Tag: Champ of the Week (Page 5 of 7)

Champ of the Week: Teemo Wrapup

May 29, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

The Teemo champ of the week has been one of the toughest yet. Teemo is missing a lot of the mobility and survivability that other champions have, not to mention that he has one of the weakest passives in the game. He can still have an excellent early game, though, as long as you’re willing to play carefully.

I started the week trying to tweak my typical Teemo build to take advantage of Trinity Force and Wit’s End. Unfortunately, that’s a lot of gold to put toward items that best augment a naturally high attack damage or a naturally higher attack speed. Teemo’s poison certainly gives him a lot of damage, but it adds magic damage to each shot, both when the attack lands and in the damage over time. For that reason, Malady/Bloodrazor seem to be the best way to go, with a little survivability as you need it. I’m not typically a fan of Frozen Mallet, but it really is a solid item for Teemo if you don’t need a Banshee’s Veil.

The strangest thing about Teemo is his secret taunt passive. For whatever reason, players love to kill Teemo. Even in fights in which I thought I was second or even third priority, I often found myself getting focused immediately. In a weird way, this can absolutely help your team. Teemo’s damage output is great once he’s farmed, but depending on map position, taking the priority off your carries can be effective.

For the most part, I think Teemo is in a pretty good place. He needs a team with enough crowd control/peel to help keep him alive, a favor he can return with the exceptional map control offered by his mushrooms. If I could change one thing about Teemo it would definitely be his passive. His passive has essentially one use and one use only: level 1 harassment. It can be helpful when setting up a teamfight, but unless you’re well ahead of your opponent, it usually doesn’t make sense to stand still long enough to take advantage of the passive. I’d like to see him get some sort of damage or utility, potentially giving him the survivability to make it into the jungle. My few attempts to counter jungle were met with almost immediate failure. Counter junglers really need to be able to control creeps, not champions, and Teemo just doesn’t have that power early in the game.

Stay tuned later today for this coming week’s Champ of the Week.

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Champ of the Week: Teemo trouble

May 26, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

This is now the sixth part of the Champ of the Week series and I can honestly say I haven’t had this kind of bad luck yet. Every time I’ve picked Teemo this week it has resulted in utter failure. My first serious attempt at counter jungling I ended at 4-10, basically tanking for our team because our real tank was never with us. In other games my teammates have been all over the place, or we haven’t had any CC.

I also had the unique displeasure of laning mid against Warwick. I can’t wait till they nerf that hairy bastard. He was tower diving me at level six and otherwise nuking straight through the 80 magic resistance I had at level 10. It was an infuriating experience.

For right now I’m just trying to keep the faith. I know I’ve had fun with Teemo. I know I’ve done well with Teemo, and not just in that fluke, the-other-team-is-a-wild-pack-of-noobs kind of way. Still, I’m having a hard time seeing those games right now. That’s one of the funny things about this game – it’s so easy to get into a rut with a champion or a comp or a class or anything and just forget to try and dig yourself out. There are champions I haven’t played in ages, probably because my last experience wasn’t so great.

Not Teemo. I won’t let that little Yordle down. If I give up on him, who are we going to send to make mushroom art on the moon?

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Champ of the Week: Teemo

May 24, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

I was sad to get a late start on the Champ of the Week this week, but the weekend away was totally worth it. I drove late last night thinking of who I felt confident I could fully test over the course of a short week and kept coming back to the same answer: Teemo. Yes, I’ll be playing everyone’s favorite Yordle this week.

I used to have nothing but loathing for Teemo. It took him forever to get a decent mushroom field going and his damage was fairly lackluster. Now, though, he’s got a pretty solid kit and he’s certainly capable of tying a team together. He also offers his team some crazy map control, which can be a lot of fun.

Teemo does suffer if he has a lackluster early game which is made especially painful against teams that push through the laning phase early. Without a big farm, Teemo feels especially dull. His health is too low to survive the bursty teams and his damage doesn’t ramp up fast enough to cut down the tanks.

That said, Teemo does have some nice early game damage and I think he has a pretty cool skillset for some counter jungling. I’m hoping some of my Nunu skills will carry over. Teemo definitely doesn’t have the creep control that Nunu does, but I could see him being powerful as a ganker against some of the slower, softer junglers.

My first experiment with it did not go particularly well. I was having a terrible string of luck, not to mention my opponents had a very competent Karma running Clairvoyance, which made things all the more annoying. Hopefully I’ll have more to report in the next several days.

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Champ of the Week: Kog’Maw wrapup

May 15, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

I usually save this post for Monday (though depending on my workload it has occasionally been later than that), but I think I’m ready to wrap the week of Kog’Maw and look ahead to my next champion.

Playing Kog’Maw this week served as a reminder of why I liked him so much at launch. He has a lot of flavor and a solid laning kit. He also scales well into late game but with enough weaknesses that he feels balanced. He performs well against a variety of champions, though I would suggest picking someone like Ashe or possibly Caitlyn if you’re up against a CC-heavy team comp.

I tried a few different builds over the course of the week, most of which relied on Bloodrazor for maximum damage output. Bloodrazor is ultimately a good item for Kog, but I think he’s actually more fun if you run with a Wit’s End/Malady build early in the game. The cost is only marginally higher and I felt like I gained better defensive stats from the Wit’s End stacks than just the cloth armor in Madred’s. Also, the build was just more fun. When I run Bloodrazor I feel like I have to max W first, and I don’t think that’s always the best option. Running Void Ooze and Caustic Spittle gives Kog’Maw a lot of early burst, though it is a bit mana intensive. It’s great when you’re laned up against a squishy opponent.

I think it’s tough to overstate the utility of Kog’Maw’s ultimate, too. If you’ve done a good job harassing your opponents you can shackle them to the lane by repeatedly breaking their recalls. I’m not usually one to break recalls but with Kog it feels like effort well spent.

If I could change one thing about Kog’Maw, I think I would change his W from magic damage to true damage. I know that sounds a little nutty – I’m not much of an advocate for true damage in most cases, but a little magic resistance goes a long way against Kog’Maw. The percentages on his W aren’t as high as Vayne’s, and they might need to drop a bit since it’s an activated skill. I don’t really think Kog’Maw needs much, and that would probably be enough to push him over the edge.

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Champ of the Week: Damn that Kog’maw is slow

May 13, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

This may have been a bad week to try Kog’Maw as my champ of the week. I’ve actually had some enjoyable games with him but I’ve also been playing Vayne and, as far as anti-tanks go, she obviously has the upper hand. Let’s be honest, though, she’s more of an anti-anything-that-moves than she is anti-tank. Still, I’m forging ahead with the Kog’Maw testing so here are a few thoughts.

I had forgotten just how damn slow Kog’Maw feels. I’m playing with the amazing Monarch Kog’Maw skin, which may contribute to the slow feeling in part. When he’s hopping around flapping his wings he certainly doesn’t feel very fast, but in teamfights I always feel like it takes me longer to get any place than I would like.

The most common Kog’Maw build also lacks the burst that many other ranged carries build for. Since most of his damage is percentage based, he doesn’t feel much different from the point that you finish Madred’s Bloodrazor until the end of the game. It’s a unique mechanic, unlike any other champion currently in the game. It also translates strangely into his gameplay.

In my most successful Kog’Maw matches I regularly have a few fights in which I start out at half health and, at a time I would normally run on other ranged carries, I turn and fight whoever is in my face and often win that fight. The percentage based damage gives him the ability to do this fairly early in the game and continue to do it through the game’s duration. With other ranged carries I simply wouldn’t do that until I have a monster farm, if for no other reason than that so much of your damage comes from critical strikes. With Kog’Maw, though, it is usually a finite and unwavering number of attacks that will kill an individual target, affected only by the target’s purchase of magic resistance or your own build changes. In some ways that makes Kog’Maw very enjoyable to play, but it can be frustrating to think that just one simple crit could have meant a kill on a retreating carry.

My biggest problem with Kog’Maw right now is how much damage high magic resistance targets can absorb. Malady is really his only option for addressing that problem, and it doesn’t reduce MR by very much. The rest of the magic penetration items are AP based, which feels like a waste of money. You could get Sorcerer’s Boots, but Cloak and Dagger isn’t really designed for a champion like Kog’Maw. I’m going to have to try a few games with Cleanse to see if that would be enough.

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