Must Laneswaps Lose?: some thoughts on the logic of laneswapping post-6.15
With Wednesday’s 6.16 patch, we are now on at least the 186th iteration of League of Legends from a technical standpoint; various documented and less documented hotfixes make it difficult to come up with an exact upper limit.
For those working in the competitive scene, it’s easy to forget that. The demands of coaching, of analysis, and of content creation require an immersion in that one, particular, fleeting ecosystem presented by a single patch and the resultant metagame of a team, a handful of teams, a league, a hemisphere.
Your sight grows short. It has to. Perhaps you can maintain some sort of grip on the future — only as a product of the present, naturally — but you can do little for the past but treat it as past, as solved.
That’s necessary to an extent, but it’s unfortunate, because as with history, the development of League of Legends is not a flat line upwards. Just because a concept falls out does not mean it will never come back.
So, with that in mind, lane-swaps. As a reminder, for sake of not abusing links: 6.15 removed the damage reduction on bottom tower, reduced the duration (to 5 minutes) but increased the damage reduction (35% to 50%) on top tower, and gave extra money to the first team to take a tower.
The consensus is that lane-swaps are dead. No team has lane-swapped in a competitive game on 6.15 to my knowledge. Every coach and analyst I’ve talked to has basically written them off entirely as a concept. After some early optimism based mainly on a misreading of the changes, I wrote them off. Then I watched some old games — not too old, mind, just from season 5 — and I realised something. I started tracing back the logic of the laneswap.
First off, the term ‘lane-swap’ as we use it right now carries in every case an implication of something that only became a precondition of the former relatively recently. When we think of a lane-swap, we think of a 3v0 fastpush, right?
Why wouldn’t we? In season 6, very, very few teams have wavered from that template. It’s become synonymous over the course of two full splits, and while there’s been evolutions and elaborations to it during that time — disruption and counter-disruption in terms of support roams and jungle pathing, for instance, or the whole wave-2 versus wave-3 debate in terms of when to push — the 3v0 (more accurately 4v0, since it’s reliant on the position of the jungler) fastpush laneswap has been pretty set since the opening days of competitive action in the spring.
A very brief reminder of the essential conditions of the 3v0. Top and jungle start on the same camp, and top typically assists with two camps; occasionally, the top laner . The top laner will then go towards the strong quadrant of the map where the tower is to be pushed, while the jungle routes up there a little more slowly in the course of his clear. The ADC slowly pushes into tower, with the intention of having the accumulation of two or three waves of minions hit as the top laner (and support) meet them there. The bot-lane-focused stream of TSM-IMT this split gives a decent example, albeit with the slightly unusual quirk of both top laners attempting to lane and soak XP initially (and in Hauntzer’s case, being punished for it).
Why did the 3v0 fastpush become quite so ubiquitious? While the cleanest and safest response to a fastpush was always another fastpush (for an obstinately equal trade that left both teams in roughly equal position in terms of gold and XP by player), it became as completely set as it was in season 6 because the changes to jungle XP on 5.22 — the death of ‘double-jungling’ — killed off the main alternative, which was to use residual lane XP and jungle XP to put top laners in a stronger position in the 1v1s that would eventually emerge, after what was more often than not an one-tower trade then.
That alternative, of course, is still gone. But there’s a concept there at work. Why can’t teams just defend the tower? Well, they can. In fact, it’s not all that long since they did. While there were certain teams pioneering the 3v0 (most notably Fnatic in the west) in the summer of Season 5, it was by no means a settled issue coming into the World Championships.
Looking at VoDs of LCK and LPL playoffs and regional finals (which is where the impetus for this piece came from, incidentally), the reaction to an undesired and unseen lane-swap was rarely to attempt to match tempo. It was generally one of three things. The first was an extended double-jungle (sometimes with a brief XP soak by the top laner, although the development of the slow-push tended to put paid to that); that would generally lead the top-jungle duo towards the strong side of the map, but that was incidental more than an attempt to contribute to any push.
The second and third were to defend. A team could force a straight 2v2 lane; the jungler could take the role of the support until the support himself could get into position. One of the better examples of that can be found in the opening minutes of Game 3 of the LCK Summer semi-final series between KT and KOO.
Alternatively, the top laner could simply sit under turret, clear from there, and use various threats and realities regarding bringing in help against any possible dive to make it too risky to force.
We saw the latter at the World Championships on multiple occasions. We should give a special mention to game 2 of SKT vs AHQ; as a defence of the second tower trade rather than the first, it doesn’t really apply directly to this discussion, but it’s worth a watch anyway. The really intriguing one was EDG-H2K. In a laneswap situation, EDG actually attempt to bring in AmazingJ and Clearlove to mount a defence of top tower in a laneswap, and promptly get dived 4v2, giving up first blood.
Why are we illustrating this one? After all, it’s a disaster for EDG, right? In fairness, there were a number of individual misplays; AmazingJ walks too far forward attempting to drive the H2K duo back, Clearlove completely bails when he could have prevented or forced an even trade on the dive, and PawN’s early, wasted TP-cancel removes the threat of a 4v3 on the dive.
But that’s not the main point. It’s this: 4vX. The reason that the 3v0 came to dominate as it did was against traditional laneswap strategies is because 3v0, as mentioned, is basically a misnomer. It fundamentally works because of the 4th man — the jungler — exerting control over the relevant quadrant of the map while the push is ongoing, and thus making any reactive response at least risky, in probability impossible. If you want to defend, you need to have 2, possibly even 3, at that tower before the top and jungler move on it — which means your own push on the other tower is going to be perishingly slow. The risk-reward just doesn’t make sense.
Let’s start working out the logic of lane-swaps in a post-6.15 world.
First, and most importantly: the concept of a tower trade before 5 minutes is dead. It can’t happen anymore. That, in itself, is a significant paradigm changer for any team swapping their duo into top lane. You no longer want to slow-push into tower; if you’re going to do anything, you’re going to look for an out-and-out freeze, and possibly to set up a slow push to hit the enemy tower at the 5-minute mark (when the fortification buff expires).
Suddenly, there is absolutely nothing drawing more than — at most — two people to that top lane on your side in the opening minutes. You can’t fast-push. You can’t dive. It would be idiotic to try to set up a gank, because you’d get nothing out of it.
This frees your jungler, and perhaps your support (depending on the nature of the 2v1 matchup), to path and be present accordingly in those first 5 minutes. It also frees your top-laner up to position proactively, rather than reactively, at level 1; if you’re going to swap, he’s going to be in the bottom lane. On the part of the jungler and possibly support, it’s fairly straightforward — through their routing, they can provide enough support to prevent any dive in those opening minutes.
For the top-laner? Well, one cannot dive without minions, and with the benefit of being able to assume a more advanced position early, he can disrupt any attempt to build a slow-push — thus not only granting him a quicker level 2 and 3, but also making it significantly more difficult to orchestrate the 10 or 12-minion waves that gave the attacking team the benefit of infinite preparation and positioning in any prospective dive.
It’s also worth noting, incidentally, that 6.9 significantly increased early damage on turrets anyway, and that optimisations to turret AI were promised as part of 6.15 (although are not live yet as of 6.16) — so 2v4 defences may in practice turn from risky-but-reasonable to actually favourable for the defending team.
I don’t know if teams are experimenting with laneswaps on 6.15. I know the attitude of most professional players and coaches, as mentioned, are that with the fast-push gone, laneswaps are dead, and there’s no point to considering them further.
Having thought it through, I’m no longer so sure. The basic modelling for the old style of lane-swaps — before the 3v0 craze — still works. The impetus for those lane swaps will still exist. In terms of the subtleties of routing and timing, I could even see those lane swaps developing into effective delayed fast-pushes anyway.
I wouldn’t be shocked if we don’t see a swap throughout the entirety of playoffs. But the seed is there for their return.
