Category: league of legends (Page 162 of 163)

      LoL: Power of the premade

      January 25, 2010 /

      Anivia looking scary.You’ll see me talk about solo queue games a lot here because that’s where I spend at least half my time. Being a freelancer, I can split my play time throughout the day when a lot of people are at work or elsewhere. When I have the chance, though, I’ll always choose to premade.

      If you’re new to the game, pay attention to the people you play with. Chances are, if you’re playing a few games in a row, you may end up with a few of the same players. Try to pick out the most coordinated players with the best communication. As an example, I was on a 5-game losing streak today. Fortunately I pulled a big Anivia play and beat a team of decent players with support from a good Mundo. That decent team, the guys I beat, wanted to friend up and play together.

      What happened next almost shouldn’t be talked about. We were stomping people so hard there were multiple rage quits most games we played and it was all because of coordination. Having Vent or Skype only compounds things.

      league of legends, PC, Strategy

      LoL Basics: Cooldown reduction

      January 23, 2010 /

      Annie nuking Nunu.Today’s LoL Basics post is a quick look at an essential stat for casters: cooldown reduction. It’s one of the best ways to increase your DPS at every stage of the game and can be very easy to max out.

      Cooldown reduction, as the name suggests, reduces the amount of time between spell casts. Take Karthus, for instance. His ultimate starts at a 180 second cooldown. That’s a long time to wait, especially if your team is playing aggressively. If you’re going with a Mejai’s Soulstealer, you want to at least be picking up assists as often as you can, and an ult is great way to do that in other lanes.

      A lot of items offer cooldown reduction, not to mention the runes you can buy. Frozen Heart is 25% reduction. Soul Shroud is 15%. Let’s say you have both those items on Karthus. Cooldown reduction works additively, so you’re at 40% reduction. For the 180 second ult, that means you can now cast every 108 seconds, which is really nice.

      There is a caveat, though: cooldown reduction caps at 40%, meaning you can’t have any more than that. If you’ve specced into utility and offense for your masteries, you likely have 9% reduction. My own rune page puts me at 10% more, which means 4% of the CD reduction on Frozen Heart is lost. Granted, it has plenty of other benefits, but you should try to be conscious of how much of an item becomes worthless for you.

      Don’t forget, you can also get the golem buff for an extra 25% CD reduction and some mana regen. Before taking the buff, though, consider whether you’re the best person to wear the buff on your team. If another player will be capable of more DPS, pass it off.

      league of legends, PC, Strategy

      LoL Basics: Crit chance or crit damage?

      January 22, 2010 /

      Warwick showing TF some love.Today I’ve got another rune discussion for you, branching off the magic penetration guide I made the other day. If you’re a physical DPS player – Ashe, Warwick, Twitch – you’re going to be going after critical strike items, typically culminating with Infinity Edge. Few things are quite as fun as burning down a Fiddlesticks with a few quick crits. So how should you spend your IP: critical strike chance runes or critical damage?

      There are two sides of the debate. For critical damage, the idea is that you are increasing your damage by means only available on two items in the game: Sword of the Occult and Infinity Edge. Those are the only method by which you can increase your critical damage and one, the Sword of the Occult, can be fairly unreliable. If you’re a Shaco player, crit damage can be invaluable as it increases the damage caused by Deceive. Early game you can nearly one-shot players if you have a full crit damage page.

      But crit damage runes are expensive. Very expensive. The crit chance folks would argue that crit chance has wider application and can more effective swing the early game in your favor. Bumping your crit chance by as much as 20% means you should win almost every stand and fight situation at level 1, and your harassment gets a big boost too. It’s easy to scare someone off with a few early 120+ hits. As abundant as critical chance items are, you could easily make the argument that runes allow you to forego some of those items in favor of damage, which could in turn lead to more Bloodthirster stacks, which gets very scary for the other team.

      For my IP points, I’d go for crit chance. They’re cheap, provide a solid benefit, and can help push you toward a few more wins until you’ve got the IP to upgrade to crit damage.

      league of legends, PC, Strategy

      LoL: Controlling the late-game

      January 21, 2010 /

      League of Legends tower.I couldn’t sleep last night so I decided to jump into a game of LoL to relax. I’ve been on a bit of a losing streak recently so I took my own advice, working the basics to try to sneak a win. Lo and behold, I was farming well, racking up some assists, and slowly turning my TF into a nuking machine.

      And for once, it was a fairly even match. We had myself as TF, Malphite, Alistar, Veigar, and Annie – a little low on the phys dps side of things but we were playing well. The other side was Twitch, Blitzcrank, Katarina, Annie and one other I can’t seem to remember. My team struggled early, but we picked things up around 14 and starting pushing towers. For the most part we were fine – our Malphite and Alistar were coordinating well and DPS was focusing targets. We did have one problem, though: Twitch.

      Despite my constant begging, our tanks just would notbuy an elixir. Sure, there was my ultimate, and I was blowing it for every team fight, but Twitch soon got wise, would flash in and invis out. By the end of the game we were all yelling at each other, everyone blamed for not focusing Twitch. Meanwhile, he continued to get double and triple kills and BD every tower we had.

      The point of this story is that the late-game is completely dependent on how you play your opponent. By 45 minutes or so, you should be heavily farmed, so it really starts to come down to strategy versus the other team. Make sure you stop to think, “what else could I be doing to help win those team fights?” More often than not, it isn’t about DPS. It’s about controlling abilities – the enemies’ – saving stuns to interrupt ultimates, focusing targets that have big AOE damage, and shutting down the invis players that turn a 3v3 you could normally win into a massacre the other way.

      league of legends, PC, Strategy

      LoL Basics: Magic Penetration

      January 19, 2010 /

      rune bookSo you’ve purchased a few heroes you like and you want to get started with a rune page. But what to get? If you dig around the forums, you’ll find every possible answer and likely end up no better off than when you started. This is a basic guide for understanding magic penetration runes and their benefits.

      If you like to play mage toons – Fiddlesticks, Karthus, Ryze – magic penetration can be a cheap start for your runebook. For a lot of mages, though, it’s a tough purchase to justify because of the way magic penetration works. Penetration only affects magic resistance your target currently has. It’s also the last debuff applied in a string of magic resistance debuffs. It works like this: fixed resistance is applied first, so Karthus’ wall, for instance, which gives a -35 magic resistance debuff. Then comes percentage based debuffs, like Void Staff. Then, after all that has been applied you get your magic penetration debuff.

      The real kicker is that penetration can’t take your enemy’s resistance below zero. Only flat resistance can do that. If you’re in some higher tier play and you’ve got enemies stacking up MR, then penetration is a great choice. It adds a level of damage you can only get from Abyssal Staff in game. If you’re a more casual player like myself, then you might see more benefit from flat AP, mana regen, or even flat health.

      league of legends, Strategy

      « Older posts Newer posts »

      © 2026 Fearless Gamer

      Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑