Teamfight Manager – Player Traits Guide
There are, as you’ll know or quickly learn, various traits that players can have when recruited. In a lot of cases, these traits are functionally irrelevant once you get into the later stages – a small stat boost until the first kill amounts to virtually nothing in the grand scheme of a game – but there are certain ones to keep an eye out for, for better or worse:
Player Traits
Despise Weakness / Collaboration Attack
These traits both tend to look great on paper but are traps. They force specific targeting – the former targeting enemies that have recently been attacked, the latter the lowest health enemy. The issue is that these players are entirely single-minded about their desired targets, to the extent of being complete morons about it.
Yes, it’s a nice thought to give your Despise Weakness player a Ninja so he can go off and one-shot the Priestess. That’s cool. The trouble is, he was going to do that anyway – all you really did was ensure that at some point during the fight, he’s going to lose interest in beating on the healer because the enemy Shield Bearer finally went down to 10% health, so now he’s haring off across the battlefield to go poke her armored buttocks.
Far more importantly, however, these traits force you into specific comps. If one of your players has Despise Weakness, you can essentially never run a comp that doesn’t include an assassin because trying to have that player run a long-range damage dealer simply ensures that they’ll faceplant the melee and die repeatedly. Similarly, Collaboration Attack locks you out of using assassins entirely and can also result in your frontline abandoning their post to go chase a Devil around the map.
But let’s say you’re stuck with these players for a while, for one reason or another. How do you cope? There are two ways, really, aside from simply picking the appropriate comps for them and letting them have their way. The first is to put them on a Priestess – thanks to her not having a basic attack, she prevents them from doing anything stupid. The second, much more long-term-viable method is to keep them on the bench in favor of another player and bring them out periodically when you want to run the comp they work in. It’s not as much of a problem to be forced into running assassins if you’re only forced in that direction every other game, after all.
Coward / Competitive
Broadly the same as Despise Weakness / Collaboration Attack above, cowards run away unless they have a buddy to hold their hand, while competitive players will chase whoever’s lived for the longest time. Unlike the above, there is no real functional use-case for these players; avoid them at all costs.
Gale / Thorn / News of Victory / Smell of Blood / Quick Cast / Clutch Hitter / Piercing Spear
These are all fairly generic, positive-only traits that you should look for in recruits wherever possible. There are small champion-specific benefits to them – Quick Cast is worthless on Berserker, for example, while News of Victory and Smell of Blood are nice for Ghost players – but overall, the effect is fairly minimal either way. Nice to have, but don’t go out of your way to get them.
Relief Pitcher
I’ve seen some confusion over this trait, so let me quickly explain – if you start a match with a player with this trait in your team, they get worse. If you bring them in later – i.e., they don’t play set 1 but play a subsequent set – they get stronger. Something of a no-brainer, then, to keep them on the bench until you need them.
Various moral traits
These can vary from good to bad, but aside from Pessimist (which should be avoided), they can all generally be ignored.
