Week 10: Teamfighting

A teamfight is five overlapping individual jobs, not one collective event, and reading it means asking what each champion is actually trying to accomplish inside it. Builds on trading (Week 4) and objectives (Week 8), since most teamfights exist to contest one.

26 April 2027

Guiding question#

Ten champions enter a fight. What is each one actually trying to accomplish?

A fight is several problems, not one event#

“Focus the ADC” is not wrong so much as incomplete — it names one player’s job and assumes it’s everyone’s. A teamfight is five overlapping individual problems happening in the same few seconds: someone is trying to reach a target, someone is trying to prevent that, someone is trying to protect a different target entirely, and someone may be doing nothing except surviving long enough to matter later. Two players on the same team can be trying to accomplish completely different things in the same fight, and reading the fight means telling those jobs apart rather than watching it as one collective event.

The vocabulary#

• engage — starting the fight on favourable terms
• peel — protecting a specific teammate from a specific threat
• positioning and spacing — where a champion stands relative to threats and targets, and how much room that gives them to react
• threat — what a champion can credibly do to someone else right now
• target access — whether a champion’s threat can actually reach the target it’s aimed at
• cooldown windows — which abilities are up, and for whom, at this exact moment — not in general
• frontline / backline relationship — the frontline absorbs and threatens so the backline can deal damage from behind it
• protecting versus reaching — a frontline player often has to choose between shielding their own backline and continuing to threaten the enemy’s, and can’t fully do both at once

Builds strongly on Week 9#

Week 9’s Team A drafted to force fights early; Week 9’s Team B drafted to survive to a late-game poke-and-peel fight instead. This week takes that exact matchup into one hypothetical fight and asks what each side is actually doing inside it — a teamfight is where a draft’s win condition either cashes out or fails.

Also reconnects to Weeks 4, 6, 7 and 8#

A fight is a bundle of Week 4’s trades happening at once — cooldowns and summoner spells spent earlier in the game are simply unavailable now. Week 6’s tempo decides who arrives first, which can decide a fight before either side has swung once. Week 7’s information constrains where a player is willing to stand — an unseen threat is answered by caution, not certainty. And Week 8’s objectives are usually why the fight is happening at all.

Fight reconstruction: Team A engages for Baron#

T–15s. Both teams are grouped near the Baron pit. Team A does not have vision inside the pit itself — a Week 7 gap. What’s threatened: nothing yet. What changed: nothing — this is the position both plans were built around reaching.

T–5s. Team B’s support used its primary disengage tool moments earlier, baiting a skirmish near the river that didn’t develop into a real fight. That tool is now on cooldown. What changed: Team B’s peel for this fight is already weaker than it was fifteen seconds ago, and neither team has swung yet.

T0. Team A’s jungler engages directly onto Team B’s marksman — the target its whole draft was built to reach. Who can access whom: Team A’s engage was built for exactly this; Team B’s remaining peel is a slow, not the knockback that would have separated them cleanly.

T+3s. Team B’s frontline top laner has a choice: peel the diver off their own marksman, or continue threatening Team A’s backline the way their draft’s damage profile depends on. Protecting and reaching aren’t both available at once — whichever they choose, the other stops happening.

T+8s. Team B’s mid laner lands poke onto Team A’s backline, the composition’s core strength — but the marksman it was aimed at protecting is already dead. The trade evens up on damage dealt and lost by minutes too late to matter.

T+15s. Team B’s marksman is dead, its win condition with it. Team A takes Baron uncontested.

When was this fight actually decided? Arguably not at T0. The missing vision at T–15s let Team A commit without risk; the disengage tool burned at T–5s removed Team B’s answer before the engage even happened. By the time anyone swung, several of the fight’s outcomes were already fixed.