
He's meant to wade into fights and punish people for trying to approach his teammates, making him popular as a deterring threat in the front lines of a siege composition. Darius, the beefy juggernaut with pauldrons twice the size of his head, is a short-ranged high-powered tank that shreds health bars (while healing his own) with a wild swing of his axe. While there are such thing as flex picks in League of Legends (especially on 5.18), where a champion chosen doesn't necessarily determine what role they're being played in, the majority of champions are nonetheless role-players.Ĭurrently, top lane focuses on two champions. ADCs tend to stay stuck with their supports, supports are rarely used as mid laners, and junglers tend to stay in the shadows until otherwise killing people. To make this easier, most champions are role-specific. It also makes the drafting phase before the start of the game a lot less confusing-when commentators and internet armchair coaches claim that a team's lost or won in the draft, it refers to whether or not a team's managed to counter specific champions, or has an overall more coherent and powerful strategy at play. Understanding the actions and decisions of a team necessitates understanding the strengths and limitations of the champions they've chosen to field. It depends on what champions are chosen, what their range of options are, and how they interact with others on their team. There are, of course, as many variations of the two themes as there are teams in contention. But as a pick composition is top-heavy in champions that are better at single-target damage than waveclear, falling behind means getting shoved under the turret where they're mostly useless. Their game plan revolves around using sight and vision wards to find opportunistic ambushes-a successful pick team will snowball rapidly, gaining both kill bounty and turret demolition gold to always have an edge in fights.

A significant quantity of crowd control spells are expected, as are bursty assassins that can take outtargets of opportunity faster than their teammates can bail them out.

After all, a dead enemy is one that can't defend their turrets.įor that goal, they pick champions that can successfully ensnare and take down opposing players. Instead, they look to "pick off" targets of opportunity, forcing engagements to send the enemy team packing back to respawn. Instead they'll "rotate" lane to lane, and often have one player off to a farther lane to split the enemy team's attention.Īll League of Legends strategies revolve around finding ways to take down turrets and inhibitors, but the pick composition does it less directly than a siege team. They lack the sheer damage of more combat-oriented strategies, or the crowd control effects to dictate the pace of a skirmish. When at all possible, the siege composition will try to avoid straight-up fights.
