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Mobalytics Analyzes How High Skill Changes Team Comp Effectiveness
With Mobalytics's help, use the power of statistics to win more games.
With well over a hundred champions, competitive League of Legends involves an incredible amount of potential situations and permutations of those situations. These varying situations arise because although different champions serve in the same “role,” their movesets can impact matches in very different ways.
When we enter Champ select, whether we like it or not, we are building something (yes, even in Solo Queue). You along with four strangers (sometimes three if you’re duoing) each choose a piece of a puzzle that is a team composition. It’s up to us as players to find the pieces that are best for us in terms of the situations we face, our play styles, and the potential strengths of the team itself.
Time to take a closer look
At Mobalytics, it’s our goal to dive deep into the data to truly understand player performance and its different facets at various skill levels. We wanted to find out the impact of team comps in Solo Queue by looking at pick rates and win rates. For more information on our methodology for data collection, revisit the previous article.
Here are some quick examples curated by our experts to review what the main composition team comps are and the champions that comprise them.
The seven common team compositions
© Mobalytics
What we learned from Bronze/Silver/Gold
In our previous piece, we learned that although Split, Kite and Pick made up the majority of team compositions in terms of pick rate popularity. In fact, those three compositions combined accounted for around 85 percent of all team comp in these rankings.
How earlier League ranks shake out
© Mobalytics
What ended up being interesting is that it was actually Area of Effect (AoE) compositions which took the cake in terms of win rate. Despite their unpopular nature, they AoE comps yielded more overall victories in all three of the rankings we studied.
Team win rates
© Mobalytics
AoE comps are better at these rankings because players overall, have less game knowledge and mechanical ability. The lack of game knowledge lends power to AoE champions because they are able to affect multiple enemies at one time. If you’re playing against a team that doesn’t know that it isn’t a good idea to stay grouped against an Amumu/Malphite/Orianna combo ... well, you’ll likely pull off some big gains.
How players change as they rank up
We find that Split push (the most popular composition for B/S/G) begins to decrease, as low as 34.1 percent in Masters — quite a decrease from 49 percent, the rate at which Bronze players built Split comps.
As players rank up, the typical composition changes
© Mobalytics
Our experts explain that this drop is due to players adapting and learning how to deal with split-pushing. At lower levels, a smurf can wreak havoc on lesser foes who don’t know how to coordinate. An early advantage in a solo lane can force one player to use their Teleport to get back to lane, snowballing into a situation where they lose potential map pressure and presence.
Lower elo players may not even notice that a split-pusher is hitting a turret due to their lack of map awareness. They likely won’t know how to manage waves properly in response or work with their Jungler to punish a split champ that pushes too far.
Split push begins to taper off in higher ranks because summoners are better aligned and know how to deal with these situations. They control vision better, they know how to manage waves or put pressure elsewhere; the Jungler will come and give aid to the lane to relieve pressure.
In terms of popularity, Kite comps begin to rise as the most popular composition. This occurs because expert players are more able to reliably land skill shots and begin to assert their mechanical dominance on players that aren’t as adept.
Higher-level players win with very different types of team compositions
© Mobalytics
In terms of win rate, we see that as players climbed, AoE started to taper off while Pick began to rise. As we mentioned before, AoE is quite effective in lower levels because players overall have less game knowledge and less mechanical skill.
They simply don’t know how different AoE abilities work, which champs have them, or even how to react when they know it’s coming. The result is that these abilities may reliably be able to catch a few or perhaps even all five enemies.
Naturally, as players get better, they understand how to space and maneuver properly. Unless there is a huge blunder by a team, Wombo Combos become fewer and far between — an ability that might have hit multiple enemies easily might not only hit a few.
The decrease of reliability of AoE spells lends strength to the rise of Pick comps which favor strong, single-target CC. Although fewer mistakes are made, they are still inevitable. One false move and a team can capitalize on an enemy who was slightly out of position.
It becomes more about controlling vision, making rotations and converting number advantages into objectives. One well-placed Blitzcrank hook turns a 5v5 into a 5v4, giving the space to breathe to make a move.
Conclusion
Our study shows that as players get better in terms of game knowledge and skill, the potential of certain compositions might be more viable than others. At lower rankings, where teams are more like to have straightforward 5v5 battles, AoE may yield more wins since you can reliably lock down multiple foes in an area.
As players increase in skill and game wisdom, they start to learn the nuances of positioning, vision control, and rotations. Full ten-champ team fights become rarer and smaller scale fights become more regular. In this sort of environment, players will make fewer mistakes so you really have to capitalize when they do make mistakes.
At Platinum, Diamond and Masters, we see a slight downfall for AoE and Split compositions in terms of win rate and popularity, respectively, and instead, see the rise of Pick compositions due to their ability to lock down an unwary enemy with hard CC as a result of vision control.
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