Team Composition

Compositions 101

What do we pick?

There're many ways to build a composition; you can focus on a stage of the game (early, late), you can focus on a role or champion (adc, fiora) you can focus on a strenght (1-4 splitpush, siege, dive), and you can also combine many of this factors to build an overall strong teamcomp. Yet you've to have in mind that a teamcomp that has strenghts, will also have weaknesses.

Knowing that we can orient our composition in different ways, let's better aim on what a teamcomp needs to be balanced; identifying the tasks that need to be present on a teamcomp and who better fits each role.

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1. DAMAGE (2+ champions)

You need champions that do damage. Killing champions or chunking their life bars is the best way to sistematically take down objectives until you hit the nexus. In every team there's a "primary" damage source, but there can be 2 or more damage threats depending on how you're planning to face the enemy team.

2. HARD CROWD CONTROL (2+ champions)

Whether is to initiate, follow up, or peel; your team needs RELIABLE hard CC skills in order to transform damage into kills, sometimes that's not mandatory, you can get kills without applying hard CC, yet most of times you'll need to chain hard CC or Hard + Soft CC to get a substantial reward.

3. WAVE CONTROL (3+ champions)

Which is basically the ability to push fast a minion wave in a splitpush situation, or waveclear in a siege situation (either defending or attacking).

4. SYNERGY (5 champions)
The synergy means that the champions have to complement each other, for example, a Sivir ultimate gives almost no utility to a splitpusher at top such as Fiora, but helps a lot to champions that need to close the gap such as Mao Kai or Nautilus.

From there your composition can be built depending on your gameplan, or adapt to the enemy gameplan.

Best roles for each task.

DAMAGE:
1. Mid

2. ADC
3. Jungle

4. Top
5. Support

HARD CROWD CONTROL:
1. Support
2. Jungle
3. Top
4. Mid

5. ADC

WAVE CONTROL:
1. Top

2. Mid

3. ADC
4. Jungle
5. Support

Note that a single task can be taken care of by many roles, and a single role can take care of many tasks, for example, Lissandra is a midlaner that has Damage, Crowd Control, and Wave Control, and can be teamed up with Fiora, that also has Wave Control and Damge.

Why we need damage is obvious, but why do we need 2 champions or more that have crowd control and 3 or more that have wave control?.

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First, hard crowd control is not just stuning, knocking up, supressing, or binding champions, hard CC is also a deterrent mechanism to take objectives, for example, you're a squishy ADC and you're fighting dragon, now imagine 2 situations, in the first one, a Gnar with the rage bar low gets close, you have 2 options, start atacking Gnar, or keep atacking dragon, in the second situation, a Gnar with the rage bar almost full gets close, you only have one option; reposition yourself away from that Gnar. The possibility of bening CC'd makes a big difference, zoning is an often underrated tool.

Second, wave control. Why is wave control needed in every teamcomp?, if you read the last ARTICLE where we talked about win conditions you probably remember that a very important win condition is "PRESSURE", and a very important pressuring element is the wave control, If you have 3 champions that can more or less control the wave pressure, you'll be able to distribute them among the 3 lanes that have minion waves.

The best way to manage wave pressure is sending 1 champion with wave control to each lane, and make the 2 remaining champions rotate between lanes to take objectives.

Thanks for reading!

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