That’s right folks – we’re on YouTube. Each week I’ll be providing a video wrapup for the Champ of the Week along with my usual writeup. And now it’s time for shameless plugs: like the video, subscribe, feel free to drop comments. I promise I’ll be checking them.

Master Yi was an odd champion to kickoff the video spotlights, mostly because it can be so damn hard to dominate with him. If the planets don’t align just right, I end up doing pretty much what I show in the video. I get a decent number of kills but I die a lot too. I overextend. I play a little recklessly. You get the point. In a lot of ways, those mistakes are also where Yi’s magic lies. He can streak under a tower at mach 10, snag two kills, and get out. It’s rare, though, to be able to do that often.

Yi’s biggest problem right now is survivability. Meditate does give him a little boost, and really I love the way that skill is designed. It has no ridiculous passive stats like Garen’s Courage. It’s not a giant shield. It totally disables Yi while he’s doing it, but it’s an enormous bump to his survivability. It needs something, though. As I mentioned in the video, well over half the champions in the League have a way to interrupt Meditate and several of them have more than one.

Build
I take a Cloth Armor and 5 pots into the jungle, grabbing a long sword and another pot or two at my first recall. I try to stay out at that point until I have Madred’s Razor, then I’ll go for my rank one boots, finish Wriggles, then finish boots. I follow that with a Ghostblade, after which pretty much anything goes. If I’m not having survivability problems, I’ll take an IE or a Bloodthirster. If I need to stay a live a bit longer, it’s GA or Banshee’s Veil.

If I Could Change One Thing
If I could change one thing about Yi, I’d give him a CC Immunity during Meditate. I do think his healing would need to be reduced, as would the AP ratio. I don’t want to kill off AP Yi, but if he can’t be stopped in Meditate, short of bursting through the massive armor and MR buff, it can’t heal as much as it does currently. I think the change would offer him some very unique gameplay.

That does it for Master Yi. If you’re in the mood for a manic play experience, give him a shot. He’s not the most durable champion, though, so make sure your Flash is close at hand. This week’s Champ of the Week is Morgana, so be sure to check back for updates on her. I just lost my first game with her (out of four) and I’m not happy about it.

This is sort of a combination introduction and mid-week analysis post. I had so many long posts earlier this week that this just didn’t make it into the rotation. Without further ado, allow me to introduce this week’s Champ of the Week: Master Yi.

I’ve played Yi with the kind of analytical focus I use for the Champ of the Week series in the past. Back then, it was “The Great Yi Experiment,” during which I tried to assess his viability in ranked. This time around it’s a little more of the standard Champ of the Week fare, focusing on builds and strategies.

I’ll say this from my games so far – Yi really seems to do best out of the jungle. He can be decent in lane but he runs out of mana pretty quickly and prior to level six he doesn’t have any reliable methods for getting out of danger. His primary method of harassment also randomly instakills creeps, which makes it easy to end up pushed against a tower.

Yi’s jungle can be a little iffy, though. It’s very random, at least until you get a few ranks of Alpha Strike or a Wriggle’s. He can get low in the early levels, too, which is why I don’t usually play him against a Lee Sin or Nunu or any other invasive jungler. Once he gets that Wriggle’s, though, he’s easily one of the fast junglers in the game, which makes him a deadly mid-game ganker. I’ve had a lot of success piling on kills in the mid-game, which allows me to snowball to late.

Check back this weekend for the Master Yi Champ of the Week wrapup. In the meantime, leave your questions and suggestions in the comments.

Within each recent patch cycle there have been skin releases that didn’t launch with the actual patch but became available at a later date. It looks like that trend will continue with some excellent looking skins for a few of my favorite damage dealers.

Master Yi, Shaco, and Mundo are all set to get some nice skins within our current patch cycle. The Yi is obviously an asian theme, but maybe someone can enlighten me on the specific reference (if there is one). Shaco’s getting a basic recolor. Mundo, though, is getting one of the coolest skins in the game. You may remember a thread a while back about Dr. Mundo and the various ways he ‘goes where he pleases.’ Remember Corporate Mundo? Running multinational corporation as he pleases? Yup, Corporate Mundo is on the way, and it looks like he’ll be throwing a cell phone from 1985.

No word on release date or RP cost for these, but you can bet I’ll be getting that Master Yi skin, probably once it goes on sale. It’s already my desktop background.

We’ve added a gallery function to the blog and are currently working out the kinks. Bear with me. It’s a much better way to display several images for a post, though.

Anyway, I’ve updated the post, which you can find here, with screenshots for your amusement (no, I don’t want to talk about that Katarina game – thank god it was ranked 5v5 premade (not thank god for my poor teammates)).

For a long time I thought Ghost was a Yi necessity, but I’m really coming around to Flash as a better alternative. It can help you avoid stuns, and once you have Yuomu’s, your Highlander/Yuomu combo will be as fast as most ghosted players. I’ve also stopped focusing on the Wuju buff so much because after the first rank the benefit is negligible compared to successive ranks of Meditate. For the most part that has worked well.

If you have other tips, I’d love to hear them. My build runs based on my farm. It’s almost always Madred’s Razor -> Yuomu’s unless my farm is unusually good, in which case I’ll jump straight to an Infinity. From that point I’ll go Stark’s or Last Whisper depending on my opponents’ armor stack, after which it’s just a matter of managing your incoming damage and trying to avoid stuns while working your way toward the enemy casters/carries.

I’ve long held that Yi is one of the more poorly designed toons in the game. He can be very easy to shut down, especially since draft mode gives your opponents the opportunity to take as many exhausts as they believe are necessary. But Yi is also undeniably fun to play, at least in my mind. It feels great to cruise around the map at mach 10 and just cut people in half. For that very reason, I’ve started The Great Yi Experiment.

I’m going to be selectively using Master Yi in ranked play over the course of the next few weeks to see just how handicapable this swordsman can be. The idea for the experiment actually came from a Twisted Treeline match in which I played Yi, and though I played well early, I got rocked late because the other team stacked exhaust. It was a painful loss. I realized after playing though, that I could have used better summoner skills to keep myself alive and dealing damage, even against three exhausts.

I’m hoping to provide scattered updates along the way. So far, it’s been fun. I’ve seen a modicum of success, both as a jungler and a lane toon, and I’m hoping to continue the trend.

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.

Patch Day is once again upon us, this time heralding the release of Akali, the Fist of Shadow. It’s a patch I’m excited for, mostly because the ninja trio is finally complete. There are some other good changes, though, including a Shen nerf, a Master Yi semi-buff (more on this later) and, an Amumu buff, and some minor changes for several other heroes. This patch also gives us Gentleman Cho, so be ready for well-dressed alien epicurean exploits.

First, we should talk Akali. As mentioned in my initial review, she is too hybrid for the current itemization. If you’d like more than just my opinion, consider that Phreak’s Akali spotlight recommends Mejai’s Soulstealer and Sword of the Occult if she’s going to do well. It makes sense to a degree, but it also points out a significant gap in the itemization. The best thing after Guinsoo’s Rageblade is two high risk/mediocre reward items? Seems to me the 1235g for Mejai’s would be much better spent toward some real AP for Rylai’s or a Brutalizer on the way to your Ghostblade.

The Master Yi situation seems like a stopgap to me. It might keep the Yi fanatics from crying quite as much but he still suffers his old fate. He’s highly susceptible to CC, often requires his ult for escape rather than attack, and offers none of the team utility of other melee DPS toons. I’ll take a Garen/Pantheon/Udyr/Mundo/Shaco/Warwick/Gangplank and even Tryndamere over Yi any day of the week. Yi’s only strength is backdooring towers, and if he’s left to do so your team likely would have won anyway. He is undeniably better than before, but to a pathetic degree. It’s like “improving” a car by giving it a sunroof. Nice? Sure. Does it improve the functionality of the vehicle? Not so much.

The Amumu buff will be especially nice for the first 6-8 levels. That’s typically the worst part of Amumu play because of his long cooldowns and pathetic early-game damage. With an attack buff and some cooldown reduction for Tantrum, he should farm much better and generally seem more enjoyable at every phase of the game.

I’m willing to wait to pass judgement on Udyr until I hear a little bit more from Udyr players. I rarely play the shapeshifter, mostly because I struggle in the jungle (I know, it’s sad). I do know a few Udyr fans, so I’ll see what they make of the nerf before I offer any targeted opinion. I will say that using Treeline as the baseline for buffs/nerfs seems ridiculous when Mundo is so god-forsakenly strong on that map and hasn’t even been grazed by the nerf stick.

Enjoy the time with the new champ tomorrow! As always, I’m sitting on enough IP to buy her several times over, so you can bet I’ll be playing her as soon as possible.

It’s also been nice to have an account to use with my brother and his friends. Several of them are lower level or new to MOBA style games. It doesn’t make sense for a level 30 account with 800+ wins to drag a level 8 who has never played a DotA-style game into a higher ELO bracket. I try to play toons that I wouldn’t normally dominate a game with so that it’s not a complete wreck for the other team, but it still gives me the chance to play with some lower level players.

I’d really like to see this kind of functionality added to the game, and I’m guessing ranked games will be the answer. As much as I worry about my wins and losses, they won’t matter a whole lot when ranked games come out. That will be the venue for serious competition and I’ll be free to watch my regular ELO tank while I work on my jungle Yi skills.