Tag: metagame (Page 2 of 3)

Still not sure how I feel about the dragon changes

December 22, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

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?

Development, Editorial, league of legends

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Trundle patch thoughts and impressions (the nerfs that finally happened)

December 1, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I’m ready to call today’s patch the biggest thing that has happened to the game since the release of Season One. Today, Riot finally took some steps the reds have been talking about on the forums for months, making changes that could have a significant impact on the metagame. It won’t change things entirely, but it will almost certainly start to shift things in a new direction.

This is one of the first patches for which we’ve seen Riot give overarching design notes along with the line by line changes. Let’s start with those.

This patch is focused upon the following main issues:
Area of Effect damage and disable spells being too powerful
Area of Effect is taking a pretty large hit this patch, especially to the damage on Galio’s Idol of Durand, Morgana’s Soul Shackles and Vladimir’s Hemoplague. After seeing its effect on the game over a longer period of time, we’ve found something more akin to Annie’s Summon: Tibbers is a proper mix of area size, damage, and disable. We have several area-effect skills in the game that have snuck past this and we’re looking to bring these back to acceptable levels.
Strong supports are able to protect powerful ranged carries too well, cancelling their fragility too easily
We’re starting with a duration nerf to Morgana’s Black Shield and Janna’s Eye of the Storm to reward better timing of the spell reactively and to raise the skill ceiling a bit on these spells. If this proves too little, we’ll evaluate the need for additional changes in a future patch.
Ranged carries, holistically, are too safe considering their damage output
While we predict bigger changes will be required, our first adjustments are to lower the movement speeds of ranged carry-style champions to provide more of a tradeoff, and nerf Blessing of the Lizard Elder when used on ranged champions. We’d like to keep ranged carries “safer” than melee, while beginning to provide more tradeoffs that both give melee a place in the game and differentiate the roles of melee and ranged characters.

I was thrilled when I read these. Continue reading »

Editorial, league of legends, News, Patches

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Trundle pre-release ability impressions

November 29, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Trundle drops tomorrow, bringing the field up to a total of 65 champions. The announcement post confirmed the skill list that was leaked around his initial debut, a skillset that I think is among the more interesting in the game.

Trundle is, as far as I can tell, a debuffer. His skills seem to be aimed at breaking the tank/physical DPS metagame by stealing stats from those archetypes and providing support with an AoE slow. In all honesty, my first thought was, “Wow, this is what Mordekaiser should have been.”

Abilities:

Rabid Bite: Trundle bites his opponent, dealing damage and sapping some of their attack damage.

Contaminate: Trundle infects a target location with his curse, gaining attack speed, movement speed, and crowd control reduction while on it.

Pillar of Filth: Trundle creates a plagued beacon at a target location, which becomes impassable terrain and slows all nearby enemy units.

Agony (Ultimate): Trundle immediately steals his target’s health and a percentage of their armor and magic resistance. Over the next six seconds the amount of health, armor, and magic resistance stolen is doubled.

Decompose (Passive): Whenever an enemy unit near Trundle dies, he heals for a percentage of their maximum health.

Trundle is melee, and from the sound of things he’ll do very well with some sort of tanky attack speed build. That does make me a little wary, as it was my chief complaint with Irelia, but his passive is worlds better than hers and he has some additional utility that appears to be castable from range.

I’ll be most interested to see how his ultimate works out. The design seems much more interesting than Mordekaiser’s, to the point that I wish Kaiser had been released with this skillset instead of his own. It has a nice, short duration during which it will still provide a massive benefit to Trundle and a solid debuff on the target. It’s solid against tanks and carries alike, and it doesn’t have the ridiculous all-or-nothing pet system that Children of the Grave uses.

I don’t want to say much more, because his skills could go a lot of different directions. I could see his Pillar of Filth being either very useful or very situational. The same goes for Contiminate. In any case, you definitely will not want to fight him one on one. Check back tomorrow for my full impressions.

Champions, league of legends, News

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The community feels the development pinch

November 13, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

ireliatt3

I would normally not bother to read a thread on the forums titled, “This game isent [sic] even worth playing anymore.” I obviously disagree. Despite the downfalls and recent design flaws (at least in my opinion), LoL is still a blast of a game, and I have a lot of fun queuing up with you guys and with my real-life friends. The thread in question, though, is now 34 pages long and caught an interesting response from Phreak.

I’ll leave you to read the original post, but the author, MoreCowbell, is basically bemoaning the overwheling presence of an AOE metagame and the limited champion selection that performs well in that metagame. He also decries characters with strong mechanics having no serious weaknesses. He doesn’t back a lot of things up, but he makes some good points (many of which I think I back up on this blog) and makes other interesting points.

I was particularly interested in this:

One of the biggest issues is that in riot’s design philosophy of making all characters equally viable all game, they would need to make all characters have the same power at all times. Characters like MF couldnt exist as they beat most other characters in a lane and late game. The reason that some characters absolutely dominate the lane in dota was because they were trash later.

That’s a spot-on observation and a lot of my problem with recent champion design. I would love to see the metagame shift away from the teamfight focus, but characters need to have different strengths at different stages of the game for that to be a real possibility. When a champion like Miss Fortune can 4-5 shot toons without health quints at almost any stage of the game, that kind of diversity can’t exist.

After 12 pages or so, Phreak dropped by to offer this:

We’re hitting a lot of the conventional “OP” champs this patch.
We will also be massively assessing all our AoE champions to ensure they’re not must-pick champions. As much as you say we’re making new champions which just eclipse old ones, we’re trying really hard to not have these super faceroll AoE ultimates since Sona (also: Sona nerfs this patch. And I’m not talking +10sec cd on the ultimate). While Swain and Lux have AoEs (even ultimates), I think we can all agree they’re much more reasonable than Idol of Durand.
If I read the original post correctly, this is the main complaint yes? That there are ~15 super OP champions that must be played, and everything else is below them?
We will assess them. Stay patient, beloved summoners. We like playing all of our champions as much as you guys do!

I haven’t been so (cautiously) excited about a patch in a long time. I’m hoping when he says “hitting” he means with a battering ram, not the tinkering hammer we see more often than not. I also like that he referenced Swain and Lux, two recently released and very underpowered champions, as having more “reasonable” AoE ults. I couldn’t agree more. I think Swain’s character design is really cool, and Lux could be a very fun toon with that short CD ultimate (and a much-needed damage buff for her base skills), but they just don’t stack up against the massive AoE pwnage in the game.

The simple fact that there are 34 pages of responses speaks to how big an issue the current design direction is to the LoL community. Players are definitely unhappy about the lack of diversity, which shouldn’t be all that shocking considering the underwhelming numbers we see on Twisted Treeline. I’m hopeful this week’s patch will be the start of some changes, but I’m aware it would take a lot of changes for things to be significantly different. We’ll find out on Tuesday.

Current Affairs, Development, league of legends

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How bad is the kiting metagame?

July 11, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

There has been a lot of talk, and frankly a lot of action on Riot’s part, aimed at fixing the kiting/healing metagame that has become so popular. There are a lot of people, though, who would tell you it isn’t really a problem, just that the game has taken a shift and people haven’t quite figured out how to fight it. In a way, I think those people are right, at least when it comes to arranged team fights, but the kiting metagame is brutal in solo queue, which is why I think we see it so often.

Phreak recently responded to a post about kiting with the following advice:

The average matchmaking game doesn’t have everyone picking A-tier champions, as Janna and co. are. The average matchmaking game doesn’t have “perfect” team comps (tank, ranged dps, mage, support, support). This team relies heavily on Ashe’s ability to carry the game. Certainly Heimer can deal lots of damage, but it’s very inconsistent: Grenade can miss, Rockets may not hit champions, and the same with Turrets. Meanwhile his ultimate actually deals no damage.
Certainly you can make the case that the team comp revolves around Ashe very well: Heimer’s turrets, Janna, Alistar all can babysit her. However, I want to bring up a counter-example:
Amumu, Morgana, Fiddlesticks, Pirate, [insert champion]. Primarily this comp focuses on the first 3. Fiddlesticks + Black Shield is going to be able to easily Crowstorm onto the enemy team, Fear/Silence the Janna, and mop up all the squishies (Heimer, Ashe, Janna). While this is happening, Amumu and Morgana Ults keep everyone in place. The 2.5 seconds on Amumu lets Morgana finish her channel, and everyone’s just been stunned during the entirety of Crowstorm. Certainly all of Heimer’s turrets and Janna are dead at this point. The disables don’t do enough damage to punch through Black Shield, so Janna can’t bounce Fiddlesticks away with her ult. Great success! Pirate adds to the mix of course, etc.
Thing is, the 5man ultimate Press-R-And-Win was flavor all through late 2009. I’m surprised it hasn’t come back, because it seems to me that if you can kill everyone in 5 seconds, you win.

First, he makes some really valid points. When things go as he described, you’ll beat any kite team in basically any game. The problem, of course, is that things never go like that for anyone not in a 5-man premade, and even if you play it perfectly, there’s still the fact that the kite team could also be full of good players, in which case the likelihood of a perfectly timed Fiddle ult drops significantly (wards, CV, general map awareness).

The other point about kite teams is simply that they don’t have to be grouped up to be totally effective. In fact, they’re usually better off when they’re spread out, forcing you to take at least one extra teammate to ensure the kill (remember, kiters are great at escaping). The kiting comps are also made up of the best pushers in the game so when you leave lane to help other folks deal with the early game pain that a lot of kiters have (zoning, general lane control), you’re leaving your lane open to the push.

In the end, it takes crazy coordination to beat most kite comps, and that’s just not something you get in the average game. Hopefully draft mode will help some of this, but for the time being, kite comps are a safe and fairly easy way to guarantee yourself some wins.

league of legends

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