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
This is delightful
Who the heck is Hairy??
Hmm...I think then the adc/support lane should go top while the dude with smite would start upper buff, lower buff, bot lane, then smite would be at dragon
posted this over at madcast, but thought I'd add it here and see if anyone has any thoughts:
So, we know there's been a ton of changes and content recently, but I wanted to focus on in on the relic shield item and its upgrades. I started talking about this in Dan's thread re: the 3.14 patch. Anyway, fast recap on the item. It has 3 upgradeable stages - relic shield/targon's brace/face of the mountain. Here are the stats as of today:
Relic Shield
Targon's Brace
Face of the Moutain
K - so, I believe it was designed to be a support item primarily, but is exceptional on an adc as well for the cost. Ignore the stats for a moment and just get the general idea. It's an item that gives both your pal in lane the same amount of gold for a last hit. This means if your support last hits when the item has charges, he gets the full gold and you do as well. Same goes for an adc last hitting. The beauty of it is that its extra income for a support and removes the adc saying "stop taking my CS." In short, it makes being a support a happier place.
The perceived problem - 2 prominent streamers duo'd top lane recently with the relic items and created a stir to the point where folks (myself included) thought this was creating a meta shift. A meta shift isn't bad, but it was perceived that its almost foolish to have a jungler and that moving to a 2/1/2 split would be better. Put this together with the fact that trinkets and XP changes nerfed the jungle quite a bit, and now there's a knee jerk reaction that you would be better served to not have a jungler at all. I thought this way earlier today... then I started to play several games where I'd duo top lane and go the double bruiser route.
Here's what I'm thinking now: running 2 bruisers top with relic shield does what you'd think it would. Gives you a nice advantage and enables you to get some extra income which is "kind of" sustainable. It has the downside of making the game super unfun for the top laner that has to deal with it... BUT - if they are a decent top laner and have a decent jungler, they only have to deal with it a bit. In my experience in several games where I adopted the top lane dbl relic setup, I got exactly what I thought I would, but if you have ANY other lane that plays poorly or is beat (remember, the other team has a jungler), then any gains won by the double lane is gone.
What you need to keep in mind is that relic/targon is primarily a lane item (imo). That means you want to drag out your lane phase generally as that's where you get your money. So, you actually maximize the damage to the enemy top laner by punishing over and over and zoning them out. BUT - this means an enemy jungler can take your buffs at will - and more importantly, the enemy jungler can provide additional pressure to overwhelm a lane. Consider a common example where a mid + jungler will rotate to a lane to provide a 4 man gank. Well, in this case, they know there is no enemy jungler. So, its literally going to be 4v2 for that setup. This sort of stalling tactic in top lane only provides an opportunity for the enemy jungler to advance and catch up. In addition, the enemy team likely has dragon control. So, the only way, in my mind anyway, for this strategy to be effective would be to score multiple kills on the enemy solo top laner during the lane phase....and... you've actually got to take the tower so you can get dragon control and begin to send one of to roam.
RE: riot nerfing the item, there is a change on the PBE for it, but I believe all they are doing is reducing the total stacks/charges the item provides. That, I believe is it, but I could be mistaken. I don't think that even address the perceived top lane problem as 2 people upgrading targon in top. The only way they truly maximize on the item would be to get that upgrade and stay in lane as long as possible. But you likely do so at the expense of your other lanes/dragon control.
Anyway, long blah blah over. I'm curious as to other folks experience with the item. Do you think I'm off? Do you think it requires a nerf? Do you think its pretty well set for bot lane? Top lane? Thanks!
I think this link is the only way to really express how I feel about the pre-season patch.
http://popwatch.ew.com/2013/11/20/channing-tatum-epic-split/
May Korean Jesus' love be with you all.
wait i think i get it.
Jean Claude is the pros in NACL and the other competitive leagues that are playing for money, doing 2-1-2 and dominating.
We are the second clip that fail and hurt ourselves.
(btw, Relic shield is being hotfixed on Monday).
Goddamn Hedgie, you do know me well don't you?
Yes, the first clip is of JCVD cruising to victory because his entire team is using an item so blatantly OP that it makes the days of League Of Cleavers seem not so bad.
The second clip is of Channing Tatum thinking that having a jungler will make up for having your poor top laner feeding his 10th death while being inhibitor dove at the 20 minute mark by two Relic equipped bruisers.
He ain't got time for yo problems
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair
Korean Jesus has bestowed upon me the Sumarai based support champ I've always wanted!
Once they make Relic Shield melee only, Kayle and Yasuo will rule bot lane together.
haha - they seriously need to change some things on the new champ. That shield is pretty sick in and of itself. Seriously consider the ramifications of a 5 second, very wide shield that blocks damage and ultimates... you don't even have to be good and you just won the game. Anyway, hopefully that becomes clear before release. Otherwise pacov = ranked in preseason immediately. (he'll be banned ofc, but hey...).
Well, this most recent set of changes to the jungle items mean that we now get a "who can solo the dragon the earliest" contest. I remember this game from season 1! Do you have any idea how early champions like WW and Udyr are now going to be able to solo dragon?
With Udyr I do... pretty sick early... now to just do it...
OK - so I spent like an hour and half toying around with things in the jungle. Learned a few fairly useless things.
First - general flow. This might sound very basic, but this is pretty important. The creeps are worth more as the game goes on. Specifically, camps are worth jack and shit early game. By the time you hit 6, the value starts increasing quite a bit.
For those of you that didn't see it on reddit, one fellow made a crappy ass speed run on the jungle showing how much gold you can get if you do nothing but douche bag farm your own jungle. At 20 minutes, you can get 7400 gold this way (one test I did tonight with graggy, of all champs, did 7500 gold at that point. Now, max gold in lane with zero kills is like 7100 at 20 minutes. The jungler can actually one up that. That's nice and all, but kind of pointless as you screw your team. It's actually pretty easy to f your team over and do this, btw.... but you also take every single buff, don't gank/pressure, etc. In short, dumb and unrealistic. But it goes to show that there IS money there if you can get at it.
Other thoughts (going to jump around a bit) - normally I start blade with aatrox. Now that machette gives you 5 hp per hit, it's actually giving the exact same regen as blade. Aatrox cannot solo dragon without madreds early (unlike mr udyr if you believe that). It's worth it for the team to take an early madreds on aatrox and bypass dorans provided you get that dragon. Questionable re: upgrading madreds to wriggles, though.
The best jungle passive imo is the one where you build stacks overtime and can use that on big creeps. If you are actually playing like a real jungler, this means you'll get 40 gold when you can rotate back to your jungle.
The top jungler now imo - lee sin. Not because he's amazing (he's great, though) - but because folks are still adapting to the new vision game. Fuggers aren't warding, supports aren't doing normal warding for their part... everyone is like woo - i have a trinket, I'm contributing to vision! But they aren't. Vision in the vast majority of my games is rubbish. Which brings me to lee. Any jungler that benefits and wants a sight stone is an INCREDIBLE buff for the team. That 1 sightstone makes up the slack for the support change nearly completely. What SHOULD happen is everyone should be picking up a green ward when they base and keep up vision. That's not even kind of happening. So, a jungler that runs sightstone automatically solves that problem. Add in lees mobility and now the enemy team has > vision than your team as well. I'm banning lee every game. I think its the right call now. I'm only doing it because of the vision, though... which is pretty huge imo.
It might be logical for the jungler to take an additional hit and pick up a sightstone to compensate for fuggers that refuse to ward outside of their crappy ass trinket.
Anyway, back to my gragas setup. I ran a few tests. 1 was a 1/15/14 and the other was like 16/14/0. The tests were just farm fests with zero ganks. Both are ok. The second was a smidge better for gold generation, but I was getting 7500 on my last run with zero lane creeps/kills at 20. The change to graggy's dash has made him actually one of the fastest junglers if not THE fastest jungler... and no one is talking about it yet. The change was that he does = dmg to all he bodyslams vs dmging the 1 he hits first and less to other things in the area. This means incredibly safe and farily quick clears of jungle camps. Ganks are rubbish prior to 6, but that's acceptable imo. He's like a more random ww. That's the thing I dislike about junglers like cho and also graggy. You miss that initiate on your gank and you are likely useless. Graggy requires to hit a SS on his ult - cho needs to get that knockup. Graggy has the edge there, but requires a high skill cap and solid knowledge of burnt summoners, etc.
Anyway, researching a ton of different things in the jungle.
Last random thing I checked out. That XP mastery in the support tree that gives you 10XP per 10 seconds if there is a higher level champ with you - it does not stack. I was thinking of some cheese tactic but that doesn't work.
Anyone else (guessing I'm looking mainly at karl here) have thoughts on the jungle that they'd be willing to share? My ranked 5's team at madcast is starting up on Friday and I'm trying to wrap my head around the jungle as best I can before we start playing. I'm looking for as much specific information as anyone has time for. EG - masteries/runes for amumu. Jungle route. Gank timing suggestions. Prioritize lane ganks or standard gank. Item build. You name it.
My Aatrox, which was quite good before imo, feels like its fallen off a bit. I've been continuing to play with varied skill level folks, though, so its really diffuclt for me to figure out what I should adapt. Still debating on itemization for him, though. Dorans means I have better early kill potential, but does very little to help me snag an early dragon. I think with madreds I can take out dragon exceptionally early on aatrox (but not 100% sure). On that line, I know I can take it early with udyr... but my udyr kind of blows over all.
I played a nasus jungle yesterday and decided that my third item absolutely should be a tank item. I was doing fine, so I went with TF, but that was not a good decision for my comp and how my team was playing. Bad decision. I think if I had chosen a tank item for my 3rd, everything would have been much better.
Anyway, any help would be appreciated.
The new jungle items are bad. That means that you probably don't want to buy them if you can avoid them, so Dorans blade starts if you can get away with it.
This is especially true in organized play probably. If you can start Dorans and immediately go into non jungling items and they have to build even the best jungling item (Spirit of the Ancient Golem), you are still WAY ahead early. That means that you can simply group as a team early, and their jungler is screwed. Their jungler will have a whole lot of gold invested in gold generation (useless since they can't farm jungle) and monster life/mana steal (also useless). Meanwhile, you spent your gold on combat stats. Big advantage to your team.
Of course, if you let them farm the jungle for a long time you will eventually fall behind, but it takes quite a while.
The other issue is early solo dragons. With the change to monster life/mana leech, a lot of champs will probably be able to do very early dragons. I'm not quite sure what effect this will have, but I don't think that you should bank everything on going for an early dragon. Sure, you will be able to do it against bad teams. But you would beat a bad team anyway, so you don't build strategies around what works against bad teams. Its a question of what will work against a good team.
And I think that good teams will learn to protect dragons pretty quickly against junglers that can do it early in organized play. So I see early solo dragons as more of a solo queue thing probably.
I definitely wouldn't build into the Madreds line just to do dragons because Wriggles is a really really bad item. Of course, you can just stop at Razors, but then you've sunk 300 gold into a jungle only passive again. Its not a terrible deal since that item does really speed up clear times, but its so slot inefficient.
This is new. I last played plain sight on steam on 1/1/1970. Yeah!
Was it fun?
streaming my ranked 5's team. game 1 went well!
Spellsy taric analysis - we played against him last night.
Runes:
MMasteries:
1 variable - he took exactly 1 point in brute force for an added 4 DMG at level 18. I choose 1 point in expose weakness as that might be more valuable - both are kind of crap, but there's not much in the spell tree.
Abilities: dazzle/shatter/(chose to roam to mid at level 2)/imbue/shatter 2/imbue 2/radiance/ dazzle 2/imbue 3/dazzle 3/dazzle 4/radiance 2/imbue 4/shatter 3/ shatter 4 - game ends
Items:
start - ward trinkey/relic shield/1 green ward/1 pot.
1st back - targon's brace/boots/1 green ward/2-3 red pots.
2nd back - sight stone/ red pots/1 blue
3rd back - mobo boots
4th back - mikails crucible
5th back - ohm wrecker
6th back - face of the mountain
7th back - giants belt
8th back - warmogs
Game devolved into hard trolling for his team with spellsy trying to 1v3 at one point.
From looking at some of his over taric games, he varies widely the items he chooses - our game was just trolling for him, so probably not a ton to learn outside of his mastery choices and that early roam at level 2. That roam didn't accomplish anything, but it might be possible to help secure an early kill at mid if you can get your jungler on the same page and do a 3 man gank.
meh. Botlane came down to that really bad level 1 trade you guys had.
If you weren't both at 20-30% hp, Lucian shouldn't have been able to 2v1 you (and certainly shouldn't have been able to snipe Bryff for the kill).
i do think that there was a potential for Bryff to have gotten that double kill in the (very) close 3v2 while they were stunned. It would have come down to a razor's edge and his Q may have been down. But there was an instant where Lucian and Taric were both stunned while at 15% hp while Annie/Amumu were in their face. It would have been a close call but i'm pretty sure that it would have worked out if you consider the 5% heal from Dangerous Game. But that's just the difference between Diamond and Gold. Being able to notice those half-a-second windows and turning it around with 50 hp.
i think that while the red-invade worked out fine, we were a little overconfident about stopping the counter red invade. i think we all forgot about his E and being able to "Shaco" his way to red extremely quickly. It would have been better for Amumu to have just done his blue and we would have ended up trading buffs and won a flash out of Ez in exchange for a few CS.
It was pretty foolish of me to have flashed over baron wall though. Even if i had gotten the double buffs, there was a big chance i would have ended up just handing them over to their top laner or my midlaner in the 2v1.
That was one of the two times that night where i overcommitted to an invasion and ended up paying a lot for it. (the other time was that Fizz game where i knew he wanted to level 2 me, i stopped it, but then the red roam let him level 3 me and midlane went out of control from there).
Should have just played Anivia that game anyway though (or asked you to first-pick Fizz).
Sigh, I love Comcast so much.
I'm guessing that something at Comcast blew up. I was playing another game when my internet suddenly went from normal to complete crap. Did a bandwidth test and found I was getting less than 5% what I normally get. I wait a bit and try and fix some stuff but the problem doesn't seem to be on my end. Wait some more then try and call Comcast. I get the message that they are getting high call volume.
I try and talk to somebody anyway. Well, turns out their call volume is so high that after you go through all their menus, their transfer systems just drops your call and hangs up on you (with either a busy tone or a mechanical "your call could not be transferred message") instead of putting you into a hold queue. I tried 4 times and every time they just hung up on me. Nice!
EDIT - Yep, some checking on third party forums shows that pretty much anybody in IL that has Comcast is out of luck. And because Comcast doesn't have a system for letting people know things besides calling in...well, its a mess.
I watched the whole game from spellsy's pov (capt'd a vid of it on youtube in case he deletes from stream). There's no doubt quite a few things could have gone better. I was already tilting at that point anyway, so ah well. Figured I'd go back and see if I could learn anything from their supports pov. A smidge.. but not much as it got so out of hand. Taric's early roam mid got him jack - and we obv should have been able to clean up 2v1 on lucian. Is what is.
Sorry karl! comcast... meh
Do you have any alternative to the crap that is Comcast? if not, I'd vote your stupid IL legislators and executors(?) out of office.
Listen to these 2 and tell me if you like one mic more than the other prease
http://www.twitch.tv/1pacov1/b/484963816
new
http://www.twitch.tv/1pacov1/b/484963082
Clips are like 20 seconds a pop. Help pacov out please
Well, it looks like Riot has decided to delete Rammus. Thats nice.
I mean, I realize that he had a high win %, but he had a really low play rate. But Riot just hates anybody who is capable of ganking right now (other than a select few champions that they like), so its time to delete Rammus.
You can really tell what champions Riot likes and which ones they dont like. J4, Lee Sin, Renekton, Kass, are all allowed to sit in really high powered states forever and nothing ever happens, but there is a faint hint that other champs might be decent, and its time to delete them.
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