That’s right folks – we’re on YouTube. Each week I’ll be providing a video wrapup for the Champ of the Week along with my usual writeup. And now it’s time for shameless plugs: like the video, subscribe, feel free to drop comments. I promise I’ll be checking them.

Master Yi was an odd champion to kickoff the video spotlights, mostly because it can be so damn hard to dominate with him. If the planets don’t align just right, I end up doing pretty much what I show in the video. I get a decent number of kills but I die a lot too. I overextend. I play a little recklessly. You get the point. In a lot of ways, those mistakes are also where Yi’s magic lies. He can streak under a tower at mach 10, snag two kills, and get out. It’s rare, though, to be able to do that often.

Yi’s biggest problem right now is survivability. Meditate does give him a little boost, and really I love the way that skill is designed. It has no ridiculous passive stats like Garen’s Courage. It’s not a giant shield. It totally disables Yi while he’s doing it, but it’s an enormous bump to his survivability. It needs something, though. As I mentioned in the video, well over half the champions in the League have a way to interrupt Meditate and several of them have more than one.

Build
I take a Cloth Armor and 5 pots into the jungle, grabbing a long sword and another pot or two at my first recall. I try to stay out at that point until I have Madred’s Razor, then I’ll go for my rank one boots, finish Wriggles, then finish boots. I follow that with a Ghostblade, after which pretty much anything goes. If I’m not having survivability problems, I’ll take an IE or a Bloodthirster. If I need to stay a live a bit longer, it’s GA or Banshee’s Veil.

If I Could Change One Thing
If I could change one thing about Yi, I’d give him a CC Immunity during Meditate. I do think his healing would need to be reduced, as would the AP ratio. I don’t want to kill off AP Yi, but if he can’t be stopped in Meditate, short of bursting through the massive armor and MR buff, it can’t heal as much as it does currently. I think the change would offer him some very unique gameplay.

That does it for Master Yi. If you’re in the mood for a manic play experience, give him a shot. He’s not the most durable champion, though, so make sure your Flash is close at hand. This week’s Champ of the Week is Morgana, so be sure to check back for updates on her. I just lost my first game with her (out of four) and I’m not happy about it.

This is sort of a combination introduction and mid-week analysis post. I had so many long posts earlier this week that this just didn’t make it into the rotation. Without further ado, allow me to introduce this week’s Champ of the Week: Master Yi.

I’ve played Yi with the kind of analytical focus I use for the Champ of the Week series in the past. Back then, it was “The Great Yi Experiment,” during which I tried to assess his viability in ranked. This time around it’s a little more of the standard Champ of the Week fare, focusing on builds and strategies.

I’ll say this from my games so far – Yi really seems to do best out of the jungle. He can be decent in lane but he runs out of mana pretty quickly and prior to level six he doesn’t have any reliable methods for getting out of danger. His primary method of harassment also randomly instakills creeps, which makes it easy to end up pushed against a tower.

Yi’s jungle can be a little iffy, though. It’s very random, at least until you get a few ranks of Alpha Strike or a Wriggle’s. He can get low in the early levels, too, which is why I don’t usually play him against a Lee Sin or Nunu or any other invasive jungler. Once he gets that Wriggle’s, though, he’s easily one of the fast junglers in the game, which makes him a deadly mid-game ganker. I’ve had a lot of success piling on kills in the mid-game, which allows me to snowball to late.

Check back this weekend for the Master Yi Champ of the Week wrapup. In the meantime, leave your questions and suggestions in the comments.

It’s just a couple days after I first mentioned the great Yi experiment, but I’ve had the opportunity to play him in quite a few matches and I’m feeling a lot less twitchy and much more confident on the Fields of Justice. As you can see from the screenshot I’ve been holding my own with him, and he’s helped me rank up to almost hit 1500 ELO (just three…more…points!). I’m also starting to realize that Yi’s redesign has helped him a lot, and made him very sturdy, even with an AD build. You still really have to watch out for stuns, though. They will be the bane of your existence.

For a long time I thought Ghost was a Yi necessity, but I’m really coming around to Flash as a better alternative. It can help you avoid stuns, and once you have Yuomu’s, your Highlander/Yuomu combo will be as fast as most ghosted players. I’ve also stopped focusing on the Wuju buff so much because after the first rank the benefit is negligible compared to successive ranks of Meditate. For the most part that has worked well.

If you have other tips, I’d love to hear them. My build runs based on my farm. It’s almost always Madred’s Razor -> Yuomu’s unless my farm is unusually good, in which case I’ll jump straight to an Infinity. From that point I’ll go Stark’s or Last Whisper depending on my opponents’ armor stack, after which it’s just a matter of managing your incoming damage and trying to avoid stuns while working your way toward the enemy casters/carries.

This patch included a lot of changes, so I’ve been taking my time playing through the various champion tweaks and remakes to get a good sense of where everyone stands.

Outside Kog’Maw, I’ve spent most of my post-patch game time on Ashe, getting a feel for just how much Hawkshot would change the game. It will. A lot. I can’t believe she gets a free CV on a 60 second cooldown. Just unbelievable.

I’ve also been playing a bit of Morgana to test out the Dark Binding changes. I really like having the damage upfront. It doesn’t change the fact that her ult is totally cleansable, which sucks, but it’s nice to have a bit of burst for a last hit and some lane damage.

I played one game as Gangplank and remembered right away what I don’t like about a lot of melee toons – they have no way to close the gap. Toons like Jax and Pantheon have leaps to get on top of the target. Hell, even Yi has Alpha Strike. Without a similar skill, melee just takes an eternity to farm to the point that they can be useful. Even with the Raise Morale changes I found it extremely difficult to contribute against Kog’Maw, Ezreal, Pantheon, Kaiser, and Shaco.

Pantheon is still crazy strong, as I mentioned in a post about Shurelia’s Q&A. Heartseeker damage is so high and so hard to avoid that it’s easy to get him rolling early. From there you just need to pick your battles wisely and it’s pretty easy to get a win. He still struggles against tanky teams because his DPS won’t outscale their health in the late game, but if you get a good enough farm in the first 20 minutes or so, the game won’t be lasting much longer.

The only major rework I haven’t messed with is Veigar. He’s still ultra-squishy with low mobility, putting him about the bottom of my barrel.

A friend of mine really likes Master Yi. I try to understand, I really do, but at the end of the day all I see is a toon with no escape mechanism and no team utility. If your opponent is bad enough he can be fine, even great, but if your enemy is mildly competent you’re going to have some trouble. To some extent his problem can be blamed on the fact that he’s melee, and melee toons have it rough. You have to throw yourself in harm’s way and hope you can live through the CC and burst long enough to get your damage in. As one forum poster put it, “when will melee DPS be viable?”

Here’s what Phreak had to say:

Melee DPS poops on kids in Treeline. It’s going into matchmaking soon. Melee DPS being underpowered is simply a function of 5 people being able to burst down 1 melee DPS super quickly. Champions like Udyr, Tynda (sic), and Mundo are able to kite in and out and heal or shield themselves, ignoring a lot of the burst out there. Yi can do similar things with meditate, I suppose.

Mostly, I feel like melee DPS does really well in small battles, and then in the larger ones seems to require a good support champ like Morgana or Kayle to keep him alive vs 5 champions. Otherwise you need to use supreme discretion to get in and out. Generally you should grab Cleanse. Ghost isn’t a bad option either. IMO it’s a different playstyle.

I agree with him for the most part. Melee toons have to choose their battles very carefully, which is why a full melee team rarely succeeds. But played well, I think melee is just as viable as any ranged. Most ranged suffer, in fact, from a reduced health pool or slightly lower damage. I’ve had some excellent games with Nasus, a toon with no escape to speak of, simply through smart play and the Ghost/Cleanse combo. It’s all about picking your battles, and making sure your teammates can help support you on your way to close the gap.