League of Legends players have begun bringing attention to a new strategy that involves Master Yi and Taric and is taking over games.
The new tactic appears to have gained popularity in China, but it’s now spreading to other regions as well. It involves taking Taric to the middle lane and putting Master Yi in his standard jungle position, but the jungling swordsman gets much more farm than he usually would. Instead of Taric taking the minions in the lane like a normal laner would, he instead freezes the lane so that Master Yi can come by at his leisure and take that farm as well. With so much farm and perhaps a few kills under his belt, Master Yi reaches his power spikes much earlier than other champions can handle.
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This is far from the first time that we’ve seen a cheesy strategy involving Master Yi, but this appears to be the latest take on the “support the jungler” tactic. Previously, you’d see Kayle go to the top lane and give up farm as well. Couple that with Kayle’s ultimate that made Yi invincible and you had a recipe for a hyper carry who had little to fear. Taric works in a similar fashion in the middle lane but is even safer than Kayle since it’s quite difficult to kill him one-on-one thanks to his heals and crowd control. He’s also got an ultimate that works like Kayle’s, so should he and Master Yi ever decided to take the fight to the enemy instead of passively freezing and farming, there’s not much that can be done.
Players have been reporting on the strategy and explaining how it works while others attempted to get ahead of the Bronze elo jokes by breaking down the case for why the champion needs to be changed. However, another League of Legends player who’s well-known in the community said that the problem with Master Yi isn’t actually something to do with the champion and instead stems from the jungle changes. If you’ve spent much time learning about Master Yi, you’ve probably heard of Cowsep, a player who’s known for his high-level Master Yi games. He commented on the strategy and said that the Master Yi strategies like this one have been around for a while but that the longer jungle respawn times made the newer strategy more effective. If the camps take so long to respawn, he asked, why wouldn’t Master Yi want to take lanes’ farm?
“I don’t think this is specifically a Yi problem and to fix it you gotta go a bit deeper than that,” Cowsep said. “Also even as a Yi main I can confirm that this strategy is annoying to play against.”
Other players have resigned to simply banning Master Yi in games for the time being until something changes.
