Hello and welcome to Wednesday's marksman daily
In this video, we're going to break down a game from one of our challenger adc's as they
play Caitlyn in a platinum game.
In Monday's video, we talked about playing Caitlyn when you have a big lane advantage.
In this game, Caitlyn had a Karma support against Varus and Fiddle.
While she has a slight range advantage over Varus, Fiddle has a range advantage over Karma,
making this matchup about equal.
In even matchups like this you want to emphasize your strengths while shoring up what weaknesses
you can.
Here, Caitlyn wants to use her range advantage against Varus while trying to avoid too much
harassment from Fiddle.
The overarching goal of the strategy we'll be showing you in this daily will be to put
the enemy ad carry behind, make them vulnerable to being abused by your jungler, while at
the same keeping yourself gankproof We'll be breaking down levels 1 through 3,
where we'll be looking to complete these three missions:
Missions:
Utilize our range advantage
Punish the enemy ADC on low minions
Freeze near turret
With that being said, let's hop into the game Caitlyn was with Karma waiting around at the
blue buff.
Seeing that Rammus was starting top, she heads down to bot lane to go for something cheesy
This is a type of move that you can't exactly plan for or prepare for, but is something
you can value out of when the conditions are right
There's a risk of the enemy bot lane being in the brush especially since Caitlyn didn't
get here immediately.
Because of that, she checks with an ability on the first brush and uses her ward for the
second.
She's now in a great position with three options to choose from.
She could Step in front of the minions and drag them down to the brush to guarantee a
freeze Stay in the brush until Varus and Fiddlesticks
come and get potshots on them from the brush.
Or she could immediately hit the wave in order to get a push going
Which do you think is best here?
Don't worry if option 1 didn't make a lot of sense - freezing is very complex and we'll
be tackling it in a future daily.
With that said, Caitlyn choose to wait in the brush and get potshots on Varus and Fiddlesticks.
Doing this correctly will support her mission of using her range advantage.
Let's see how it pans out This gave her an awesome health advantage,
but let's rewind and think about it.
First, it's important for you to understand that you won't get these results in every
matchup The reason this play is good is because of
two things: abilities and range.
Karma and Caitlyn have abilities that they can cast from the brush and guarantee hits
on.
Cait also has a range advantage over Varus, which will let her get the first hit off no
matter what.
Other champions that would be able to do this similarly well to Caitlyn are Sivir, Ashe,
and Ezreal.
If she had been playing a different ADC with a weak level 1 and no ability to cast from
FOG like Twitch, Tristana, or Vayne, she wouldn't want to fight this.
In Monday's daily we saw the Twitch fall behind doing this exact strategy for this very reason.
The same goes if she had a weak level 1 support, like Alistar Leona or Rakan
The second thing that comes into play here is execution.
Caitlyn want to avoid taking too much damage from minions, and also not over-extending
into their duo lane.
This is about chunking an enemy laner, not trying to kill them.
Even though Varus counter-played this well by hugging the wall, he took such a bad trade
because his support wasn't here with him.
To quickly review, this was the best option because Caitlyn and Karma have skillshots
they can line up from the brush, and Caitlyn has a range advantage that lets her get the
first hit.
It was also executed well because she didn't overextend or take too much minion damage.
With that being said, let's hop back into game.
Caitlyn is up a good amount of health on Varus, and her goal now is to try and extend that
lead.
She's going to do that by punishing him whenever he goes for minions.
She see this low blue minion, and wants to deny it.
She could have waited a second on this Q, but the idea still stands - when there's a
low minion, Varus is going to want to kill it.
Either he'll take harass to get it, take a trade and lose it, or give it completely.
All of these are good scenarios for Caitlyn Varus steps up to last hit, and she's able
to get a free auto off on him.
We talk about punishing on the minions a lot, and that won't change, but really pay attention
here because we're about to cover about an even more advanced version of this tactic.
Watch two things here - the way Caitlyn moves and then the way Varus moves in response.
Do you see the little dance happening?
When she moves forward, Varus moves back.
When she moves back, Varus moves forward.
He's a good enough player that if he's focused he can constantly do this to avoid her range
Despite this however, she's still able to hit him with a headshot.
Believe it or not, the reason for this is actually backed by neuroscience.
Your attention can only be in one place at a time.
We can tell he's focused on Caitlyn.... until something distracts him.
In this case, while she's dancing back and forth, she's watching these two minions get
lower and lower.
She knows that he's going to switch his focus from her movements to the minion health as
it gets in last hit range, because as an ADC he's taught to have perfect CS.
The moment Caitlyn thinks he's going to switch his focus on the minion and off of her movements,
she bucks the trend of how she's been moving and steps a bit further up to get her auto
attack off.
Varus meets her auto, which is really well played by him.
A worse player would easily take free damage and miss the minion here.
Now this might seem really hard to do, but think of trying it after you're comfortable
with punishing on low minions.
All you're adding in is moving back and forth to threaten while you're waiting for a minion
to get low.
Then put yourself in the enemy adc's shoes and go for the harass at the same moment that
you would want to last hit if you were in their position
Fiddle was on point in punishing Caitlyn on her minion kill, but she still ends up denying
both minions from Varus.
Let's move forward to the next important minion.
Here there's a low blue melee minion Caitlyn can punish on, but there's also a low red
caster that she wants to kill This is important to note because killing
the red caster is top priority, and after that she can look to punish on the blue melee.
Killing the caster delayed her harass by enough time that he can dodge.
That's fine, it's okay if you don't punish on every minion
It's always important to respect level 2 advantages.
Even if you're up in the health, the extra combat stats and abilities can be enough to
get them right back in it.
The third melee minion on the second wave will give level 2, and Caitlyn doesn't want
to be on the receiving end of that advantage, so she backs up proactively
Here we come to the third mission in this lane - freezing.
Think about what's happened so far.
She traded her health for Varus', denied him on what minions she could, and because of
the lack of attention she's given to pushing, the minion wave has naturally built to push
against her.
Her response here will be to freeze in front of her turret along this line and then make
Varus as uncomfortable as possible.
Once the enemy minion wave clashes with her new allied wave, she wants to thin the old
wave out.
This is because she wants to prevent Varus from utilizing this big wave to overwhelm
her and push to the turret.
There's a trend happening here.
Varus wants to push, but Caitlyn doesn't let that happen.
She's specifically able to do this because she's in an even matchup - we don't recommend
this type of freeze if you're in a bad matchup, and there's plenty of better ways to abuse
an advantaged matchup.
Varus doesn't have any advantage to pressure with, which makes it hard for him to push
the wave all of the way into the turret.
It helps that Cait has spent the lane hitting him whenever he steps too far forward.
Even though he's pushed up, she's in complete control.
As Fiddle leaves the lane, Caitlyn trades with Varus.
This is a great trade because it at worst it's a 1v1 where both lose health.
The beauty of this freeze is that Caitlyn can't really be ganked by the enemy Cho'Gath.
However, if she trades with Varus, he gets lower and more vulnerable to a jungle gank.
Even if there's no gank coming, he's going to feel really pressured to get this into
the turret.
Not much happens here other than more of the same.
Caitlyn's keeping the wave in the center, wards the brush to prevent fiddle from abusing
or getting caught off guard by a jungler, and she's looking for trades against Varus
when there's potential.
At this point she's kept the wave frozen here for a minute with Varus being pretty vulnerable
the whole time.
She sees Rammus ping that he's on the way and just has to act casual.
She baits the fiddle in to overcommit with a cute move backwards without being in any
real danger.
This makes the kill extremely easy.
The core part of the video is over, but to wrap this up, she hardshoves the wave into
the enemy turret and harasses Varus on every minion, eventually leading to a repeat gank
from Rammus and a dead enemy ad carry.
Having ended that story, lett's recap what we've gone over!
This laning phase was all about adaption.
Caitlyn came into it with a plan, but smartly pivoted when the conditions were right.
After seeing her jungler start top, she decided to go for a bot lane brush cheese.
Because she wasn't in the lane immediately, she checked the brushes with abilities and
a ward From here she could freeze, push, or go for
harass.
She had abilities to cast from fog and good range, so she opted for harass and got a health
lead.
From here she wanted to trade my health to put Varus further behind in health and gold.
She did this by punishing on the CS An advanced way to punish savvy lane opponents
is to dance back and forth until there's a low minion, and then change the trend of how
you move to get an auto off.
She respected the level advantage.
She understood that she gave this level advantage to them by focusing on harassment instead
of pushing.
At this point both Varus and Caitlyn are low.
The difference is she's at no risk of getting ganked by the enemy cho'gath, while Varus
is wide open to a rammus gank.
She freezes for an entire minute, and Rammus eventually comes down.
At that point it's free kill after free kill.
It's always important to go into your games with a plan for how you want to play.
This will help direct you and the better the plan you make the lower the chances are that
you'll ever be confused.
On the other side of that, it's equally important to recognize situations that don't happen
every game.
Mastering a gameplan by-the-books is excellent, and you'll get very far doing so.
Being able to adapt on the fly and capitalize on things that happen once in ten games is
what separates the good from the great.