We are on for games tonight. If you’re interested in joining your fellow readers for a few games, jump into the “Fearless Gamer” chat room in the League of Legends client around 9:15 or so. We’ll get started at 9:30 in whatever we have available based on the number of players that can make it.
If you can’t get into the chat room for some reason, you can add me at “The Wiggin Boy.” Hope to see you tonight!
The forums provided a serendipitous thread necro for me to wrap up the Soraka Champ of the Week series. In the thread linked here, Xypherous lays out some of the design problems around heals, which I think is a decent place to kick off the Soraka discussion. Soraka is strong as most every other healer is strong – they all remove attrition from a game.
Healing is a really tough mechanic to balance for a game like League of Legends. In order for the healer to have any fun whatsoever, the heal needs to do something during the laning phase, which usually means giving it a somewhat short cooldown. Later in the game it needs to scale in some way to be remotely useful, which means AP builds can be both viable and infuriating. In short, heals don’t really work. Even if a heal could truly provide a judgement call for a player, heals just happen too often to really be balanced.
That’s essentially what I saw with Soraka. If my team was willing to sit back, not rush fights if the enemy ignites were up, or start a poking war, we won. We won easily, too. Even in games where I’ve built a Deathfire or a Guinsoo with Soraka, the wins have been decisive. There’s not much more to say about her.
If I could change one thing about Soraka, it would be Starfall. Though the spell is occasionally lulzy and provides a decent debuff, it doesn’t have a practical range for teamfighting. It’s decent for farming, but again, it suffers from a short range. I’d love to see Soraka get something like Lux’s Lucent Singularity, a skill that could slow in an area on the ground. She would probably need a slight heal tweak due to the increased lane power, but I think she would be more fun.
That does it for Soraka week. Check back tomorrow for next week’s Champ of the Week. It’s back to someone I’m not particularly good with. What can I say, I’m a glutton for punishment.
Valve quietly mentioned that DotA 2 was fast approaching just yesterday. The message appeared at the bottom of a press release about the Steam content delivery system. “Soon, Dota 2 will be delivered using [the new system]” was all it said, but there’s a little more info circulating the web. Apparently MYM, one of the most popular DotA teams in the world, is headed over to Germany during Gamescom along with several other European and Asian teams, supposedly to play in a promotional tournament at the event.
It’s no secret that Europe and Asia both have exploding esports scenes, particularly with regard to the MOBA genre. Gamescom seems like an excellent place to showcase the most anticipated entrant in the MOBA field. As for release dates, Valve hasn’t said anything, but Gamescom runs from August 17-21. I would imagine we won’t see the final product for at least another month, which puts us at late September, early November, just like roughly every other game you’ve been hearing about for the past three years.
Personally, I’m excited for DotA 2. I really enjoy Valve games and I have faith in what they can bring to the genre, especially with regard to multiplayer features. As much as I enjoy League of Legends, the game is way behind in terms of social features. If Valve can deliver core technical features players have come to expect, it could see incredible growth and visibility in this sector of the industry.
That said, I also think DotA 2 could miss the mark with a lot of casual players. The strength/agility/intellect system from those games feels opaque and archaic, even as someone closely familiar with the game. I could absolutely see people who are accustomed to the AP/AD system get frustrated with learning a whole new system for categorizing champions and choose to stick with LoL.
Will you be playing DotA 2?
Remember that preview we saw for a character called the Monkey King back in April? It looks like he’s finally ready to join the League. Riot put together a preview comic as his sneak peek, but we know very little about the role he’ll actually play.
I’m guessing from his size that he won’t be a Tanky DPS, but that’s really just hopeful thinking. Also, the lore for the Monkey King makes him out to be much more trickster than he is straight warrior, but this isn’t necessarily a direct adaption of the Eastern myth.
Scoot on over to the official forums to see the whole thing, and in case you missed it, here’s a link to the art preview Riot posted a few months back.
Leona’s mid-week release has been messing with my schedule a bit, but I’ve still been able to sneak in a few games with her here and there, enough at least to give you an impression post. Leona has all the skills necessary to be a powerful force in the game, there’s just one problem – she doesn’t have a lane.
The current metagame is focused around leveling an AP carry and either a high burst ranged carry (Corki, basically) or a bruiser in the mid and top lanes and allowing the pure ranged carry to farm bottom with a support. The support sustains the carry for a big farm so that the team can scale in to late game. Unfortunately, Leona isn’t very good in a solo lane. She doesn’t farm creeps well, she doesn’t harass well without another player with her, and she sure as shit can’t jungle. For competitive play, that leaves her one place to go – bottom lane – which means the carry is left without a healer, hoping to snag a few kills in the early game thanks to Leona’s crowd control. There’s one giant problem with that strategy, though.
Have you ever noticed how low the kill counts are in competitive matches? Competitive matches are about safety for the majority of the game – players ward, every team brings support, every team packs Clairvoyance – with a focus on objectives and the occasional teamfight. That’s not really where Leona shines. Leona is about having an aggressive lane and teamfighting often, using her low-cooldown CC skills to pick apart the enemy team. In a metagame that is essentially a farm-off, she doesn’t have a place.
That said, I’m hoping the metagame can make a shift some time in the near future, because Leona is a lot of fun when I can actually use her abilities. Leona is a tank in the purest sense of the word. She has a boatload of CC but fairly weak damage, especially compared to champions like Jarvan. Riot got so many things right about her kit I’m wondering if we’re about to see a very significant shift in the game’s design. She doesn’t do crazy damage, she doesn’t even do any kind of resistance debuff. She doesn’t push well, though she can occasionally set up a push with a tower dive. She doesn’t farm well. She’s only there to lock down targets so that the rest of her team can put together some kills.
I would love to see the game-extending support metagame die in favor of an action-creating CC/Carry lane on the bottom. I think Leona has the kind of kit to make that possible, but until the passive support game gets nerfed, I don’t think we’ll see Leona in a ton of games.
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