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.