Although most League of Legends patches drop on Tuesday, the Maokai patch has been delayed for some reason this week. Phreak responded to a post titled “Doesn’t tree come out tomorrow?” with the following:
This week most likely. No promises on patch date.
Phreak also mentioned in other threads that he finished the Maokai spotlight some time last night, so hopefully we’ll see that at some point today.
The Maokai skin and bundle list is up, so I figured I’d post while patiently waiting for the spotlight to go live. I really like Maokai’s art so far, more than I’ve liked anyone’s art since Swain released.
For skins, Maokai’s getting Totemic Maokai and Charred Maokai, both of which look really good. Alistar’s also getting a new skin, Longhorn Alistar, which makes me wonder whether he’s getting his rework this patch. It wasn’t mentioned in the preview so I doubt it. Maybe two weeks from now?
I won’t be hosting games tomorrow night, in honor of all of our girlfriends. Take the evening off, spend some time grinding rep with your S.O. We’ll pick back up next week.
Also, new header FTW!
There’s a post on the forums right now citing the champions that are “mained” by the top 50 players in ranked solo queue. It’s interesting to see what those players use most, but I’m not so sure what sort of conclusions we can reasonably draw from the information.
The most played champions among the top 50 players are Shaco, Pantheon, Kassadin, and Ezreal, each with four players who main the given character. You have to remember, these are just the characters those players play most often. Also, they don’t represent a huge majority over other characters. The original poster said this:
– Only 28 of the game’s 69 champions are represented in the Top 50 as someone’s Main.
– Only 2 tanks, Singed (3) and Alistar (1). I guess if you count Nunu (1) it’s three.
– Only 5 Ranged AD carries… and only 1 of those is high on the list. I guess six if you build AD Ez
The fact that 28 characters out of a possible 50 (remember, only the top 50 players were recorded) are represented actually seems really good. To me, that points to player skill as more important than champion choice, but even that is hard to qualify.
Zileas also posted in the thread, giving overall stats for champion choice. The window between the most played champion and least played champion is surprisingly small. Ashe is played in 3.8 percent of games while the least played champion is .4 percent of all picks. Again, this doesn’t really say much about balance. Riot has said that players over 1200 ELO make up roughly the top 25 percent of the player base. Basically, there are a lot of low-skill players affecting those numbers, players that don’t really factor in to the balance discussion.
Also, among all of this, it’s important to remember that not all champions are free. As Zileas pointed out, it’s not really surprising that Ashe is the number one pick. She’s 450 IP and very easy to play. When you consider the champion rotation and the way that players unlock different champions, it’s tough to say that the number of games played per champion mean a whole lot. It’s probably fair to assume that a crazy OP champion would be purchased right away, at least at the higher tiers, but I don’t know how much that matters to newer players. I would imagine that new players don’t see the full potential of a character very often, particularly if they’re new to the MOBA scene.
There are definitely some interesting stats in the thread, but I don’t think we can take much more from them than that free champion rotations keep more champions in play. Since players have limited access to champions, the free rotation makes us more likely to try someone new when they’re available, which is a good thing. Other than that, all I can say is that I wish Riot made more stats like this available. It’s a really interesting look at the player base and how all the different aspects of the game affect player choice.
Riot posted a patch preview for the upcoming Maokai patch, and though it wasn’t presented in video form this go round, we still got a lot of good information. At the top of the list, for me personally anyway, is that Vlad is getting a nerf.
You may remember Vladimir’s champion spotlight, if only because it was so funny to listen to Phreak tell us just how overpowered Vlad would be. Riot’s stance is that he’s not explicitly overpowered, which I can sort of agree with. Certain characters do very well against him, but a lot of toons don’t, and he snowballs way too fast with the bonus survivability he gets from his passive. His passive is getting a nerf, but probably more importantly so is Sanguine Pool. I’m excited, to say the least.
Anivia is catching a nerf to her annoying ult -> E combo, which is almost a guaranteed 25 percent damage done to her target with very little required effort. The change will make it cost more mana for players to ‘pulse’ her ult, quickly toggling it on and then off, hopefully reducing the number of times that simple combo can land. I don’t think this will be quite enough, but we’ll see.
Rammus is also getting nerfed, this time on his speed. Powerball bonus speed is down 15 percent. Again, I’m not entirely certain that this addresses his issues, but it should help. I can understand Riot’s resistance to nerfing tanks. There are relatively few tanks in the game – a heavy nerf to one tank makes the rest of the list look pretty sparse.
Lastly, Ryze is getting a long awaited rework. I’ve played a few Ryze games recently. He’s pretty fun if he gets farmed, but the mechanics on Spell Flux make him unreliable in lane. The change will make him a ranged caster-carry. His spells will have shorter cooldowns, longer range, lower base damage, and scale with mana as well as AP. I’m actually really excited to try him out, though I wonder how Spell Flux now works. If the bounce range wasn’t increased with the cast range he could still feel a little frustrating.
Some of the cooldown reduction items are getting a rework, but I’ll cover that in more detail once Riot releases the actual number changes.
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