Category: league of legends (Page 158 of 163)

LoL: Support Runes

Support rune page.As my ELO has improved it’s become increasingly important to have a good mix of tank, support, and DPS on a team. I’m plenty willing to fill that role for my team, so I like to have a good rune page to support it. The problem is, I like to play a lot of different toons, so I like my rune pages to be applicable to just about anyone. That’s a tough thing to pull off for support, but here’s what I’m working with.

For now, I focus on CD reduction and a little mana regen and some armor. The last is because I was playing an armor stack Rammus for a bit (lot of fun if you haven’t tried it – just make sure you itemize properly against mages). With my 9/0/21 mastery, I’m sitting at almost 20% cooldown reduction, which is great for someone like Alistar or Rammus. I tend to use this page for toons like Blitzcrank and Nasus if I’m playing support as well. The real frustration comes from the red runes. There just isn’t much that makes sense for a lot of toons. Most of the support/utility marks are such low percentages that spending the IP doesn’t make sense.

I’ll probably continue to mess with various setups using Tier 1 or 2 runes, just to see what I like. I would hope for a mark buff, but I don’t think that’s very likely. What do you like to go for? Magic Resist? Armor? The scaling buffs?

LoL: Twisted Treeline timeline

Twisted Treeline.When I opened the announcement forums and saw the words “Twisted” and “Timeline” next to one another I was ecstatic. Finally there was some news about the 3v3 map that we’ve long awaited. You know how this ends, though. There is no timeline, no new information. Just a nostalgic look at how far the map has come (which could actually be a good sign that it’s coming fairly soon).

It’s a fun read, and it does give me hope that we’ll see the new map by the time Spring rolls around. As I’ve said many times on this blog, I primarily play with two friends – we’re looking forward to the map for obvious reasons.

There is at least one more change to be made before the map is quite ready. Here’s the teaser for that change from the original post:

The Twisted Treeline originally envisioned needed a lot of work to bring it in line with the goals of the Design Team. In order to balance it to be on equal footing across the various champion types, to allow for multiple opening strategies, and to keep the game length under control, many different aspects of the map required extensive tweaking from the original design. Ultimately, the Twisted Treeline of today is a very different place than the one that debuted on October 21st, 2009.

And there’s more to come! The Design Team has authorized me to tease you all with the promise of at least one more, game changing feature that they intend to pull from their proverbial bag of tricks. Stay tuned!

Source: LoL Forums

LoL: Using custom skins

Necron Blitz.I’m a big fan of Riot’s various skins for the champions in game. A lot of them are pretty damn cool, and it’s nice to be able to show your pride in a particular toon by playing with one of the skins. Buying all of them would be a little ridiculous, though, and there are a few standard models with no skins at all. Thankfully, a small community of artists has cropped up to provide custom skins for free.

If you head over to heroesmod.com you can have a look at the skins available for any character. The site has full instructions for installation. My personal favorite is the Necron Blitz I used for the picture, but there’s also an Iron Man Blitz, a pretty cool Nidalee skin, and a nice replacement for Morgana. The skins only exist client-side, so your friends/enemies won’t see them, but it’s a nice way to add some flavor to the game. Did I mention it’s free?

Start with the tutorial for simple directions on installation. A lot of the skinners on the forums suggest you mess with a zip file in your DATA folder and it’s just not necessary.

LoL: Snowballing and its eventual nerf

Morgana's about to get ganked.We’ve all been on the receiving end of a good old-fashioned beat down at one time or another. The other team bangs out a couple early kills and suddenly you and your teammates are stuck 3 levels down and your towers are getting steamrolled.

This situation happens frequently enough that Riot is looking at ways to change it. According to a post from Zileas, they’re trying to discourage the 5-man roam that has become so popular. Here’s his post:

Our philosophy on this issue is that individual snowballing is good, and team snowballing is bad. Right now, team snowballing occurs too much — one super carry twitch is a lot easier to handle than 5 guys who are 3 levels higher than each of you.

We are going to make some experience table tweaks to reduce team snowballing without hurting individual snowballing much. We are also going to make a new 3 lane map that is larger, has less cross-map connectivity (so that there is higher cost to 5 man roam, and less shutdown of the farming/laning phase via the first tower being down), etc.

We probably will nerf flash.

We wont be nerfing snowball items. Emotional highs from the game you super carried make this genre sticky. We removed it too much in the beta, and it cost us. Sorry, but being super carry annie or super carry corki once in a while gets a player through the 8 defeat in a row streak they hit the next day.

I’m on the fence about early gold for kills. It’s been something we have been talking about, for the reason you cite. OF course, an early kill is also harder than a late kill.

I can appreciate the thought behind this, though I worry about the pace of the game. The roaming gank squad has already taken its toll on pace. I’ve had a number of games recently where safe play from both sides led to more than 20 minutes without a death. Discouraging ganking seems like it will just make the laning phase that much longer and more painful. There are plenty of games in which I feel like losing my outer turret is the best thing that could happen because it breaks me out of the laning mentality. I realize that this is the point – to keep people from leaving lane – but that’s where the fun of the game is.

If anything, I think the best solution is the 3-lane map with less interconnectivity. That at least gives you the option to farm a lane once the tower is down with some potential for intra-lane ganking so long as there are enough hiding spots.

What do you think? Are there too many games in which snowballing is a serious problem or are you okay with the 5-man roam?

LoL: Queue dodgers make the dodging even more worth it

Evelyn, the noobmaker.My friends and I have a new rule: no Heimer, no Eve, period. It held guideline status, but there was always some occasion where our team comp looked good, despite the potential for a noob Heimer or Eve and we would let it slide. Every time we made the exception, or so it seemed, we would lose. The player would be just as bad as we expected and our team would fall apart by the 30-minute mark. The same thing happened last night, which is why we’ve taken that guideline and bumped it up to constitutional amendment levels. In the current matchmaking system I will no longer play a game with Eve or Heimer in it.

Say what you will about queue dodging, I value my time in the game too much to spend 25 minutes watching teammates feed, and as experience dictates, Eve and Heimer players are noob players the vast majority of the time. I don’t have fun trying to drag them along behind me, giving encouraging advice that they just won’t heed. Instead, I’m always going to try to convince that player to switch toons or I’ll be dodging the queue.

There are a lot of other people who obviously feel this way. Most games I have to wait through two or three queue cycles before I can play. For the most part, it’s not something I mind, if only because I can understand the mindset. As queue dodging becomes more prevalent, it becomes more beneficial to my sanity to dodge as well. When it takes five to ten minutes to find a game, I want that game to be competitive, not a landslide in either direction. It’s a vicious cycle, but one that’s become almost necessary for my enjoyment of the game.

I would love if this was not the case and there is a simple solution: fix matchmaking. Queue dodging, for me, is a symptom of the poor matchmaking system. I would be totally fine playing with Heimer and Eve if I was confident my teammates were at least decent players and hopefully aware and ready to compensate for their respective champion’s weaknesses. That’s just not the case, though, and until I start to see significantly better players in my queue, I’ll be dodging the champions most prone to noob players.

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