Hello everyone.
We couldn't believe it when we saw it, but Faker and Dopa played 3 straight games of
Solo Queue versus each other.
We figured it'd be fun if we turned it into a video, and see who came out on top in their
mini series.
This is some beautiful, high level game play, that you won't want to miss.
Before jumping in, make sure you hit like on this video.
If we hit 10,000 likes, we'll make sure we upload part 2 of this guide next week which
you WON'T want to miss.
That's a pretty high number, but it's only fair since we put a ton of effort into these
ones.
With that in mind, let's get into the guide!
We're sorry to disappoint, but these games are going to be far from bloody.
When you're this good at the game, it's unlikely to ever be solo killed in lane.
At a high level, solo kills are usually a result of greed or disrespect towards your
opponent.
How we'll determine the winner of this series will be based on who achieves their match
up goals the best.
Every specific match up in the game has goals that you can strive for to get ahead of your
opponent.
For example, let's say you're playing Kassadin.
Meanwhile the enemy mid laner hard countered you by locking in Renekton mid.
In that lane, your goal wouldn't be to solo kill Renekton, take his tower, or out roam
him.
Your goal would be to not die and gracefully go down 20 to 30 CS.
Renekton needs to shut down Kassadin really hard, or the counterpick won't be worth it.
By playing safe and minimizing losses, you could argue that Kassadin is technically winning,
since he's going to outscale Renekton so hard.
So, we'll be judging who wins this series by which of the 2 players achieves their specific
match up goals the best.
And with that, let's head into the first game.
Their first game will feature Faker on Sylas versus Dopa on his trusted Twisted Fate.
This being a ranged vs melee match up will mean that Dopa will be looking to get a decent
lead before the first base by abusing the range advantage.
Meanwhile, Faker wants to preserve his health and try to stay even in CS.
He'll also want to set up ganks onto Dopa as he overextends for harass with Sylas's
powerful gank follow up.
To preserve his health, Faker will want to time his last hits while Dopa is also last
hitting.
Twisted Fate can't harass very well outside of his auto attacks, so Faker will be free
to move up while Dopa's auto attacks are being used on minions.
This match up becomes quite interesting at level 6 due to Sylas's ability to snag Twisted
Fate's ultimate.
Having lane control at this point will be critical.
Being the first one to move and roam can decide the game, or being able to follow up on the
other's roam will also be important.
At the start of the lane Faker is missing, so Dopa begins auto attacking the first 3
melee creeps.
This is important for Twisted Fate, since as we said, his main form of harass is auto
attacks.
On the first wave, the initial 3 melee creeps on both sides usually die at around the same
time.
But by auto attacking them preemptively, Dopa frees himself up to land this gold card while
Faker is last hitting.
You may be wondering why Dopa doesn't choose to go for another auto attack on Faker for
both damage and another Kleptomancy proc.
This is because Dopa already has a minion advantage and he wants a nice and big slow
crash onto Faker's tower.
If he extends for another auto attack here, the caster minions would hit him.
The caster creep damage isn't the problem.
The problem is that then his minion wave would be winning by an even bigger margin, and this
can potentially screw up the timing and size of his later crash.
Slow pushing can be a delicate balance, and Dopa will primarily be looking to auto attack
Faker when he extends into the melee creep range, where he can auto attack him while
not pulling too many creeps.
Besides this early hiccup here where Faker takes an auto for no reason, both players
are going to play this quite standard.
Dopa is actively building his slow push, meanwhile Faker is just last hitting whenever possible.
But Faker will begin changing his game plan quite soon.
The usual gank timing for junglers is around 2 minutes and 50 seconds to around 3 minutes.
Faker needs to make sure Dopa doesn't get a clean crash before then, and that he's level
3 so that he has his full combo to follow up the gank.
So he tanks 2 autos to try and thin the wave, and then tanks another gold card combo trying
to clear more minions.
Faker then opts to fully commit since Nunu is coming, but Dopa stays calm and plays this
very well.
He just trades back on Faker since he's still level 2 and incredibly weak.
Then he walks into this corridor because there's no way Nunu can angle his snowball to get
there.
Now you may ask, can't Nunu just punish Dopa for pathing this way by cutting his escape
off?
Unfortunately, not.
If we switch to Faker's point of view of the game, they have no knowledge of where Skarner
is.
Nunu can't cut Dopa off in the river, since Skarner could be there and he would get 1v2d.
Faker had the right idea for this lane, but messed up on the execution.
He needed to be level 3 for this gank timing, but Nunu clears a bit faster than the average
jungler.
So when Nunu came early, Faker tried to make up for it by just brute forcing the gank.
This may work on a less skilled player who's first instinct is to run to their tower, but
Dopa is smart and knew that running forward would both punish Faker and escape the gank.
Dopa now knows where Nunu is and has a decently big wave he can crash, so he can play very
aggressively here and look to punish Faker hard under tower.
Now we don't know if he did this on purpose, but knowing Faker, he probably did.
He knew Dopa would use Q to finish the wave and then immediately walk into tower range.
So he tanked Dopa's Q, which means that when he walked in, he took tower aggro.
Unfortunately for Faker, he's screwed up the lane too much and this bit of damage isn't
enough to stabilize the lane.
The way Faker goes for these last hits with complete disregard for his own health and
mana indicates that he's 100% basing after he clears this.
Therefore, Dopa hard shoves the wave and gets a clean base off.
Faker teleports back to lane to catch most of the experience from the wave crashing into
his tower.
So Dopa answers by teleporting back to the lane.
This may seem a bit weird, since Dopa could have just walked back to lane because it's
a cannon wave and at most he'd miss 2 maybe 3 melee creeps and keep his teleport up for
later.
As we said, for this lane, level 6 and lane control is super critical.
Since they're basically even in experience, missing even 2 or 3 melee creeps can give
Faker the level 6 advantage.
More importantly though, he'd be giving Faker a lot of time to set up vision and take control
of the wave.
This could snowball into Faker getting a free ult roam off.
So, he commits his teleport, and thanks to his superior buy from winning lane early,
he's able to have complete lane control for the next few minutes.
This lets him get a clean shove on the level 6 wave, while Faker is still level 5 to ult
top lane and score a return kill.
Faker will try to answer back by shoving the next wave as fast as possible, but only denies
Dopa 2 melee creeps.
After this next shove, Dopa also goes for his second recall and we can compare results.
Faker is down 11 CS despite Dopa leaving lane to help his top laner.
Not only that but he did it while outplaying jungle pressure early on and even denying
some counter jungling options from Nunu
It's safe to say that Dopa clearly won this lane.
The second game will be Dopa on Orianna vs Faker on Camille.
This match up functions quite similarly to the previous one.
Orianna will abuse her range advantage to harass Camille.
Camille will want to preserve her health so that she can be health enough to set up ganks.
The only major difference in early game plan for this match up is the fact that Dopa isn't
limited to just auto attacks for harass.
He can weave Qs in even while last hitting to have a lot more pressure in lane.
Dopa really wants a significant advantage in the early game, because once Faker hits
6, the amount of pressure Dopa can exert will be very limited.
He won't be able to extend far in the lane without Camille just setting up ganks with
her ultimate.
As the laning phase begins, we see Faker chasing down Poppy trying to get some pre lane harass.
The problem with this is that Dopa can zone him a bit from the wave, so Faker ends up
missing 1 melee creep worth of experience.
This will throw off his level timings during the early levels, which can actually be a
big deal.
Otherwise, this lane begins quite standard.
Once the melee creeps of the first wave are dead, Dopa moves forward to zone faker until
the next wave arrives.
This isn't a big deal, as Faker isn't really missing any experience at the moment.
But it's good for Dopa to do regardless in case Faker were to screw up.
As we should know by now, ranged champions want to auto attack melee champions when they
don't have any minions to last hit.
Faker is about to take advantage of this with a nice read.
Faker moves forward knowing full well that Dopa has a timing window to auto attack him.
Faker times his W so that when Dopa auto attacks, he's slowed and in range of these caster creeps.
Dopa takes a lot of return damage, and despite being a level down, and being melee, Faker
actually wins this trade with a really heads up play.
Moments after, Faker makes another really smart play.
He sees Dopa use his Q to last hit, and that his own 2 caster creeps are getting quite
low.
This means that Dopa's auto attacks will be preoccupied and his Q will be down.
The only way he can harass Faker is with W. So Faker moves in and wiggles back and forth
trying to bait out Orianna's W. Dopa doesn't fall for it, but this still gives Faker a
free Fleet Footwork proc, which not only heals him, but gets him out of range before Dopa
can punish him for it.
Now Faker is required to last hit this melee minion, so Dopa begins walking forward, so
that he can't hit it for free.
Unlike Faker though, Dopa doesn't wiggle back and forth correctly, so he gets hit by Faker's
W, which last hits the minion as well.
It's okay for Orianna to get hit by this sometimes, but if it happens too much, he'll be giving
Faker way too much free sustain.
Faker inevitably gets punished here due to the match up, but he keeps looking to land
his W on Dopa whenever it's up.
Then he just has to wait for the wave to fully crash into him.
The cannon creep is a high priority here, so Dopa moves forward to punish the last hit.
Once again, Faker baits Orianna Q by wiggling back and forth.
Dopa should have waited to Q faker as he auto attacked the cannon instead.
Faker misses it regardless, but still a mistake from Dopa.
We're back at that 3 minute timing of the game where junglers start to become active
on the map, so Dopa concedes pressure to lay down a ward.
But this ward is incredibly weird.
If we take a look at the start of the game, we see Kennen was not at red buff to leash
at 1 minute and 30 seconds, and the enemy bot lane was missing from the lane.
Karthus clearly started bot side, and Karthus players tend to just full clear.
But even if Karthus decided to try and vertical jungle against a Nunu for some reason...there's
no raptors up.
He'd be getting ganked by a level 2 Karthus with just blue buff.
What we're saying here is that this ward makes absolutely 0 sense, and we're chalking this
one up as an auto pilot ward, which would be fine had Karthus started red buff.
This random ward gives Faker some breathing room to get these 3 CS, then as Dopa gets
back into lane he immediately misses his Q again and gets tagged by another W from Faker.
Dopa at this point has gotten no significant damage down, so Faker is able to fully commit
with his hookshot for a clean trade.
He then falls back to last hit and dodges yet another Q from Dopa.
When Faker hits level 4 off this next wave, he looks for another W. He actually does a
small optimization trick here by using his W while it's still rank 1, and leveling it
up mid cast.
This uses the mana cost of the lower rank, while doing the damage of the leveled up rank.
This works on A LOT of abilities in League, and is very useful tip to keep in your back
pocket.
It will almost always work on abilities that have some form of delayed damage.
For example, as Zigg's bomb is traveling, you level it up, and it'll do more damage.
It also works on Camille's E and Q, since they also are delayed damage in a sort of
way, though there really isn't any point in doing so, since their mana costs don't change
as you rank them up.
This is simply to demonstrate that it works on almost all delayed damage abilities, and
testing how this works on your specific champion pool can save you a bit of mana every time
you level up.
Back to the lane, Faker finishes clearing this wave by landing yet another W onto Dopa.
Then he moves into the river, likely to fake a ward placement.
There's no need to place an actual ward, since we saw Nunu stroll on by to the right side
of the map moments earlier.
Which does make this following face check a bit weird.
Faker is forced to flash away, but this does result in an unintended consequence for Dopa.
He is now out of position, so Karthus can come in and zone him from the lane.
This forces him to go into his own jungle.
Dopa is aware that this will give Faker a free recall which will put him very far behind,
so he greeds to try and salvage the lane, but Karthus is smart and waits for him to
snag an easy first blood.
At this point, it's safe to say that Faker won this lane.
You may argue that this was jungle difference based on the last 30 seconds or so, but Dopa
being in this position is his own fault.
If he had been higher health and mana at this point, Dopa and Nunu could easily fight their
way through Karthus back to mid lane.
Then Dopa and Nunu could set up a freeze together, since their 2v2 would be stronger in that
case.
This would put Faker incredibly behind.
But Dopa simply got outclassed this lane.
He consistently messed up harass by missing a ton of Qs and wasn't even aware of the enemy
jungle's pathing.
Meanwhile, Faker made a ton of intelligent decisions to deal with the range disadvantage
and landed literally every single sweet spot W.
He gets to recall with higher CS in a melee vs range match up, and will now have teleport
advantage.
That's a complete stomp in our book.
The game clearly goes to Faker.
Unfortunately, we're running low on time and won't be able to finish this series in just
1 video.
Subscribe and hit the bell icon, since we'll be uploading the final game of the best of
3 if we hit our 10k likes goal.
See you soon!