I've locked/archived this thread/blog and have started a new discussion over here: http://forums.demigodthegame.com/454943/
Please join me if you like.
Am I streaming?
Well, I started a thread back in August (https://forums.joeuser.com/411269/) that's seen a lot of activity and actually had quite a few good bits of information for new and old players alike. I figure it's time to start a new thread and perhaps keep the OP up-to-date with useful information, etc. Feel free to use this post for any LoL discussion, etc.
Super fast background: I played a lot of Demigod as pacov/cheesuscrust. Back in August 2011 or so, I started getting heavily involved in LoL and folks have been kind enough to chime in with tips and links to various sites that have been quite useful to me. In addition, I've been able to keep up with folks that I've played Demigod with in the past and meet some new folks that play LoL and frequent these message boards.
Here's some of the things I've learned in the previous thread:
New Player tips
Great site I visit every day for LoL related news - http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends
pacov's misc info
Here's a guide I made
pacov's Guide to Improving at League of Legends and Moving Up in Elo
k - so I'm just going to put down some of my thoughts. I'm not amazing at this game, but I do certain things that improve my odds of winning in ranked and so far its panning out just fine (bronze 5 to gold 5 in about a month or so). We all have varied skill levels, so some of this might be useful and some not. Caveat complete.
Prerequisite- you need to know how to play every single role. You don't have to be a god at every single role (more power to you if you are - I'm certainly not). You need to be able to play at a serviceable level in every single role and excel at least at 1 role (preferably 2). In my case, I'm good at support and adc. I'm not great, but have serviceable mids and jungles and so so tops. Knowing what you are good at and bad at is very important. If you don't know, I can probably tell you - but you really should know... Anyway, you need to have enough champs to make solid picks in any role and you need to be able to cover any role if it comes down to it. I'll talk about how to get better at specific roles in a bit.
Champ select advice - Don't be the "fill" guy unless you really feel like you are awesome in all roles. Call your preferred role immediately when you hit the lobby. Say "adc pref." Do this as soon as you hit the lobby. Some people believe that if you call a role you magically get it. This is stupid, but if you call something out, folks will often accomodate your request. If you are feeling wishy washy for whatever reason, call out multiple roles in order of what you want to play - "adc/mid pref." In my experience, you generally do not want to call support. It's a very important role, but you want to be in a position to carry every single game if possible. If you aren't calling out a role, you are hoping that other players can carry you. If you are hoping that folks will carry you, you don't deserve to win. You need to know your best roles and you absolutely should request them.
Solo or duo in ranked? - Well, my 1st thought here is that you should solo. If you solo, you have to rely on yourself. IMO - its a much bigger test of skill to play solo and win than to duo. Do you want someone to carry you or do you really want to know that you are actually good? That said, provided you have the right duo partner, you can increase your odds of winning quite a bit. The simple math is that instead of having 4 teammates as unknown quantities, you only have 3. If you have a good duo teammate, you know what you can expect. When you duo, you get the most bang for your buck by having complimentary roles. Support/adc is good; jungle/mid also works. Even if you don't have direct symmetry in roles, if you are an amazing mid and I'm an amazing adc, our odds go up quite a bit if we both get those roles. Our odds go way down if we can't get those roles and are forced to play out of positions that we are weaker. For example, Bryff is a good mid. If he duo's up with me, the only way he will get to play that role is for me to call mid, take it myself, and then put myself into a position like support where I can't carry out of (I'm always 1st pick, Bryff is always last pick when we duo)... that and I have to show the mid I'm picking at the start which means Bryff gets hard countered. In short, we can expect that we will be a disadvantage when duo queuing. Now, if Bryff queued up with someone at a lower elo than himself that was solid, he'd likely be 1st pick and be able to get mid and have a better chance of carrying the game. Anyway, you need to keep in mind where you end up in pick order when duoing if you aren't looking to go adc/support. If you want that, you can usually get it.
How do you get better in roles that you are not good at? - Well, here's what I do. And this is really what I do on a regular basis. I think about what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. For instance, I realized that I don't play any hyper carry ads. So, I read up on hyper carries like vayne and kog maw. I look for guides on how to build them (most adcs are the same btw ), I look for vids on how people play them (eg how do I all in with a specific champ - is there a combo - when do I all in - what's the best way for me to burst - how should I behave in lane with this champ). Then, I fire up a custom game and try out the mechanics of whatever champ vs AI. Usually I learn a few tricks during that custom on how to position myself, etc. Then, I'm off to normal games where I'll request the role or character I'm trying out. Now, people still report your for being awful in normals, but it really is where you need to try out characters to see if you are any good or not as the bots are useless for proving your skill level to yourself. So, fire up that normal and ask to play a role (again - after you've tried out the champ against bots). If you don't know anyone you are with and you are quite awful, I suggest muting everyone at the start of the game. Then, do your best. Continue with this until you feel like you have a serviceable skill level in whatever role. And keep in mind what you need to work on. For me, I noticed I didn't really have alot of mids for ranked, so I started practicing some with gragas against and karth. That way, I'll be able to get the job done if I need to play mid. The next thing I need to do is put more time into being better top lane. Again, because while I prefer adc/support, I might need to play top for the team. So, best to be ready for it. Put your time in and practice roles.
One last thought - there are certain things you can generally expect in ranked. 1 - if you are 1st pick, you generally can call whatever you want. Common knowledge, I'm sure - but I'll add - CALL WHATEVER YOU WANT. 2 - if you duo queue, you generally can lock down both adc and support. It works best if your adc is 1st pick, ofc. I've bumped into like 10 random dedicated supports in all of my games of LoL. People generally aren't going to call support. So, if you are 1st pick and duo'd, just call adc and then your duo partner can almost always get support.
Lol King profiles for ranked tracking
I'm not going to update this regularly, so just consider it a snapshot (I'll add a date when I update them). Anyway, I enjoy seeing folks progress through ranked and keeping tabs on that sort of thing from time to time.
Snapshot updated 05/28/2014
Character guides
That provides some good perspective. So let me ask you this. Let's say I'm on blue side. My top laner is in decent shape and we have about a 50-60% chance of pulling off a kill. My red spawns and I see the enemy jungler go near my red. If, for instance If I'm about 5 seconds away from top, would you go through with the gank or protect your buff? I'm trying to get a good feeling for this sort of thing as I'm always pissed if I happen to be away from my buff and I'm worried about it getting picked off.
i dn´t know what i can answear to you pac, i´m in portugal when i send a message to you and you was off, is just because the time zone is diferent and i was with hope you read and do the same answear to me any time you go there if i was on or off just that not to pissy you really and sorry if i ask anything wrong.
k streaming - about to try to out mr karls suggestions.
rui - I'll contact you soon.
Don't feel bad, I've been getting my ass handed to me in top lane last few times queuing up with Hedgie/Cow/Karl last night... like seriously demolished every time.
Re: Pacov's MMR
I'm at a lower level of Ranked than you are and I find the competition much tougher than in Normals. Maybe it's people just tryharding more or the fact that I don't ever try out things like Support Urgot in ranked, but it certainly feels like there is a significant difference in the MMR between the two. I just assume it's the same for you as well, so I think your Naut spectate game should be ranked if you want to get the most out of everyone's critiques.
Re: Karl
I get your perspective and I can't say that you're wrong... but maybe this will help you see mine:
Say you end up going top in a game, something you're far from specialized in. You want to go with Cho cause he's a safe laner with whom you're very familiar with and you know the basic matchups against most top laners. You're not going to snowball your lane and rule the game after, but you're not going to feed and you are going to get your farm and be a positive asset to your team later on.
But no. Hedgie is telling you that we need an AD DPS champ, not an AP Tank top lane because of something about Dive Comps vs Poke Comps vs AOE Comps when the Koreans played against the Chinese...
So yeah, you play a champ that you played a few times before that fits your team comp better and supposedly counters your opponent's top lane choice... and hopefully goes better than last time you tried him... but it doesn't and you feed hard and the Rene you were going against gets out of control and your team loses because of you.
Do you really want to hear someone talk about the champ you originally wanted to play being a "Win Lane Lose Game" champ?
Karl, you're a great jungler and I'm great as a support... in our separate roles we have a fantastic selection of champs and can match our team's comp and counter the opponents. When we go to lanes we're not as familiar with, we have to just do the best we can and for me that means picking Jayce. The reason I like him is because he's hard to counter, he's a safe laner, and he doesn't need the jungler's help to at least get his farm if the lane goes to shit for some reason. I know all too well what you mean about him being "win lane/lose game" but I look at it more of a win lane but can only carry so hard sort of thing. I don't think you've ever played with a good Jayce (not that I am or ever will be a good Jayce... but I can dream) and I think your perspective of the champ and his late game potential suffers because of it. He's not a fucking AD version of Nunu so just get that thought out of your head.
Its impossible to carry a game that your teammates are all doing terrible in with Jayce, but if I win my lane and if everyone else is just doing okay to slightly bad... then we will probably win and that's a fine result for me when playing outside of my comfort roles in Ranked... which is my focus nowadays.
I get that you feel frustrated in team comps that are too squishy when you're the only real tank, but me playing champs that I'm bad at doesn't really make the game much funner does it? Next time we play together, maybe I should jungle and you go top? Because otherwise I'm going to play Jayce because that's who I think should be my go to top laner... unless you have some other suggestions on what should be my go to guy? Can you teach me to play Cho?
rui
It's perfectly understandable that a player might not be able to play the perfect pick in every lane for every situation.
However, I think that experienced players should generally have a few champions in every role (who aren't banned all the time) who can fulfill the _generic_ version of the role. Essentially, you can't count on every team to be able to play effectively play in highly idiosyncratic playstyles, so you should probably be able to fill the default team comp that everybody falls back on.
In my opinion, the function of top in a generic composition is to provide a reasonable combination of some tankiness, some damage, and some threat to the enemy backline. Therefore, everybody should be able to fall back on champions that can reasonably do those things if necessary.
Now, my selection of champions for top is admittedly thin, but I can fulfill the "generic top" role if needed with a few different champions.
I just think that if you are going to work hard on one champion for a specific lane, it should be a champion that does a good job filling a fairly generic team comp rather than really wanting a pretty specific and not terribly common team playstyle (in pub games anyway).
The above is basically the main reason that I learned Cho. Cho can reasonably fulfill the generic requirements for top, mid, and jungle, so he kind of kills 3 birds with one stone. Plus he can reasonably switch from pure tank, to tanky AS, to burst AP.
It's also my opinion that many people put too much emphasis on "individual winning their lane" rather than "maximum team contribution for team winning", which is part of the reason I started in this discussion (its not you with this mentality really, its just a lot of other people that I randomly play with or see posting on forums). I agree that Jayce offers a nearly optimal solution for lane winning, but I'm just suggesting that "who will give me the best shot of winning lane?" is not the right question to be asking.
Since I should probably be learning a new top lane champion one of these days, I have given some thought about who people really should be picking up as a fallback top champ, and my thought is Renekton. He is a strong laner without too many counters and he fulfills the generic version of the role very well. And he is strong as hell, but not banned or played too often.
June 5th, 2013
I will attempt to observe a wild Pacov in the jungle and will jot down some notes as I do!
3:30 Pacov has smited red buff and is level 3! His mid lane is pushed but top might be gankable... I expect him to press Tab to see if Jayce has placed his ward or even has wards. Oh... no Tabbing, going off to farm wolves instead. Jayce is hard to gank but his Jax should have a gap closer and stun specced at this point so it is strange that he wouldn't at least check the ward situation.
4:40 Ah! The Pacov's plan was to let Jayce push and have a better opportunity to gank! But did Jayce place a ward in the meantime, and actually the earlier time would have been better even though he hadn't pushed the lane yet? The subject never pressed Tab so we won't know if a ward was placed... if we did know a ward was put down, the gank would be probably be better through the tribush since Jayce has pushed right up to tower. Instead, Pacov ganks the long way through the warded river and Jayce sees him coming. Amazing Jayce mechanics ensue, and the gank fails.
5:30 After doing Double Golems he returns and gets Jayce to flash so the gank is successful! Well done mister Pacov. Oh wait... he is going to "camp" the lane now for what seems like an eternity. What a waste of time... even his own Jax is pinging for him to go away!
But wait! A wild Jungle Yi appears! A fight... Pacov dies but his top lane is fed a double kill! Bravo!
Hmmm... I have just realized that this is not a ranked game as I suggested was to be played, but just some normal game against scrubs who like to dick around with troll picks like Jungle Yi. Hmmm... I have all of a sudden lost interest in spectating this match and shall go off to do something more productive with my time.
Well, one thing that we learned is that I shouldn't play Lux in the last few games when I'm too tired to play well. I had had some good games when I played her early in the night, but that was ugly tonight.
Correction: after that final game, it is pretty clear that I just shouldn't be playing that late at night.
ow... back hurts... chogath so heavy. huehuehue
any other feedback thunder? I check tomorrow. Thx!
so you've been seeing me a lot the last few days... work conjoined my weekends... so I will see you people who go to bed at ~11pmET next thursday
Nah, I actually quit watching cause the internet was way too slow at work to load up the archived stream... like for every 15 minutes it would load 1 minute of footage or something crazy. I'd go do some things and come back to see you clear one camp before it started buffering again.
The enemy jungler was actually Diamond IV so it was silly of me to call him a scrub... but to be fair, he did not get that high in ranked playing Jungle Yi.
I thought that Jungle Yi was actually a thing that happens a bit at high ELO. Yi really isn't that bad in jungle.
it's Teleport/Smite Yi. He was using Ghost instead.
Jungle Yi has got the lowest win rate as a jungler (41%) in Diamond+ level play and 47.5% for Gold/Plat, but the site I like to use gets kinda confused when people pick up Spirit items so that might be off a little... or a lot.
Considering that you're a proponent of top laners being tanky and having CC, I'm surprised to hear you're a fan of Jungle Yi.
Thunder - if it helps, I could always export a vid of me jungling to youtube so you could check it out at a lower resolution. Obv you couldn't watch it live then, but you could at least watch it. Let me know and I'll make a highlight and export... only takes me about 3 minutes to sort something like that.
Well... I might catch you post 11PM - prob not tonight, but mayhaps on Friday. I'm taking the afternoon off work today (won't be free) and all day tomorrow off.
re: jayce - I keep going back and forth between seeing him as a decent top lane pick in many combos and the more traditional I would rather have a bruiser/tank top. I love that he's relatively easy to play in a duo lane, so that does open up some options... we just need to practice how we swap out and fix a few things. We did an ok job with the lane swap last night, but plenty of room for improvement. Our adc/support did great job pushing for an early tower. I have an unorthodox view on the best way to have jayce solo bot on purple side, but it does gimp the jungler. If jayce could hit lane at level 2 or at least be close, then awesome. And having a blue would also be great. You could pretty easily disrupt the adc/support going that way, so not only could you get an early top tower due to the swap, but we could keep the adc bot under farmed (I think I did a good job disrupting the adc's farm though).
I'm beginning to think you have no idea how the jungle works, hedgie. Of course I want to give karl's top lane opponent double buffs.
Yeah, top lane was my fault. At that point of the night I couldn't land a skill shot to save my life and I was too tired to make reasonable decisions.
With that being said, randomly giving him a bonus kill plus double buffs, and then pushing the creeps all the way from my tower to his tower was...unhelpful. If you are in a lane that is behind, you just can't push the wave all the way from the friendly tower to the enemy tower. It's basically a giant middle finger to the laner because while you might have denied some xp to the opponent, you have guaranteed that your teammate is going to get zoned out for a long while.
Of course, I decided to fix the problem of being zoned out by running in and feeding instead, but I'm just pro like that.
Yi seems to be similar to Jayce - he is very good in certain types of games (everybody running around and split pushing), less good in generic teamfights. So he can work just fine in some cases. It's just that the rest of the team should probably be on board with the fact that a Yi will be in jungle so that they can pick accordingly.
I don't mind niche champions by any means. I just think that thought should be given at the selection screen when using them.
Yi is awesome if your enemy team just picked a squishy composition with no way to CC him out of commission. If they didn't, Taric is enough to neutralize his cheese almost entirely. Yi comes in for the kill, Taric stuns, Yi dies. Whether he's old school AD Yi with amazing damage output, or AP Yi with the ability to burst someone down and then tank the entire teams damage, one stun bones him in an epic fashion.
Gotta love those guys that meditate under tower fire expecting to kill Taric when they finish...
in demigod all time i play tank i was sad, now in LOL i discovery my true nature support pure suport forever
So... I'm downloading a F2P game right now that I am super excited about. Marvel heroes - its on steam. Here's just a copy paste of the reviews. You'll be thrilled to know that for $250 you can purchase some of the content... I'm still pretty excited to check it out based on the reviews, though
“Comparisons to the Diablo series aren’t lip-service; Marvel Heroes plays exactly like a gamma-irradiated puree of Diablo II and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Real-time mouseclicking combat? Check. Tons of loot? You bet! Crafting? Absolutely. Randomly generated levels and loot drops? Stop it, my nipples are getting hard. Speaking as a fan of both franchises (as well as the Marvel universe in general), my time in the closed beta was nothing short of nerdvana.”- PC Gamer, May 2013
“Not only does Marvel Heroes seem the perfect title to scratch the Diablo-itch; it's also an MMO to please the most discerning Marvel fan.”– MMORPG.com
“Marvel Heroes combines the best of the MMO genre with the best of the Action RPG genre”– Curse
“Marvel Heroes is a beautiful game, and an incredibly fun one at that. It also offers a distinct change of pace for gamers who may dig certain aspects of Diablo III, but are looking for a richer overall setting to while away the hours.”– Ten Ton Hammer
I'm buying the $250 worth of DLC with the game, but if it sucks, I'm blaming it on you.
holy fuck that is expensive
well... I've played that marvel game about 30 minutes or so now. They appear to give you 5-6 free character choices at the start. No idea how you unlock other champs, etc. If you know the marvel universe, you will immediately recognize some of the places you end up. Really cool setup. Graphics = ok. Gameplay is really diablo 3 like. Cut seen animations to push the story along are really good. Anyway, I'm certainly having fun with what I've played. I have not encountered any MP aspect yet. I assume I'll hit that after playing through some stuff. Anyway, I currently recommend giving it a look at least. Really cool and I'm having fun 30 min in anyway. Off to bed - night all and thx for the games!
edit - ah - actually I see other players after the 1st mission. Not sure if you can interact as I'm off to bed, but you can at least see other peeps.
hunny and I went on a rampage tonight... the last game was even kind of trolly with the shit we were doing... looks like tomorrow i should be expecting a series of losses to make up for it.
deleted for ya.
If anyone else picks up that marvel game... and you can add people in game (no idea atm), I'm pacov in game.
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