Kills, deaths, and gold per minute in each lane

tl;dr Nidalee jungle ascending

I don't know about you, but I prefer teammates that get a lot of kills, don't die a lot, and get tons of gold. The most common measure of kills and deaths that I have seen around is the venerable K/D/A, which is typically measured as (K+A)/D. That metric has upsides (it is simple, it counts assists, etc...), but it has downsides as well (it favors junglers and midlaners, it favors longer games, etc...). By splitting the data up by lane/role, and controlling for game length, we can perhaps get some new insight into popular champion picks.

There was an interesting discussion on reddit this week about last week's post where /u/Pilon23 expressed, "This is really interesting. All I want now are more tables." and I know how that feels. I suspect that by the end of this post he or she, I, and hopefully even you will be happy.

This weeks dataset is 96,851 NA diamond, master, and challenger ranked solo-queue matches played on patches 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3. I first sliced the data by champion + lane + role. This is good because we do not want support Annie dragging down the stats of solo mid Annie. Then I took the ten most popular picks for each lane/role and measured kills/min, deaths/min, and gold/min for each. In this way, we may be able to gain some insight into the performance and popularity of these champions.

Here is the first table, kills/min for solo top laners:

This table lends some credibility to the popularity of Riven and Irelia in this role. Jax is the tenth most popular top laner in this dataset, but is ranked fourth in kills/min; in my experience he is a bit more one-dimensional than some of the other picks on this list, but he sure is good at getting kills. I would like to see this table for lower elo (MMR) games, but I do not have the data handy. I feel like in my own low-elo games, tanky team-oriented picks like Renekton, Gnar, Nasus, and Sion are pretty rare.

Here is the deaths/min table for top laners:

I really like this table, since it is basically ordered by ascending tankyness among these picks. Riven gets a lot of kills, but she also dies the most (of these champs). Irelia has dropped down to be with the likes of Gnar, Nasus and Sion. Lots of kills, check, few deaths, check. The actual numbers here are close, but the ordering of this particular table is more or less stable over randomly chosen subsets of the data.

Here is the gold/min table for top laners:

Rivens get rich, that is not too surprising since kills give gold. However, Vladimir is higher here than on the kill table, and Rumble is lower. The spread here just is not very wide. Tens of gold/min adds up to around half an item in a reasonably long game, maybe an item at most. None of these picks are winning the game on their own, but Vlad is power-farming creeps.

Now we can move on to junglers, starting with kills/min:

Nidalee's popularity as a jungler is surging at the moment, and probably for good reason. I am also not surprised to see Lee Sin is the most picked jungler, as he is definitely one of the more fun champions to play. It is worth mentioning again that this dataset comes from top-ranked players who tend to prefer high skill-cap champions, so that explains some of what we see here. I did somehow expect to see Fiddlesticks getting more kills.

Here is the table for jungler deaths/min:

Fiddlesticks has more deaths than kills. RIP. Unlike the table for top laners, this one does not appear to be sorted by tankyness (spell-check doesn't like that word, but I do). Rek'sai and Hecarim are super-mobile, which makes them hard to kill. Pantheon and Rengar have more ways to go in than they have to get out, which may explain why they are ranked high here. But with a spread of only 0.02 deaths/min over tens of thousands of games, I do not see this table affecting decision making that much.

Here is the jungler table for gold/min:

Lee Sin is on the bottom here, but I think that is because he contributes to the game in so many ways other than just getting rich and buying items. He typically takes a Sightstone, and coupled with his mobility this leads to good vision control. Looking at these three tables, I am inclined to say that Hecarim may be a bit underrated, and I think we should expect to see a lot of Nidalee, at least in the short term. I miss Bigfatjiji's Nocturne.

Moving on, here is a table of solo mid kills/min:

Katarina is just a solo-queue stomper. It is interesting to see that mid Lissandra gets quite a few more kills than top Lissandra. It seems that mid laners just get more kills than top laners. Ahri is in the middle of the pack here, she underwent some changes in the middle of the data collection for this particular dataset, so we would have to slice it up a bit further to see how those changes affected her with respect to these metrics. Also interesting to note here is that the sample sizes for mid lane are a bit smaller than for the other roles. There are apparently more viable mid lane champions at this level of play.

Here is the mid deaths/min table:

Azir with more deaths than kills, I think everyone (even Riot?) is still figuring this champion out. Kassadin has few deaths given the number of kills that he gets; mobility is so important in League of Legends. Xerath has the fewest deaths/min of these champions, that comes as a bit of a surprise to me, but perhaps these high-skill players position him well enough to survive.

Here is gold/min for mid:

Here again we see that kills can only do so much for actually earning gold. This list is basically ordered by descending ease of farming creeps. The variance from top to bottom here is quite low again. It is just not the case that any mid champion gets that much more gold than another (at least among these frequently played picks).

Now the tables for marksmen, starting with kills/min:

Graves gets picked so much. These sample size numbers are "by far" the biggest in this post. The role of marksman is, I guess, the most well defined in the current meta. The spread here is also the narrowest, as I have noticed time and time again writing these articles, the balance of this game in terms of the marksmen is impeccable. The least played champion on this list is Lucian, which is pretty wild, given his immense popularity at the end of season 4. Kalista is at the top of this list, and is also the most recently-released ad carry. Coincidence?

Here are deaths/min for marksmen:

The lowest kills/min on the table above is still higher than the highest deaths/min here. This table slices this data super-thin, 0.04 deaths/min is probably about 1 death per game. I am not sure we can say anything too concrete given this data.

Here is gold/min for marksmen:

These numbers are just too close to each other. These ten champions are separated by less than 1cs/min. That is absurd. The order on this list is sadly not very stable over subsets of the dataset. Again, I think the main takeaway here has to be that marksman balance, especially given the wide variety of fun and interesting play-styles here, it just tremendous.

Here are the tables for supports. These metrics are not as useful for analyzing that particular role, but I include them here for completeness:

Everyone with more deaths than kills. Teamwork OP.

I appreciate you taking the time to read these articles. As a bonus for those of you who make it to the bottom, here is a freaky game where some Kha'Zix went buck-wild and got 29 unanswered kills. That is the biggest kill streak in the dataset used for this article.

I love looking at this kind of data, and I love discussing it with you all. Get at me on twitter and let me know if you have any feedback or thoughts. I hope you liked it too.

That is it for today's #LeagueMath. Go read another article or if you have already read them all, mash F5 until another shows up. It wont be long, I promise. You can't have league without math, and so you can't have league without LeagueMath.com.

The feelings of calculators of K/D/A were not harmed in the making of this article.

Peace.