Aqua Dragon is perhaps one of the most unique contributors to the League of Legends community. If you know of Aqua Dragon, it may be as "The AD Malz guy" -- their /r/summonerschool Mod epithet. Aqua Dragon reached their peak rating with this pick in season 4, creating and piloting AD jungle Malzahar all the way to Master tier. On top of this, they also won the award for best season 5 jungle guide with their corresponding write-up on MOBAFire. Aqua Dragon is in general a clever and thorough guide writer, and a visit to their profile reveals a plethora of unconventional guides created for both themself and others. Aqua Dragon is always putting theory into practice, boasting a Season 8 champion pool of AP Jungle Malzahar, Tank Karthus, Support Orianna, AP Kog APC, and Bot Vel’koz that they play actively in Diamond. As if all this was not impressive enough, Aqua Dragon is also the co-creator of the (now-defunct) premiere ban analysis website, www.bestbans.com.

In a time of confusion and chaos in the LoL meta, join me in hearing the thoughts of a veteran in using analytic and creative skills to navigate through uncharted territory. Read on to learn about the current state of jungle Malzahar, effective theorycrafting, and what motivates Aqua Dragon to do such awesome work. I sincerely hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

First off, I have to ask: how did you get started with AD jungle Malzahar?

Aqua Dragon: My favorite designs have always been monsters, and so both Cho’Gath and Kog’Maw quickly became my favorites. Once I figured out that Voidlings had AD scaling, I figured if I could play AP Kog’Maw, why not AD Malzahar? I also loved minionmancers, including Orianna and (not yet released) Azir. That sounds superficial and it was! I started League in Season 2 and I wasn’t a prodigy or anything. I largely stumbled on the success by accident; I only picked Malz in ranked because somebody banned my then-Jungle Cho’gath. From there it was practice, iteration, failing, failing, more practice, failing some more, and reaching Master.

Nowadays, AP Malz is fully superior to AD, but I enjoy the Voidling playstyle nonetheless

Wow, what a happy accident! Tell me more about the switch from AD to AP. Is this the first time you've taken AP Malzahar to the jungle?

Aqua Dragon: This is indeed the first season. The killing blow to AD Malzahar was surprisingly nothing direct, but rather something that seemed initially benign: Archangel now gives 20% CDR.

Why did this matter? Because until that point, getting CDR, AP, Mana, and Magic Pen on a jungler’s budget just wasn’t feasible. Meanwhile AD itemization offered ample CDR, especially since Warrior Enchant gave CDR but the AP jungle item didn’t (and also it does now too). Without that utility benefit, AP just ended up wholly outclassing AD. But while I’m stubborn (you kind of have to be to play Off-meta), I’m also not willing to play something unique just for the sake of uniqueness if something superior is there.

Fair enough! OK, one more thing about your current jungle Malzahar build. I noticed that you run Unsealed Spellbook, which is a keystone I haven't seen much of since its latest rework. Do you think it's underutilized? Could other junglers benefit from it similarly?

Aqua Dragon: I don’t think so. Using Unsealed Spellbook requires a very specific set of conditions to use optimally, most notably the lack of any other great Keystone for a high utility champion.

Most junglers have awesome keystones that further their win conditions like Predator. The only other champion I believe who has a lack of awesome jungler keystones is Ivern, who Unsealed Spellbook is fairly common on as well.

That makes sense. Now, beyond just jungle Malzahar, you have written a number of other off-meta guides and have even made a couple reddit posts cataloguing successful off-meta picks that others use, I believe. What motivates you to research and develop off-meta picks in general?

Aqua Dragon: For my primary five champions, the main motivator is that I have fun with those champs! I enjoy minionmancers like Malz Jungle and Orianna Support. Sustained damage artillery champs are fun, like AP Kog and APC Bot Vel'Koz. And Tank Karthus is just kind of ridiculous in their own way.

I think this question is partially related to two misconceptions a ton of people seem to have of me:

1. That because I enjoy and specialize so heavily in a good number of off-meta champions, that I must enjoy ALL off-meta champions. This is largely untrue and for the most part I rarely play anything outside of my off-meta specializations. I'm not a one-trick pony, but I'm also pretty stringent on the kinds of off-meta builds I believe have true workable potential at very high ranks. People often come up to me with a serious off-meta idea and are surprised to find how analytically critical I can be.

2. That because I enjoy these off-meta champions, I must hate meta champions or would even stop playing my champions if they became meta. For one, one of my primary champions, Vel'Koz Bot/Sup, is not particularly off-meta; the largest divergence is that I run Ghost instead of a more typical summoner. For two, I enjoy some meta champions as well! I just don't tend to play them because I prefer my current roster instead.

So the aim is not simply off-meta for off-meta's sake; it's more about the aesthetic and playstyles of the champions. Furthermore, you're also quite meticulous when it comes to determining whether an appealing build is actually competitive enough to merit piloting. Is that about right?

Aqua Dragon: Right. While I initially got lucky with my off-meta builds being reasonably good, I don't just rely on that luck to guide me now. I know and encourage people to be critical about all builds, both meta and off-meta alike. I even have extensive calculators I've set up to really establish that. For example:

Nice! OK, so, circling back to the off-meta guides and the reddit posts: how do those fit in with (or perhaps contrast) your overall framework? Do the successful off-meta practitioners provide inspiration? Do the guides you make for people strike you as things competitive at the highest level (e.g. support Olaf)? To clarify, I'm specifically talking about the posts that catalogue 'unusual builds,' and the guides you make for others or don't actively pilot.

Aqua Dragon: A lot of the Reddit posts I've made are pretty in line with these ideals and when I write those other guides for champs I don't play, I'm still giving them the due diligence they deserve through extensive field testing.

I've definitely been impressed, even if not necessarily inspired, by the successful off-meta builds of other people (Diamond Jungle Yorick comes to mind). And it's nice to be proven wrong too, like when I thought Xerath Support wouldn't do too hot, but they started seeing some relevance in Diamond in Korea.

Only a few of the guides do. Most of the ones I wrote were out of a request to optimize the build. I think many of them are largely outclassed by other picks. But, many of them are plain fun! I think that matters more than climbing viability.

That makes sense. It's also really cool that you put in the time to test out picks in game, in addition to all the calculations and conceptual work you do. Are there any picks right now that you think have potential, perhaps pending the right pilot or a small shift in meta? I immediately thought of your marksman Azir, for instance, when traditional ADCs started shifting out of the meta more.

Aqua Dragon: We are on the verge of seeing AP Tryndamere spiral back into popularity I feel, pressed on by this meta being so ideal for split pushers combined with the recent buff to the spin slash cooldown. There already is a Diamond+ AP Trynd main whose name eludes me, but I think we're going to start seeing the build appear way more often very soon.

I've heard some talk of AP Trynd, yeah. Exciting stuff! Also, what do you think of the current 'chaos meta'? Especially re: bot lane opening up beyond marksman and gold funneling.

Aqua Dragon: It's really cool! It's the first time I can play a champion in their unintended position (Vel'Koz Bot) and not get flamed absolutely every game for it. It's kind of refreshing. While I enjoy the diversity, I'm a bit concerned about how buffing some particular marksmen (Caitlyn) could wipe the delicate balance. But I suppose it's not too bad because if it's only one oppressive marksman, they can always be banned without much issue.

My bigger annoyance is the sheer amount of split pushers in the meta. I respect that split pushing is a viable strategy to victory, but man do I hate fighting against it haha. Somebody has to go on Tryndamere duty to stop the inevitable force crashing into the base repeatedly, and that person has a tendency of being me...

Haha, yeah. As someone who also likes to play some off-meta picks, I can especially sympathize with your first point. Speaking of which, did you follow the 'Smite Singed Support' saga back when it was going on? Do you have thoughts on that, or in general what the community's role should be in regard to what an individual summoner wants to play?

Aqua Dragon: There were two main thoughts I ended up having during that saga:

1. People kept saying, "It's fine as long as you communicate your plans!" To which I say, people are far too optimistic about how well communication is received. When playing something especially off-meta, anything that is said becomes grounds for debate. In almost every Support Orianna game, somebody tries to critique the build, the playstyle, the champion, etc. and there's no use trying to argue in the middle of a match because it's not going to convince anyone. In a similar way, there is no amount of communication that Singed could have given that would not have resulted immediately in harsh flaming, critique, pinging, or even griefing.

2. People also said, "I don't want to play with Singed Support!". Well, suck it up. I don't like playing with Tryndameres either but my enjoyment of my teammate's champions/builds is irrelevant if we end up winning the match. Or another way to put that: if an optimal winning strategy frustrates my teammates, it is Riot's job to make that no longer an optimal strategy. It is not my job to cater to that frustration.

Fair enough. Speaking of optimal winning strategies -- what sort of math (or programming and other skills) goes into your analyses?

Aqua Dragon: The calculators I use are just Excel based and frankly are just a lot of "If Yes, then #" statements. But the more interesting part is a statistic I've developed that I feel is criminally underused: "Damage Efficiency." As a contrast, "Cost Efficiency" is the number of stats people get for the money they put into an item. As an example, see the following image:

Image Courtesy of www.leagueoflegends.wikia.com

But this has serious limitations. It assumes every champion can use the same stats with equal effectiveness. It assumes AP champions even benefit the same amount from AP. It has trouble evaluating the true damaging effect of passives like Liandry's. It's just not very useful.

Damage Efficiency, the metric I much prefer, asks: How much damage are you doing for the gold you spend? Take the following calculation I did with Kog'Maw, for instance. This build has Oblivion Orb and Sorcerer Shoes for 2600 gold. In total at Level 8, with a few predetermined spellcasts and MR amounts, the total damage dealt to the target is 426. Thus, 2600 / 426 = 6.1 Damage Efficiency. Or more intuitively, 6.1 gold paid per point of damage.

And this is wild because it reveals how suboptimal a lot of people's build paths are. Stuff like upgrading to Morellonomicon instead of just leaving something as Oblivion Orb or building Rabadons on most champions when Void Staff is more damage efficient in almost all cases, even at like 50 MR!

Right. Another way to look at this, I think, would be to say that oftentimes it's not the calculations themselves that are hard, but rather finding the correct metrics to look at and the right goals to optimize toward. To be fair, also, I think these 'correct metrics' and 'right goals' can at times be elusive or tricky, no?

Aqua Dragon: Right exactly. Damage calculations are trivial to do for the most part. The toughest part is trying to think "What's a fair evaluation for what i want?" So when I'm doing my number crunching, a discussion I might think is, "What level can I expect to have Oblivion Orb by? How much MR will my priority enemies have? How does this compare to Void, Rabadon's, and Liandry's? Are there enough inventory slots to make this worthwhile? What runes should I test alongside this? Does this small change affect the final result?" The hard part is finding those right metrics, as you alluded to.

That segues perfectly into my next question. How do you decide what variables to focus on? Are there any fundamentals you look at virtually every time, such as damage efficiency or total budget?

Aqua Dragon: Knowing which variables to focus on is extremely tough work! I do pretty much always look at Damage Efficiency rather than total budget though. If the total budget of a build is 10,000 or 50,000, it wouldn't change that a better damage efficiency would spend each gold piece better.

I also try to test three different case scenarios for champions: a burst combo (usually one of each spell), a simple harass spell (a one-time use of something like Q), and a sustained damage fight (assuming multiple spellcasts of the lower cooldown spells).

Sometimes, understanding the purpose of a champion makes testing some of these things unnecessary. For example: Tank Karthus is completely unconcerned with their burst damage. I literally only care about how much damage their Defile does with maybe a Lay Waste tossed in every now and then. In that case, testing becomes significantly easier. But even with all those test cases, Damage Efficiency really is the heart of determining which items are the best for each one.

A small point, but to be fair, isn't total budget something you took into consideration when looking at Malzahar's options for reaching a certain CDR cap within a given amount of gold?

Aqua Dragon: I did not. Instead, I looked at "how much damage efficiency am I giving up to go for this CDR item?"

For example, on my Damage Jungle Malz build, I skip Luden's entirely, opting to sit on Lost Chapter and then running straight into "Ryliandries" (Rylai's Crystal Scepter & Liandry's Torment). This is because I saw how much damage efficiency I was giving up for 10% CDR + Mana and decided it just wasn't worth it, especially after enough field testing made it feel like my damage was kicking in too slowly, corroborating the theoretical results. All theoretical results should always be paired with real results, ideally.

Now, it's important to know that even though damage efficiency is important for build path, it makes no comment about the component buying order. My AP Kog build doesn't need all the damage items right away and will instead opt for multiple ruby crystals before completing a single item. The damage efficiency tradeoff is worthwhile.

Right. Well, we could probably talk about the nitty-gritty of LoL theorycrafting for a while, but I still have a few more topics to pick your brain about. For one, do you ever use this sort of analysis in other games, or activities in general?

Aqua Dragon: I don't use calculators for any other games, but I do maintain this same kind of analysis for pretty much anything I do. I have a trend of starting off games / activities worse than others, but very rapidly improving. I also like to experiment and try weird strategies in all games I play. Actually back in Starcraft 2 maybe years ago, I reached Master Tier in 2v2 by employing a super bizarre strategy that I'm disappointed I didn't tell enough people about.

For anyone who doesn't playing Starcraft, the simple version is this: every player begins with a few workers, one of the weakest units in the game. My teammate would start the game by immediately sending all but one of their workers to the enemy base. Enemies would try to set up a wall at the entrance of the base, but my teammate would keep disrupting them until the enemy was forced to pull nearly all the workers off their own activities. This fighting would go on for some time... long enough that my swarm of fast, numerous, vicious zerglings would run at the now-unfortified base and tear everything apart. It was probably the first time I had "major game success" using an off-beat strategy.

Awesome. What about your preference for monster designs? Does that extend to other games as well? (A swarm of vicious zerglings sounds a little like Malzahar, right?)

Aqua Dragon: Absolutely. Give me Zerg. Give me Tyrannids. Give me Leviathan. And of course, give me Voidlings ahah.

I would expect nothing less. I'm also curious as to whether you've dabbled with Magic: the Gathering, or are familiar with the player archetypes. You strike me very much as a "Johnny-Spike."
From the original article by Mark Rosewater:

Johnny/Spike or Spike/Johnny

The Johnny/Spike player wants to win but only on his own terms. Most of the rogue tournament deckbuilders are Johnny/Spikes. They go to great lengths to be able to win with original decks. Even when they have to use a pre-made deck, they will always tweak it to give the deck their own spin. A good example of a Johnny/Spike card is Basking Rootwalla. The card is cool and offers interesting deckbuilding opportunities but still has the raw power needed to win.

Aqua Dragon: I know all the rules to Magic and have casually played a few times on request, but it's not something I actively tried. I did play a lot of Hearthstone though and was constantly experimenting with a build archetype I called Netherlock, focusing around constant never-ending AOE clears. I enjoy AOE destruction and was willing to take that experimentation as far as possible. I think that really does fit the Johnny/Spike archetype!

On that note, I feel Hearthstone is especially indicative of how specialized I go whenever I play something. I've played well over 1,000 Warlock games, but less than 50 games total of all the other 8 classes combined.

Wow! Well, while you are most definitely a specialist, you certainly seem to have a considerable breadth of knowledge, at least when it comes to LoL. How do you balance delving deep on some specific strategy or playstyle with also learning about the array of options available within a game?

Aqua Dragon: That part does require a bit of active involvement. I read all patch notes fully and keep up with Rioter posts, including the regular gameplay thoughts from Ghostcrawler. I have a keen interest in game design and so keep tabs on what Rioters and players feel. Reading lots of Reddit threads is really useful for getting a pulse on how people in that community feel, while also often being educational on what many champions do.

And of course, play enough, and you get a feel for how champions work and their win conditions. After fighting Smite Talon twice, I got a pretty good idea of their win condition compared to standard Talon and was able to incorporate that into my reactions accordingly.

There's also an active process I have of constantly questioning "Why?" when I see champions rise up in popularity. To answer that question, I needed to know a lot, so I made a concerted effort to learn.

You mention that you have a keen interest in game design. Have you pursued game development or anything similar yourself? Would you ever consider working at Riot?

Aqua Dragon: I actually went to the University of Utah to major in game design (technically a Computer Science Major with an Entertainment Arts Engineering Emphasis, but uh, that's too long). I started designing games when I was in 7th grade so I relished the chance to be at one of the best game design schools in the nation.

In the end, I came out with a Communication major. Through the process of gaining skills, confidence, and experience, I realized I was more interested in making my own games, rather than games for another company. That's what I've been focusing on preparing on, though my last year got eaten up from being a middle school assistant teacher (I've since left the job and am aiming to be an SAT tutor, which requires many less hours of work). Once my finances are in a steady spot, it'll be time for full game development!

That's fantastic. Are you primarily interested in developing competitive games (such as LoL, SC2, and HS) or are there other genres that are serious contenders for you?

Aqua Dragon: Despite how much I play and enjoy League, my true love has always been platformer games. I've beaten so many major platform game out there (Super Meat Boy, Super Mario Bros 1-3, most mainline Kirby games etc.) and I have a keen interest in experimenting with a Platforming Bullet-Hell hybrid, which is a fairly unexplored genre combo.

I hope to try that out some day! In the mean time, let's rewind to a previous project of yours: www.bestbans.com. Tell me about how that project came to be.

Aqua Dragon: Ah how I wish the site for it was operational! It began out of wondering if there was some more meticulous way to determine optimal banning besides just gut feelings. If a champion is picked 30% of the time and wins 70% of the time, can we use that information to determine if they're an optimal ban?

Through a lot of iteration, and a little help from Phreak (thanks, buddy!), I was able to develop a formula:

(Winrate - 50%) * (100 * pickrate) / (100 - banrate)

The specifics behind it are a bit boring, but the main thing is the formula asks "How often does this champion win out of 10,000 games compared to the average?"

It is NOT a formula for evaluating strength. It is a formula for evaluating win consistency, which is the most important part of banning. It doesn't matter if a champion wins 90% of the time if that champion only gets picked 0.01% of the time. A champion that wins 55% and gets picks 70% is much more likely to be a reason for losing rank.

I still regularly use a fan-made Best Bans spreadsheet to help me determine bans.

That's awesome! I may have to save that spreadsheet for later use. So, what went into actually making the website and using Riot API to pull data? Is that a tricky process to navigate?

Aqua Dragon: Funny enough, I wasn't skilled enough with the Riot API to actually pull data using it. So I uh... developed code that would parse the webpage of a Mobafire line-chart, scan it for the last point of data, and record that. Not the most elegant solution, haha.

After I got two others on board, they were more familiar with the Riot API and so we got to stop using my original, super robust, super excellent solution.

That's not at all what I was expecting, but that's actually a pretty cheeky and clever solution. What coding language did you use?

Aqua Dragon: It was coded in Java, later transitioning to Ruby when it became a website. It started off as just a program I would sometimes run on my computer, and Ruby allowed it to be self-maintaining.

Gotcha. OK, indulge me for a moment, since this is a question I've had for some time. Is there a version of bestbans that uses that same formula, but also takes into account the probability of a champion being banned to determine whether or not you should ban it?

As I understand the above formula, it's effectively determining in what percentage of your games a given champion actually shows up and wins, but it makes to no comment as to how you should ban based on others' banning behavior beyond that.

Scenario: Caitlyn and Ashe have the same solution satisfying that formula, but Caitlyn's banrate is 15% and Ashe's banrate is 7%. Wouldn't it make sense to prefer banning Ashe, since they have identical impact but other summoners are more likely to ban Caitlyn?

Aqua Dragon: Pasting the formula again here for reference:

(Winrate - 50%) * (100 * pickrate) / (100 - banrate)

That question is actually what Phreak helped me solve! Initially, I wasn't sure how to handle the banrate, but Phreak suggested adding the division by banrate you see there. This effectively handles the ban amount.

For an intuitive example in practice:

Let's say Janna has a pickrate of 20% and a banrate of 40%. A champion cannot be picked if it's banned (astonishing). In other words, 40% of the time, Janna cannot even appear. Janna can appear in 60% of games. In that 60%, there are 20 percentage points where Janna is picked. In other words, Janna is picked 1/3 of the time they are not banned (60% not banned, picked in 20 percentage points). Thus:

(pickrate) / (100 - banrate) = 20 / (100 - 40)
= 20 / 60
= 33%

This is what I call their "adjusted pickrate". Janna is picked in 20% of games, but when you account for banrate, they are picked 33% of the time they are actually available.

I think I get that, but suppose that for two champions, their adjusted pickrates are equal, as well as their impact, but their banrates are not equal. Let's say one champion appears more often but wins less, and another champion appears less frequently but wins more (and in fact, their influence is identical.) Wouldn't a good tiebreaker then be to look at how likely they are to be banned in the first place, or am I missing something?

Aqua Dragon: I feel in that case, they're both identically worthwhile to ban. I think your higher banrate one might be more worthwhile just because you can hope the enemies will ban it for you. That was actually one area I had wanted to explore. Sometimes I found myself skipping the bans on higher influence champions just because enemies would usually ban it for me anyway. But it was something that always eluded me, and by the time I thought about it more extensively, I was no longer in charge of the site.

Right, that's what I mean. If we consider a more extreme case (not sure if this is even possible given the metrics) in which two champions have the same influence, but one champion had a 99% banrate (and a corresponding winrate just slightly over 50%, maybe even a low pickrate since that wouldn't need to do any of the heavy lifting in determining adjusted pickrate) and then a champion with a 1% banrate but the same influence, surely you can just look at the prior probabilities of 9 random people banning and easily choose the second champion. But I digress.

Speaking of which, you have mentioned that you are no longer in charge of the site. Did you sell it off or anything like that? Is there possibility of a reboot in the future?

Aqua Dragon: Truthfully it's 5 random people, since there are 4 who you can see. I think it might be worth revisiting at some point.

Me and my two partners did indeed sell the site. I think at some point, I'd like to try asking for it back once I have enough funds to justify it. In the meantime, I do have another League website idea I'll be working on once I get more situated!

That's very exciting. I'll be looking forward to that new website, and I would definitely love to see bestbans back in action. Alright, well, this has been extremely enjoyable, but I think it's time to wrap up. Do you have any shout-outs or final thoughts you'd like to share?

Aqua Dragon: While I might enjoy AP Malz Jungle, I'd really like to see AD Malz make a grand return and it's not a total pipe dream!

"You're also going to see us shipping individual champ to champ changes over the coming months which are aiming at either opening up playstyles that used to exist but don't anymore (AD Malzahar, Lane Nidalee, AP Trist as a potential examples), or introducing playstyles that have never existed on a champ before (I wonder what an AP Shotgun knees looks like)."

I recognize that it's listed only as a potential example, so I'll understand if they backtrack from that path, but it'll be so cool to reclaim that if it reaches fruition!

Want more of Aqua Dragon? Check out the links below!

Aqua Dragon's Twitch - https://www.twitch.tv/aquadragon33/

Aqua Dragon's Mobafire Profile - https://www.mobafire.com/profile/aqua-dragon-242946/content/builds

Aqua Dragon's YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0SnVCe1rEL9NCfU6yhf0Ew

Aqua Dragon's Discord Server - https://discordapp.com/invite/0yEkHlQ8vHfsSP40

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