Summoner School

Transcript

G'day this is UberGiantsBro, and in this episode of How To Team Fight we're breaking down the big team fights from the Gambit Gaming vs Samsung Galaxy Ozone game in the group stage of the season 3 world championships. The main themes I'm focusing on this episode is target selection and positioning, two extremely important factors to team fighting and I'll be pulling on a core concept from Summoner School as well so keep an eye out for that. Btw we'll be going over this team fight slowly so don't worry, I just needed something to play in the background haha okay let's get into it.

So the two big main points for this team fight are this great initiation that we're about to see from Jarvan and Zyra as well as the Shen's position. So first for Shen, he's a pretty tanky bloke so he stays to finish off the tower but he holds on to his taunt. He doesn't burn it straight away! I see so many Shen's that just taunt straight at the carries and end up missing and being useless for the rest of the fight. Instead what Darrien does on Shen here is he holds on to his Taunt, effectively creating a zone which scares Vayne and Ryze.

So I'll just play it forward a bit more. As we see Ryze and Vayne are still focusing Shen while the rest of Ozone engage. Pausing it again, if you look at Shen's items you'll see he has a lot of auto attack blocking potential with Doran Shield, Ninja Tabi and most likely defense masteries too because he knows Vayne is going to be the main one focusing him in this team composition. This is great itemization from Shen. But doesn't Vayne deal a lot of true damage from Silver bolts and Bork? Sure, she does. But the problem is that Shen is not a priority target, especially since Shen doesn't deal much damage himself.

Just because you can kill a tank quickly, that doesn't mean you should focus the tank. But Vayne doesn't have many other options, since she is so short range and Ozone is all clumped up it would be dangerous for her to go near the group. Now is a great time to bring in the summary of the position and target model taken from Summoner School.

"A champion is in the best position and attacks the best target when he is unlikely to die and attacks the greatest damage dealer."

I think this is a great principal to follow for team fighting when you don't know who you should be focusing. In regards to our example here, Vayne is force to focus the Shen because he is the only target she can really get at safely. This also applies to Ryze, but because Ryze is a bit more tanky and the Sona Crescendo is down he could probably afford to move straight towards the main fight.

So as the fight plays on a bit more, all of Ozone's front line get destroyed by the high burst of Gambit and Vayne only picks up a kill on the Eve. The key factor in that fight was great zoning from a tanky Shen and Ryze not having his ultimate up for the engage - imagine if Ryze was in position to get his AOE off when Zyra and Jarvan engaged.

This team fight is a great fight because even though Ozone is behind, their carries are still able to exercise great target selection by focusing the greatest damage dealers while being unlikely to die most of the team fight. They're basically doing my job for me, I could just let you watch them in slow-mo haha.

But no, so as soon as Eve gets in range of Ryze, Ryze focuses her and then immediately backs off with his cd's. Let's take a look at where the main damage threats are because we'll be focusing on them mostly (KOG, EVE, RYZE, VAYNE). They are fairly spread out, but here's a general idea of where the focus should be for each carry - Ahri has most of her skills on CD so she isn't a big threat for now. Kog can focus Jarvan and Singed because the group focus brings them down very fast.

As it turns out, Vayne is able to chase Eve all the way down here because she knows Eve's ult is down. Playing slowly forward a bit more, Vanye immediately turns her attention to Kog after Eve instead of Sona because Sona is not a threat. It could be argued that Kog should've switched to Vayne earlier as soon as Vayne went after Eve but Singed was low already so they focused him as a team before turning on to Vayne.

A play worth mentioning here is that even though Ryze is focusing Shen, it effectively allowed Vayne to go ham. Again, notice the target selection where Vayne focuses the Ahri even though she is practically in the middle of four enemies. This is a big risk but a calculated risk, all a part of making good decisions on who you should be targeting. Team fighting dynamics can get very complicated like this so even though the position and target model is extremely useful, there is more to it which you can learn about in Summoner School. I'll try my best to explain them here for you in these videos.

A lot of knowing who to focus comes down to practice and evaluating yourself by watching recorded games of your team fights after you play. In game in an actual team fight you're repeatedly asking yourself, "is this guy a threat, is this guy a threat?" to determine where you should be positioned and who you should be focusing but a lot of what you learn about positioning and focus can be forgotten in the heat of the moment. If you remember one thing, try to remember the summary of the positioning and target model from Summoner School "A champion is in the best position and attacks the best target when he is unlikely to die and attacks the greatest damage dealer."

That's all for this Team Fight Analysis, I hope you learned something and if you did make sure to give it a thumbs up. I just wanted to give a quick shout out to my Twitter @UberGiantsBro which is a great way to get in touch with me or ask any questions you may have. Thanks for watching and have fun dunking noobs in solo queue.