It's no secret that Dopa is back and playing in Korean solo queue at the moment. While
he does specialize in Orianna and Twisted Fate, he's also one of the best Fizz players
in the world. Every mid laner knows the feeling of falling behind in assassin mirrors thanks
to your team giving away free kills, but in this guide we'll show you how Dopa comes back
from an early deficit in the mirror and completely stomps the game anyways.
The match-up we'll be looking at is Fizz vs Qiyana.
With basically all melee vs melee match-ups the following missions are ususally what you'll
be following 1 - Push the Wave
2 - Trade with a Minion Advantage and 3 - Bounce the Wave and All In These missions
are basically the same every single time, because they're proven to work and get results.
That being said, we're going to see how trying to apply these missions got Dopa in a bit
of trouble, but of course then we'll look at how he dealt with the misfortunes that
came his way anyways.
Before getting into the lane, we do want to discuss a small optimization that Dopa has
went for in his runes. Some assassin players have started running Zombie Ward very often
and starting sweeper at level 1. Why this can be specifically good on assassins
is because they're all generally pretty slippery when it comes to avoiding ganks during the
laning phase. As long as you don't blow your getaway tool for a trade, then it doesn't
really matter where the enemy jungler comes from or if you see him before hand, since
you can usually just get out anyways. Therefore, denying your opponent's vision
is quite powerful. As a melee champion, you're much more likely to get shoved in, and if
you can deny wards from them while they shove, it can lead into some very easy ganks for
your own jungler. And that's it for pre-game prep, let's get
into it. At level 1, Dopa immediately starts applying mission 1 and pushing the wave.
On the minimap though we can see his team fully committing for an invade
There's a fairly good option that a lot of mid laners favor in situations like these.
If you have decent level 1 wave clear, you can hard shove the first wave into the tower,
before collapsing to the invade. At level 1 everyone is pretty weak and generally lacks
CC. Your team technically should be able to stall out 3v4 rather easily, while you finish
shoving. This way, if your lane opponent reacts, they'll
miss the entire wave *and* the wave is slow pushing into you once you both go back to
lane. That's basically game over for your opponent.
That's likely what Dopa was trying to accomplish here by hitting the wave really aggressively
from the get go. Problem is, his team killed Ezreal at the start, and then Dopa saw him
teleporting back in. With Qiyana and Ezreal flanking his team from this angle, it's very
likely his team gets wiped. At the end of the day, this is basically one
of those really awkward solo queue situations where you have to leave a bad lane state and
make a split second decision. Dopa couldn't control what was going on here and rotated
over, lest he get blamed by his team the rest of the game. The outcome is horrible for him.
Qiyana gets a kill and red buff, while he gets nothing. Not only that, but remember
he had to leave a pushing wave. He gets back to almost nothing to farm, whereas Qiyana
comes back to a fairly healthy wave. And that's how he fell behind in a dangerous, snowbally
match-up. Let's now see the steps he takes to easily get back into the game.
The one saving grace is that the wave did end up kind of crashing into Qiyana's tower.
Dopa doesn't really have to force a crash, and can patiently wait for the wave to push
back into him. It's important to recall that our previous
missions won't be very applicable any more. Dopa did technically get a bounce back for
mission 3, but since Qiyana obviously has red buff and is full HP, he won't be able
to all-in her any time soon. Dopa knows this quite well, and isn't going to make any mistakes
here. He'll just play patiently and wait for mistakes.
As Qiyana is busy last hitting, Dopa walks up and uses minion dematerializer on the cannon.
This is a very small optimization, preparing to last hit a ton of minions under tower.
It's best to eat a minion up and put your dematerializer on cooldown, so that you may
have it available again in case you need it once minions hit the tower.
As the wave comes in, he tanks it a bit in order to make last hitting a easier. First
he prepares and last hits the melee creeps in front of him. With his minion dematerializer
up again, he uses it on a caster creep to preserve some health, since he's tanking quite
a bit of damage at the moment. Then, he kills the low health one, and only then once the
wave is clean and easy to last-hit does he allow it to crash, where he obviously picks
up every single minion. Pretty solid last hitting, and honestly one of the better things
to take away when studying Dopa. He's very meticulous about last-hitting minions, since
it is honestly the most important thing you can do during the laning phase. You really
should be planning how you're going to last hit every single creep all the time.
Thanks to his patience, we'll now see the same thing again but in Dopa's favor this
time. Since he got the bounce back slow push, he's the one in control and Qiyana has to
respect him. Right now the state of the lane is basically mission 2. Dopa just got a minion
lead from a bounce back and is waiting for Qiyana to get impatient and screw up. Unlike
Dopa who has all the patience in the world, she does eventually walk too far forward and
takes a fair chunk of her health as consequence Unfortunately though, Dopa now faces another
predicament. A frozen wave near the enemy tower, while you're playing a melee champion.
There's a small trick you can pull in situations like this, to force your opponent to break
the freeze themselves. Notice how Dopa's team is posturing really aggressively in bot lane?
This looks like a dive, so Dopa pretends to be walking towards his team to help them out
in killing Qiyana's bot. Most players are going to panic here. They
don't want to maintain a freeze while you go slaughter their team, so they'll instinctively
begin shoving in the wave. Dopa waited patiently for Qiyana to fix his
lane for him and once she's wasted the rest of her mana and cool-downs, he goes in and
lands enough damage to chunk her out of the lane.
Now that he's got the lane entirely to himself, what do you think Dopa's best course of action
here is? 3 sec pause
If you realized you don't have enough information to make this decision, then you know exactly
where you should be looking. Dopa has 950 gold at the moment. Now you can truly answer
this question. What should he do at the moment? 3 sec pause
The answer is to shove in the next wave. Freezing after forcing your opponent to take a terrible
base is a great strategy to make them miss a ton of CS and experience.
That being said, as a melee AP champion vs an AD assassin, you almost always want to
try and get Seeker's Armguard on your first base. Seeker's is so efficient against AD
champions that giving up the potential freeze here is totally worth it.
Dopa gets back to lane and clears the waves that Qiyana has shoved in. Then he uses his
sweeper to look for vision he can clear. Knowing that there's no wards in the area, he sits
in the bush for a potential ultimate. This is also a really strong tactic to use
aghainst other assassins in mid lane. A lot of wave clear from assassins tends to also
be tied to their escape tools most of the time. Even Akalis use their Shroud for the
extra energy for more Q's a lot of the time. Sitting in fog waiting for them to maybe blow
their only escape is a good tactic to use every now and then. Unfortunately, Qiyana
is a Challenger player in Korea, so she's not falling for the bait and wasting her W.
Dopa realizing that she's not going to fall for it, times his ultimate instead when she
auto attacks to last hit. There was definitely time for Qiyana to react here, but obviously
Dopa was counting on the fact that the random ultimate from fog would catch her off guard
for a free kill. To take his base Dopa finishes crashing the
wave, but notices something going on in bot lane. He begins rotating over, but Qiyana
has already spawned at this point. Dopa fights her, but he has no ultimate or
ignite, and is forced to flash away in order to live. He clearly overestimated how tanky
Seek's Armguard is making him. No one, not even Dopa is without faults. He
may have his own take on what he should have done, but here's what we think was the best
move. Qiyana is giving up the wave in order to flank
his bot lane in order to score some kills. All Dopa has to do is literally stand in her
way. This serves 2 purposes. One, he's protecting his team from her roam. He can just buy time
for his team to retreat from their play by just standing in her way.
Two, remember that Dopa crashed the wave before moving. Waves will usually bounce and slow
push towards you when you do this. By just standing here, Dopa would be winning lane.
Qiyana's minions would be overpowering his own due to the even minion rule and she'd
be losing more farm than he is every second that she stood here.
The next time the 2 meet in lane again after that failed fight, Dopa has complete control
of the lane and dominates a quick trade. This prompts Qiyana to completely abandon
the lane in hopes of a bot lane roam. While Dopa has hit this minion quite a bit,
since the wave is so close to Qiyana's tower, it's still going to push back to him, even
if he roams right now to match her...which is obviously exactly what he does.
As he rotates over, it's clear that the fight has kind of ended, as both sides are backing
off with low health. This prompts Dopa to scout for vision and clear it, so that the
enemy doesn't really know what he's up to. Qiyana makes a bold assumption that Dopa likely
went back to middle, but no. He used his sweeper and all the control wards in the area to make
sure no one knew what he was up to and picked Qiyana off once again.
He retreats to get his blue buff, and like we said the wave was pushing back to him so
he comes back to a nice bit of farm at the end of it all.
At this point, everyone in the game is snowballing, especially him and it's safe to say the game
is over.
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As a brief recap, what we really enjoyed about this particular replay was how simple Dopa
made everything look. Typically, in assassin mirrors when the enemy gets an early kill
and buffs, the lane becomes incredibly difficult since these match-ups can snowball very quickly.
Despite that, Dopa easily came back with some basic fundamentals. It's never about fancy
moves or mechanics with him, but rather a stream of minor decisions and adaptations
that allow him to have such consistent results in his games.
He knows when his opponent has control of the lane, and doesn't make get antsy and give
away free trades, unlike Qiyana who frequently gave him free trades
After that, it was just great decsion making around minion waves that alloowed him to easily
turn the tides and snowball as he usually does.
That's going to wrap up this guide. As always thanks for watching and see ya next time.