Is Nautilus actually OP?
MSI 2023: The Reason Why Mid Laners Like Nautilus Are Rising Once More
MSI 2023 has seen a rise in some curious mid lane picks like Nautilus. This has some players wondering why these tanky more facilitative picks are being prioritized over some of the other mid lane champions. Well there is a simple answer: The current lane power.
The meta of the League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational favors one lane and one lane alone, meaning every other player on a team is going to make sure that the powerful lanes get ahead, no matter what.
MSI 2023: One Lane Decides The Outcome Of A Game
The current state of professional League of Legends favors one lane and that is the bot lane. Teams at the 2023 Mid-Season Invitational have noticed this and decided to throw all their eggs into one basket, which in the case of this tournament is their ADC.
Teams will draft around their ADC, making sure that they are the ones to survive and have as much gold as possible, which is where picks like Nautilus or even K'Sante in the mid lane come into play.
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They're tanky picks with reliable forms of crowd control with which they're able to keep the enemies in check. They're also able to isolate targets with ease thanks to their abilities, which means they can threaten enemy squishy champions as well.
Nautilus, for example, might have the slowest auto attack range of any champion, but he's still got decent wave clear and base damage, which means he can roam the map and have an effect there. By helping push the lane and roaming bot, it means that the team is going to have easier access to the dragon, and he can help snowball the bot lane ahead.
This is also in part due to the current state of mages in League of Legends. Ahri seems to be the only viable mage and if Lissandra, the usual counter, is banned, players will pick Nautilus since he's just going to build some magic resist and survive the lane before going to roam.
This is a similar meta to 2019, when FPX won the League of Legends World Championship, so players are just going back to what has worked in the past and thanks to Nautilus being extremely tanky and good into AP champs without too many resources, teams pick him up and then facilitate their ADC's to reach their highest potential for easy wins.