Taiwanese League of Legends team Flash Wolves was widely expected to beat European opponent Origen today in the World Championship quarter finals. The first game has probably changed some people’s perspective on the match up, thanks to an Origen landing a pentakill so efficiently they made it seem...casual.
30 minutes into the match, Flash Wolves had a strong (if not insurmountable) lead in the game. They were ahead by five kills, and had roughly 4,000 more gold than Origen—meaning that they had more experience and money with which to power up their in-game champions to close out the match. Origen decided to go try and kill Baron, the big purple worm monster on the upper left chunk of the League map. Baron grants the entire team a powerful performance boost, so the monster is a hotly contested kill for both teams each time it pops up. My guess would be that they’d decided to do this to close the gap between the teams without initiating a team-fight, which is always a risky proposition when your team is behind in League.
Flash Wolves caught Origen in the act, and tried to run in and stop them. Origen’s Soaz, playing as the brawny melee warrior Darius, responded with the League of Legends equivalent of swatting them away like a pesky fly:
Darius is the big dude wearing a basketball jersey and carrying a hoop (it’s a very popular alternate skin Riot made for him since one of his attacks looks like he’s getting a slam dunk). It only takes him 17 seconds to wipe them out:
REKT. The game didn’t last much longer after that. The pentakill caught Origen up to Flash Wolves. They won a few minutes later by sneaking into the back of Flash Wolves’ base and destroying their nexus before FW could even get there and put up a fight.
As Future said recently: “I see how they counted us out, but they never gonna do it again.”
Seeing something like this go down seems like even more evidence that Darius is a total fucking monster right now in the League meta game. No wonder Riot just nerfed him in the 5.20 patch that came out this week. The rest of Worlds will remain on patch 5.18, though, so I’m guessing we’ll see a lot more of the dunkmaster over the next two weeks.