Miss Fortune’s introduction to the League has caused a bit of an imbalance. She has one of the better passives in the game, and it’s a passive that vexes Teemo fans. Teemo has an entire skill dedicated to a passive movespeed buff, and Miss Fortune’s is just better. I went back through the existing champions to see who was in dire need of a passive rework and the list is long. So long, in fact, that I’ll be splitting this feature into parts to make it easier to follow.

Alistar (deals 20/40/60 percent additional damage to turrets) – Once the pinnacle of pure tank power, Alistar now appears in almost none of my ranked matches. The Sheen nerf hit him really hard, particularly in conjunction with his passive. With an excruciatingly slow base attack speed, his passive gives him almost nothing. Also, when you’re at a turret, either you’re taking it uncontested or, as Alistar, you should be disrupting your opponent, not whacking away at the turret.

Ashe (While out of combat, Ashe’s critical strike chance increases by 3/6/9/12/15/18% every 3 seconds, removed after next attack)- On the whole, Ashe is a pretty strong toon. She farms well, has a permaslow, a free CV, and a great ult. So why this crappy passive? It essentially allows you to open the fight with a crit, which is really not much of a damage increase for a carry. You’ll probably crit anyway quite a bit as a carry.

Fiddlesticks (Nearby enemy champions have their Magic Resist reduced by 10) – First thing you’ll notice is that it doesn’t scale. Granted, it reduces everyone’s MR, but not by nearly enough. Since the string of Fiddle nerfs, he could really use a new passive.

Heimerdinger (Heimerdinger gives nearby allied Turrets and Champions 6 / 12 / 16 / 22 health regen per 5) – Heimer has officially been nerfed off most ban lists, and as such, I think it’s time he gets a new passive. The regen is nice for turrets, but since the Heimer nerf, very few teams stand and poke a turret down slowly, so this isn’t really relevant. It won’t ever serve to save you or your allies or even your greatly nerfed turrets.

Janna (Increases the Movement Speed of all allied champions by 3%) – I’ve never liked Janna’s passive and I may be one of the few. Three percent movespeed is hardly noticeable, especially when so many toons these days have their own speed boost or a gap closer of some kind.

Kassadin (Kassadin takes 15% reduced damage from abilities and transforms this damage into bonus attack speed) – The damage reduction is nice, but transforms it to attack speed? There’s a reason you don’t see people playing attack damage Kassadin. He’s also so soft that even the 15 percent reduction rarely saves him.

Nasus (Nasus drains his foe’s spiritual energy, giving him a natural 10/15/20% Lifesteal) – Lifesteal on a tank toon – need I say more? If it scaled in some way with his HP gain, this might be a different story, but most of Nasus’ damage comes from his ult in combination with Spirit Fire. Very few players play Nasus for Siphoning Strike, and even if they do, this passive relies heavily on players staying close to you. You know what happens when Nasus ults, I know you do. People scatter. Goodbye, passive.

There are a few runners-up from this category that I’ll just mention briefly. Eve takes 50 percent reduced damage from minions but she needs remade in full, so she didn’t make the list. Gangplank’s passive (a healing debuff/slight poison) isn’t great, and makes no use of his primary skills – Parrley and his ult – but it is a healing debuff, which puts him well above the others on this list. I think Karthus could use a rework in full. His ult is cool, and his passive allows you to get the ult off when you otherwise didn’t, but any passive based on dying first seems a little dumb to me. Still, there are far worse, and his passive at least synergizes with his skill set to a degree.

Stay tuned for more passive remake candidates. I thought up a better name for this feature just after posting so I renamed it.

First, I’d like to draw your attention to my awesome title for the champions introduced since season one launch who exceed most other champions at taking the solo lane: supermids. The reason I thought it up (I know, I’m so creative) was that I needed a way to talk about Vlad, Kog’Maw, Miss Fortune, etc. without typing that out every time I wanted to talk about the great carries in the game. Enough of that, though. On to the post.

I played two games tonight with a friend with hopes of breaking into the 1600s in ranked solo. I had been playing well all day and things just seemed to be going right. We lost. Both games. Hard. The biggest problem in both cases was our comp. In the first game my buddy was stuck in the mindset of 3s so he banned Singed. No biggie, still 3 bans, but we decided to joke around and ban Eve. That left a few strong toons on the board. Our opponent first picked Warwick so my buddy and I snagged Garen and Miss Fortune. Solid start for the team. Unfortunately, a teammate thought we couldn’t leave Kog’Maw on the board, so he picked him over some CC (Morgana was still available). Our fourth teammate chose Sona and I knew we were in trouble. Our fifth pick: Mordekaiser.

Sure, we had strong toons, but the sum of the parts was virtually nothing. Without crowd control to keep the enemy away from the carries, we got rocked. You can go too far in the other direction, too. For my next game I didn’t ban Amumu because frankly, a lot of people suck with him. The other team first picked Warwick again. I snagged Garen for a buddy and our second player picked Taric. We had said someone should get Amumu, but I was already thinking we were on the verge of being too tanky. With good DPS, though, we should have been fine. Our third player takes Shen and immediately locks him in, even though our fourth had said several times that he was picking Amumu, which he still did, leaving us with 4 tanks, short on damage. I had my friend pick TF in the hopes that we could stun them down. We couldn’t. Our outside lanes were getting worked and it was just a matter of time before our opponents had complete control of the map and we were too short on DPS to burn them down.

Even when the supermids are available, you have to focus on comp over individual toon strength. I asked everyone after the first game if they really thought we had a decent comp. The response was this: “You had Garen and Kog’Maw. Your comp was great.”

Sigh.

The latest patch notes from the PTR are a little disheartening. The biggest news I can see is that there are no Miss Fortune nerfs in the works. That’s right, none. She is not currently slated to receive any changes.

I’m hoping this gets changed. I can understand that there aren’t a lot of Miss Fortune players out there breaking games. As powerful as her abilities are, they’re also easy to overestimate, and if she gets behind, she won’t be much good. I think we’ll see something on the order of the old Nidalee though. I’ve had several games recently in which I was able to get MF as late as seventh pick. People have stopped playing her for some reason, which leaves room for devotees to hone their craft. It’s really just a matter of time before people realize how easily she can farm, how little time she spends out of lane because of that passive, and insanely good each and every one of her skills are.

You can read the latest TR patch notes on the Test Realm forums.

There you have it, folks. The proof (click the pic for a larger resolution). You’ll notice I have four kills, which is really high for the 13-minute mark, but I think I still could have hit this goal without too much trouble if I didn’t get those. Most required me to stop killing creeps, and in at least one instance, I left lane to get an assist, which was only 87 gold. I could easily have had that from the creeps I lost, if not more.

Also, you’ll notice I died. I was really excited that I might hit the 12-minute mark, so I overcommitted to try and help out our Yi (and hopefully pick Ashe off in the process). I was an easy kill.

I’ve written a decent amount about Miss Fortune’s incredible farm ability and the way she breaks the laning phase. She’s so strong I’d like to issue a challenge – see how fast you can farm up up an Infinity Edge and post your results in the comments. The game should be live – no bots, no practice – and try to include a screenshot if you can.

My current record is somewhere around the 14-minute mark. I had 4 kills and probably something like 90 creeps. At the end of the game, which was just 25 minutes long, I had 175 creeps and, as a result of my farm, 12 kills. As you can see in my screenshot (edit: screenshot was broken for some reason and won’t upload, I swear! I’ll try to get another), my timer was nearly 15 minutes, but I purchased my Infinity and my boots at the same time, and I was already running to lane. I’d say 14 minutes is a reasonable estimate. I should also point out, the game I’ve posted above gave me the idea for the challenge, it wasn’t a result of me trying. I just had a good farm and though, hey, I bet the guys at the blog would like this. My second attempt, I had Infinity somewhere just past 15 minutes and I didn’t have any champion kills (I even died twice). My own goal is to break the 12-minute barrier. We’ll see.

A couple tips for pretenders to the throne:
1 – With a good spec and runes, you don’t need to buy mana regen at level 1. Get two or three health pots and be on your way.

2 – Farm the wraith camp whenever your creeps push to tower. Your own creeps will be dying too fast to bring the enemy’s low enough to last hit

3 – Don’t rank up your boots, even if you aren’t trying to do this challenge. There’s really no need.

Good luck! Don’t forget to post your own results in the comments.