League of Legends Addicts Thread

There is similar strategy to know when its your "turn" to use it and when its safe to use it, one hit will it in it's un-upgraded form and 3 in the upgraded. So while you can bring a key item into a team fight it is pretty risky as killing it gives everyone on your team 175 gold and locks any items on the courier till it respawns in 3 minutes.

A big thing that I disliked about LoL and most LoL players hate about dota is that in dota you can deny your own creeps. When your creeps are under 50% you can attack/kill them yourself, killing your own creep give's your opponent a fraction of the exp at a shorter range and 0 gold. Just saying this for anyone who plays LoL and might be interested in dota that this is the biggest complaint that I have heard about the game from LoL players.

 

For some reason none of this week's free champions are showing up as available during my draft selection. I wanted to do some Skarner'ing.

 

Were you playing ranked? Because free week doesn't show up in ranked. Otherwise, that's just some odd shit. Were any free week champions showing up?

 

Ahhhhh that's why. Bummer. I got confused b/c I remember seeing them in draft mode before, but now I'm remembering that was when there were loading probs with ranked so they only had normal games available.

In other complaints, if you're Tristiana for the love of Jeebuz don't initiate a late game team fight by rocket jumping to the front of the line. Ugh.

 

I've started playing a couple games trying to level up from 17. Warwick is an interesting champ to jungle. At this level if I can get going its good, but if i don't get ahead it really starts to suck

 

Don't really worry about jungling much before you have full runes/masteries. It's about 100x easier with them. And at low levels it can even be tough to get a reliable leash.

 

I would have agreed with this in season 2, but in season 3 with the addition of more item flexibility for junglers, better mastery paths for junglers, and an overall detune of the jungle difficulty many more junglers are viable and all junglers become doable without max masteries and runes. Especially on someone like warwick, or any of the other sustain-based champs, it shouldn't be a problem for him to jungle at 15+. I'd also encourage jungling at these lower level games because its great training for later on--nothing worse than a level 30 player who doesn't know jungle paths or how to read a map and determine which lane to gank. Also, he's going to be way more effective as a jungler at these lower levels so if anything it should give his teammates a sizable advantage, even if he is slow to finish the paths.

 

Speaking of jungling, can someone give me a valid reason why a set jungler is needed? I understand the gank aspect of things, but wouldn't that be just as viable sending one of either top or bot guys to gank? The whole jungling idea sounds really good in theory, but I haven't seen a really good example of it working as well as sticking 2/1/2 in the lanes. Perhaps I haven't played in enough games to really understand the overall benefit, but perhaps it's a built in game mechanism simply for the purpose of filling the middle of the map up with something other than trees. I'm probably being short sighted, but I'd like to hear opinions.

 

Well the theory behind is jungling has a few reasons:

1. XP - in a 2/1/2 setup, only 1 lane is getting full XP while the wings have to share. With a jungler you maximize XP by having 3 solo's so they level more quickly.

2. Gold - just like XP, doubling top means they have to share the gold being farmed. Using a jungler maximizes gold production.

3. Ganking - You can't gank as well in a 2/1/2 setup b/c as soon as someone disappears from a lane, your opponent will start pinging like crazy. You're never really certain about where a jungler is however. Even if his ganking fails, the constant uncertainty about his location forces your opponent into spending money on wards, not overextend their lane, and makes them think twice about tower diving.

4. Buff control - without a jungler of your own, the enemy jungler has an easier time entering your side of the map and stealing your buffs. Having 2 blue buffs on your team (esp early game where sustain is an issue) and an extra red buff up top is a big advantage.
4.1 - Additionally, say you want to get your mid AP the blue buff around the 7min mark. It would take him a long time (and HP) to walk there, defeat the golem, and head back to lane hoping that his opponent didn't get a good dent into his tower. But a jungler can start on the golem, get it down to one or two shots, call over the mid and pass it off rather quickly. This would be especially important if you're the purple side as the golem is closer to the bot lane meaning either your ADC or support would have to leave lane (both of which are rather undesirable) to help the mid defeat the golem more quickly.

One might be inclined to say that if you double up top, you can overrun the person forced to solo there. That's not necessarily the case as an experienced player will know how to stay under his tower and farm (or even a less exp'd one can get a Philosopher's Stone to keep up his health and mana all while giving him gold). Meanwhile he can keep poking you down until his jungler is able to come in, clean up and get the kill.

 

Bans...

So I generally always see these 4 banned: Malphite, Amumu, Shen, and Blitzkrank. I always find the last to be a bit odd. Yes, he is annoying, especially early game but if you just stand behind minions and farm he is impotent. I also don't think he is as strong late game as a lot of other champs who almost never seem to get banned (namely Jarvan). I also don't see Hecarim get banned much even though I personally think he is a beast.

 

Blitzcrank is a thread mainly because of his early game deniabilty for last hitting. Yes you may be able to avoid his grabs, but your farm will vastly suffer as he scares you into moving free and getting those last hits. Now if youre Cait or Ashe, this may not be huge problem. If you're Graves or Vayne, this is a bigger problem. Also, his silence ult in team fights is pretty devastating. It shuts down escapes and so many other things, not to mention his knock-up. He can also grab over walls (think second turret walls). Also his mana shield is a pretty solid bait tactic tied with his overdrive. Anything that is a last minute shield helps a ton, he has one that scales up huge. He also doesn't require a ton of skill. He has one skillshot, that moves pretty fast. Jarvan and Hecarim require a little more skill to play. Also more people have those 4 since they're cheaper IP wise and have been out longer. Heca's adoption rate is low. If you play blind, I doubt you can go two matches in a row without seeing at least one of those 4 guys.

 

Blitz-

I think he is a carryover ban from before Thresh came out, who was designed to counter Blitz's playstyle. lantern for grabs, suppress on chain for overdrive, etc..

Everything Parker said, then his potential to turn a 5 v 5 into a 4 v 5 late game. No one likes to lose that way b/c it is infuriating and largely out of your control if someone is dumb enough to wander close to a wall and get pulled, so he gets banned.

Shen for the global ulti because noobs can't remember not to dive when his ult is up.

Malphite, I'm not really sure on that one. He's strong mid-game but has a slow jungle time. He has another "game-changer" ulti, but its not nearly as strong as amumu's, in my estimation, given its travel time and range. He used to be a super strong top laner but his shield got nerfed and his scaling is really weird. I think this is another holdover ban.

Amumu - ulti punishes noob teams. This is a solid ban that you see at higher elos, as well.

If I'm banning, I usually pick what lane I'm going to and ban my hard counter - only thing you can control at the outset is the matchup you get, and I don't think letting the other side have shen is necessarily worth getting hard countered. Lots of people who snatch up shen or malphite b/c you didn't ban them turn out to suck with them, likely because the characters are so often banned and they get little practice.

Also I ban characters my teammates demand to play when they are being unreasonable, like AP SORAKA MID OR FEED. I find this the most satisfying use of the ban feature.

 

Can I just say that the surrender command is seriously aggravating. I've had 3 matches today that right when the 20 minute mark hit, boom, surrender vote. One of the matches we "came back" and won. The other two were started cause they had one champ 8/2/1 and no one else on their team had more than 2 kills.
I get the idea behind it, but it should really be bumped up to 30 minutes. 20 is way to short and once people are in the mindset of quitting, the game falls to shit.

 

It used to be 25 and they moved it down because as you can see, games can be decided earlier and people were upset about their time being wasted. The issue now is they made it easier for comebacks now that gold values for 0/20/2 have been lowered to zero. The issue is they haven't kept everything in perspective.

Out of all the constant bans, I think Malphite is probably the weakest. He E has an AS Debuff but given how everyone has learned to kite so well, not sure it is as powerful. Also all his abilities scale off AP, with the new meta, no one builds AP on him. Relics of old time. Blitz is still the most frustrating because he can stay tanky while building into AP due to his mana shield and the most powerful his ult, the better.

 

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.surrenderat20.net/2013/03/lets-talk-about-champ-select.html#more" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.surrenderat20.net/2013/03/le ... .html#more</a>

Holy shit this is great to know they're thinking about fixing Champion Select and Q'ing up. They're thinking about something like a WoW Dungeon Finder that would solve more problems than fix. If League of Legend had a system like that it'd get so much fucking better. ESPECIALLY if you buy a brand new champion and want to play it against real people. If you could jump into the Q saying "I want to go Mid" and you get matched up with people who WANT to be in the lane they're in, win rates go up, and troll rates have to tank significantly. Their response to that is sort of silly because they're saying "Well not everyone plays with the same strategy" even though +95% of my games have gone with the 1-1-1-2 strategy. And 4.99% of the time it didn't is because someone was trolling because they didn't get the lane they wanted.

 

His E scales on armor and AP and his W (the splash damage) and armor/AD increase scales on armor/ad. Q and ulti are 100% AP. Balanced builds that take advantage of his diverse scaling are just too hard for most noobs to put together.

 

I'm down for this. Someone in the Riot thread posted what I thought was a fairly innovative idea. Letting people Q for Captain and Mercenary slots, where the captain selects people who chose a particular champion and a range of lane assignments/roles they can play that champion in. Win rates won't go up, though, for any particular person in a statistically significant way. Certain bands of skill or elo are likely to gain more from this change than others, however, so I think you may be right about the lessened trolling.

Also, I don't understand why Riot doesn't use IP as more of a carrot/stick for people who troll. Make the tribunal consequences include an IP reduction modifier as a punishment once the ban is over. A large part of my satisfaction with the game comes from gaining IP and opening up new champions, rune pages, etc., to diversify my ability to fill different roles in the game. Taking that away from trolls could provide more of an incentive to reform rather than switch to a smurf and keep fucking with people.

Second - bans from the game should include lengthy ranked q only bans after the original ban expires. In short, I think Riot should ban people from Ranked with far more frequency because those people who fuck up ranked games can still use their skins/bought champs in normals. This is a punishment that cleans up the most frustrating consequences of trolling without twisting the knife.

Also, draft mode has far fewer trolls than normals, if some of you don't know. The downside is that it takes forever and if someone dodges after all 10 champs are picked its like a wasted 6-7 minutes. Parker usually has patience for it while I don't, but I know that he is right in saying that more patient and sensible players abound there.

 

The new Q system sounds great. I was wondering if they'd institute a similar one to WoW's. I'm tired of being the guy who constantly acquiesces just so we have a balanced team.

I see IP as a dicey topic. Someone else mentioned increased IP as a reward for scaling the ranked ladders (or something to that effect) as well and I think the reply to both considerations is the same. The slow build of IP is directly tied to Riot's business model. I'm not sure how much money they make off of selling Riot Points b/c people want skins vs people who want to use them to buy champs/more rune pages but I imagine a decent chunk of it is for people who don't want to do all the grinding to get all the champs. So giving out more IP hurts their bottom line. Likewise, a system where they reduce how much IP you get could have people crying foul and accusing them of rigging the system to make you more compelled to spend money on RP.

 

Normal Draft, as opposed to Blind Draft filters out a lot of trolls. Yeah its 6-7 minutes to get a game started, but you're not stuck in a 25+ minute game because 3 people instalocked mids. The math is simple. Time wasted in shitty blind troll games > time wasted in Normal Draft because of the time it usually takes and queue dodges. If you have a full pre-made then you can still go Blind, you'll probably win based on the other team surrendering from the trolls on their team.

Normal Draft are for people who think they're practicing Ranked so they take it more seriously, there are still trolls, but way less frequently. Also I can tell you it drops the chances of ending up with Central/South American assholes to less than 10%. The game has made me racist against them. As soon as I get in a game and I see "jajajaja" I know that 1) If I die once, they'll be screaming at me being a noob and saying GG at a 0-1 score. 2) If I don't call MIA every single time my champion leaves screen it'll be the same response. 3) My chances of winning have decreased 70=80%.

Looking at all the Riot Posts, they basically fucking glance over the WoW Dungeon Finder like system saying some bullshit like "Well not everyone plays the same way." Except 90% of the fucking game is the 1-1-1-2 Meta and has been for almost 2 years nwo so what the fuck are they talking about? They should apply this to Ranked and Normal Draft, and continue to let Blind be the fucking wasteland of trolls and trying out new champions. They keep focusing on the Prisoner Island idea and Champion Select Kicking which are both less viable AND untested ideas. Hopefully it'll come around.