4Game

I've thought about it a lot and I'm going to conclude that 1+4, 2+3, 5 is the optimal picking strategy, when no player is allowed to talk to any other player (ie; most pubs).

Reasons:

• It is GOOD against playing against itself.
• It wipes the floor with "supports first" in pubs.

The problem with supports first:

The biggest problem with supports first is that your supports are blind picking. A naive person might say:

'They are supports, fuck them, why do THEY need last pick?!'.

Because if the supports are picking first.. The ONLY information they have in almost ALL pubs is who the other support is. ie; AT best they are picking to support the other support player.

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They are NOT picking to help 'lock down' the jugg.

They are NOT picking to help buff the Medusa.

They are NOT picking to save your pos 1 Sniper when he gets jumped.

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If you WANT your supports to actually have a good chance to support you, LET them have last pick, so they are picking a support with full information of what is countering YOU as a core, and what NEEDS to be countered on the enemy team.

But why can't I just counter them with MY core?

Because a core countering another core is extremely dependent on HOW the game goes. If you pick Faceless void to counter say a Juggernaught or Puck… That is EXTREMELY dependent on how much farm you get during the game. It is entirely possible you have a bad game, you chrono the Jugg but you simply don't have the damage to kill him.

The inverse is NOT true. When supports counter their cores.. It does NOT matter very much how farmed the support is. It's the innate spells of the support that's fucking over their core, which makes it so much worse for them.

An example:

Your team's AM farmed all game for 30 minutes straight sacrificing towers, and team fights to finally get enough items to blink and kill their Medusa…Only to get black holed and obliterated by their pos 5 enigma that literally has brown boots and a blink dagger.

Another example:

You saw their Phase 1 PA pick, and decided you'd pick Axe to blink call her and ruin her. After a decent laning phase, you finally get blink blademail and vanguard. You blink call her; Last pick shadow demon disrupts her. You realise the last 15 minutes of farming, sucking up resources and the whole pos 3 pick is now more or less worthless due to 1 spell from a pos 5 that has 0 last hits, and is 10 levels below you.

It's a far more devastating counter to be countered by a pos 5, than by an enemy core that needs farm for the counter to work.

So next time your support wants last pick. He is not griefing. He wants to support you and contribute to the game in the best way possible. You are griefing by not letting him due to some deluded idea that you are going to be countered, when it is likely you will be countered incidentally any way and your support won't have anything to help you because he first picked venomancer.

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