When trying to understand a rosters strength, we need to address the role of team cohesion in a team’s success. It can be difficult to define cohesion and because of that everyone has a different opinion of what it means and its value.

Defining Terms:

Team cohesion allows teams to learn more easily as a unit and reach their potential as a team. Low cohesion teams make players look worse than usual and coaches have a far harder time instructing them. On a high cohesion team, individuals can reach their full potential and coaches can work more efficiently. High cohesion teams are more likely to not only reach their full potential, but have the opportunity to create something new and undocumented in terms of team play. So, what does good team cohesion look like?

Team cohesion is a product of balancing player agency properly. A balance of aggression and caution, play makers and role players, carries and tanks all working smoothly towards a common goal. Player agency involves the level of control a player will enforce on their opponent, the difference between a hard carry and a role player. Recognising different levels of player agency in individuals and orchestrating those players to work together is the baseline for good cohesion.

An extreme example of high player agency can be illustrated in soloq by the, “Hashinshin model”. Hashinshin is infamously known as a player that will win or lose you a game by himself. His playstyle requires laners to give him information on their opponent’s statuses and his jungler to provide even or greater jungle pressure, regardless of whether it’s the right move for the team as a whole. He needs to be the focal point of the game, like Kobe Bryant and the Lakers (if Kobe was in diamond). This is a perfect example of a high agency or hard carry player. Whether through intentions or actions, they try to create as large of personal advantage as possible.

The Side Lane Struggle

In league of legends, it is very hard to have two hard carries on opposite sides of the map. Due to the great distance of these two lanes, the jungler can only support one at a time. If the adc and the top laner both want to exert pressure, chances are one gets punished and the other succeeds (based on jungle pressure). You give yourself the highest chance to succeed when one side lane is granted the right to hard carry and the other becomes a role player because this allows one player to specialize in creating advantages and the opposite player is specialized in giving away as little as possible. This tends to make a simple net advantage.

Examining SSG during 2016 summer we can see an example of this: Cuvee was a two-way player that was getting hot and Crown was far and away the star of the show in 2016. Ambition was more of a farming style jungler that facilitated this and the bot lane (at the time) were role players.

(2016 LCK Summer Playoffs, SSG vs AF G1)

There are common practices where side lanes will both be pushing simultaneously. However, while both lanes are pushing, a jungler will only be giving assistance to one of them. The lane with the jungler on it’s side has the burden of gaining advantages because they have an easier fight, if they were to be ganked. The opposite lane has the primary objective to avoid incoming ganks first, then take what they can. This strategy implements shades of grey for both lanes, but the primary objective still rings true: if you have the jungler you are creating plays, if you don’t you are being cautious.

Ignoring the previous concept, you can have all three lanes be extremely high pressure and win, but you have to be mechanically superior every game and pick winning lanes (hard to pull off).

Who’s Carryin’ This Game Anyway?

It is less defined and obvious, but this push/pull relationship may be mirrored in the middle and jungle roles. Essentially, the jungler can always cover mid and one other lane at a time because of the way the map is built. If the mid attempts to create their own advantages (carry), the jungler has to support this in order to be successful. If mid wants to get priority, they require wards, ganks, and jungler tracking similar to the duo of Faker/Bengi. If mid tries to play back (role player), the jungler only has to worry about one lane and can use the rest of their time to create their own advantages. We see a good example of this low agency mid/high agency jungler from TSM in 2017 summer, just not worlds. Hauntzer is a two-way player, Bjerg is best as an enabler (in my opinion), Sven is very aggressive (pre-worlds 2017) and Double wants to win lane with Bio.

(NA LCS Summer, Week 7, TSM vs EF)

Finally, one last explanation of team cohesion. We have gone through the relationship of agency between top/bot, jungle/mid and even how jungle will impact 2 relationships at once. However, League has evolved to have a third supplementary pairing in support/jungle. While you want to balance the other lanes in terms of agency, it gives your team an extra strength if support and jungle mirror each other. In other words, if you have a high agency jungler and a high agency support (or vice versa), it is a strength. This is because it is far easier to get them on the same page when making plays together. If your jungler meets up with your support for a vision play, while one has a strength in invading and the other specializes in defensive play, they will probably have different ideas about the next action. This leads to indecision and inefficiency. If they both share a common strength they can play almost without thinking and sometimes create magic through natural synergy. This is essentially a free advantage as long as it isn’t at the cost of the mid/jungle or top/bot agency pairings.

Cohesion Misfire

Up until this point you have seen examples of high cohesion teams and how they operate. In order to fully grasp the concept, we must explore a poorly built roster, where team cohesion was suboptimal. For this I am going to use the roster change between Team Liquid spring 2016 and spring 2017. TL 2016 bolstered Lourlo- a role player, Dardoch- the definition of a carry jungler, Fenix- a strong role player and the carry-focused bot lane of Piglet/Matt. The solo lanes were not relied on to get things rolling, while Piglet and Dardoch were comfortable being the carries of the team. They were a pretty good team that just came short of missing worlds. They were well balanced and fit our team cohesion guidelines.

Cut to 2017 spring. Dardoch’s behaviour issues couldn’t be solved, Fenix is out and in comes Reignover and Goldenglue. They replaced a hard carry player in Dardoch with a better, but supportive jungler in Reignover. Now you have a role player top, supportive jungler, role player mid and only a single high-pressure lane in Piglet/Matt. Goldenglue was a downgrade from Fenix, but he alone wasn’t the difference between 4th and 9th place. Even though Reignover was the better player, Dardoch was far and away the better fit for Team Liquid.

You cannot have only 1 carry player and expect to get the most out of your players, just as you cannot have 4 carries and only 1 role player.

Final Words

Keep in mind, these are just the basic player compositions that promote cohesion. We are still very new to League of Legends strategy as a whole. We have had attempts at jungle carry/mid carry centric teams with more passive side lanes and everything in between. The point being, this just lays a foundation for how much aggression/passivity is needed in the game at one time and how these playmaking and supportive roles interact with each other. These are the basics.

Through this evaluation we have learned what cohesion looks like and how it interacts with player agency. These two concepts don’t necessarily mean you will start the best or end the best, but it improves team play through efficiency. In these scenarios everyone has defined strengths, which compliment each other and facilitate larger team advantages. This means they are more likely to hit their ceiling as a team and potentially start to create plays that they didn’t even know were possible. This balance of team cohesion helps teams define their style and learn to execute it. Let’s try to add this knowledge to our judgement of new rosters: five great, high ceiling players, might not make a great of a team and some lower ceiling guys may surprise you.