We are on this week for FG LoL Mondays – 9:30 PM EST as usual. Try to log in about five minutes beforehand if possible. We have been generously offered a vent server, courtesy of Antiquus, so we’ll be able to chat it up while we own.
I’d like to get started as quickly as possible so we can get a few games in. I’ll be cutting off invites for the first game at 9:35. Hopefully it’s not just me online 🙂
A friend of mine has been playing a lot of Warwick recently and doing very well. That has served as a nice dose of interest for me, since I don’t play Warwick a ton. In the few games I have played him, I’ve been reminded of just how strong he is and how easily he can swing the tide of a game. So when will people start banning him?
A lot of people would say that there are simply better ban targets – Amumu, Morgana, even Twitch – but as I see it, Warwick should be banned over pretty much any of those for the low skill ceiling he has on the utilities he provides. Don’t get me wrong, I think Warwick is as nuanced as the next toon, but you don’t exactly have to know what you’re doing to jungle with him, and he has one of the absolute best lane-ganking abilities in the game. For a lot of players, Warwick is the only toon they know how to jungle, so taking him off the board forces less skilled decisions, and as we get more and more champions, I think that’s going to become the real purpose of the ban. There will be so many champions that players just won’t know how to play them. Take the ones they do, and you’ll have an interesting match.
If you aren’t sure who to take off your ban list to think about adding Warwick, consider Amumu. It sounds crazy, because Amumu is crazy strong. But Amumu really needs to jungle to get off to a good start, and a lot of people just aren’t very good at it. Also, Amumu is one of those toons that tends to get extremely low while jungling, at least early, which gives you a decent chance to kill him and steal his buffs. Amumu is also such a high priority ban these days that most players jump at the chance to play, even if they haven’t played him in a few months. They’re rusty, or just unfamiliar with his playstyle, and end up getting rocked.
I almost feel bad writing this because my friend is such an avid Warwick player, but Warwick causes me so many problems that I really want to see him banned more often.
One of the most anticipated changes in the recent patch was the Teemo rework. Formerly queue-dodge material, Teemo was supposed to find a place on the team this patch. I don’t think it worked.
Teemo’s big issue has always been that he doesn’t do well in a team fight. He’s fine during the lane phasing, great at covering the jungle with shrooms, but multiple shrooms don’t provide scaling damage, and during a team fight, Teemo struggles to maintain position, especially with the big AOE metagame.
Obviously there will be exceptions to this rule, as we know from the few posts that have popped up claiming that Teemo is “doing well in high ELO.” But a champion needs more than a professional-level player and the right circumstances to be a valid choice in ranked matchmaking. By taking a look at his design it’s easy to see that he’s in a confused place right now, not quite a caster, not quite a carry, and somehow still not a hybrid.
Think about building him as a carry. It sounds fine, and he can do respectable damage, but he has no escape mechanism and his poison doesn’t stack like Twitch. Toxic Shot gives him a weak initial damage modifier with a poorly scaling DoT. Blinding Dart is great against a carry, but toons like Miss Fortune, Kog’Maw, Ashe, and even Tristana still have damage dealing skills that can be applied outside the dart. If you don’t outfarm them, they’re probably still going to kill you. Attack damage also means his shrooms are just glorified wards, providing small utility in place of a truly game-altering ult. Shrooms also have the disadvantage of being goldmines to players with an Oracle’s Elixir.
As AP Teemo’s shrooms are more of a threat, though still countered by vision mechanics. His poison gets a little buff, but again, it doesn’t stack, so you’re stuck with a mediocre DoT and a decent blind for your damage. Let’s see, which other casters have attack damage modifiers, no CC, and a single-target nuke? None. He’s completely outside the caster archetype for damage.
As a hybrid, Teemo suffers from a mixture of the above afflictions. His shrooms don’t hit quite hard enough, his attacks are mediocre, and he’s still stuck dancing at the edge of a fight, trying not to die.
Teemo still has a long way to go before he can be taken too seriously. Riot has mentioned that he’s not going in the direction of a carry, which is nice, if only because it suggests that he’s unfinished. I do hope, though, that they find a place for him.
I still remember the game that made me unlock Fiddlesticks. I had just played against him and seen how devastating his ult could be against a team. I was still new to the game, probably no higher than level 14, but I knew from my time spent in DotA that any ultimate with that much team-slaying potential is worth having around.
Fast forward to today. Well, yesterday, actually. I decided to play Fiddle in a ranked match just to see how he would do. I was excited to see his name in the patch notes, but his changes may as well not have have happened. I’ve given up on my “rules for maintaining ELO” again, mostly because I really like the draft system versus the free for all rules in normal, so any champ is on the board for me. I started in the jungle like I normally do and all was well. I was farming fairly quickly, picked up dragon at level four, and all seemed well. Then the teamfights started.
At first it was okay – I was showing up just a little late so my ult could deal some real damage without much threat to my well being. We did lose one fight, though, and it was all downhill from there. Although Fiddle is a solid farmer in the jungle, he is terrible in lane, so once the laning phase is over, he’s pretty much screwed as far as cashflow is concerned. If you aren’t winning teamfights, you’re going to be hurting for some gold right when you need your damage to scale quickly.
I think he could be helped in a couple ways. One, change Dark Wind. It used to be his bread and butter damage spell, but it’s been nerfed beyond usefulness. Fiddle needs a solid nuke outside his ult. Something that can’t be as easily interrupted as Drain. Something to help him produce a little bit of cash in lane. Another thing that could help would be giving his fear some sort of secondary component, like passive cooldown reduction, and making it a static 1.5 or 2 second fear. That deprioritizes the skill as he levels, giving him room to build more points into his damage skills.
I’d really love to see Fiddle return to some form of viability as a caster, and I don’t think it would take much to get him there.
Seriously, I don’t know if I can say enough good about the Harrowing event that Riot put together for this Halloween. This event blows everything they’ve done in the past way out of the water, so much so that I can’t wait to see what’s in store this holiday season.
If I have one criticism it’s that the new map doesn’t play often enough. I feel like I’m only seeing it 30-40 percent of the time, and I’d definitely like to see it more. It just has great character – the jack-o-lanterns, the bats, the nightly setting, the crazy saturated orange colors. It’s great. Gimme more.
The skins rock, too. My personal favorite is the Poppy skin. Her lollipop turns into a red/white candy cane pattern when Paragon of Demacia is at max stacks and, c’mon, you’re smacking people with a sucker. I also picked up Nosferatu Vlad and Zombie Ryze in the hopes that someday Ryze will be decent and I’ll have a kickass skin for him. I won’t be going for Mundo Mundo, mostly because I saw it in game and I literally didn’t notice it was different until I heard the sound his cleaver made. It’s funny, but not worth $6 or so. I also passed on the Fiddle skin because I’ve already got spectral Fiddle, and if he ever becomes worthy of a cool skin again, I’ll be going for Bandito. That might change over the next couple days. Pumpkinhead Fiddle is currently my desktop background.
In any case, awesome work, Riot. Events like this make me love you.
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