Another day of LPL action has led to another display of Aphelios’ dominance on the Rift. FunPlus Phoenix bot laner Lwx picked up his first pentakill of the season on Aphelios during the League of Legends team’s series against Rogue Warriors earlier today.
This play happened in the second game of the series. FPX won the first game and already had an edge over RW in the early game of the second one. At the 18-minute mark, RW missed their engage in the mid lane and Reheal’s Sett got caught by Crisp’s Thresh.
Lwx showed clean positioning to melt the enemies’ health bars without exposing himself to crowd control abilities and casually secured a pentakill, showing no signs of joy but only focus in his player camera.
“At that time we just won a teamfight and I had gotten a quadrakill. I just told my teammates: ‘Give me the pentakill’ and I made it,” Lwx said in the post-match interview.
RW fell too far behind after this fight. FPX secured every objective on the Rift before destroying their Nexus while RW’s players died in the last defense attempt, granting a clean victory to FPX. Despite running complex compositions, they made it look easy against RW.
Lwx’s pentakill on Aphelios, which was the third of his professional career, got him the MVP title of the second game, on top of getting the award for the first game too.
This is already the second pentakill scored on Aphelios in a major league of the competitive scene this year. T1 bot laner Gumayusi picked up a pentakill on the champ last week during their intense series against world champions DWG KIA.
Although Aphelios lost his prominent place in the meta after successive nerfs last year, he still has a strong presence in major leagues like the LPL and LCK. He’s especially popular in the LCK with a 88-percent presence rate, according to gol.gg.
This can be explained by the item rework that took place during the offseason. The new system offers incredibly strong items to ADC players, such as the Mythic item Kraken Slayer, which is a match made in heaven for Aphelios.
With or without Aphelios, though, FPX have had solid performances since the launch of the 2021 Spring Split, despite losing to EDward Gaming last week. The signing of world champion Nuguri in the top lane seems to have enabled the team’s full potential after a shaky 2020 season, though he’s still adjusting to speaking in Chinese with his teammates.
They still have many series to play before potentially reaching the playoffs, however. FPX will face off against Worlds runners-up Suning in their next match on Saturday, Jan. 23 at 5am CT.
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