Category: league of legends (Page 127 of 163)

Xin Zhao Spotlight is here

July 10, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Riot posted the Xin Zhao Spotlight early this go round, giving you time to think about whether or not you’ll be picking him up at the Season One launch this Tuesday. The video gives some much needed clarification on his skillset, though I don’t think it does a good job displaying Xin Zhao’s specific skillset.

Did anyone else feel like this was more of a tutorial on the basics than a display of the potential behind Xin Zhao. That first kill on Guinsoo looked like a damn bot (I’m guessing Guinsoo was typing?) and most of the teamfights played out such that I didn’t see Xin Zhao doing a whole lot – it was mostly his fed teammates dishing out the damage and pulling down triple kills. It’s kinda tough to get a good look at any champion when you have a power combo like Alistar/Annie for teamfights. The one helpful tip was the Malzahar kill top for which Phreak used Audacious Charge. That’s about all I learned. Use it like Kat/Akali to get close to people but with a bonus AOE slow.

league of legends, Previews, Video

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Riot starts Season One transition, stops recording wins

July 10, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

If you’ve had a chance to play this weekend, you may have noticed the lack of change in your win count. No, it’s not a bug. It’s one of the ways Riot is hoping to maintain as much uptime as possible for the changeover to Season One.

With regard to the wins, it’s an issue of stat recording. They’re revamping the internals, so you don’t keep any wins you might accrue over the weekend. Kinda sucks, but I’m not too worried about those disappearing from my stat record if I get access to a much more robust system in a few days. I do wonder, though, what kind of stats we’ll get to see for legacy games. I know those games will still be private, but will they get the full analysis package of the other games?

I’m glad to see Riot is taking precautions for uptime around the Season One launch. Here’s hoping the rest goes smoothly.

league of legends

lol new season one stats s1 transition season one stats win count win percentage wins

More LoL lore is on the way

July 9, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Just last week I asked how familiar you all are with the lore behind LoL. Personally, I’m not much of a lore guy. If it doesn’t grab my attention right off the bat, I’m probably not going to be persuaded to spend the time necessary to learn the story behind a given game.

It seems weird to me then that Riot is just now trying to beef up the lore behind League of Legends. It has always seemed like an afterthought, and the way Riot plans to handle things here is certainly unorthodox.

The new lore in LoL will be delivered by way of the new “Journal of Justice,” a tab in (I’m assuming) the client that will be completely dedicated to lore. The journal will be updated every two weeks. This all seems strangely formulaic to me, but the real oddity is that Riot will implement a “Like” system, just like Facebook, so you can weigh in on the story arcs that interest you most. Those plotlines will presumably get more attention than others going forward.

I’m always surprised when a game that isn’t necessarily story driven gets the full-on creative treatment, but maybe players are really dying for this. Anyone dying to read the first entry in the JoJ?

league of legends, News

backstory joj journal of justice lol lore lore new lore story

Xin Zhao official ability list is a bit different than the first leak

July 8, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Shortly after Xin Zhao was announced at PC Gamer, Leaguecraft had a list of his abilities up that sounded fairly official. In my experience, those lists are usually right, but for Xin Zhao things are a little different than we first thought.

Here’s the official ability list:

Three Talon Strike: Xin Zhao’s next 3 standard attacks deal increased damage, with the third attack knocking an opponent into the air.
Battle Cry: Xin Zhao passively increases his attack speed and can activate this ability to further increase attack speed and lower his ability cooldowns with each attack.
Audacious Charge: Xin Zhao charges an enemy, dealing damage and slowing it and all other enemies in the area. Audacious Charge increases Xin’Zhao’s armor temporarily and lowers the cooldowns of all of his abilities.
Crescent Sweep (Ultimate): Xin Zhao fiercely sweeps his spear around him, dealing damage to nearby enemies based on their current health.
Tireless Warrior (Passive): Xin Zhao is healed for every 3 attacks that he lands. This amount increases every 2 levels.

As spazticmonk mentioned on the original post, the charge would probably have had too long a cooldown as his ultimate. It looks like that will just be his E skill, giving him the mobility Riot wanted. You’ll also notice that the “reverse skillshot” is gone from Crescent Sweep, though I wonder what “based on current health” means – more damage if they’re healthy or more damage if they’re hurt? As I mentioned before, Xin Zhao seems like he has the ability set that makes a successful melee champion. I’m looking forward to trying him out with the launch of Season One.

league of legends

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Apparently I’m top 1500-3000 by ELO

July 8, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

A recent post asked Riot where the staff fell by ELO distribution and Riot actually responded. I see a couple of those guys regularly, at least I did when I was tryharding a bit and parked somewhere around 70 games over .500. From the looks of things, I’m in the top 1500-3000 players of the player base.

Here are the numbers:

Top 100:
Phreak 2417
Andy Ho (business analyst) 2310
Top 1500:
RiotJeffJew 2014
Ezreal 1985
Geeves 1970
Top 3000:
Zileas 1941
VeigarTheHorrible 1933
Pendragon 1915
Tryndamere 1900 (he was 2000 a week ago, but i guess he tried new stuff)
Shurelia was like ~1950, but not on the top 3000 list because she nerfed her rating on her primary live account to teach some of her family members the game. I don’t see her right now, so cant ask what her other smurf is called (other than darkshurelia)
Veigar would be a 2300 or 2400 if he played more on live.

I see Geeves and RiotJeffJew fairly often, by which I mean I’ve seen each of them a few times. Are you guys seeing any Rioters in your games?

It’s interesting to me that the gap is so small and that I see these guys as often as I do. I really do wonder how many people are playing the game if so many of the Riot staff are so high in the ELO charts. It’s pretty great that we’ll have access to this kind of information when Season One launches. I like to have goals in game, whether it’s just getting a win or trying to move up 100 spots on the leaderboard. I really didn’t think I was as high as I apparently am, which is also a nice bonus to this kind of info.