Breaking the Meta In Patch 5.8

Understanding the meta is one of the key components to playing well and adapting your playstyle. Unless you plan on trying Janna in the jungle or Twitch mid you should be relatively okay. However, if you actually follow the meta you are setting yourself up for success even more.

There should be around forty champions that work well with the meta right now, which might be a few too many to digest. Therefore, I will be looking into a fewer amount. Remember that this goes for everything in the article as there is a limited space to cover everything on.

In difference to the last two patches, we see new strong picks in the mid lane. The two strongest ones would be Annie and Cho’Gath. I have felt the wrath of Annie in my face, repeatedly, and it is not nice at all. I am surprised about her awful burst right now, which is surprising as she has not been buffed.

Cho’Gath can be very aggressive and zones the other mid well if you can learn to land his spells! Later on, in teamfights, his aoe cc can be very useful for good engages and stopping poke.

In the jungle, there are several strong champions but two stand out: Amumu and Volibear. Both of these champions benefit from the new jungle item. After nerfing other junglers these two happened to synergize well with the new jungle item, making them very strong.

In the bot lane, Jinx or Sivir with Janna or Sona make a good team. Jinx seem to be the more common choice but do not hesitate to pick Sivir if you like her too! Leona has been very strong, patch after patch, but this patch, Janna and Sona beat her slightly. Leona is still a strong pick and Janna can be tough to master so Sona should be the safer choice.

The gods of the top lane this patch are Sion and Hecarim, the second being played in the jungle as well surprisingly. Hecarim didn’t used to be very expected in the top lane before either but there he is. I have personally seen very little Hecarim but a lot more Sion. I am not sure whether this is because Sion is stronger or just easier to play. In the league I am in, perhaps the players underestimate Hecarim.

A good team comp from these champions could be Annie (with stun) accompanied with a rolling thunder Volibear Q. Add some Jinx zaps together with some knock-up wind for the same effect on bot. Additionally, this would make it very hard for the enemy champion to ever escape your grasp. Use Sion’s ultimate or Hecarim's speed to catch someone out of position, or just catch up, and just mash all the buttons with the rest of the champions and you have a pretty solid comp.

Moving on to bans I would find it wise to ban any of these strong champions that you find the most annoying to play against. Many will want to play Sivir, Jinx, Annie etc. so why not stop them from doing so? Don’t know how to counter Annie’s burst? Ban her! You need to be able to poke them on bot lane? Perhaps it’s wise to ban the spell shield woman!

You might be more heroic than me though, and maybe you feel like the god of top lane, why would you be afraid of some Heca speed? I know right. Try instead to ban Fiora. She isn’t a god strength-wise right now but can be pretty hard to face. To be honest, I do not know what it is that makes me go flip table every game I meet her but she keeps wrecking, not only me, but my whole team, game after game.

One can always also ban the everlasting cursed champions Katarina and Zed.

To conclude, here are some ban-worthy champions:

Champions that are not ban-worthy right now but were before, might be champions such as Leona, Sejuani, Sion, Fizz, Pantheon and Warwick. My last points are a few changes in the latest patch and some item changes that one needs to remember to play at one’s best.

The ever-annoying Fizz has been through some changes. Remember, he is not ban-worthy, but it could be worth keeping in mind that he has been buffed slightly and how that will affect your play.

Fizz was nerfed in patch 5.2 and Riot felt like they overdid the nerfing and have buffed him back up, only slightly. This means that our fish-friend Seastone Trident’s (W) passive damage, that used to make 20/30/40/50/60 + 0.45 AP over three seconds, now makes 20/30/40/50/60 + 0.45 AP plus 4/5/6/7/8 % of target’s missing health over 3 seconds. Additionally, the active damage has been reduced to 10/20/30/40/50 + 0.25 AP only. There are a lot of numbers in there but the consensus is that the passive damage will not make more damage over three seconds instead of some more damage on the active hit.

Something else that’s changed with this patch is that the gift of the toadstool (the gromp smite buff) has been nerfed. I’m sorry junglers, but this is true! Riot feels that it was a little bit op against squisher targets in the late game, with few counter options, as well as making the other jungle-buffs less useful with less strategic diversity to the game. Gromp’s poison has not been brewed long enough to make 10 + 10% bonus health magic damage over 3 seconds, it has been reduced to 5%.

The two item changes that has been made are to the Cinderhulk enchantment and the Tiamat.

The Cinderhulk enchantment (to the jungler item) gets a nerf with less health (from 350 to 300) and getting more expensive (from 2200 to 2250), again, to make all enchantments viable and to increase strategic diversity. The health reduction was to make the Cinderhulk less op and the cost was raised to the cost Riot had initially imagined for it.

Tiamat’s passive damage used to have three “stages” of damage depending on how close you were to the target. This has been changed to linear scaling. The choice to change is technically because of a bug the made the targets far away take damage as if they were close. With linear scaling the target will always take damage depending on how close or far you are from the target.

I hope this takes you closer to the meta and 5.8’s key components to playing well. Play LeBlanc, don’t ban Fiora, ban Fizz and… no, wait? How was it again?