Welcome to the second half of the 2018 League of Legends season, where all the roles are backwards and we pretend crit isn’t in the game anymore.
In this unpredictable meta, traditional marksmen have been almost entirely kicked out of the bot lane, with exceptions in Lucian, Kai’Sa, and Ezreal, thanks to huge nerfs to base stats and crit items. Most marksmen have bowed out of the bot lane, and every other type of champion has risen to replace them. These have included mages, tanks, bruisers, assassins, duelists, fighters, and whatever Heimerdinger counts as.
We experimented with these downright nutty new bot lane champions, and we’ve gathered what we believe are three of the most fun to try out. If you’re tired of your lane or your main champion, now’s a great time to pick some of these up and march to the bottom lane.
Veigar and Zilean
Normally, when you take two bad things and smack them together, you don’t get something great out of it, but Veigar and Zilean seem to be one of the exceptions. Both champions have very poor early levels, but start to hurt with an item or two near the mid-game. When combined, though, they’re much more fearsome, and it’s all because of Veigar’s cage.
If Zilean drops both bombs side-by-side, he can take up roughly 90 percent of Veigar’s cage, forcing the enemy to walk onto bombs or walk into the edge of the wall and take a stun. When Veigar drops an Event Horizon in the mix, it’s even worse for the enemy. If they don’t have a blink-type gap closer like Ezreal or Flash, they’re either going to take a stun or way too much damage to maintain lane pressure. It’s a nasty combo.
Yasuo and Trundle
Chances are you’ve already seen the Yasuo and Alistar combo in the bot lane, due to Alistar’s innate synergy with Yasuo’s ultimate ability. That’s all fine and dandy, but if you’re looking for something even more meta-defying, you should try Yasuo and Trundle instead.
Trundle’s pillar counts as a knockup if he summons it underneath an enemy, and it comes out of the ground in the blink of an eye. This gives the Yasuo-Trundle duo chances to surprise-engage on the enemy bot lane, which is something Alistar can’t do. With Alistar, if he starts waddling toward you through a minion wave, chances are he’s going to engage.
With Trundle, though, he can summon the pillar from anywhere, and his resistance-shredding ultimate combines with Yasuo’s passive armor penetration ultimate to turn the tankiest of lane opponents into squishies to walk all over.
Ziggs and Fiddlesticks
If you watched the EU LCS last week, you may have caught the Heimerdinger and Fiddlesticks bot lane duo that Vitality rolled out. Ziggs, we’ve found, solves some of the more glaring issues that Heimerdinger has, without sacrificing the annoyance factor. Ziggs has rapid-fire spam with his Q as soon as the game starts. Its cooldown is extremely low, and it deals respectable damage.
Fiddle’s crow provides even more annoyance and poke to the enemy duo, and his Fear is great for peeling away from big engages due to his lane’s immobility. Ziggs offers two things over Heimerdinger that really make this a special pick. Firstly, he has long-range harass and sustained damage that can help his team keep high DPS later in the game. Secondly, he has high tower-taking power, which is one big shortcoming that most non-marksman team comps have. Not to mention, his ultimate synergizes very well with Fiddle’s to create one big, fat wombo combo.
Patch 8.13 should arrive next week, but we don’t expect this meta to slow down any time soon, so feel free to try out your own combinations, too. Honestly, you could probably get away with anything, because that’s the world we live in right now.
