Ranked Champion Challenge is complete!

ryze_splash_6

It’s done, folks – I now have wins with 76/76 champions in ranked games, the vast majority of which came in 5v5. In fact, all 11 of the champions I had remaining when I started attempting this achieved victory on Summoner’s Rift. Exciting stuff. You can see my top 10 ranked champions in the image below.

Ryze was the holdout champion, and in all honesty I thought I might be stuck on him for a week. He’s a tough champ to play against tanky teams because after a certain point he just stops scaling all together and you’re stuck with a defensive build against a bunch guys who can soak everything you throw at them. After six attempts, though, I managed to pull a win (went godlike in that game, no less). I think it was really our Eve that pulled us through. She did a great job ganking lanes early and keeping their Vayne down.

This was a really enjoyable challenge. It makes me wish Riot would get serious about getting some achievements into the game. Achievements are a tough thing for a MOBA because it can encourage some unconventional and sloppy play from players who should probably be learning the game, but it could be very cool to tie some kind of IP bonuses to achievements. At the very least it could encourage champion diversity from more players, which I think would be a great thing.

  

Champions Online goes free-to-play: now with crippling client download!

Champions F2P

I had almost forgotten about the Champions Online F2P launch today. My MMO fire has all but died out in the wake of my Minecraft discovery and the joys of playing jungle Nasus in League of Legends. I was browsing the Minecraft subreddit, though, and found a post that reminded me of the release. I jumped on Steam to sign up for the new service and download the client.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem possible to download the client from Steam. All you get is an executable file that then downloads the necessary files. I pulled the executable from the official website and started my download. Minutes later, my internet connection was all but crippled, but I was only pulling files from Cryptic at 16 kB/s. Yes, 16.

I’ll probably queue the client to download overnight, but that doesn’t make my day one experience any better. The free-to-play model is based on the idea that your user experience is good enough that people will want to pay for more content. So far, I’m not feeling great about Champions.

  

The case against mindlessness

sona-difficulty

I’ve written a lot of posts recently about the overpowered toons in League of Legends and I realize several of them may have come across a little whiney. I often have emotions around a given aspect of the game before I’ve really sat down to put the words behind those emotions, so you guys get to read me working through the crap to get at the heart of the matter. Well, thanks for bearing with me.

This post is a culmination of a few different posts regarding relative champion strength and the overwhelming fury I feel toward champions like Sona and Mordekaiser, so I hope it will be a little more focused and my point of view will be easy to understand.

Most of my frustration with League of Legends in the past few weeks has revolved around the relationship between a champion’s strength and the skill required to provide the maximum team benefit that champion provides. For many of the overpowered champions in the game, the problem is that the champions are both strong and incredibly easy to play. It’s something I think Riot misunderstands, as you can see from the difficulty screen above. There is literally no situation in which I would consider Sona difficult to play.

Mordekaiser falls under that same umbrella. There are players who think it’s tough to know when to fight with him, but I could not disagree more. Your team is there, you fight, and you get a ghost and murder the other team. If they aren’t there, don’t fight, unless you have a ghost with you, in which case you should kill the entire opposing team. In all seriousness, though, Kaiser’s ease of use comes from his shield, which allows him to be a serious threat to any opponent in lane just by standing in range. Consider other casters, like Annie for instance. If Annie wants to deal damage to me she has to get relatively close, giving me the opportunity to deal damage in return. Kaiser has to do the same thing, but his shield removes his personal threat, allowing him to harass at will without consequence. It’s a crappy mechanic to play against, but worse yet, it encourages players to be sloppy and lazy.

The easy to play/easy to win champions actually hurt the game as a whole by allowing players to enjoy success without the skill to back it. One of the great things about this game is that the wide variety of champions can encourage players to get better. When I saw my first good Shaco I thought, “damn, I want to be that guy.” I was horrible with Shaco when I started, but now I’ve probably played 500 games or so with him, so I’m really good. It took time. My first game with Sona, I died too much. Every game after that, I dominated with her. It was easy farming, easy laning, and once I had a locket, easy winning. When those types of champions dominate games, players don’t learn how to gank, how to lane, when to run, when to dragon, any of it, nearly as quickly as they do with a difficult champion.

Then there’s the simple fact that strong champions carry weak players to higher ELOs. I have run into at least ten different players who, after seeing their favorite champion banned or chosen (most often it’s Mordekaiser, I’m not kidding), say something like, “Shit man, they took my guy. Anyone wanna trade? I don’t have many champions.” That’s a problem. I expect players to be able to play a variety of champions and fill a variety of roles, just as I hope they expect the same from me. I know I’m a great carry, but I’m also a very good jungler, a very good nuker, and a decent tank/support player. I own every champion in the game. I can play every champion in the game with a modicum of success. The same can’t be said for the jungle Kaiser I played with over lunch who tried to gank MF middle by walking out of the mid-lane river brush with red buff and trying to auto attack her. No. No, that’s not going to work.

I want to see thoughtfully designed champions, champions with very real, very high skill ceilings. Enough of the MFs and the Sonas and the Mordekaisers. This is the same issue I used to complain about with Sivir, but back in the day, Sivir was just about the only toon with a crazy-low skill ceiling and a crazy-high impact. These days it’s like a free-for-all on high-impact mechanics that require as much thought as relieving my bladder. Biological imperatives aren’t interesting, and neither are mindless champions. Make me a toon that I want to learn instead of someone I could play with my elbows and I’ll remain convinced that this is the game for me for the near future.

  

LoL: Olaf Impressions

Glacial Olaf.

I was fortunate enough to catch a couple games with Olaf today so I wanted to share my impressions, as usual. Olaf is definitely a strong champion – potentially too strong, though I think his lack of a initiator/gap closer will be his weak point.

For starters, Olaf is insanely strong in the early game. My first match with him I managed to bait a Kayle/Nasus combo down my lane a bit before creeps had spawned. They had me to about 60 percent when I turned and my lanemate (another Kayle) and I rocked them. Olaf’s attack speed gets so high he is just unmanageable if you have to be close to deal damage.

Unfortunately, his passive is his one great strength. Yes, it is awesome, but I wish his other skills offered a bit more. Ghost is pretty much a necessity, because you just aren’t fast enough otherwise. If someone is toward the edge of your axe range, the distance they cover while you cast is enough that they’re out of range by the time your axe lands.

Olaf is very strong in the jungle, which is good considering his ability to burn through mana. Most of his skills are cheap, but they’re up often so you can really churn through that blue bar. It’s also really nice to have lizard buff early in the game for the slow. That means you can rely less on your somewhat sporadic axe and more on your heavy-hitting Reckless Swing.

The fact that Reckless Swing is pure damage is another strength. It deals what it deals, regardless of your enemy’s resistances. It can also hit you pretty hard in the early game, so be sure you’re going to live through the encounter before spamming this too hard.

As for the rest, it feels a little early to talk about Olaf’s position as a part of the ongoing metagame. Patch Day always encourages odd choices, and I saw more Kayle players today than I care to remember. I also seemed to see Ashe in every game I played, which meant I was getting kited all over the map. If you’ve enjoyed heroes like Pantheon or Mundo, give Olaf and go and let me know what you think.

  

LoL: Akali impressions (live)

Akali on TT.I’ve only had the time for four games today with Akali, but between that and my time on the TR I feel like I have enough data to offer up some initial impressions.

First, I like Akali. The energy system provides just enough spam to keep me happy while still limiting DPS output to a reasonable degree. That said, the fact that Akali is melee makes her incredibly susceptible to CC/AoE damage dealers, and without her own hard CC she can be easy to counter.

For my first game I set out to try AD. It was broken for most of her duration on the TR so it seemed right to give it a go. Akali is a great farmer, especially if you have a lane partner capable of some decent harass. I had quickly put together my Rageblade and a Phage (which I didn’t love). My burst was solid and I was healing well from her passive, but I was missing something. My next item was a BF sword, and in the time it took me to farm that (which wasn’t long) I watched my damage go from good to just below mediocre. She doesn’t have enough of a CC to keep an opponent close and her Mark of the Assassin (Q) and ultimate are both laughable as AD. Mark is so bad as AD you shouldn’t even waste the energy to use it. By the time I had a Bloodthirster and Infinity (yeah, my farm was huge in an average length game) I was cutting people down fairly quickly, though mostly through right clicks, which kills a lot of the “feel” of the character. Crescent Slash feels extremely lackluster the further the game gets, mostly because of the crappy damage coefficient. I know she’s meant ot be a hybrid toon, which is fine if you have a mix of AP and damage, but consider a skill like Volley, which is used at range, covers a wide radius, gets 100% of your attack damage plus bonus damage and shares a similar cooldown. For the number geeks, at 300 attack damage, Crescent Slash will deal 310 damage (180 from AD ratio plus the 130 bonus damage). Volley, by comparison, would deal 380.

For the second game I went AP and was similarly disappointed. The ult felt better, but her ratios are pretty bad for Mark (40%) and downright deplorable on Crescent (30%). Without a monster farm she is hardly something to fear, especially since she has to be on top of you to deal any damage. The only person I felt like I was rocking was a Zilean who had built zero survivability, and once he was down I was usually out of energy, leaving me woefully exposed to his allies. Consider that at 300 AP – which is a lot if you aren’t sitting on a 20-stack Soulstealer and can’t benefit from Archangels – her Crescent is dealing a meager 270 damage while Mark is hitting for 540 (including the proc). Compare that to Anivia’s Flash Frost – which you can proc for extra damage if you’re good – hitting for 660, stunning, slowing, and synergizing with her other nuke. I think increasing her ratios a bit would make AP feel much more viable. Since shroud deals no damage, she needs the other skills to hit hard. I feel like her passive is meant to counteract her melee vulnerability, but by level 10 a 20% spell vamp isn’t going to save you from much. In most cases you’re healing back something on the order of 60-90 damage for each cast. That’s fine if you’re at a distance and capable of running but when you’re buried in the mix it’s not going to help.

On the whole, I think it’s still very difficult to make melee DPS viable without some sort of survivability. Garen works well because he has both passive and active damage reduction, a speed boost, and slow immunity. Though you could argue that Shroud adds survivability, your enemy still knows where you are and can spend AOE skills to blow you up without much trouble.

As I play her more, you can bet I’ll be making more posts about her viability. Stay tuned.

  

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