I won’t be hosting games tomorrow night, in honor of all of our girlfriends. Take the evening off, spend some time grinding rep with your S.O. We’ll pick back up next week.
Also, new header FTW!
Category: league of legends (Page 77 of 163)
There’s a post on the forums right now citing the champions that are “mained” by the top 50 players in ranked solo queue. It’s interesting to see what those players use most, but I’m not so sure what sort of conclusions we can reasonably draw from the information.
The most played champions among the top 50 players are Shaco, Pantheon, Kassadin, and Ezreal, each with four players who main the given character. You have to remember, these are just the characters those players play most often. Also, they don’t represent a huge majority over other characters. The original poster said this:
– Only 28 of the game’s 69 champions are represented in the Top 50 as someone’s Main.
– Only 2 tanks, Singed (3) and Alistar (1). I guess if you count Nunu (1) it’s three.
– Only 5 Ranged AD carries… and only 1 of those is high on the list. I guess six if you build AD Ez
The fact that 28 characters out of a possible 50 (remember, only the top 50 players were recorded) are represented actually seems really good. To me, that points to player skill as more important than champion choice, but even that is hard to qualify.
Zileas also posted in the thread, giving overall stats for champion choice. The window between the most played champion and least played champion is surprisingly small. Ashe is played in 3.8 percent of games while the least played champion is .4 percent of all picks. Again, this doesn’t really say much about balance. Riot has said that players over 1200 ELO make up roughly the top 25 percent of the player base. Basically, there are a lot of low-skill players affecting those numbers, players that don’t really factor in to the balance discussion.
Also, among all of this, it’s important to remember that not all champions are free. As Zileas pointed out, it’s not really surprising that Ashe is the number one pick. She’s 450 IP and very easy to play. When you consider the champion rotation and the way that players unlock different champions, it’s tough to say that the number of games played per champion mean a whole lot. It’s probably fair to assume that a crazy OP champion would be purchased right away, at least at the higher tiers, but I don’t know how much that matters to newer players. I would imagine that new players don’t see the full potential of a character very often, particularly if they’re new to the MOBA scene.
There are definitely some interesting stats in the thread, but I don’t think we can take much more from them than that free champion rotations keep more champions in play. Since players have limited access to champions, the free rotation makes us more likely to try someone new when they’re available, which is a good thing. Other than that, all I can say is that I wish Riot made more stats like this available. It’s a really interesting look at the player base and how all the different aspects of the game affect player choice.
Riot posted a patch preview for the upcoming Maokai patch, and though it wasn’t presented in video form this go round, we still got a lot of good information. At the top of the list, for me personally anyway, is that Vlad is getting a nerf.
You may remember Vladimir’s champion spotlight, if only because it was so funny to listen to Phreak tell us just how overpowered Vlad would be. Riot’s stance is that he’s not explicitly overpowered, which I can sort of agree with. Certain characters do very well against him, but a lot of toons don’t, and he snowballs way too fast with the bonus survivability he gets from his passive. His passive is getting a nerf, but probably more importantly so is Sanguine Pool. I’m excited, to say the least.
Anivia is catching a nerf to her annoying ult -> E combo, which is almost a guaranteed 25 percent damage done to her target with very little required effort. The change will make it cost more mana for players to ‘pulse’ her ult, quickly toggling it on and then off, hopefully reducing the number of times that simple combo can land. I don’t think this will be quite enough, but we’ll see.
Rammus is also getting nerfed, this time on his speed. Powerball bonus speed is down 15 percent. Again, I’m not entirely certain that this addresses his issues, but it should help. I can understand Riot’s resistance to nerfing tanks. There are relatively few tanks in the game – a heavy nerf to one tank makes the rest of the list look pretty sparse.
Lastly, Ryze is getting a long awaited rework. I’ve played a few Ryze games recently. He’s pretty fun if he gets farmed, but the mechanics on Spell Flux make him unreliable in lane. The change will make him a ranged caster-carry. His spells will have shorter cooldowns, longer range, lower base damage, and scale with mana as well as AP. I’m actually really excited to try him out, though I wonder how Spell Flux now works. If the bounce range wasn’t increased with the cast range he could still feel a little frustrating.
Some of the cooldown reduction items are getting a rework, but I’ll cover that in more detail once Riot releases the actual number changes.
It was only a matter of time before intrepid programmers from the LoL community got fed up with the long wait for Riot’s official replay system and decided to do something about it. Matt and Cam, two programmers from Perth, have made a third party League of Legends replay tool, and it only took them three weeks.
Yeah, three weeks. It doesn’t interface directly with the LoL client, and since Riot is currently working on its own replay system, the company has been removing links to the program on the official forums. That said, you can get the program, called “LoL Replay” from the developer’s website.
Up to this point, the best way to see a “replay” of your game was to video record your desktop, which can be a resource intensive process. The LoL Replay tool works by recording network traffic and using the data to recreate the game afterward. This allows the player to view different perspectives from the match, though I don’t know if it’s possible to watch enemy movements.
I’m away from my desktop right now, but I’ll be giving this a test later today. The news is especially relevant now that Riot has released a launcher/patcher capable of supporting replays, even if it is only in beta.
via: PC Gamer
Riot posted the official Maokai ability list to the forums today, and he already sounds different than the PC Gamer exclusive. I’m glad to say that – his ult sounds much better and it’s very cool that his traps deal damage when they land in addition to their explosion effect on detonate.
Here’s the official list:
Arcane Smash: Maokai slams the ground, the force of which knocks nearby enemies back and sends an arcane shockwave forward damaging and slowing his enemies.
Twisted Advance: Maokai dissolves into a cloud of arcane energies. He regrows near a target enemy, dealing damage and rooting it in place.
Sapling Toss: Maokai hurls a sapling, dealing damage on impact. The sapling becomes implanted in the ground warding a nearby area. When enemies approach, the sapling attacks, exploding in an arcane blast that damages enemies.
Vengeful Maelstrom (Ultimate): Maokai shields his allies by drawing power from hostile spells and attacks, reducing non-tower damage done to allied champions in the area. Maokai can prolong the effect as long as he has mana to spend on it. When the effect ends, Maokai unleashes the absorbed energy to deal damage to enemies within the vortex.
Sap Magic (Passive): Each time a champion near Maokai casts a spell, he gains a charge of Magical Sap. When he has 5 charges, his next melee attack drains energy from his target, healing Maokai for a percentage of his maximum HP.
The fact that his ult deals damage in, at least from what I can see of the screenshots, a pretty decent radius makes this guy sound much better than he did yesterday. I also really like his art direction. I’m curious to see how the ground slam will play out. From the description it sounds as though it’s a close range knockback but a long range slow.
Be on the watch for him this coming Tuesday.
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