scarra · @dscarra
31st Jul 2014 from TwitLonger
Generally what can Shiphtur do in midlane that you can't? What about vice-versa?
This was originally an ask.fm question but I hit the word cap. I did not know there was a word cap.
Before I can answer this question I should probably clear up why I wasn't a top tier player (especially in the current meta).
I was a player who's strongest strength was the lane and establishing ways to get ahead out of lane. I was able to pretty much get any champion out of lane and get notoriously bad matchups out of lane effectively.
My greatest fault was my inability to conceptualize team fights and my decision making. For some reason this wasn't really picked up well by general populance. My inability to have strong decision making in game made it so that If I didn't have a significant lead on my opponents, the other lane opponent would out-impact me due to poor decision making of my own.
I was able to get by in earlier metas because there would be a lot of instances where I would get ahead early and then use that early lead to snowball kills to create a huge margin of error for me in terms of decision making (If you're 4-0 you only have to hit like 2 abilities and autos to kill another player or win team fights/skirmishes).
However, this meta (which I personally think is terrible and a hard deviation from what should be focused on in terms of mobas and league in general), is one that really makes kills very ineffective. A combination of a massive amount of anti-snowballing implementations (no real way to effectively counterjungle with huge xp boosts off jungle camps, huge XP increases off buffs, etc etc) and the introduction of teleport with the super ridiculous increase in dragon gold, made it extremely hard for you to snowball effectively off early kills and really set the pace of the game. Anti-tower diving buffs and xp range changes just accentuate the fact that early game especially in this meta is worth a lot less than other seasons.
It actually makes a huge deal on a global scale too. Last seasons when you looked globally, you saw a lot of very specific regional metas that had very big clashes in terms of playstyle. I don't just mean champion picks (example: aatrox is a very euro pick), but more along the lines that EU/NA had their own style of playing and another region like china would be a region that people called extremely aggressive, to the point where there were jokes that in china's SR there wasn't turrets.
This new patch kind of homogenized all the metas into one, and regions that excelled at doing stuff like early pressure (aka china) really lost the identity of a lot of their teams. While the best chinese teams were able to adapt to this change, you can see the overall impact of this change is that generally all the regions metas are very similar and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, I really don't like it when it's more of a forced change rather than a natural evolution.
Let me make it clear that I have no problem about anti-snowballing. I just feel that anti-snowballing is fine (and actually necessary to some degree) as long as there are also appropriate snowballing factors in the game as well. As of right now, there isn't. I feel like a lot of players and spectators to some degree realize how important killing players is and kills are but aren't able to verbalize it effectively because it's just a very hard feeling to pin down. It took me a half year to even realize why I felt this way. A lot of the problems in the game from champion diversity to staleness to lategame competitive only team comps to even feelings of boredom about playing the game all are somewhat related to kills.
I kind of rambled on about irrelevant things but now that we've kind of established the current meta and why It's hard for any individual to get really strong early game leads, here's why shipthur is a better player than me:
1) mechanical upgrade
2) Decision making upgrade especially going into late/mid game skirmishes/team fights. You can really tell the difference if you watch the way he positions in these areas.
3) Better champions in the meta (I mainly focused on a lot of assassin oriented/melee oriented champions if I wasn't playing karthus/ryze)
Even though me and shipthur may have comparable laning phases, the transition from the laning phase to the mid-game and late game were strong improvements especially in the current meta.
If the meta were to change to be more snowbally and kill oriented, it would be a lot better for me, but that definitely isn't the case at the moment.