Update 5/25/2017
Well, I started a thread back in Dec 2011 that’s seen a lot of activity (some 922,000 views over the course of a few years apparently...). That thread had a good deal of tips/strategies/discussions about League of Legends from new and old players alike. You can find the previous thread (now archived) here: https://forums.joeuser.com/413863. I think its time to start fresh with a new thread.
What’s this thread all about?For those that followed the previous thread, the type of content you see here will be fairly consistent to what you are used to. Please consider this a place to discuss LoL related content as you like. I'll do the same and treat the thread as a blog as well where I talk about what’s going on with me in LoL. Feel free to jump in and join the discussion if you like.
Quick background on meI played a lot of Demigod as pacov/cheesuscrust. Back in August 2011, I started getting heavily involved in League of Legends, and folks from the community were kind enough to help me figure things out. I play LoL most nights, stream, make videos and it’s my main gaming interest.
Some links
Me picking GP is never a troll. I probably have almost as many games on GP as I do on gragas or ziggs. I mained GP for a while when I started playing and continued to use him for specific counter picks (TF) in other seasons in ranked. I think at one point I was like 15-0 in ranked with GP.
1 - yes, no longer serious imo based on that pick. That's not saying in anyway he's throwing or trying to feed. That's saying he picked a weak champ (imo) that made it so the other lanes would have to carry to win and that his carrying would likely be staying mid, tossing an ult out here and there, and eventually... after quite some time, taking out his tower. A safe, selfish pick imo when I asked for a decent pick (a decent champ that might be able to help out or have any positive impact outside of his lane). Again, its not auto loss... as long as we do well in top and/or bottom. So, I don't like the pick. I was annoyed by the pick, but again, all that is the emotional side after feeling trolled a bit already.
Could you not summarize support Gragas as very similar?
Both GP and Gragas boast subpar winrates. (objectively a weak champ and thereby unemotional at all)
Gragas is a safe, selfish pick because he's a tanky and mobile support who "accidentally" manages to leach a fair amount of CS. His teamfight impact is selfish and safe as well, compared to more conventional supports. Oh, and if you build him glass cannon, he's really dependent on making sure top and/or mid does really well.
yet I'd consider graggy's ult something that would validate picking him in a team comp. I just don't think the adv of getting an easier laning phase justifies taking gp due to his mid/late game disadvantages.
If it only takes one ability to make a champion fit a teamcomp, why does that not apply to gangplank? (both have similar engagement and disengagement value).
Furthermore, GP ult allows him to have some global presence to counter the Karthus. What do you need to do when you're getting 3v2'd + Karthus ult? Run away. GP ult helps you do that and prevents additional deaths. This is "yet another" thing that GP does in that particular matchup.
Maokai, The Mummy, and GP all have AOE ults that Gragas' ult has a lot of anti-synergy with. Thresh, Nami, Morganna, Leona... so many strong supports that you do know how to play well would have gone so much better with that team, or most teams. Why not pick one of those if you wanted to have a last game of the night where everyone did their best?
Instead you picked a not that great support that you apparently don't have much experience with while getting worked up that one of your pals picked a not that great mid who he's extremely good with?
I totally understand where Pacov is coming from and can see why he was upset with my pick but I think the important thing is that when I pick GP I am not trolling. Maybe when some one else picks him it is trolling but I actually have a decent amount of experience with him and have had success playing him.
As 1st pick, I didn't really have much control over everyone else's pick (and zero control of whatever crap sy was going to do). It is a fair criticism that I could/should have taken another support, though.
I am curious to hear a comp where anyone can tell me they actually want a gp on their team vs another champ. I honestly cannot think of one.
OK. Fair enough and thanks for saying so. I definitely would have preferred a different champ as is now very obvious. I just don't think gp brings anything meaningful to the team outside of early lane dominance in certain match ups.
Anyway, that's a couple nights in a row where I'm either bent out of shape or getting bent out of shape at the end of the night. Going to try to call it a night a little earlier I think.
People need to stop complaining about internal tier lists.
Unless you are in high Diamond or something, you simply aren't good enough such that tier lists matter that much. A very well played tier 3 champion at least as good as a kind of well played tier 2 champion at our level of play. We just aren't good enough to consistently exploit somebody like Gangplank's weaknesses in the long term, so the game comes down to individual skill on champions just like it always does.
I mean, I agree that in theory GP isn't a great champion. But he has a higher winrate than Lucian and Renekton when I checked yesterday. You know why? Because tier lists matter a whole hell of a lot less than individual skill on that champion.
I mean, I probably wouldn't encourage a new player to learn to play something like AD Sion top, but if somebody happens to already be good at somebody not currently popular, I don't have a problem with them playing it. (The guy we were playing with the other day is not good with the champions he plays top and is still learning them, so thats another issue...).
Plus, there are a lot of bigger factors that you should be worrying about at champ select. Namely, team composition. We have all this complaining about people picking champions that aren't high enough on somebody's tier list, but we ignore MUCH larger problems.
Take last night. We first picked a top/jungle combo of Nidalee/Eve. Come on. Thats TERRIBLE unless we are going for some kind of extreme split push, no teamfighting at all comp. We get no CC, no front line from our jungle/top. Nidalee could poke in principle, but Eve can't, so we don't really have siege either. Then we quickly follow up with a mid pick of Malzahar. So that doesn't fit at all with split pushing, so we have a nothing comp.
But because those are 3 champs that don't violate anybody's tier list, nobody says anything despite the fact that the game is basically unwinnable (unless the other team is openly incompetent). But if somebody had picked something that made a better team comp and therefore gave us a better chance to win, but happened to violate a tier list, we would get a 2 day ongoing thread about it.
(I'm not saying that the game in question was lost because of team comp since everybody lost their lanes, but the game would have been lost even with good lanes due to comp).
Karl and I in complete agreement?! It's a Festivus miracle I tell you.
One thing I will say as a support player is that I feel that a lot "tier strength" of support champions is tied to their "team comp strength" in a way. Back when Leona and Thresh were considered God Tier, I feel it had a lot to do with picking a tank support really opened up the selection for the rest of your team. Yes, they were too strong in lane but having a Tank on the team that didn't need gold opened things up for DPS jungles and such.
The top support picks today cover a lot of your teams needs so you don't end up with useless team comps as much, and I think that's why they're the top picks more so than that they're overtuned or too strong in lane or whatever.
Well, I don't think I'm personally going on and on about tier lists as much as I simply believe GP is a weak champ. It's his jacked up kit that is just smeh. And I don't believe a game is lost because of a single pick. In the instance I've been talking about, I believe we needed a stronger pick. But, skip all that and lets talk about tier lists and the meta then.
Now, I generally don't get too sour when I see someone take an arguably weaker champ (based on some tier list or experience). I'm actually generally ok with that and its fun to play various champs in various roles. I personally generally dislike meta changes like dbl bruiser bot and just don't find them fun. No tier list involved there... just something I generally don't like.
I also dislike picks that force you into behaving a certain way - all really enforced by a champion pick. That's not to say some of those picks are bad; I just don't like em. For instance, a ww jungle means no pressure until he hits 6. Knowing that, lanes have to adapt and are typically put in a position of having ganks from the enemy team and none for you team. In short it puts you into a position where you can fall behind, but then have the expectation of getting back ahead once ww hits 6. Another example is ww mid. Sure, its a champ that you can pick, have good sustain and do fine, but you generally need a jungler's attention to make anything of that ww mid unless its you are up against a baddie.. Nothing really wrong with doing that, though. Just not my preference. WW mid isn't conventional, but it works and he can provide tanky engage for the team later. GP can win his lane and provide very little later imo.
But continuing in that, there are gains the team gets out of not just composition, but certain champs. For instance, a fizz that's either doing well solo or because his jungler got him ahead is a major threat to the enemy team in pretty much all lanes. A gp is a threat to the other mid laner and that's about it (sure, he has some minor power with his ult, but its just not that good). Anyway, the biggest benefit I'd expect out of a gp mid lane is for him to keep the enemy mid busy and unable to roam/impact other lanes. Except if its karthus, then he can still impact other lanes.... so the most I can really hope for is that karth it kept from csing and leveling a bit early/mid.
Anyway, here's where you START to get into tier lists, but also think about team comp. I can put champs into tiers based on how they would do in a certain role, vs a certain matchup, in a certain comp, etc. There's nothing wrong with that and its good to be able to think about all of those things. That said, some champs are certainly better than others at certain things. I don't get terribly bent out of shape when people aren't picking god tier champs in the slightest. A god tier champ might be rubbish when played by someone in our group. Not a big deal and nothing to be dogmatic about.
I guess my main thought is that I don't super care about tier lists (either?). I also agree that I would very much like us to think more about composition. That's more problematic when someone like karl can't muster the words "I'd like to play jungle," ofc. And when we have certain folks with us (eg that fella that went eve... idk, sy going whatever he felt like).
But here's where we hit some crap: let's say I've been playing support all night. I want to play top as nidalee for a game. OK, now we get some guy that has decided they want to play eve (nothing to do with karl refusing to say "I'd like to jungle" hue). Well, now I'm in a position of having to be like well... guess I won't play nidalee now (even though I've been playing support all night and just wanted to do one thing for fun...). So, I have to beg off and go play some other champ.
So, what should we be trying to do more proactively to get better team comps? Some of the MC folks just want to play w/e they want to play (I enjoying playing with those particular folks quite a bit less and don't invite them as often). Thoughts?
Adding to this:
i think we'd all agree that if a random locks in Brand support, Quinn top, or Viktor mid, we'd be a little "eh i'm not so sure about this". The thing is, we know each other, and we know that Apoz is godlike, Karl's Brand support is legit, and psydragon is literally the only good Quinn in the world.
The problem is that literally every champ warps the team into behaving a certain way.
Leona forces botlane to be aggro, even if they just want to sit back and take it easy. Kog'maw alone creates "protect the Kog", even if there are many ways to play a PTK comp. An enemy picking Ryze top or Kass mid requires your jungler to be proactive about ganking those lanes pre-6 or else they're done for. And neglecting other lanes in the meantime.
Like the discussion we had less week or whatever, mid + jungle picks along completely dictate the pacing of your teamcomp for the first 15 minutes.
Overall, perhaps this entire conflict could be resolved by just playing Ranked 5s. At least then everyone is coerced into trying hard
Another alternative (as benevolant!leader!pacov) that you could do is just start hosting more games on TeamBuilder. Let teambuilder be your "okay fuck around and do whatever" queue and then draft is more serious. :shrug:.
i know that you've been supporting a ton recently, and it's pretty natural to want a more "Authentic" game when you don't have to support. i think that's perfectly natural (and going Nidalee in the Nid/Eve thing was probably fine). But if there's one person every game who is in "fug it mode, i'm playing Teemo jungle" every single queue, these issues are going to continue persist.
Either everyone needs to care about team comp and try to make a dedicated effort (and that means more than just your lane matchup), or no one should.
Well, I think if we have 5 of us on the ranked 5's team available, then we should be able to sort out composition in advance as long as we are talking. Even with that, I think we have some room for improvement in that we don't generally talk about composition. We just pick specific champs that we want to play and then pick something that fits with that. I can't really think of a time where we go in saying, let's play protect the kog - what's a good fit for that strat? Or a poke comp, etc. These are just things we don't talk about and then we decide on the fly. Probably something we could talk some about here.
I don't know how team builder would work. I generally just like using that so I can get w/e role I want if I'm playing with just 1 or 2 peeps. That could help us sort through comps visually, though, without time constraints.
yeah, but if we've just added some fella that has the strangest list of champs he plays (our eve said he could play eve jungle, or 2 supports, or 1 random mid or something), I have no idea. One of the problems with MC (in my mind) is that when I reach out and try to get new folks playing with us, I often have no idea of their skill level, etc. Which usually only translates into us playing a game with them and me not inviting in the future. Bleh.
also... when the crap are you going to join us again for games Hedgie?
"by just playing Ranked 5s"
This needs to happen more often.
my internet is pretty crappy sporadically. Frequently during the hours y'all are on.
Erm, Top Nidalee. Jungle Shaco. Jungle Tryndamere. Jungle superfarm FF Udyr. Pretty much all of your recent projects require that your team act/pick in really really specific ways. Thats all fine, but its odd for you to say that you dislike picks that require specific play styles, then pretty much exclusively develop champs that require specific playstyles by your team.
I'll freely admit that something like Mid WW is an odd pick. But what it requires is that the jungler ganks when their mid inevitably pushes. Thats not really something that forces the jungler to act in an abnormal way - most junglers would pretty much automatically do this anyway. So for a jungler, mid WW isn't a big deal (its usually easy mode actually, I've played jungle with several mid WWs before). WW mid does have other implications for team play style though.
WW jungle (especially as I play him where I don't farm up a FF post 6) warps teamcomps/team play a lot less than a top Nid does IMO.
You pretty much covered exactly why I made the comment re: ww. We reach the same conclusion - its not necessarily bad, mind you, but it requires adaptation. You also note that most of those champs I don't currently play. Worked through them, did a bunch of math, testing, playthroughs, etc. Decided to drop most of them BECAUSE of the adaptation required.
One game where you played ww mid, other lanes were struggling quite a bit and I wanted to try to get them back into it. But then there's mr ww at mid wanting a gank because he can't do anything without one. Champs that can't do anything without a gank are weaker than champs that can solo. Again, it ain't a bad thing, per se, because that ww comes in handy later on and, at the least, can typically hold his lane. But that also removes a bunch of damage from the team comp which means other lanes need to do well so there is more dmg to compensate.
I agree re: ww jungle warping team comps less than nid... kinda anyway.
Something I would like to push a few of us toward is learning some new champions:
Currently our ranked team suffers slightly from people with narrow champion pools. I would specifically like to point my finger at Karl and Bryff. Bryff's Irelia top and Kassadin mid are usually good picks but what if Irelia is picked by the other team and Kassadin is banned? I think Bryff would greatly benefit if he/we could broaden his champion pool. I think a Renekton/Lulu/Ryze/Kayle/Malphite/J4 would all be really good champions for bryff to pick up. They all fufill a different role than Irelia does. I know how to play all of these champions to a mediocre to advanced level and would be more than willing to help bryff out for 1 or 2 games with build orders and bad match ups.
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Karls champion pool lacks a strong AOE CC initiator (yes you play amumu but not to my liking). Last night the last game when I played Kass was an excellant example of what-are-we-supposed-to-do-without-an-initiation team comp. We didn't have the forsight to see this problem but now it will be easier to catch in champ select. If Karl was on something like Malphite/j4/sejauni/amumu/hecarim/zac/wukong we could have started team fights from long range. We had problems getting onto the squishy lux/lucian because of our short-range initiation. I think the jungle role is the place to fix this problem (or leona/annie support).
Now lets address my problem with your amumu play. In general you play the champion just fine but my problem is your build order. You like to build damage. Yes I know it is perfectly fine to do that but it causes problems late into the game when we need peel/longevity in team fights. You go in pop ult and die. What we need is you to go in pop ult/randuins and not to die in 2 seconds, and come back to peel for carries if they need it and this all preferably happens as a dive after we poke them down while seiging. Playing a more supportive/initaitor role is what is needed more than the extra damage.
The big 3 (lee sin, elise, eve) would also be nice for karl to pick up but that would again leave bryff as our tank/initiator. Unless Karl develops godlike Cacoon and Lee sin ward hoping->flash->ult skills.
If anyone else has ideas for what we might be missing/need it would be nice to hear it.
Played a couple ranked last night.
Got my Plat 1 back c:
I can play Sej/Amumu whenever you want. But if you want pretty much any of the champions you list played (other than J4), you need to have Lee Sin banned, because if we play Sej/Amumu against a Diamond level Lee Sin, the lanes are going to have a bad time.
Last night, we actually had a Morgana, who is a great initiator with Dark Binding (followed by Bryff jumping onto it).
I play Amumu builds every which way. In solo queueish type games, I tend to build a lot of damage, but I certainly build tanky in other games if I feel like it (I always start the AP jungle item since its way better on Amumu, but after that I can build anything). So yeah, I don't have a problem building a tanky Amumu (or Sejuani, who is really pretty much the same thing) if people want it. We just need to remove Lee Sin first.
Eve isn't much of an option since I don't get much of a chance to play non bruiser/tanks with the people we play with. I'm not really mechanically good enough to be a great Lee player, unfortunately (I've tried, it didn't go well).
"Got my Plat 1 back c:"
YAWN... when you are you going to sack up and grind out diamond? We could try duoing a few times again if you want some one that isn't terrible 75% of the time.
Morgana as an initiator:
I have always thought of her as more of a pick specialist with her Q or a go in 2nd type of champion with her ultimate. She is not reliable for starting fights. Flash+Ult+Zhonyas to start a fight is very unrealiable when compared to all the champions I listed (not to mention only possible late into the game). Pretty much all the champions I listed require only two spells to do the same thing without using flash (but it can be used if necessary). She is strong at getting picks and pooring on the CC after a fight has already started but not at being the heart and soul of our team fight engage.
Banning lee singah:
Sounds like a plan.
I wasn't thinking of Flash+Ult as the initiate. I was thinking Binding + Irelia. Binding is very long range and lasts FOREVER. While the other team is worried about the Irelia, the Morgana has time to walk in and press R without always having to flash. Pro teams use stuff like that as initiations from what I've seen.
I agree that its not as good as Amumu or whatever, but Amumu brings a lot of potential weaknesses (especially since we all tend to lean toward late game champs, which can't protect against Amumu's weaknesses). I mean, I'm not opposed to playing Amumu at all. I like Amumu. I'm just saying that people have to be aware that while Amumu does some things very well, he sucks at a lot of things too (Sej and most of the other "real" tanks too - its why they aren't played much).
You're a much better jungler than I am Karl, but I've had some experience playing Lee and have a talent for kicking dangerous enemies towards Pacov and Hedgie when they're low on health. I will teach you.
I think Eve is built pretty tanky nowadays after her SotEL right? I'd disagree that your jungle stable is an huge issue though. You don't play the big three but you do play their counters like Udyr...
"I'd disagree that your jungle stable is an huge issue though."
I wasn't really implying that karl was a massive flaw in our ranked 5's team. I mean we won pretty decisively after we had a nice pick in that kassadin, kog, udyr, morg, irelia game (it just took a lot longer than I wanted it to and it felt like we didn't really control the tempo of the game). It would be nice to have more options for us to dictate when we fight instead of waiting to get initiated on (and in general you lose more fights if you are the team getting intiated on) or get that lucky pick.
I also think it is much easier to win for us by going for big 5v5 team fights with a lot of lock down HERP DERP CC ults than it is for us to win trying to get a lucky morgana q, elise q, thresh hook, random pick or what have you on an important target (not the 4000 HP sejauni/mundo/nasus/whatever).
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