Cornered: CLG’s limitations and the challenge ahead

CLG have some issues. Let’s look through three of them.

The rookie jungler and his tangibles

OmarGod was an easy target for criticism before, during, and after the series. Before the series: while showing more positive signs than negative to most in his 16-game LCS stint, he was still a rookie jungler coming into his first playoff series. During the series: it could hardly escape notice that the team were forced, or at least inclined, to use a first pick on his Gragas or Zac in every game, and he had his share of very noticeable individual misplays, such as his leap into a full Thresh combo in game 1, or his first-blood-giving gank in game 4. After the series: both sets of criticisms, mashed up and magnified.

It is not, however, those intangible elements of pressure and the psyche that should be the concern for CLG enthusiasts. A mind can’t be changed in a day, but it can be compensated for. The more concrete problems of the lack of synergy between OmarGod and his teammates on ganks and small skirmishes — well, that’s tougher, but there’s ways to work on that in a short period of time.

The real concern is that OmarGod looked like a Challenger jungler in his pathing. Of course, really, he still is; he’s played a third of a season in LCS, and this is the first time in his career (or at least, in the past year-plus of his career) that he’s on a team that won’t just naturally gravitate towards following his every move. To CLG’s credit, too, they are doing a damn good job of trying to hide that weakness; they can’t gravitate towards him, but Huhi and to an extent Darshan are both picking and playing heavily to neuter the map in the early game, and to keep him comfortable.

So, what exactly are we talking about with that pathing comment? Glance at the first few minutes of OmarGod’s game 2 pathing below (blue Zac against red Gragas):

His perception of LirA’s potential paths are poor, and he gets abused on timing for camps multiple times because of it. He farms efficiently when he can stay on-route, but barely even ventures into his own river, gets no deep vision, and when he’s forced off-route, well, you see the laboured gank attempt on top.

We should qualify that statement with “it’s LirA”, of course, but this isn’t something that only LirA could do; recall how MikeYeung and a last-placed Phoenix1 abused OmarGod in his one attempt so far to play a pressure jungler on stage (OmarGod on Elise, albeit against a Nidalee). OmarGod has that classic solo-queue jungler malaise, that farm-only syndrome. There’s no shame in that; it’s not something that can be fixed overnight. It takes knowledge, but it also takes an incredible amount of experience and repetition, to get the muscular and neural processes to the efficiency to know your pathing limits every time. MikeYeung is the exception, not the rule, with regards to bucking that problem on first appearance, with even Akaadian running into the same problems in the Challenger Series last year on Dream Team.

It’s still a problem. Is it a problem that can be concealed? To an extent, yes. There aren’t too many lane combinations that can split the map early, and there are a couple of options that OmarGod can drop down to in terms of utility junglers that can insulate themselves early. (Warwick, a pick that he played in the Challenger Series, would qualify there). But it does make demands of CLG’s compositions, and that split-map threat is a scary one.

An one-note transition?

This little image encapsulates essentially the entire mid-game plan across the entirety of the quarter-final series:

Notice the following things:

1. Stixxay (Tristana) is about to look to solo-push the lane (on several occasions in this series, he didn’t even make the swap, instead hammering down towards bottom tier 1 with no tower behind her).
2. OmarGod (Gragas) and aphromoo (Bard) are in the vicinity. However, OmarGod is farming or deciding on his next move, aphromoo is either moving with him or barely peeking up across rover.
3. Huhi (Cassiopeia) and Darshan (Gnar) are both looking for opportunities to move up because they can’t get pressure as of yet themselves.
4. There isn’t adequate vision coverage for a dive threat or full-on siege, and nobody’s in position for it anyway, so CLG slowly chip very small amounts of damage off and hope the enemy team is stupid enough to engage on Stixxay.

OK, “stupid enough” is perhaps a step beyond the pale. But CLG’s mid-game over the past few weeks has been extremely slow and extremely reactive. That is not a good place to be against the top teams in general, particularly not against Immortals, who have been the highest-octane, highest-efficiency team in the league in mid-game over the course of the split.

Certainly, part of this turn likely owes itself to OmarGod’s step up to the starting roster; him and aphromoo at times look like a pair of amateur dancers crossing each other on the stairs and shouting a thousands “my mistake” and “after yous” at each other. OmarGod feels he cannot move up alone, while vision control has long been a concern in aphromoo’s game.

aphromoo has been in the bottom-3 among qualifying supports for wards per minute since Oracle’s Elixir started tracking the numbers in 2015. While it’s vital to stress that this doesn’t reflect qualitatively on his vision control directly (an extreme variable on either end tends to point to deficiencies, but the overall correlation tends to be loose from experience), it does suggest style. aphromoo is not terrifically proactive in warding; he trades that off for the pick and counter-engage threat he provides, not just in terms of skillset, but in terms of the essential way he personally plays the map in the mid-game. Until now, it’s been somewhat easy for CLG in the modern era, because both Xmithie and Dardoch have essentially provided trails for him to move into when CLG want to play towards that; if OmarGod is capable of doing that too, he’s not showcasing it yet, and that’s going to require a difficult adjustment for aphromoo.

The meta has not helped either, mind. The team looks more comfortable when Stixxay has a hand in the initiation, and aphromoo is hence able to move towards utility or the zoning nightmare that is his Blitzcrank; there is a reason that CLG tried to play Ashe weeks after every other team had given up on her.

On the other side, the meta is only getting worse; one under-appreciated component of the solo lane and jungler shifts is the amount of free vision and bush-checking it has given teams (think Maokai, Jarvan IV, Gragas on the former, and any of the myriad mages popping up here and there for the latter). Clearly, there’s not an easy way to fix the efficiency of a team’s mid-game; at this point, it seems most likely that CLG will double-down, look to set up carries with high waveclear, and stall out games.

Can the damage be done?

There’s both an “if” and a “when” worry with CLG having to play that way.

The impulse, seeing HuHi’s Vel’Koz, is to write it off as ‘cheese’, and HuHi as a ‘cheeser’. While that’s unfair, the Vel’Koz — while successful — both played to HuHi’s big strengths this split, and indicated a weakness that isn’t a weakness for HuHi personally, but is a big problem for CLG.

People have looked at HuHi’s Aurelion Sol and Taliyah, and concluded that CLG want to roam onto sidelanes, play-make early. If that was ever the case, it isn’t now. With OmarGod’s weaknesses, and the growing diversity — and hence reliability — of splitpushing from top, CLG have doubled-down on stabilising mid, and even when employing the threat of a roam, to use it as just that, a threat.

Vel’Koz is never going to roam down. So, why Vel’Koz? Well, apart from the pressure it can exert in most lanes (Vel’Koz will usually win the push, particularly past level 5), consider this:

This is a very quick-and-dirty, inexact illustration, but a subtle thing that Vel’Koz has is not only a very high range on his abilities compared to most control mages, but his ult in particularly also works extremely well around choke-points (both in terms of catching people there, and being un-hampered by their presence), and with most of his impact in fights being loaded into that ult, he has a very high range in terms of coming into a fight near mid and managing to have maximal impact.

The tendency would be to think that the Vel’Koz reflects the “when” in that statement earlier. I’ll talk about that in a minute, but the “if” is more the concern here. What do Taliyah, Aurelion Sol, and Vel’Koz all have in common? They have little-to-no use in terms of damage-per-second later in the game. They do well in lane, they have high base damages and hence will win fights early, but come to 40 minutes, what does Vel’Koz do against, for the sake of argument, let’s say a composition with two tanks, a ‘standard’ ADC and mage mid, and whatever support? His AP scalings are too weak to assassinate the back-line, his damage is too bursty to do much to the front-line, even with Liandry’s and the like. He doesn’t have a clear role in fights.

That’s not to say that CLG can’t win with a relatively passive mid-game and something like a Vel’Koz, but it’s a very hard place to be working from. Most of HuHi’s proven picks fall into that category; if you were just to look on paper at most of what they played against NV, with the exception of the Cassiopeia game, you would generally say that the top-side of the map for CLG falls off compared to NV’s picks.

That, essentially, is the “if” worry: if they pick these things, can they win late-game as they seem to need to? The “when” worry is this: when they go to late-game with a composition that can win late-game, can they perform well enough? While not ideal, even with that need to get pressure around mid, CLG can just draft for a hypercarry ADC, or if the stars align, get a high-damage carry that will get the necessary pressure through mid still (like Viktor into the counter matchup in game 2).

A lot relies on Stixxay. There are two hot takes to be made on the CLG ADC, both equally wrong. The first is that, because his damage numbers this split have been atrocious (25.7% of team damage — 9th of 12 among ADCs — and 513 DPM — 7th of 12), he can’t. The second is that, because they won playing around him in the NV series, he can.

In the first case, he played so much utility this season that it’s hard to come to a firm conclusion, and so on, and so on. (It is a shame, incidentally, that Oracle’s Elixir no longer tracks by-champion data directly.) In the second case, there is a major difference between putting down damage in pick situations (and it’s worth noting that HuHi put down a DPM of 760 in that series, above all other players in this split’s playoffs that I could find bar tockers on Brazil’s Red Canids), and putting down DPS on even terms at 40 minutes.

From the eye test, Stixxay had a few troubling moments in that series in the few moments where NV were able to pull off massed teamfights. One dragon fight in game 5 sticks on the memory as emblematic:

Awful? By no means, and he cleans up somewhat at the end, but you can see that the DPS simply did not come in for large portions of the fight (and yes, he was zoned, but CLG keep moving forward nonetheless). It was far from perfect, and with how CLG look to need to set things up at the moment, they may need perfection from Stixxay.

CLG are not quite doomed. We have seen many times in the past that they have historically been a team that are able to take a flawed or limited concept, and execute it to its maximum utility.

However, right now, they should be far heavier underdogs than they’re generally considered to be (which, by most betting odds, is a 40–60). Putting asides debates about the relative quality of the teams, NV was close to a perfect matchup for them, LirA’s capacity for aggression asides.

This is a team that right now finds itself stuck in the ring, in its own corner, with very little space to manouevre. Yes, they may be able to out-punch opponents; certainly, Stixxay’s fans in particular would tell you it can be done. But this is going to be a tough series, and unless they have something incredible prepared, a test of raw power from a team who have a reputation for always winning by their wits primarily.