Even the top stars in the world are not immune to mistakes, and when reflecting on them, surely the person who made the error just wants to “sink into the ground”. Even Faker has accidentally bought the wrong item, and SofM and Score – two of the top junglers in the world – have occasionally missed their Smite, but a mistake as severe as forgetting to bring Smite like the young talent Wei from eStar is truly… speechless.
Specifically, during the group stage of the LPL Summer 2020, in the match between eStar and Bilibili Gaming, the 17-year-old jungler from ES made a blunder when he forgot to switch his summoner spell from Ignite to Smite in the first game, resulting in eStar entering the match without any theoretical jungler.
Although they were “handicapped” without Smite, Wei was still able to maintain relatively balanced stats against l3est16 from Bilibili due to Graves’ strong jungle clearing capability. eStar even took advantage of their map control to secure 2 Wind Dragons when BLG showed no signs of moving down to the bottom half of the map.
However, everyone understands the importance of Smite. Other positions can be flexible in choosing summoner spells, but the jungler must take Smite to control major objectives. The consequence of forgetting to bring Smite left eStar extremely passive in contesting major objectives, particularly Baron, and as the game progressed, the situation spiraled out of their control as Bilibili easily secured objectives and snowballed the game.
The final result of this Bo3 match left the rookie team of LPL in the 2020 season with even more regret, as they had a strong comeback in Game 2 but ultimately still lost narrowly with a score of 1-2.
Looking back at the first game, many have affirmed that if Wei hadn’t forgotten Smite at home, ES might have had numerous opportunities to win, considering even a Graves with Ignite had a higher farm score than the opposing jungler.