Mid Hecarim, it's not just horsing around

When Keane locked in Hecarim for the mid lane against CLG in game 5 I like many others was shocked. Hecarim was an out of favor melee jungler known for his speedy ganks facing the ranged wave clear machine of Ziggs in lane. After watching the game multiple times and reading up on some lane Hecarim guides though I not only know what Keane saw in the pick, but also where things went wrong for Curse Academy that game.

THE GOOD:

Hecarim has a shockingly strong laning phase. Where most melee champions struggle early on in lane without some form of ranged harass/farming spell Hecarim doesn't seem to suffer the same problems. Keane's starting item choice of boots combined with Hecarim's high base move speed and his passive that ignores minion unit collision made it shockingly easy for Hecarim to avoid most of the ranged harass coming out of Link's Ziggs. On top of his ability to dodge harass Hecarim brings a spammable aoe damage tool to both shove the wave and harass his opponent, as well as self sustain from his W. When put all together Hecarim not only survives the lane but actually does quite well managing to put harass back onto Ziggs and only falling behind in farm from jungler pressure and when roaming.

Lane Hecarim solves one of the champion's biggest issues, gold income. One of the major issues with Hecarim as a jungler that saw him fall out of favor was the gold flow of the jungle. Hecarim needs expensive items like Trinity Force to be fully effective and it takes forever to farm up that much gold as a jungler. Dedicated farm from a lane, helped along by his surprisingly good lane phase means Hecarim can hit those item break points quick enough to be relevant in the mid game. Hitting his big damage items quicker means opponents have less defenses and Hecarim can do the ridiculous 50% hp burst hits like we saw Keane do to Dexter 17 minutes into their game 5.

Even as a laner Hecarim's speed makes for impressive roams. As a jungler Hecarim's speed was a prized part of his kit, allowing him to zip through enemy wards and be on someone before they could react. Though moving from a lane makes him a bit more predictable that speed for Hecarim is still there allowing impressive freedom for the post 6 roams to put the rest of his lanes ahead. In this way Hecarim works a lot like Twisted Fate pick, he farms his way to level 6 as quickly as possible then roams to build advantages elsewhere on the map.

Hecarim is a strong split pusher. His spammable Q and high move speed allows him to shove waves into towers quickly and safely a must for any split pusher. Not settling for just shoving around minions though Hecarim is also capable of putting down incredible burst and chase onto someone caught alone trying to shove back his minion waves. We saw the ridiculous burst Keane put onto Dexter before he'd even finished his Trinity Force. That instant burst potential means Hecarim's split pushing forces a lot of enemy resources to come deal with him.

THE BAD:

Hecarim is about as melee as you can get with only small AoEs on his abilities all of which are targeted around himself. This means Hecarim is not very good at sieging objectives. That can be a problem as the game goes late and you're forced into sieging the enemy's inhibitor turrets, as well as it changes the dynamic of the team comp you build around him. Being very melee means it's easier for defending opponents to land poke and ranged CC to kill you under turret. So Hecarim needs to fight away from enemy turrets, and a team that helps him catch the enemy when they venture out for neutral objectives like dragon or baron.

His late game is nothing to brag about. Hecarim's big power spike is the Trinity Force which sets up his mid game nicely and helps his mixed AP and AD scaling. It also means that he will not be as effective in the late game. He can continue to stack glass cannon and hope to finish out the game quickly while he's still far enough ahead the other team can't build defensive items, or become sort of a utility semi-tanky split pusher and flanking initiator, but either way he'll pale in comparison to late game monsters like Ryze.

Head on team fights are terrible for Hecarim. He's too  fast, his big initiation tool sends the enemies running away from him, and no matter how fed he is he'll never be as tanky as someone like Mundo. That means if Hecarim attempts to simply fight a head on team fight by running straight at the enemy he'll both run the enemies away from his team, and out run his own team, leaving him stranded in the middle of the other team with no backup and not nearly enough effective health to get out. You can deal with that by getting flanking team fights, but you need vision denial and room to move about to get a proper flanking team fight, which leads to the next problem.

When Hecarim falls behind it's hard to recover. It's hard for him to engage in heads up team fights, he needs vision control to either team fight properly or split push, his biggest power spike is his Trinity Force completion which typically comes first, he can't siege very well, and is about as Melee as you can get. All this adds up to Hecarim being mostly useless when he falls behind. He won't be able to split push, engage fights, or be much use in siege defense, from behind.

WHERE IT WENT WRONG:

So we've got the good and bad of the pick out of the way and we can see Curse Academy definitely went to work making use of the good parts of mid Hecarim. By 18 minutes Keane had done reasonable in lane against Link's Ziggs, and used the impressive speed and burst of Hecarim to roam and rack up 5 early kills before even finishing his Trinity Force. The biggest missteps for Curse Academy were actually in champion select. We heard in an All Chat segment that they were determined to play the mid Hecarim since they'd prepared it but their composition didn't really set it up as well as they hoped.

Seconds before going "Woah! what?" Source: Lolesports

Curse Academy built a cheesy speed buff composition to boost the Hecarim but few of their champs were set to spike at the same time as Hecarim and they weren't particularly good at the mid game picks he'd need to avoid his problematic sieging. Instead of trying to build a speed buff comp they'd have likely been better suited building a pick/disengage comp around it. So instead of Zilean we'd want Janna, Nami, or Thresh support for crowd control(CC) and disengage. An Elise pick instead of the Lee Sin for jungle would sync nicely with the pick comp goals as well as make up for Hecarim's sieging a bit, all while still keeping within the new trinity of competitive junglers. The Lulu top is actually decent for a Hecarim pick/disengage comp considering the meta at the time of this game, though I'd have liked a Corki for ADC to better synergize with Hecarim's power spike timing. With our new Lulu, Elise, Hecarim, Corki, Janna/Nami/Thresh comp we still use Hecarim's early roam power to help build everyone to their mid game spikes quicker but there's far more weaknesses than the one CA built. We've now got CC for picks, extra siege potential from Corki and Elise to make up for Hecarim's lack, and the potential for both a 1-3-1 or 4-1 split push where the core group has enough safety from Support ultimate and crowd control, Elise cocoon, and Corki's leap away that they can safely avoid an enemy engage onto them.

Curse Academy's team comp wasn't the only problem in champion select though, the team CLG had assembled was also very problematic for Hecarim. CLG had built a decent team fighting and sieging comp with both incredible late game scaling and plenty of ability to stall the game if it falls behind. With Ziggs, Ryze, and Tristana they had plenty of wave clear in case of falling behind to stall out Curse Academy long enough for those three to out scale the opposition. To make things worse Ziggs' near global range ultimate also meant CLG had strong answers to both the roaming and split pushing potential of Hecarim. Ziggs could use his ultimate to get involved with other lanes without having to keep up with Hecarim's impressive speed and shut down split push attempts with relative ease. When ahead CLG's comp is also excellent in team fights, with an impressive amount of AoE as well as Kha'Zix and Tristana's ability to reset their jumps and keep pursuing with each kill, and sieging turrets thanks to the high range and poke of Tristana, Ziggs, and Kha'Zix. Before Hecarim had even been hovered by Curse Academy CLG had built a comp that was good at countering Hecarim's strengths and stalling long enough to utilize their own.

There were some errors made in game as well by Curse Academy but those were far less relevant to their success in the game than their unfortunate champion select phase. CLG had a comp well built to counter Hecarim's strong points and weather the mid game storm of CA. On Curse Academy's side they not only let through problematic answers to Hecarim they also failed to build a comp that truly took advantage of the champion's strengths.

Lee Sin, the real King of the Jungle.

Image Credit: Riot Games

It's no secret that Lee Sin is a strong jungle pick. If I asked you to name a popular competitive jungle he'd easily be one of the first to come to mind, and Lee Sin is widely regarded as one of the 3 "S tier" or best jungle picks available. Lee Sin's kit gives a lot of potential to out play and that along with the relative strength of his numbers makes him so popular. What's not so obvious though is just how utterly oppressive Lee Sin is in the jungle.

Throughout season 4 Lee Sin has enjoyed a top spot in the jungle. In spring Lee Sin and Kha'Zix teamed up to force all but themselves Elise, and Evelynn out of viability in competitive play with their insane early damage capabilities. Other junglers like VI or Jarvan simply couldn't deal with with Kha or Lee who would walk into their jungles and fight them from level 3 on. Since then Kha'Zix ate a hefty nerf that dropped him from the equation and left Lee Sin alone at the top.

Since Kha'Zix fell out of favor it has opened up junglers other than the S tier of Lee Sin, Elise, and Evelynn in competitive play but almost all of them require Lee Sin to be banned before they can safely be played. In OGN Lee has only slipped through against non S tier junglers a grand total of 6 times. While Lee does hold a 2-4 record in OGN it's all examples of skill disparity between teams, like in Samsung Blue's victory over IM#2, or heavy misplay like CJ Frost's loss to SKT T1 S. When we expand to include the LCS regions in our numbers Lee Sin's win rate grows to 12-10 over non S tier junglers this summer. A full seven of the 10 losses against non S tier junglers, including the four from OGN, are blatant examples of skill disparity or misplays.

The three losses for Lee Sin not easily explainable by blatant misplays, or by the fact it was a team that failed to advance facing a team favored by many to win OGN Summer, come at the hands of Nunu. Nunu's victory over Lee Sin shouldn't come as too much of a surprise though. The Yeti rider has always had a very binary nature in the jungle, either getting an early lead and playing flawlessly to win, or making a mistake to fall behind and lose in fantastic manner. It's why I continue to hate Nunu in the jungle when I see it picked, because few teams have the ability to play it as flawlessly as required to ensure victory.

Some might argue that Lee Sin alone is not that oppressive in the jungle considering that Evelynn and Elise hold a much more impressive 23-14 record against non S tier junglers. While those numbers are certainly more impressive it is important to notice the fact that almost universally in those games Lee Sin received a ban, usually from the team playing the non S tier jungler. What's more while they will allow Elise or Eve to make it through champ select, the teams with the best pick/ban phases almost never allow Lee to slip through when intending to play anything other than Elise, Eve, or Nunu. Samsung White, SKT K, Alliance, Fnatic, and C9 have never allowed Lee Sin through champion select when they picked any jungler other than Nunu, Eve, or Elise. Samsung Blue has only allowed it once against IM#2 who failed to escape groups, and CLG has only allowed it once but picked their non S tier jungler after seeing the enemy lock in Elise.

Lee Sin commands intense respect in champion select from top teams making him the target of dozens of picks and bans in the summer season alone. The best teams avoid the mistake of picking any jungler other than Eve, Elise, or Nunu without first guaranteeing Lee Sin is off the table. Those teams that have picked non S tier junglers into Lee rely mostly on out playing their opponents, which has worked for some like SHC and SGB, and exploded in the faces of others such as CRS and TSM. It is clear from looking at the way the best teams play champion select that this summer Lee Sin is the undisputed king of the jungle.