Category: Editorial (Page 15 of 34)

      Champ of the Week: Malzahar wrapup

      June 5, 2011 /

      malzahar_splash_1

      My week with Malzahar was probably the most successful Champ of the Week I’ve had so far, though Nunu may have edged him out. In any case, I can only remember having one truly bad game with him, and that was this evening in a post-cookout haze. Malzahar is just an incredible pick for an AP carry, offering a solid mix of utility and damage without really falling short anywhere.

      One of the biggest things to learn about Malzahar, and something I haven’t quite mastered, is when to use his ultimate. I know it sounds simple enough, but that ultimate is devastating, completely shutting out an opponent in most cases, and it can be used on a variety of targets if played right. There is that unspoken rule – never focus the tank – but if the tank has all of the enemy CC and made a misstep near a tower, a quick Malzahar ult can give your team 5v4 advantage and allow you to steamroll down a lane. The flipside is knowing when not to use your ultimate. Using your ultimate during a teamfight can cost you a lot of damage. A stun or silence and you’ve missed out on a crucial part of your kit.

      Even without his ult, though, Malzahar still devastates teamfights. His AoE silence has excellent utility and the percentage based damage from Null Zone grows quickly with AP. Malzahar has no problem farming, either. At level 3, Malefic Visions hits hard enough to easily farm creep waves with a few auto attacks. With a Voidling proc, Malzahar not only burns through creep waves, he also becomes a strong side pusher that requires two people to gank.

      If I could change one thing about Malzahar it would be the AI on his Voidlings. I lost more to towers than I wanted, and they often danced back and forth in the lane instead of defending me in the midst of a gank. The Voidling deals heavy damage, especially once it levels up. Having a little more control of that damage would probably make him a bit OP, which I honestly think he’s on the verge of, anyway.

      Champ of the Week, Champions, Editorial, league of legends

      Is the early game too passive?

      June 4, 2011 /

      Nunu in the jungle

      If you watched the Dreamhack qualifiers, you may have noticed just how passive the early game is. It didn’t take Dreamhack to reveal that fact, though. Think of the last game in which a player died before the five minute mark and wasn’t called a noob. Yeah, I can’t think of one either. The early game in League of Legends has become extremely passive, a fifteen minute race to 100-minion counts with the occasional dragon. There’s a great thread on the forums discussing the issue, which I’ll leave you to read at your leisure. I think the poster, ParoX, makes some great points about contributing factors, but I think there’s another system in play that adds to the passive early game. Early game deaths are just too penalizing.

      A couple months ago, Riot adjusted death timers in the early game to make deaths less punishing, but I’m still seeing towers drop before the five minute mark fairly regularly. When an early death means the loss of early lane protection, players tend to be much more conservative in what they will attempt.

      A big chunk of the penalty can be attributed to the strength of junglers. Early ganks often happen when a jungler makes a move, turning a lane fight into a 3v2. If a kill succeeds, three champions are now pushing a turret that is often not well protected. If the tower drops, the game shifts dramatically, especially for the team that lost the tower. Because junglers rely on jungle creeps for XP, those players get territorial, leaving few places for the beaten lane to farm. This also opens the winning lane combo up for roaming, increasing the passivity of other lanes by presenting more threats from the brush near each lane.

      I think one thing Riot should seriously consider is a nerf to early game jungling, at least at the rate jungling can currently be accomplished. The fact that junglers can keep pace and in some cases outlevel lanes, all in the cover of fog of war is kinda silly. What I would really like to see is a move toward roaming instead of jungling. Unlike jungling, at least for many junglers, roaming has some serious risk. The roamer loses XP or leeches from his lanes, can miss kills, can botch tower dives, and certainly loses quite a bit of farm by leaving a lane. As it stands, junglers suffer very few of the consequences without a concerted effort by their opponents, and even then jungle fights are fairly risky for invaders.

      I’m glad to see RiotStatikk paying close attention to the current thread on the forums, but I’m worried by the caveat he placed at the end of his call for help: “I will be reading this thread. Identify what you see as the root problem and offer solutions on how to solve it with the least game-shaking changes possible.” I think it might be time for the game to get a decent shake. In fact, this is the perfect time to make some big changes. Season Two is forthcoming, hopefully giving people a chance to tune up their game and make some positive movement on the ladder. I can hardly imagine a better time to make some significant changes to prevalent player strategy and game mechanics.

      Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

      Does LoL need an ‘easy mode?’

      May 31, 2011 /

      Easy Button.

      I have a couple good friends that I frequently join up with to play Twisted Treeline. It’s not a perfect experience by any means, but it allows us to play a draft mode together and the games are relatively short. The best part about TT is definitely game length, but the map leaves an awful lot to be desired in terms of balance.

      The time issue actually carries over to Summoner’s Rift for me. I rarely queue for 5v5 unless I know I have an hour to spend and even 3s can take 40 minutes if the game goes long. That’s a pretty long chunk of time to commit to a game, especially if it ends up being a loss. I’m sure we’ve all had games that are going so poorly that there’s no hope of victory but teammates hang on and refuse to surrender. Those types of games make me long for a quicker experience.

      DotA had an “easy mode” toggle that could be used with each gametype, granting bonus gold per second and I believe extra gold for towers. It increased the pace of the game by allowing players to passively reach a level of farm more quickly, similar to the way Twisted Treeline generates per-second gold faster than Summoner’s Rift. I actually think it would be cool to have an “easy mode” playlist in League of Legends, a mode in which the XP and gold rewards were tuned so that 30 minutes looked like 70 minutes does now.

      That mode wouldn’t work very well on Twisted Treeline. The 3v3 map just snowballs out of hand far too quickly. Games would likely be decided by the first fight (and in some cases, they still are). For Summoner’s Rift, though, I think it would give casual players more opportunity to fire up a game while the baby’s napping, in between classes, or just before heading to bed. Speaking of which…

      Editorial, league of legends, Reviews

      Champ of the Week: Early Malzahar impressions

      May 31, 2011 /

      malzahar_splash_0

      I got to play a few games over the holiday weekend with this week’s Champ of the Week, Malzahar, and I’ve been having a really good time. Malzahar is an incredible farmer, and when left alone for too long, he becomes an incredible pusher as well.

      My basic strategy to this point has been simple: build enough survivability to get by and then stack up mass amounts of AP. In about half of the games I’ve picked up a Rod of Ages early (12 minutes in one case) and moved to Deathcap from there, but in others I’ve been less worried about the health stack and just picked up Catalyst before moving on. I’ve had roughly equal success both ways – the basic lesson seems to be ‘don’t overdue the survivability.’

      I had sort of forgotten the massive buffs Malzahar received since his release. The last time I gave him any serious attention his ult could be Cleansed, it had a much shorter range, and it didn’t have the suppression bonus. Those changes have given Malzahar the ability to fight at great distance with devastating power.

      If I’m having trouble with one thing, it’s remembering to keep my Malefic Visions up in team fights. The cooldown gets very short with a golem buff or enough CDR, making it totally feasible to have a couple spells ticking at the same time. I’m slowly improving on that, though.

      I’m really curious where Deathfire Grasp could fit in a Malzahar build. I don’t know that it’s any more efficient than a raw AP stack, but the active and the extra cooldown reduction could be interesting with enough AP. I think I underuse Deathfire, even though it is one of my favorite items in the game. If I can get ahead of the enemy farm and pick one up, it’s an almost Veigar-style insurance that one of my enemies won’t get to participate.

      Check back later in the week for more Malzahar impressions.

      Champ of the Week, Champions, Editorial, league of legends

      The E-Sports sportmanship problem

      May 30, 2011 /

      Over the weekend Riot set quite a few E-sports records with its Season One Dreamhack qualifiers, the most notable of which is likely the 60,000+ viewers that tuned in for the qualifying matches. It was a clear marker of the popularity of E-sports in North America, not to mention League of Legends as a game.

      There was an ugly side to the proceedings as well. The whole tournament started under the drama umbrella that is Couter Logic Gaming and Team SoloMid. If ever you needed evidence of the age demographic of competitive gamers, just read a few threads between these two teams and their supporters. It won’t be interesting, I promise. It will be full of petty insults and the kind of high-school-grade trash you’re probably reading so often in the Tribunal.

      I think I was fortunate to hit my competitive gaming peak before any of these big tournaments got popular. The Halo 1 competitive scene was remarkably friendly, and I spent loads of time on message boards working out reload mechanics and powerup spawn times with the same guys I was playing against. We were all in love with the game and, frankly, stakes were pretty low. I was never up for $100,000. I think the biggest prize package I was ever competing for was a flat CRT TV (yeah, that’s right – like a bulky TV with a flat screen), a new Xbox, and a copy of Halo. Sure, it was nice, but it wasn’t going to make my life dramatically different (and I was playing against the Ogres, so…).

      As the competitive scene gains ground, the prizes have ratcheted up, which seems to somehow inversely proportional to player attitudes. Jon Tran at Top Tier Tactics put together an awesome piece about the effect player attitudes is having not only on competitive gaming but on the form’s mainstream acceptance. It is absolutely worth the read, but the basic gist is this: competitive gaming has a mainstream ceiling until players can learn to respect one another.

      If you want proof, consider Grackis. He is one of the most infamous LoL players, mostly for his insane fits of rage, but also for his skill. He was recently asked to commentate a competitive match at NESL and the LoL community went batty with indignation. If the very community playing the game doesn’t want this guy casting because of his bad behavior, do you think the gaming community at large wants to hear him rage?

      Of course not. In fact, I’m willing to bet the only reason people pay attention to any of the high tier players is because of the desire to be those players. They are the masters of the craft, so people are willing to take a little abuse if it means learning at the feet of people like HotshotGG. Unfortunately, exposure to the kind of “lol ur bad, kid” has infected most competitive gaming communities to the point that they’re nearly unbearable to be a part of. Review a few Tribunal cases and you’ll know what I mean.

      I’m hoping things improve, but as long as we continue to offer up celebrity status to players with an attitude, I think it will be quite some time before there’s a shift in tone.

      Editorial, Games in Media, league of legends

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