughts.
Solomid/Curse Everyone was saying that Curse threw the first game, and while that's partly true, it's not the full story either. In the first game, TSM was winning top and bottom lanes, while losing mid fairly heavily. Nyjacky's Morgana was dominating Reginald's Ryze really badly. It was very close until Curse made some plays around the 20 min mark, scoring some kills and taking a few towers. Curse had about a 4000 gold lead, which is fairly substantial, and then they started making mistakes. They forced an ill-advised Baron; they did take it, but they were cleaned up in the subsequent fight. It was a bad decision, but in their defense, they felt like that had to force the action because of Dyrus/Shen split push. That was followed up with a terrible fight where no one touched Chaox at all, and he cleaned up everyone on Curse. At that point TSM had equalized the gold total, and they steamrolled one more team fight to take the win. It was really bad teamfighting from Curse, no one properly focusing the Blood Boiled Graves. Chaox was the clear MVP of this game for TSM. In Game Two, Curse won a midgame Dragon fight decisively and snowballed the match from there. They used their AOE team comp to perfection in the midgame and built a huge lead that TSM could not recover from. Cop had an outstanding Corki game (12-0-5). But despite that, I felt like Nyjacky was the MVP of this game - he completely shut down Reginald's Ryze and was the key figure in the teamfights. The common sentiment is that Curse lost Game Three on the picks/bans screen, and I completely agree. TSM picked Morgana away from Nyjacky, and he was forced onto Ahri instead, where he was ineffective. Curse wanted to run another AOE team comp, and Ahri did not fit into that at all. Furthermore, with the last pick Westrice chose Darius to lane against Dyrus' Jayce, which was a terrible choice. Westrice was dominated in lane and had a miserable performance. He was seriously awful in this game, getting caught multiple times and not offering anything to the team. Meanwhile, Jayce poke was instrumental in setting up winning team fights for TSM. Nyjacky was caught in a binding to cost Curse a Dragon fight, and Saintvicious got caught in bottom lane to cost them another Dragon later. Curse was forced to fight for Baron after they had been poked down, lost, and then were snowballed out of the game from there. Their team comp had no real synergy, and the Ahri/Darius picks failed badly. This was by far Solomid's best game. Dignitas/Counter Logic The first game was fairly standard. Dignitas gained a small lead and carefully nurtured that into a larger and larger lead as the game went on. They did not make any serious mistakes and grew the gold lead from 1k to 3k to 5k all the way up to 10k. They refused to let CLG sit back and farm into lategame (which was the goal with CLG's Shen/Kogmaw/Vlad team comp). Dignitas forced CLG into fighting for team objectives and eventually the gold lead was too much to overcome. Scarra's Gragas (7-0-7 on 15 total team kills) was the clear MVP. Game Two is the one that everyone keeps talking about, with good reason. The game lasted almost 80 minutes. Dignitas unveiled a full on pushing and poking team strat: Caitlyn, Nidalee, Janna, Gragas, Alistar. Their goal was to take towers and win the game quickly. CLG countered with another one of their "stall into lategame" team comps: Kogmaw, Orianna, Rumble, Chogath, Sona. The first 35 minutes or so went exactly as Dignitas planned, as they took all of the outer towers and forced CLG back into their base. Right when it looked like the game was over, Dignitas screwed up a fight around Baron and allowed CLG to take it. For the next 15 minutes, everyone thought for sure that CLG had the game, as they had a super fed lategame Kogmaw and CLG was taking all of Dignitas' towers. Dignitas was hanging in the game by backdooring CLG inhibitors, which were open due to their base towers falling earlier. There was a crucial fight around 55 minutes, where Doublelift inexplicably walked away from the rest of his team during a teamfight and was bursted down, allowing Dignitas to keep their base alive by a sliver. This was just terrible positioning by Doublelift, and Varis was crucifying his positioning as we watched it. From that point, Dignitas scored a couple of key picks on CLG champions, and very very slowly sieged down the CLG base. Eventually they took all three inhibs and followed the super minions into the base, with the Nexus finally falling after a heroic struggle. Despite Doublelift finishing the game 14-3-5, it was his few deaths that swung the game in favor of Dignitas. There were other serious errors for CLG as well. Bigfatjiji was simply terrible as Orianna, whiffing ult after ult after ult throughout the game. There was a time when Jiji was considered the top AP player in North America, but he has fallen off hard in the last year. Jiji is the clear weakest player on CLG at this point, getting dominated in mid in game after game. Scarra outplayed him massively in both games. Voyboy wasn't nearly aggressive enough on Rumble; again and again, if he ulted and went in after Dignitas, he could have won teamfights for them. Instead, he let Nidalee keep poking away at a distance with spears. For some reason, he also took 60 minutes to get a five item build, and never completed a six item build in a 75 minute game. As a solo laner! What was he doing all that time?! Chauster insisted on taking Promote in every single game, another poor choice. I know Chauster is a far better player than I am, but Promote really didn't give their team much. Promote is defensible for a fast-pushing team comp, but CLG had a "stall till lategame and protect Kogmaw" team, where promoted creeps served no purpose. An Exhaust to shut down Caitlyn just might have come in handy at some point! Yes, I know that Chauster was using Promote to push out side lanes over and over again throughout the game. There was some value there. But does that outweigh the usefulness of having Exhaust? Uh no, not even close. No Exhaust meant that CLG's bottom lane lost every single engagement, since Kog could never fight Cait without getting Exhausted. They gave up any chance of winning bot lane in exchange for... promoted minions? Not buying it. Now on to today's final matches, where the third place game is FAR more important than the actual finals. Strange format there. Curse has a pretty good chance to beat CLG if they can fix their mistakes from yesterday. I was not very impressed by CLG at all. They were very close to losing against Legion, and couldn't take even one game from Dignitas. Whatever they've been doing in Korea, it hasn't been paying off thus far. They need to do something about Jiji in mid, and get Chauster to stop wasting a summoner with this Promote nonsense. Some of us will probably be watching the games on Teamspeak today, if anyone reading this wants to join.
Jacky actually released a video saying how he wanted to pick Ori for Ori/Shy/Malph comp.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35yIhOShz5g Instead, Darius v Jayce/Nunu.
I get the feeling that TSM would be quite content to spend the next three years playing against late game comps.
After seeing CLG's performance it reminds me of someone asking Reginald I think why they weren't going to Korea (I think it was right as CLG and dignitas went), and Reginald was basically saying, it's an enormous investment of time and money, on a very risky payout, so they had better things to do with their time. It seemed like CLG spent all that time in Korea, just to play a few tournament matches against Azubu and hope to copy those few games to revolutionize the meta. I feel like they could have accomplished the same thing just by simply watch the vod like I'm sure TSM are doing anyway.
Is CLG still in contention for the actual world championships? It was the top 3 placing teams, correct?
Don't have time to post many thoughts (a group of us were watching on TS last night) but I'll just say that I think CLG beat Curse in game 1 because they won their lanes rather than because of anything strategic that they did. Picking Promote on their support over and over again (even when they weren't going push comp) was very strange indeed. I'm not sure CLG have a very deep understanding of what they're doing strategically... as Tyrmith says, it feels like they're copying something else without understanding why it works in much the same way as some NA teams did with Moscow 5's evolution of the meta.
Game 2 was a fairly spectacular throw by Curse during a game they seemed to have in their pocket. And TSM are clearly the best team in NA. I don't think they're as good as either M5 or the leading Korean teams, however. |
