If you've played FPS games, you know KDA allows you to evaluate if a player is good or not. It's pretty easy, if someone has a KDA of over 2, you can assume he is a decent player. Quick update on what the KDA is, which you probably know already, it's the kill/death/assist ratio of a player, it's calculated by adding up your average kills and assists, and dividing it by your average amount of deaths. For instance, if i'm sitting on a 4-3-7, 4 kills 3 deaths and 7 assists, it means my KDA equals
(4+7)/3 = 3,6, that would mean I have a 3,6 KDA in this game.
I've looked up overall stats of pretty much every champ and taken a sample out of all of them from champion.gg. What we can see there is that most champs have a KDA averaging between 2 and 2.5. There might be some discrepancies here and there, but I think I got it. Roles don't really matter, as assists balance out the lack of kills in roles like support and top for instance.
So, here we are, on average, no matter the role (regardless of the actual amount of kills and assists), a player has an average KDA of between 2 and 2,5.
Yet, when you look at pro players like UZI or Rekkles, mostly ADC players, they often rack up insane KDAs, sometimes over 30. Does that mean they are that much better than everyone else?
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| Okay, Jankos isn't an ADC but I like his face |
I would be inclined to say that KDA is pretty much irrelevant in Pro play, especially on teams that are dominating a league. Since they win every game, they don't die a lot, sometimes they do not die on a champ over the course of a split (looking at you doublelift). Since they win a lot of games, they just stack assists and kills without dying, leading to insane KDA. So, to me, KDA in pro play indeed shows how much better they are than everyone else, yet, a player from an average team can still have a pretty impressive KDA even if his performances are weak and his impact low. Shoutcasters tend to look at damage dealt and kill participation to see if a player has an impact on games, so should we, soloQ players, do the same?
Is SoloQ another story?
In soloQ, if you die a lot, then it might mean that you are not playing properly and therefore, your KDA would show that you are indeed, pretty bad. Yet, there is always a bigger picture, and a bad KDA could just be due to your playstyle or picks. Dying is rarely a positive thing, but some champs are kind of supposed to die in even fights to allow their carries to do their damages.
So here we are, getting to the bottom of the issue. If you are a tank, or enabling support, you probably won't have an insane kda, as almost every fight causes your death but eventually leads to a win.
We could be considering then that KDA is a factor if you are playing carry roles like adc or mid, or carry toplaners and junglers. As soon as you're playing a carry, you should be dying less, as a dead carry is a carry that won't deal damages.
Rengar and other bursters are another story, as they quite often trade one for one, even if good rengars always find a way to get out of sticky situations.
Yet, a carry that doesn't take risks and ends up with a good KDA, but didn't do his part of the job can be considered bad, and that won't be shown by his ratio. That's when looking at the Kill participation and winrate come into the picture.
Conclusion
I would be tempted to say that someone that has over 7 deaths a game on average, and a kda lower than 2 is bad, and I would probably be right. If you die a lot, you give the ennemy team gold, and more chances to come back. Yet if you also have a lot of kills and assists, it will be balanced out.
So in the end, the KDA is an okay indicator, but it has to be looked at with care. What if someone has a 1.2 KDA, but a 70% winrate, can we really say that this player is bad? No, definitely not. Same if this player has a great kill participation every game (over 60%)
Yet, in all fairness, from my personal experiences, players that have bad KDAs tend to play to aggressively, and lack map awareness. They aren't mechanically weak, they just get caught out a lot, and this costs them many games, and they can get snowballed really hard.
KDA is useful, just don't throw it around like if it was the stick of truth about whether a player is decent or garbage !
As usual, a big thanks for reading me, and don't hesitate to check my other stuff out !
Tisba, out
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