Ssumday: In-Depth Analysis on Teleport Priority and Success

This analysis will be on Ssumday, the top laner for KT Rolster. Ssumday is not a player who magically appeared in the scene and was instantly recognized as a great top laner. He originally started out on the KT Rolster B team, but when KT Rolster B became KT Bullets he was benched. It wasn’t until he was placed on KT Rolster Arrows that he became the permanent top lane starter. He wasn’t the greatest top laner when he started on KT Rolster Arrow. However, he has grown a lot since 2014 and now it’s his chance to prove himself on the world stage. What I will be looking at is his teleport priority and success.

Note: All data is collected from the 12 games spanning from playoffs and regional finals.

Overall Teleport Priority

               Fights > Flanks > Objectives > Farm > Wave > Save Ally = MatchTP

The first and most important thing to note with Ssumday’s teleports is the higher priority towards farm and waves. He is sitting at 25% teleport priority which means he is emphasizing getting himself farther ahead over his team. The most obvious reason for this is because Ssumday is one of the two carries for KT. He thrives in split pushing and applying much needed pressure early on since Arrow usually isn’t a dominant force early on. If I compare this to Acorn’s overall teleport usage for farm and waves he is only at 14.28%. That is quite a big difference between the two. Of course, Acorn isn’t a main carry for LGD, but teleports can have massive impacts early on. I will discuss this further in the specific teleport reasoning and success section.

The highest teleport usage is focused on the most impactful and important teleports, fights, flanks, and objectives. Objectives help improve the overall map pressure for the team such as securing a baron, a dragon stack, or even taking down a tower so when you shove a wave on that side it goes deeper into the enemy’s territory. Fights and flanks are meant to grant kills and picks so your team can either take an objective afterwards or secure more farm afterwards to increase your lead. A flank teleport may also be a priority for certain team compositions who want to have their top laner dive the back line.

The lowest values are save ally and match teleport. Since Ssumday uses his teleports early on for more farm this leaves less chance to match the opponent’s teleport. This same logic can be applied towards saving an ally. Another factor is Ssumday prioritizes using his time to increase his creep score versus possibly coming away with nothing on matching a teleport or saving an ally. In KT vs Koo G1 Ssumday matched a teleport at 10:45, but ended up canceling thinking his team was safe. Smeb went through with his teleport and Koo ended up killing Arrow.

Overall Teleport Success

Wave and Farm

There isn’t too much to talk about when it comes to success for wave and farm teleports. Usually the top laner will succeed in securing the creeps. For farm teleports in particular since the wave isn’t crashing on the turret. However, in wave teleports if your recall is off and the enemy pushes in the wave fast enough you can lose minions. This occurred with Ssumday’s wave teleports. 66.67% of his wave teleports resulted in him missing some minions. Every ounce of experience for a top laner is important. Especially for Ssumday who played a carry oriented top laner for 58.33% of his games.

Match TP and Save Ally

The save ally and match teleports are the second least impactful teleports. Ssumday only used his teleport twice for each occasion. His success wasn’t very good for either of them if I were to combine them he would be sitting at a 50% chance to go even, 25% to be successful, and 25% to fail. I would be interested to see if these values would improve with more uses since 75% of these teleports he ended up canceling. This essentially leaves it in the hands of the other KT members on the impact of the teleport.

Fights and Flank

The first teleport I will go over is fight teleports. Ssumday has a 64.29% combined kill and blow summoner success to make a reasonably large impact with his fight teleports. If I combine his chance to go even with success then Ssumday’s fight teleport success is 57.15%. This isn’t horrible, but with the 28.57% chance an ally dies means KT is trading poorly in these fights. Now if I look at his flank teleports the death chance is 40%. This again shows KT is trading more heavily in these fights and not outright winning them. In all the flank teleports KT got 14 kills and 11 deaths. In all the fight teleports KT got 8 kills and 8 deaths. If I combine these values KT had a KD of 1.15. One reason why some of the flank teleports go poorly is due to Ssumday using a ward that is too far away from his team. Three examples would be Ssumday’s 3^rd teleport in Koo Game 2, Koo Game 4, and Jin Air Game 1. The enemy team can clean up the fight before Ssumday makes it to them.

Objectives

When it comes to objectives the most important facets are the success and failure, pressure, and death toll. The reason is if your team can hold a high success with low deaths then you can halt barons and dragons with low risk along with being able to take these objectives with low return to the enemy. The chance for deaths is 37.50% with a 50% success and failure rate. KT lost 3 of these objectives, halted 3 of them, and secured 2 of them. However, one of those halted objectives resulted in KT going 1 for 3 and losing a mid turret. The important thing to note is KT couldn’t win out 6 of these objective teleports and secure themselves the objective. This can be due to poor timing and set up for these objectives. A late teleport can give the opponents the time to quickly burst the objective down.

Specific Teleport Reasoning and Success

1^st Teleport

Average Timing: 3:53

Farm > Wave = Fight > Everything Else

With the overall teleport priority on farm and waves being 25% it is by no surprise the combination for these two teleports is 83.34%. The average timing also helps support this value since early teleports for farm occur prior to 5 minutes usually, especially using teleport on t1 turrets after doing two jungle camps which is around 2:27. In all the wave teleports Ssumday missed some minions while all his farm teleports were fine since it’s the easiest teleport to succeed in. However, this priority is so high that it gives other teams a good indication that Ssumday won’t be making any early plays using teleport. The enemy team can position their jungle start so their top laner isn’t being forced to teleport early on. This opens up some strategies like having your top laner assist in a tower dive. KT likes to freeze Arrow’s lane often so Piccaboo can roam freely. You can swap your support to your top laner, shove that lane in to stop the freeze, during this whole process have your ADC shoving in against Ssumday, and finally teleporting in for a dive. This strategy forces the attention of Piccaboo back top side while also minimalizing minion loss for your top laner. I would also like to note that this is only one strategy that can be implemented when the enemy teleport is down.

The only other teleport used for the first teleport is for 2 fights. One teleport was canceled and the other led to one kill. Not much can be based off for fight teleports other than Ssumday not using his 1^st teleport often for fights.

2^nd Teleport

Average Timing: 12:18

Flank > Match TP = Save Ally = Fight >Objective = Wave = Farm

Wave and farm teleports have drastically fallen off. The combination of the two is now only 16.66%. This is typical, especially if we look at the average timing since teleport usage needs to allocated more towards team oriented and objective oriented uses.

The 2^nd teleport holds all the save ally and match teleports. The main reason is with tier 1 turrets being down this makes pushing out riskier. Heavier warding is also implemented by both teams so the chances that Piccaboo or Score getting caught in the enemy territory increases. 33.33% of teleports were dedicated towards these two types of teleports. As I mentioned in the overall teleport success though 75% of these teleports were canceled. Ssumday believed his team was safe most of the time. Two of the cancels applied enough pressure, but one of them resorted in Arrow dying. Going by these numbers 33.33% of the canceled save ally and match teleports resulted in both losing the teleport cooldown and costing KT a death.

The main teleports to look at is flank and fight. Ssumday has a high kill success for his flank teleport and a high chance for a death. The same can also be said for his fight teleports. KT isn’t the cleanest team fighting team with Ssumday teleporting down early on. As I mentioned previously they trade kills often. We also need to factor in Ssumday’s average CSD@10 which is -7. He is consistently behind compared to the enemy top laner. This seems a bit strange at first since Ssumday prioritizes his first teleport so much on obtaining more CS. One partial reason is KT plays towards keeping Arrow safe over keeping Ssumday safe. This can cause the enemy to dive him. Another reason is the enemy team will push in Piccaboo and Arrow in a 2v2 situation. Now KT can’t have Piccaboo roaming to apply more jungle and map pressure which allows the enemy jungler to attack Ssumday more safely.

3^rd Teleport

Average Timing: 23:53

Flank > Fight > Objective > Everything Else

Wave and farm teleports are now gone from here on out. Using a teleport to secure farm is very rare unless it is used to defend a turret from a massive wave.

The three most impactful teleports are the main focus now. Ssumday’s flank success drops for his third teleport. In multiple games he teleports too far away for his flank. This gives the enemy team plenty of time to clean up. If I just looked at the numbers this would be a random guess, but if you watch the games for some reason his third teleport flanks typically seem off. Ssumday’s fight teleports are more on point. Once Arrow starts powering up he becomes more useful in team fights. Ssumday just needs to make sure he isn’t teleporting in a bad spot to help out. The average timing also is usually when some of the carries he plays start ramping up harder like Fiora, Riven, and Yasuo. Fiora isn’t the best flanking champion along with Yasuo. They are better being with the team for set ups. This can be implication on why some of the flank teleports go poorly since 66.67% of the flank teleports (4 out of 6) were on carry oriented champions.  

There were only 2 objective teleports so I will refrain from saying much other than KT taking a bad trade for one and the other being SKT securing the dragon and just backing out.

4^th Teleport

Average Timing: 32:02

Objective > Fight > Everything Else

All the teleports are dedicated towards fights and objectives for Ssumday. None of them involved flanks which is interesting since usually teams want to incorporate flank teleports when tier 2 towers are down. The fight success for Ssumday is rather poor. Having a 25% chance to secure a kill and even do nothing this late in the game loses your team out in a potent cooldown. It also eliminates the effectiveness of split pushing. Several of the champions Ssumday plays incorporate split push capabilities that KT would utilize.

The objective teleports become highest here for Ssumday. Two of the objective teleports occurred when KT is ahead and use the teleport to take parts of the opponent’s base while two of the other objective teleports are used to halt baron without leading to a death. Ssumday uses his teleport twice to bail out his team and twice to lead to a victory. The main issue I have with this is using teleport to halt a baron means your team didn’t have vision set up, were out of position, or just lost a fight. Only negatives can be the causation for burning teleport to stop a baron. One of the objective teleports in particular resulted in Koo securing the baron still. This helps push the idea that KT isn’t setting up vision around baron correctly in the late mid game and can leave out chances for Ssumday to flank using teleport.

Also, the overall lack of flank teleports shows KT would rather face up front rather than take advantage of a possible miss position of the enemy team. Flanks are still possible without teleports, but they are harder if the enemy covers the area with stealth and pink wards.

5^th Teleport

Average Timing: 43:49

Fight = Objective > Everything Else

There were only two times Ssumday used a 5^th teleport. Both teleports had 100% success, but in the end it was either going to be 100% success or 100% failure. Nothing can really be derived from this besides noticing Ssumday getting a flank teleport out in the late game.

6^th Teleport

Average Timing: 48:01

Flank > Everything Else

Similar to the 5^th teleport, there was only one 6^th teleport. It happened to be successful so Ssumday had a 100% success rate here. As noted like the 5^th teleport as well Ssumday used his teleport for a flank in the late game which wasn’t the case as much in the late mid game.

Conclusion

Ssumday has come a long way. He has evolved himself to become mechanically stronger with better decision making. However, his teleports are still not on par to a player like Acorn. LGD of course has better macro play compared to KT, but some of the flank teleports and even teleport cancels by Ssumday are questionable. Ssumday needs to work on his mid game flank teleports while also KT should be lowering his teleports for early farm. Four minutes is a big time window for teams to look for tower dives and possible flanks. It also greatly hurts Ssumday if he uses it early and then dies in lane so then he misses potentially multiple waves. If Ssumday can improve in this facet then KT can have a chance to match Acorn, but it may be too late to improve on such a task. The first 4 games will give us a good indication prior to their super day on October 10^th.

Credits towards lol.esportspedia for past information on Ssumday and lolesports for the picture and VODS to collect data from.