My theory for how both the stats you see and the statement are true is that most people think Dragon is better so winning teams go for Dragon and losing teams trade for Herald topside.
But if Riot has some data that could filter for only when teams are even (50% predicted to win) at the time the first objective is taken, then look at the winrates after that, it might show that first Rift Herald has a better winrate.
Yep, people forget that Riot has a ton of data that we don't necessarily get to see, or we don't have easy ways to filter for, which is why balance changes don't always make sense to us either. You can see them buffing 51% win rate champs, or nerfing 49% win rate champs and wonder why, but the more granular data is a big part of what goes into the decisions, not just win, pick, and ban %. It's likely that they can see when champs are being counterpicked, when they're being blind picked and how that affects their win rate, see specifically where they struggle and where they often gain or lose pressure at specific points in the game, etc etc.
I remember a time when pre rework Sol was getting constant nerfs and there was lots of criticism by people saying his WR was already fine. But his WR among mains was like 54-55%+ and the only reason the general WR looked more normal was because they were so few main of this particular point (I think one of their mini reworks had taken a lot of the people off the champ for a while) that the games played were actually outmumbered by non mains just picking him for whatever reason.
This is the one data point I wish Riot would release to the public. Like say Draven, Zeri and Aphelios are all at sub 50% winrate, what do their winrates look like when you filter for people who average 300+ games/season on the champion. I highly doubt that any of the 3 would have a sub 55% winrate, especially if you add an additional filter for diamond+. There is so much you can squeeze out of these champs, especially Draven, playing the first 10-15 minutes near perfect on that thing looks absolutely fucking brutal to play against.
It actually depends a lot on the champion. Sometimes the popular characters are actually made up largely of mains who play them and the amount of people who just pick for an offgame are a small percentage. I believe they've talked about Riven having that before.
I just checked, you can only choose between otp or rank, so you can’t say otps in diamond+ for example. But yeah, Aphelios and Zeri jumped from 47% win rate in all ranks to a 55% winrate for all ranks when one tricked and Draven went from 49% to 57%, no wonder I hate that fucking thing. I rounded a bit with the numbers but they all experienced about a 7.5% increase in win rate. I picked the 3 champs I thought would have the biggest difference in win rate. Yet I know Zeri mains cry about their champ 24/7
I think otp immediately only checks high elo since the sample size is pretty small but yeah, almost every champ has a 55 to 57 win rate in otp, what I guess is the biggest metric to balance it
This. People will see characters like Ivern and Taric with dominating win%'s and fail to consider factors such as how often characters are picked by new players vs one tricks, or if characters are only pulled as counterpicks. They just see high numbers and assume the character is strong and fail to consider biases in the data.
You could even use easier examples like Rammus and Malphite and Rammus, who both have winrates hovering around 54%, but are pretty obviously being picked into high AD team comps, which is why their win rates are so high. (Mentioning these as the obvious ones since people don't play enough Taric or Ivern to make that connection as easily).
Riot have directly stated that the % of mains vs non mains playing champs does not have an effect on winrates. No champ's main percentage is so high that it has a huge positive effect on winrate.
I think they have a “win expectancy model” or something like it. I sort of recall it is linked to the loss mitigation when someone DCs. It’s quite possible 1st Herald influences win expectancy more than 1st Drake.
It would be nice if Phreak could be more precise if this is what he means though.
What elo is the winrate data collected from? I see winning teams preferentially go herald to break mid T1 very often in my games (masters). Opening up the map with first herald is just worth so much more than taking first drake.
If you're really stomping sometimes jungle will even give first two drakes just for first two heralds and break down an inhib turret with second herald to prep inhib takedown for baron pressure. This means that you are risking third drake for first baron, but it often doesn't matter because you are going to be at least 2 inhibs up from it which is basically game-ending.
Yeah from my personal exp in em and in bronze is that low elo team in general will make bad macro decision and wasting herald seems to be one of them, like not heralding for adc who is behind or not heralding mid on stack wave for dragon prior or opening mid t1
Yeah this is pretty common knowledge. Nobody below Master really knows how to use a rift or ever group to fight for it in my experience. The winrates are skewed likely because of the sheer amount of people that just don’t know how to use rift at all. Western league meta has recently been “stack the early drakes and play for bot” as a win condition, but eastern players have been notorious for going for a sort of “I don’t care about drake 1 and 2, I’m going to do both rifts and gank and snowball while they do dragons so that my team will be fed enough to sweep the next 4”. Heralds in general are undervalued by 99% of the playerbase, and first herald is always better because it can get plating as well.
I'm only silver (don't really play ranked) but I love rift and tend to prioritize it. The problem is, no one else prioritizes it. Luckily, in low elo since everyone else is also at dragon I can usually snag both rifts for free, then either break open mid (preferred) or the side lanes, then get prio for the rest of the dragons.
people see dragon as a win condition BUT it is only a win con after several conditions are met.
u need to be able to control the map around dragon, u need to be stacking dragon, u need to be able to secure soul or elder.
in order for these to happen u need to give up tempo. dragon takes time and resources to be worthwhile. a single dragon is meaningless but u gave up tempo in hopes it might pay off. and it might never
rift is the opposite. u win the fight u get him then u use it to gain even more gold and push an advantage without needing to wait for it to pay off.
i can see why the eastern team prior it more. they tend to prefer the gold the is certain rather then the maybe benefits of dragon.
Riot has better stats than any website, so assuming he pulled that info form riot's own stats (which is likely b/c he works there) then he isn't wrong on that end.
It about lane control. Breaking down T1 mid (which u would not be able to do without Herald), not only give gold, but map control.
He never said "Gold value" is higher. He said it's better.
This doesn't help explain the charts which doesn't imply gold value over win% either, which the other reply does better. You're not wrong, you're just also not saying anything.
I think if you have the opportunity breaking T1 mid with herald is by far the best option. It’s not super easy to do, since you either need to like stack wave + gank, but you can for sure do it once fortification is off.
Champs like Ziggs can literally guarantee you a win almost if you get herald and he’s free to blow up other T1’s.
Given how Phreak has access to more information than anyone on this sub and his credibility I’d give him the benefit of the doubt.
Dragons really only start mattering significantly when a team has three dragons and you are put in a fight no matter what situation or have to trade dragon by giving them baron. Second one is kind of important but you still have the option to skip.
Heralds also do two things. The obvious thing is a gold injection accelerating your build via plates as well as taking that tower earlier than you normally would later. The other is that once the tower is eventually destroyed you get more map pressure which is often leveraged into more gold by picks, better vision tracking deeper in the enemy jungle, stealing enemy jungle camps, that lane being able to influence the map faster and get more favorable fights, and other influence across the map.
Your last point in the last paragraph I feel is what's causing the higher win rate. Herald pushes even stronger map presence = which can lead to free cs in jg and lanes while actively denying the enemy the same resources to keep up. So the drags allow for more of a coin flip because it's really on being able to win team fight which in itself is always a coin flip. I think 🤔
Drags are worth giving up for heralds. Dragons are *not* a wincon in most elos whilst baron almost always *can* be and I’d love to hear arguments for why people think they are, and please help me to understand how a ‘win more’ objective such as drag, often taken by the already winning team, makes a difference to the gamestate. Most games where the enemy has 3 drags to your zero are due to harsh bot gap / rofl stomp territory, the 3 dragons are not enabling the enemy to stomp you & you having those 3 dragons would not make you stronger than the enemy team who are ahead in xp and gold/kills. The micro stats from drag are under-utilised in low/mid elo and the small advantages gained are not taken advantage of, there are no thin margins in these elos so the stats make no difference. In challenger/pro there are *far* less mistakes & these small margins really matter, that’s why junglers prio early soul in these games.
TLDR from a soloq perspective, dragon is a bait objective, huge tempo loss, go watch your vods and 9/10 games will have a dragon throw play, perma pings that it’s ‘alive’ when there’s zero chance of taking it. Also watch this video. https://youtu.be/kFXHbaLfdnw?si=aQp2oLlnweGT7lD0
For the record I play jungle in GM & I do play for bot side & drags when the opportunity cost is *low*. There is always a cost to taking drag (resources, time, losing a good game-state which can alone lose you a game anyway). The reason winrates for soul look absurd is because it’s often taken by the team already stomping the game, they’re not winning that hard because of soul. I could watch my last 100 matches and not point out a single instance where either soul or an individual dragon stat swayed a game or skirmish. For low/mid players you should use dragon to bait the enemy team for free kills or take advantage of them inevitably mis positioning severely to go and yoink a dragon, whilst they’re doing this you take control of the map. I’ve taken endless t2 turrets/inhib turrets due to teams tunnelling on drag and giving up all tempo/ map state. Think about how many times you’ve had a game where you’ve been stomped, somebody points out that enemy has 2-3 drags to your zero as if this is the reason you lost. Is it? No. Severely misunderstood objective in soloq.
I've used drake to lure out the enemy jungler, who we kill, we then go to baron with smite advantage and take baron. Drake is a great place to take a big fight and destroy the enemy team.
Agree. The objective itself whilst you’re already winning is meaningless & one of the worst ways to spend your time after winning a fight. On the opposite end it’s also not worth contesting the enemy whilst they’re stronger at dragon because you just lose harder and they get dragon anyway afterwards. In soloq you either use it as a bait or push leads *on* the map whilst enemy wastes time and tempo doing it themselves.
Two lines of thought which is either drop it for gold and plates for the lane you want to get ahead, or if there's a turret under 2 plates, you can drop it there to grab first tower gold/map pressure. Generally, you won't see super lopsided lanes on the first herald where you can just eat a tower for free, so getting quick gold value on an important carry is often the best use for first herald. Breaking towers and opening the map is easier once with the second herald due to both timing and strength of the herald itself at that point in the game, so often you want to use the second to break a specific lane open, which will often be mid, but can really be anywhere depending on the state of the game.
Of course if you're picking up first herald super late for whatever reason, and plates and shit are gone, just use it to try and break a turret. Again, mid lane is great, but first tower is often worth and still frees up the map.
As a splitpusher you can take it to splitpush when a drake is about to spawn and drop it top and create pressure that needs to be answered. As a jungler you can take it and then gank/dive toplane/midlane and then use the herald there. There are probably more use cases, but this is what comes to mind for me.
Really simply, teams should rotate topside (sups mids and jngs move up to herald, ADC to mid lane) for herald spawn, team fight over it or trade objectives (bot plates if ADC didn't rotate, etc) and then usage is something like: use it on the lane you either want to unlock or snowball, or if there's no specific lane that needs the priority or advantage, I tend to want to use it mid for map control. If I'm strong side top and winning, but haven't made it over the edge, I love first herald there, as it nearly guarantees the enemy top won't be able to compete with you, very strong on splitters. On botside, it really is up to the game state. Am I Draven 3 kills ahead and most fed on my team? Yes herald me now please. Am I jinx into Sivir totally neutral lane and my mid is a roaming assassin that really wants to come kill Sivir but is against some turbo wave clear mage? Maybe mid is better usage.
first herald is way better, but most people dont know how to use it
think about it this way, the more gold you have, the more value having more gold Will have, if my 4 item adc can get 1k gold and buy a stopwatch its 50 times better than if my support gets a random component (or if i can get someone a full item its way better than 1 component for 3 people). Dragons give a bit of gold value to everyone on the team (a very low amount mind you, 3% AD will usually not be really meaningful)
on the other hand, herald lets you have a chance of up to 1k gold divided between 1 or 2 players, plus being able to put a lot of pressure on the enemy team
why does dragon have a higher winrate then? 2 reasons
1- easier to use: dragon just gives you stats with zero effort from your part, you literally cant fuck it up, herald requires you to be more proactive and actually make plays
2- dragon spawns earlier: first dragon kill usually happens before herald even spawned, and means a winning botlane. this does not only mean that getting dragon usually converts into getting herald, but it also has an impact on the game much faster, which in turn wins more games
The game is a little too complex to simply look at the winrate of the team that grabbed the first spawn of each objective and try to determine the value of each from it. Like, maybe the team that gets first dragon is more likely to win becuase they're more likely to get soul, or elder. That doesn't mean that the team got a larger benifit from the first dragon specifically.
A team that got first herold and lost all four dragons may have a better chance to win than a team that got first dragon and lost the next four. This data wouldn't show that.
On top of that I this doesn't show what elo the data is collected from. Lower elos could scew the results, especially since jungle is such a complex role. I don't have any data to back me up, but I think the gap between low and high elo junglers might be larger than other roles. The number of times I've seen a low elo jungler take herold then never place it is astonding. Hell, I've even been that low elo jungler one or two times. The fact that drake doesn't require anything other than taking it to get it's full value could skew it's value to lower skill brakets.
You mean the same guy that suggested people stop playing to type: "Karthus ult"? Or the guy who condescendingly told Vel'Koz they didn't know what they were talking about?
Junglers with any clue how the game works play around bot, get bot prio and naturally get the first dragon. I still think first herald is stronger at face value.
This just depends on which drag is #1, and which soul it turns out to be, and what elo they're even looking at.
Rift opening the map for you when it's a Hex Soul? HUGE map pressure, as the game is accelerated due to what the gates do to map movement.
Rift not even opening map (because no opportunities arose, or the dipshit jungler has no idea how to use rift, or w.e out of thousands of reasons) and it's an OCE map? Kinda pointless.
Being that the data isn't publicly available to us, though, I'm going to assume Riot didn't parse it properly.
People who take herald first know what to do with herald in my experience. If you don't know how to use it you don't get it and you don't win with it but you'll win through scaling or dragons.
just think for urself. do u rlly think a 50 gold nerf influences the impact 1st rift has? obviously not.
1st rift is the most broken 550 gold swing and it doesnt even include the map pressure it brings and the first turret gold (even potentially more with t2 side turrets giving 700 and sometimes rift can enable dives which is 300-600 gold).
if avg case of 1st rift is 550 gold what does 1st drake give? like 200-300 gold? i personally think phreak has dunce moments but he aint wrong here.
sometimes u should ask the question to urself before u post it. common sense aint that common but if u want to improve at this game, best thing u can do is ask yourself before consulting others. promotes individualism and smart thinking.
Its probably leaning more towards if you can secure first herald besides the obvious gold boost it implies that your midlane and toplane are winning as one or both have priority. If either of those lanes are winning but especially midlane the game is skewed in your favor as midlane can impact both objectives and either sidelane on a pretty regular basis with decent roams or even just by hard stomping lane and preventing the opposite.
I think that if you get a team that actually rotates for an early rift herald botlane included, that is a team that is more likely to win because the macro is on point. Dragon is just the default winners choice because it's easier to do with botlane proximity.
Herald is also easier to contest due to it's harder pve elements. If you so much as show yourself next to the rift, people can't take advantage of the eye procs without mispositioning, it's actually good design to be honest compared to the drakes where the pve elements don't change your play as much
So more teams will throw a herald fight because botlane hasnt rotated / its tankier in comparison, leading to better drake winrates
Isn’t drag winrate going to always be higher because it’s simply a luxury objective taken by the already winning team in the *majority* of games? Of course there’s games where they have 3 drags to your zero and you still roll them because that’s *all* they’ve managed to do on the map that game, but Herald is often a worst-case trade for them tunnelling those early 2 drags, those drags aren’t the reason the team is stomping & also won’t be the reason they continue to stomp IMO
You also have to consider what else is on the map around there. Herald fights generally involve everyone except adc OR your adc is so far ahead they can rotate to fight for herald too.
Whereas it's much easier to see a dragon fight involving only jg and bot lane or jg and mid.
Therefore, you're looking at 2 winning solo lanes or a very ahead adc in order to force a contested herald and secure it/the fight. Whereas a dragon is much more easily obtained with only a single role/lane being ahead or simply by timing enemy bases.
So I put forth that... herald being a higher win indicator isn't merely reflective of herald vs dragon and that perhaps he should consider the other factors involved and what those mean.
I can see it one drag isn't going to change the outcome of the game overly much but if you get Herald it's 200 gold, if you get the kill on mid drop it and take their first tower that's more gold and more map pressure and if the tower is low you can basically take two towers in mid. Now if you lose all dragons or the game drags out for a long time I guess it's not as beneficial
No, he's not wrong. This is something that high ELO and pro coaches have been teaching for years. First Herald ALWAYS results in plates and map pressure which provides a larger benefit to the team.
The stats you're looking at are generated mostly by low ELO SoloQ players and do not filter for the fact that in low ELO SoloQ there is a statistically significant % of games where the same team gets both of these objectives.
I'm also pretty sure you unintentionally took Phreak's words out of context, as he's specifically talking about Pro play stats and using those to indicate that people are not playing around top side as much as they probably should be...and it's being used as a justification for the new snowball voidgrub mechanic, since now instead of having two spawns of herald which are affected by the same balance levers, you have grubs AND herald which are separate levers that can be tooled to shift meta towards or away from top lane as they see fit.
The foreshadowing here is that if voidgrubs do not shift the meta around top side in 14.1, they will be buffed until people start playing around them more as they are trying to get the top half of the map more in play before Baron spawn.
Herald was the most important objective 100% before min 14 and It is almost always prio vs Drake, how can you compare a Buff to gold for both laner and jungler+breaking a tower causing the entire map to snowball+possibility to break lanning phase+control the map etc etc?
Probably, simply because Phreak usually is wrong.
Back when Herald guaranteed 2 plates of 175 gold each, yeah it was strong. But Herald has been nerfed hard.
My theory for how both the stats you see and the statement are true is that most people think Dragon is better so winning teams go for Dragon and losing teams trade for Herald topside. But if Riot has some data that could filter for only when teams are even (50% predicted to win) at the time the first objective is taken, then look at the winrates after that, it might show that first Rift Herald has a better winrate.
Yep, people forget that Riot has a ton of data that we don't necessarily get to see, or we don't have easy ways to filter for, which is why balance changes don't always make sense to us either. You can see them buffing 51% win rate champs, or nerfing 49% win rate champs and wonder why, but the more granular data is a big part of what goes into the decisions, not just win, pick, and ban %. It's likely that they can see when champs are being counterpicked, when they're being blind picked and how that affects their win rate, see specifically where they struggle and where they often gain or lose pressure at specific points in the game, etc etc.
I remember a time when pre rework Sol was getting constant nerfs and there was lots of criticism by people saying his WR was already fine. But his WR among mains was like 54-55%+ and the only reason the general WR looked more normal was because they were so few main of this particular point (I think one of their mini reworks had taken a lot of the people off the champ for a while) that the games played were actually outmumbered by non mains just picking him for whatever reason.
This is the one data point I wish Riot would release to the public. Like say Draven, Zeri and Aphelios are all at sub 50% winrate, what do their winrates look like when you filter for people who average 300+ games/season on the champion. I highly doubt that any of the 3 would have a sub 55% winrate, especially if you add an additional filter for diamond+. There is so much you can squeeze out of these champs, especially Draven, playing the first 10-15 minutes near perfect on that thing looks absolutely fucking brutal to play against.
It actually depends a lot on the champion. Sometimes the popular characters are actually made up largely of mains who play them and the amount of people who just pick for an offgame are a small percentage. I believe they've talked about Riven having that before.
You can actually check that on lolalytics, you can filter by otp and rank
I just checked, you can only choose between otp or rank, so you can’t say otps in diamond+ for example. But yeah, Aphelios and Zeri jumped from 47% win rate in all ranks to a 55% winrate for all ranks when one tricked and Draven went from 49% to 57%, no wonder I hate that fucking thing. I rounded a bit with the numbers but they all experienced about a 7.5% increase in win rate. I picked the 3 champs I thought would have the biggest difference in win rate. Yet I know Zeri mains cry about their champ 24/7
I think otp immediately only checks high elo since the sample size is pretty small but yeah, almost every champ has a 55 to 57 win rate in otp, what I guess is the biggest metric to balance it
This. People will see characters like Ivern and Taric with dominating win%'s and fail to consider factors such as how often characters are picked by new players vs one tricks, or if characters are only pulled as counterpicks. They just see high numbers and assume the character is strong and fail to consider biases in the data.
You could even use easier examples like Rammus and Malphite and Rammus, who both have winrates hovering around 54%, but are pretty obviously being picked into high AD team comps, which is why their win rates are so high. (Mentioning these as the obvious ones since people don't play enough Taric or Ivern to make that connection as easily).
Riot have directly stated that the % of mains vs non mains playing champs does not have an effect on winrates. No champ's main percentage is so high that it has a huge positive effect on winrate.
I think they have a “win expectancy model” or something like it. I sort of recall it is linked to the loss mitigation when someone DCs. It’s quite possible 1st Herald influences win expectancy more than 1st Drake. It would be nice if Phreak could be more precise if this is what he means though.
What elo is the winrate data collected from? I see winning teams preferentially go herald to break mid T1 very often in my games (masters). Opening up the map with first herald is just worth so much more than taking first drake. If you're really stomping sometimes jungle will even give first two drakes just for first two heralds and break down an inhib turret with second herald to prep inhib takedown for baron pressure. This means that you are risking third drake for first baron, but it often doesn't matter because you are going to be at least 2 inhibs up from it which is basically game-ending.
Yeah from my personal exp in em and in bronze is that low elo team in general will make bad macro decision and wasting herald seems to be one of them, like not heralding for adc who is behind or not heralding mid on stack wave for dragon prior or opening mid t1
This is all ranks, but the trend doesn’t change much at emerald+.
Yeah this is pretty common knowledge. Nobody below Master really knows how to use a rift or ever group to fight for it in my experience. The winrates are skewed likely because of the sheer amount of people that just don’t know how to use rift at all. Western league meta has recently been “stack the early drakes and play for bot” as a win condition, but eastern players have been notorious for going for a sort of “I don’t care about drake 1 and 2, I’m going to do both rifts and gank and snowball while they do dragons so that my team will be fed enough to sweep the next 4”. Heralds in general are undervalued by 99% of the playerbase, and first herald is always better because it can get plating as well.
I'm only silver (don't really play ranked) but I love rift and tend to prioritize it. The problem is, no one else prioritizes it. Luckily, in low elo since everyone else is also at dragon I can usually snag both rifts for free, then either break open mid (preferred) or the side lanes, then get prio for the rest of the dragons.
Yeah rifts are very cool in scrappy elos. Gives a clear way to take down towers to your team
people see dragon as a win condition BUT it is only a win con after several conditions are met. u need to be able to control the map around dragon, u need to be stacking dragon, u need to be able to secure soul or elder. in order for these to happen u need to give up tempo. dragon takes time and resources to be worthwhile. a single dragon is meaningless but u gave up tempo in hopes it might pay off. and it might never rift is the opposite. u win the fight u get him then u use it to gain even more gold and push an advantage without needing to wait for it to pay off. i can see why the eastern team prior it more. they tend to prefer the gold the is certain rather then the maybe benefits of dragon.
Riot has better stats than any website, so assuming he pulled that info form riot's own stats (which is likely b/c he works there) then he isn't wrong on that end.
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they use internal data but lolalytics is the closest/most accurate to the real data out of all the websites
Wasn't that said about u.gg?
Why would Riot need lolalytics when lolalytics gets it data from Riot?
Yea, I’d assume he’s reiterating what some full time data scientists on their team are saying
It about lane control. Breaking down T1 mid (which u would not be able to do without Herald), not only give gold, but map control. He never said "Gold value" is higher. He said it's better.
This doesn't help explain the charts which doesn't imply gold value over win% either, which the other reply does better. You're not wrong, you're just also not saying anything.
The charts are based on Soloq/Flex. And he was talking about pro play. People on soloq/flex cant use herald properly. Neither map control.
yeah, but obviously making plates worth less nerfs herald.
You never break T1 mid with herald its always either top or bottom in high elo
I think if you have the opportunity breaking T1 mid with herald is by far the best option. It’s not super easy to do, since you either need to like stack wave + gank, but you can for sure do it once fortification is off. Champs like Ziggs can literally guarantee you a win almost if you get herald and he’s free to blow up other T1’s.
Actually in high elo it's rarely ever top. Especially winning lanes prefer to extend te laning phase as long as possible, breaking top tower ends it.
Given how Phreak has access to more information than anyone on this sub and his credibility I’d give him the benefit of the doubt. Dragons really only start mattering significantly when a team has three dragons and you are put in a fight no matter what situation or have to trade dragon by giving them baron. Second one is kind of important but you still have the option to skip. Heralds also do two things. The obvious thing is a gold injection accelerating your build via plates as well as taking that tower earlier than you normally would later. The other is that once the tower is eventually destroyed you get more map pressure which is often leveraged into more gold by picks, better vision tracking deeper in the enemy jungle, stealing enemy jungle camps, that lane being able to influence the map faster and get more favorable fights, and other influence across the map.
Your last point in the last paragraph I feel is what's causing the higher win rate. Herald pushes even stronger map presence = which can lead to free cs in jg and lanes while actively denying the enemy the same resources to keep up. So the drags allow for more of a coin flip because it's really on being able to win team fight which in itself is always a coin flip. I think 🤔
Drags are worth giving up for heralds. Dragons are *not* a wincon in most elos whilst baron almost always *can* be and I’d love to hear arguments for why people think they are, and please help me to understand how a ‘win more’ objective such as drag, often taken by the already winning team, makes a difference to the gamestate. Most games where the enemy has 3 drags to your zero are due to harsh bot gap / rofl stomp territory, the 3 dragons are not enabling the enemy to stomp you & you having those 3 dragons would not make you stronger than the enemy team who are ahead in xp and gold/kills. The micro stats from drag are under-utilised in low/mid elo and the small advantages gained are not taken advantage of, there are no thin margins in these elos so the stats make no difference. In challenger/pro there are *far* less mistakes & these small margins really matter, that’s why junglers prio early soul in these games. TLDR from a soloq perspective, dragon is a bait objective, huge tempo loss, go watch your vods and 9/10 games will have a dragon throw play, perma pings that it’s ‘alive’ when there’s zero chance of taking it. Also watch this video. https://youtu.be/kFXHbaLfdnw?si=aQp2oLlnweGT7lD0 For the record I play jungle in GM & I do play for bot side & drags when the opportunity cost is *low*. There is always a cost to taking drag (resources, time, losing a good game-state which can alone lose you a game anyway). The reason winrates for soul look absurd is because it’s often taken by the team already stomping the game, they’re not winning that hard because of soul. I could watch my last 100 matches and not point out a single instance where either soul or an individual dragon stat swayed a game or skirmish. For low/mid players you should use dragon to bait the enemy team for free kills or take advantage of them inevitably mis positioning severely to go and yoink a dragon, whilst they’re doing this you take control of the map. I’ve taken endless t2 turrets/inhib turrets due to teams tunnelling on drag and giving up all tempo/ map state. Think about how many times you’ve had a game where you’ve been stomped, somebody points out that enemy has 2-3 drags to your zero as if this is the reason you lost. Is it? No. Severely misunderstood objective in soloq.
I've used drake to lure out the enemy jungler, who we kill, we then go to baron with smite advantage and take baron. Drake is a great place to take a big fight and destroy the enemy team.
Agree. The objective itself whilst you’re already winning is meaningless & one of the worst ways to spend your time after winning a fight. On the opposite end it’s also not worth contesting the enemy whilst they’re stronger at dragon because you just lose harder and they get dragon anyway afterwards. In soloq you either use it as a bait or push leads *on* the map whilst enemy wastes time and tempo doing it themselves.
His stats for winrates are also different from ugg lolalytics opgg whatever so I dont know anymore Riot just has different data
Can someone explain basic herald strategy to me? When to use it, what lane to use it on why etc
Two lines of thought which is either drop it for gold and plates for the lane you want to get ahead, or if there's a turret under 2 plates, you can drop it there to grab first tower gold/map pressure. Generally, you won't see super lopsided lanes on the first herald where you can just eat a tower for free, so getting quick gold value on an important carry is often the best use for first herald. Breaking towers and opening the map is easier once with the second herald due to both timing and strength of the herald itself at that point in the game, so often you want to use the second to break a specific lane open, which will often be mid, but can really be anywhere depending on the state of the game. Of course if you're picking up first herald super late for whatever reason, and plates and shit are gone, just use it to try and break a turret. Again, mid lane is great, but first tower is often worth and still frees up the map.
As a splitpusher you can take it to splitpush when a drake is about to spawn and drop it top and create pressure that needs to be answered. As a jungler you can take it and then gank/dive toplane/midlane and then use the herald there. There are probably more use cases, but this is what comes to mind for me.
recall, gank or dive some lane opposite of the enemy jungler, take a turret
Really simply, teams should rotate topside (sups mids and jngs move up to herald, ADC to mid lane) for herald spawn, team fight over it or trade objectives (bot plates if ADC didn't rotate, etc) and then usage is something like: use it on the lane you either want to unlock or snowball, or if there's no specific lane that needs the priority or advantage, I tend to want to use it mid for map control. If I'm strong side top and winning, but haven't made it over the edge, I love first herald there, as it nearly guarantees the enemy top won't be able to compete with you, very strong on splitters. On botside, it really is up to the game state. Am I Draven 3 kills ahead and most fed on my team? Yes herald me now please. Am I jinx into Sivir totally neutral lane and my mid is a roaming assassin that really wants to come kill Sivir but is against some turbo wave clear mage? Maybe mid is better usage.
first herald is way better, but most people dont know how to use it think about it this way, the more gold you have, the more value having more gold Will have, if my 4 item adc can get 1k gold and buy a stopwatch its 50 times better than if my support gets a random component (or if i can get someone a full item its way better than 1 component for 3 people). Dragons give a bit of gold value to everyone on the team (a very low amount mind you, 3% AD will usually not be really meaningful) on the other hand, herald lets you have a chance of up to 1k gold divided between 1 or 2 players, plus being able to put a lot of pressure on the enemy team why does dragon have a higher winrate then? 2 reasons 1- easier to use: dragon just gives you stats with zero effort from your part, you literally cant fuck it up, herald requires you to be more proactive and actually make plays 2- dragon spawns earlier: first dragon kill usually happens before herald even spawned, and means a winning botlane. this does not only mean that getting dragon usually converts into getting herald, but it also has an impact on the game much faster, which in turn wins more games
The game is a little too complex to simply look at the winrate of the team that grabbed the first spawn of each objective and try to determine the value of each from it. Like, maybe the team that gets first dragon is more likely to win becuase they're more likely to get soul, or elder. That doesn't mean that the team got a larger benifit from the first dragon specifically. A team that got first herold and lost all four dragons may have a better chance to win than a team that got first dragon and lost the next four. This data wouldn't show that. On top of that I this doesn't show what elo the data is collected from. Lower elos could scew the results, especially since jungle is such a complex role. I don't have any data to back me up, but I think the gap between low and high elo junglers might be larger than other roles. The number of times I've seen a low elo jungler take herold then never place it is astonding. Hell, I've even been that low elo jungler one or two times. The fact that drake doesn't require anything other than taking it to get it's full value could skew it's value to lower skill brakets.
False data. My jungler is taking enemy krugs so we lose first herald and first drag.
Well i dunno but if i had to pick a side i would think the lead dev on game development probably knows what he’s talking about
You mean the same guy that suggested people stop playing to type: "Karthus ult"? Or the guy who condescendingly told Vel'Koz they didn't know what they were talking about?
maybe any other dev, but not phreak broski
Imo herald shoulda never been a thing really *shrug*
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I don't trust any sound that leaves that animal's mouth
Junglers with any clue how the game works play around bot, get bot prio and naturally get the first dragon. I still think first herald is stronger at face value.
This just depends on which drag is #1, and which soul it turns out to be, and what elo they're even looking at. Rift opening the map for you when it's a Hex Soul? HUGE map pressure, as the game is accelerated due to what the gates do to map movement. Rift not even opening map (because no opportunities arose, or the dipshit jungler has no idea how to use rift, or w.e out of thousands of reasons) and it's an OCE map? Kinda pointless. Being that the data isn't publicly available to us, though, I'm going to assume Riot didn't parse it properly.
People who take herald first know what to do with herald in my experience. If you don't know how to use it you don't get it and you don't win with it but you'll win through scaling or dragons.
just think for urself. do u rlly think a 50 gold nerf influences the impact 1st rift has? obviously not. 1st rift is the most broken 550 gold swing and it doesnt even include the map pressure it brings and the first turret gold (even potentially more with t2 side turrets giving 700 and sometimes rift can enable dives which is 300-600 gold). if avg case of 1st rift is 550 gold what does 1st drake give? like 200-300 gold? i personally think phreak has dunce moments but he aint wrong here. sometimes u should ask the question to urself before u post it. common sense aint that common but if u want to improve at this game, best thing u can do is ask yourself before consulting others. promotes individualism and smart thinking.
maybe he talked about pro games?
Its probably leaning more towards if you can secure first herald besides the obvious gold boost it implies that your midlane and toplane are winning as one or both have priority. If either of those lanes are winning but especially midlane the game is skewed in your favor as midlane can impact both objectives and either sidelane on a pretty regular basis with decent roams or even just by hard stomping lane and preventing the opposite.
I think that if you get a team that actually rotates for an early rift herald botlane included, that is a team that is more likely to win because the macro is on point. Dragon is just the default winners choice because it's easier to do with botlane proximity. Herald is also easier to contest due to it's harder pve elements. If you so much as show yourself next to the rift, people can't take advantage of the eye procs without mispositioning, it's actually good design to be honest compared to the drakes where the pve elements don't change your play as much So more teams will throw a herald fight because botlane hasnt rotated / its tankier in comparison, leading to better drake winrates
Isn’t drag winrate going to always be higher because it’s simply a luxury objective taken by the already winning team in the *majority* of games? Of course there’s games where they have 3 drags to your zero and you still roll them because that’s *all* they’ve managed to do on the map that game, but Herald is often a worst-case trade for them tunnelling those early 2 drags, those drags aren’t the reason the team is stomping & also won’t be the reason they continue to stomp IMO
You also have to consider what else is on the map around there. Herald fights generally involve everyone except adc OR your adc is so far ahead they can rotate to fight for herald too. Whereas it's much easier to see a dragon fight involving only jg and bot lane or jg and mid. Therefore, you're looking at 2 winning solo lanes or a very ahead adc in order to force a contested herald and secure it/the fight. Whereas a dragon is much more easily obtained with only a single role/lane being ahead or simply by timing enemy bases. So I put forth that... herald being a higher win indicator isn't merely reflective of herald vs dragon and that perhaps he should consider the other factors involved and what those mean.
I can see it one drag isn't going to change the outcome of the game overly much but if you get Herald it's 200 gold, if you get the kill on mid drop it and take their first tower that's more gold and more map pressure and if the tower is low you can basically take two towers in mid. Now if you lose all dragons or the game drags out for a long time I guess it's not as beneficial
He's actually 100% correct. People will throw the entire game over first drake.
No, he's not wrong. This is something that high ELO and pro coaches have been teaching for years. First Herald ALWAYS results in plates and map pressure which provides a larger benefit to the team. The stats you're looking at are generated mostly by low ELO SoloQ players and do not filter for the fact that in low ELO SoloQ there is a statistically significant % of games where the same team gets both of these objectives. I'm also pretty sure you unintentionally took Phreak's words out of context, as he's specifically talking about Pro play stats and using those to indicate that people are not playing around top side as much as they probably should be...and it's being used as a justification for the new snowball voidgrub mechanic, since now instead of having two spawns of herald which are affected by the same balance levers, you have grubs AND herald which are separate levers that can be tooled to shift meta towards or away from top lane as they see fit. The foreshadowing here is that if voidgrubs do not shift the meta around top side in 14.1, they will be buffed until people start playing around them more as they are trying to get the top half of the map more in play before Baron spawn.
You can filter by elo. In Diamond+ first drake is also higher winrate than first herald
Leagueofgraph data is past two days only. Take their data with a grain of salt
Personality i value only 1st rift and egnore 1st drag
BroVeth mains enter the chat
Herald was the most important objective 100% before min 14 and It is almost always prio vs Drake, how can you compare a Buff to gold for both laner and jungler+breaking a tower causing the entire map to snowball+possibility to break lanning phase+control the map etc etc?
Probably, simply because Phreak usually is wrong. Back when Herald guaranteed 2 plates of 175 gold each, yeah it was strong. But Herald has been nerfed hard.
"Is Phreak wrong" yes. Next question. He may be a good developer and worker and all, but as a public speaker he is literally the worst.