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Wednesday, February 17, 2016

LoL Analysis: 2016 NALCS, IMT vs DIG (Week 5, Day 1)

I have a lot of respect for every player on these pro teams. These guys and girls sacrifice a lot and work hard to play these games for us. That said, Team Dignitas would be proud to get to 30 minutes against Huni, Reignover, and Company. DIG did not look convincing in their last win against Echo Fox and should probably just try to snowball their bot lane and hope for the best as they cannot win the solo lanes. Playing the long game against Immortals has obviously not worked for anyone, so I'd encourage them to play power champions, try for picks, lane swap back and forth, and generally try to muck things up and create chaos. Basically a C9 game. 


Picks and Bans – Reignover hovered Nunu for a fair bit before taking Rek’Sai. Rek’Sai is one of my favorite junglers because of his utility and ability to soak damage, but I would have loved to see him continue the 6.2 Nunu resurgence. I wrote that DIG will lose the top lane and that they shouldn't split push, but Quinn is actually a great pick for BillyBoss against Gangplank. And Ahri is no pushover in the midlane. This is a fun comp from DIG.

It is so much fun to watch WildTurtle and Adrian. They use the healing from Soraka to get the small sentinels, reach level 2 faster, and take an already advantageous Kalista vs. Lucian early game a step further by shoving to the turret. But BillyBoss and Shiphtur are also shoving and making IMT miss CS. Until Reignover shows up top and poof! goes the advantage in another IMT First Blood. This is the weakness of playing a long lane. BillyBoss has to shake this off and keep shoving - he can’t sit back at turret and let GP scale. He does well to get back quickly and trade with Huni while Kirei ganks mid and kills Pobelter.

The next few minutes were pretty chaotic as the teams traded kills. Overall, DIG are playing well – they made some nice TP plays an were able to stay up in the top and mid lanes. However, WildTurtle and Reignover have huge CS advantages of their own and map control is all IMT. Look at this sequence at 22:30. IMT are playing super aggressively but DIG rotating quickly to even the fights. Problem is IMT pivot to turrets and DIG are not able to rotate fast enough to match IMT's global abilities. With their catch comp, DIG don’t have the tools to siege or repel sieges. IMT have really impressed me with how they’ve finished games when they have leads. Around the fights, they shove lanes, starve jungles, and control the map.


From here, the game was textbook. IMT with a huge lead and Baron Buff on all 5 members clean up. Still, I like what DIG did. They mucked up the game and got lots of early kills – for much of the game, they were only 1 kill down. This shows some of the tools teams can use against Immortals – highly mobile pick-oriented champions. Kirei didn’t melt against Reignover. Shiphtur had a CS lead on Pobelter. They just couldn’t follow through into the turret-taking phase. I wonder if more teams will try to laneswap onto IMT to make some of those towers come down faster while using the pick comp. Then again, WildTurtle admitted after the game that he tunneled a bit hard looking for kills, so this may have just been a more casual game from IMT. 

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