Trymbi wants to prove he’s more than just Rogue’s fifth player

It was a surprising weekend for Rogue, as the previously undefeated squad dropped two games in Week 4 of the LEC. We caught up with support Trymbi after their defeat against Astralis, to discuss the team’s plans to bounce back and his own goals for 2022. 

In League of Legends, nobody’s infallible. Going an entire split without a single defeat is almost unheard of, even for some of the best teams in the world.

The nature of the game means that skill isn’t always the deciding factor in victory, and sometimes, the ‘better’ team will lose based on draft differences, a moment’s poor decision-making, or any number of minute factors that can’t be controlled.

But that didn’t make it any less shocking when a 9-0 Rogue dropped a game to an 0-9 Astralis in Week 4 of the LEC.

Understanding the loss to Astralis

Support Adrian ‘Trymbi’ Trybus described the loss as “a f**kup”, and explained how a single mistake by Rogue during an early red buff invade into bot lane dive turned the game on its head.

“The game went pretty much to sh*t,” he explained, “and obviously it was still winnable, but we really needed to be creative in the way we played and we couldn’t find the skirmishes we wanted.” The game was a far cry from the dominance Rogue had displayed earlier this season, and they only managed to secure a single tower against one of the weakest teams in the league.

The loss to Astralis ruined Rogue’s chances of the elusive 18-0 record. They hadn’t dropped a game in 2022, and many thought they had the potential to become the second-ever EU team to achieve the illustrious 100% regular-season win rate.

Trymbi himself even believed in the team’s potential. “I really believed in us getting the 18-0, even though it’s something you can only really dream of,” he admitted. “I think it was really doable, and it sucks that it happened, but I still think we lost the game on our terms and we can learn a lot from it. It’s not the kind of game where we just int it and move on.”

Where do Rogue go from here?

It was a rough week for Rogue. Not only did they lose to Astralis, but they also lost their matchup versus Misfits Gaming the following day. It’s the first 0-2 weekend the org has had since Spring 2020, and it’s a hard loss to take even if it offers the team a valuable opportunity for improvement.

“There’s always something missing, even if you’re technically the best team in your league,” explained Trymbi, “and you can’t let the result-based thinking get to you and think, ‘Oh, we’re 9-0, so there’s nothing really to improve’”.

According to Trymbi, everyone on Rogue understood that there were improvements to be made even before the 0-2 weekend. The losses “refreshed” the team’s mentality and are helping them to stick to the grind despite their secure position at the top of the LEC standings.

The ‘fifth wheel’ of one of Europe’s best rosters

This 0-2 weekend was just a bump in the road for Rogue. And for Trymbi, whose own personal goals for 2022 weren’t focused around an 18-0 record.

“I want to showcase that Rogue’s bot lane from last year wasn’t just about Hans sama” he said. “Obviously, I loved working with him, but it wasn’t great to see all the messages about how good we was. He deserved all the credit he got, but it was pretty miserable for me, seeing that everyone thought I was just the team’s fifth wheel.”

Support is a role where it can be difficult to gain recognition on an individual level. Support players rely heavily on their team to provide damage, which they facilitate with either healing or crowd control depending on the champion.

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There are a few support players who are able to stand out amongst their teammates, and Trymbi references Fnatic’s Zdravets ‘Hylissang’ Galabov as a player who shines in this role.

“It’s not that easy to showcase what you’re doing and how good you are if you’re not playing an engage support, like Hylissang does with Rakan,” he said. “Everyone just knows how good he is with that champion.”

Building a legacy, one win at a time

Trymbi recounted how the community doubted him in his opening split, and explained that he understood that those doubts were still there, even after the team’s consistently high performance: “Obviously there’s still doubt. Honestly, I haven’t won much, it’s just nine zero, just nine best of ones like everyone says. That’s just the regular season, it doesn’t matter.”

His eyes look into the future, and to the playoffs, where Rogue will once again need to prove they’re more than just a regular season team.

“I don’t want to be remembered as the player that was just chilling in the regular season and couldn’t deliver in the playoffs,” he said. “I want to be remembered as a player who played good League of Legends, and a player that people enjoyed watching.”

The criticism of being unenjoyable to watch is one that’s been leveled at Rogue multiple times in their LEC history. Their gameplay throughout 2021 spawned the meme of ‘Rogue time’, where Rogue would fail to capitalize on a strong early-game lead and stall out games in a way that many viewers found uninspiring and dull.

So far in 2022, they’ve managed to evade the ‘Rogue time’ criticisms, and Trymbi admitted how “refreshing” it was to see “people actually enjoying our gameplay compared to last year, when there was a lot of hate”.

But they’re not out of the woods just yet when it comes to community skepticism. There is still very much a perception surrounding Rogue that they’re a regular season team that crumble at the first sign of a best-of-five. Nobody knows this better than Trymbi.

“This year, it has felt really nice, the way that people actually started to believe in us,” he said. “But I can’t be satisfied enough with that. I just need to keep improving.”