The Unkillable Demon King

The Unkillable Demon King
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Been given a ticket to watch New Zeland All-Blacks play this year, maybe the same thing will happen and I'll enjoy rugby more, who knows.

I'm not into either, but with my background esports certainly is easier to see as interesting since it's something I enjoy doing myself and can relate to more than most physical sports.

He can clearly utilize many champions at a skill level higher than most people. This includes many different areas like itemization, skill order (both learning and usage), positioning, movement, teamwork, etc.

While reading the flow of the game is a much more general level above that. It takes knowing all the champions of the match and what they are likely to do. It takes keeping track of what has happened and predicting what the enemy will do next. Most of all this gets multiplied massively if your team can influence the flow to your advantage.

As with most video games you can't really see the skill until you have played it yourself and know what it takes.

He's not being humble, there's just more to this than you might think.

For some context for the following, League of Legends is split between top, mid, jungle and bottom lanes (where there are two people).

So say you stumble into a fight situation that's 2v3 against you in the bottom lane, do you fight or try to run? Well, maybe you should run. But if you look at the map and you're close to your jungler, you can rely on them turning the fight. What about your summoner spells (utility spells with long cooldowns), are they up while your opponents' are down? What champions are you two playing, do you have a lot of Crowd Control, are you easy to kill, are you reliant on your Ultimate (a powerful skill, usually helping to define a character, usually on a long cooldown)? Is that Ultimate up?

What about neutral monsters, which grant bonuses? Is their own jungler likely to be up top getting red buff? Does it look like other enemy team members are also coming down to get Dragon (which used to give gold, but now gives team-wide buffs)?

What about how you've been doing so far in the game? Are you 'fed' (well-equipped/high-level) or not? Are they 'fed'? If they are, have they been spending on the right equipment to take you out?

All of this and much more goes into one, very simple, fight or flight decision that doesn't occur in FPS games. Decision-making is probably the biggest, most important skill for League of Legends, and that's why Faker talks about his decision-making strength in this way. That said, he's ignoring skills such as last-hitting and landing skillshots, probably because they come naturally to him. That's why he's able to say "regardless of which champion I play". A less mechanically-skilled player would have to stick to easier champions, such as Annie, but they could still do very very well with the right decision-making skills.

Essentially, there is a relatively low skill ceiling for mechanical skills (a combination of "don't stand in the fire" from WoW, being able to land your skillshots, and being able to quickly do basic arithmetic) and a very high ceiling for decision-making ability. In FPS games, the reverse is true.

> For me this looks more like someone running around aimlessly, bashing some spells and getting lucky. Please explain.

You are basically correct. This is a moderately skilled player with a character built around pure damage and avoiding damage trampling less skilled players who haven't accounted for the fact that he can dodge their abilities and damage, and have probably built their equipment wrong. In general a match at higher skill levels wouldn't have lasted so long and there wouldn't be so many kills.

He could have died here, though, he's not just bashing some spells. When he goes up in the air, he's able to dodge attacks. When he turns golden, he's invincible due to an item he has, but he can't move. He's helped by the fact that they waste their spells during times when he's invincible, which is pretty lucky (but you can count on it in the lower leagues). It's the fact that his enemies are running around aimlessly and bashing their spells that lets him survive, actually.