Last night IGN released the first gameplay footage of Nocturne. The footage is basically a champion spotlight, without all the detail devoted to showing the champion’s individual skills. It’s a nice look at what he can do. I really love the fear tether idea. It’s not entirely new – just a remake of Leblanc’s Ethereal Chains – but it adds nice flavor to the character. Check the video and, as always, let me know what you think about Nocturne in the comments.

Though I’ve spent most of my gaming time in Cataclysm lately, I have been sneaking a few games of LoL with my brother. There’s been a lot for both of us to catch up on, though the dragon change has probably had the most impact. Teams are definitely playing the game differently now that dragon is worth so much gold.

One of the most interesting setups I’ve seen was a team that ran two junglers. I’d seen it before, but it had never seen all that effective. I guess I should mention they were both jungling in their own jungle. I was jungling ours (and getting ganked all the damn time – there is no getting away from Nunu and Trundle). With two people constantly mia, our lanes were playing very safe. No one was farming well, so no one wanted to buy wards. Obviously this is all a bit anecdotal, since it was just one game, but there does seem to be a lot more focus on dragon in general, and more games seem to slip away from me early if my team doesn’t ward.

I really think the double change – XP nerf, gold buff – was a little too much. Dragon is such a crucial element of the game that I’d always prefer to err on the side of moderation rather than dramatic change. I’m still working to figure out just how much it matters, and there are some farming toons/comps I’d really like to try to exploit the extra cashflow. What have you seen?

This is not a joke. This is not a troll. My team just got legitimately smoked by jungle Eve. I don’t mean we fed, I mean we were warding, talking, moving together, everything, and we just got smashed.

I don’t really know what to say about it other than it was simply the best Eve I have ever seen. Her positioning was near perfect and she never overcommitted. Our Morgana wasn’t great, and that might have helped, but their team was meaty enough that four of them could fight and we’d be stuck either waiting for eve to pop out or watching her push a turret while we fought. It was…sort of sickening.

So what do you do against an invisible champion that is always mia? It’s very difficult to counter if done well and means you spend the majority of your time away from turrets, buying wards, and hoping she doesn’t choose you as a target. As Twitch, I was always the target.

The good news is that Eve still suffers as she always has. She’s very soft once you get to her and not much of a threat without the element of surprise. I’ll be interested to see how she progresses as more people learn to jungle with her, and what changes Riot will make to either help or hurt the endeavor.

A friend of mine has been playing a lot of Warwick recently and doing very well. That has served as a nice dose of interest for me, since I don’t play Warwick a ton. In the few games I have played him, I’ve been reminded of just how strong he is and how easily he can swing the tide of a game. So when will people start banning him?

A lot of people would say that there are simply better ban targets – Amumu, Morgana, even Twitch – but as I see it, Warwick should be banned over pretty much any of those for the low skill ceiling he has on the utilities he provides. Don’t get me wrong, I think Warwick is as nuanced as the next toon, but you don’t exactly have to know what you’re doing to jungle with him, and he has one of the absolute best lane-ganking abilities in the game. For a lot of players, Warwick is the only toon they know how to jungle, so taking him off the board forces less skilled decisions, and as we get more and more champions, I think that’s going to become the real purpose of the ban. There will be so many champions that players just won’t know how to play them. Take the ones they do, and you’ll have an interesting match.

If you aren’t sure who to take off your ban list to think about adding Warwick, consider Amumu. It sounds crazy, because Amumu is crazy strong. But Amumu really needs to jungle to get off to a good start, and a lot of people just aren’t very good at it. Also, Amumu is one of those toons that tends to get extremely low while jungling, at least early, which gives you a decent chance to kill him and steal his buffs. Amumu is also such a high priority ban these days that most players jump at the chance to play, even if they haven’t played him in a few months. They’re rusty, or just unfamiliar with his playstyle, and end up getting rocked.

I almost feel bad writing this because my friend is such an avid Warwick player, but Warwick causes me so many problems that I really want to see him banned more often.