There are a lot of “pending” skins ready for a variety of champions that have not yet made an appearance in the LoL store. Skins like Woad Ashe, Frosted Ezreal, and the much anticipated Riot Singed have been teasing me since the launch of Season One and then, just the other day, I saw one in game.

No, they aren’t yet available, and it wasn’t a special release. Apparently for some players there is a client bug that allows early access to the skin. As far as I can tell, you pick a champion for whom you already own a skin, select that skin, and don’t lock in. You then choose a champion with an unreleased skin, like Singed for instance, and allow the timer to count all the way down. For whatever reason you’ll be given a random, non-standard skin from the champion you choose.

Personally, I’ve not been able to replicate this feat, but it seems a good number of other players have. Have you been playing the unreleased skins? I would love to get pics up but the LoL forums have been running insanely slow today.

I’ve said plenty of times that I love Shaco. That frenetic, crazy playstyle just suits me. I’m also in love with all the control Shaco brings to the map. He is one of few characters that has a very easy time dealing with Warwick by himself in the early game.

Unfortunately Shaco is also fraught with bugs. The most current is one that shows up time and time again. Deceive isn’t granting the proper amount of bonus damage. Instead of dealing critical damage (200% of your base) + a bonus 40 percent at rank one, it’s only dealing base damage +40 percent. That sucks. A lot. It takes him from being one of the strongest early game characters to a fairly mediocre pile of excrement for the first ten minutes. His jungling potential is still there, and once you get a Madred’s you’ll hardly notice the difference, but as an avid Shaco fan I’m hoping they fix this one relatively soon. He’s so well-dressed now, how could you not want him to be a real contender again.

I had the misfortune of experiencing one of the craziest bugs I’ve seen since release. While rounding my enemy’s lizard camp on SR, I found that that lizard was down but the little minions were attacking something. I couldn’t see any hero, though, so I started to kill them so I would know when the camp respawned.

Suddenly, I heard Udyr’s Bear Stance and I got stunned, though I couldn’t see him. I thought it was lag, but I had full control of my character. Udyr…was invisible. I’m talking completely invisible, not even towers could see him. It was a terrible bug to experience, especially as an opponent. He could run around during teamfights and attack us and there was almost nothing we could do. I did manage to kill him once by attack moving near his location. Worst of all, our team was stomping theirs, but with such a strong hero permanently invisible, there was little we could do.

At one point my teammate started furiously pinging the enemy healing pad. There was Udyr, running and changing stances in place, just as he surely would have been on the field were this not massively glitched. This is horribly gamebreaking, and unfortunately Riot says it has been difficult to address because it’s hard to reproduce. Apparently it can happen with multiple champions, though my forum searches seem to find more instances of it happening with Udyr than anyone else.

The servers are officially back online and staging games. I’m in one now to give a test to some of the new features, mostly the new store. I would love to say I’m giving Kennen a go, but the store is down and I haven’t been able to purchase him.

Udyr’s running a thread on the forums to address the store maintenance. There is no ETA yet, but hopefully it will be fixed within the next hour.

I neglected to mentioned a couple new skins in the patch. Pantheon got a 300-themed skin, all shirtless, rippling goodness, and Taric got a crazy-fabulous pink skin, dubbed the Armor of the 5th Age. I have no clue what that means, but it looks pretty incredible. Nothing quite like marching down towers in bright pink glory.

I’ve been a part of a popular thread on the test realm forums regarding Shaco bugs. If you haven’t played Shaco recently you might not want to start. As fun a character as he is, he’s horribly buggy right now, sometimes to the point of breaking the game.

As a for instance, I was running down a Kat the other day on TT. I had just given her a nice burst to put her at 10 percent health or less. A simple deceive and maybe a two-shiv and she was done. Nothing stood between us but a wide open lane. I press Q, click up next to her and…I go nowhere and stay visible. My deceive cooldown starts and I stare at my computer with a sad dejected look. We still haven’t nailed down why this happens but it’s happened a few times for me and others.

The big one, though, is deceive damage. When deceive allows you to port and stealth it’s not dealing proper damage. I first noticed it when I was attack creeps on Twisted Treeline. I had approximately 155 damage and was deceive critting minions for around 330 damage, almost exactly the 200 percent crit plus the 10 percent damage from the offensive mastery without the bonus 120 percent damage that should be applied by level 5 deceive.

Shurelia has confirmed an upcoming hotfix for this, likely on Monday. It was supposed to have been in today but it got pushed back because of some technical issues.

On the whole, I’ve been pretty impressed with Riot for its support. The servers are rarely down, and when they are, it’s typically for short periods of time. Until recently, anyway. It’s no secret that there’s been a lot of server trouble since the last patch. I won’t blame today’s issues on the patch, not in full anyway, but there have been red posts confirming that the latest patch included at least one crash bug. Couple the server-crippling problems with glitches like double spell casting and I have to ask, did they patch too soon?

My answer is yes. Absolutely. Frankly, I don’t know why it wasn’t broken into to two patches. There was so much content that something was bound to go wrong, particularly on a rushed schedule. Granted, the community was getting restless for Pantheon and Gragas, but both in one patch? Why? Pantheon was obviously ready – the only complaint I see about him is his ultimate, which needs very little change in my mind – but Gragas is a confused mess of AP, physical damage, and tanking skills. He doesn’t scale well and fits poorly into most team comps. Why not save him for a later patch.

I wouldn’t bother writing this if it didn’t have me worried about later patches. My hope is that the Twisted Treeline patch will get plenty of testing before it flies through. On the whole, I’d be much happier with six hours of scheduled maintenance each week to roll out small patches than the 10+ hours we’ve had this week to fix the blunders of the latest patch.