Riot Phroxzon thoughts on meta at First Stand and solo queue experience

Phroxzon also commented on his experiences at First Stand on his X post but I mainly took the notes about the meta in both competitive and Korean solo queue.

https://x.com/riotphroxzon/status/1901665859141304510?s=46

And that’s a wrap on First Stand !! Incoming “I ain't reading that, happy for u, or sorry that happened” post xD

First Stand Gameplay

  • Was pretty happy with how the lane swaps and adjustments to Atakhan worked out. Don’t know the exact number), but it felt like mostly Ruinous with games of Voracious where it made sense and no lane swaps
  • There was a good amount of AD/AP squishy and tank mix in each role with omega gigachad Zeka pulling out the Sylas Ahri and Akali where it made sense 🙃
  • Skarner and Kalista were the outliers on priority, but teams didn’t seem particularly effective with Kalista…
  • Skarner on the other hand; will discuss with the team about larger work on him when we get back; he’s too effective at too many things, while also being impotent for regular players
  • As announced yesterday by Greeley, we’re hoping to see adaptive drafts continue with Fearless for the rest of the year, I think diversity will continue to increase as teams get better at finding lines to draft that make certain counterpick/situational champs god tier after certain champs are out; it will evolve into more of a TFT/Chess style “find the optimal line to draft with the pieces given”, which the prospects are really exciting
  • An improvement point feels like how long it takes to end if a team gets a significant early lead; part of this is how optimal boringly slowly choking the opponent out is over 15 min, rather than changing the incentive structure so that ahead teams can make major decisive play and can end the game swiftly
  • Maybe an opportunity space for the future… but interested in hearing peoples’ thoughts on this

Solo Q Experience and Balance - Outside of the work obligations, had some time to slam 20 Solo Q games; was pleasantly surprised by my level this time around, feels like I’m playing around solidly KR D2/D1 level, which is quite shocking, because it’s not like I’m Masters level on NA right now and haven’t been able to play more than 50 games in the last 6 months due to life. Probably would've won more if I wasn't such a kda player xD - Main character syndrome still feels really peak here, the person either goes 8-0 or 0-8 and is spam FF’ing repeatedly, so minimizing my enemy laner impact, scaling and playing defensively to support my jungler feels most effective even though I’m playing Ori who feels like a dog champ on this server, since it’s so hard to actually land QW on anyone due to their mechanics and it’s risky to walk in river and so easy to die to ganks - Moving to help jungler in lost fights to avoid mental boom is the only thing that I’m finding annoying, some of these fight selections feel extremely perplexing, like Zac wanting to fight Lee at first scuttle with no prio and I end up having to sac my lane half the time to prevent them from AFK’ing or soft inting because I didn’t move, it’s super annoying… - Every post game chat also feels like at least 3 players are writing their PhD thesis, which is somewhat amusing, but also really unfortunate… - It feels like Lee Sin or Viego are in every game with a 30% pickrate, so if you can prevent the team from throwing and always follow them around and play secondary, they can carry, whereas on NA, Lee Sins in Diamond can't carry and suck relatively (ping hurts as well), so it’s not like you can play around them reliably

  • It was interesting to feel again for myself just how different these champs feel in their balance state across servers, indeed in one of the press conferences there was a question about balancing decisions making no sense for the state of the champ on KR server. I can see why KR players get angry when we buff Lee because the other regions suck at him, he unironically feels 2-3% winrate stronger on KR server, same with Jayce who has a monstrous pickrate here as well
  • We even almost buffed Lee Sin for First Stand because he’s been pretty absent from Pro, so I’m actually not quite sure what we’re meant to do about that…
  • The other thing that I forgot was how good it was to play on 2ms ping. I’m not sure whether it’s net positive for the person dodging or the person hitting, but since I mostly play immobile mages, it feels like I can dodge line skillshots and range leash people more effectively, which makes Mages feel so much better, though it also means it’s extremely hard to QW tag someone in a teamfight as Ori, let alone hit them with R
  • I’m curious if any people have done any analysis on this
  • I also attached typical KR Lee Sin penta

Anyway, back to NA tmrw, lots of work to do