With the removal of the dodge stat, Riot inevitably had to remake Jax in some capacity. I was really curious what it would mean for the Grandmaster at Arms, but it looks like he won’t be changing much. In place of the old Counter-Strike, which trigged an active stun ability when Jax dodged an auto attack, Jax now “charges” the ability, allowing him to dodge all incoming attacks for a short duration, followed by an AoE stun and damage effect. Think of it like Sion’s shield, just on a much shorter fuse.

Obviously this has some pretty serious implications for the late game. A 100 percent physical damage mitigation, even for a couple seconds, is a pretty big deal. You will notice that Counter-Strike is now on a pretty long cooldown – more than 20 seconds at rank one – though it does scale down as rank improves.

Jax also lost his old passive, presumably to account for the increased survivability granted by his new skill. In its place, Jax now has the stacking bonus attack speed component of his ultimate on a passive. This allows him to jungle easily from level one, which I think is the scarier part of his remake. If you watch the Champion Spotlight Phreak posted, he takes down dragon at level 7 without losing much health at all.

If you hated Jax prior to this remake, I’d imagine you will learn to hate him all over again. The changes will be going live with the next champion patch.

As 2011 drew to an end, Riot completed the dodge rune refund that began earlier this December. In case you aren’t aware, dodge runes are still available from the store. Riot is planning to remake the champions that rely on dodge (honestly, only Jax comes to mind for me), but until that’s done you will still be able to use dodge runes in game.

I’m definitely curious to see what the Jax remake will look like. Jax has been a hot topic of discussion since his initial remake back in the Twisted Treeline era of League’s development. At the time he was as hyper a carry as a hyper-carry could be. He’s since been toned down, but he will always be one of the champions that has had his day in the sun, while characters like Katarina and Twitch haven’t seen serious play in more than a year.

Personally, I’m not sad to see dodge go. It just doesn’t seem to have a place in League of Legends. My obvious point of comparison is DotA, where evasion can’t be had early in the game. In that game, evasion works well as a late-game mechanic for carries, who can still be shut down by teams with hard CC. In LoL, dodge is only acquired early, and tends to unreliably augment a character’s survivability.

How do you feel about the removal of dodge? Are you looking forward to a Jax remake? What will you be doing with your IP?

It seems I was one of the earlier accounts to be refunded the IP cost of dodge runes. For me, the total came out to a whopping 14,000+ IP. I’m honestly not sure how I was refunded that amount of IP. When I added things up, the total cost was just over 7k, so I’m not exactly sure where the extra 7k came from.

I will say, I’m pretty pumped to have over 15k floating around again. I haven’t been playing League quite as often lately, so having a little buffer for the next few champion releases could be really handy.

I think it’s strange that Riot is still letting us purchase dodge runes. I understand that they don’t want to totally screw Jax players with the refunds, but why do them now? It’s a little odd. In any case, I’m glad to get a nice fat IP boost before the holidays. Have you received your refund yet?

The rise of tanky DPS brought with it the fall of ranged DPS, a change I was initially glad for but have since grown to loathe. For all the pain that ranged DPS has brought on me in the past, I much prefer seeing a squishy guy kill me than a brick wall with 2800 HP do the same thing. At least with the squishy guy I know there’s a bit of risk involved in killing me. Bruisers don’t have to think twice.

Among the changes this patch, which I didn’t have the time to cover in full, was a buff to Infinity Edge. BF Sword is now 200g cheaper. Agility Cloak is 50g cheaper. And finally, the combined item got a 5 damage buff, up to 80, and a 5 percent critical chance buff, up to 25 percent. The idea was to get damage dealers up to that critical damage point earlier in the game. Unfortunately, I just don’t think it’s enough.

Part of the problem is character design. Many defensive toons now have built in shields, which can completely negate an attacker’s damage. This is especially painful if the hit was a critical strike – with normalized critical strikes you might not get another one before you die. In the case of a champion like Malphite, the shield even scales with defensive stats, making it all the more painful.

Another part of the problem is dodge. Dodge is hugely problematic for physical attackers because it completely negates their attack without any real cost to the target. Granted, most dodge stats are pretty low, but the complete negation of an attack is a brutal penalty, and its inflicted with the same effect at all levels.

The last issue is itemization. Sure, you can address the dodge issue with Sword of the Divine, but that armor penetration is virtually worthless on a target with 200 armor and 3000 health, to say nothing of the laughable 100 magic damage proc. I know I boisterously supported the Last Whisper nerf in days of yore, but I think it’s time to give the item its attack speed back. Damage dealers need that big DPS boost around level 12-15.

I almost suggested the creation of some kind of health/AD item, but that would be such a monster buff to the bruisers that it just wouldn’t work out.

Today we got another patch, this one full of bug fixes and small tweaks to existing characters. It also brought some painful reminders that Riot is still a very young company and growing to fast to handle its exploding community.

I’ve written a lot, both here and on the official forums, about the queue dodge penalty system. It sucks. It doesn’t work. People still dodge and troll and do whatever they can to avoid playing with certain players or champions or whatever. This most recent patch actually increased increased the queue dodge penalty. Instead of rewording things, I’ll copy my thoughts from a forum thread I created today.

No one likes to get queue dodged. It sucks. Adding a penalty doesn’t encourage players not to queue dodge, though. It encourages people to attempt to force a teammate to queue dodge. Increasing the time penalty will only make this problem worse.

The whole point of the penalty was to encourage players to make an informed decision about whether or not to drop queue. An informed decision shouldn’t force you to always make a bad decision. I don’t want to join a game with an AFK player or a player who chooses revive/smite Eve and threatens to feed if he doesn’t get mid solo. I also don’t want to wait six or a ridiculous fifteen minutes for another game while that player gets dumped right back into queue.

And let’s say I actually start the game and our friend leaves or goes AFK or feeds or any number of things trolls do just to get to the next game – what’s the penalty for that player? He has effectively ruined the game for 9 other people and in most cases wasted at least 25 minutes of time for 9 players. Even if he leaves it doesn’t count against him in any fashion whatsoever. He gets a leaver mark that can’t be seen until he has likely already ruined a game? That’s like covering up the scarlet letter until Hester Prynne has nailed every married man in town and then telling their wives they should have seen it coming.

Get rid of the queue dodge penalty. It didn’t fix anything when the penalty was two and ten minutes. It made the game creation process much, much worse. I realize the queue dodge system sucks but this little band-aid won’t stop the bleeding. Figure out something new (new lobby system, perhaps?) that will actually address the problem.

In short, the dodge penalty is not doing its job – improving the game experience by reducing dodged games. It’s actually making things worse by incentivizing players to troll, which is terrible for a community.

The reason I think this all points to Riot’s immaturity as a company is that they’ve remained quiet about it, responding to few if any of the posts regarding the dodge problem, and there are a lot of them (posts). Riot is trying to force this system, which is a crap solution, to work when it just doesn’t, instead of implementing a new lobby system or some other player management system that accounts for things like dodging and leaving.

Granted, they might be working on something, but the dodging has been an issue for months. I wrote about my first experience with the queue dodge penalty back in February. The development cycle for these kinds of fixes is way too long, most likely because Riot is understaffed, so the company comes up with these bandages when what they really need is surgery.

Thankfully the community has started to turn around. When the queue dodge system first came out, anyone willing to speak out against it was downvoted into oblivion. Players are starting to realize, though, that the current system sucks and it really needs to be fixed. There’s a lot of support in the forums for reverting the change. Even if the old system wasn’t any better, it certainly wasn’t this bad.

Get on the forums and show some support.