Hey everyone.
As you all know, G2 Caps is back where he belongs, in the mid lane.
Although that's painful to say, since somehow Perkz is comparably good, Caps is just one
of the most fun players to watch in League of Legends because he'll ALWAYS make the big
play we all at least try to make in our own games, only to mute all directly after.
Caps on the other hand often breaks the game wide open and looks like he's smurfing in
Challenger....or how he likely ebayed his account.
Which is actually what this video is about.
How Caps Limit Tests and what us mortals can learn from it.
This will be a 2 part series, with this video focusing on his laning phase limit testing,
followed up by some mid game limit testing later on.
Let's get into it.
There's only 1 mission for this guide, and it's to always be mindful to not do any limit
testing without some idea behind it.
Limit testing is a word thrown around a lot when it comes to improving, and it makes people
do the most random things.
As you watch this guide, you'll see that while it may sometimes look like he's really running
it down, that there's almost always a reason why Caps is playing so aggressively.
And with just that in mind, let's hop into our first game, where he'll be playing Sylas
vs a Syndra.
The match up is going as expected early on.
Syndra has chunked him real low, so Caps wants to shove in this wave and look to base.
As he attempts to do so, he doesn't react in time to Syndra's E and is forced to burn
his flash He recalls and teleports back, and then tries
to fully crash the wave.
Syndra counters with her visually bugged teleport, and Caps is once again in another rough spot.
You definitely never want to be frozen on this close to the enemy's tower as a melee
champion.
So, what does he do?
Just like before he hard tanks the Syndra trying to crash the wave
He makes a huge mistake and tanks a tower shot during the clear, forcing him to run
for his life.
Until...he turns around at 60HP and dies to Syndra Q
We're going to ignore everything that led up to this, and focus solely on this moment.
What do we know so far?
Well, Syndra used W moments earlier, and her E right before the final moments of the fight.
At such an early level, of course her abilities will be down for a while.
This means that her only forms of damage at the moment are Q and auto attacks.
Caps has 57 health, and his W is on a 2 second cool down.
Syndra only has time for 1 auto attack during that cool down, which wouldn't kill Caps at
this health.
So, if he goes in, she *has* to land her Q, otherwise his W comes back up, and he'll back
up to around 1/3 of his health bar.
At that point, she'd probably have to flash away, since she'd be tanking minions and Caps'
auto attacks.
Then he'd be in complete lane control, as he had 2 corrupting potions ticking here and
another in his inventory, whereas Syndra had no potions left.
She'd be on low health and nearly oom, vs Caps with plenty of resources to work with.
From a completely disastrous situation, with just a quick outplay, he'd be back in control
Whew, that's a lot of what ifs and very game specific information.
Let's get into what we want to teach from his death.
Take a look at the fight one last time.
What do you think the lesson here is?
If you said his auto attack was wrong, you're correct.
Of course, there's no guarantee that he'd dodge Syndra's Q, if he didn't auto attack.
That being said, it's much more likely than by wasting time on it.
Caps wins this fight the second he gets his W off.
He doesn't need to etch out every bit of value possible.
This seems like a highly specific concept, but it's not.
You can apply this logic to a lot of things.
For example, let's say you're almost done pushing a wave in mid, but there's 1 pesky
caster minion left.
You already have 1400 gold, more than enough for lost chapter and a control ward.
Do you really need to last hit that caster creep?
No, you're just leaving yourself vulnerable to a random gank or something.
It's okay if you don't get full value out of everything, if you don't necessarily need
it., and that was exactly his problem here.
Alright, onto our next example.
This time Caps will be playing Akali against a mid Rumble.
The lane will begin with some very good fundamentals on both sides of the match up.
Right now, the waves are about even but closer to Caps' side of the lane.
Therefore, his wave will reinforce first, granting him the wave advantage and a slow
push.
Knowing that he can use this for a guranteed base timing, Caps is very liberal with his
own health and chunks Rumble down while he finishes crashing the wave into the tower
Then, he takes his recall As any teleport user should know.
Your goal is to find a good recall timing, after crashing a wave.
Then, you teleport back in and set up a freeze with your health and item advantage, so Caps
does just that.
Of course, Caps is playing in high elo, so the Rumble is definitely not incompetent.
He's also going to use the safety of a slow push to finish crashing in his own wave.
To prevent that, Caps tries to use his health and item advantage to take trades, even at
this minion deficit.
But the match up isn't that favorable for Akali early on, and he gets *heavily* out-traded,
nearly dying.
Let's pause here.
Even with this trade going awful, could there be a possible reason to go for it?
Delaying Rumble's crash would be the correct answer here.
If Rumble had ignored Akali and focused on shoving the wave, he'd get to cleanly crash
the wave and take his recall.
Instead, his focus on trading with Akali delayed the crash, meaning he has to stay for another
wave to finish crashing.
This gives Caps' Reksai time to get to mid lane and look for a gank, onto the immobile
Rumble.
Let's watch what happens Another beautiful int from our star player.
We need to go back to the critical moment.
It's here, where he willfully gives up his whole health bar to set this up.
Keep in mind, that we wouldn't recommend doing this without a duo.
But if you knew your jungler is coming mid, here's what we could learn.
If Ivern doesn't appropriately react and come to protect his Rumble, then Rumble is likely
to instantly die the second he's touched by Rek'sai.
But Ivern *did* come which led to the disastrous 2v2.
Unfortunately for Caps, he missed his initial Q.
If he landed that, he could've probably auto'd and Q'd once more and Rek'sai would likely
finish off the kill.
Not only that but his E on the minion ran out.
He was clearly planning to use that to get out at the last moment.
Once again, all well and good.
But how does this help us with our own games.
This was super specific just like last time.
Well, Caps created a very positive situation during this trade.
As we've addressed, if Ivern doesn't help Rumble, they'd easily gank and kill him.
Then, if he plays this fight correctly, they'd also kill him for overstaying in lane.
His decisions just looked really bad, because he misplayed this fight.
The lesson here is to never be results oriented, especially concerning misplays based on mechanics.
You're going to screw up sometimes, but the more often you put yourself in these kind
of dangerous situations, then the more often that you'll be able to outplay your opponents
and take a lead.
Which brings us to our last replay.
For this last match up, he'll be playing Syndra vs Zed.
Much like the other games, he's not looking too hot during the early game.
Zed's movement was actually fairly good during the start of this laning phase.
He baited out Caps' Qs really well, and dodged almost all of them.
This is not an ideal start in any ranged vs melee match up, as the mission for any melee
champion is to preserve their health so they can all in you.
Skipping ahead a bit, we can see Zed is chilling at nearly full health, whereas Caps is starting
to run low on mana.
Wanting to make up for his missed skill shots, he goes to place a ward.
But this ward is pretty bad.
The enemy jungler is Kayn.
If you've paid close attention, you can definitely answer this.
Why do you think this is a bad ward?
During the early points of the lane, even though you want to focus on your match up,
you should always be aware of where the enemy jungler started.
We saw Cassiopeia be in lane immediately at level 1.
Not only that, but we also saw Darius appear in lane after leaving the top lane bush, also
indicating that he hadn't leashed.
With his recent buffs, Kayn is going to be meta for a while, so this is pretty relevant
information.
Whenever he doesn't get a leash, Kayn usually does Raptors, Red into Krugs.
Then, depending on what's going on, he can choose to start vertically jungling, or just
transition gank through mid to get to the other side of his own jungle.
Our foreshadowing is not subtle.
Caps dies to this level 3 gank.
Whenever you die to early jungle ganks, always question yourself on whether you had the accurate
read of what side of the map the enemy jungler would come from.
Caps probably just wasn't paying too much attention this game, and placed an auto pilot
ward.
Not only that, but if you're against a melee mid laner, you *need* to land your early harass.
Had Zed been lower during the Kayn gank, he wouldn't have been able to initiate like he
did, and Caps would have also been safe that way.
With some lessons learned from this death, unlike the other times, let's see how he brings
it back.
With his Rengar taking a random fight in the river, Zed scores yet another kill, putting
him at a 2-0 lead over Caps.
Despite all that, Caps establishes a good wave against Zed.
It's near his own tower, allowing him to punish Zed appropriately as he tries to CS.
Once again, with all the knowledge you have from this game.
What's an appropriate assumption you could make at the moment?
Reading that Zed will hit 6 soon is the correct answer here.
Remember, he has 2 kills over Caps, so he should have a substantial more amount of exp.
The Melee and Cannon minions give the most exp on every wave, so it's very likely Zed
will ding 6 off these melee creeps, and if not, he'll definitely level up off of the
cannon creep.
Caps is undoubtedly aware of this.
Even after being chunked down, he stays near Zed's W. He knows there's no way he dies here,
because the second Zed presses ult on him, he immediately stuns him and obliterates him
under tower.
In a completely lost lane, Caps manages to turn it around by having confidence in his
ability to hit confirm his abilities.
Some of the more obnoxious champions in League have abilities that will lock them in place.
Zed's ult forces him to come out behind you, letting you easily CC him out of it.
Ekko's R literally tells you where he's going back to, and then he has a small animation
keeping him still for a moment.
Zoe's R is the same thing.
Having the confidence to punish them and learning the frame perfect timings to punish these
types of abilities will take practice, and you'll fail at it a lot.
And that's the point, Caps has probably failed this so much that by now he's completely confident
in his ability to react to it perfectly.
This final example will wrap things up.
We at skill-capped are just really happy that Caps is back to playing mid.
There's something really refreshing about a player who is not afraid of looking bad
for the sake of improving.
That's something we should all strive
to do as well.
In any case.
We hope you enjoyed, and be on the lookout for part 2, where we'll break down some of
his mid to late game decisions.
Thanks for watching.