Missed ya aragorn (the dude II).  Think I invited you once or twice.  Catch u sometime soon, I'm sure. 

Played a few games tonight from like 9pm est-11:30 or so est.  My most enjoyable games were with doggu (butch ).  Let me walk you through pacovs brain this evening... might prove interesting, might not and be boring... at any rate, enjoy pacov's thought process if you like.

I hang out with my wife from like 5-9pm est (right after work).  I was considering going to bed early (4 hours or sleep or so previous night), but a big storm tore through Ohio complete with thunder every 30-50 seconds.  This made me quickly accept that I wasn't going to fall asleep soon.  Anyway, my wife actually does fall asleep.  I wait a little bit then head down and decide what to play - skyrim or lol.  I remember aragorn's post about wanting to do some pre, so I jump on lol.  He's not online or out of game when I get on, so I try to decide if I'll solo or invite some folks.  I check and I see Karl online, paintmaster, and isdoggu (seriously, doggu was taken?  the world is broken).   I think if I join karl, I'll need to start with a ranked game (as he indicated hating playing normal games recently (wait for later to respond)).  I decided to shoot doggu an invite.  He joins immediately.  I then try to inv paint.  He's afk apparently.  We launch.  I decide I just want to dominate, so I go ap sion and doggu goes lane fid (not a huge fan of lane fid, but doggu does it really well).  Anyway, we end up on this meh team.  I'm laned with xin top (we have no jungle).  The xin is randomly passive.  So, pretty much every time I go for a kill, he's just far enough away that we get the kill and I die.... this happens multiple times (leaving me richer with money, but annoyed at dying completely unnecessarily - as getting a kill would have happened quite easily if he backed me up more.  I will trade 1 for 1 if I need to get sion more money so I can dominate, but obviously I don't want to give them any money.  And every death in the entire game happened completely unnecessarily because our team was very passive when it mattered.  I finally figured out that my team was going to be a bunch of shites when we grouped up as 5 at mid... doggu pops his ult.  The other 3 on my team literally run away now.  I dive... doggu and I easily kill 2.  Then the other 2-3, all with low hp kill us off.  We engaged because our team was there... as soon as doggu made his move to ult/flash, these shites literally ran off.  Made no sense.  Gave me 2 kills anyway, but completely pointless deaths again.  Anyway, I decide that I cannot trust these idiots at all and can only rely on doggu.  So, I get doggu to back me up and we tear up bot.  I also wait for one of the other goofs to engage before I go I in as I'm sure they will run off.  This results in like 4 kills for me doing the cleanup on isle sion bit.  Anyway, we win, but our team was shite.  Kuddos to doggu.

Next game is doggu/pacov/jona/zen.  So, I'll start with this:  Jona is okay for me in small dosages.  If you've played with jona, you'll understand that he can do no wrong.  For instance, he chose jax.  We don't have a jungler.  He doesn't take smite.  He buys armor + health pots. He asks me and doggu to help him take blue at the start (side note - this is retarded).  We try, but the blue ogre resets.  This is doggu's fault apparently.  Anyway, now with much less mana, I figure jona and I will try to destroy top quite easily 2v1.  Nope.  After 2 waves of creeps jona decides to become the wandering jungler.  Fast forward 8 minutes in... jona has just hit level 4.  I haven't seen him top lane as he's still wandering without any real ability to work the jungle.  Anyway, I get so annoyed with jona, I start fing up and getting frustrated.  My stats were certainly better than jona, but I died more than I should have.  Jona then shared that the monkey lord we were fighting top is OP and that there was no way we could have taken him or pushed him if the 2 of us worked the lane... after all, jona says he has never lost using monkey lord (JONA - PLEASE ONLY USE CHARACTERS THAT MAKE YOUR STRATEGY AND PLAY STYLE INVINCIBLE - if you cannot lose with a particular character, you are obviously doing your team a disservice by using any other character).  Anyway, we eventually surrender.  Again, I'll admit I didn't play amazingly well.  Better than jona based on stats, ofc, but not well. 

And last game, I inv karl and doggu.  We play one out with me as grag, karl as panth (he loves playing panth when he can), and doggu as fid.  I cover mid against a really, really bad twitch.  Bad to the point of wandering away from his tower multiple times and letting me destroy it really quickly and easily.  Anyway, we win and it was a nice way to end the night.  Nothing super exciting about the game... I did, to their credit, end up spending 1200 gold on oracles (they had twitch and shaco).... this is quite bad, but paid out in kills in the end.  Completely my fault for letting them get me at least 1 of those times. 

Surge + new masteries may make Skarner a pretty strong solotop. My opinion is still, jungler should jungle

But Surge will be really strong on him, I think. Still think someone like Renek or Nasus is far stronger top but... meh. 

Flash nerf isn't too crazy... the range reduction is pretty significant though. Still totally able to flash through walls and such and so I think it'll still be popular (which is good... it should be). I do suspect a lot of high level play will be rocking mostly Flash. But on some characters, Ghost or Cleanse might take its place (Ghost is already great on solotop Skarner and Signed). Cleanse for people with spammable dashes that can through walls already, like Trynd.  

Cleanse is pretty strong now. It might make for some pretty interesting solotop matchups. (More interesting than "ha, I exhaust you!" "No, I exhaust you!" at least). 

CV got hit like a "truck" though... 8 seconds of sight every 70 seconds compared to 10 every 40. 

With the mastery changes massively buffing junglers, and CV nerfs making counter-jungling riskier while also making ganks easier... we'll see. But I think the utility of CV (no face checking, counter jungling, baron + dragon control) is powerful enough I think it'll still be on most teams. 

Surge will be pretty scary on Tristana... AP scaling abilities with a pretty high attack speed. 

do what now?  "reveals champions for 6 seconds in addition to revealing the area for 6 seconds (does not reveal stealth)" - anyone want to take a stab at what this means?  I have no idea.

Didn't know there was a big demand to buff junglers.  Anyway, looking forward to this.  Surge seems crazy powerful to me, though. With a character that can work as a hybrid, this sounds nuts for jax. 

ah - thx!

Yeah, I was up late playing... so tired...

Yes, all the masteries are reset.  There is no more balance according to a very good team I hooked up with who had a head start playing a few post patch games before I did.  "Every champ feels like they are UP or OP with the new masteries."  And I couldn't argue with them... hopefully its just that some people are quicker to adapt than others so we'll see.

@Aragorn  Appreciate the tip man, but I'm aware of the Patron Saint of Jungling's work and am already a fan.  I was just excited that WW's jungling has gotten far easier than it was for me before and it looks like buying potions is a thing of the past for him. Heck, I can clear while being at full health with speed boots and no pots, which wasn't really an option before.  WW has always been a safe clearer with a great choice in routes, but now there are no more routes for him. Start at blue, start at red, start wherever you like and clear being at full health the whole time.

Thundercles was taken so I'm "LavaShark" now.  Hit me up for a game anytime after I learn my new set of champs... don't think you want to play with me while I'm struggling with Veigar.  He's fun, but boy is it hard to stay alive early game.

ooo... downloading patch... nerdy goodness soon.

OK, jungling is A LOT faster and safer with stronger masteries now.  WW has 10 seconds gone off his clear time, Rammus is down to clearing jungle at 3:30, and Amumu is much faster and safer.

pacov sleeps - hates pug annie, though.  Miserable shite that refuses to play with them team and then feeds.  Meh.  Anyway, I'll check the thread in the am.  Night folks.

Do you know how I can immediately tell if someone is from the US or not?  It's whether or not they recognize this picture.    It's from a movie that gets run 24 hours a day each year on Christmas (literally - one station runs it for 24 hours straight).  Anyway, yes, its a bar of soap that this kid (Ralphie) has to keep in his mouth for using foul language. 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085334/

Yeah - I figured.    Anyway, happy to explain. 

Re; the latest summoner (the fish guy), easily has one of the best looking ults in the game imo.  Really glad they took the time to develop that shark animation.  Anyway, picked him up and have been using him as an ap caster that mixes things up.  His passive lets him run through creeps without collision and he can hop away while untargetable as well, so he's great for 1v1 to poke a bit.  Just about all of his skills have some very tactical purpose, so its going to take a bit to figure out all the best ways to use him. 

Take for instance his q.  Its a fixed range dash where you always go that fixed range.  So, you could use it to get behind your enemy by dashing through them to chase or you could use it to put some distance between you and the enemy if you need to bugger off.  I'm mostly intrigued by his e ability - this enables him to quickly move to a location, be untargetable, the continue to move, etc.  It's a bit tricky for me as I've only played the guy 2-3 times now, but I think if I master that, it will be quite good.

I don't really like the new summoner icons, but I think it will grow on me. 

Everyone seems to love jungling now - makes me want to give it a go again. 

Oh, and I've been experimenting with different summoner spells.  When I was fizz, I'd take promote and solo lane.  I've been toying with its usages.  Sometimes its nice for farming while I'm off to another lane.  Other times just for helping to quickly push a tower.  Other times to save a tower if I'm stuck 2v1 and getting low on hp... other times for ganks.  Casting this when you are 1v1ing can result in some extra dmg output.  Anyway, blahblah over.

For Ryze, the Ult doesn't work off AP.  Only the other three abilities have AP scaling, and q is only .2.  It's all but pointless to run up just AP for Ryze, because that q is the one you're going to be doing most of your damage with, it has a 3.5 second CD.  The e and r aren't terrible, but they aren't good either.

Where it really gets tricky is that you can drop your cd's by one with each cast, so that q needs to be cast as often as possible.  At 70 a cast, you'd need huge mana regen to keep it going frequently enough to see the benefits from your passive.  By building mana, and using an Archangel's Staff, you can do both, and make your q and w immensely powerful, which in turn makes your r all the more powerful as well.  The only ability that doesn't gain immensely from building mana, is e.

A Tear should be your first purchase.  You'll get more spell damage out of Ryze from 4k mana than you will 500 AP, and 4k mana is a hell of a lot easier to get, and will come with half that AP anyway.

Archangel's Staff, Rod of Ages, Frozen Heart, and Banshies Veil will make you downright tanky, and give you more damage than you'd manage stacking AP items without armor.  Not t say a Rabadon's isn't a nice buy after your mana pool hits the 4k range, but you want to stack mana for that 3.5 second q to hit like a truck at 8% damage from max mana.  With such a fast firing ability, you can get the max stacks on the Archangel's staff a lot faster than most as well.

Not relevant to any games played recently, but I'm seriously thinking of having a "I blame doggu" t-shirt made.  I mean, c'mon.  That's good stuff even if it means nothing. 

edit - looking for suggestions on tweaks to my ram build as a jungler.  See my last few games.  Anything you see as off or something you'd suggest?  I don't need playstyle suggestions - i get that - just build suggestions.  I'm using a VERY HEAVY armor build for runes, etc, and masteries.