This isn’t exactly fresh news, but I do think it’s interesting to see some of the tactics employed to unseat League of Legends as king of the MOBA world. As you probably heard, Heroes of Newerth went free-to-play over the weekend. The rollout included some interesting ads on various gaming sites. One such ad encourages players to “stop laughing” and “get serious.” I can only imagine that’s a dig at the LoL acronym everyone is using for League of Legends.
The more serious threat is obviously Valve and DotA 2. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the game would be unveiled at Gamescom – there had been rumors about the tournament for weeks – but the prize purse for the tournament shocked me. For those who aren’t up to speed, Valve is flying the top 16 DotA teams to Germany to compete for a $1 million prize purse. Yes, again, a million bucks. That’s not buy-a-new-computer-and-pay-for-college-supplies money. That is life-changing money, money that could support a professional gaming career into the forseeable future. The benefit to Valve for making that commitment is obvious – they want every competitive team to come play DotA 2.
Will it work? Absolutely. I cannot imagine any of the top teams in competitive strategy games not taking a crack at DotA 2 with that kind of prize purse available. As for HoN, well, I think the game has enough barriers to entry that players entrenched in other games are unlikely to leave.
I don’t know how many of you are on Twitter, but the Riot staff has been teasing its followers this week with the promise of amazing content. If Dark Shurelia is to be believed, we may see Magma Chamber as early as this week.
The forums have been abuzz as well. RiotMontag said the amazing content we’ve been waiting for his coming “Not Soon. This Week.” I’m curious what that means, though. Are we going to see another Friday patch day like we did with Leona? For the Rioters’ sakes I hope that’s not the case – I would imagine the servers are going to need some attention over the weekend and no one likes working on the weekend.
This is the most buzz we’ve had surrounding League of Legends since Dreamhack, which I take as a truly positive sign. It seems like good timing, too. Valve just announced the first public showing of DotA 2 at a Gamescom tournament later this month. Oh, did I not mention that the purse for first prize in the tourney is a million bucks, USD? Yeah, you read that right. One million dollars cash to the first place team. Dreamhack was cool, but Valve is definitely sending a message to competitive players in just about every strategy game on the market. Can Riot’s news this week keep up?
It’s time to burn one of my favorite champions for the Champ of the Week. I’ve had a good time playing some champions that aren’t in my regular rotation over the past couple months, but I would love to get back to someone that’s right in my wheelhouse. This week’s Champ of the Week is none other than Blitzcrank, the Steam Golem.
I’ve written before about just how much fun I have when playing Blitzcrank, and little has changed about that. He’s one of the most stalwart champions in the League, catching the occasional mini-buff but rarely seen as needing a nerf. He’s also one of the most unique champions out there, providing a benefit to the team unlike any other champion.
I’m going to focus on a few things over the course of the week. First, I need to get back to farming well with Blitz. The last few games I’ve played with him my farm has been atrocious. I used to be excellent at farming with him, too. Secondly, his build. I’ve always been a Sheen believer, but I haven’t played much Blitzcrank since the introduction of Manamune (a shame, I know). I want to spend some time focusing on maximizing Blitzcrank’s early kill potential and hopefully increasing my early game farm.
Check back later in the week to see how Blitzcrank stacks up against the game’s best lane champions. Also, feel free to drop any questions or advice you may have in the comments. May the hooking begin!
I decided to post the video trailer for Demonblade Tryndamere here just in case any of you were looking to purchase him/the skin and wanted some context around the purchase. My week with Tryndamere was cut a bit short due to my traveling, but I still feel like I’ve had enough time with him to analyze his playstyle since his remake and the things he’s now up against. This is going to be kind of dense because Tryndamere is built around some complicated mechanics. Bear with me.
I just got out of a game with a Tryndamere on my team who started the game 0-7. To be fair, he was not a great player, but I think Tryndamere’s freshly weakened early game had to be a partially contributing factor. Though I did jungle with Tryndamere a decent bit over the past week, I’m not going to cover that much here. Trynd is a seriously weak jungler – any jungler worth his salt knows that Tryndamere relies on losing health to make it through the jungle. He’s easily ganked, easily countered, easily shut down. It’s not a good thing.
Let’s talk laning. Old Tryndamere was decent in lane for a couple reasons. First, if you got him below 50 percent HP and were standing next to him, he was going to crit your face off. His crit chance would skyrocket, which then added both damage and crit damage to each successive swing. Except when it didn’t. There were times when I was ready to scream at my computer because of missed crits or enemy Tryndamere players who landed several in a row at level 1. It was inconsistent, and while I understand the desire to level this out, I don’t think the remake really accomplished it. He hits less hard, which is fine when playing against him, but it has completely de-incentivized him to get into a fight during the early game. He doesn’t get the combat benefits fast enough any more, which is a big problem, and it extends to the late game.
Old Tryndamere used to be able to get his most useful stats when he was at full HP: crit damage and additional damage. Though new Tryndamere has passive additional damage as part of Bloodlust, and a decent bit of it, he doesn’t get any additional damage until he starts to lose health. Instead, he gets crit chance, which is a pretty crappy stat. It doesn’t scale well, can be totally eclipsed late game by armor penetration and flat damage, and Tryndamere gets enough in an average build that the 35 percent from his Fury generation isn’t really all that helpful late in the game.
Early, though, he’s totally reliant on that 35 percent crit if he’s forced to fight, but he’s much better off not engaging. Tryndamere has no decent lane harass if he can’t stay on top of creeps and stack up Fury, and he’ll take somewhere between 15 and 20 attacks to get full Fury in the early game. It’s ridiculously easy to counter for most solo champions. The nerf to the Spinning Slash cooldown also reduced his ability to get into and out of those early fights. Without a strong farm, Tryndamere is severely gimped, unable to contribute meaningfully in a fight.
His one saving grace right now is his ultimate, which can allow him to creep back up the power scale, if only because he can stay involved in a fight long enough to hopefully last hit or grab a few assists. When he’s ahead, his ult feels like a decent way to prolong a fight, but with the nerf to the Bloodlust heal, it almost always feels like he’s just delaying the inevitable.
That does it for last week’s champ of the week. I’ll have this week’s posted later today. Remember, no FG LoL Mondays tonight but, by all means, feel free to invite me for a game if you see me online this week.
In the past two days, the forums have become a fountain of leaks about the long awaited stealth changes and remakes for the two primary stealth characters, Evelynn and Twitch. The changes are not final, and while Riot is definitely taking a risk by leaking these things before they are finalized, it’s very cool to have a little something to talk about while we wait for Season 2 and some other features to launch.
1. Evelynn and Twitch are permanently stealthed when they rank their level one stealth abilities. However, Evelynn and Twitch can be seen when they are within X units of an enemy champion (Slightly under vision range), or when they are within a true sight radius.
If they attack, they are revealed briefly for 2 seconds before going back into stealth.
This ‘X’ is being adjusted for feel between the two champions. ‘X’ is smaller than champion vision radius, so you can “stalk” an opposing champion, but it will be farther away.
2. Evelynn and Twitch have a “sight gem” above opponent’s, telling them when the enemy can see them or not and whether they are “safe” (green sight gem), “warning – you are close to being seen, but still unseen” (yellow sight gem) or “being seen” (red sight gem.)
So, once Twitch and Eve rank their stealth skills they become permanently stealthed unless attacking/casting. All other players now have limited true sight, allowing the stealthed characters to be seen if they are within a certain radius of the player. Stealthed players can determine their visibility to other players by looking for a “sight gem” on each player that will change color accordingly (probably utilizing tech from Orianna’s ball distance indicator).
This is definitely the best idea I’ve seen so far for the stealth remake. I’m not a huge fan of stealth in general, but I think that was mostly related to the inability for a non-stealth player to know just how much benefit an enemy was providing to his team. The fact that a stealther could literally be standing under my feet without my knowledge was just ridiculous. This removes that element and forces a lot more careful planning and thought on the part of the stealther.
That said, this system could be very painful for new players to learn, especially in conjunction with brush. The ability to get into brush unseen is very powerful, especially during the laning phase. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see a more active lane phase, but it worries me to think that the aggressive play could be so one-sided toward invisible units. This is all speculative, though, so I’ll wait on my critique for a more finalized build. For now, I like the idea, and I like the potential it creates for future stealth characters.
