Upcoming Worlds Finals is full of storylines and spicy matchups, but toplane stands above all of them: Zeus vs TheShy. Why above all? This Worlds we have only 2.5 teams where toplaner is main damage dealer. 1.5 of them are in Finals. That’s quite a story for tournament which started with botlane oriented meta. Let’s dive deep!

Disclaimer: All number you will see will be affected by three factors: TheShy played more games (due to 3:2 journey and full series with BLG), WBG games are 2 minutes longer which impacts numbers like damage per minute, WBG is the bloodiest team in the tournament (as you can expect from LPL representative) with average almost 15 kills per game.

Champion Pool

Overall narrative of this clash is very simple: parity. The more you look into their play style and numbers, the more you see similarity and parity. It all starts from a champion pool:

  • Zeus: 12 games (10:2 win/loss), 6 on Aatrox, 2 on Jayce, 1 on Rumble, Gragas, Gnar, Yone. His only 2 losses were on Aatrox, 1 to Doran’s Rumble and 1 to 369 K’Sante;
  • TheShy: 16 games (11:5 w/l), 5 on Aatrox, 3 on Rumble, 3 on K’Sante, 2 on Gnar, 1 on Graves, Quinn and Ornn;

As we can see, Aatrox is by far their most preferred pick, also both of them played already Gnar and obviously Rumble. Zeus can pull his iconic Jayce, TheShy – Graves (and I think Jayce is in his pocket too). Zeus seems to ignore K’Sante sticking to his favourite Gragas when team needs frontline (and when you need to counter Jax), TheShy is in contradiction average K’Sante enjoyer when his team needs frontline. By the way, speaking of Jax. Quite interesting that both of them yet to play this champion at Worlds (and knowing how many counters to Jax exist, most probably trend will prevail).

When it comes to draft, both TheShy and Zeus are neither a focal point for their teams, nor a “pick always blind”. Zeus champion was locked after opponent’s toplane selection in 58% of the games (8th result) and TheShy in 63% of the games (6th result).

Carrying fights

At the start I mentioned that there are only 2.5 teams where toplaner is the main damage-dealer, let me break it into details.

We used to think about TheShy and Zeus as about carry machines who heavy lifting their teams. Quite interesting that the picture is a bit more nuanced. They both participate only in around half of their teams kills: 49% for Zeus (13th result), 54% for TheShy (10th). You can notice that this is pretty low number. A whole bunch of toplaners have higher number.

But when we add kill share ratio (% of total kills assigned to toplane), then both of them have better look: Zeus KS% is 25.8% (2nd best) and TheShy is 21.9% (7th). Transforming this number into simpler terms: both TheShy and Zeus don’t join every fight of their team and miss a lot of action, but when they join, they heavy carry those fights. Especially when it comes to Zeus, who has the best KDA above all toplaners and is the only one who has kills > assists: 42/19/39 (4.3 KDA). TheShy seems to die more often and has KDA only 2.7 (52/48/76).

Fun fact: 12 from 19 deaths of Zeus happened before 15-minute mark. He died only 7 times in 10 games after 15-minute! We definitely have a new “KDA King”, insane result.

We can confirm this narrative by 2 more numbers:

Both TheShy and Zeus produce the highest damage-per-minute from all toplaners: 637 DPM and 620 DPM respectively. They contribute 28.1% and 28.4% of their team’s damage! There is only 1 player who damage more in relative terms: Kiaya with 29.3%. In case of TheShy, his numbers are equal to Light’s numbers, who has a similar DPM and DMG% numbers, but Zeus stands above all in T1. He by far the biggest damage contributor to T1 damage profile. Faker has 25.5% DMG% and Gumayusi – 23%. This is why I mention 2.5 teams. Kiaya and Zeus are full cases when they dominate KS% and DMG% being main “carry factors” for their teams and TheShy also has Light at his back to carry him.

Also, Zeus holds the best “performance” from all toplaners and midlaners this tournament. In game-3 against LNG his Jayce outputted 1048 DPM, absolutely insane number, especially if we reming ourselves that it was a pretty short 25-minute game. Only 2 players from entire tournaments had better results: BLG Elk against Fnatic (1210 DPM) and WBG Light against NRG (1145 DPM), but both those games were way longer.

Lane Kingdom

Both TheShy and Zeus just gapping hard their lanes. Just see it out:

  • Average CS@15 is 16 for ThyShy and 11 for Zeus – 2 best results;
  • Average GD@15 is 725 for TheShy and 420 for Zeus – 1st and 3rd best result;
  • Average XPD@15 is 640 and 566 for TheShy and Zeus respectively – 2 best results;
  • TheShy solo killed his opponent 7 times (best result), Zeus – 6 times (2nd result);
  • The prize “biggest gap of the tournament” is also under their names. TheShy’s Graves gapped Bin’s Aatrox by 49 cs and Zeus’s Jayce gapped Zika’s Renekton by 47 cs;

Parity and Priority

At the end, we have clash on undisputedly 2 best toplaners of the tournament and arguably 2 best players of the entire Worlds so far. Lane Kingdom, insane domination over opponent, similar carry-style champion pool, a huge damage output for their teams and heavy carrying in key fights (did you know, that in that game 3 T1 vs JDG when Faker engaged on Ruler, Zeus did 35% of T1 damage?) – all parts of puzzles are in place.

One can argue that TheShy had way easier path. He lost to Kiin and the only decent toplaner whom he gapped was Bin (as no one else was on his way), while Zeus has dominated 369, Bin and Zika (by a lot of people “the best mechanical toplaner”), but there is one thing which separates them and which makes TheShy super scary: jungle priority.

You can go on here and here and play with heatmaps to see jungle pathing and kills@15m distribution on your own, but overall the biggest difference between T1 and WBG is area where jungle puts focus.

T1 are heavy topside team. Oner quite often builds his pathing to cover Zeus, he spends a lot of time at the topside, T1 are heavy prioritising Heralds and overall playing topside to unlock Zeus, leaving Gumayusi on strong early game champion to play on his own. They have that unique style that they don’ try to snowball borland bully trio from Kalista/Cait/Varus and rather balance it investing heavily into topside. It transitions to numbers that Zeus has First Blood in 25% of his games, plus he was “FB Victim” (meaning to die first) only once entire tournament.

In contradiction, WBG is all about botlane. WeiWei just camps at bot after first jungle clear and covers Light and Crisp. They heavily invest into Light’s hyper scaling carries, quite often leaving TheShy on his own. WBG way less prioritise Heralds, and TheShy has a very little privilege to grab his jungler attention for first blood (only once entire tournament), more often trying to survive ganks and absorb pressure.

In some sense, T1 and WBG just mirror each other. T1 utilise strong laning skills of Guma to funnel Zeus, and WBG utilise strong laning skills of TheShy to funnel Light.

That makes TheShy super scary and balances, at least for me, his “easier” path to Finals. If we can achieve this by having so little resources, you obviously should be scared about him.

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