For all of the perverts that were waiting on Teen Annie, well, you can now rejoice in your perviness. The Prom Queen Annie skin went live today, along with Almost Prom King Amumu. When is that poor mummy gonna catch a break?
Category: league of legends (Page 79 of 163)
We’re on for this week. Last week was a good time – we even got to get back to playing a little progressive draft, which is always a good time. As usual, group up in the Fearless Gamer chat room around 9:20PM EST for invites. Remember, the chat room is case sensitive.
If for some reason you can’t get into the chat room, add me at “The Wiggin Boy” and I’ll be sure to get you an invite. See you guys tonight!
I’ve finally had the time to edit down all of these pictures for your perusal. They are a couple weeks old and have been leaked on other sites, but here they are for you. These are shots from Magma Chamber and several pics of the graphical update slated for League of Legends.
As you can see from the initial image, the overall map design looks to be just about done. What we’re likely waiting on are the little tweaks that happened with Twisted Treeline over time. Remember all the brush changes and the mob changes, the gold per creep and gold per minute changes? All of those things affect the balance of a map.
I’ve also included some champions in post-graphical-update form. Personally, I don’t really care about this stuff. I like stylized graphics, and frankly, graphics are rarely the thing about a game that gets me hot. I do think some of the new models look better, but some of them just look like they’re wet.
As I mentioned yesterday, this stuff is long overdue. I hope we get to see it soon.
I think it’s safe to say that the League of Legends community is as restless as it has ever been. It has been more than half a year since the last major feature release, and promised feature updates remain unreleased months after their announcements. Several high profile players have made long forum posts with titles like, “@Riot why I’m losing interest in your game,” and, “Riot’s downward spiral.”
The thing is, I still have a lot of fun with League of Legends. My personal beef with Riot is that a game that once had as active a development cycle as I’ve seen has grown stagnant, relying on bi-weekly champion releases to keep the game fresh. I started playing the game in December of 2009. Just three months later there was a new map, not just in development, but in the matchmaking rotation. Somewhere along the way there was a client revision. Four months after the Twisted Treeline release came Season One, complete with ranked matches and a new client experience.
It has been more than six months since Season One launched. In that time, there has not been one major feature release to the game (sorry, tutorial modes don’t count). Magma Chamber was announced in September, as was an upcoming graphical overhaul. Both features remain unreleased. There is still no team/clan support. We still don’t have normal stats available, despite the fact that they’re being recorded. The achievements pane, which was introduced last July along with the Season One release, remains unused.
In short, it’s time. In fact, it’s past time. A major content update is long overdue for the game. Riot has had a lot of opportunity to expand the game and stay at the forefront of MOBA design. Without a serious release in the near future, I think we can reasonably expect the game to start bleeding players, either to other MOBA franchises or to different games altogether.
I know it has only been a day, and that’s probably not enough time to see just how the changes will play out, but that’s never stopped me before. So how do the Doran’s changes feel so far? Is it making your laning phase more active.
On the one hand, I think the Doran’s changes were good. Doran’s items were traditionally too good for the cost. They were too forgiving, providing too many stats for the low cost, particularly in the health department. I don’t think increasing the cost was the right way to go for an active lane, though. To me, an active lane phase is a laning phase during which there is a lot of back and forth. The lanes are dealing and receiving a lot of damage, and working to survive it through self heals and regeneration. This still allows for kills from bursting, either from Ignite/Exhaust, or from the appearance of a jungler.
The cost increase, at least this far, has only resulted in players taking Doran’s items without regen. That doesn’t make the lane phase more active for everyone, only for strong lane toons. A strong lane toon’s heavy harass now goes unmitigated by a weaker opponent, virtually guaranteeing the strong laner’s success. For everyone else, the change is overwhelmingly negative. Once you hit half HP, you better head back to base, and it’s not exactly like half HP is a hard target to hit. A Xin Zhao/Lux lane will put you to half HP without burning much mana at all.
The problem is that the cost increase did away with regen, and regen is actually the lane mechanic we want. Lower health with a focus on regen means that people are still susceptible to death, but they have a way to stay in lane over a period of time. The problem to this point hasn’t been the regen, it’s been regen combined with high health pools. The health pools mean you survive a lot of damage, and then regenerate back up to that level. If the health pool drops, you won’t always survive the burst, and that’s what makes a lane active – the threat of death with the potential to still stay in the lane. Without regen, strong lane toons dominate the game, and they decide the game against their opponents very early on.
This can be solved, in a way, if no one takes a Doran’s item. In that case, players will have less health and be taking potions – low health, more regen – an all around good thing. The problem is that some toons have enough regen to get away with taking Doran’s, while the softest champions need the regen badly enough that they’ll have to forego the extra health. Basically, the problem gets augmented with champions like Xin Zhao, Renekton, Mundo, or anyone else with high regen or a self heal. When you couple that with the fact that the best junglers tend to be fast moving (think Rammus, Udyr), and the worst laners in the game have suddenly been marginalized to the point of near unplayability.
I think the best case scenario goes one of two ways. First, the Doran’s get another cost increase, to 500g, and a slight buff to compensate. Then they occupy this space of being a ‘comeback’ item, something underfarmed players can buy to regain some lane presence around level 5-6. Second, they remove the Doran’s items from the game altogether. As it stands, I think they’re still too viable on some champions and too much of a noob trap, to borrow a phrase from Morello, for others.
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