Tag: season one (Page 6 of 7)

Xin Zhao Spotlight is here

Riot posted the Xin Zhao Spotlight early this go round, giving you time to think about whether or not you’ll be picking him up at the Season One launch this Tuesday. The video gives some much needed clarification on his skillset, though I don’t think it does a good job displaying Xin Zhao’s specific skillset.

Did anyone else feel like this was more of a tutorial on the basics than a display of the potential behind Xin Zhao. That first kill on Guinsoo looked like a damn bot (I’m guessing Guinsoo was typing?) and most of the teamfights played out such that I didn’t see Xin Zhao doing a whole lot – it was mostly his fed teammates dishing out the damage and pulling down triple kills. It’s kinda tough to get a good look at any champion when you have a power combo like Alistar/Annie for teamfights. The one helpful tip was the Malzahar kill top for which Phreak used Audacious Charge. That’s about all I learned. Use it like Kat/Akali to get close to people but with a bonus AOE slow.

Riot starts Season One transition, stops recording wins

Nexus down.If you’ve had a chance to play this weekend, you may have noticed the lack of change in your win count. No, it’s not a bug. It’s one of the ways Riot is hoping to maintain as much uptime as possible for the changeover to Season One.

With regard to the wins, it’s an issue of stat recording. They’re revamping the internals, so you don’t keep any wins you might accrue over the weekend. Kinda sucks, but I’m not too worried about those disappearing from my stat record if I get access to a much more robust system in a few days. I do wonder, though, what kind of stats we’ll get to see for legacy games. I know those games will still be private, but will they get the full analysis package of the other games?

I’m glad to see Riot is taking precautions for uptime around the Season One launch. Here’s hoping the rest goes smoothly.

Xin Zhao official ability list is a bit different than the first leak

Xin Zhao and Garen.

Shortly after Xin Zhao was announced at PC Gamer, Leaguecraft had a list of his abilities up that sounded fairly official. In my experience, those lists are usually right, but for Xin Zhao things are a little different than we first thought.

Here’s the official ability list:

Three Talon Strike: Xin Zhao’s next 3 standard attacks deal increased damage, with the third attack knocking an opponent into the air.

Battle Cry: Xin Zhao passively increases his attack speed and can activate this ability to further increase attack speed and lower his ability cooldowns with each attack.

Audacious Charge: Xin Zhao charges an enemy, dealing damage and slowing it and all other enemies in the area. Audacious Charge increases Xin’Zhao’s armor temporarily and lowers the cooldowns of all of his abilities.

Crescent Sweep (Ultimate): Xin Zhao fiercely sweeps his spear around him, dealing damage to nearby enemies based on their current health.

Tireless Warrior (Passive): Xin Zhao is healed for every 3 attacks that he lands. This amount increases every 2 levels.

As spazticmonk mentioned on the original post, the charge would probably have had too long a cooldown as his ultimate. It looks like that will just be his E skill, giving him the mobility Riot wanted. You’ll also notice that the “reverse skillshot” is gone from Crescent Sweep, though I wonder what “based on current health” means – more damage if they’re healthy or more damage if they’re hurt? As I mentioned before, Xin Zhao seems like he has the ability set that makes a successful melee champion. I’m looking forward to trying him out with the launch of Season One.

Are Riot’s servers ready for Season One?

Server Fire.

A few months back it wasn’t entirely uncommon to see the servers go down every other day for long periods at a time. Sometimes they would come back up only to go down again. The trend has returned recently, though to a different degree. The 5v5 Matchmaking queue has been down frequently over the past several weeks, which often leads to Busy status for the server.

So what happens when Season One launches? We’re getting a new client and a bunch of new features, all of which encourages more people to play and people who have maybe taken a break from the game to make their triumphant return. In short, Season One will be the most aggressive server load Riot has yet seen. Will Riot be ready?

Honestly, I think not. I hope we see unparalleled server stability, but Riot has proven itself to be young and struggles with the scale of the game. That’s not necessarily a fault – every young development house with a wildly successful game is likely to have this issue. There just aren’t enough highly skilled and experienced developers and support techs in the wild to support this kind of rapid growth. On the one hand, we can applaud Riot for its dedication to quality – only highly qualified people are filling company positions. On the other, though, it means we will suffer some frustrating times surrounding the game’s most anticipated features.

Season One launches July 13th!

Season One client.

Well, Riot proved me wrong…sort of. The League of Legends Season One will launch with much fanfare a week from today, along with the new hero, Xin Zhao.

Riot hasn’t released any more information regarding the inaugural season, other than pointing to the original Season One preview. Also, I should point out one very important word in Pendragon’s post – “targeting.” No guarantees on next Tuesday, folks.

I’m hoping Season One is as cool as it has the potential to be. I’ll mostly be playing the Solo 5v5 playlist, with the occasional 3v3 when I have friends online. I think it will be tough for me to find a solid 5v5 team, despite my active play schedule. I do tend to split my time these days, playing a few games here and there between a more active work schedule. I’m willing to bet most serious 5v5 teams will want to get a lot of playtime in over the next couple days.

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