Category: league of legends (Page 132 of 163)

Kog’Maw is patch-ready

Kog'Maw, Mouth of the Abyss.

Riot’s gone and posted the official “champion approaches” info for Kog’Maw, including his skill list. It looks like the latest creature from the void will be making his way to the League by the next patch.

Let’s have a look at his abilities, shall we?
Bio-Arcane Barrage: Kog’Maw’s attacks gain range and deal a percent of the target’s maximum health as magic damage.

Void Ooze: Kog’Maw launches a peculiar ooze which damages all enemies it passes through and leaves a trail which slows enemies who stand on it.

Caustic Spittle: Passive: Increases armor penetration. Active: Kog’Maw launches a corrosive projectile which deals magic damage and doubles his passive armor penetration for 4 seconds (Removes the passive until available again).

Living Artillery (Ultimate): Kog’Maw fires a living artillery shell at a great distance dealing damage and revealing targets. Additionally, multiple Living Artilleries in a short period of time cause them to cost additional mana.

Icathian Surprise (Passive): Upon dying, Kog’Maw starts a chain reaction in his body which causes him to detonate after 4 seconds; dealing magic damage to surrounding enemies.

It looks to me like he’ll play a little bit like Kayle, with the active cast on Caustic Spittle increasing damage he deals and the ranged attack he gets from Bio-Arcane Barrage. I have to say, I’m not thrilled to see another melee toon, and his passive has to be among the worst in the game. When will that be useful? When you die? Isn’t part of the game trying to not die? Four seconds also seems like an eternity for the detonation. It would be much more interesting, in my mind, if targets he killed were infected and would explode after they had died. As always, we’ll have to see how this plays out, but for now I am wholly underwhelmed by his skill list.

Will Kog’Maw be the latest toon that’s banished to unplayability?

What is poking? [metagame]

Janna is the new OP.

Part of the reason I like to game is that it makes me think critically about a situation in the face of a load of variables. With a game like LoL there are almost infinite combinations of heroes and matchups, and with the different build possibilities there is always a new strategy to consider. That said, LoL does have an active meta game, meaning the popular strategy/build method for victory is constantly changing because of new patches and new heroes.

Right now people generally think healing is the flavor of the month ticket to victory, but a couple people on the forums have laid out interesting counter arguments. One guy on the Test Realm said it’s not the healing so much as the kiting, which gives a team with a healer the ability to make the most of their healing power. An adjudicator also posted in the general discussion forums claiming that “poking” is the problem. Poking, as he puts it, is using a team’s ranged harassment abilities to wear down the opponent from a distance, forcing them away from towers and allowing your team to push. Characters like Ashe and Ezreal are great at this, though Ezreal is probably the best because his whole skill lineup is based on harassing the enemy team from afar while healing your own team.

Whatever you want to call it, the problem remains the same. Teams with healers are successful because they can stand out of the range of fire and heal the harassment that normally brings a target low enough for your team to initiate a fight. Add to it the fact that two of the best healers in the game, Ezreal and Janna, have the best ranged harassment in the game and you’ve created a situation that far too heavily favors any team that features those two toons.

The good news is that Zileas agrees that this is a problem and says that Riot’s focus in the next two patches will be addressing the ranged harass/healing combos that are so grossly overpowering other strats right now.

The LoL player chart

RagerI always love it when a game has been around long enough to have its own archetypes for the different players. The WoW player archetypes were always among my favorite forum posts back when I was playing a lot of Warcraft.

Someone has finally made one for League of Legends and posted it in the forums. The scales for the chart are “faggotry” and “actually skilled at League of Legends,” which are some pretty lame criteria, but the descriptions are funny nonetheless. I’d say I fall somewhere in the DotA Player/Teacher/Tryhard area with the occasional Rager running through my veins.

Where do you fall?

UPDATE: Can’t believe I forgot to link it – here you go.

Where are all the patched champions?

new_champ_spreadOne of the great things about LoL is the endless possibility for expansion. There can always be new heroes, new maps, new game modes, etc. Those things need to fit well into the game to really serve as expanded material, though. If no one’s playing those modes/champions, they have virtually zero effect on the game.

That’s exactly what I’ve been seeing in the new champions. They get played for their launch week and the subsequent free week and then fall completely off the radar. I almost never see Olaf in game any more, and when I do I tend to smash him. Malzahar? Never. Akali? Less than never. Garen? Rarely. Kennen? Nope. Mordekaiser? Occasionally. The only patched champions I see on a regular basis are Shen (who is in nearly every game), Ezreal (same, almost every game), and Pantheon (only because Heartseeker is crazy broken right now).

If you take a look at the champion list at LoL Base, you’ll see that the only one of the champions I never see that has a positive win/loss ratio is Mordekaiser. The rest are negative, in some cases drastically so, which says to me a couple things. First, and most obviously, those characters suffer from some kind of serious design flaw. Though I think several of the champions I mentioned are solid (Kennen and Garen for the most part), the others have trouble providing serious support to a team. It could be that players just haven’t figured out how to play these new champions, but most of them are old enough that someone, somewhere should be playing them or singing their praises, and that’s not really the case.

It’s too early to say where Kog’Maw will fall, but if he follows the current trend, we’ll see him for two weeks and not much more.

Champion Sneak Peek: Kog’Maw, the Mouth of the Abyss

Kog'Maw, Mouth of the Abyss.

If there’s one thing League of Legends is missing, it’s monster champions. Today, Riot gave us a sneak peek at something that is finally non-humanoid: Kog’Maw, the Mouth of the Abyss.

Kog’Maw made his first appearance back when Malzahar launched, in the picture above. A lot of people thought that might be his original voidling skin, but it turns out that’s actually our boy, Kog’Maw. Unfortunately the picture is the only thing we have to go on at this point. I think he looks pretty cool, I’m just hoping his mouth-related abilities aren’t quite as buggy as the gentlemanly Cho’Gath.

Pendragon included a silhouette of our new champion in the official post, but I think the pic above does him more justice. I’m as excited about this guy as I’ve been about any of the recent champions I can remember. I’m also kind of happy that the Test Realm is down because it makes his release a little more mysterious. I can’t wait to see a skill list.

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