Author: Jeff Morgan (Page 112 of 260)

      Hexdrinker and other recent item changes

      November 21, 2010 /

      runegorger

      At long last, here’s a post about the newest item, Hexdrinker. I can definitely see the need for such an item, and it seems like this could be an early step toward addressing the power of Banshee’s Veil against mages. Hexdrinker works as follows:

      +35 Attack Damage
      +30 Magic Resistance
      UNIQUE Passive: If you would take Magic Damage which would leave you at less than 30% of your Maximum Health, you first gain a shield which absorbs 300 Magic Damage for 4 seconds. 45 second cooldown.

      For a total cost of 1800 gold, it’s really not a bad item. I often have a hard time deciding on my early-game magic resist item for my DPS toons and this readily fills that spot. The shield actually works quite well for the mid-game (levels 9-15 in my mind). The 300 damage shield is just enough to keep you alive in most instances without feeling heavily unbalanced to play against.

      The big problem I see with Hexdrinker is that it doesn’t combine into anything. That will probably come at some point (as leaked in the picture above), as we’ve seen with the Gunblade, but for now it can feel like a wasted slot, especially if an opponent gets ahead. A fed Anivia will blow through 300 damage without thinking about it, but if you’re playing some controlled and consistent games, this could be a good choice for you.

      Speaking of Gunblade, there’s an item that got a huge buff. Both spell vamp and lifesteal got serious boosts, which is good. I never believed in Gunblade, but it certainly looks a little more attractive for a few toons. The other spell vamp item, Will of the Ancients, got a nice cost reduction and a vamp boost. Again, it’s an item I never think to use. I might have to find space in my Vlad build.

      Sword of the Divine got a small buff, but who uses that item anyway. Oracle’s now has a little truesight eye over the wearer, which is really nice. I do wish it was a little more pronounced. If you put a ping mark on a target it can be hard to see, but then again, you’re probably marking them for a reason.

      Editorial, league of legends, Patches

      Who is The Wiggin Boy?

      November 21, 2010 /

      Guess Who?I want to start this by apologizing for the lack of content over the past few days. I’ve been busy with mainsite work, which, after mentioning to a couple folks who play in the Monday night gamenight I host, made me realize you would have no idea what that means. It also made me think, hey, you guys read the stuff I put together every day and I really appreciate it so I figure I could tell you a little about myself. Give a little context. That whole thing.

      Obviously my name is Jeff. I started writing here more than a year ago, mostly about general industry news and trends. It was all very boring, but I was still fairly green to the blogging scene. I started writing here because I had done some writing work for this blog’s parent site, Bullz-Eye.com as well as a sister blog to this one about technology and gadgets, Gadget Teaser. Around last December, a couple friends who I had gamed with in the past mentioned League of Legends. I was immediately in love, being a long time Dota fan myself. I started looking around for League of Legends blogs and didn’t find any so I focused this blog in that direction and here we are.

      As for my personal life, I’m twenty-six, living in North Carolina and writing full-time. You know, I think I’ll just go back to the beginning and give you a little rundown of my experience as a gamer and we’ll see how this goes. I’ve been gaming since I was a kid. In fact, I have some very vivid memories of myself as a kid, running around the house on Christmas Eve chanting “Nin-ten-do! Nin-ten-do!” I didn’t get one that year, but I played at my friends’ houses as often as I could and I was a big computer game geek. Fast forward a few years and I got an N64 for Christmas and got truly hooked on the gaming scene. My Advanced Chemistry course in high school had about a day a month during which we had nothing to do. A few of us would bring in consoles and we’d hook them up and order out some of the best drive-in burgers you can get (look up Swensons if you’re ever in northeast Ohio). In college I was a huge Halo freak. My friends and I played across the LAN for huge chunks of the day, every day of the week. We skipped class for Halo (and Counter-Strike before that). We played in local tournaments. We hosted our own tournaments, and I even looked up a few regional tourneys when I was home on breaks. Once upon a time I was thinking about playing Halo professionally. I even played with a few of the world’s best players at the time in a tourney outside Columbus and fared well enough to fuel the dream. Instead, I met a girl and started writing and went after those things, but I didn’t exactly leave gaming behind.

      Shortly after college I started playing WoW. I was almost exactly two years late, just before the launch of Burning Crusade. I joined a server with a couple friends, the same friends who got me into LoL, incidentally, and just ran with it. A year later I was an officer in a BT raid guild, gobbling up info about Wrath. That was about the time my brother told me about Dota. I had seen him play it a couple times, but I had gotten as much from Warcraft 3 as I thought was possible, so I didn’t mess with it much. A couple months passed and he was still playing so I joined in. I fell in love with the playstyle – the pace, the reasonable game length, the complexity of different characters and builds, the flow of the map – and left WoW behind.

      That basically brings you up to speed on my history writing here and my history gaming. I recently rekindled my WoW flame, but that has since died out (a story for another post) and I’m still going strong with League of Legends. I’ve also started writing more reviews for the blog’s parent site, alongside Jason Zingale, who has long been in charge of the gaming section among other things at Bullz-Eye. Jason’s reviews are more about the experience of playing a game than the technical side, which I’ve always appreciated. I really don’t care if something has the Havok engine if it plays like crap. It’s a good spot to turn if you’re looking for some new reviews.

      Anyway, I hope this gives you a little insight into my life. I’m thinking about starting up a personal blog in the coming weeks, which I’ll be sure to share here. It will likely be focused on pop culture, but even more likely it will be a confused wreck of half-baked thoughts and theories. If you like things a little more organized, this will still be the place.

      Editorial, league of legends

      Patch Day 11/16 – The nerfs that didn’t happen

      November 17, 2010 /

      attachment-7-php

      It’s patch day again, a day that was supposedly going to bring some balance to the game. While I’m pleased with the nerfs Sona caught, some of the Riot posts on the forums led me to believe we’d see significant rebalancing this patch but there really wasn’t much.

      That said, here’s the rundown, which, as usual, is only big picture stuff. You can read about all the little bug fixes yourselves.

      Amumu got a bug fix and damage reduction to his ult, both of which look really nice. I know that Amumu is strong – anyone with an AOE disable is – but he’s often not a great pick for a team. He’s quite bad in lane, and he takes a jungling spot from your team. Granted, he’s a very strong jungler, but that leaves the enemy free to use a toon like Warwick or Shen or Udyr, all of which are strong picks as well and much less reliant on one big skill. In short, I think this is a good change.

      Corki got nerfed, though not a ton. He’ll be extremely scary if he’s ahead, and I’d say, despite the nerfs, he’s still a top-tier carry. His Big Ones deal 60 percent increased damage, down from 100 percent, and Missile Barrage caught a general mana cost and base damage nerf.

      LeBlanc got a buff to two of the stats that were recently hotfixed. Her ultimate now has a scaling cooldown and she gains .5 more armor per level. It’s very strange to me that she was apparently so broken she needed hotfixed but that the hotfix was apparently overkill. So why has Sona been so busted for so long? That’s another post for another time.

      Lux caught some small buffs, but I don’t think it’ll be enough to make her a force in most games. Her Prismatic Barrier got a missile width increase and a slight AP buff, while Lucent Singularity has increased radius and greater slow values at all ranks. Her ultimate also now ignites her passive debuff if it’s already on the target and then reapplies the mark. Personally, I’ve never been able to make much of her passive. It’s decent against melee toons in lane, but anyone else just avoids the thing. I still think she needs some base damage buffs for her spells, even if they’re small.

      Miss Fortune caught some nerfs and a strange little fix. Her auto attack missile speed is slower, though I’m not sure why. It’s not that she’s attacking slower, just that once she does, the actual bullet takes more time to land. It really makes very little sense to me. Bullet Time got some bug fixes that will result in damage nerfs and also had a significant cone width reduction. Make It Rain also got a slight damage nerf, though personally, I’d still maintain that it’s Double Up causing most of the lane problems.

      Sona is probably the one place Riot delivered for me this patch. She’s still very strong, still a giant, walking Baron buff for her entire team, but she isn’t quite as easy to play. I still think her design is severely flawed, mostly because she isn’t encumbered by targeting her spells, but hey, it’s a lot better than they did on any other top-tier toon.

      Here are the Sona changes:

      -All aura durations reduced to 2 seconds from 3
      -All aura buff durations reduced to 0.25 seconds from 1

      Hymn of Valor
      -Attack damage and ability power aura reduced to 6/8/10/12/14 from 8/11/14/17/20
      -Mana cost increased to 65/70/75/80/85 from 55/60/65/70/75

      Song of Celerity
      -Active movement speed boost reduced to 8/10/12/14/16 from 8/11/14/17/20
      -Mana cost increased to 65/70/75/80/85 from 55/60/65/70/75
      -Aria of Perseverance mana cost increased to 65/70/75/80/85 from 55/60/65/70/75

      Crescendo range reduced to 1000 from 1100

      That’s pretty much it for the champions. As I said, not a lot in the way of top-tier nerfs. I think Miss Fortune is ever so slightly less problematic, as is Amumu, but Galio is still a ban, no questions asked, and you’ll probably still see Sona on the list as well. The one bright light here is that Riot has talked at length about fixing some of the frustration around the AoE metagame, so maybe those changes (which would affect every champion I’ve listed) are lined up for a later date.

      I’ll have another post later this evening regarding the new item and the item changes.

      Champions, league of legends, News, Patches

      FINALLY client to game whisper is back

      November 16, 2010 /

      STFU Noob.spent most of the day hung up with work, but I did get a chance to test out the latest patch this afternoon. I’ll have a full set of impressions for you, but I experienced the absolute best part of today’s changes within the first three minutes of my first game. I got a whisper from a friend who wasn’t in my game.

      For those who don’t know, players used to be able to communicate from client to game and vice versa before Season One. When ranked play launched, though, the feature was taken away, and though I’ve heard several reasons, I don’t know for sure so I won’t speculate too much. Whatever the reason, it was infuriating to be alt-tabbing to get the Skype messages my friends had sent just to see if I was playing another game.

      Those days are finally gone, and we can once again annoy each other with cross-game chat.

      league of legends, News, Patches

      FG LoL Monday is on! (9:30PM EST) – CANCELLED

      November 15, 2010 /

      EDIT: CANCELLED: Sorry guys, had some stuff come up tonight and I won’t be able to make it. By all means, though, group without me and have some fun. Should be back on for next week.

      We’re on tonight, folks. For anyone new to the scene, we get together on Monday nights to run some games together and have some fun. If you want to join us, just join the chat channel “Fearless Gamer” (which is case-sensitive, btw) in the client and we’ll get set up.

      I’m planning to get started around 9:35, so try to log in a few minutes early. Hopefully we can get a group of ten together and run the progressive ban system we tried a few weeks back. It was a lot of fun and ended with some crazy comps.

      See you guys tonight.

      FG LoL Mondays, league of legends

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