Metagames and League of Legends

Obviously, every competitive game has a metagame to it.  Certain dominant strategies rise to the fore, granting an advantage to the innovators who developed them, leading to a period of scrambling where other players seek to implement this new strategy, while looking for counters.

But I’ve never really paid any attention to them, prior to playing League of Legends.  Since LoL is effectively a purely competitive game, it’s impossible to avoid the metagame.  Even if you aren’t actually paying attention to the community, you begin to notice effective champions/teams as you play.  You will attempt to emulate or counter these strats as you continue to play, either finding a viable counter or simply finding you choose to go with the flow because, well, it’s easier.

Quick primer: League of Legends is a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena), patterned after the venerable DOTA mod for Warcraft 3 (though DOTA was not the first of its kind, it was the most popular).  It’s a game where opposing teams of players control a character, attempting to destroy some objective while keeping their opponents from destroying their objective.  Pretty standard fare.  What makes DOTA-style games interesting are the characters you can choose from, and the teams created from their synergies.

In LoL, just before I started playing in earnest, the metagame in ranked play revolved, apparently, around the “poke” game.  This metagame, as near as I can tell, favored hit-and-run attacks spread across the map, with high mobility characters rising to prominence.  In this way, pressure could be applied to multiple points of the opposing team’s territory, while offering minimal opportunities for them to come to grips with you.  Effectively, this would be an attrition war, because pokers would tend to be less effective in an out-and-out team battle royale.  To counter this, a healing metagame developed.  The few healers/damage mitigator classes allowed attrition to be nullified, while allowing your own pokers to keep up pressure.  It also meant that out and out team battles became a bit more common, as the healers could keep the squishies up while they focused down targets.

From there, a tanky-dps metagame grew to the fore.  If healers can keep a team of squishies alive, then they can keep a team of damage sponges alive even longer.  Because certain damage sponges can offer a lot of burst damage or AOE damage (or CC, or a number of other benefits), they could burst down a squishy faster than the healer could keep them up (I’m looking at you, Garen).  Eventually, healing became an unnecessary part of this: if you could bring their team to bear through continuous, landsliding pressure, then annihilate them before healing could have an impact, you didn’t need healers of your own.  Support switched over to CC and a few, game changing moves (Morgana’s Black Shield).  Burst fighter tanks or heavy support tanks moved to the fore.

That held until recently, where that game evolved into an AoE/CC game.  Games came down to the team fight.  You roamed as a team, pushing when you could, and moving to bring your power to bear on them.  The goal was to catch someone out of position and annihilate them before they could respond.  Running around by yourself was a sure way to die, when they might have sight on the entire map, so you ran as a team…meaning clumped up team fights became the norm.  Once that moved into place, tank dps became less important, because now you just wanted to make sure you could lock down the entire team long enough to kill them, before they did that to you.  Thus massive AOE+CC became the defining metagame. Here’s the picture:

Your team is pushing into their base, they can either attempt to split up and push your base while poking you, or try to bring you into a team  fight.  If you split, and they catch you, you lose, and they’ve got the ability to do that.  Instead, you want to bring them to bear.  You find them under your tower (a dangerous spot for them, but not unmanageable).  You initiate.  In this case, maybe one of your AOE tanks teleports into the middle of them and hits their ult (amumu mashes r, everyone is stunned for 2.5 seconds).  Your entire team unloads their aoe into the other team.  The stun breaks, but your Galio has flown into the middle of them and hits HIS ult, once again locking them down for 2.5 seconds.  They all die.  Now you can push with impunity for 30-60 seconds.  That might be game over.

That right there is the current metagame.  What’s interesting is to analyze where things will go from here.  First, we can see that a high-mobility game really has some advantages against that team.  By refusing to commit to a team fight, while applying pressure across the map, you blunt a lot of the effectiveness of the AOE game.  However, skirmishing in this way is dangerous…unless you can out maneuver them.  I would expect anyone with high mobility AOE to be really potent here: Zilean and Ezrael (particularly if he gets his ability damage buffed).  Teemo, of course.  Twitch probably has a big place here.  A carry of some kind with Sona can probably wreak havoc (I’d lean towards Miss Fortune here…shed be an absolute beast in a mobility game, even moreso than her current laning dominance).  Amumu would fade here, as an initiator, but Galio probably would retain a top place.

Heimerdinger might actually gain relevance in a poking game, due to his lane presence, particularly late game. He can punish a pushing team with minimal risk.  I’d also expect teams to begin picking assassins to counter this; the best in-game bust killers tend to be melee dps like Xin or Yi.  Twitch is obviously another fantastic pick, as he can add potent AOE damage while still working to burst down solos.

I don’t think this leads into a healing game yet.  Healing is still too impotent to help sustain a poker without other aspects added.  I think Lux will actually gain some prominence if a mobility, poking game comes into play.  She provides the right support for escapes, while packing some serious high-range firepower.

Many other casters are probably too short range here.  Annie is simply not as good a poker mage as a veigar.  Karthus has a solid role here, as might Malzahar.  Swain and Fiddle will remain on the outskirts…their range just isn’t up to snuff, I think.

Anyway, I find this sort of thing fascinating.