Originally Posted by
Tor1g0d
youre literally contradicting yourself. off-meta will always exist. its unpopular because it's OFF-meta. its really hard to find new and innovative way to do things but it does happen. like you said, it ALMOST is never optimal. there are certain counterpicks such as the infamous mf support into zyra that rocked the world stage.
Let be me a little clearer on what I mean. League doesn't have offmeta like Dota does in that League's balance really only supports one meta at a time because more than half the cast at any given point is bad in competitive play, and more than half that remain are just suboptimal compared to the meta ones, but still adhere to the team meta that forms.
For example, that Nocturne pick was "offmeta" in that he's not a popular pick for the rotation meta, but he fits into the team meta of rotation-heavy play, and he played in a team comp that heavily capitalized on his semi-global ult to perform rotations using TP and Galio. The Rammus pick was "offmeta" in that he's not a popular pick for a siege meta, but he fits into the siege meta as a tank jungler, and he was used in a team comp that tried to pull off a siege comp using Rammus as the front line. MF support was initially "offmeta" in that she didn't see play as a support usually, but she fit into the support meta as a bully support. Her success in that role as the only person who could outpoke Zyra consistently while still providing team utility revealed that she fit extremely well into the bully support meta. An abnormal power curve. And then they nerfed the range on Make It Rain, thus gutting her power in that role.
"Offmeta" in League just translates to "suboptimal meta", rather than Dota where "offmeta" literally is offmeta because it stands in opposition to the meta strategy. For example, this year's The International's Main Event saw a good percentage of every hero get picked or banned; 19 heroes were not picked or banned out of 115, with 3 of them just plain not allowed in competitive play. League's World Championships saw 79 champions picked or banned out of 134, with the vast majority of roles seeing at most 5 main picks in that role (defined as their total play constituting 50% of the total picks in that role), and the main picks all overlap in terms of what they're trying to accomplish within their role. This points towards a very specific meta in League compared to Dota.
It's too hard to not adhere to the meta in League because the number of bans is complete ass. You get 5 bans per team in competitive League, you get 6 per team in Dota. 12 champions out of 115 are gone compared to 10 out of 135. You're going to see more variance and true offmeta in Dota because of this, because you can actually effectively force an offmeta game to happen through a combination of picks and bans and the hard counters available in Dota. You can't force a team to not play the meta in League because of how nonrestrictive the bans are, and how there's no true hard counter in League. As such, there's no room for true "offmeta" picks because everything in League is structured around the dominant team meta, and there's not enough tools to force a game's pick and bans to not adhere to this dominant meta.