Original League of Legends (LoL) Thread

Lol, changing the title doesn't do THAT much imo.
I've deduced who it was, but I think they'll stop now, seeing your reactions.
Edit: also for those who don't know about it..

 Spoiler

Just post a picture of a QSS with a similar caption, oof.

 WHY IT SUCKS TO BE NEW AT RANKED (apparently)

<KoolKalvinz> uve played ranked?
<biohazard504> yep
<KoolKalvinz> i just assumed u smurfed
<biohazard504> first few games of ranked
<biohazard504> was like
<KoolKalvinz> and played against pomegranatety palyers
<biohazard504> "im new to ranked"
<KoolKalvinz> so
<biohazard504> "WELP pineapple YOU IM GOING JUNGLE KAT"
<KoolKalvinz> the same pomegranatety players
<KoolKalvinz> u were playing previously
<biohazard504> except with bigger number obv
<KoolKalvinz> except now u know factually and numerically they are pomegranatety
<biohazard504> 1250 is seriously like
<biohazard504> random luck draw
<biohazard504> and if you let on that youre new to ranked in any way
<biohazard504> your entire team will just troll you
<biohazard504> and intentionally feed
<biohazard504> what is it with the community
<Rayquaza2233> biohazard504 : is that actually what happens if you admit you've never played ar anked game before
<biohazard504> Rayquaza2233: yep my first ranked game
<biohazard504> said i was new but would work to form teamcomp and pomegranate and tryhard
<biohazard504> three people lock in
<biohazard504> take smite
<biohazard504> kat rushes for blue
<biohazard504> biulds dorans blade
<Rayquaza2233> ...
<biohazard504> all the AP's stack AD
<biohazard504> and i'm just sitting there going wtp
<Rayquaza2233> I think this is an isolated incident.
<Rayquaza2233> At least, I hope so.
<biohazard504> this has happened four times
<biohazard504> out of six games
<Rayquaza2233> wtp
<biohazard504> to be fair jungle kat didnt do too bad
<biohazard504> but they were duoing blue and wolves as jungle kat and jungle leblanc
<biohazard504> then splitting buffs
<biohazard504> Rayquaza2233: four games were like this
<biohazard504> one game was neutral
<biohazard504> and one game was "hey youre new ill help you out"
<biohazard504> "what do you play the best"

<Thorns> teemo and kog are similar in that their damage comes from on-hit, but teemo is tanky dps and should be played as such

[IMGSPOILER=es #1]http://i.imgur.com/iFl3A.jpg[/IMGSPOILER]

Oh man, I just played a brutal laning phase with my irl friends. Naturally I was playing Skarner.

Teemo vs. Cho'Gath + Skarner top
Maokai vs. Kennen mid
Annie + Skarner vs. Sona + Caitlyn bottom
Master Yi jungling

Annie was recently introduced to LoL, so she got paired with me so she wouldn't screw up a solo lane. We lost the tower pretty damn fast unfortunately. The adversity we faced early game was soon turned around with good teamwork and top elo strategies. Even though Maokai played like Chu8, I learned quite a bit from this game, both due to the fact that dire circumstances were thrusted upon me, and there's a comparison mark between me and the rival Skarner.

--------------------------

Now having said that, here's what I think is a good general-purpose lane Skarner build:

Exhaust and Ghost for summoner spells. Apparently my rival agreed with me here.

I went with 0/21/9 masteries, but I'm looking at 8/21/1 as well. Not sure which one would work better.

AS marks, but otherwise typical tank runepage setup.

Start with Q if you're up against melees, or if you think your lane partner can back you up. Otherwise, start with E.
R > W > E > Q skill order. Even though you don't get longer suppresses from leveling up R, it has an effective 1:1 AP ratio, and is the most "bursty" of any of your skills.

Regrowth Pendant --> Philo Stone
Boots --> Mercury Treads
Sheen --> Trinity Force (core DPS item)
Build tanky, or get Rageblade if you're having a boner.

Start with Regrowth Pendant + pot. Build it into a Philosopher's Stone, so you can survive laning phase and not go OOM as much. Seriously, Skarner has mana issues early game, but they pretty much disappear late game. This is in part because some items give you a mana pool increase, and if you want to, you could get blue buff with decent speed after you have Sheen. But back to laning phase, Skarner is quite vulernable to harass. W and E are his sustain skills, and E is the safest way for Skarner to get some CS.

Q is intentionally kept at level 1 because it drains your mana the fastest compared to W and E, and chances are his laning can become craptastic against certain setups. But it's still great for getting Sheen procs, since it has a low CD, and the procs come every 2 seconds at minimum. Seriously, Sheen has better deeps than a couple levels in Q, unless the opponent builds armor.

Mid to late game, Skarner can't survive getting focused, so you'll want to have tank items soon. For this reason, I am unable to suggest sparing much more gold on DPS after Trinity Force.



EDIT: zOMG Skarner's easter egg actually shows up consistently in LoL Replay xD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJXbJNO7F-4

Just got a loss where the enemy team got heavily carried by a Kat with 2 warmogs, Atmas and magic pen shoes, and our Amumu's only source of MR was his merc shoes.

I'm back from 3 days of going out with friends, having fun, and not think about LoL. Played two games tonight and here they are!

 Full 5-man premade with my IRL friend, his bro, Corn, and Duel

Early on, the worse case scenario happened. For whatever reason, Duel wasn't playing well on GP and was constantly getting instagibbed by Eve and others in his jungle. As a result, he was underleveled quite badly and was basically shut out from jungling.

Fortunately, things were going well for us. I was going against an enemy Malzahar, but I soon figured out how bad he was. I was constantly outfarming him, and whenever I saw Malefic Visions killing off my allied minion wave, I would retreat back a bit and farm back up after. I was 20-30 CS ahead of him by 10 minutes, and hit the 200 CS mark by 23 minutes (a new record for me; never hit that point so early in any typical game).

Meanwhile, my friend - on Galio - was having a farmfest too. Going against a Taric, that Taric didn't do damage, and my friend simply freefarmed like nuts. To give you an idea how bad the matchup was up top, my friend had 180 CS by 23 minutes while the Taric had only 40 CS.

Also, Corn hit the 200 CS mark before the 30 minute point.

So besides Duel getting his ass raped (and us cringing every time we saw him get slaughtered), it was a lot of turtling going on (not a lot of action, maybe a few kills here and there). Eventually, I snagged my first kill: catching the enemy jungling Cho'Gath coming out of the brush in mid-lane. I dropped my Null Zone, then ulted him while he was in the Null Zone. His HP sank as fast as an 100lb anchor, and I gave him Malefic Visions to finish him off. (Now I didn't have to worry about a full-stacked Cho threatening me or my team)

Besides one horrible mistake I made, I did very well. In fact, our team did very well in teamfights, dominating almost every one of them.

 All-AoE team

So as a joke, one of my IRL friend's friend decide to put together a premade composed of champs who had AoE abilities (in terms of our team composition, only our ultimates were AoE). In the beginning, me and my IRL friend - on Galio - harassed the hell out of bottom early on. As Sivir was tower hugging getting ready to head back to the fountain, I decide to shoot her just to make her a bit miserable. To my utter surprise, I see her HP drop from 200-something HP to 0, heard "first blood" and +400 gold. Gotta love having 30% crit chance early game.

On the other side, their GP got fed, and he eventually got the Atmog combo, which made him harder to kill since he was partially tanky. However, things eventually turned our way, and we managed to force the other team to surrender.

Next up: Get back up to 1250 ELO and get bronze designation. >_>

 Terrible things have happened in this game.

Too much 1v1ing and insufficient ganking made GP miserable. Oh sure WW tried to gank, but Skarner is too speedy, not to mention he trolls with ample slows and saved a few teammates in ganks gone wrong.

Most satisfying moment of the game for me: the enemy Janna was going around with Oracle's killing our wards, so when a 5v5 team fight broke out in mid, we did our thing. But I noticed that Janna was going to run when things went downhill for them after Brand got owned. She didn't get very far as I chased her down. She screamed to no avail as I dragged her back into the clusterfk, then I went straight towards the front of the fleeing column of champs, slowing everyone as I went. I was almost like a wall of slowing going at 500+ MS and attacking 1.5 times per second.

I also downed a tower from full to zero in one push. Crazy.

I also downed a tower from full to zero in one push. Crazy.

Those are always fun to do

I didn't realize that the IEM qualifiers went on over the weekend. I have some catching up to do, but from what I read...WHERE YOU AT TSM!?

 Epic game....featuring the first real tank I used back when I was a nub

So I decided to bring out my trusty 'ol armadillo out for this game. Haven't played him much ever since I started using Amumu and discovered how godly he is in killing teamfights.

Things were really bad for us. When Janna accidentally kses Malz for one of our kills, Malz starts spazzing and goes afk for a bit. So we were somewhat screwed, except we managed to barely hold on.

The other team did get baron once. The second time around, we got a brief sight of the other team doing Baron. Seeing Baron was low, I decided to pretty much run in, taunt, and ult Baron in hopes of stealing the kill. I did get the kill, but I got killed upon attempting to roll out. Worth it, though. That was the turning point; with the Baron buff, we were able to defend a bit much longer.

Late, late game, upon realizing Baron was up for the 3rd time, we decided to check if the other team was there. They were all there, but I was in first, so that prevented them from pulling any surprises on us. By this time though, I had my full build: I had 340 armor and 230 MR; if they tried to kill me, it would be hard, long, and painful (lets talk about having over 500 armor and almost 400 MR with my Curl on). We were able to scatter them (Vayne at this point could hit quite hard), then make a big push and take out the inhibitor (I managed to tank the turret without the help of allied minions >_>). We decided to go back after they all respawned.

With Baron not being taken, we decided to check again. They were there doing it, but they saw us and came countering us. We quickly decided to split up and have Vayne and Shaco run to the now-exposed Nexus and BD the hell out of it. Meanwhile, me and others would remain on site to poke around and provide a distraction. That was enough to secure the victory.

I still reported Malz for being a huge as'shole though >_>

Also, since I thought our team was eventually going to lose, I simply decided to partially tank myself up and get a Philo Stone and HoG just to generate as much money as I could before we eventually lost. Though as we were turning things around, I had gained enough gold to start getting very tanky (eventually sold off my Philo Stone and turned HoG into Randuins)

For the record I told claw I didn't want to 5man premade last night but he drug me there anyways lol.

It was like midnight and I was super tired just wanted to play a casual game but ended up getting
counter jungled hard by enemy eve and their jungle cho who warded my blue most of the game.
They also had a pantheon come join in on the ganking a couple of times.

I couldn't gank anyone because I was underleveled from being ganked in my jungle setting me back in gold
and exp, also all 3 lanes were pushed to the enemy tower 99% of the time so it was pretty crappy setup.

It got me frustrated at first but then I kind of shrugged it off and caught up in levels and started warding the map and getting
every dragon that came up. Also did what I could to hand out buffs to the appropriate people as often as I could.

That kind of stuff happens alot in 5man premades and usually I can deal with it but I was already out of my normal by playing
jungleplank instead of fiddles or lee. Not gonna bother with games like that when I'm tired lol.

This is probably my 2nd last research dump on Skarner. More optimal matchups led to better results in exploring Skarner's "OP" side.

I'm sure many of us have fell victim to Ashe's permaslow at some point or another. Skarner's Crystal Slash is a lot like this, with additional qualities and detractors.

For one, it has a "windup" time in that the first Slash does not slow. Subsequent Slashes however slow your victims, and this is an AoE effect that can disrupt a team, and also synergizes with Fracture, which is Skarner's healing ability. Pumping points into Crystal Slash makes it hurt quite a bit, and can be considered significant extra damage if you compare Skarner and Ashe auto-attacking someone to death, at least until Ashe gets a lot of AD items. Skarner is much more vulnerable to CCs unfortunately because he is most definitively a melee champion in nearly all respects, only topped by Udyr. To compensate, Skarner has high base speed (320), and he gets an MS bonus from Crystalline Exoskeleton (up to 23%), and is able to catch up to opponents much better than Ashe can. Last but not least, Slash is an actual spell proc as opposed to Ashe's Frost Shot toggle. This means you have the option of charging up Tear of the Goddess ridiculously fast (if you have the mana to fund your spells), and/or you can abuse the crap out of Sheen effects. While Slash does not damage the tower itself, the proc bonus you earn plus Crystalline Exoskeleton's AS bonus lets Skarner do some serious damage to towers when he is able to.

Because of Crystal Slash's windup condition, use of it early game should be reserved to chase away champions or kill them outright. Using it to farm minions should only be used if your turret is being threatened; Fracture does much more damage for its mana cost. With Slash spamming avoided, your mana can hold a little while longer until you get Philo Stone, then you should last much longer in terms of sustain.

Crystalline Exoskeleton has me conflicted, and definitely has an anti-fun pattern built in: optimal use is not clear. Clearly you would want to use it to attack champions and kill them, and the bonus effects plus the damage buffer certainly allow for this. That is, until you face against a champion with a potent burst combo. If he is able to break your shield immediately, you might find yourself with much longer cooldowns than anticipated, which leaves you even more vulnerable. Base CD on Crystalline Exoskeleton is a little longer than most spell CDs. This begs the question of whether it's better to use it to survive burst damage, or use it for arguably better benefits post-burst surviving. This may probably have to be judged on an individual basis.

Anti-fun aside, if Skarner has a large amount of CDR and AS, he can be in "steroid" mode for as long as he has 60 mana. Crystalline Exoskeleton, along with Crystal Slash, is Skarner's bread and butter skills, and can allow Skarner to do some split pushing by himself. I don't believe he should be doing this if there are a lot of MIAs or the adjacent jungle areas aren't lit up with wards, but still he is definitely one of the better champs to do such a task, as he has decent DPS vs. towers, and can clear creeps with good speed (as opposed to the likes of Shaco or maybe even TF).

One mark of comparison in champion ult power is the amount of damage that can be done. First impressions of Skarner's ultimate Impale leads to the complaints about the short duration and the low base damage. As awesome as it would sound to drag people around forever, Impale is one of those cases where it's pretty miserable for the enemy in a 1v1 situation if they don't have a long lasting slow or some other CC or a way to block Skarner's slow attacks.

Here's how I like to think about Impale's power. When you start up your permaslow on a victim, the effective time you have to attack him before he can reach safety is multiplied by a factor. Mathematically speaking, this factor would be [distance to safety] / (1 - [slow %]). While Impale only allows you to drag your victim at least as far as a Singed toss or maybe even a Blitzcrank grab, the fact that your victim is slowed means the effective distance you dragged him is multiplied by the same factor. Bonus! This results in the victim taking much more damage total than a "sheer damage" ultimate (600+ damage at lvl 3; Impale is 200 + 200 at lvl 3). Obviously there are things like flashes and whatnot, but that's kind of the same story for a lot of champions with similar mechanics.

Use of Impale puts limitations on Skarner. I've already stated that Skarner cannot hurt the suppressed victim with anything other than DoTs and Impale itself. However, the victim is still wide open to attacks from anything else. Skarner also can't use Fracture for whatever reason while Impale is active. Not that you'd want to anyways, since you'd be busy dragging him around anyways, and Fracture has a cast time. I'm honestly not too sure where this would make much of a difference, and I only learned of this because of slowing down and pausing my replays. Additionally, the utility of Skarner's ult can be diminished by CCing Skarner.

Overall, I'm finding myself more and more satisfied with how Riot handled Skarner on release, but I would still like to see them address issues about his survivability and contributions to a team fight. The fact that Skarner is quite vulnerable to kiting does not help his case.


EDIT: You know the part where I said you can't hurt your Impale victim? That was complete and utter bullshyt and I facepalmed myself quite hard. You still can't auto-attack him or use Fracture though.

 Epic game....featuring the first real tank I used back when I was a nub

a) use the [IMGSPOILER] tag, it saves space ;_;
b) dat Nidalee build

[spoiler=Played a perfect game with jungle tank Cho'Gath in ranked - feelsgoodman.jpg][/spoiler]

I gotta say...this is one of the best games I've played using jungle Cho in ranked.

So while I was stealing the mini-golem camp after the 1:40 mark, Akali happens to wander over...and facecheck in the bushes where a bunch of my teammates were watching over me. We kill her easily for first blood. After stealing the golem camp, I do my jungle route, then ganked mid and took out Cait.

Bottom was also doing very nicely; the Ashe at bot was doing very well and eventually would be one of the carries on our team (besides me). We slowly take out their towers: bot went down, then top, then mid.

Overall I have to say that I got the majority of my kills from catching people out of position, then nom nom noming them down. Like for instance, when a Nocturne tries to Paranoia into a small patch of brush up top targeting Teemo while I was right next to him.....that was a free kill right there.

(Though I nearly got killed by Ignite while my team was wrecking the enemy Nexus.....)

Riot just uploaded a Blitzcrank champion spotlight 0_o

Just encountered a 5-man group consisting of Blitzcrank, Alistar, Leona, Maokai, and Orianna. Three of them had Clarity too. Holy fking crap that was annoying!

We adopted the strategy of getting more sustain than them, since we had a Soraka on our team. It shouldn't be too difficult, since generally CC moves have inferior damage. Irelia would just walk in and soak up all the CC, while the rest of us would spam MR and BV. I was Anivia this time, because a friend wanted to be jungle Skarner. Figured I would give spellvamp a spin to help assist replenishing Anivia's already fragile HP bank, and I managed to stay relatively healthy most of the time.

http://www.facebook.com/notes/leaguecraf...7107032983

They posted a preview on the changes Riot is doing to Soraka and Sona. Soraka got nerfed pretty hard.

Lamest changes since the kayle rape.

http://www.facebook.com/notes/leaguecraf...7107032983

They posted a preview on the changes Riot is doing to Soraka and Sona. Soraka got nerfed pretty hard.

Soraka too good! Sustains carries too much, and saves teammates from certain death!

Edit: (As of 12:01 PM PST) Did the chat system go down again? I just logged on and saw no one on my BL online....when usually there is at least 10 people on at this time. :f6:

Lamest changes since the kayle rape.

A primary goal is to nerf sustains in general. They've definitely done that here, but I agree, this is an overall nerf to Soraka's viability. The changes to her ult are disgusting.

@Will, your internets failed or something.

I can forsee that the only change will be a rush to get Janna for AD Support bot, and the other team just gets lumped with another Support if they choose.

Before all the healing, Janna was considered the best support anyway, so it will just revert to that again. I also wonder why they plan to nerf Sona's Ratio more when its already ass.

Before we used to have Taric/Sona/Soraka/Janna bot, now we'll have Taric/Janna/Zilean bot.