[Translated] Return of the King – Does WE have a chance in LPL after their surprising 2nd place victory in IEM9 Poland?

Return of the King – Does WE have a chance in LPL after their surprising 2nd place victory in IEM9 Poland?

Original Chinese Article: http://lol.178.com/zt/webaoji/

Can the team hold their seat in LPL? Can they even join the LPL summer season? The good news is the last 4 teams in LPL regular season will still have a chance to compete with seed 3 to 6 team in LSPL for the last 2 seat in the LPL. This article will cover how strong is the team after their lineup change.

One has to admin there was not much expectation of WE in IEM9 at the beginning. Most people just want to see how strong is GET was – the number one Korean team. However with the“upset” by WE in IEM9 Poland, many people began to question Riot’s official power ranking.

Interestingly after the closing of IEM9, on March 18, Riot released their worldwide team power ranking. In this week’s global team ranking, EDG, OMG and Snake soared to the top three as expected, while GET fell to the fourth place. The overall ranking LPL team has also been improved. Unfortunately, the “biggest surprise of IEM9”, WE team still does not appear in the top 20 of the list.

Riot’s performance evaluation of WE in IEM9 was quite high, “WE can be the fourth or fifth team in LPL”, however Riot did not comment on the chance of WE staying in LPL. Actually it is really difficult to judge because WE changed their lineup right before IEM9, in addition, their performance during IEM9 is also hard to predict. Here we try to get a profile of individual player with their performance in IEM9.

Aluka

Aluka often plays muscular champions (they mean tanky champions), there should be many reasons. First, he may not play well with champions like Rumble, Irelia and Kassadin. It is also possible that he can play well, but the synergy with STYZ was not good, he particularly depends on his teammates to deal damage, so Aluka must play pure played muscular champions. In the interview Aluka also said if he can rely on his teammates, he will play Nautilus, which will allow Spirit to have more damage output. Nautilus can be pretty powerful in mid game.

Mystic

The situation is now changes with Mytic replacing STYZ as ADC. Mytic ranked number 2 in Chinese server, so there is no doubt on his personal ability. From the 3 games with GET, we can also his movement, response and output in the team are better than STYZ. The only concern is he is still not very stable. Oftentimes, he will think he is as strong as his opponents and get baited.

Xiye

Xiye is now the mid-laner, and his style is very different from that of Ninja. So far, Xiye mostly play assassin champions, this also reflects his personality. Xiye is a physically small person, but he has an especially tough game style. I was most impressed by his Ahri mid-lane risky encounter with corki, if successful it will be a highlight moment, otherwise it would ruin the game.

I would say, such unpredictable moves from Xiye really confused GET. Korean players usually are very rigid and precise. Their game plans come through a series of experiments with conclusions that you should not make such move, otherwise you will be eliminated, hence the games are under their control. In the game with WE probably GET felt it would be a sure win. But when they lost the teamfight at dragon to World Elite in game 2, they were completely confused. This is because they had never lost any teamfights in Korea. So after they lost in the second wave, they were completely crashed mentality. They did not understand why they could lost in a group flight. Of course, they will calm down after they returned home and have a post-mortem with the game. They may not lose if they meet WE again but this time they are completely lost.

Spirit

Spirit is still the best performer in WE. In the game with CJ and GET, the team’s rhythm is basically controlled by Spirit. We can see a world class map movements regardless if they were trying to offense, defence or control the dragon. In this game, we saw the real Spirit, the Spirit that we saw in SSB.

Can WE keep their seat in LP?

We can conclude that there are no disadvantages on the strength of the individual player. But according to their performance in IEM9, we still need to pay attention on the mid-game rhythm and group flight, or we can say the synergy of the team is still a concern. After all, they just changed their mid-lane and AD, the lull in team synergy is understandable. We can also see their new mid-lane and AD still keep their more aggresive solo-queue style, which may easily be exploited by oponents.

Simply put: If WE can have an advantage in early game, Spirit will take the initiative to bring up the rhythm, and the five players seem to be particularly affected by the morale, the greater the advantage, more easily they can play. However they may loss their toughness under disadvantage.

With the end of IEM9, WE has to face a severe situation in LPL league: relegation. Although they have huge potential with the new lineup, but there is really not much time left for WE. WE has three games in  the ninth week to play against OMG, LGD and SHR, the tenth week play against EDG, KING and EP, the last week of the regular season to play against GT.

Honestly, it is rather difficult for WE to maintain as top eight for relegation. However, they still have a chance after the regular season. In addition to the top 2 seed in LSPL will be promoted, there will be 2 more seats from the LPL qualifying game where bottom 4 of LPL will compete wtih LSPL3-6 team. So WE will still have a chance to stay in LPL.