Hey everyone and welcome.
Today we'll be running you through a fairly uncommon matchup - but one we can analyze
to learn a number of things about how to get meaningful results through lane when you're
playing a ranged champion against a melee.
This time, we'll be taking a look at Ryze vs Fiora.
For this game we had our very own Ariana Lovato, a top 50 challenger player smurf in Gold,
to show how hyper effective it can be when applying our concepts, proving they work in
lower elo.
Ryze of course has the range advantage, so he can use that to harass on last hits.
For wave clear Ryze is also favoured thanks to the AoE from his E and ranged auto advantage
to constantly hit the wave safely .
So this is all pretty much favoured for Ryze, besides at level 1 - where Ryze has no damage
and no CC and is the only point he can't really do a whole lot.
For damage, Fiora does more in trades, but she'll have a difficult time reaching Ryze
once he learns his W, unless she can outplay with her E to stun him on it.
The missions Ryze will want to follow this game are:
Let Fiora push at the start to survive his level 1 window without having to contest the
wave
Begin to get more aggressive at levels 2,3 by pushing the wave
Then, once reaching her tower, be very proactive with harass as she tries to last hit
The enemy jungler this game is Xin Zhao, while Ryze has a Trundle.
As the game starts, Ryze has to leash.
This is fine, but it's important to note that Ryze has really weak mana regen and his starting
item is a mana crystal, so when you're leashing on him, it's suboptimal to use spells on the
buff.
As Ryze gets into lane, we're going to see that Ariana allows Fiora to push into him
on the Ryze.
The reason for this is to play around Ryze's awful level 1, and prepare the wave for him
to punish Fiora on Ryze's much stronger level 2 and 3.
If he wasn't Ryze, but still playing a range champion, he'd skip mission 1, and start work
on the other 3.
So, Ryze just keeps his distance from Fiora, scores the last hits and lets Fiora get a
slight push lead.
He does go for a couple of hits onto Fiora to lightly apply pressure while she goes for
CS, no reason not to, but with just one hit from Fiora she equalizes - demonstrating why
Ryze would rather wait until he levels up before getting aggressive.
Overall, this is going completely to his gameplan so far, as he isn't taking any damage, is
getting his last hits picked up, and he's able to get some harassment down
This gank is from Tundle pretty weird, and it doesn't really make much sense for him
to do, given there's a red wave protecting Fiora and very little damage with no CC to
help out.
There's no reason however not to try and follow up on it and they do land some damage onto
Fiora, which is nice for Ryze, but a waste of time for the Trundle.
The important thing to remember when ganks like this come in is that you don't allow
it to ruin your strategy.
We can see that even though Trundle came in here and there was some minion aggro on Ryze,
there's still a minion advantage for Fiora, which means that Ryze can still easily allow
it to push into him for a huge punish later on at levels 2 and 3.
The only thing that's changed with this gank is that it removed Fiora's health pot from
the equation while also making her a bit worried and causing her to go ward.
Something we wanted to point out was how Ariana is able to slip in autos against Fiora.
We're consistently seeing this really disciplined auto harass as she's at the edge of his range,
then immediately pull back, out of range for Fiora, or the minions, to retaliate.
Landing damage for free without hindering his wave control.
Now that Ryze is level 2, Mission 1 is done with he's able to look for big aoe bounces
off of his E.
This is just a taste of what's to come as when Ryze gets level 3, things will only get
harder for the Fiora.
He hits the E to secure this last hit, spreading his spell flux, followed by an immediate Q
to chunk out Fiora.
This was a move for harass and he isn't looking to actually push the wave yet, but he was
able to effectively thin the wave so he can get more aggressive, while it's still pushing
towards him - while trading at the same time.
Super efficient stuff and follows a basic concept we teach often of trying to hit your
spells on the wave AND the champion when you're looking to control waves to thin or push them.
At level 3, he'll have the full extent of his kit, which will allow him to then snare
Fiora to force a ton of damage onto her.
At this point we can see both of them posturing around the freshly thinned wave, with Ariana
getting another great auto onto Fiora.
He's gotten about a dozen of these off so far in this laning phase, and if he hadn't
been so infuriatingly consistent with this Fiora would much healthier.
Players really struggle to deal with this type of punishing and gradual harassment,
because it feels like they're being hit every time they move up and whenever they move back.
Checking in on our missions, you may be wondering why he's not acting on mission 2 once he'd
gained level 2.
The reason he hasn't actually started actively pushing the wave, but is content with thinning
it for a soft freeze while harassing - is that there's no need to proactively push,
he can just harass until the wave naturally starts pushing back to Fiora at this point,
as she has to stay so far out.
Again, Ryze conceded the push at level 1 because Ryze is pretty weak at level 1.
But had this been say, a Gnar, then getting the push right away and getting a ton of damage
on Fiora under tower would be the more effective, proactive play.
Anyway, level 3 is on the cards with this soon diminished third wave.
He's going to hit level 3 off of either the cannon, two casters, or the melee, and the
casters are currently being focused.
Fiora misses her vital here, and takes an auto and E in responseAfter he hits level
3, we should see him play extremely aggressive against Fiora in order to capitalize on all
of the great harassment that he's landed so far.
it's Important to note that Ryze is also guarding himself behind the left blue casters now,
which will force Fiora to take a bunch of damage if she lunges in against him again.
He continues his path to drop cannon aggro from the brush.
Now, this low caster will give Ariana level 3
Fiora's made this lane much harder for herself by consistently standing next to low minions
that Ryze can spread his E with.
This is something you'll find often catches people off-guard in top on Ryze in particular,
because he's a pretty uncommon top laner.
Fiora's mistakes have caused her to take way more damage than she should be, which is accelerating
Ryze's gameplan to where he can skip through his strategy to push and harass, as he can
get all the value he needs right now.
Finally, Ryze has skilled up his snare and it's time to strike
it may seem obvious to some viewers that Fiora really should back off earlier, but think
about the positioning of the wave.
This is a really common mistake people of all elos make, where they try to get a bit
too greedy and push the wave into the turret, when in reality they should back off, recall,
and teleport back
Anyway, she ended up sticking around, so let's take a look and see how this goes
Yeah.. that was pretty brutal.
As we play it back, Ariana was moving around to try and predict the riposte from Fiora,
but she doesn't end up using it.
Securing Ariana a low cost kill on this Ryze, only spending his flash.
Xin Zhao pops up and tries to even the standings, but it doesn't quite shut down the Ryze.
When you have to recall anyways, wasting a Jungler's time and health when they have double
buffs is one of the best things that you can do.
We can see that he's wasted so much of Xin Zhao's time that his red buff ended up expiring,
while Ryze lost absolutely nothing for doing that.
As Ryze recalls and returns to lane, we can see that he's finished up his tear and picked
up a mana crystal.
At this point, he's able to really spam out a ton of spells, and Fiora is going to get
punished every time that she steps up to the wave.
Because of this Fiora's poor play and Ariana's excellent execution at punishing her, he'll
be throwing out these missions and just going with a freeze and harass.
He doesn't need to shove anymore to gain a lead, he's already got one and by shoving
to increase his harass - all he'd do is expose himself to ganks.
Whereas he can still continue to pressure with a freeze, very similarly to the active
mission we've practiced recently from Mcbaze.
There is pretty much nothing that Fiora can do to stop this outside of calling for Xin
Zhao to come help her.
As Ariana himself phrased it "if he plays well on the Ryze here, there's absolutely
nothing that Fiora can do in this position to win.
This huge wave is impossible for Fiora to trade into, and even though Ariana gets lazy
and misses a couple cs, he has complete dominance in this lane.
In this instance, Fiora shouldn't even be trying for the farm.
She has to wait until he pushes this wave into her turret, because if she tries to farm
out in the open like this, he has the range advantage over her to punish her just like
this.
And as we mentioned earlier, she can't trade into him, because he has an actual army of
caster minions that are all ready to punish her
With this last punish happening, Fiora can't even farm any of the minions in this huge
wave at the turret anymore.
At the same time, if she misses these minions, she's going to be out of the game for at least
15 minutes, and will never be able to 1v1 Ryze for the rest of the game
Ariana also knows that she needs at least the exp from the wave, so he moves up hyper
aggressively to check for her leeching at max exp range.
And at this point, as we watch Ariana semi-proxy the wave, the lane is completely over for
Fiora, as she is down 15 cs and 2 levels at just 6
minutes into the game
Alright, so this game we saw Ryze play safe during level one where he couldn't get any
real lead due to his weak stage of the lane.
He did however do a great job with landing auto attacks from maximum range, denying Fiora
the chance to punish and not aggroing minions
Once he hit level 2, he thinned the wave so he could get more aggressive, but he didn't
start actively pushing because there was no need.
He was able to get the harass right away due to Fiora's poor positioning, constantly playing
pushed up and not getting enough work done during her level one.
Once Ryze hit level 3, he chipped away at Fiora and eventually flashed in for the kill
after failing to bait her riposte.
Xin came, where Ariana gladly accepted his invitation to waste his time during his high
threat double buff window.
Once Ariana teleported back to lane with a kill and a freeze setup, he continuously harassed
as it naturally pushed back to Fiora off the slow push, building a huge wave and sending
her packing before she could pick up any CS, deleting her from the lane.
Alright, so that's it for this one - thanks for watching and we'll catch you next time.