Part 4

So Worlds just ended and we have a 2014 World Champion for LOL. The 16 teams from across the Globe faced each other over 78 games, over 5 weeks and across different locations in Korea. 8 teams were knocked out in Groups, 4 teams in the quarter finals, 2 teams in the semi finals and finally the winner was crowned in the finals with a 3:1 victory over their opponent.

Samsung White the 2014 world champions beat Starhorn Royal Club from China in a best of 5 with a 3:1 victory, losing only the 3rd game against their rivals. Losing only 2 games throughout the whole torunament, 1 against Starhorn Royal Club and the other against Western team TSM in the Quarter Finals, they destroyed all their opponents. Not dropping a single game in the Group Stages, they destroyed all teams in their group, getting out easily.

Their support Mata earned MVP with his mechanic and team mentality play that lead his team to victory. There are arguments for all the players earning MVP in this tournament with some of the best play from a team in League of Legends history. With a high arrange of champions that they can play, they were unpredictable in the pick/ban phase of the game. They would bring a new srategy every game and play it to perfection. It was even mentioned that they could of been playing inferior strategies some game to test what they could do, sometimes being explioted for it and sometimes coming out on top.

On to the articles in hand, I'll be demonstrating graphics for every champion in Worlds listing aphabetically. They will describe the pick and ban rate for every champion, the win rates, their most common lane opponents and a team they were played by most on a percentage or a team recognised with that champion. I'll provide a small story behind the champion's success/failure, reasoning for the champions presence and some videos of the champions in action at Worlds. The aim here is to describe the effect of the champions played in the tournament and grant an understanding.

Rammus came out during the Worlds tournament as Alliance's Shook faced off against Meteos from Cloud9 as he played Jarvan IV. Rammus has various strengths and just as many weaknesses. He has one of the strongest forms of crowd control in the game and can be a monstrous late game tank. Though that is true, he can be easily kited and itemised against, meaning that the champion needs to be played with some intelligence.

As a tank jungler, you mainly see Rammus be a strong scaling champion who plays the part of peeling and initiating fights, specifically on one target. His early game is very shaky as he lacks in jungle clear and can be defeated in 1 v 1 scenarios against other junglers. This meaning he's easily invaded upon and loses his jungle to the enemy team. That being said, if he can get an early gank in, it can end with a kill as his taunt can lock down a target for a considerable amount of time. In the late game, he is one of the strongest armour orientated tanks in the game as he gets a lot of in built stats from that stat. By initiating fights on to the enemy carries, Rammus can be very destructive as he can lock them down long enough for his team to follow him up.

In Worlds, Rammus saw 2 plays. Once by Alliance in the Groups Stages and once by Starhorn Royal Club in the Finals. In both games, the pick won the game and faced off against Jarvan IV. Now in theory, Jarvan is one of the best options against Rammus as he can block off any form of mobility that Rammus has with Cataclysm. That forces the Jarvan to use his ultimate defensively instead of offensively though and when you need Jarvan to initiate, that objective becomes unfulfilled. With his strong crowd control, insane speed with power ball, scaling tank stats and the unexpected resurgence of the champion at Worlds, Rammus came out on top with a 100% win rate in the little amount of games he was involved in.

Rengar has slowly come back during the end of the season and became a somewhat dominant pick during the Worlds tournament. Rengar while played in the West, did not see anywhere near the amount of success seen when played in the East. With stronger co-ordination, teamwork and mechanical play, we saw players like Dandy and Spirit succeed on the champion. Rengar is an amazing champion when played correctly, but needs his team to co-ordinate effectively.

Rengar isn't the strongest early game champion in the game but does have good match ups. Defeated by champions such as Lee Sin whose early game is beaten by no one. While he can defeat champions like Rammus with a lack of early game presence in terms of damage. In regards to ganking, he excels at it when reaching level 6. Able to come into lane with stealth and jump on one champion and burst him down with his mass single target damage. When followed up by other champions, it can easily end with a kill. The ultimate becomes consistently stronger as the game goes on. Excels at finding stradlers on the map and can easily get to the back line in team fights.

During Worlds, we saw the Chinese and Korean teams use the champion and destroy any team they came across. Samsung White's Dandy and Royal Club's Insec forced enemy teams to pull out bans. They would communicate with their team and gank efficiently across the map. Using effectively placed wards and understanding where the enemy wards could be placed, the team would adjust their movements and actions to match their plans immaculately. Their amazing play of the champion would ebb out into other teams and they would dab their hand in Rengar play. With some of the jungle champions being nerfed for the patch at Worlds, Rengar became a little bit stronger, which can be seen in his end of tournament win rate stat.

Riven is a interesting champion and we've seen her jump to the rift and back multiple times over the years. If she gets a few kills under her belt, Riven can get out of control and can deal with nearly any champion in the game. Her problem is that she needs to get rolling to have impact. This unpredictability made it so she wasn't seen as a competitive pick anymore. Especially after the nerfs she got in the middle of the season. That said, she appeared in one game being played by #3 Korean team, Najin White Shield.

So Riven is a scary champion when played correctly. As a melee champion, you don't fight Riven early on. With basically 3 spells in built into 1 ability and the damage increasing auto attack passive, she has one of the strongest level 1s in the game. As the game goes on, while you need to bully her and try and put her into a weak position so she doesnt scale well, don't put yourself into unnecessary damage by getting a little bit too close. She plays the role of a split pusher, dueller and roamer really well with her destructive damage output, amazing mobility and strong scaling.

During Worlds, White Shield's top laner Save battled against Alliance's Wickd. Irelia is one of the strongest duellists in the game as she has pertinent crowd control, true damage, a gap closer and mid ranged projectiles with her ultimate. She picks up speed in the mid game with the item Trinity Force. Riven is reasonably relevant throughout the game, but has an advantage against Irelia as she can pull out more damage. With her 2 forms of hard cc, Irelia needs to play with a bit more care. Save seemed to bring out the Riven pick and make it work. Eventhough he got put into a uncomfortable position in the early game with rotational play and gank pressure, he stayed relevant throughout the game.

Rumble blew up on the Worlds stage with him being picked in the first game of the whole tournament. Samsung White's Looper picked the champion against EDG in their first game of the tournament. Coming out with a victory, Rumble exploded through the teams and became a reasonably dominant pick during the tournament. Excelling in early to mid game objective control with strong team fight after 6, Rumble became a optional pick once again.

The last time we saw Rumble dominate the top lane was in Season 3 where mages and strong early game bruisers dominated the lane. We saw champions like Kennen and Rumble be constantly picked. So Rumble hasn't got the easiest laning phase as he can have a hard time farming in lane and putting out damage on the opponent champion. It all depends on the individual's mechanics and control of Rumble's passive, Junkyard Titan. Rumble can increase his own damage and soft cc with this passive. He can also silence himself if he goes too far, but improves his auto attack damage to compensate. Rumble comes into his own when dragon starts becoming a priority and team fights are a regular occurrence. With Equalizer, Rumble can create either create a huge AOE damage creator or zone champions aggressively. He can easily control the movement of the enemy team, making him a nuisance in large scale fights around dragon and other objectives.

At Worlds, the first pick of Rumble was a bit strange. Rumble has relatively low cooldowns and against Maokai, Rumble can easily help him get his passive heal on auto attack up quickly. With Rumble's lack of escape, Mao'kai can easily set up ganks for his jungler to jump in. Rumble does create some form of pressure in the mid game. While Mao'kai jumps into Rumble's back line, Rumble can zone off the entire enemy team, making it easy for Rumble's team mates to kill the Mao'kai. This does take a certain understanding of the champion and knowledge of how to place his ultimate correctly. I've mentioned before the power of the mid game right now in this meta. The mid game team fights can dictate games. Rumble's prominent strength is his power spike in these team fights. Teams at Worlds were all trying to continuously pick the champion for that reason. With his positive win rate, you can determine the champion was successful for his chosen purpose and when failed, you could say it was the lack of mechanical skill and practice on the champion.

Ryze has been an OP pick throughout all of Season 4. With his versatility, reasonably strong early damage, strong late game scaling and itemised defensive stats Ryze has dominated a lot of the games on his own. With a second form of scaling using both ability power and mana in his damage, Ryze has an interesting item path. Ryze was a high priority pick during Worlds, being the 5th most picked/banned champion during it.

Ryze is an incredibly strong mage and with no skillshots, can be hard to deal with when played well. Ryze is known for his amazing late game dominance as he deals mass AOE damage, becomes hard to kill as his item path makes him more tanky, can lock down his targets and reduce the magic resistance of his opponent champions. While in 1 v 1 scenarios, Ryze doesnt have that much of a bad time as he can use is Overload consistently due to his passive cooldown reduction when abilities are used. With no mobility tools though, he has hard time escaping ganks and 1 v2 scenarios. This becomes less and less important as the games goes on. He eventually makes himself known in team fights, locking down priority targets (normally with flash) and quickly reducing their health bars with his AP burst.

Throughout Worlds, we saw Ryze be used and abused in multiple games. In nearly every game he was picked on the Top lane, left on his island to farm and scale into his strong late game. He was chosen for Mid during one game, where SSB faced SSW in the Semi Finals. Ryze did lose in this game as the future champions rolled over their sister team to advance into the Finals. On the top lane, Ryze needs to play a reserved but reasonably aggressive play style to get through his can be rough early and mid game. Chinese player, Gogoing is known for a few champions which he shown up with at Worlds. Dominating some of his games on Irelia and Ryze. As said, when in the right hands, Ryze can destroy games. With his insane priority in pick, Ryze came out at Worlds as an overall successful champion finalizing at 59.5% win rate. Skip to half way through the video to see Gogoing play as Ryze against teams at Worlds.

Singed has been recently changed in terms of kit, changing some forms of his gameplay, adding a snare to his mega adhesive when flipped into it. The champion has a unique play style where his goal is to attract attention from the opposite team by "proxy" farming behind the enemy turret lines. During the Worlds tournament, the Singed update wasn't involved so they were playing the old version. Picked against Mao'kai, a team utilised the champions weird play style.

Singed is an extremely obnoxious champion and incredibly weird to play against. While he hardly spends any time in lane, you're never able to push up as your minions never seem to exist. A goal of his in the early-mid game is to create a diversion so his team can put pressure on other parts of the map. By forcing the enemy jungler and possibly other champions to come up to the top lane, Singed's team can do other things to try and win them the game. Taking global objectives like dragon, ganking the bottom lane to help them win that lane and taking turrets to push through and win. As the game develops, he uses his kit to obnoxiously get to the back line and create pressure, zoning champions away with his poison trail and flinging enemies into his team.

At Worlds, we saw Singed being played by one team and one player. Looper came out with the pocket pick against the dominant tree, Mao'kai. With Mao'kai's lack of lane presence, Singed can proxy behind the turret with more ease then against other champions like Irelia. Secondly, Mao'kai's passive which heals him after 5 spells are used around him isn't as easy to enable as Singed's poison trail doesnt count as a continuous amount of spells, only 1 when it's activated. Looper used his teleport during his games as Singed to try and win team fights. In the game against TSM, Singed used his teleport in the middle of TSM which made them scatter. With his fling and mega adhesive, he was able to create kills for his team. While it worked in the game against TSM, Looper didnt seem to create the same presence when facing Starhorn Royal Club in the finals.

Sona hasn't appeared at a consistent rate throughout the whole of Season 4. From her being the number one support in Season 3 where teams labelled her a priority support pick, she's not having anywhere near the same amount of impact. As the season developed, Riot finally noticed that Sona's style of play was basically boring. So they mixed it up a little bit. By enunciating her auras to make them have more of an impact and be visually more noticeable.

So Sona's auras got changed. Her spells still do the same thing practically. She has a damaging ability which aims for two targets, a heal which aims for the least healthiest champion by percentage, a self movement speed buff and a large AOE ultimate which stuns enemies hit for a duration (and makes them dance). The auras are what Riot have changed. As a whole, Sona's auras are now visible to all players so understanding where you need to be to be granted the aura's passive is easier. Her auras are also increased in duration the more allies she gets inside the aura area. Her Hymn of Valor aura now grants allied champions extra magic damage on next auto attack. Her Aria of Perseverance now grants a small health shield. Her Song of Celerity grants bonus movement speed for her allies.

At Worlds, Sona was one of the dunces in the classroom and came out with no marks at the end. Multiple reasons come together to describe why she wasn't successful. Firstly, she was played by only one player during Worlds as a niche pick to try and throw his opponents off. nRated, arguably one of the weaker MECHANICAL supports (he's a great tactician for the team with his knowledge) at the tournament. He played her in the games where Svenskeren was banned from playing so their team wasn't playing to the best of their ability. Finally, the matchups he was put into weren't the easiest. Nami in all sense and purposes, is just a better Sona as she has a stronger laning phase and the same kind of impact in the later team fights. With Janna as well, the two supports Sona faced were known in this tournament to have more of an impact and importance in the games during Worlds.

Swain started seeing some play as Mao'kai became relevant in the meta. As Mao'kai rose to dominance on the top lane, we started seeing more unconventional picks appear. With his lack of lane presence, we saw picks like Swain become relevant as they could get through the early game a bit easier. Swain has been in the game for a long time and is one of the strongest DOT orientated champions in the game.

Swain's early game fully depends on the mechanical skill of the player and the champion he's facing. Like all champions, they have relevant counters to be considered. Some of them champions though can adjust their play style to compensate. Most of these champions are what become strong in a meta and are good choices in games. Swain has a hard time dealing with range. A mid range mage, when he catches someone he can get a considerable amount of damage on top of them. The problem is, if champions such as Lux and Xerath are blasting him from double the range his spells reach, what can he do with his kit to kill them. That's why we've seen him in the top lane as of late facing off against Mao'kai's. Alongside the fact that he can deal with Mao'kai's crowd control by healing off him with Ravenous Flock, Swain can control Mao'kai in the match up. Reasoning for why we see the champion coming up here and there right now.

SK Gaming's Fredy122 picked Swain into the Mao'kai pick, creating an unusual strategy that would in the future, win them their game. As i've mentioned above, Mao'kai has a hard time against Swain so analysts and viewers alike expected the champion to be put in the same lane as the Mao'kai. SK Gaming threw all that out of the window and lane swapped themselves, putting Swain in the duo lane. This made them weaker in the early game as Swain would have a hard time trying to scale. They did this though to help their ADC, Candypanda scale up as Vayne. By giving Vayne a 1 v 1 lane against the Mao'kai, she could freeze and free farm. The Swain eventually got into a place where could help his team through the cc and AOE damage he provides. The Swain lane swap was ingenious as they confused TSM with their strategy and threw them off their game.

Syndra is one of the strongest lane bullies on the mid lane currently. With her low mana costing and low cooldown Dark Sphere, she can land damage on her enemies at a consistent rate and from a safe distance. With good manipulation of the Dark Spheres and correct positioning, Syndra at level 6 has the ability to decimate a single targets health bar very quickly when using all of her abilities. As mobility is such an important tool right now, you question how does Syndra survive in the meta with her lack of one.

Syndra is a complicated champion but when effort has been put into learning the champion, you can start seeing the impact her kit has. Syndra's main weakness is her lack of escape mechanism. Aside from that, she's one of the stronger mages in the game. This is especially true when considering single target damage. Syndra can bully her opponent around in the early phases of the game. Using her low cooldown Q to harass her opponent and farm efficiently. When grabbing her W & E abilities, she can manipulate minions and cc her opponent down with good sphere control. As soon as she reaches 6, she needs to dominate the lane and boast her dominance across the opponent laner. Threatening them with a potential all in. For that reason, she's picked against assassins as she can push them out of lane early and abuse her range advantage.

During Worlds, we saw multiple teams pick up the champion. We saw some bans of the champion, aimed at banning specific players off the champion. We saw Dark Passage draw some bans against them as their mid laner Naru, is known for his skill on the champion. We saw a lot of bans being aimed at the mid laners from the NA region with Syndra. Bjergsen, famously known for his pentakill in Season 3 when he played in EU on Ninja in Pyjamas. Cloud 9's Hai also saw Syndra bans aimed at him as he shown comfort on the champion. The ban is especially effective when it comes to a player like Hai. Hai is known to be a less mechanical player, but an amazing shot caller. With a champion like Syndra who can have an easier laning phase, he can put more effort into helping his team c0-ordinate their strategy.