I Was Wrong About Champion Pools

#CoachCurtis #LeagueOfLegends

[sinthorias]

Character development: after years of coaching league, Curtis realizes that people learn better if they're having fun.

[Lilacil]

Something I feel doesn't get mentioned often (by anyone) is that just because a champion is 'easy' or 'hard' mechanically doesn't mean it will be for you as an individual player.

A good example of what I mean is when Ornn came out I could just do his ult because I'm good with timing, but I saw many others struggle to execute it. The degree to which it was challenging varied & I'd say the same thing about someone like Zoe; some people just have a knack for it. On the other side of this though, some people will not have a fluid connection to easier champions. I consider Alistar one of the hardest champions to execute (for me) but don't struggle with something like Azir. The way you connect to different champions, and how easily they flow for *you* I think is an extremely important thing to consider when picking champions & I personally think you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't pick champions that you already have a head start on if you're looking for quicker results.

[warpk]

I’m disabled(muscle disorder with chronic pain) so I always play easy simple champs that don’t require high APM. Right now my core is Warwick/sett/garen mid and top(Warwick mid underrated). I’ve been experimenting with other toplaners but these are simple enough without being demanding. I picked up vex as a counter pick also for when melee is unplayable but prefer melee

[ryanpower]

I totally agree that if you’re not having fun you won’t improve. I was playing support and was no longer enjoying it so I switch to ADC and dropped a little LP at first but now I’ve climbed higher then my peak at support and I’m really enjoying trying to improve again.

[Userre]

Something I'd like to add from a top lane perspective is that when it comes to champ pools, class identity is incredibly important in figuring out what champions to play. For example, I main Fiora 100% and love her to death, but I also play Camille, Irelia, Shen, Jax, and I'm trying to learn Gwen a little to have a topside AP threat. Personally, that's too many champions for me so I'm only actively playing 3-4 of them. But what's important to note is that all of these champions have very similar identities: Gwen is quite similar to Fiora in gameplay while Camille, Irelia, and Jax are all stereotypical divers (and Shen is more peel oriented but can definitely dive the backline and do loads of damage). Even more importantly, all of these champs are auto attack based so learning the melee auto attack trading pattern translates to improved performance on all of them. Sure, many of these champs are mechanically quite complex, but their reference points are all quite similar which makes them more palatable to learn as a group of champions. Compare that to a top lane champ pool consisting of Gragas, Teemo, and Yorick. The overall shared skillset of these champs is pretty small and so training on one champion doesn't necessarily translate to improved performance or understanding on the others.

I have no idea if what I'm saying is worth anything, but just something I wanted to add to the overall conversation :)

[kevlarsweetheart]

Hi, coach. Would you consider completing that chart and posting it in Twitter or something? I got really interested in it and would love to see it in full form.
Cheers from Brazil!

[kimikophoenix]

Hi Curtis and the rest of this wonderful community! I've recently gotten back into ranked after failing previous times through years before as a result of feeling like I had no talent for the game. I've definitely learned through your videos and the BBC that I was not respecting the difficulty of the game and was letting myself get demotivated after seeing friends who were learning at a much faster rate than I was. I've overcome a lot of the anxiety I had back then and have learned that I have to study and put more time into things to learn them in comparison to others. I'm currently in Bronze, but I am motivated to prove that I can become a proficient player through hard work, effort, and continual self-discovery. I apologize for the long rant before the question! I just wanted to give some background since I believe it could be relevant. I chose mid as my position and made a champion pool of Leblanc as my primary champion and Tristana as a secondary since I chose Bottom as my secondary role and wanted to have an AD champion as a secondary. I noticed Leblanc is fairly mechanically intensive, along with having a fairly high reference point on your graph, and I am wondering if it's okay to be learning the game through a champion like Leblanc at this early of a stage. I know there's no clear-cut answer, and there's a lot of factors that can come into account. Mainly, I'm just worried that I will potentially develop bad habits and ruin my ability to play her at higher ranks in the future. I appreciate any thoughts and/or advice anyone in the community might have. Keep up the great videos, coach! They've helped me become extremely excited about learning league!

[slaintwice]

Love this vid Curtis, all of our perspectives change over time and it is refreshing for you to share yours.

[Iced_Capper]

This is very true, I've dumbed my pool down to Akshan, Twisted fate, and now looking for a complex champ (Between Sylas or Ekko since he got a great buff) but before I used to do Yasuo, Katarina and Zed lol it was brutal to keep up with their mechanics especially when I didn't play one of them for a couple of days

[michaelperkin]

Great video. Would love to see a deep dive into lissandra much like you did with vex and galio. Your thought process and champion identity conversations are so insightful

[TIRapi]

Great concepts! I "unstuck" myself playing zilean mid only. Even though i was winning a lot these games felt so boring. I´d rather stay stuck forever than play another game on zilean lol

[rikyj-to]

I stopped playing league almost 2 years ago but I'm still watching your videos every now and then.
I love your approach at coaching and how you explain league concepts.
Keep going

[stefanmeyer]

Hey Curtis! Nice video and thanks for your thoughts on this one.
I think there is an inherent trade-off between player identity and niche filling champ pool. If my playstyle is assassin, my champ pool will reflect that, but champs in this pool will share the weaknesses of assassins in general, meaning I can only compensate so much for the giant niche they are not filling. On the other side, if I have a small but diverse champ pool, say an assassin, a mage and a tank I minimized the niche, but can not exploit the benefits of my player identity.
My 2 cents.

Thanks for the video!
(Ps. The graph was very illustrative, though I am wondering what negative mechanical complexity represents :P)

[stone]

Went from hardstuck Plat 4 for around 5 years to Diamond 1 quickly in EUW using your material.

Appreciate all your videos - accepting I was the issue with different aspects of my game, instead of blaming others for 'what they could of done' has fixed my mentalilty and given me a holistic view of the game to really build on what is going well and why + what is not and how it can be developed.

Jumped from Diamond 4 to Diamond 1 in like 2 weeks, which really surprised me, considering my blockade at Plat 4 - all thanks to you!

[reidmock]

My two mains are Kog'Maw and Azir. I'm best at Kog'Maw, and I usually prefer him, but sometimes I want to play something more mentally stimulating so I swap in Azir. The two champions are different enough to keep me focused over the long run; I'm less likely to autopilot my games.

One of the reasons I like Kog'Maw so much is because of how different his playstyle is depending on if you build AP or AD and what role you play him in; AP Kog mid moonlights as an artillery mage while AD Kog bot is a teamfight-focused hypercarry through and through.

As for Azir, I just like how he can do a little bit of everything. He has mobility, self peel, burst, sustained DPS, waveclear, splitpush potential, late-game scaling, poke/lane bully capability, etc. He's also low key viable in the toplane if you ever get bored of mid. Also I'm addicted to attack speed so that's certainly a factor.

I occasionally play Singed whenever I'm in the mood to commit some warcrimes.

[zozihn]

I think 12:50 is super important. I'm an FPS player first and foremost. I like high intensity, problem solving and split second decision making on the fly. I don't have an RTS or WoW background. Always found RTS looked daunting macrowise and boring in terms of what was happening on the screen mechanically.

Thus, the problem I run into is I don't actually have the decade+ of muscle memory built up for camera control and tracking information the same as I do for executing combos and movement/in-the-moment threat assessment.

The point I'm getting to is that many many players in the League community will look at mechanically simple champions that "only have one combo" and say it's simple, but the statement is relative in context of League. Purported ease of use is relative to the skill of the pilot.

Simple doesn't mean objectively easy, and it also doesn't necessarily mean boring. A sword is simple, a sidearm in a shooter is simple, but how you use them can be very interesting.

I always say "I like to blow stuff up". Meaning, I like something that does one thing very very well and the thrill of executing that perfectly to outplay someone (read: they saw me and blew up, or didn't see me and blew up). In League, I'm still trying to find what exactly translates to that. But currently I have had the most exhilerating moments with champions who yell "hold my beer" and jump directly into the fight, or blow up one specific person and then run away.

[dharma]

A few months ago I began maining Shaco support and have gained over 400 lp with it. A huge part of climbing for me was the volume of games I became willing to play once I had a champ that was extremely fun for me. Before finding a fun main I struggled to play more than ~6 ranked games a week, and that volume makes gaining rank extremely slow, even at a very high win rate. My WR didn't really change, or even fell slightly, when I switched to Shaco. My game volume has increased massively though, and this has allowed me to climb at a pace that feels rewarding.

[xkavvu]

I've never agreed with the two tricking thing as it makes the game feel like a job. End of the day, it's a game. It's for fun. Love this character arc btw

[turretop]

I was a mid lane otp'ing a champ for a long time and it was mostly fine. However I started playing more top during the last year and immediately noticed I could not reliably do the same up there. I have a very vast champion pool that I'm very comfortable with now (around 15 champs) and a few tricks I've been following was to have a decent amount of easy champs to play, helps learning faster and prevents spending too much time building your pool. Have a decent amount of ap/ad/tanky champions for various situations. Learn champions that do not all get counterpicked by the same champions, and lastly get a few safe blind picks.

[TwistedTeaFate]

With the preseason changes and RoA coming back, I very much think TF will be meta again. I'd love to see you update your guide on him!