With the 2017 World Championship right around the corner, I think it's safe to say the game won't be changing much until preseason, meaning that the ranked grind at the end of the season will be fairly similar to the ranked grind now. Now that we all have some time to plan our attack on whatever rank we're aiming for, we should look at the state of the League ecosystem and get a feel for what champions might be worth our time. Right now, those champions are highlighted by tanks, engage heavy champions, and hypercarry ADCs.

A Note: The desolate wasteland of solo queue is never going to be as homogenized as pro play. You'll always have your Rivens, Yasuos, Ahris, and Vaynes running around in any meta, regardless of their relative strength, due to their dedicated player bases. Take anything in this post with an implied "if there are a lot of tanks in your games." That being said, let's move on to the tanks.

Tanks

Before jumping into exact details of why tanks, and Cho'Gath in particular, are perceived as so powerful, I want to take a look at what a late game Cho'Gath build looks like and what his stats end up being. I'll be taking Hauntzer's Cho'Gath build from Game 3 of the NA LCS Summer Finals as a build outline. The build consists of Gargoyle Stoneplate, Ninja Tabi, Righteous Glory, Thornmail, Warmog's Armor, and a Warden's Mail that I will, for the sake of both simplicity and a more well-rounded build, swap out for a Spirit Visage. Taking runes, masteries, and a conservative 6 Feast stacks into account, we end up with the following stats for a level 18 Cho'Gath.

Armor 276.18 Magic Resist 160.45 Health 5010.4 Cooldown Reduction 30% Health Regeneration 93.51 Feast Damage 957.6

Keep in mind that these numbers don't factor in item passives or actives such as Gargoyle Stoneplate's 40 Armor/MR when three enemy champions are nearby, the 40% health increase active, the 30% regeneration boost from Spirit Visage, or Warmog's out of combat regeneration. The armor and magic resist values amount to roughly 73% and 62% damage reductions respectively. Basically, this is a massive tanky dude who isn't nearly as kitable as we're all used to a Cho'Gath being. Rupture still knocks up and slows, but the recent rework also gave him Vorpal Spike auto attacks that slow and increased range (up to 75 at 10 Feast stacks). On top of that, Feast can fairly easily reach 1,000 true damage without building a single point of Ability Power, which can often take over 50% of the average mage or ADC's life pool or soften up an enemy tank by completely bypassing resistances and taking anywhere from a third to a fourth of their HP in a single bite.

From my point of view, the largest changes that led to the arrival of the tanks were Thornmail, or more specifically Bramble Vest, Gargoyle Stoneplate, and the buff to the Cinderhulk jungle enchantment. Bramble Vest is a 900 gold item that reduces all enemy auto-attack healing by 40% through application of Grievous Wounds and reflects 20 magic damage. If bought early, the reflected damage is substantial and heavily discourages the sort of trades champions like Fiora could previously use to completely shut out tanks in laning phase. Similarly, the Cinderhulk buffs, from way back in Patch 7.13, cut the cost of completing Cinderhulk and added 5% more bonus health, which can realistically amount to 100 or more extra health late game. Finally, Gargoyle Stoneplate acts a sort of pseudo-Zhonya's in that both play patterns involve using all relevant skills, hitting the item active to become far more difficult or impossible to kill, and living to see another round of cooldowns, excepting a few special cases like Cho'Gath using Stoneplate to crank up his Feast damage. To summarize, tanks simply have more options and better options for itemization.

The Answers

So what do we do against Cho'Gath or any of these other meatballs? Bust out your high DPS or % health damage tools, that's what. Brand, Malzahar, and Vayne are all theoretically great picks. Brand and Vayne have some pretty rough lanes, but their power as situational picks is undeniable, whereas I personally believe Malzahar is underrated across the board and can see some serious results on the next patch or two. Blade of the Ruined King, Liandry's Torment, and Rylai's Crystal Scepter are all items to consider in any game where you're facing a hefty tank line. The combination of applying near constant slows to fairly immobile champions and percentage max health damage adds up.

As for high DPS answers, this is more along the lines of what we see in pro play. The Cassiopeias and Tristanas of the world can shred through tanks given enough time to scale and enough room to breathe in teamfights, though these can be fairly tenuous dreams in a solo queue game. As an extension of these champions, Ardent Censer supports are still quite good even after the nerf to the item. Speaking of supports...

The Engage Crew

There seems to be a fairly simple way to look at the support pool right now. You have your big time engage supports like Rakan, Alistar, Thresh, and Blitzcrank who are out to make the play. You have your engage denial champs like Morgana and Tahm Kench that tell those engage champions to take a hike. Finally, you have your traditional Enchanter-style supports like Janna, Sona, who exist to nullify the "good enough" engages and push their damaging allies over the top when it comes to the big fights later in the game. As the title betrays, the support role revolves around engage champions and how to deal with them. This is likely due to how much follow-up Crowd Control is available in the average team composition in the League of Legends of today.

In professional play, you'll see heavy use of both the engage and engage denial supports, as the level of execution is expected to be higher. The enchanter style supports are more common in ranked games due to both their ease of play and the lack of burden on them to make plays. That being said, engage supports are very playable in any world where tanks are good. This is due to how the average enemy team composition fails to exploit their major weakness, the need to get in close while being underleveled and having less gold. With less average damage from any enemy champion, an engager has to worry less about dying immediately after a suboptimal engage and could realistically blow through their spell rotation more than once in an engagement. This scenario is nearly unheard of in other worlds where junglers, top laners, and sometimes even supports can put out large amounts of damage.

Engage champions can also be seen as more flexible. By nature of having high impact crowd control, they can pick between disabling the enemy front line and allowing your damage dealers to shred them or catching the enemy Tristana who stepped just a bit too far up.

One side effect of the engage supports is that AD Carry players are freed up to play more of the high DPS champions like Jinx or Tristana. The days of Ashe or Varus being used as primary or secondary engage are gone for the time being, though that is also at least partly due to their weaknesses as immobile carries without a good way to navigate a fight or avoid getting run over by tanks.

Greed Up, Team!

One final thing to consider is what the dominance of tank and AD Carry driven teamfighting compositions means for available counterpicks. I touched on champions that are directly good against tanks earlier like Brand and Vayne, but you should also consider champions that work well in the type of drawn out games where hypercarries are the main source of a team's damage. Jax, Vladimir, and Kassadin are the three legacy late game monsters that first come to mind. Note that all three of these champions scale incredibly well, but function as split pushing nuisances. A good way to beat a tanky team fighting comp is to never teamfight. Knowledge of how to constantly pressure the map is a necessity with these champions, but there's never been a better time to learn.

As always, I appreciate any questions or comments and love to hear any differing stances and opinions. Thank you for reading and good luck in that inevitable end of season grind!

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