I know it’s only been one day since the patch but the servers were up so quickly I’d imagine people were able to play a number of games yesterday. So, how are the new tenacity items treating you? Have you been buying them or just sticking to your trusty Merc Treads?
I think I’ve only purchased the Cloak and Dagger in any of my games so far, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I really like that it offers an opportunity to buy Ninja Tabi or the cooldown boots, which are really the only boots I tend to use on my DPS characters. Occasionally I’ll get ‘Zerker’s Greaves but that’s rare.
So far, I think the new items will mostly be for niche uses, like Gangplank. He gets a lot of benefit from Cloak and Dagger, where other champions would probably do better to spend the cash on more damage. I am a little worried that some of the tankier toons will benefit from it as well. I’ve already seen more Warwicks in Sorcerer’s Boots than I care to.
I’ve done a couple AP champions and a melee assassin for this feature – I think it’s time for some ranged DPS. Looking at Kog’Maw’s kit it seems that, other than Vayne, he’s probably best suited for flat out tank killing. Ashe is likely still the best pick overall for a ranged DPS, but if Kog’Maw can get ahead, he can burn tanks like no other. That said, he’s very susceptible to crowd control effects and suffers from a fairly weak early lane presence.
Basically, I want to see how Kog’Maw performs against a variety of comps with an average farm. He is absolutely devastating if overfed, which also has me interested in seeing how well he can carry against tanky DPS teams. I think the changes to Wit’s End make it the perfect Kog’Maw item, so I’m going to try a few builds centered around a Wit’s End rush to see how well it scales.
Check back later in the week for more impressions. Hopefully I can get a few Vayne games in before the day’s end and have some impressions on her tomorrow as well.
Once again, I spent much of my Champ of the Week playtime early in the week, knocking out quite a few Nocturne games with very poor results. One of the problems with strong, popular champions, at least as it pertains to this feature, is that I can rarely get them in ranked. These champions will be banned often, which means reverting to normal games for testing. That’s not all bad, but if I can say one thing for ranked it’s that teams attempt to put together a decent comp at least 50 percent of the time. I can’t say the same for normal, which is why my early Nocturne games ended so poorly. Nocturne is definitely not the kind of champion that can just flat out carry anything. The bruisers are still too strong when played en masse, especially if Nocturne’s teammates are all as squishy as he is.
That said, it still happened. I still had a couple games with solid team composition and in those games I was dominant. I was particularly thrilled to have a game last night in which I was paired up with a Twisted Fate. Our combined ganking power was just too much for our opponents. Nocturne’s ult is a big part of what makes him strong. He doesn’t have to worry about positioning for teamfights. All he has to do is get within the general vicinity of a fight before ulting onto anyone in vision. I would often wait until fights were virtually over before heading in, making sure the enemy team had burned summoner spells and ultimates and cutting up low-hp targets.
That’s really where Nocturne excels; he absolutely trashes low health, low armor targets. He is slated to catch some nerfs tomorrow, but he will retain the damage steroid on Duskbringer, despite the nuke nerf. I’m not sure I need to say much more about the champion than what I’ve said in other posts – his kit is just too overwhelming for most champions to handle.
As for the one thing I would change, I think it would be his ultimate. It just needs to be changed, completely. The rest of his kit is strong enough on its own – he doesn’t need a global vision reduction along with a huge radius dash for positioning. Give him a weakness. Make the people playing him actually think about their positioning.
Tomorrow’s patch includes some very welcome changes to CC-reduction, which I’ve covered in another post, but also some unexpected changes to champions. Shen’s getting a damage tweak, Karthus is getting a small nerf, as are Jarvan and Nocturne, while Gangplank is getting a buff. Along with the champion changes, Sunfire is getting a nerf and Wit’s End is catching what I can only consider a buff.
I’m not sure why Riot thinks Shen, or any tank for that matter, needs to be able to carry games, but that’s the context given for Shen’s upcoming damage tweak. Vorpal Blade and Ki Strike are getting an initial nerf but will now scale better to “let Shen carry but not deal a ton of damage without trying.” I get that with the Vorpal Blade change, but Ki Strike scales with his HP, something he’s likely to itemize for in most any situation. Like I said, I don’t get the change, but I’m hoping the Vorpal reduction will be enough to counterbalance what could be a very strong late game Ki Strike.
Karthus is getting a basic AP ratio nerf to his ult and a duration nerf on his passive. Essentially, killing him will actually reduce some of the damage he does, though not by a ton. I don’t see Karthus much these days, but I know he’s made it into a few high-level matches recently. I’m guessing the changes are coming as a result of his presence there.
Jarvan’s getting a much needed damage nerf to hopefully force him to build for damage before dishing out crazy burst. I’m curious to see how the numbers will work on this one, so I’m not gonna say too much about it. Nocturne is getting the same treatment – damage nerfs to his highest ranks of Duskbringer and Paranoia, which will hopefully tone him down a bit.
Gangplank is getting stat per level buffs to both his attack speed and armor along with an attack range buff. His Remove Scurvy and his Ultimate are getting cooldown reductions, and his ult will now have a better slow at early ranks. All of this is good news, but I wonder if it will really be enough to make him enjoyable to play. He still has low base health and his ult’s radius is too small for the way the cannonballs hit. It’s still unclear why Riot hasn’t just made it a larger version of MF’s Make It Rain at this point. I’ve seen a couple people say they don’t want it to be a global snipe, but making it unpredictable isn’t necessarily a more favorable situation. The guy who gets sniped by it won’t be consoled knowing that Gangplank’s next two ults didn’t work in other games.
Sunfire and Wit’s End are both getting some tweaks, though the Wit’s End changes are much more significant than Sunfire. Sunfire remains the same, just with a 5 damage per second reduction on the burn. Wit’s End has lost the mana burn, though it still deals the 42 magic damage per hit. In place of the burn, the item also grants the bearer 5 magic resistance on attack for 5 seconds, stacking up to 4 times. I think we’ll start to see Wit’s End much more often with the change.
I’m looking forward to testing the changes tomorrow. Check back for impressions and, as always, you can add me at “The Wiggin Boy” if you’re looking for some games.
The preview for tomorrow’s patch is now live, bringing with it some very interesting news regarding the future of crowd control in League of Legends. As I mentioned in a recent post, crowd control is more prevalent than ever and in need of more counter-itemization than just Mercury Treads. Tomorrow’s patch delivers just that, introducing three new items that reduce crowd control under a new name, Tenacity.
Tenacity works just like the old Mercury Treads CC-reduction, reducing the duration of stuns, slows, taunts, fears, and snares by a percentage equal to the amount of Tenacity (at least I’m assuming so). Tenacity now also includes blind and silence reduction but the effect cannot stack with other Tenacity items.
It’s also worth noting that Tenacity is no longer a percentage value, likely so it can be assessed for potential diminishing returns should Riot decide to let Tenacity stack. I’m glad to see that sort of mathematical conversion. It goes against some of the design simplicity of LoL and the “burden of knowledge” design standard, but the game has been complicated enough that I think this kind of thing will be necessary.
You can see the new items in the picture at right. Notice how cheap they are? Obviously the items are meant to be an early game Mercury Treads replacement, so the cost is fairly similar. Cloak and Dagger is 1450g, Moonflair Spellblade is 1290g, and Eleisa’s Miracle is 1200g, the same price as Treads. These items will allow players to do a couple things.
First, we can now get the defensive benefits of treads while building offensive/support stats. This is huge, especially because there is no tanky version of these items. The bruisers in the game rarely itemize for AP or attack speed/critical strike, with the possible exception of Rumble. Essentially, the lower health champions should see some enhanced survivability in with a little early game damage.
Second, the items allow for different boots. This is really a secondary benefit because the other boots currently in play aren’t very good, at least not for physical carries. We’ll probably see quite a few carries with Ninja Tabi for the extra survivability, but against AP heavy teams, Merc Treads are still probably the best option. They get better CC reduction than any of the new items and they also add magic resistance. This will be a somewhat nicer buff for the AP/support toons out there, since magic penetration can be hard to come by if you don’t roll Void Staff. Early Sorcerer’s Boots with the Spellblade/Miracle will make AP/support both durable and deadly.
This is such a big mechanic change that I’m going to hold off calling it one way or the other. For now, I think it’s a step in the right direction. My guess is that the numbers will need tweaking, and I think there’s a very good chance we’ll see stacking Tenacity in the near future. The 25 percent reduction offered by the new items might fall short of what’s necessary for players to see a real benefit from the item.
