League of Legends (Old)

[hitogoroshi]

Also tried LoL once, interface is just vastly inferior to that of WC3.

Hooba-jooba-wha??

I'm not here to argue which games is better (I prefer LoL, but balancewise it's in a pretty shitty place) but saying that the hacked in shitty rts interface is better is just stupid and dumb. LoL's interface is miles above DotA, because it was

actually designed for the game

. Maybe you're more used to DotA's, but in terms of objective usability, it's LoL hands down. You don't need to select your hero to use abilities, for a fuckin start.

[hitogoroshi]

Yeah all of the team arena games seem to attract bad players like flies.

FWIW, I absolutely LOVE a good Taric on my team. Aura-hog Taric along with a true tank means that the rest of your team can be three squishy carries and still be totally safe.

[hitogoroshi]

Point is, you can't micro said clones. Auto-target is for nubs.

Uhh, you can. He said that. Just shift + right click.

[hitogoroshi]

Many players who complain that they believe they are getting more bad teammates than random chances would dictate are the same ones who lash out at their teammates for doing poorly. Matchmaking isn't singling them out and systematically dealing them bad teammates, but rather they are being given a normal mix of good and mediocre players, and then they berate the latter group until it's a mix of good and terrible players. I actually have an RL friend that I've seen doing this, I could look at his last ten games and see him having excellent scores in all of them but only winning half of them or less than that, and then play a duo queue game with him and watch him flame his teammates whenever they die in the laning phase.

This is really, really true.

[hitogoroshi]

spoiler alert: play pantheon mid, snowball for great justice

[hitogoroshi]

Yeah, Panth is one of the rare heroes for whom exiting the laning phase 3-0-0 is

losing.

HSS gives him a 1v1 edge on Ashe (though she has more utility), but Trynd at 45 will wreck Panth. (To be fair, Trynd at 45 will wreck everyone.)

[hitogoroshi]

There are few better feelings in LoL than the simple feeling of

being poppy

. It's like, your team can be 1-14, you can have lost every lane and you can still just say "ok, you die now." Being poppy roughly consists of picking out the twisted fate and making his life as miserable as possible. RAWR SO FEERS!

As I call it, "slaking my unquenchable thirst for kneecap." Poppy is loads of fun, though she's so difficult to play I've let her fall by the wayside. Probably I should play the five or so games I need to get back in the groove, but I'm this...goddamn...close to being 100 wins over losses and I want to hit that for ego rights first (since I suspect my first few poppy games will be hilarious losses).

[hitogoroshi]

Basically there are two ways to build poppy, either the gimmick AP (relying on the fact that the DI 20/30/40% amp applies to the DFG nuke) or the CDR hybrid kinda ad/kinda tank sheen rushing bonkmaster. At least so it was when I actually had some skill with Poppy.

[hitogoroshi]

DFG Poppy is def. the burstier of the two. Hybrid AD/tank/CDR is more sustained, but yeah, generally when you're drafting a Poppy you're taking her as a bursty anti-carry.

[hitogoroshi]

Here's a livestream video of mine!

Apologies for me laughing at my own jokes/repeating myself. It's a tic that pops up if I'm not careful to reign it in.

[hitogoroshi]

She's certainly the easiest, though.

Before season one, riots pricing strategy was four tiers of price, dictated by ease of play.

Post season one, the pricing strategy became "never ever have the two lower tiers ever again", and mostly just repeating 6300 - 6300 - 3150 - 6300 - 6300 - 3150.

[hitogoroshi]

Okay. 499 wins, 400 losses. Will I get the epic screenshot? All comes down to this next gaaaaame

[hitogoroshi]

Button is mostly right. However, it's okay to buy Tier 1 runes, because they are so absurdly cheap. They will have very little impact on your games, but more than none, so why not? Tier 2 runes are the garbage runes you want to avoid at all costs.

So yeah, get ONE Tier One runebook just for shits. Arpen/Mpen reds, MPregen/level or armor yellows, CDR or MR blues, HP quints, depending on your main.

Speaking of main - if you find one free hero you really enjoy, go ahead and buy them. If you're worried you're buying a "bad" champion, ask us in this thread. Because non-tanks tend to not buy resistance items in low-level games, you can pretty much play whoever you want (that is, a team of five casters dosen't do all that poorly in a low-level game). A lot of LoL is so similar for every champion that it's good to learn last hit with one characters timers over and over. Any non-jungler should work, though I'd also reccomend a non-tank for your first purchase.

So, buy one champion you really enjoy and play them semi-exclusively (playing other free champs as they come, obviously), get ONE Tier 1 runepage, and then save for Tier 3 runes.

Also, if you enjoy LoL, the Collectors Edition is worth the money. $20 for 20 champions, $10 of Riot Points, a few Tier 2.5 runes, and a Kayle Skin. I have a lot of criticism for Riot's business model, but the Collectors Edition is legitimately a great deal, and the twenty "base" heroes are a very healthy core to build upon.

P.edit: Jungling is difficult without a full Tier 3 runebook. and even if you can do it you'll be pretty slow. I'd advise against it.

[hitogoroshi]

Garen is a good choice if you're enjoying him. He's not in the core 20 if you choose to buy the Collectors Edition, and he's ridiculously non-farm dependent, so you're less likely to get in the spiral of "sucking so hard I can't do anything".

bite sized garen guide:

skill priority R > E > Q > W, with one rank in W at four

Items: Doran's Shield, Boots, Mercurys Treads, Sunfire Cape, Aegis of the Legion if no one else got it, reactive tank items to counter whatever they're doing.

You're a disruptor off-tank. You have a spammable silence (!) a physical AoE that you can combine with the Sunfire Cape magical AoE (!!) and an execution ult (!!!). So you don't want to build straight damage - you want to be a tank that they can't break down, so you can just wade in silencing, doing AoE damage, and generally making a mess of things.

[hitogoroshi]

Really, KoC? I was under the impression Amumu's jungle turned to shit after the jungle buffs, and even with Tier 3 runes it's still a marginal thing. Shows what I know...

[hitogoroshi]

I'm down for skype LoL-ing. Pops and I used to do it waaay back when - like, back in the days when Gate was a level 1 spell and we could all be cheap as fuck with teleport.

[hitogoroshi]

1. They aren't even summoner level 30. Entirely different game, ELO aside.
2. They're much lower ELO. The difference in ability between a 500 and 800 player is massive because they are working on BASIC estimates of fight outcomes and FUNDAMENTAL strategy. The difference between a 1500 and 1800 player is not as large.

3. 3/21 is waaay worse the 7/15.

Once the gulf had widened, dying without killing was probably close to inevitable once you walked past your tower. That puts the tank score in a different context.
4. Statwhoring is bad, all stats need to be taken in context. An 0/3/0 player

probably

played poorly, but that's not necessarily true. Teammates can totally let you down, you can tank for kills that you never tagged for an assist (happens a lot to me as Annie, apparently after Tibbers stuns you, Annie taunts you for 5 seconds.). You can die shortly after backdooring a key tower. The list goes on.

Well, at least you acknowledge you kinda suck. That said, if you're not 30, okay, fair enough, still learning. My bad.

Cyber - choke on a million dicks.

Note the "they". Pops has over 1000 games played; he wasn't in that game. But scumchat as a whole picked up LoL like, less than two weeks ago.

[hitogoroshi]

I'd love to join in the skype fun when I'm not so busy. I've basicially given up competitive LoL (Bloodline Champions is a lot more of an e-sport; more satisfying for me perosnally) but I still have a lot of info shoved in my head from when I was a tryhard.

[hitogoroshi]

did you run midwick, the superior warwick?

[hitogoroshi]

best build on vlad is Dorans Shield + Sorc Shoes + Guise then as appropriate from the pool of (Veil, Sunfire, Rabadons, Abyssal, Rylai's)

also I'll have to agree with ot that LoL, while fun, is a kinda sub-par esport (at least when compared to SC2/BLC/Quake/etc)

[hitogoroshi]

oh thank christ annie changes

I love her, but I could just never justify playing annie over vlad/swain/etc.

also this buffs my annie playstyle more than others so wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[hitogoroshi]

[hitogoroshi]

not my original work, ftr. Dunno the author. But it's a good guide.

I remember watching some tournament, wcg I think, where bigfatjiji managed to pull his team out of a losing slump by being boss as fuck with kennen and abusing zhonya's (this was before the hourglass/deathcap split). Good fucking times.

[hitogoroshi]

i plan on playing as much as i can this week while i'm on vacation in order to both get level 30 and push myself to play better as a whole in hopes of eventually play ranked successfully

hit me up (ahallucinogenic both on AIM and on LoL) if you're interested in joining me, keep in mind i'll probably be streaming as much of it as i can

I could go super serious business mode and try to work with you, if you like.

I'm actually gonna play in a tournament soon (we're not taking it too seriously because I still hate high-level competitve LoL, but I'm the kind of person that ALWAYS takes tournaments at least kind of seriously) so I kinda feel like pushing myself too, and getting my mains fired up instead of "well time to run the superior warwick"

also I have a headset again so (>_>)b

[hitogoroshi]

Yeah. The focus is more on zoning than denying. Many people (myself included) think it's a good change.

[hitogoroshi]

hito's wrong. Annie buff was ridiculous. Not ridiculous in that it made her a much much better character, but ridiculous in that a top tier character was buffed and appreciable amount.

Annie hadn't been top tier for a while. There's been power creep in AP town. (Leblanc says hi)

Now Annie is awesome again~

[hitogoroshi]

Prepping for a tournament. I haven't missed competitive LoL at all, but man I forgot how fun it is to plan a team comp and work with it.

Check it:

Amumu/Malphite Jungle
Annie Solo Top
Caitlyn/Ashe mid
Jarvan and Malzahar bottom

That team. So great. With the jungletank ult (Unsstoppable Force and Sad Mummy are both awesome), Jarvan ult, malzahar ult, annie stun, and possible ashe arrow - wow.

[hitogoroshi]

Slashes are variable members. Note the "and" for a two-person lane.

Technically, we all have "seconds" we're ready to play if they're banned or picked. But those two are people who are willing to switch depending on enemy comp, whereas Annie/Malz/Jarvan are really only switching if they're banned or picked.

[hitogoroshi]

Blitzcrank is in the same category as Anivia - pair with any hard CC = death.

[hitogoroshi]

Just finished my duo lane guide for Nasus and Soraka. View it here.

[hitogoroshi]

Yeah. The video was shitty though because I was tired and continually muttered under my breath.

Also there's been some rune/mastery tinkering between then and here.

[hitogoroshi]

Here is a general guide to runes. Once you're level 20, these are the ones to get immediately (they aren't the ONLY good runes, but they're the ones you should have before getting others, unless you have a gimmicky main that wants a different page)

Marks:

Armor Penetration
Magic Penetration
Attack Speed (Junglers)

Seals:

Mana Regen/Level (flat mana regen is a scam)
Armor

Glyphs:

CDR (flat beats out scaling for most champs, though ultbots may think differently)
Scaling AP
Magic Resistance (scaling and flat are both good...depends how you like it)

Quintessences:

Flat HP
Flat AP
Armor Penetration
Attack Speed (Junglers)

Start by picking the type from each category that benefits your main(s) the most. Get one from each for a full page. Then, look in to getting other sets (generally marks are the first you want two sets of - armor pen and magic pen.)

So, Kiwi, your page looks pretty good. Though if you're building a character with good ratios I'd recommend AP quints over HP quints. The days of HP quints being blatantly overpowered are long over.

[hitogoroshi]

or doran stacking in "early" lanes to push your advantage as far as possible.

Eh? I always thought Dorans stacking was for a lane-dependent champ losing or holding neutral in their lane. If you're winning an early lane, it seems like rushing your core (at least the damaging parts) is the best way to keep snowballing...

[hitogoroshi]

I could be biased because I tend to have very aggressive cores.

For example, if I'm Corki, I don't get another Doran's Blade, I rush a Brutalizer. It's probably more power than the +30 dmg I'd get from three dorans blades, all in one handy slot.

[hitogoroshi]

BTW hito, why do you get a brutaliser on Corki? I can see the synergy with his gatling gun, but with just gatling gun and and arpen you'll be penetrating anything that has no armour built. Or if you want more pen, then you get more from a black cleaver. But arpen isn't that great on corki anyway, as half his abilities (and most especially his ult) do magic damage, so you're not getting that much out of it compared to on someone like xin zhao. I prefer sheen - early game burst, he needs the mana and he loves the eventual triforce. He doesnt mind the ap too much either - his ratios are not good, but the stats are not wasted. He's one of the few who likes every stat on a triforce including the movespeed. And if you're getting triforce, why not get sheen over brutaliser as your midgame item?

Triforce will make you do more damage strictly on auto-attack, but Corki's main damage things are Gatling Gun, which does physical damage and scales off of your true AD, and Missile Barrage, which does physical damage and scales off of AD. Triforce is a lot of money to spend not making the number on Gatling Gun any bigger.

[hitogoroshi]

Not sure we could run a 5v5 tourney - do we have 20 people who play?

We could do *one* game with two captains drafting people from this thread, I suppose...

[hitogoroshi]

I'm interested in a partner for my grind up the elo ladder.

You MUST play either 2x ranged right click or 2x hard tank (with peels). You and I are going to put the team on our backs and drag them along, kicking and screaming. You should be able to type out directions without losing too much game time (no complete sentences while pausing in bushes for 5 full seconds, plz). You MUST have a microphone and be willing to talk to me. You MUST make mistakes once or thrice, but never again (or try, anyway).

Hit me up with your LoL name and approximate playtime windows.

Why the requiring double for two archetypes and no mention of others? When you duo queue, one player gets first pick and the other gets last pick.

A better duo queue distribution is, "You must have 2x strong solo tops (One AD, one AP), and 2x strong junglers." That's the best way to work duo queue. And to a first approximation all junglers tank, so it gets your team a hard carry and a fatty running around the map dropping map awareness like candy.

[hitogoroshi]

I think Flash needs one of these changes:

• Doesn't go through walls
  
• Cannot be used for 3s after you take damage
  
• Must be targeted onto a champion

I think it's annoying, overpowered, and unfun as an escape. I think that it's right where it needs to be as a gap-closer. A more aggressive Flash would stay in use for characters who need it (the Alistars of the world) but it would no longer be the "get out of anything bad ever free" card that gives it its current ubiquity.

[hitogoroshi]

The "it helps you farm" thing is clearly bunkum.

No it's not.

The more burst on Siphon, the greater the health of minions that can still be one-shotted, the

more likely

you are to get a siphon last-hit the instant it's up.

Hitting the caster point (the point where a Sheen Q can one-shot a full health caster minion) speeds up your farm immensely. Go play a Nasus game and notice the speed upgrade.

Also, I don't know where you're getting the idea that it's an unusual situation that you can q something without getting an auto-attack. That happens pretty frequently.

[hitogoroshi]

Heh. Zom was actually one of my teammates in the Reddit tournament. Funny coincidence.

EDIT: Nuwen deleted her post and now I look crazy

[hitogoroshi]

If you're really aggressive, there are two kinds of champions to look in to. One are the ridiculously durable sustained damage dealers, like Mordekaiser or Garen, who might not secure kills as often but won't be punished for being alone as often either. (An actual quote from a game as Morde: "Yeah I'm just gonna start fighting, you guys show up whenever"). The other option is to play a "madness" character who relies on insane aggression and burst, like Leblanc or Pantheon. But you'll feed a lot with those until your positioning becomes good another to sustain your madness.

So my advice is to start with fat sustained, and you can gradually shift to squishier, more bursty champions as your map awareness and positioning improve.

[hitogoroshi]

Zito: Janna is a great introduction to supports. Veigar is a nice two-for-one in that he'll help you work on being a caster AND last-hitting. Mordekaiser is just great fun, fat guy who wins his lane. I'd stay away from a true tank for now since tanking requires a lot of game knowledge to do right.

[hitogoroshi]

I've rediscovered my intense love of Shen. WHY DID I STOP PLAYING YOU BABY.

Now, do I get Dr. Shen or Blood Moon...? :O

[hitogoroshi]

shotty, you play an awful twitch <_<;

There hasn't been any such thing as a "good twitch" in a long time = (

dan dinh plays a p good roaming twitch.

Bleeeehhhh, riot has now taken every stealthy and just bent them over their knee, and decided to visciously sodomize them in the most painful manner possible.
Twitch is a piece of shit who just kinda gets rolled as soon as he pops out, and he just doesn't have enough damage output to justify it
to be fair I haven't played new eve, but without that stun she seems alot less scary
shaco... well I mean he's shaco. I wouldn't say he's as bad as the other two, but he's not in a good place right now imo.

Maybe it was just because I was taught at a very early time in my LoL career, that if I see twitch, he needs to die, but it's just too easy to kill him, even when he has friends. I mean, think about how many twitch ganks happen, where the twitch still dies (and half the time the gankee gets away due to flash).

Twitch is still workable because of his ult, but he relies very little on the stealth and requires insane positioning. He might actually be the most positioning-dependent champ in the game (and I say this as a Corki player). And Cleanse. Rat needs his Cleanse.

But yes, you need 200 wins minimum to have the kind of positioning skill it takes to play a proper Twitch.

Eve is now basically nothing, I agree. Shaco is a buggy weirdo but will never be completely out just because of his insane versatility (one of the very few champs who can be built AD, AP, Tank, or Support and excel at all).

[hitogoroshi]

K/D proves extremely little about skill with anyone, because the worse you are, the worse your OPPONENTS are, the easier it is to get kills. K/D combined with Ranked Elo is important - in normals, skills are better shown with absolute measures.

If I had to pick some metrics for successful Twitch play...

• Wards destroyed (by either Oracles or Vision Wards - it doesn't count if someone else gave you vision)
  
• How accurately you followed Exhaust cooldowns (you should be asking teammates to type when Exhausts are burned)
  
• How little you were targeted by hard cc in teamfights. The idea is that Twitch shouldn't pop out into the fight until the team has soaked up the hard cc, and then he pops spray and pray at mid ranged to the SIDE of the fight.

The point is, K/D in normals, especially from sub-thirties, proves fuck all. I've carried with ad annie in low level games. Is that because ad annie is supremely powerful? No; it's because you can get away with a lot of stupid shit in low level normals. Like in that last game, Shotty's team has 9 bf sword items and 17 total ad related items - the opposing team has 2 total armor items, one of them Kat's starting Doran's Shield. Congrats on the win, but that doesn't prove Shotty is a good Twitch - it proves the opposing team are fucking morons. Shotty had NO boots in the last picture. That's fucking awful play. Not being punished for it only proves he's against people physically incapable of punishing. It's like covering yourself in honey and meat tenderizer, running through the forest, then coming back and saying "Hey, bears are no problem at all!" No - you just haven't found any yet, and I assure you where I'm at it's all fucking bears.

I realize it's kinda cruel to talk at a banned Shotty, but I always get peeved when players throw around their KDR like it means something without a ranked elo to back it up, and I feel bad for espeonage for having to relay the message.

On the note of objective criteria, if anyone sends me a replay, I'd be happy to look it over and critique.

[hitogoroshi]

Patch preview.

I like pretty much everything here.

[hitogoroshi]

Required watching.

[hitogoroshi]

There's apparently a stability issue involving Leona in some way. So they rolled out the balance changes but are waiting on some arcane signal before releasing Leona.

[hitogoroshi]

Best Yorick counter: TF and Ashe on the same team. See, it's not that you get

no

gold for killing a ghoul, it's that you get

zero

gold for killing a ghoul. Zero is a number. And you can add numbers to other numbers...

[hitogoroshi]

A lot of the right advice has already been said, but I'll take a stab at it too because I have some side comments:

Marks (Reds)

: IMO the worst designed runes. The fact is, you basicially just grab the penetration that'll help you more. Most of the reds are just awful. A jungler might grab attack speed, but it's not worth it for a laner since attack speed is a dirt cheap stat.

Seals (Yellows)

: If you have a mana bar, mana regen per level runes are AMAZING. Don't get flat mana regen runes - they cross over at

fourth

level. Garbage. Armor yellows are nearly required for junglers, and are good even just for laners who want some beef. Dodge runes are an acceptable replacement, but ONLY if you have the Nimbleness mastery. Having one without the other is silly, but the two of them combined can be pretty effective. If none of this interests you, CDR yellows are one of the very few out-optimal runes that are still worth taking (in my opinion, at least.)

Glyphs (Blues)

: Fuck I love blues. Blues are the perfect example of what all runes SHOULD be. There are lots of viable blues and it's down to your personal preference. Best of all, as Shanba rightly points out, blues matter little enough for your jungle that even junglers get in on the fun. CDR blues are awesome - I'd avoid scaling CDR, since the crossover isn't until 13. Scaling AP blues are also incredibly useful for AP characters. Don't get flat AP blues - crossover is 5.8, and most AP characters won't be ganking until ult anyway. Magic resist is really powerful, and the crossover level is smart enough (9.9) that both flavors are viable. Flat MR blues will give you a HUGE edge laning against a caster mid. Scaling MR blues are great for a tank worried about slot panic - resistance without clogging a slot is always cool.

Quintessences:

In the old days, HP quints were so dominant that there was no point having other quints. Those days are behind us now, and while health quints are still very powerful, there's room for others. Good replacements include flat AP(the best gold value per rune in the game), AD (but only if you're running 21 in offense), Magic Pen/Armor Pen...lot of room for personal preference. Really, take whatever quint you want. But start with HP because it's a great baseline.

So I'm level 20+ and ready to start this rune thing. What do I do?

You're going to start by picking your 'main' to rune for. Sure, you may play quite a few, but you want a character or set of characters in mind when you rune. Don't make your first a jungler - jungling requires you to be pretty good at reading the gamestate, and it's not a good first thing to rune for.

Then, it goes like this: (remember, when I say "buy a rune", I mean buy a full set of 3/9).

Step One: Buy flat HP quintessences. (Greater Quintessence of Fortitude)

They're no longer the best quints always and forever, but they're GOOD on everyone, which makes them great start quints. You'll be using them on multiple pages. Once you've got a more robust set of other colors, you can get other quints.

Step Two: If you have mana, get Mana regen/level runes. (Greater Seal of Clarity)

There was a GIANT nerf to mana regen yellows (and a buff to base mana to compensate.) Guess what? Mana regen yellows are still

fucking awesome

. If you don't have mana, you can wait on your seals for a while.

Step Three: Get the appropriate red: Either Magic Pen or Armor Pen. (Greater Mark of Insight/Greater Mark of Desolation)

Pretty self-explanatory.

Step Four: Get some nice Glyphs.

Glyphs are awesome, and there are lots of choices. If you use AP and have good ratios, get AP/level (Greater Glyph of Force). If you frequently solo mid/top and don't use AP, get flat Magic Resist (Greater Glyph of Warding). If you're a tank, get scaling Magic Resist (Greater Glyph of Shielding). If none of these things describe you well, go for CDR (Greater Glyph of Focus).

Step Five: If you didn't get Mana regen seals, get another seal.

If you run (or plan to run at 30) the nimbleness mastery, the Dodge seals (Greater Seal of Evasion) are best. Otherwise, pick either Armor (Greater Seal of Resilience) or CDR (Greater Seal of Focus.) Note that Focus seals are STRICTLY WORSE than Focus Glyphs - that's why you don't generally take out-optimal runes. But yellow CDR is still decent if Armor/Dodge/Mana Regen are all somehow not doing it for you.

Congrats! There's your first runepage. Now time to get a second one to expand your horizons...

Step Six: Get the red you didn't get in step 3.

Step Seven: Get Mana regen/level seals if you haven't already.

Step Eight: Get scaling AP blues if you haven't already.

And you should have two pages that look like this:

Page One: Armor Pen / mana if you need it, other seal if you don't / Choice Glpyhs / Flat HP quints

Page Two: Magic Pen / mana if you need it, other seal if you don't / scaling AP glyphs / Flat HP quints

From there, you're on your own, but this is a very good start for runes.

[hitogoroshi]

brasil tier list 2.0

[hitogoroshi]

Guinsoo talks about possible jungle remakes.

Probably a while before we'll see any of this. But it's a tantalizing thought.

[hitogoroshi]

Also important to note is that counter-jungling has gotten considerably more sophisticated. In the old days warwick was a free pass to 1400. Now enemies tend to be a lot more aggressive in your jungle. It's why I'm loving jungle Udyr so much - he has a quick and

safe

jungle. And it's why I shy away from jungle Amumu and Olaf in Ranked - too easy to counter-jungle those two.

[hitogoroshi]

Yeah, I think a lot of people here don't know the difference between AP Carry, Anti-Carry, Assassin. (Hint Veigar is not ALL FUCKING THREE.)

AP Carry: Carries are characters that work remarkably well with farm, and are the late-game damage dealers. They tend to be poor early game (there are some exceptions, like Corki and Vayne - but those also tend to have less of a farm advantage and rely on winning their lanes, making them more mongrel half-carries). AP Carries are simply the AP flavored versions of this. It's also worth knowing that AP carries tend to be more about levels than farm, which is why they go mid instead of duo bot. Thus, an AP Carry without heads tends to fall off lategame in a way AD carries do not...which is why you want both! AP carries rock midgame, AD carries rock lategame (if there is one at all).

Anti-Carry: Anti-carries are the characters who beat carries in lane. They have LESS of a farm advantage than true carries, but they also have significantly more lane presence. They need heads to be doing their job. Poppy, Pantheon, Leblanc, Urgot. Pick one person and fucking RUIN THEM. Don't play conservatively, because if there's a 0/0/0 Urgot with 1.5 times as much farm as the 0/0/0 Trist,

he's losing.

In teamfights, they keep shitting on the carry, just like they did in lane.

Assassin: A character who can roll on momentum and decimate an enemy team, but also one who tends to be incredibly fragile. The general rule of assassins is that they can't win a toe-to-toe fight without being fed, but they have an element of their kit that allows them to suddenly engage. Akali, Shaco, Kassadin. If one of these champions fights pretty much anyone equally farmed, tanks included, they're going to LOSE. But when that tank gets to half hp and burns all their cooldowns, the assassin can get in there and secure the kill, trying to snowball and get fed to the point they win 1v1s (which is when they become truly awful)

[hitogoroshi]

Gah, you don't realize how much of a time sink LoL is until you have other things to do. I always prefer LoL socially in the summer but when school starts I yearn for the short games of BLC...

[hitogoroshi]

One last bit of advice from me: NEVER get W at level 4. Go Q-E-Q-E R>Q>E>W while getting your first point in W at either level 8 or 13. Ezreal is at his strongest at level 4, and getting a point in W throws it all away. It's not even a useful skill in almost every circumstance until level 10+ either way, and even then it's not very useful.

Unless you're building AP Ez, in which case it's FABULOUS.

I'd recommend rushing IE or an early brutalizer on Corki.

[hitogoroshi]

I don't recommend changing that build even with AP Ezreal.

Umm, no offense, but have you ever won a game with AP Ezreal? I tend to find people who advocate Q focused AP Ezreal always follow up with "But don't play AP Ezreal, he's shitty" and never make the connection...

Focusing Q with AP Ezreal is silly. The AP ratio is nads. Focus W, and you've got godly early game harass, because W is strong, has a good ratio, a fat projectile, and can't be blocked by creeps.

A good AP Ez is something like WQWE, R>W>E>Q. There's no reason to focus Q with AP Ez; then you're basicially "AD Ezreal, but shittier."

[hitogoroshi]

Codex does mana, ap, cdr, all of which are wonderful on Ezreal. I usually go Dorans Ring, Sorc Boots, Codex as my core.

[hitogoroshi]

The only thing I miss is Innervating Locket. I used to be a good Udyr, now I don't even know how to build him

I don't do tiger, but here's my phoenix udyr guide that works quite well

aspd reds, armor yellows, scaling mr blues, movespeed quints. 1-14-15, smite and ghost.

open with a regrowth pendant + hp pot. take a point in phoenix, start at little wolves, kill them without smite (proc phoenix a second time when the waves stop.) smite the big wraith, take a point in turtle, use turtle and phoenix to kill wraiths. then use turtle/phoenix to kill little golems. this should make you go oom. It's okay! go b. you should be 3 - take another point of phoenix.

finish your philo stone. (you'll need to sell your pot to get it when you b. that's intended. you sell the pot most games, it's there if you're counterjungled / forced to hold super early / etc.) Then, do a full clear, starting with blue and ending with red. Take turtle at fourth and bear at fifth.

you should then be fifth level with move quints, red, and a level of bear stance. GANK CITY. from there, play it by ear as to whether you gank or jungle or w/e

Items: {Heart of Gold and basic boots}, {ninja tabi, merc treads, or swiftness as need dictates}, {wriggles lantern}. That's the core. then play it by ear (though randuins and sunfire are both excellent against physical).

[hitogoroshi]

I go cloth armor + 5 pots for Phoenixdyr and I can go through the entire jungle without any problems...

it's not like philo udyr is FORCED to back early. he backs early to get philo stone at 3:00 and have the magical money fairies start dusting him with golden sunshine as fast as possible.

besides, it might be a personal thing but I don't like ganking pre-five for udyr. obviously you could take bear sooner and try to gank sooner, but I like having 2phoenix/2turtle/1 bear before I go for ganks, even if they take a little longer. weak udyr is susceptible to "jungler shows up and feeds buffs" syndrome more than others imo.

[hitogoroshi]

People say that ELO Hell doesn't exist. Let me tell you a story.

I'm the tank. Their team is GP, Yi, TF, Wukong, Karma.

Karma is playing hard support and the rest of their team is playing AD. I have 405 Armor. I have a Randuins. We get into a teamfight. It goes 1 for 5. With me in the middle laying down CC and literally fucking up their team. My team saw the need to play man marking and focus a different champ each. I literally played a perfect game. I gave all the farm in my lane to our Cait. I got a heap of Gp5s so I stayed on the same farm. I saved people's asses. I built to the opponents. I gave the kills to the carries. I warded. (I was the only person warding) I did everything right but no matter how well you play a tank can't carry.

that's why you play a carry or a jungle if you feel you're below your true elo

[hitogoroshi]

Is Poppy broken?

please stop bragging about smurf games for fucks sake

[hitogoroshi]

Wonder if it'd be worth getting Philo on Riven even though she has no mana.

Come to think of it, if you want boots besides treads, an early philo into a midgame Miracle seems viable...

[hitogoroshi]

mundo is fucking glorious on dominion

[hitogoroshi]

I'm still a big believer that nunu could be an excellent mid.

I do this, and he is.

He falls off mid/lategame if they have a lot of hard CC (my favorite thing about normal draft is more nunu time <3) but his lane game is obscene.

[hitogoroshi]

Rune Page 1
Armor Pen Reds
Armor Yellow
Scaling MR Blue
Flat Attack Damage Quints

Rune Page 2
Magic Pen Reds
Scaling Mana Regen Yellow
Scaling Ability Power Quints
Movement Speed or Flat AP Quints (Or 2 Move, 1 Flat)

Pretty good setup for first two rune pages?

Page 2 is solid. Page one might be (with the flat AP quints and scaling blues), too, if you usually play bot lane carries with tame early games. If you're playing aggressive carries (Corki, Vayne) or bruisers doing a lot of early brawling, flat MR blues give you early lane dominance more than scaling. Think of how much early fighting you're doing and let that guide you. I know with my Corki page, I prefer the flat, but Corki also does more early brawling that most AD carries.

[hitogoroshi]

Rune Page 1
Armor Pen Reds
Armor Yellow
Scaling MR Blue
Flat Attack Damage Quints

Rune Page 2
Magic Pen Reds
Scaling Mana Regen Yellow
Scaling Ability Power Quints
Movement Speed or Flat AP Quints (Or 2 Move, 1 Flat)

Pretty good setup for first two rune pages?

Ehhhhhh. AD and AP runes are bad. You'd be better off with Armor Pen Quints for the first set and Magic Pen Quints for the second set. Other than that, looks good.

AD runes can help your last hitting game a lot early game, and many AD characters have abilities that scale with bonus AD. Sure, ArPen will make your l1 autos hurt more, but on Pantheon, say, I'm much better serviced by AD quints for Spear Shot/HSS.

Whether you want AP or MagiPen quints depends on your ratios. I think AP is better for casters (especially ones who will build Deathcap), while Magic Pen are better for people with poor ratios who still do magic damage, like Mundo/Shen/Morde.

[hitogoroshi]

Not to mention, if those are the only rune pages I build for awhile, the first one with the AD Quints will help out with jungling at least a little bit, right?

Actually, the "standard" jungle page is something like:

Aspd Reds
Armor Yellows
Choice Blues
Aspd Quints

But jungling isn't something to rush in to, imo. You need pretty solid gamestate analysis to jungle effectively.

[hitogoroshi]

can we all just stop bragging about smurf games please and thanking you

[hitogoroshi]

we should do a nuwen appreciation game in respect of her absence

izzy takes flash

I refrain from building guise on vlad

etc.

[hitogoroshi]

holy FUCK I am lovin Shaco

[hitogoroshi]

Let's play the make a champion game, that's always fun

pick a passive, 3 skills, and an ult to make a champ. the only rules are that the skill must be on the same button as it is on the original champ, and only one ability per chanmp

go here if you need a refresher

passive: ryzes arcane mastery (when you cast a spell, all other spells have 1 second reduced from their cooldowns)
q: veigar's baleful strike
w: sonas Aria of Perseverance (the power chord effect is wasted, but it's worth it)
e: sorakas infuse
r: morganas soul shackles

basically this guy can farm the q super fast (infuse stops him going oom, and casting w and e reduces the cooldown of q 2s), then use the sicknasty ratio on morg ult for :winning:

[hitogoroshi]

Also, I posted an idea on /r/leagueoflegends. Thoughts?

[hitogoroshi]

Annie build for winners:

Dorans Ring
{Boots, Ruby, Saphire}
Catalyst
Blasting Wand
Rod of Ages
Sorc Boots

Build reactively from there

[hitogoroshi]

Spy, I'll requote my rune guide I posted earlier:

A lot of the right advice has already been said, but I'll take a stab at it too because I have some side comments:

Marks (Reds)

: IMO the worst designed runes. The fact is, you basicially just grab the penetration that'll help you more. Most of the reds are just awful. A jungler might grab attack speed, but it's not worth it for a laner since attack speed is a dirt cheap stat.

Seals (Yellows)

: If you have a mana bar, mana regen per level runes are AMAZING. Don't get flat mana regen runes - they cross over at

fourth

level. Garbage. Armor yellows are nearly required for junglers, and are good even just for laners who want some beef. Dodge runes are an acceptable replacement, but ONLY if you have the Nimbleness mastery. Having one without the other is silly, but the two of them combined can be pretty effective. If none of this interests you, CDR yellows are one of the very few out-optimal runes that are still worth taking (in my opinion, at least.)

Glyphs (Blues)

: Fuck I love blues. Blues are the perfect example of what all runes SHOULD be. There are lots of viable blues and it's down to your personal preference. Best of all, as Shanba rightly points out, blues matter little enough for your jungle that even junglers get in on the fun. CDR blues are awesome - I'd avoid scaling CDR, since the crossover isn't until 13. Scaling AP blues are also incredibly useful for AP characters. Don't get flat AP blues - crossover is 5.8, and most AP characters won't be ganking until ult anyway. Magic resist is really powerful, and the crossover level is smart enough (9.9) that both flavors are viable. Flat MR blues will give you a HUGE edge laning against a caster mid. Scaling MR blues are great for a tank worried about slot panic - resistance without clogging a slot is always cool.

Quintessences:

In the old days, HP quints were so dominant that there was no point having other quints. Those days are behind us now, and while health quints are still very powerful, there's room for others. Good replacements include flat AP(the best gold value per rune in the game), AD (but only if you're running 21 in offense), Magic Pen/Armor Pen...lot of room for personal preference. Really, take whatever quint you want. But start with HP because it's a great baseline.

So I'm level 20+ and ready to start this rune thing. What do I do?

You're going to start by picking your 'main' to rune for. Sure, you may play quite a few, but you want a character or set of characters in mind when you rune. Don't make your first a jungler - jungling requires you to be pretty good at reading the gamestate, and it's not a good first thing to rune for.

Then, it goes like this: (remember, when I say "buy a rune", I mean buy a full set of 3/9).

Step One: Buy flat HP quintessences. (Greater Quintessence of Fortitude)

They're no longer the best quints always and forever, but they're GOOD on everyone, which makes them great start quints. You'll be using them on multiple pages. Once you've got a more robust set of other colors, you can get other quints.

Step Two: If you have mana, get Mana regen/level runes. (Greater Seal of Clarity)

There was a GIANT nerf to mana regen yellows (and a buff to base mana to compensate.) Guess what? Mana regen yellows are still

fucking awesome

. If you don't have mana, you can wait on your seals for a while.

Step Three: Get the appropriate red: Either Magic Pen or Armor Pen. (Greater Mark of Insight/Greater Mark of Desolation)

Pretty self-explanatory.

Step Four: Get some nice Glyphs.

Glyphs are awesome, and there are lots of choices. If you use AP and have good ratios, get AP/level (Greater Glyph of Force). If you frequently solo mid/top and don't use AP, get flat Magic Resist (Greater Glyph of Warding). If you're a tank, get scaling Magic Resist (Greater Glyph of Shielding). If none of these things describe you well, go for CDR (Greater Glyph of Focus).

Step Five: If you didn't get Mana regen seals, get another seal.

If you run (or plan to run at 30) the nimbleness mastery, the Dodge seals (Greater Seal of Evasion) are best. Otherwise, pick either Armor (Greater Seal of Resilience) or CDR (Greater Seal of Focus.) Note that Focus seals are STRICTLY WORSE than Focus Glyphs - that's why you don't generally take out-optimal runes. But yellow CDR is still decent if Armor/Dodge/Mana Regen are all somehow not doing it for you.

Congrats! There's your first runepage. Now time to get a second one to expand your horizons...

Step Six: Get the red you didn't get in step 3.

Step Seven: Get Mana regen/level seals if you haven't already.

Step Eight: Get scaling AP blues if you haven't already.

And you should have two pages that look like this:

Page One: Armor Pen / mana if you need it, other seal if you don't / Choice Glpyhs / Flat HP quints

Page Two: Magic Pen / mana if you need it, other seal if you don't / scaling AP glyphs / Flat HP quints

From there, you're on your own, but this is a very good start for runes.

[hitogoroshi]

Shotty, item order is a very important part of builds and something you should consider.

Think of these two Annie builds:

A.)
Blue Crystal
Red Crystal
Boots
Blasting Wand
Blasting Wand
Moonflair Spellblade
Sorcerers Shoes
Catalyst
Rod of Ages

B.)
Boots
Red Crystal
Blue Crystal
Catalyst
Blasting Wand
Rod of Ages
Sorcerers Shoes
Blasting Wand
Moonflair Spellblade

Both have exactly the same items, but B is MUCH better than A.

[hitogoroshi]

Grab some MR, and hope he itemizes poorly. I've seen so many games where people get fed, spend the gold poorly, and then suck. And on the other side, I've seen so many people try to prematurely surrender because "X is fed, it's over." Maybe if they do a good Void/Veil/Cap build, sure, but they might neglect magi pen or they might neglect resistance. Wait and see.

[hitogoroshi]

Shaco would be godmode for that. He can zone with boxes and then go over the wall in a pinch. Not to mention razors + hallucination.

Nunu is great to pocket the Consume; with no smites, that's probably what gets the dragon.

Come to think of it, you probably want 2 people that can dragon and 3 that can zone off the enemy. Something like blue buff anivia, rumble, ???, shaco, nunu.

How do they decide blue vs. purple? Blue has a HUGE edge in that mode.

[hitogoroshi]

OH MY GOD

A TASTEFUL MISS FORTUNE SKIN!

there are no words

[hitogoroshi]

I think he means tasteful as in Mafia MF... mafiascum <______<?

no I meant tasteful by riots super-misogynist standards

I mean yeah I wouldn't want my girlfriend to meet my mom dressed like that, but at least it's tastefully sexual instead of hilariously demeaning

Hito I'm in love with Vlad now

I require training (and yes I bought ze haunting guises)

mpen reds, dodge seals, scaling ap blues, ap quints

go 9-21-0. exhaust mastery, nimbleness, 3 ranks of ardor. so good.

I like Exhaust/Flash the most. If not having improved summoners bugs you, you could go Exhaust/Heal or Exhaust/Fortify but I can't say I'd recommend it. (In Dominion do Exhaust/Garrison).

QWQE (Or QEQW if you're certain you won't be ganked pre-4), R>Q>E>W

Dorans Shield, Boots, {Ruby Crystal, Amp. Tome, Sorc Boots}, Deathcap is your core

alternatively you can go hextech into WotA if you'd rather do shitty damage instead of good damage

from there it's reactive, generally survivability and rylais are good options though. remember AP gets you some health (that's why you can go guise into cap without being a squishy fucker, you get the HP on guise plus hp on all of the ap you're grabbing). Don't get void unless the priority targets are packing 100+ MR, in which case you'll want to sell your guise.


EQ rolls help you harass in lane. if they try to get sassy with you, REQWEQ is a giant sucker-punch with a lot of healing on it

don't be a moron about your tides stacks. you want to hang out at about 1 or 2 usually, go to 4 if you've got the health and you're ready to rock

[hitogoroshi]

Yay I was almost there!
I ran dodge on him already cause I don't have hp/level. I run one apen quint cause 50 apen with boots and guise is so sexy on screen...

But you're gonna need to sell me on this exhaust >_>
I ran 10/12/8 or somethin weird because I like xp mastery (since all other ap mids are bound to have it) and late tree defensive are meh. (But I can see ardor bein useful) I like ignite cause it helps kill things and is amplified by hemo, which let me ensure at least a double kill in team fights.

Ill try him without a hextech and see how that works though hmm.

eh if you're not finishing defense tree ignite's not so bad. but people with heals in their kit love exhaust because stalling for time is just that much better when you get a heal at the end of it. plus exhaust is just op in general. not to mention exhaust + pool make vlad just obscenely baity

as for blues, :shrug: cdr may very well be better. my vlad page is my general no mana caster page and I just have ap blues? come to think of it cdr is probably really good on EVERYONE without mana. I might switch that shit

[hitogoroshi]

so shanba what you're saying is that mf needs the best item

[hitogoroshi]

fate/shanba/jd/patrick/hito great justice team??

(nuwen sized hole in my heart :'()

[hitogoroshi]

Depends on how many people are allowed on the team.

Fwiw if people were curious as to our team, we have I'm So Meta Even This Acronym (ISMETA) with myself, JD, Shanba, Patrick, and Fate, and Izzy and Nuwen (I BURN THE BONES OF MY ENEMIES IN A PYRE CELEBRATING YOUR RETURN) as "subs" (tbh I'm anticipating myself being out of a job when Nuwen is back). I assume we'll do the ranked thing when the queues allow, for now we're testing out 3 major comps (and 1 troll comp {lol pool [lol delimiters]}) and finding the strengths and weaknesses of each.

[hitogoroshi]

yeah. protip if you just hit level 30, you are still not at all ready for ranked. so xp boosts are silly.

ip boosts can be good in rare supergrind circumstances

[hitogoroshi]

nope, signed up for one though so we'll see?

[hitogoroshi]

As it stand we're all gonna be in the bronze tier I think 0_0

Is there a third scummer team besides Instalock and ISMETA?

[hitogoroshi]

LOVING the new masteries. There's a lot of intelligence in the design. It's strategically head-and-shoulders above the previous incarnation. There's gonna be a lot more incomplete-tree builds, a lot less bland 9-0-21.

gonna do a complete redo on masteries and runes, quite excited tbh

[hitogoroshi]

I didn't see anything in the patch preview about dodge runes going away?

Dodge isn't. Nimbleness (the mastery where dodging gives you +10% ms for a few seconds) is going away, and for most characters that was pretty much one of the only reasons for dodge - I made sure to only ever take dodge runes in conjunction with my nimbleness page. So now I'm probably not having dodge at all, and a lot of people agree with me, I think.

I imagine they'll announce passive reworks for Jax, Sivir, Udyr, and then all at once say, "Dodge runes are being removed, people are being refunded, Tabi is getting reworked."

[hitogoroshi]

I got that idea from the LINK but the video pretty explicitly said it's this patch.

[hitogoroshi]

Yeah if 8% gave junglers lvl 2 after mini golems exactly wtf is this gonna do

they're going to buff exp gain from jungle by roughly the same ammount

blue or mini golems giving 2 and a full clear giving 4 should happen w/o masteries I believe it was said

[hitogoroshi]

Ezreal has Rising Spell Force.

[hitogoroshi]

thoughts on new things:

I think bruisers want 5-25-0 and HP quints

supports want at least 21 in utility - I think 1-1-28 is best honestly but JD favors a few points in defense. maybe I will start actually playing some supports and trying stuff out

offense masteries for AP are a *little* too good, I suspect a nerf soonish but in the meantime if you build ap there's no excuse not to get 21 offense. 21-0-9 for mana kids 21-9- 0 for no-mana kids

masteries fucking rule for jungling. 21-0-9 ad junglers, 0-21-9 tank junglers, and 9-11-10 aspd junglers are where I'm tentatively making my stand, but jungling is always champ dependent and subject to lots of non-obvious stuff. still though that last page - bladed armor, utility mastery, and the 10% arpen is a pretty winner combo to anyone who gets aspd and jungles with a wriggles

[hitogoroshi]

if you have archmage+hat yesyesyes

if you don't then it's case-by-case for them versus MR/CDR

[hitogoroshi]

Online now.

-edit- "One more solo queue can't hurt, he said."
Done. So done. AP Lee Sin jungle. In ranked. His excuse? "It worked against bots".
He had TWO WINS IN REAL GAMES. BOT GAMES ALL THE WAY TO 30.

Erm, that would be two ranked games you see in his profile after the ranked game :p

Man, ohh man kat free week is awesome food.

FTFY

High skillcap champions on free week are the best times to try to boost your LoL self-esteem.
They can feed anything, and I mean ANYTHING.

To be fair, it's more high skill *floor* champions than ceiling. Like Annie has a decently high skill ceiling but a low skill floor. etc

[hitogoroshi]

Amumu's jungle is getting weaker after the patch because he deals percentage damage which is comparatively worsened in the jungle after the changes.

yeah if only he had a spammable flat damage aoe D:

[hitogoroshi]

graphic is garbage

level six would be a little more pertinent but still pretty bad in terms of expressing who is more dangerous than who (the entire reason lb's early burst is so much more dangerous is because her leveled up q appears twice in her burst)

this pretty much has no useful information whatsoever, in the sense that comparing champions in this way is completely bonkers and pointless

[hitogoroshi]

one of shens big strengths is that he is versatile as all fuck with items. he's happy with pretty much anything so you can itemize sooo reactively

good shen opens are dorans shield against ad tops and mantle + pots against ap. boots pots is also an option in some matchups.

against AD, generally I'll get my boots, and then angle for boots 2 (still generally mercs on account of mercs rule, even against ad top) and aegis/SFC. aegis is super useful, but if you ever back with giants belt money, just get the giants belt. remember finishing sunfire is NOT a priority. you don't get sunfire cape because it's a good item, you get sunfire cape because giants belt and chain vest are both *amazing* items and SFC lets you stick them in the same slot. from there just kinda wing it - stuff like banshees, fon, rylais, etc.

against AP is really fun. aegis has a mantle in it too. so often times I'll open mantle + mantle + boots. you have NO IDEA how infuriating this is for ap tops. then finish the aegis and treads. from there, reactively, basically the same list as before.

there are also some nonstandard builds you can use to react to weird shit - atmogs shen is good if you have 3k your first back, sorc/guise shen makes your lane a MASSACRE when you need it to be (this hurts his teamfighting, so apply sparingly, but if you're in a "well, if top doesn't win, they don't have a chance" situation consider it), and occasionally you can go for the magical boots ruby ruby ruby belt belt build for winners.

oh also randuins is good sometimes and get a hog if you plan on doing it, I dunno I don't get randuins much but it's a good item and really I should

[hitogoroshi]

(my gameplan is treat the randoms like royalty, and we'll work around them in order to hopefully avoid the normal team morale problems) and not actively gimp ourselves.

(this is the best plan!)

[hitogoroshi]

on the bright side I think that might be a peek at crimson elite swain in the foreground so it's not a complete travesty

[hitogoroshi]

I can stream, I suppose I could also play but I haven't played League in a while and I will continue not playing it for a while cause my next week is gonna be awful

[hitogoroshi]

attack speed is the stat for tower killing and jungle basically

so barring specific onhit builds you only want to get AS runes on some junglers, since runing to kill towers is silly

[hitogoroshi]

Well Ill stick around to try out some of those items, inb4 hito and new guise. Fuckin movespeed. Gonna be goddamn core on Vlad and Morde and friends now.

yeah. the buff isn't quite as good as it seems because being able to slip in a ruby crystal sneaky-sneaky was a cool thing about guise. It's still really fucking baller mind you, but I wish it was still amp + ruby and just had movespeed :p.

For the record I do have DotA2. I'm not a big fan but I'd love to dick around in bot games and talk shop and see if maybe I'm just missing the point?

[hitogoroshi]

found the ponies dead even, put Brandi one ahead.

[hitogoroshi]

Ez Soraka rapes too. Endless Mana lets Ez do the poke and harass all by himself that he needs forever. Man have I pulled off some sexy kills with Ez soraka

it's even better when the ez is AP.

[hitogoroshi]

You kids should go get yourself learned about League's most underrated item

Although I'll add that he didn't touch on one of the biggest things, which is that an early ruby crystal is actually really awesome early on.

[hitogoroshi]

Alt-E is better than trying to click yourself; make sure you've got that down.

Remember as Morg you generally want to POWERPUSH - back off, or POWERPUSH - roam if you see a good opportunity. The usual rule of generally trying not to push don't really apply to Morg since she can just dump off creep and leave with minimal danger to herself.

[hitogoroshi]

It was done by M5 in a scrim vs TSM if I recall right, and now everyone is using it.

I bet AP ez will finally start hitting mainstream now that people are learning how fucking absurd his W is.

[hitogoroshi]

It's a competitive game. On the internet. I seriously doubt any one of us is completely innocent of trashtalk

(especially if the other team started it, in my case <.<)

Fun fact: for the other team, his team was the other team.

[hitogoroshi]

can we go back to theorycrafting posts and whining about the latest buffs/nerfs plskthx? it doesn't get people's panties in quite so large a wad and doesn't usually end in people calling each other names.

while we're at it can we say no endgame screenshots

that rule would make me so very happy

[hitogoroshi]

Janna is still insanely strong (note that some of her picks are as AP mid as well, so it's deceptive)

wait I haven't followed competitive lol in a while, this is a thing???

can my favorite champion go in more than one lane? :O

[hitogoroshi]

ugh. people stole the keys peg/reck/etc donated without leaving new ones. any chance someone can throw one my way?

[hitogoroshi]

Hito on smite.

[hitogoroshi]

Yeah. Brevity is etc.

[hitogoroshi]

aww shucks bv you're making me wanna run that again

[hitogoroshi]

Yorick/Zilean is

so fun

, you guys.

[hitogoroshi]

The changes are bad, the concept behind the changes they stated in the patch preview was good, but their choice to either lie in the patch preview or do a complete 180 was appallingly bad. After the changes Orianna is a weaker champion than before the changes, that's really all there is to say on the matter.


The changes are bad, the concept behind the changes they stated in the patch preview was good, but their choice to either lie in the patch preview or do a complete 180 was appallingly bad. After the changes Orianna is a weaker champion than before the changes, that's really all there is to say on the matter.

mathcrafters are saying that because they're not taking into account the global cooldown reduction which is a Big Deal

ori got buffed like unquestionably dude

[hitogoroshi]

suppose I should have said the quantitative utility of the gcd

it's less "dps" but dps is close to meaningless for ap mids

it's the difference between getting the ult off before the enemy flashes out and not. It's like a 22.5 frame advantage for every link of every combo. maybe it does less damage if your enemies are completely immobile and allowing you to roll your skills on cooldown, but that's not the environment mid is in. ori can now smartcast roll when she couldn't before, and that is terrifying

[hitogoroshi]

and just about every high elo (1800+) Orianna player has also attested to this as well.

They mention Xypherous and Roku being thrilled with it in the thread you link...

Mid damage isn't dps. Dps is basicially confined to towers, jungles, and occasional brusier/ad carry slugfests. AP mid fights are per event. Cooldown is useful because it puts your events on a shorter clock, but you're not generally throwing your roll every time it's up. If mid lane is just standing still, throwing skills as soon as they're on cd, something has gone terribly wrong.

Mathcrafting old Q+W and new Q+W is fundamentally disingenuous because new Q+W is easier to land. That Fizz might have trollpolled the .5s delay W but can't pull it against the .15s delay, etc. The thread is saying, "Well geez, Orianna is going to go oom quick if you spam all of her abilities as soon as they're off cooldown" which is a no shit sherlock kind of thing and true for pretty much everyone with mana. You can throw Q's and hitconfirm into W's. It's a lot easier of a hitconfirm than it used to be, since the time between the two is like a third of what it used to be.

I mean, if you're against opponents you land every skillshot on, or opponents who always got hitconfirmed by old Q+W, then yeah you'll probably do worse against them than you used to, because this makes it easier to land all her shit but some people were already being hit by everything. I know in my experience with Ori it's pretty easy to dodge most Q's (unless your farm puts you in predictable spots) and I'm worried about the fact that if a Q hits me, she can confirm it into a W and I only have .125s to react instead of .5. That is, it's not about the damage per Q (because they're certainly not all connecting!) - it's that Ori can only spend mana on W when a Q connects, and it's very difficult now to escape the W if the Q hits you. this matters a big deal against kids like Vlad and Fizz and Morg, less so for kids like Brand who could pretty reliably get hitconfirmed by old Q. (Of course, when people level Q instead of W, you don't really care about that anyway.)

Also: in teamfights, the difference between having .5s to flash out when the brusier gets an E and .125s to flash out when the brusier gets an E should be a pretty big thing. Oriana's R has always had that bit of "pop your flashes/hourglasses/character flashes cause here it comes" quality to it, and now when she smartcasts she can effectively hitconfirm into her ult by

shielding a ally.

So basicially now by attacking anyone within Ori's (increased!) tether range, Ori can pretty much guaranteed ult you. That is scary. .-.

I suppose the real point I'm making is that unless you have two wizard trees rooted to the ground throwing magic at each other and never ever moving, talking about dps in mid lane means nothing. Mid lane is rolls and clocks. Maybe it turns out most people can't dodge Ori's shit and this nerfs her across an average composite of games - but if the patch was a nerf, it's only a coincidence that this math said the same thing. I mean, I'm pretty sure 4 stacks E spammin Vlad has at least twice Ori's DPS, but that doesn't matter because that's not what it's about - it's about a very safe, hit-confirmable QW versus a very risky, escapable QEWEQ. This really isn't even about Ori as much as me being infuriated by "mid dps" calculation, because dear people calculating mid dps,

when I'm in midlane I dodge shit.

, and unless your calculation includes chance to hit, confimability of chains, threat potential, loss of utility, etc, then it's not really useful.

edit: maybe my rambling will make more sense if you check this out. At least in my case, my average is double the speed I need to escape old Ori's chains, and

half

the speed I need to escape new Ori's chains. gulp.

tl;dr: if ori hits you with something that you could have dodged with .5 gcd, then she did infinity percent more dps

[hitogoroshi]

Decided to grab an elobuff sub for a month. It's alright. A lot of raw data which is nice, but the samples sizes are often kinda low and there isn't a good way to see how many games are going in to each stat. Also, some of the data is kinda naive - the "synergies" section is basicially worthless at present, and the %win with items stat is too naive at present (Madreds Bloodrazor ranks really high a lot, but how much of that is Bloodrazor winning the game and how much of it is the game having ALREADY been won to the extent a bloodrazor doesn't change anything?) Probably gonna stop it from re-upping, unless I learn some really cool stuff playing with it.

I fear for all of the amateur inferences that will come out of people misinterpreting elobuff data. But if they set up some controlled viewer filter sets (for example: take synergy and divide it by the champs standard win rate, and compare synergies and counters explicitly in the lane) it could be really neat.

[hitogoroshi]

Courtesy of the SomethingAwful LoL thread:

One thing that everyone, myself included, forgot about the Q->W damage swap is that (Orianna's) Q only does full damage to the first thing it hits. Assuming whoever you're laning against is conscious, you're probably going to clip at least one or two minions with your ball before you hit them. In teamfights, you'll do full damage to whoever you hit first, but it will fall off on subsequent hits, which means you'll probably do lots of damage to the tank but not as much to the carries that are hiding in back. Her W, on the other hand, does full damage to everything it hits, along with the slow.

[hitogoroshi]

screw 1v1, I want to do 2v2 Proving Grounds Duels. Blind pick. Which team of 2 will be the best?

(bro combo)

[hitogoroshi]

It's a good thing you linked that or I would have missed the reference

[hitogoroshi]

Eh, I see what he's getting at though. Kat isn't a hypercarry in that it's not like Kat's scaling is super strong, it's just that if she gets a bit of an early edge she can really ride it out. But if I could pick a hero to just afk farm 15k and rock out with kat is way way down on the list compared to Kayle/Jax/Tyrnd/Nasus/all of the ADs.

[hitogoroshi]

Lanes like Taric/Graves and Leona/Varus are the ones that kill the pony. Also probably anyone/MF.

[hitogoroshi]

You also check the LoL thread on SA huh Spy? xP

[hitogoroshi]

[hitogoroshi]

Hey guys. What's your favorite food item at Wendys? Mine is the double stack.

[hitogoroshi]

Endgame screenshots won't really help with that. Lolrecordings will.

In general though just running this checklist on yourself:

• Did I buy and intelligently place at least five wards?
  
• Did I force dragons/barons whenever we had local control and do my best to establish local control?
  
• Did I take timer on dragons and barons? (Piss easy now with the timestamps, but you should still type the timer for non-timestamping teammates) If the enemy took it out of sight, did I at least take approximate timer?
  
• Did I do my best to lead on objectives? ("Drake up in 1min, be ready to contest"; or sometimes as simple as pinging a tower when you know your kill isn't enough control for baron)
  
• As top/mid/ad carry, did I out-CS my opponent?
  
• Did I ever die without securing something of importance with my death?
  
• Did my build accurately match the situation I was in?
  
• Was I a positive influence on my team in chat?
  
• Did my positioning accomplish what I intended it to accomplish?

Will virtually always show you at least one or two things you need to improve on. I would pretty much say that none of us on mafiascum have ever, ever had a game where we checked all those boxes and lost (or indeed, had a game where we checked all those boxes at all!)

[hitogoroshi]

Lol...my team just pinned a loss on me cause I didn't ban blitz and they can't dodge skillshots...

This attitude is poison to improving in LoL. I mean, in a tug of war where you all lose, you don't look down the rope and say "Who is the weakest person on this rope? They, and only they, stopped us all from tugging hard enough to win." But somehow people make a hobby doing this in LoL. I mean, who cares if your teammates are "pinning losses" or whatever? If you were 2400 elo level good, you could carry four bad teammates and win. So focus on fixing what's stopping you from being that good. Who cares about which player is "most responsible for losing", that's a made up thing you should just completely ignore.

[hitogoroshi]

Being a dick to my teammates does not effect the outcome of the game/

First off, that's affect with an a.

Secondly...what? Have you ever interacted with human beings in real life? It

absolutely makes a difference

. Like, for fucks sake, even if you're always better than everyone you queue with (and you're NOT, I guarantee you), even THEN I don't see how you'd think this. Imagine you're on a baseball team with a bunch of five year olds. When one of them misses the ball, do you think saying "WOW REAL TODDLER. HEY RETARD TODDLER THROWING MATCH GG" won't affect anything? Or do you think maybe they'll play worse because instead of focusing 100% on recovering from their mistake they now have to deal with being flamed at the same time?

I can't count the number of times I've done really poorly in lane (0-2, 0-3) and then turned around and carried the game. Y'know how I pulled it off? I was playing with friends, and they just didn't talk to me about how I was feeding so I could just focus myself on turning the game around. You want to CREATE that environment for your pubbies, as much as possible - a place where they're elated over good plays and don't get stressed over bad ones.

What usually happens is that you get a draw of good, average, and bad players for your elo, and then you flame and turn them into good players who don't really want to help you and average and bad players who do poorly because there's being flamed.

Here's a new rule: you can only say a disparaging remark in team chat once for every two wards you place. This rule will gain you Elo if you follow it.

PS: Required reading.

[hitogoroshi]

Mechanical skill is the only thing you can control in the game, you can't make your team play better. You can't make your team not feed/lose their lane so fast that you it effects your laning phase. The simple fact is, your team will always be idiots.

• Retreat ping and call MIAs for lanes besides your own
  
• Give your team build advice ("Everyone grab a bit of MR as soon as you can. Shen, if you could fit an Aegis into your build, it'd be very helpful...")
  
• Tell your team in chat all you know about the enemy jungler's standard routes ("Lee will probably L2 gank top or mid with red")
  
• Shove your lane so you can go elsewhere and directly influence
  
• Ward for other lanes
  
• Time objectives, give warnings to assemble starting around 90s from them coming up
  
• When enemies take objectives in fog of war, take approximate timers ("9.23 ish e.blue")
  
• Praise successes, it helps people go on the good kind of tilt
  
• Offer direct feedback for mistakes, always with a smiley after ("Warwick, that Vayne is saving her QSS for you - just ult the Vlad, it's better than nothing ")
  
• In bot lane only, communicate constantly with your lanemate - do you want to go aggro or passively farm? Are we looking to push and get on the map or hold this lane as long as possible? etc.

All of these are things to do that don't involve mechanical skill (aside from shoving and just directly helping another lane with your presumably fed body.)

[hitogoroshi]

This is good and all, but your team as to choose to listen to you. More often than not..They won't. Again, mechanical skill is the only thing that you can actually control. You can do those things and hope your team follows suit, but they will most likely result in your team ignoring you and fucking it up.

Let put it this way. The thing that

isn't

true is that there's some sort of mystical barrier around 1100-1300, and that if someone carried your account to 1400, you would miraculously never go below that.

If you're sure your mechanical skills are up to snuff, then something else is what's holding you back. I have never played with you, but poisonous attitude and lack of helpful communication are two things that commonly drag teams down, and you seem unrepentant about not doing either, so they're very likely causes.

Literally everyone

who is 1400+ elo was 1200 elo first. Think on that for a moment, dude. You're not in some probability vortex where wah-wah all of their pubbies are great and mine are awful. After as many games as you've played, IF you could prove your pubs were on average worse than the enemies, it would be direct proof that YOU SPECIFICALLY are making them worse than the average, which is exactly what we're all telling you your shitty attitude does. And if your pubs AREN'T worse than average and you lose, that means you're actually not playing up to their average. Those are the only two options. There's no third "an evil wizard cast a probability spell on me that makes my pubs worse than average but it's not my fault at all" possibility.

[hitogoroshi]

If I had to pick the top 4, I'd say CLG.eu, M5, Azubu Frost, and Najin Sword (I've never actually seen them play, but beating Blaze is a big enough deal xD).

M5 is my favorite to win as well, or maybe Najin Sword once I can see them play. I think M5 won't make the same mistake they made against clg.eu again, and I'm reasonably sure M5 can take Frost.

[hitogoroshi]

najin sword copying fate and me B)

[hitogoroshi]

My predictions: m5 beats ig, Frost beats TSM, m5 beats frost. Haven't seen World Elite OR Taipei Assassins play, so I can't make predictions for those matches. I will hazard a guess that it's the winner of the Najin Sword/Taipei Assassins match that makes it to the finals from lowerside.

[hitogoroshi]

prediction: semifinals 2 are the real finals

[hitogoroshi]

that would have been so much worse if it had been phreak and riv for 8 hours. can you fuckin imagine.

[hitogoroshi]

KoC, you're not seriously telling me that they'd rather have Azubu Frost advance than the very last team in North America advance and thus were biased towards Frost. Frost outplayed TSM. Period. That does not excuse their behavior, and they were fined quite heavily for it.

Honestly, did Riot shoot your dog or something?

Man, don't say stuff like the bolded. I agree with you about Riot's decision being a pretty good one, but ending on that is like saying "let's make sure this discussion is as angry as possible!"

I think that dqing Azubu would just put a weak and not-prepared TSM into a semifinal they have no chance of being seriously competitive in. But Riot needs to take this seriously and I'm glad they were as thorough as they were (putting in the dude adjusting for screen glare is a good sign.) Ultimately, it's a company full of dudes who love the game, not dudes who are experienced at running a business, and I'm willing to cut them slack because their heart's in the right place. I can easily see why a Starcraft fan would view things differently, because I think there's a lot more professionalism there than in Riot since well, it's much more of a

business

than Riot's "League is cool, let's all watch some".

[hitogoroshi]

I'd rank M5 and TA as the best two teams. So, fully prepared to eat my words if I'm wrong, but I think this game is the real final.

[hitogoroshi]

Holy crap, I'm an M5 fanboy but TPA's comp is all kinds of brilliant here.

M5 first blood nonwithstanding, I think TPA is winning game 1 here.

[hitogoroshi]

hahahahaha

outcomped but it doesn't matter m5 is m5

[hitogoroshi]

Haha, yeah. I don't know why they dropped the kog/taric mid, that was a big deal.

Still, happy to be proven wrong here, I want m5 to win!

edit: m5: they know how to push the buttons really well, and they pick the broken champs.

[hitogoroshi]

3 strikes and you're out comp in semis. Legit.

[hitogoroshi]

I don't even care if they lost. M5 ran a 3 strikes comps in semis. My heroes. <3

I think they'll still get game 3, I think Genja was just feeling really cocky because he was so farmed in game 1.

[hitogoroshi]

=(

I'm still an m5 fanboy. I think they just got too cocky after that first stomp and took a couple of really cheeky, no-cc comps and it bit them in the ass.

M5 s3 fighting~ TPA is certainly a team it's okay to lose to.

[hitogoroshi]

elise is apparently a giant spider... please let me never lane against her ;_;

No, Elise is another "let's make an x only actually the x is a sexy lady" champion. The "spider" element is that her belt has six fake legs on it. I suppose she could have a swollen web-abdomen thing that her front-on picture hides but when you look at the shape of her legs I'm like 95% sure they threw that out the window to give her a well-defined ass. Because x=plant wasn't riot games enough.

EDIT: Oh, I found the post saying all of the abilities. I totally called the ass thing but her ult makes her an Actual Real Spider so there's that

[hitogoroshi]

hey I could be cast-bros with JD! Although I have a lot of shit tonight. >>

[hitogoroshi]

fyi Ninja Tabi effect physical auto-attack modifers of which Rengars Q is one, they are also the cheapest lvl 2 boots (being able to kite is how teemo wins the lane) and provide a ton of ar.

Get them for Toplane teemo, no you don't need 'zerker greaves as you don't actually use AS much in lane and AS is an incredibly cheap stat.

Yeah, something to remember is that when ad carries get beserker's greaves, it's not because AS is a super great stat they want a bunch of, it's just that slots are on an absolute premium for ad carries and it lets you not devote a slot to aspd except for the possible PD.

I'm pretty sure if you had 8 item slots, no one would ever get greaves.

[hitogoroshi]

Is a new edition of the thread something we're interested in?

[hitogoroshi]

Is a new edition of the thread something we're interested in?

Couldn't you also give someone here mod powers on the first post?

Yeah - that's why I'm asking if people just want a shiny OP or if they want a new thread or what. Multiple possibilities exist~

[hitogoroshi]

Let's crowdsource this, everyone can post crap they think would make a good OP, and then I can just put it all together with me as the OP or just give it to someone if they nail it in one.

Yes, armor yellows are the best runes in the whole game, get those.

[hitogoroshi]

I'd be down Reck, can probably grab friends cause I have a bunch of them around today. As long as you don't care about winning - I've seriously lost my mojo lately.

[hitogoroshi]

I would appreciate the nonranked player to quit telling the silver/gold guy to practice his mechanics. Its incredibly rude and im getting kinda sick of it.

"Don't you tell me I should work on my weightlifting, I've only ever seen you lift two pounds and I can lift three whole pounds :<"

It's not at all rude to say we all need practice, because literally no one here is a good league of legends player by any objective measure.

[hitogoroshi]

Quadz, I think your issue is that you're not going back to wolves, judging from the times you're giving.

Remember, if you kills wolves BEFORE you take blue, if you walk to wolves right after wraiths they'll come up right as you're walking there. So it's wolves -> blue/smite -> wraiths -> WOLVES -> red/smite -> golems

[hitogoroshi]

Ah yeah, I typically don't go back to wolves until after red. Is going back to wolves really a typical jungle path? It seems inefficient.

It's actually the standard path on most junglers, yeah. It's called a "full clear" because, as long as your leashers don't leech any xp, you JUST hit level four without masteries after golems, which leaves you with double buffs and level 4 ready to gank. I don't think a faster route really exists unless you counterjungle.

Myko, I think red stealing is pretty situational and I wouldn't call it a route exactly. (Unless you're running the bro combo.)

[hitogoroshi]

That's old news; it used to be a riff on the Konami Code, I believe.

It doesn't actually make the servers any more stable. It just lets you risk it and connect anyway. A little helpful if like, PVP net is what's down and you just want a custom, I guess? But generally the servers are down for a reason. That's just the debug to try to connect anyway - I imagine just so rioters don't need special clients to troubleshoot shit.

[hitogoroshi]

Yeah, that's right. I remember it being a not-quite-the-Konami-Code, but I think that change was just because someone found the code...sometime back with the old launcher.

[hitogoroshi]

If you want pen and CDR, there's always Guise/Lucidity.

I like CDR blues on manaless casters.

[hitogoroshi]

Whoa, I want to test if that also lowers the damage for Galio (and Malphite).

[hitogoroshi]

Yeah, I know it can be done, but does Resolute Smite actually do less damage?

Too tired today, but tomorrow, LEAGUE SCIENCE.

[hitogoroshi]

that is the best thing.

[hitogoroshi]

hey shanba have you played new treeline? It seems like Trundle would actually be good times there.

[hitogoroshi]

I like the new treeline, although Lord Van Dammes Pillager seems like the wrong direction to go in dealing with The Olaf Problem

[hitogoroshi]

how is this dude not Talon

[hitogoroshi]

Who do you think is more useless?

in a general "what's viable on SR" sense?

Syndra, Urgot, Yi, Karma, Fiora, Tryndamere, Udyr, Volibear

pretty simple

Udyr top is still a madman. He got nerfed a bit with the stupid minion collision idiocy, but double tiger is still one of the most significant level 1 bursts to hit top lane (it's outclassed only by Rengar and Riven iirc.)

Fiora can be good as long as a counterpick. She loses more lanes than she wins but she doesn't lose em all, and she brings a fair bit to her team with her e (for turrets) and ult.

[hitogoroshi]

'cmon izzy, don't sell yourself short, I'm sure you have great level one burst

[hitogoroshi]

haha, awesome story Fate.

[hitogoroshi]

Hmm. I was thinking for the new LoL thread, maybe edit in links to the first post made with a new patch released, so that you can browse it in a timely matter? (Obviously, we wouldn't be able to do it at the start, but we could reserve space for it.) Second post is all of our usernames, third is an FAQ and links to various posts of interest. Is this about what everyone was thinking?

I've got a few drafts bumming around and that to me seemed the most solid.

[hitogoroshi]

I've got skittles, may as well be proactive with them.

[hitogoroshi]

Well, I could just co-opt the OP, but with all of the major changes for S3 it's a pretty good time to get a new thread.

I mean, think of how much build advice is just going to un-exist with new masteries and items, for starters...

[hitogoroshi]

I think a new thread is the way to go. People are of course free to object.

[hitogoroshi]

Okay, hopefully Saturday I can do it, I'll do my best to pull together the assembled resources people have been throwing up but I'll probably miss some. In the mean time, if your name is on that giant list from a page or two ago, add it and put it in a spoiler tag or something.

[hitogoroshi]

Ohmwrecker

High End Siege Item
Recipe:Catalyst + Chain Vest
Active: Disables nearby enemy towers for 2.5 seconds, preventing them from attacking.

Fate.

You know what this means.

You know what we must do.

[hitogoroshi]

My post wasn't about the ohmwrecker in general, it was specifically about how a certain tower diving monk may appreciate a ninja bro who can show up from anywhere and turn the tower off.

[hitogoroshi]

speaking of the other thread, now is the time to re-bring-up effort posts you would like to be assimilated

(I'm vaguely considering not opening it until Season 3 officially starts just to keep it not-confusing for people reading down the line, but I'm working on the learnin' shit post 3 now)

[hitogoroshi]

If you want it to be stuff that pertains to season 3, there is a lot of stuff that can be abandoned

yeah I noticed that paging through specific advice and such, which is why I'm thinking of keeping it locked until s3 starts so people don't click the season 3 lol thread and the first page is all "heart of gold? the fuck are these kids talking about"

[hitogoroshi]

bad manner(ed)

mellow harshin', buzz-killin', gettiin' mad at video games, etc

[hitogoroshi]

the golden rule is to first look for the biggest grain you can afford out of all of the things you need. if you're at 1700 gold, getting vamp and greaves is probably more utility than getting a bf sword, but you get the bf sword anyway because if you start getting stomped and not getting as much money you have all of these cheap little hops to make and still get stronger (boots, dagger, long sword, upgrading long sword to vamp, upgrading boots to greaves are all <500) but if you get the finer grained stuff first then the coarse grains are this stupid albatross around your neck

[hitogoroshi]

you need to be careful about how your teammates will react when busting out the bear puns, they can be pretty polarizing.

[hitogoroshi]

Yes, but balancing for any other level is a little strange, since there's always an answer to fix OP/UP champions for those 98.5% of players (get better at the game.)

Of course, fixing champions that are overpowering at lower levels is a good goal too (and from a financial standpoint, some things are VERY IMPORTANT to do right for new players). Since LoL is a free to play game that relies on growth, sacrificing the competitive viability of a few champions just so they won't stomp shit in newbie games is probably a fair enough sacrifice. But doing it the other way around - making a champion who's fine at Diamond+ even stronger so worse players can do better - is pretty much never warranted. About the only example I can think off the top of my head would be fixing a mechanically demanding "trick" the champ had (something that only top tier players would use) and then giving the champion a general buff. For example, getting rid of Viktor's double-cast ult bug and then buffing him. But absent a "top players only" mechanic like this, Riot should only look in to buffing champions who are weak in competitive play.

[hitogoroshi]

Also - it is stupendous how much you can turn a game around just by only talking about game relevant stuff in team chat.

I had a really horrible opening in a game as jungle Vi. Was like...0/4/2. This is a ranked game so I'm getting a lot of "gg trash cakes Vi" (verbatim.) Now, the things I fucked up basicially fell into two categories: I noticed a dangerous spot and died trying to ward it (this gets me a lot.) And I assumed we'd be fighting less than we would be, so I blew my ult just to protect a teammate or whatever when it would have gotten a kill later. But strangly this isn't what I was being bitched out for, I was getting flamed for a.) low cs (as a jungler??) and b.) buying wards. No, I shit you not. We had terrible ward coverage, so I bought lots of wards instead of rushing my core, prompting my teammates to say "lol Vi buying wards. u rich Vi??"

If I had defended myself in chat - saying "Why should a jungler have cs at all?" or "well SOMEONE needs to get wards" we probably would have lost. If I had admitted "yeah, I've been overextending and ulting too much", that would have been better, but still bad, because teammates would feel okay throwing the game since they had me to blame. It's a strange thing in the average league players pysche but it happens a lot.

Instead - I

shut the fuck up

, focused on

playing out of the hole

, and only used chat for timers/calling drake/other strategy stuff. I notice that people have gotten used to killing me and are prioritizing me over my teammates, so I slowly, painfully get a Randuin's. I see Katarina is fed, so I pocket my ult every goddamn fight for her. I keep buying wards, because the pubbies are totally wrong on that score, but I don't berate them for it in chat. And then we totally steamrolled and I ended 4/7/17 and everything was fine.

Thus endeth the rant. The reason I have a really good W/L ratio isn't because I'm super good, it's because I don't throw games whining in team chat. :p

How? I'm saying it's shitty to be like "since these guys are 'fine' at the top level of play and not fine at lower levels of play, let's just have the lower level players not play those champs" The only ADC with a halfway decent win% at Bronze/Silver is MF(where most of the players play at) so because she's not completely out of control for 1.5% of the player base, we don't need to tweak the other carries so they can hang? I think that's a little silly, and it's relevent to Hito's point.

Like I said - if there's some way you can tweak a character up for the lower levels and nerf by an equal amount at the top, that's generally a pretty good move. Otherwise, the buff for lower levels is going to make them that much better than everyone else at the higher levels! And that's not a worthy tradeoff, y'know?

I'm not saying it's easy to get better by any means, I'm saying that if you make a champion just "better", then unless it's well-targeted it makes them better everywhere, and it's not worth making a champ be instant ban at higher elo just so they're competitive with other champions at lower elo if they happen to require a large skill investment to be good at - because players can always just drill a lot with that champion, but the top tiers can't say "okay - everyone who plays Vayne, she was fine competitively before and got a buff, so you all need to be a little shitty when you play Vayne, okay?"

[hitogoroshi]

Can someone name me a champion who would actually do better with Chalice->Athene's instead of Tear->Murasomething? Because I can't think of one.

GALIO ARE YOU KIDDING ME

[hitogoroshi]

If you only play one role, stop doing ranked queue until you're comfortable in at least 4/5 roles. It'll help, trust me.

[hitogoroshi]

Me/Grimm/Fate/Nuwen have been playing a lot recently and want to get a ranked team together. Right now, I'm jungling, Fate's playing top, Grimm is support, and Nuwen is kind of switching between mid and ADC. Ideally, we'd find an ADC and let Nuwen go perma-mid, but that's flexible.

I don't know how much time I can really dedicate to a ranked team, but I can at least be AD so you can start having a full ream to practice with while looking for a 5th. Let me know.

[hitogoroshi]

Apparently, I've lost like three post on ADCs.

Pretty much the JD-Brandi argument summed it up, If you aren't a platinum player, you have no business playing Vayne.

I personally don't like Cait. You can dominate lanes with other people much harder(although they generally aren't as safe), she doesn't have a steroid so her late game isn't great outside of her range being awesome, and like her fellow steroidless, safe-laning sisteren, she can't initiate fights/doesn't have as much utility(which is much more important at lower levels then at higher levels). So if you aren't going to try to crush a lane completely, aren't higher levels of gold, and need a safe laner, I recommend Ashe over Caitlyn.

Are you honestly saying Our Lady of Cupcakes doesn't have much utility??

Cait is cool if you want to go solo/if you really need to be safe/your support is Thresh ("COME QUICK LET ME SHOW YOU THIS CUPCAKE I FOUND"). But yes she is pretty mediocre in teamfights compared to steroid kids.

[hitogoroshi]

Hey, I haven't really been following this tournament thing but if you need casters or a sub or whatever tag me.

[hitogoroshi]

yeah I know, my first series I broke the One True Commandant (Thou Shalt Not Play Leona When Thy Lanemate Is Unable to Hear Thy Voice Intoning that Now is The Time To Shoot Champions and Not CS) and I got distracted because ARAM

[hitogoroshi]

Leona if you're in voice with your ADC, otherwise Vlad.

EDIT: But yeah, if you play Leona, you must learn to love blood and hate and kill

[hitogoroshi]

I can also do color commentary for any of these non-matches, should they mysteriously refuse to refrain from happening.

[hitogoroshi]

not getting sightstone first back is fine, but surely you want the sightstone eventually? Even if it's staying mostly in lane, in bot lane you want to start to establish control of the river for dragon, and obviously later game you want to keep 3 wards down as much as possible (plus a pink).

I actually think Leona and Blitz are two that can go sightstone particularly early. Both want to tank a bit, and the extra health is helpful. Vs. a ranged caster like Sona where the health is nice, sure, but your poke is from distance and extra damage/healing can be helpful. Both Blitz and Leona are about setting up plays. Damage is helpful, but isn't really the "point."

yeah sightstone is super good on Leona because you're maxing Eclipse which is a bonkers armor/MR steroid at level 9. so early HP is super strong on Leona because it combines with Eclipse and you just go in with total impunity. Not only that, but getting sight stone means selling yellow trinket for red, and the reset on Q lets Leona do really sassy plays with red trinket.

most Leona games my core is targons + sight stone + boots (usually treads). HP is the best combat stat for Leona anyway, so why not get HP that lets you see shit?

[hitogoroshi]

you pick your champs by side?

Side bias is real and exists; matchmaking puts a slight higher ELO on purple to balance it out (and at least last I checked Blue is still a little favored despite this.) It's not a huge leap that you have champs you're comfortable skillshotting on blue (shooting away from the UI) but not purple (shooting in to the UI).

[hitogoroshi]

one of the most annoying things in ranked is when someone whines about there not being wards on objectives but never upgrade their trinket. The yellow trinket upgrade is so goddamn cheap now that really NO one has an excuse to not upgrade, but if you're actively acknowledging that you understand vision is a good thing to have then you have no excuse times ten billion.

[hitogoroshi]

wow. i think i like that even more

Some of the graphs are pretty interesting! For example, despite being a quintessential "late game" champion, Vladimir has his highest winrate in the 20-25 minute time-bin (53%), whereupon his winrate drops dramatically until the 35+ minute bin (which is the latest bin available). I might have expected a pretty different power-curve.

As a vlad player: this is because Vlad murders lane when he gets going (Hextech and Guise or Needlessly Large Rod), but he can't roam that well to secure kills because he has no CC. So if the advantage from Vlad winning lane isn't enough to close out the game, he's kind of just waiting for big teamfights to start so Hemoplague can style upon everyone.

[hitogoroshi]

So he's like a worse version of Rumble?

To his credit, Vlad is much harder to gank/much better in 2v1's. Rumble beats him in most other respects, though.

[hitogoroshi]

Argh, silver is impossible to climb out of now unless you're plat or higher. I hate it.

elo hell don't real though

I mean sure you can place low in like, initial placements or w/e because of random chance, but once you hit a few dozen games you can't really say you "are gold" but are "stuck" in silver. it's very possible to climb out of silver while being a gold-level player and not plat; we call these players "gold players"

(a random tip from looking at your match history - you should be upgrading your trinket way more than you are. Both because it's good, but also that it suggests bad itemization/item ordering if you're not. You should be trying to minimize the gold in your pocket walking out of fountain most of the time - so never cashing in that 250g residual for improved yellow trinket, for example, suggests that you're ALSO not buying pinks when you have a spare 100 and no pink down or greens if you have no sight stone and etc. Riot doesn't store "money in pocket each time left from base" so I can't know this for sure, but you should be aiming for an average of <100g.)

[hitogoroshi]

(a random tip from looking at your match history - you should be upgrading your trinket way more than you are. Both because it's good, but also that it suggests bad item ordering. You should be trying to minimize the gold in your pocket walking out of fountain most of the time - so never cashing in that 250g residual for improved yellow trinket, for example, suggests that you're ALSO not buying pinks when you have a spare 100 and no pink down or greens if you have no sight stone and etc. Riot doesn't store "money in pocket each time left from base" so I can't know this for sure, but you should be aiming for an average of <100g.)

This is a thing I'm aware of, but am bad at doing.

It's a hard skill!

some handy tips: resistance items tend to have the most anemic combines and most of the utility of combining a resistance item is just getting the slot (GA and Visage are exceptions), so they're among the best items to buy one component of and just sit on. If you can afford the biggest grain you're going to be aiming for (BF Sword/Needlessly Large) you should usually get it no matter where you are in the build, because you have no guarantee you're going to be in that situation again - you might be backing with 400g the next few backs, and you don't want each of those to be "still waitin for my BF sword". (Giant's Belt used to be in this category until it's crazy builds-from-ruby buff.) You should almost never be completing your SECOND item resisting a type of damage if you don't have anything improving your health. Flat pen is always amazing regardless of how low/high their resists are or whether you have % pen or not. Remember that it's not a one-way street of go back -> check money - you can and should fine-tune the risks you take farming based on item breakpoints (but don't get stupid about it.) And finally, here is the golden rule of itemization:

if you don't know what to buy, buy a Ruby Crystal.

[hitogoroshi]

I like Jungle bear more for a few reasons-

• Bear is actually pretty bad at CSing and easy for a ranged top to deny
  
• If you gank people often aren't able to click on you and know if passive is up. In top lane the top laner will have a pretty good idea if passive is up.
  
• Stalker's Blade is quite good on bear
  
• Juggernaut enhancement kicks ass for bear and lets you get Tabi or Swiftness instead of Treads (which in turn lets you get Visage earlier without going too ham on MR)
  
• Bear E and W are both quite strong in the jungle. In particular the later is good to stop smite-steals.
  
• Early jungle fights tend to take the form of "chase someone blindly through the jungle a long time" and if they trigger bear passive you can run forward a bit then turn to strong results. style points if you smite Red buff for this.

Overall Jungle bear kicks ass. With a core of something like [Sweeper, Stalker's Blade, Boots] -> [Tabi/Swiftness, Sightstone] -> [Juggernaut, Visage, Randuins, Ruby Sightstone] you can do really well.

[hitogoroshi]

I like Jungle bear more for a few reasons-

So I read this without context and thought hito was talking about udyr maxing e jungle (tiger jungle, phoenix, etc).

._.

The secret is, if you just stun all the monsters, you don't need any armor. Pro strats.

[hitogoroshi]

I'm vaguely trying to get back in to Ranked, mostly settled on a champ pool. Curious about feedback:

Top:

Vladimir, Nasus, (Kennen).
Vlad's my best champ, he's super strong and no one knows how to play against him. Wonderful times. Nasus is there if we really need physical damage or a endgame clock. Ken as a swap in if we're cc starved or a bad Vlad matchup (although Jarvan gets banned all the time now and Swain you can just swap against, so I'm not sure if Vlad has any bad matchups right now??)

Mid:

Galio, Kennen, (Yasuo)
Galio is one of those borderline OP champs that still no one likes for some reason, so he just gets to hang out? My Galio loadout starts with 63 MR and like 50 AP. It's gross. He handles magic mids, and Kennen does very well against physical ones, because he itemizes Zhonya's so well. I've only played like three Yasuo games but I'm deliberately working hard on him because I want to have an AD mid available to me. So ideally Yasuo goes from swap to full champ once I get acclimated.

Jungle:

Amumu, Volibear
Basically I just pick the damage our team has less of. They're both tanks - I think I might want to pick up a more glass cannon-y jungler? Nocturne used to be my go-to for that but I do not like him in new jungle at all.

AD Carry:

Graves, Ezreal
I try not to take AD, because to this day I don't kite well. So when I do, I play Graves who never runs, and Ez who fights from a million years away anyway. I wish I could add Jinx because she's a load of fun but c'est la vie.

Support:

Leona, Janna, (Nami)
Leona is incredible. Janna never dies. Nami as a swap against low range adc and melee support because Spellthief's abuse is super fun.

Anything you think it's missing? I actually play a pretty large number of champs, so it wouldn't be hard to add one or two. I'm just deliberately trying to focus myself for a while.