[Season 5] Lux, the Lady of Luminosity - Page 2

Starting with the composition, I don't know if Lux was their original plan or not (she's picked last), but it's a very good composition to build around her. Gnar and Corki are both excellent champions for poke comps, strong at disengaging, and also both strong in lane.

The following Nunu pick is also an excellent jungler to pair with Lux. Nunu's style of play (and the way he's played in this game) is to be in the enemy jungle stealing things, getting vision and warding. This deep warding gives Lux the safety to throw Q's out in the 1v1 (which Pawn does a lot of in this matchup), and Lux's ult gives Nunu the safety to fight Lee 1v1 if he needs to, since Lux can assist the fight faster than Leblanc can. Later on in the game, Nunu gives a lot of area control through his ult and pushing power through blood boil, which does a lot for the comps teamfight.

The only pick I'm a little curious about is the Leona, which I don't necessarily think pairs all that great with Lux. They hovered over Annie for a while which I think would have been a better pick to assist Lux, but at the end of the day I think what they wanted with the support pick was guaranteed engage, since little Gnar and Nunu don't have that, and Leona's engage is more guaranteed than Annies I suppose. Either way, meiko did very well.



As to the build, Pawn ran what I feel is a very greedy build to take against Leblanc, with HP/level yellows, CDR/level blues, and 21/0/9 masteries and Heal. It ended up working out for him, and I wonder if he just figured he was a stronger player than Dade and could afford the greedier build, or if he assumed Nunu would be backing him up for most of the game. He also ran 3 points Archmage instead of Sorcery or the Weavings, which is what I take against LB as well. It can be hard to get passive autos on LB because she jumps around like a bitch.

I'm a little bit curious as to the later items in his build, although they're not bad. He goes 1 Dorans into Athenes, which is fine, Clearlove gives him every blue buff and they also steal or attempt to steal a couple of the enemy teams, which tend to go to Corki if Lux already has one, and Lux if she does not.

After that he goes for Deathcap, which he does finish by the 25 minute timing, so that's also fine. Then he builds Void and ends the game with a NLR. Basically the standard season 3 Lux build.

But I'm wondering if Void Staff + Haunting Guise would have been the superior pick here. Since Pawn is taking CDR/level blues, a Liandry 6th item is appropriate (although the game ends before he would have even gotten close to getting 6 items). By the time these items would have finished, Lee had almost 100 MR, Kennen had a Zhonyas so he could dodge the combo whenever, Leblanc had about 70 MR, and Thresh had enough HP items that combos were not killing him anymore. On top of that, Gnar and Corki both have real strong waveclear, so I don't think extra waveclear from Lux was very necessary.

I think it's fairly academic because Pawn was so far ahead that he could still kill Leblanc and Tristana if he landed a combo, which is what you want to do, but I think Void+Guise into Deathcap would have been a slightly stronger build had M3 been fighting back a bit better, and would have been obtainable with the gold he had at the end of the game. I think Lee should have built a Locket first item in this game, and if he had done so the early Void would have definitely been the better choice.

I suppose at the end of the day since Pawn was 100-0ing the required targets either way, getting more minion damage was the correct choice.



In terms of playstyle, Pawn plays it excellently. He hits Dade with two E's at level 1, which puts Dade on the backfoot early on, and Nunu's warding lets him stay aggressive the whole time without worrying about Lee ganks. I think Dade could have been more aggressive in the level 2-5 area to punish Pawns greedy build, but it seemed like he was playing a little scared. Maybe he was scared of being snared as he jumped forward and being stuck inside the enemy minions, which Pawn does do to him a couple times. This is something that's extremely difficult for me to do in the Lux LB matchup, and it's fun to watch a professional playing her with much better mechanics than I have.

There's a really good example of strong aggressive Lux play at about 17:05 in the video. Pawn pushes a wave up, then moves just out of vision at the side of the lane. He snares Dade by Qing through a minion, following up with a combo that gets him below half HP.

After pushing the following wave up, he E's in the middle of the lane. This is excellent E positioning, because Dade has three choices here. He can either A - miss all 3 CS. B - Walk through the E and take the hit, or C - Try to go around it. C seems like the sensible choice, but it's not because it funnels him into the space between the tower and wall, which is an easy Q hit. Pawn Q's him during the jump, which snares him forward enough for a passive auto (Pawn could have gotten a second auto here if he'd been a little quicker, I think.) Dade ends up taking more damage than he would have just walking through the E, and if Pawns ult had been up this would have been a kill.

Pawn has two deaths in the game, and they're both fairly understandable. The first is in a teamfight at 20:20. He kills Dade, has to flash away from Kennen, and gets enough damage on Lee that an auto will kill him too, so chases for it and gets taken out by a pretty confident Q confirm from Dreams. Pawn makes a slight misplay here, his shield is up but he doesn't use it when the Sonic Wave lands, and I think if he had been attack moving he actually would have landed the auto before Lee finished sailing in anyway. But chasing the Lee is totally understandable, and it was a good play by Dreams.

His second death is shortly after at about 21:50. We don't really see what happens because it comes right after a replay, but it looks like he got caught by about three people going to his blue buff, and that shit happens sometimes, if it's not warded there's not much you can do. This is more good positioning by M3 than it is a mistake by Pawn.



There's also some examples here of M3 playing poorly against the Lux pick. In general I think they don't respect her damage later in the game, and Pawn gets a lot of free bindings that turn into easy kills. But a prime example of how you should never play against Lux is at about 22:50. After the fight at about 22:20, Corki is very clearly seen moving bot by M3's wards. But rather than send somebody bot to stop him, they send 3 people mid in order to attempt to trade towers.

This is a bad call, because a fed Lux like this can easily defend her tower 1v3. She just ults a creep wave (and hits Tristana with it in the process, the casters comment on that but not on her deleting the wave which is the objective), and M3 gets no damage on the tower at all while Corki easily takes bot by himself. They can't dive her in this situation because with her shield and snare she'll go at least 1 for 1 and they won't get to take the tower after anyway.

This is also an example of strong play by EDG, because they had Clearlove and Meiko at the enemy red buff at this time, not only taking the buff, but ready to collapse bot lane if M3 had gone after Corki like they should have.


After this it really becomes kind of a bit of a boring game, EDG is far ahead but since their comp is mostly poke it takes them two barons to break into M3's base. There's some good bindings and a really nice Tristana snipe towards the end of the game, but not too much that stood out for me to comment on.



Ultimately, Pawns Lux looked leagues better than the Lux play I've seen in the LCS, in terms of build order, mechanics, and also strategy of how she's built into a team. Pawn ends 7/2/9, and even though it was a bit of a boring game, it was really cool for me to see my girl used to such success.

I'm not going to go super in depth analyzing his play this game, because the camera was on him almost none of the time, and he didn't really do much that I'd consider worth talking about in depth. He had two deaths, one of which was a good play by CJE that he couldn't have escaped no matter what, and the other was in the last 20 seconds of the game. He had good skillshots for most of the game and played it real standard, so not much to talk about.

It is worth noting that the team composition around this Lux pick is very similar to the LPL team composition, except they have Jarvan for hard engage so they can take the better poke support in Janna.

I would however like to spend some time bashing Frozens build, because it was bad, and you could tell he was playing Lux because Xerath was banned and he didn't have an optimized game plan set up for her.


I'm gonna start with him taking Cleanse. The only cleansable hard CC on the enemy team in this game was from Leona. He had no reason to take Cleanse in lane, and arguably no reason to take Cleanse in teamfights. He only uses it three times in the entire game. He uses it for both of his deaths, and both times Leona isn't on him so it doesn't do anything.

The third time is to stop a Leona stun in the fight at 41:30. While he does stop the stun, all of his cooldowns are down, he doesn't get bursted by anybody, and he walks around for a second without even autoattacking.

I'm pretty comfortable in saying his Cleanse had absolutely 0 impact on the game, and anything (even Revive) would have been better. I would have taken Heal. Frozen had Heal, but switched it to Cleanse when the Leona got locked in, I'm not too sure why he thought Leona would be stunning him over Corki.

This is the biggest build error he made and would have made the biggest difference. The other things are pretty nitpicky, but they're there and I want to pick at them, because I don't think professional players should be making mistakes that can be solved before the game starts.



Next I want to talk about his Masteries. They're not terrible. Here's the player builds in the game:
http://na.lolesports.com/lck/2015/spring/matches/week-6/incredible-miracle-vs-cj-entus

But they could have been better. For starters he doesn't take Double Edged Sword, which is a spectacular mastery on Lux, since she's often attacking people who can't fight back, and isn't worth too much in a fight after she's used her burst combo anyway so dying faster makes very little difference.

He also does the Korean thing of taking 3 Archmage 2 Devastating Strikes, instead of the other way around. I was a little curious as to the math on this so I did some.

What I found is that, while this is probably the right decision for most champions, it's not the right decision for Lux. Xerath for example has lower base damages and higher AP ratios than Lux does, so this is probably the right move on him.

For Lux, her base damages are so high and her ratios are so low, that a point in Devastating Strikes outdamages a point in Archmage basically the entire game long (although it's usually very small, usually within a single point of damage) while also increasing her AA damage. That's for champions that have the minimum expectable MR in a game. Against tanky champions with big MR items, Devastating Strikes is much better than Archmage on Lux. Every enemy champion in that game had an MR item by the end of it (except Leona who has her W), so this mastery choice was simply incorrect.

His runes were fine, he ran Mpen / HP per level / MR / AP, which is standard.



His item build however was also bad.

He started Flask + 3 HP pots, and had no mana for what looked like the entirety of the early lane, meaning he was unable to harass Azir when Azir is at his weakest and obtain any kind of an advantage. Having Cleanse also prevented him from being aggressive here, but we already talked about that.

He goes back to base at 5:45 with 35 CS, so he got 9.33 CS per minute. Based on our Dring vs. Flask math in the guide, this is well over the amount needed to make Dring the superior choice. So he's unable to bully Azir at all, and Azir goes in to the game with a CS lead when he scales better anyway.

He builds Athenes first and then Sorc Shoes, which is fine.

But then he goes for a Deathcap, completing it at 25:45 minutes. This is too late of a timing to get Deathcap second for farming, and much like the LPL game, this is a team that has Corki and Janna, giving them ridiculous waveclear already. You'll notice that at no point in the game can Frozen one shot caster minions with E. He may have been able to immediately after buying the deathcap and we don't see it, but shortly after the minions level up enough that he can't again.

He 100% should have bought Void Staff second in this game, especially considering that at the time he buys Deathcap, Maokai and Reksai have already purchased MR, and Leona has it built in to her kit.



I honestly don't think these errors would have turned the game around. IM pretty much got outplayed, and I think Frozen actually did just about the best of anybody on his team.

But it's sad to see professional players using builds that are just mathematically inferior to some other setup like this. I thought these Korean teams are supposed to have analysts who figure this stuff out and tell the players prior to the games? The Korean teams are usually much better at this sort of thing than the Western teams.

Which is why I think Frozen wanted to play Xerath and couldn't because he was banned, picking Lux as the backup. All of these decisions (except the Cleanse, wtf Cleanse???) would have been correct for Xerath.