I feel like I already know the answer to this question, and even if it was yes, I doubt many people would be willing to admit it. I had a strange thing happen the other day. I got into a game in which a teammate was playing Shaco. I love Shaco, and I think he can do great things for a team if he’s smart. Our Shaco seemed fine, but he just kept saying how great he was with Shaco. He finally said, “guys, I have never lost with Shaco.” My response: “that’s a lie, but no big deal. Play smart, have fun.”

It was probably an unwarranted instigation, but there was just no way that was true. Very few people playing this game can boast a record so significantly over .500 that they would have champions they’ve played quite a bit be undefeated. My teammate proceeded to feed, giving up his double buffs to the enemy Xin Zhao shortly after acquiring them on several occasions. At this point, he deserved a little grief. I said, “First loss, eh?” to which he replied, “Yup, check my profile. I was 16-0 until this game.”

Now why would you say that in a game that makes stats publicly available? My only regret is that I couldn’t check his stats from the lobby to share the info with our team (and our enemies, who he had been goading before the game started). The screenshot shows our friend’s stats. Not only were the 16 wins a complete fabrication, obviously he had lost quite a few ranked games as Shaco as well. I really don’t get why he would not only lie, but initiate the lying. Weird.

So do you lie about your performance in game?

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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.

This most recent patch brought with it the bane of Shaco players everywhere – nerfs that warrant pulling him off your ban list. Before we get into the nerfs, though, let’s take a look at some history.

For a long time, Shaco was one of the most feared champions at any tier of the game. If a player had invested IP in crit damage runes, you could bet he was going to two-shot the closest caster, thanks in part to strong fortitude elixirs and the bug that allowed his Deceive to hit as a crit plus a mountain of bonus damage.

Once that Shaco disappeared, we started to see the emergence of something a bit closer to today’s Shaco. It was usually Madred’s, though the occasional Sheen/Infinity Shaco still popped up. Players were relying on Shaco’s clone to provide a lot of their damage during a gank or teamfight, so Sunfire Shaco seemed to also do well. Much of Shaco’s strength lies in his ability to get behind players undetected, get a kill, and get out. Riot nerfed his Deceive several patches ago to help with this, but apparently it wasn’t enough.

Yesterday’s Shaco nerf was a nerf across the board. Deceive has a longer cooldown, doesn’t last as long, and breaks any time you cast anything, including Jack in the Box. Two Shiv Poison no longer puts a partial blind on the target, his passive bonus damage is down to 20 percent from 25, and his ultimate caught a massive nerf. Hallucinate now has a 33 percent longer cooldown at max rank and lasts 60 percent as long as it previously has. If it sounds like a lot, that’s because it is.

While some people might argue that he’s more in line with other melee, remember that position is the most important part of playing Shaco. Shaco has very poor base stats, so you need to make sure you’re behind your target with a box in place in order to do the best damage. The Deceive nerf makes this hard, but the Jack in the Box nerf makes it harder. It’s very easy to walk away from JitBs as they are placed, and almost laughable to avoid them mid fight. There’s also very little now to keep players from just blowing you up when you pop out. While I do think the partial blind on Shaco’s attacks was a bit much, why not leave it on the active. That would at least give him some damage mitigation after he’s visible.

The bright light in all of this is that Shaco will still be an excellent jungler. Despite the fat nerf, his JitBs still fear creeps, providing a nice damage buffer when you need to get lizard. When thinking about Shaco as a jungler, it does seem that he is being balanced around having both buffs at all times. While I understand the idea (because it is so easy for him to get buffs), it’s going to be very frustrating for Shaco players who fall behind or those whose team falls behind.

This post isn’t only about Shaco, but about the ban process in general. While by and large I think bans are good and that draft mode is a big improvement for the game, I do wonder what Riot will do about champions that are getting banned in most every game.

Your experience may differ from mine, but nearly every game has Heimer/Shaco/Shen banned and then either Soraka, Xin Zhao, or Taric. For now this has encouraged much more variety in champion selection, but even now I see a few champions popping up more than I think is reasonable. Ashe, for one, is in just about every game – I mean like 90 percent. So what can Riot do to make sure the ban system continues to encourage variety, both in bans and the champions played?

One solution is obviously nerfs, and I think Heimerdinger is a great candidate. He is still too strong a lane presence for most characters to be successful against, and in solo queue that’s a big problem. Players are largely focused on picking a team with synergy, and not necessarily a team that can play against the opponents.

Another solution would be buffing the marginalized toons. I haven’t seen Kog’Maw once in draft mode other than a game in which I picked him. I haven’t seen Kennen. I don’t see Karthus or, much as it pains me to say it, Eve. Give those characters the tools to be successful in a draft setting and maybe we’ll get more variety.

I also wonder if Riot would ever consider global bans – toons that change from week to week that are unplayable, just as some champs are free each week. Part of being a good player, in my mind, is knowing a wide variety of toons. It seems pretty important to the competitive environment, then, that the best players know how to play more than a handful of champions. In most cases I think that’s already true, but it would encourage a breadth of knowledge that could help every player improve.

I had this thought the other day when I got into a game with a Shaco player. That’s not really a story in and of itself – Shaco is appearing in almost every game since Zileas labeled him OP. The story is more in the way this Shaco decided to play.

Like most Shaco players, ours ran off to golem first thing to set himself up for the rest of the game. He was packing Smite, so I figured he’d spend a little time in the jungle and then, as most Shaco (and most jungle) players tend to do, hit up the lane that was pushed furthest for some early game killing. That wasn’t the case. Despite my pleading (and explanations that our lanes were suffering/being pushed and really needed to be ganked), Shaco continued jungling and only offered a phrase that completely blew my mind: “The fucking point of jungle Shaco is not to gank.”

I…was…floored. I understand that the primary advantage of a jungler is the exp. bonus for a teammate, but the secondary – and only secondary by a tiny margin – advantage is the element of surprise and opportunity to gank in any lane, thereby increasing the experience given to the ganked lane as well. My first reaction was, wow, I should not be paired with a player who so fundamentally misunderstands the game. I realized, though, that this could just as easily be a result of Shaco’s imbalance as it is the player’s ignorance.

I don’t know what your hero spread looks like, but mine is pretty wide. I play a lot of different champions, despite the bursts of new champions around patch time. I don’t think that’s the case for a lot of players, though, and I definitely don’t think that’t the case for the Shaco player in question.

This guy clearly misunderstood Shaco on a level that only someone fairly new to Shaco would. If he had been playing, say, Ashe – one of the strongest characters in the game – he could easily storm his way to a bunch of wins. That doesn’t make him good at the game, though. That makes him good at playing Ashe. The problem is that when he tries to transition to a toon like Shaco, most of his skills are lost. There isn’t the same kiting, the stun, the range advantage, the necessity to stay and farm. The game is almost entirely different, but the average player might not have that understanding about that game.

When I first started playing LoL I really liked that you could slowly build up and unlock champions. I’m starting to realize, though, that the champion unlocks coupled with the rune system means that most players will choose just a small number of champions to master and then fill out their rune pages accordingly. I actually played with a guy the other day that didn’t know Nidalee’s cat form skills don’t cost mana.

I would blame this on the character selection system, but I don’t think it would really be a problem if the characters were more balanced. Players would be less likely to change to a perceived OP toon and more likely to choose toons that they truly enjoy rather than the flavor of the month champions. Granted, not every toon can be balanced with every other toon, but when toons like Ashe and Ezreal stand as high above the pack as they have, it keeps players from being as widely familiar with the game as they could be, if only because the potentially or probably successful champion list is shorter than it could be.