I caught a late night game with Tekli last night and had a blast. We rocked pretty hard, despite our team constantly pissing and moaning that we were going to lose. During that game we were up against a Kassadin and there were so many situations that made me laugh that I just had to write this post.

Here’s the situation:
Kennen: Hey, what’s that in the shadow, over by the turret.
Annie: I don’t know, but it looks ominous.
Kennen: Is that…is that a dress?
Annie: …I think it might be…
Kennen: Well I guess we should keep pushing.
-Annie and Kennen push on the turret-
Kennen: Has it moved?
Annie: Nope, still standing there.
-Turret falls, scene end-

So I’m being a little silly here, but that situation happened so often I was cracking up. We would be pushing on a turret, occasionally with just one or two people, and Kassadin would be standing just behind it, right at the edge of the fog of war, watching. That’s the real problem with Kassadin right now. He dumps all of his damage, all at once, and once it’s gone, he’s kinda screwed. Despite having a blink as his ultimate, I still see most Kassadin players take the summoner spell Flash because his ultimate deals damage so it’s kind of a waste to use it only to escape. Unfortunately, using it to deal damage means you’re right in the thick of things, which is exactly where Kassadin doesn’t need to be.

With all of the reworks for underplayed champions, I’m surprised Kassadin hasn’t received any love. His Nether Blade skill is pretty much worthless, even for AD Kassadin, which I almost never see. The rest of his skills are focused on insta-gibbing someone, but if you aren’t ahead of the curve, that becomes a big problem. It’s a design problem I think a lot of characters face, at least those that aren’t ranged. It’s the “blow everything you’ve got and hope the guy dies” idea. Granted, you have to give melee toons pretty high burst to be effective, or a way to mitigate lots of damage so they can get close to the ranged guys. If you require a guy to strand himself in the middle of the pack to deal his damage, you’ve required him to take some extra measure of escape, which means you’ve designed some crappy extra measure of escape like Flash.

When Flash is removed from the game, which you can almost guarantee is coming, I’m sure we’ll see Kassadin less and less.

I had a nine-game winning streak going just the other day. Nine games. It was great to look at my summoner profile and see so much green. Unfortunately the tenth game I drew a 20-minute 0-6 Taric. You can imagine how things went from there. I decided to end my quest for the elusive ten-game streak and go on a Heimerdinger bender. Here’s what I found out.

As great as Heimer used to be in mid, he was always easily shut down. The old turret system required too much time to be effective and was easy to counter. You were also dead if you left those turrets for any reason. Now things are different. The ability to drop red turrets at will gives you great DPS if you’re in a pinch and allows you to set up lanes much more quickly.

I like to start off mid by alternating turrets and rockets. I’ve had a little trouble with some of the ranged DPS, but once you get to level four you can push minions back easily and place turrets as you will. I tend to bury mine in creeps to make them a little harder to target and keep them close enough to attack as many enemy creeps as possible. By level five you should be pressing your opponent to his tower with little trouble. Start watching for ganks – they’ll be coming if the other team is intelligent.

From there you’re just trying to burn down that mid turret. I can easily take a turret before the ten minute mark. If your opponent leaves you alone, keep pushing. Encourage your teammates to join you if you can. I recently had a game in which I had aegis by the eight minute mark. We were knocking down the nexus before 19. It was insane.

For teamfights you should be trying to stay out of the mix. You want to be dropping as many turrets as possible for both the damage and the MR/AR reduction and the potential slow. Whatever you do, do not underestimate that slow. It will save your ass. It will save your team. It will get you kills.

As it stands, Heimer is an excellent pusher. I think he’s a great candidate for heavy AP builds, but I really prefer to run around blowing up turrets at level 5. If you were a Heimer fan in the past, give the new version a shot. I’d be shocked if you didn’t like it.

A few weeks ago I wasn’t seeing Gragas at all. Even after the buff he was beyond rare, relegated to nearly Katarina levels of nonexistence. Since then, though, he’s shown up more and more often, and since he’s free this week I thought it would be appropriate to run a State of the Hero analysis on the rabble rouser.

Gragas is a very deceiving toon. Most new Gragas players think AP is the best way to go, especially when they see how hard barrels can hit early in the game. Think of those things like a small nuke, though, and you’ll be fine. Attack damage Gragas is much stronger, mostly because of the low cooldown on Body Slam. Think of Gragas like Blitzcrank – plenty of skills to proc Sheen for tower pushing and a nice set of attack skills for laying down some burst damage.

The only time Gragas really has problems is at the end of the game. If you haven’t been playing strong – by strong I mean at least 2:1 for your K/D ratio – you’ll find it hard to blow through an opponent without some help. For the rest of the game, though, Gragas feels just fine. If you have some health regen runes you should find it easy to stay in lane with a little help from your passive.

The one thing I find problematic about Gragas is that it’s almost necessary to have Clarity. Without it you will have serious mana problems if you want your damage to scale relatively quickly. I would love to see a little buff to Drunken Rage, but it already provides so many buffs that it would be hard to justify increasing any one of them without decreasing another.

If you’ve not played Gragas, this a great time to give him a shot. Stick to your lane, pick your fights wisely and you’ll probably have a lot of fun. Who doesn’t want to be a big fat guy throwing around wine barrels for fun?