Author: Jeff Morgan (Page 66 of 260)

Champ of the Week: Teemo

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I was sad to get a late start on the Champ of the Week this week, but the weekend away was totally worth it. I drove late last night thinking of who I felt confident I could fully test over the course of a short week and kept coming back to the same answer: Teemo. Yes, I’ll be playing everyone’s favorite Yordle this week.

I used to have nothing but loathing for Teemo. It took him forever to get a decent mushroom field going and his damage was fairly lackluster. Now, though, he’s got a pretty solid kit and he’s certainly capable of tying a team together. He also offers his team some crazy map control, which can be a lot of fun.

Teemo does suffer if he has a lackluster early game which is made especially painful against teams that push through the laning phase early. Without a big farm, Teemo feels especially dull. His health is too low to survive the bursty teams and his damage doesn’t ramp up fast enough to cut down the tanks.

That said, Teemo does have some nice early game damage and I think he has a pretty cool skillset for some counter jungling. I’m hoping some of my Nunu skills will carry over. Teemo definitely doesn’t have the creep control that Nunu does, but I could see him being powerful as a ganker against some of the slower, softer junglers.

My first experiment with it did not go particularly well. I was having a terrible string of luck, not to mention my opponents had a very competent Karma running Clairvoyance, which made things all the more annoying. Hopefully I’ll have more to report in the next several days.

Multiple mastery pages arrive with today’s patch

Late last night, Guinsoo tweeted that a “sneaky new feature” might make the patch. I thought it might be something small and simple but instead we got a long-awaited feature. Today’s patch included multiple mastery pages.

The system is simple enough – you save your masteries by creating a custom title for your page and then adding as many pages as you like, up to 10. In case anyone is wondering, the feature is free. Nope, doesn’t even cost IP.

Ten pages is a crazy amount of diversity for the current mastery system. I’m hoping that means we’ll get to see some improvements to what’s currently there. I actually think I’m only using eight, and that includes some redundancy for minor changes, like four percent attack speed instead of six armor penetration.

It’s kind of hilarious, but not knowing that this was on the way made me really happy when it was actually implemented. I really hope Riot keeps that up in the future. Granted, we’re waiting on a lot of improvements, to both the game and the PvP.net client, but little surprises here and there are much more enjoyable than the long wait for “incoming” features.

Patch day passes without champion release

Frostfire Annie.

I’m happy to report that I wasn’t eaten by bears over the weekend. I did come back to a decent amount of work, though, and there is the usual catching up to do across various gaming forums and RSS feeds. I finally had a chance to check out today’s patch this afternoon and was a little surprised when there was no new champion.

I know the teaser post was made late in the week, and I’m guessing with the office move Riot didn’t have time to fully balance out a champion. With that in mind, I’m really glad we didn’t see a new champion today. In fact, it has made me wish champion releases were just a little further apart. I’ve mentioned that before, but it’s been a while since Riot has actually missed a release date, giving me some time to reflect on the difference.

It’s a nice breather to be able to focus on the other champion changes in today’s patch, even if those changes were pretty light. Annie got some minor buffs, as did Kog’Maw, and Vayne saw a few minor nerfs, but Alistar saw some pretty serious damage nerfs that could dramatically affect the way players build him. Irelia also got some significant changes – mostly to her ult – which I’m interested to test out a bit.

I am a little curious when we’ll see Orianna. I would love to see her put off another two weeks; I can’t imagine it makes financial sense to release her even mid-cycle and then give us another champ a week later. If anything, I suppose I could see pushing her back a week and then pushing the development cycle out a week from here forward.

What do you think? Is this a nice respite from the stream of champion releases or do you prefer to have someone new in champion select every two weeks?

Champ of the Week: Nunu wrapup

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I know it’s only Friday, but I took some friends up on a last minute camping trip so I’ll be gone until Monday. I didn’t want to leave you high and dry on the Champ of the Week, though, and I certainly played enough games with Nunu this week to throw together a conclusive wrapup.

My conclusions are essentially the same as they were a few days ago. Nunu is an absolute blast if you can stomach not being the guy with your name in lights. Not all the time, anyway. While most characters with Nunu’s brand of team buffing and enemy debuffing don’t have what it takes to blow up a target, Nunu’s ult offers him the chance to be the star here and there and that makes him feel even better.

There is one important facet of Nunu’s gameplay that I haven’t talked about and that I rarely cover on the blog: peeling. Peeling is getting in the way of enemies who are trying to get to your team’s carry, just as you are trying to get at the enemy carry. Teams need to be able to do this or else the carry gets burned down and suddenly you’ve come up short on damage. Since Ice Blast has a 60 percent slow at max rank, Nunu is great at peeling. He also has the added benefit of a movement speed buff to throw on the carry, hopefully offering enough of a gap for escape. Nunu can also plant himself between the enemy team and the carry, waiting to use his ult until the enemy overcommits.

In short, Nunu has all of the tools you could want from an allied jungler, so long as your team has enough damage in the lanes. Between your team buffs, your debuffs for your opponents, some very solid damage output and the extra dragon/Baron control offered by consume, Nunu can be the cornerstone of any competitive team.

Minecraft 1.6 to release next week

Minecraft Nether

At first, Minecraft 1.6 wasn’t looking like it would be much fun. Notch mentioned the majority of the release had to do with bug fixes. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be glad for a more bug free experience, but bug fixes are about as low on the glamour totem pole as you can get. As the days passed after 1.5, though, Notch seemed to get more ambitious, adding an updating map feature to the 1.6 to-do list along with an update everyone can get excited about – Nether functionality in SMP.

To this point, Nether functionality has only been possible through server mods. It works well enough, but its a strain on server resources and adds one more thing that has to be updated by a third party coder before multiplayer servers using the feature can expect to upgrade.

If you haven’t played in the nether yet, get there in your single player world. It’s unbelievably spooky for a world that is made solely of blocks.

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