League of Legends: How every LEC team should improve in the offseason
FC Schalke 04 – Top Lane
Following the news that star AD Carry Elias “Upset” Lipp will be leaving Schalke 04 during the offseason, we’ve already been narrowed down to just four roles to choose from. Fortunately, S04’s performances in 2019 made it clear who should be leaving the roster before the 2020 Spring Split if the German org wants to improve on their 3rd place Summer playoffs finish.
Ten splits of League of Legends at the highest level, countless carry performances, and multiple European playoff appearances – there is absolutely no denying that Andrei “Odoamne” Pascu is a veteran and legend of the EU scene. Guiding two separate H2k Gaming rosters to the World Championship, including one 3rd-4th place finish, could be considered the shining moment of Odoamne’s career, but Schalke’s last gasp failure to clinch Worlds qualification may have been the 24-year-old’s final chance of reaching an international competition on a European team.
A disappointing Spring Split was wiped from the memory of Schalke fans as they reached the finals weekend of the LEC Summer Split in Athens, falling 3-0 to Fnatic in the “semi-final”. Clearly the third-best team in Europe at the time, it was almost unthinkable that this roster wouldn’t qualify for Worlds in the Regional Finals, especially after Rogue had demolished their opponents, Splyce, in the playoffs.
Schalke then went on to lose 3-0, leaving fans dismayed with fingers pointed towards their experienced top laner who was caught overextending multiple times during the series, a sight viewers had become familiar with throughout the regular season.
In fact, Odoamne was widely regarded as S04’s weak link all through 2019 and this is backed up by some of his Summer Split statistics. Despite competing on a top-four roster in the second half of the season, Odo only managed a 2.7 KDA with the second-lowest average kills of any top laner in the LEC at 1.8.
Some of this could be explained by the priority Schalke placed on bot lane, with jungler Trick spending the majority of his time on the south side of the map, but even then you would hope for a CS per minute number greater than 7.4 from such a seasoned solo laner. In 33% of his games, Odoamne was the First Blood victim, evidencing that LEC viewers weren’t the only ones to spot the top laner’s vulnerability, opposing EU teams also took advantage of this weakness and built a gold lead from the top side of the map.
It could be argued that it’s unfair to place so much blame on a single player for Schalke 04’s shortcomings in 2019 and ultimately every player lacked the quality required to achieve the org’s goals for the season. That being said, if we were to pick one member of the roster that impressed the least and could be subject to the dreaded roster swaps before 2020, Odoamne would have to take that spot.