[Team] TL B - Page 10

On September 04 2011 06:40 TheYango wrote:

I disagree with this sort of prioritizing. I used to be a fan of it, but experience has made me question the effectiveness of this sort of thing. One of the dangers of creating a role priority based on counterpicking like this is that you're overly prone to setting up advantageous lanes that end up having no real synergy in the mid- and late-game. As Lance and Navi can probably attest to, one problem that we've had (and continue to have) is that we'd focus too hard on counterpicking individual lanes, and end up with 5 champions that did not fight well together. As such, when teamfighting came around, even if we came out of laning with an advantage, it would become exceedingly awkward for everyone to do what they needed to do, simply because the champions in question didn't interact well together.

Because you can't know for sure what type of comp you want to play when first pick rolls around, IMO, the largest deciding factor in the early picks is FLEXIBILITY. You want to look at the champion pool that is open, and pick champions that allow you to pick into multiple team types. These come in all roles, and if such flexible picks are open, you can't just let them roll past just because you plan to counterpick them later. Generally these high-priority champs are hard to counterpick, either because they can be slotted into multiple roles (e.g. Udyr, Lee Sin), or because their teamfight utility is so game-changing that they can present problems/options even if they lose lane.

Let us use solo-mid as an example. Orianna and Zilean are two of the strongest mid AP picks for arranged 5s right now. You simply cannot leave these champs open if the pick rotates to you and they are open. You're not going to just bee-line your jungler/support/AD with these champions open. Regardless of how "good" or "bad" a matchup is, they are largely won and lost on player skill, not on the inherent skew of the matchup. This is even more true of mid-level arranged games, where skill level is much more variable, than in high-level games. With Orianna and Zilean, their "bad" matchups aren't THAT bad, and even if they lose mid, their utility alone is game-changing enough that dealing with them in teamfights is just a pain. Coupled with the fact that both are extremely good in multiple types of team compositions, and you just can't afford to leave these types of champs till 4th and 5th pick.

When it gets to 4th and 5th pick, you should be mindful of counterpicks, but at the same time, you need to pick something that's synergistic with what you have. Most bad matchups aren't bad enough to outweigh poor team synergy.