Category: Editorial (Page 25 of 34)

      Where are all the Renekton players?

      January 22, 2011 /

      Renekton fighting his brother.

      I’m actually not surprised to see so few Renekton players, but I’m wondering if you’ve seen the same thing. For the first couple days, as with most patches, he was picked pretty quickly. He’s fallen off the radar, though. In fact, I’ve had a couple games without a Renketon on my team or the other.

      Part of that is probably the IP cost. I know I mentioned in a previous post that I don’t mind the IP cost – I think it’s a good way for Riot to encourage financial support for the game. I am surprised that it has taken so long for people to run out of IP.

      The other part is no doubt that his playstyle is a bit underwhelming in lane. He’s great 1v1, he’s a solid ganker, but his heal is really lackluster in lane. Yes, he can be a strong lane partner, but without that he loses a lot of the survivability he needs to stay in lane. Think about Pantheon as a counter example. His primary harass combo is Spear Toss -> Aegis -> HSS -> Spear Toss. It’s targeted, reliable, and best of all, he builds up a shield when he does it so he doesn’t take too much return damage. He can even do that on a turret and soak two hits free of penalty. It’s kind of a sweet deal.

      Renekton, by contrast, is wide open to return fire when he dashes in. Even if he dashes back out he has still been in range for quite some time, and his heal definitely won’t save him.

      For now, the skill ceiling is probably high enough on Renekton that you won’t see him in many games. That is, of course, unless he gets buffed.

      Champions, Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

      Why Minecraft matters to gamers

      January 21, 2011 /

      Building Blocks: Why Minecraft Matters to Gamers

      I’ve been hesitating to write about Minecraft for about a week now because I wanted this article to go live on our main site first. I first heard about Minecraft probably six months ago or so. In fact, I think I remember taking a peek at it last April, but that could be wrong. At any rate, I didn’t get too involved with it. I was deep into League of Legends at that point, so there really wasn’t time in my gaming schedule.

      Fast forward to today, when my LoL schedule has become fairly casual. Now I understand the appeal of the open world. It’s an incredible game, despite the primitive graphics and the fact that the game is still in beta. If you’ve played it, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, well, you need to.

      I won’t say much more than that for now, mostly because I’ve written an article for our parent site about the importance of Minecraft’s design. Here’s a quick excerpt:

      For all of the fun and magic that makes “Minecraft” great, the thing that makes “Minecraft” important is its design. The game’s original developer, a guy named Markus Persson that the “Minecraft” community knows as Notch, did something a lot of AAA developers would laugh at. Instead of trying to immerse the player in a world by using narrative, he chose to focus on gameplay. By simplifying the controls, the world, even the graphics, Persson created a game world that players can call their own, a world they want to shape and be a part of in ways that other games don’t allow. My own first experience with “Minecraft” was so overwhelming I actually sat and giggled as I played. There is so much potential – truly unbounded creative potential – that I was immediately transported back to childhood, sitting in front of an upturned bucket of Legos, wondering what I should build next.

      You can check out the full article on Bullz-Eye.com.

      Development, Editorial, Minecraft

      Renekton impressions – maybe he really is related to Nasus

      January 20, 2011 /

      Galactic Renekton.

      I wrote that title as 75 percent joke, and to be fair, most of his problems are melee related, not champion related. Let’s forget all that and talk about the good stuff for a minute, shall we?

      Renekton has the hyperactive playstyle that I love. He’s regularly casting, has a fun little dash, and he flourishes his blade when he swings. Also, he’s a damn crocodile, in case you didn’t notice. Renekton also brings a decent stun to your team, and once the skill is at max rank, he can use the stun pretty often. His ult isn’t bad, and if you couple him with a stunner, you could have a decent lane.

      That said, I am just now having my first runaway game with him, and I don’t really feel like I’m dominating all that hard. A big part of the problem is his cooldowns. They are long, to the point that you better have some cooldown reduction items with you. I understand they sort of have to be this way because of the fury system – too short and he’s constantly using furious abilities – but it limits the regularity with which you get to use his skills, which are all pretty cool. No doubt, part of the issue is that the resource system is new, and it’s still tough to know what the best use of all that fury is in the moment.

      The other problem is that Renekton seems to be balanced around 1v1 fights where he is at or above his opponent’s level. In that situation he is very strong, much like Xin Zhao. His stun really cuts people up, especially if you’ve used a furious Dice, and a furious heal can be enough to keep you up against one target. Against multiple targets, though, you’re taking too much damage to even notice that heal.

      It’s as though he was designed specifically to take second solo, which, when he can get it, is great. In the six or seven games I’ve played with him, though, I haven’t been solo. More often than not, I’ve been against strong ranged harass with another melee. When you’re the same level as multiple opponents and lower than the people ganking you, Renekton suffers like every melee toon. He’s easily kited despite his dash (the range is very short because he can do it twice if he hits someone) and often subjected to chain CC before he can even reach a target (or safety).

      As for build, I’ve tried several things, but the thing I liked most so far is a Bloodthirster -> Trinity. Trinity is a little strange on him, but the added movespeed, health, and slow proc make a big difference for his gameplay. His cooldowns are long enough that you usually aren’t wasting the bonus damage procs, either.

      I’m sure I’ll have more to say about him in a few days. I’ve been pretty busy with work and starting up a Minecraft server so I haven’t put quite as much time into studying him. This weekend I should be able to get a few more games and let you know how he feels.

      Champions, Editorial, league of legends

      The next great MMO: I need a game where the mechanics don’t break my immersion

      January 11, 2011 /

      World of Warcraft UI.

      With any game, I always hit a point where I cease to be immersed in the game as a world and start thinking about the mechanics, the way the game actually works. In Counter-strike, it was the day I learned to jumpcrouch. Suddenly this game-changing mechanic turned me from a terrorist running about desperately trying to stay alive into a hopping ball of impossibly accurate death. In Halo, it was the way grenades would explode once they sat still. I perfected grenade trapping on every map, so there was always an extra burst of damage where and when I needed it. With Oblivion, it was discovering that I could beat the game at level one by choosing primary stats and never leveling them up.

      WoW suffers from this immersion problem as much as any game. Creating a class for the first time, you rarely think about the different racials. If you’re going to PvP, though, it’s obvious that human is your best choice. I always loved Beast Mastery on my hunter because I got to have a big scary pet and, in Wrath of the Lich King, unique pets, but when Blizzard nerfed BM damage into the ground, it pretty much killed my favorite way to play the class. Hunters lost a lot of flavor for me that day, and it was because of a mechanical change.

      The thing I’ve always loved about MMOs is the flavor of the different classes. While I love to try different things, I’ve always been a player who settles into the class I enjoy most and really identify with. Every time mechanics intrude on my class immersion, I wonder how the next great MMO will deal with it. I started taking a look at RIFT recently, a game that has been getting a lot of positive attention in its beta phase. To me, the game looks too much like WoW for me to seriously consider it. If I’m going to pay a monthly fee for WoW or a game that looks an awful lot like WoW, I’m probably going to stick with WoW if only because I have so much time invested in it. Still, I was trying to keep an open mind on RIFT, until I read the talent trees for the different classes. They’re basically the same kind of boring crap you get in Warcraft. Increases your spell haste by 3 percent. Increases your damage from this spell by 10 percent. Gives you a chance to get a free spell cast. None of that stuff is fun or flavorful – it’s all mechanical. It helps your name climb up the damage meters. It doesn’t make the game any more interesting than it was before you put your talent point there.

      My hope is obviously that someone will find a way to blend flavor and mechanics for an MMO, but it’s going to take someone with serious vision. I think a lot of developers confuse depth with complexity. League of Legends is a great example of a deep gameplay experience without a super complex experience. The fact that my hunter in WoW has 50 action buttons on the screen seems to me like a design failure. With so many different skills, I’m immediately sucked out of the game to worry about where to put my latest macro. While the four button approach for LoL may be too slim for the MMO experience, there has to be some happy medium, one hopefully much closer to four buttons than 50, that allows me to engage with the game world intuitively and simply enjoy my class for what it is.

      Editorial, MMO, The Next Great MMO

      Ionian Boots of Lucidity are too much good for too little cost

      January 9, 2011 /

      chronokeeper_splash_2

      I spent a lot of my post on the caster item changes trying not to say anything definitive. This post is different. For this post, I know exactly how I feel and what needs to be said. The Ionian Boots of Lucidity are way too damn good for their cost. Period.

      My philosophy on AP used to be pretty simple; build spell penetration before AP. It was a more effective way to increase your damage output and the spell pen items were cheaper, in most cases, than the high-tier AP items. Basically, building a caster was always some sort of tradeoff, just like an AD toon. Instead of attack speed, damage, and armor pen, you want CD reduction, AP, and magic pen. Some people would say that the boots just balance out casters against AD toons, but I really think they’re too strong.

      The casters in the game have been balanced around the difficulty of obtaining cooldown reduction for a long time. Most of the CDR items were niche tools, designed to help against certain comps but not so great against others. The bread and butter of a CDR build used to be Frozen Heart, but it was only good against AD-heavy teams. Soul Shroud is a support item and wastes a lot of stat points for most casters, and Deathfire Grasp could typically be bypassed for a better AP item. Most casters I saw sat around 20-30 percent CDR and stacked AP. Now, I can have 30 percent CDR as soon as I make 900 gold, which can be as early as level four or five.

      For any champion who relies on a rotation of spells – Annie, Ryze, Zilean, to name a few – the boots are insanely good. If CDR is to AP what attack speed is to AD, then these boots are supposed to be equivalent to Berserker’s Greaves. The difference is that mages are built for a big burst and then a period where they don’t do a whole lot of damage before that big burst comes back up. Physical damage dealers rely on individual attacks for nearly all of their damage. Early in the game when their damage is low, Berserker’s Greaves don’t do so much. The Boots of Lucidity, on the other hand, do a lot.

      The changes to high-tier caster items already brought the mages in LoL in line with the AD carries for the most part. There are still a couple AD carries with kiting abilities that a mage can’t quite match, but for the most part, a mage’s damage output is just fine without giving them cheap access to cooldown reduction. I’ve lost one game as Zilean since the new boots released, and even in that loss I was better than 2:1 on my K:D ratio.

      Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

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