The LEC Summer Split is off to a wild start and Rogue is caught in the middle of the crossfire between rosters that stayed the same and revamped lineups. After two weeks the squad sits at a 3-2 record, with the games in week two against Misfits Gaming and G2 Esports being nail-bitingly close, resulting in a 1-1 week score.
Many expect Rogue to contest for the title, but Odoamne sees important points that need to be ironed out if they want to stand a chance.
Rogue’s top laner Andrei “Odoamne” Pascu joined for a chat after the team’s narrow loss against G2. He spoke about the devastating Nocturne/Fiddlesticks combination his team chose to play in their game against Misfits, and why they stuck with Fiddlesticks alone the day after. Odoamne pondered on his team’s strength at the moment as well, and pointed out what needs to improve for a successful Summer Split.
Hotspawn: It was a hectic weekend for Rogue, Odoamne, with two incredibly tense series. First, a clutch win versus Misfits, and then a nailbiter loss versus G2. How was it for you to play these games?
Odoamne: It was an action-packed weekend, yeah. It definitely was a big contrast compared to [the first weekend], where the games were much slower and more telegraphed, I guess. Yesterday’s game was ok. We kind of dropped the ball at some point, where we got caught in the top lane. I feel like, if that doesn’t happen, the game is completely steamrolled by us because we’re gonna be able to get Dragon Soul really early. Our composition is really hard for them to walk into when we’re ahead.
I feel like we just gave Misfits one opportunity to catch us for free. That swung the momentum a bit, and I feel like we executed one crucial team fight wrong. That made the Soul point be really far away from us. I feel like our composition, at least the one yesterday, was very execution-based with a strong early and mid-game. It’s the type of comp that gives you access to Soul at like 25 minutes. We just need to not drop the ball, but we kind of did. That’s why it was a bit shaky.
Hotspawn: The Nocturne/Fiddlesticks combination was very exciting to watch. Is that something that you had been extensively practicing?
Odoamne: Uhm, we kinda locked in Nocturne because it enables a lot of plays. It puts a lot of pressure on an enemy team even if you don’t fly in as Nocturne. Just the fact that you can turn off the lights gives you a lot of power in these objective-scenarios where we’re scrapping for drakes and stuff. You effectively cut everything from the enemy team. They’re not able to play off of each other’s movements, comms are not so viable, just because they don’t have a lot of vision.
But yeah, we’ve been trying combos and stuff. We liked the Nocturne/Fiddlesticks combination. We felt like Fiddlesticks usually gets countered easily by vision, and the fact that they have no vision to see him coming creates a lot of power for this pick. I can ult early, and he can just ult at the end of those four seconds when people start running away. Usually, when you ult with Nocturne, people start freaking out and going everywhere. It gives you a lot of time to pick your fight, you know?
Hotspawn: Today, against G2, we saw you pick the Fiddlesticks again, even though the Nocturne was banned. Did Fiddlesticks just feel that powerful against Misfits?
Odoamne: It still felt pretty strong. It’s just that we made mistakes before Fiddlesticks was online. At least for us, we believed that Fiddle was still fine into things like Rumble. You just need to keep it somewhat stable, up until the point where Fiddlesticks gets online at like level six. He is just a really strong pick, I think. Or at least, Inspired makes it work pretty well. Today we messed up before Fiddlesticks got to play the game, and then Rumble kind of took over.
Hotspawn: Was it stressful to play that game versus G2? It was incredibly close and at times almost felt like scrim game.
Odoamne: It wasn’t really stressful. You’re just playing and looking for opportunities. You kind of know what your place is to fight, where you should fight, and what good places are for the enemy to fight. It’s not like we were freaking out or we were stressing out super hard. We could have done a better job at the early and mid-game, but overall it wasn’t really a stressful game or whatever.
Hotspawn: I did an interview with G2’s strategic coach, Nelson, earlier. He was very critical of G2’s level of play. How do you look at the state of G2, and also your own level of play?
Odoamne: I still feel that, at least in the way our early games go, we should be the best team in EU. We are consistently getting such massive leads. I feel like we’re kind of at the point in our team where we need to agree on what we want to do for our mid-game. There are different opinions going around and as long as we are not on the same page, that’s where you see us throwing mid-games a lot. But I feel like, if we get to iron out our mid-game, just the fact that we’re so strong in the early game and we’re getting such consistent leads in the first ten minutes of the game, we should be above everyone else.
Mid-game is our big issue right now, I guess, but we’re not super concerned about it. I feel like there is a lot of time to fix it. Comparing ourselves to our level from Spring, we are definitely higher now. We’re just starting to come together and figure out what we want to do together, so our growth should still be pretty big.
Despite a 3-2 start to the Split, Odoamne says the Rogue has leveled up compared to Spring (Photo by Michal Konkol/Riot Games)
Hotspawn: How is this different from the Spring Split then? It seemed like you guys were on the same page back then.
Odoamne: We were still kind of in our formation phase, I guess. We were still figuring out what we want to do, and when we finally get our playstyle together, that’s when you saw the real issues that were happening. Then everyone had a clear picture on what we needed to fix. Also, when you get so far into the Split and you get to play the finals and stuff, you get a big red flag: why did you lose a final? So now it’s very clear that the issues we had from the finals are a byproduct of the issues that we had throughout the whole Split. They were surfacing then, in that high-stress situation. Now that we’re aware of everything, we’ve been taking steps to fix all of those things.
Hotspawn: We’ve only seen two weeks of play in the LEC, so it’s relatively early, but there were a lot of shakeups to the teams. What do you think about the competitiveness in the LEC during the Summer Split?
Odoamne: I think it could be more competitive. Some teams kind of made downgrades. [Laughs] Yeah… But I mean, most teams that made changes made it for the better. I feel like they’re probably gonna be better in the long run. The level should be rising, I think, for the Summer Split.
Rogue plays their next game in the LEC against Schalke 04 on Friday, June 25th, at 8 PM CEST. You can watch the game live on the official LoL Esports website.
