Showmaker is absolutely tearing solo queue apart at the moment. At the making of this
guide, he holds *both* the rank 1 and rank 2 titles in Korean Solo Queue, and he did
it without duo queueing. It's safe to say he's probably the Best Solo Queue player in
the world at the moment, on top of being an insane professional player. In this guide,
we'll show you exactly how he dominated a melee vs ranged match up, with a masterclass
of wave manipulation, map awareness, and basic fundamentals. No mechanics are required to
do what he's going to accomplish in this game. Let's jump right into it.
Okay, the match up Showmaker is in will be Qiyana vs a Xerath. Basically, a standard
melee vs ranged match up. Let's do things a bit differently this time. Instead of us
giving you our missions, think back and you try and think of the missions. What do you
think you'd do for the early levels in this type of match up?
Okay, if you had something the lines of 1, let them shove
2, give up CS to preserve health and 3, looking to find an all-in once you
hit level 3, then you've obviously been following our content well.
Knowing our missions, let's see how Showmaker plays this out.
The lane begins....and he immediately begins auto-attacking the wave, discarding our entire
mission game plan. What gives here? Are these missions guidelines
bad, or is there something else going on here? There is. You can always take things a step
further, and to do so we have to understand why we have those initial missions in the
first place. Looking back on mission 1 - Let them shove,
we usually recommend this because you shouldn't really have much of an option here
Against ranged champions, you *should* get zoned at level 1 by their range advantage.
But if you noticed, Xerath was a few seconds late to the lane. Showmaker easily gets rank
1, because he punishes every minuscule mistake his opponents make.
That actually gave him enough time to deal significant damage to the wave, giving him
early lane control. Then our previous mission 2, give up CS to preserve health isn't really
as relevant anymore. It's much easier to punish melee champions, when you have a minion advantage.
But when the melee has the wave advantage, the ranged champion can't freely auto-attack
them, unless they want to tank a bunch of creep aggro. By getting early control Showmaker
is preserving health at the same time. But, wait there's a problem with Showmaker's
improvised game plan. By having the shove, it'll be hard to get any kills with Xerath
being under the safety of his tower. Can you think of a reason as to why this won't be
a problem this game? It's mostly because of both team's drafts.
In top lane he has a Jax vs Kennen. In this match up, Kennen is likely to spam shove Jax
into his tower. Being able to roam up there for easy set ups with Jax's Q E combo, has
a high possibility for success. For his jungle he has Elise. She's a super
aggressive jungler who wants to skirmish or set up tower dives. Being able to roam with
her during those tower dives could blow the game completely wide open.
As for the bot lane match-up, it's Aphelios Thresh vs Varus Bard. Both of these lanes
want to play pretty aggressively, and his own bot lane has a ton of crowd control set
up, if he were to roam down. Having priority is definitely super important when you have
a bunch of volatile lanes like these. Thanks to getting that early lead, Showmaker
retained minion control throughout the lane by constantly playing aggressively on the
wave, and not letting Xerath take back control. Thus, he's able to get a clean crash against
a ranged champion and has priority to go bottom Now, when looking to gank, it's not required,
but *definitely beneficial* to know where the enemy jungler is.
We just saw Lee Sin top side, so Showmaker is aware that he can be as patient as he wants
with this dive. His early priority and map awareness grants his him and his team an easy
2 kills. After he recalls and gets back to mid lane,
Showmaker has 2 fairly neutral waves near his own tower. Based on the information you
have available to you, what do you think he should do?
Whenever looking to get priority, always ask yourself - Is it even worth getting in the
first place? Look at the map at the moment.
Kennen is finishing shoving in a wave, so Jax will be stuck farming under tower for
a while. Not only that, but his jungle and bot lane are all in base. There's literally
nothing to proactively do on the map at the moment.
Okay, so fast pushing isn't the best option here. When you have fairly even waves close
to your tower, a really consistent wave control choice you have is to slow push the first
wave, waiting for the reinforcing wave to arrive. By doing this, you build a decently
sized slow push, which means that you can almost always guarantee a crash on the next
wave, since you'll have such a large minion advantage.
Once again, with another clean crash, Showmaker uses his priority to roam, resulting in yet
another kill. Fast forwarding a little later, Showmaker
picks up a random kill. Not much to analyze there.
Afterwards, he heads back mid and fast shoves this wave, so that he can use his level 6
power spike for yet another roam. Let's see if you've been *realllly* paying
attention. Where do you think he should roam this time?
His bot lane was in base, so there wasn't much to be set up down there. On top of that,
his Jax is owning top now, so he can't really roam towards Kennen either.
But, if you were paying attention at level 1, you would have seen that Kennen wasn't
in lane until 1 minute 50 seconds into the game, indicating that he likely leashed. Which
means, Lee started at his red buff at level 1. Knowing this is pretty important. It means
that around the 7 minute mark, the enemy jungler will *likely* be around the side of the jungle
where his initial buff will be re-spawning. Having just shoved the mid lane wave, Showmaker
has a ton of time to kill. He waits around patiently knowing that Lee very probably is
going to path around this area, and is rewarded yet again with another kill.
It's safe to say thatt at this point the game is over, at least in Challenger Korean solo
queue where people know how to close out games.
Alright, let's briefly recap. Showmaker probably went into this game with the idea that he
would follow our standard missions for a melee vs ranged match up.
But being the rank 1 player that he is, he realized that he has volatile match-ups in
every other role. In games like these, it's very beneficial to change your game plan,
so that you can capitalize on the easy kills all around the map.
But it's not like he can just break the rules of the game and randomly get priority against
a ranged champion. He needed to find a window where Xerath would mess up his lane control
and allow Showmaker to get wave control. It just so happens to be that Xerath messed
up by being slightly late to lane at level 1. The game was over before it even began.
But to be fair, every game against Showmaker is kind of like that, so we can't blame Xerath
too badly here. And that wraps up this video. Hope you guys
enjoyed, take care, and see ya next time.