Jozrael

I'm not official really. Riot is the only officialness. That being said, I do make it somewhat my business to know what's going on in LoL, and I don't mind keeping friends updated too . I do want to intern there as soon as I can afford to live in CA though :\. Being a dependent on the east coast makes this somewhat implausible atm.

As for twitch, he is being nerfed further, but they don't have the specifics pinned down yet. Others getting the nerfbat are Udyr for sure, and everyone is yelling at Riot to tweak Poppy.

ManWithAPlan

someone ought to suggest they add anti backdooring like they did in dota. It's too easy in this game.

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In the end we are but wisps

Zeraph

They have many times. The short end is that they like it how it is. I tend to agree. there are plenty of counters.

Vaultboy

My only problem with backdooring is that mega-dps-ers like Yi don't always give you enough time to counter. Sure, you can often kill him, but not before he gets the tt and rax.

__________________
"Failing tastes of bile and dog vomit. Pity any man that gets used to that taste."

Lasereth

Currently on my longest losing streak ever in LoL. 8 straight losses. I used to be 24 wins up and now I'm 15 up. I play different champs based on what my team needs but every time it's like we're against waaaay better players. Udyr and Shaco have been behind at least half of those losses, and Kayle behind the other half. Udyr at level 11 won against me as Pirate and my teammate as Nasus, both of us level 9. Total BS. And Shaco...how the hell do you even lane against him with exhaust and ignite????????

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"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

Jozrael

Re: backdooring. There currently is a backdooring bonus that towers get. If there's no minions around they receive bonus armor and MR. That's about as far as Riot wants to take the mechanic (the #s have been tweaked many times, and I'm sure they'll receive more in the future).

Personally I think when the TP scroll mechanic is implemented it'll solve most of that.

@Lasereth: There's a LOT of champions that with some luck and skill can 2v1. That being said, Udyr is dumb right now :P. He's shut down in big teamfights by CC, but that's about his only weakness (and a slow, if durable, earlygame).

Shaco is interesting. I recommend getting a ward for your lane and keeping him down. If you're soloing ask for help. If you're dualing and got outplayed early ask for a laneswitch (sometimes even having your solo come deal with him). You don't want shaco getting a good earlygame or you're in for big trouble later.

Zeraph

Hey Joz, I think I may have found a bug with Twitch. This only seemed to happen when he used his ult. He had boots, frozen mallet (doubt those two matter) malady, and madred's blood razor...I always forget the exact name, but the expensive one, that does a % of magic damage (may or may not matter.) Anyway, I'm pretty sure malady was procing off twitch's passive, his poison. Possibly even madred's. After only getting hit 2-4 times from twitch's ult, I'd run away and watch my health fly down. I was getting hit for 30ish damage multiple times a second. And I could swear an occasional 60ish, but the numbers went by so quick I couldn't tell. And I mean a *lot* of damage just from this poison damage, this went way beyond his normal passive. I saw huge chunks of health come off. IIRC twitch's passive is 2 damage and can stack up to 6 times. Which is only 12 damage...So unless they changed him recently, or malady is supposed to proc off poisons (ya right..)

Zeraph

Woot, new personal record. 32 kills, on shaco. I looked at the clock at one point, the 15 minute mark, and I had 10 kills, I was getting a kill about every minute and a half, lol. The whole time this song was running through my head.
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta shaco
lol

Lasereth

I finally broke my losing streak last night. I lost 10 in a row but then I decided to dick around with Teemo since I hadn't played him in a long time. Well something clicked and I dominated every match I played as him. I had really high kill to death ratios every match and ended up 6 levels higher than the enemy team a couple of times. I also adjusted my runes and changed up my masteries and summoner spells. Either way it's really working out with good ole Teemo!

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"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

Zeraph

Nice. Teemo is quite fun to play. One item you may want to try with him, as it's not obvious, is nashors tooth. Most teemos I see play him as pure carry and don't pick up any mana regen or CDR, which means like 1/3 less shrooms than they should be putting out from lack of mana regen alone. And a simple chalice is a waste of a slot most of the time.

With the CDR and mana regen from nashors, plus my little bit of mana regen from seals, I can put out nearly twice the shrooms that teemos without any CDR or mana regen can. And shrooms = win. Also nice to have extra mana for blinding shot. I like to start with a meki pendant + pots and harass the crap out of them. So far it hasn't failed. I can 2v1 a lane like that, and with a competent partner keep them hugging their tower.

I've even kept back cho's with a regrowth pendant, ashe's with health pots, etc.

Jozrael

Tooth is MADE for Teemo :3.

Vaultboy

I've never played Teemo before. Or Ashe. They just seemed too much like sniper and drow respectively, who I also seldom played on dota. Maybe an -ar or -rd mode in LoL will change that - or if Joz lets me mess around a bit in high elo games, like with Kayle (who i still suck with).

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"Failing tastes of bile and dog vomit. Pity any man that gets used to that taste."

Lasereth

I've won like 8 or 9 in a row as Teemo now. Last match was like 17-3-15. I like this guy way more than I thought I would!!!!

__________________
"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

Zeraph

copy cats! ;P

Jozrael

I typed up a pretty long epic reply here, but realized that most of it was pretty focused on me, which some here may not necessarily find interesting. My latest blog post contains a couple things about Elo, but mostly my history with LoL.

---------- Post added at 11:38 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:31 AM ----------

Back on topic: LOL PANTHEON.

Zeraph

I read it. You must have traveled in time to scalp my teemo build! :P Actually that's pretty cool we both came to the same conclusion.

How do you know what elo the games you were in are? Or were you estimating? I thought no one ever knew except the top 200 (and even then only once every month or more) and very few random people below that from forum posts.

Jozrael

All I can say is it was exactly 1637 at 9pm on 1/10/10.

---------- Post added at 01:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:05 PM ----------

And now to try to convince them that Pantheon is OP :P. Gogo playtest!

Zeraph

No fair!

Pantheon? New champ?

Jozrael

Open to all on the TR awhiles ago ;o.

Gragas I'm undecided on. Everyone seems to think he's UP, but I think he needs a bit of metagame cycling. I think pantheon will quickly become very situationally OP, even if his ult will be worse than useless in unskilled hands.

---------- Post added at 04:51 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:46 PM ----------

Up again.

Jozrael

2k Parrrley crits are hi-larious (when it is your ally). We did some theorycrafting and it could go much higher. It's awesum :3.[COLOR="DarkSlateGray"]

(Btw, why did automerge fail me T_T. Now I can't delete the doublepost :P).

Zeraph

It doesn't auto merge if the time difference is greater than 10-20 (ish?) minutes or so, as it should be. Since you may be posting something new we wouldn't know about it if it merged.

Meh, I don't play the test server, too busy playing main. Too IP starved :P The no fair comment was that you got to see your elo ><

Parrrley is halARRious. The pirate, is such a random character, being such a crit based one, then with his ult being random damage too. Then of course he has a cleanse/heal on a 25sec CD... I've only played him a handful of times but had 2 or 3 insane games with him where it feels like I'm on god mode because I get all my good random damage at all the right times. I don't usually taunt, but I kept telling the enemy team I was a pirate jedi :P

Zeraph

Damnit, runes are too expensive. Especially the 820 ip ones. There is almost no reason to make them that expensive, especially since they don't make money off them and the 820 ip ones aren't any more powerful than the 205 ip ones, or they aren't supposed to be anyway. Especially considering how many champs there are and that each one needs a slightly different rune build.

Now that I'm working on runes finally, I'm trying to build a crit dmg rune page for shaco... it took me like 6,000 ip for like 8 runes

Jozrael

Actually, more expensive runes may very well be more powerful, they polled competitive players months ago on which were the best runes and priced based on that. It's -CHAMPIONS- which aren't supposed to be priced according to power.

Zeraph

I thought runes were based on math? How can math lie? Or did they intentionally imbalance them? Considering how new runes are and how old that poll must have been that can't be very accurate. It certainly can't be 4x of a difference. I can see a 1-200ip difference, but 600ip differences?!

They make in game items balanced, like 8% crit vs 14hp regen. I don't get the disparity in cost. I can understand if they want to make money. But if in game items followed the same code, regrowth pendant would be like 200g, and greaves (8% crit or whatever its called) would be 800g.

I don't get the difference. Buying MP5 or HP5 runes would be an early game advantage just like buying the regrowth pendant would vs greaves. Its like the same balancing formula.

Jozrael

First off, subjectivity plays a large role in all these things.

Items in game are balanced for a healthy metagame, not based on math. For example, Riot felt that survivability was too cheap/accessible/overpowering, so they gave survivability items a 10% nerf in effectiveness across the board (in addition to heavier nerfs to Catalyst and others). Giant's Belt for example is way less effective than its original implementation (which was fricking godly, lol. It was 500 HP for 1000g, or 2g per hp. Then it was 500 HP for 1100 gold, then 450 HP for 1100 gold, then 450 HP for 1150 gold, then 430 (or is it less now?) HP for 1150 gold). These aren't based on comparing a math equation to crit chance, but just how they want the metagame to evolve.

Runes were implemented a LONG time ago, and rather badly at that. There have been a couple revamps to specific runes, but it's still a case of balancing for the metagame rather than easy math equations by this point. When the Store came out, instead of rebalancing all the runes to make them as equal as possible in strength, they fixed the edge cases (HP quints way OP, MPen runes way UP) and just priced on popularity.

Again, I don't really mind. It's kind of the same thing with Champions: some people are outraged that they price them differently (regardless of whether they are tied to champion strength or not). I just think it's good business. Most all of the runes I buy are the most expensive ones, because they are my favorite. Doesn't really bother me, because I still don't feel the prices are excessive. I play a bit more than the average casual player but far, far less than a hardcore player (when I played 18 hours a day sometimes back in beta :P).

Pricing is just so subjective.

Zeraph

I don't know man, I just know this isn't a full game like say Dragon Age origins. If I want to buy everything I think its like 45$ + an ongoing rate for IP and/or exp boosts + hours of game time. That's like an MMO, yet this is a fraction of the depth of one. And I have not been all that impressed about their ongoing balance tweaks so far. This game is the size of something more along the lines of a one time buy of 30$ like HoN. I love that there's a free option, but I feel they went a little over board with some of their ways to make money.

Lasereth

I don't care what anyone says, Heimerdinger is OP right now. His rockets are absolutely ridiculous. I have been solomid Teemo here recently and there is nothing you can do versus those rockets. Jesus christ they hit so hard, and the range is ABSURD. I know the range is being nerfed next patch but still. He didn't even turret nest...he just saved all his mana for the rockets and kept me at bay very easily. I could barely stay in EXP range or I get hit by them. I killed him once with a balls to the walls Exhaust/Ignite/Blinding Dart/Red Potion/stand my ground thing but he got me to 1/10th HP and I should have died to minions. And that's versus HEIMERDINGER. AS TEEMO. Then in team fights he would waltz up, fire the rockets, and whoops there goes 1/4th the life of my entire team, not to mention is stun grenade which is hard to dodge in a team fight. I can't believe how he just shut down our team completely. At 15, with me at 12, I couldn't solo his turrets, literally. 1v1, versus ONE of his turrets, I'm dead.

Just raging ATM

__________________
"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

Zeraph

I know. Its funny. I keep seeing people say how much hemier sucks. But they just haven't seen good ones. I also just recently realized AP increases his turret damage as well. And he's support. Also something people don't realize is that his passive heals real turrets as well. I've sat next to and defended nearly dead turrets and brought them back to nearly full. He can actually push or defend very well (as support, not solo) its just there aren't very many good hemiers + most teams won't work with him. They don't let him get a foothold later game.

Although I don't think he's overall OP, just early game missles vs non healing type champs.

Jozrael

Personally, I don't feel Heimer is OP. It has to do with champion diversity. There are a number of things Champions can be good at: CC, burst damage, AoE dmg output, farming, leveraging items, map mobility, etc. There's always going to be one Champion who is the absolute best at any one thing: this doesn't necessarily mean that they are OP, just that that's their niche. Balance has to take into account the Champion as a whole.

Heimer's rockets hit mega hard right now, but that's pretty much the limit of his burst. Assuming he's not fed, he's not going to be the bane of your team with smart play. What he is exceptional at right now is guaranteed, constant harass. I'm not sure how big the range nerf on his rockets is going to be, but it's going to help. A healer shuts down Heimer's biggest asset, since pretty much any (including Alistar) can outheal his harass with the long rocket cooldown. With healers being unfavored in the current meta due to strong -healing mechanics, this means he's generally a very strong earlygame pick for a team right now.

Zeraph hit the nail on the head with his last sentence: he picked out Heimer's niche. If your team can't find a way to deal with that, or at least minimize its effect and leverage your own strengths elsewhere, then it's either a flaw with your team composition or your play/teamwork.

(This being said, he DOES hit ballin hard ><).

Re: overpricing. As I said, subjective. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I not only respect yours but agree with your reasoning that LoL is not as complex as a MMO. Keep in mind though that that is not the main thing determining business model. LoL has a long, indefinite cycle similar to a MMO, unlike a box product. Their pricing scheme falls in the 'reasonable' category for me, but that's just my opinion and has no greater weight than yours or anyone elses.

(P.S. boo multitasking, lol. I accidentally referred to Wesnoth instead of LoL everytime in this post before I caught myself :P)

Jozrael

Zeraph

Nice post. And lol at the players in denial in that thread. Its really annoying how above average everyone automatically assumes they are.

People supposedly want a challenging game, yet still think they should be winning nearly every time. And if they aren't, its someone else's fault. This is the real reason why most people can't handle PvP oriented games.

Jozrael

That's in a nutshell, yeap.

Lasereth

Just got my first ever quadra kill in LoL. I did it as Teemo. Ha ha ha ha ha ha

Black Cleaver + Bloodthirster + me on the sidelines while the team fight happens, artillerying away = DEATH@!!!!!!

__________________
"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

Jozrael

Haha nice ^^.

I think I'm gonna play some Nunu for awhile once I get back, but Teemo sounds interesting too. Gotta start saving up for Nidalee :3.

Vaultboy

I think I'm done with LoL for now. Too much frustration, too little joy (constant balancing/updates, crap MM, leavers, afkers, moaners - its only worthwhile if I'm playing in premades these days. At least then you ride together, you die together).

ME2 and Dragon Age will keep me suitably occupied for the next while.

__________________
"Failing tastes of bile and dog vomit. Pity any man that gets used to that taste."

Jozrael

Sorry to hear that vaultboy . I will miss you when I log back on.

By chance, did you read my post on enjoying LoL?

I do agree premades are stabler (especially if you're not properly rated). /Ignore for moaners, leavers and afkers are tough to handle .

Will miss you!

Zeraph

Yeah, I'm getting sick of the community too. I know its not MMs fault but the people. I get people who are trying a new champ or have connection issues in almost every game. So its always so one sided. And if its not the odds are I have to listen to some idiot adolescents bitch at each other. I'm only playing enough to get my win of the day in pretty much. At least until they release a new champ. Then I'll play a little more, then go back to win of the day (if that).

Perhaps the one sidedness stems from the lack of good support characters and how well the offensive characters do. With so much dmg flying around its a lot easier for games to snowball. I'm thinking perhaps AD needs a 15% nerf, and AP needs a 10% nerf (both of em across the board, including base). Offensive runes could also use a nerf, I think you know which.

Champs can tower dive way too easily, or tower dart more like. That is they can run in, cast a ranged nuke, and run out before getting hit. Or literally tower dive, run in, kill you and get away. You can be standing next to the tower and still get hit and they can get away. That isn't right. The towers are already long enough range, I think nearly all ranged nukes with decent damage need a nerf to their range (skillshots and pure mages withstanding; I'm thinking of nunu, kat, etc). There are already too many champs that can harass you or kill you past the range of your tower with skillshots. Letting nonskillshots do this is like a slap in the face to the champs that actually have to aim their skills. This would also help with gank-snowball effects. The only other thing I can think of would be to add an AOE slow effect near towers.

Or something to those effects. Perhaps slows could use a nerf (as that's often what allows early ganking snowball effects.) Nerf carries slows the most, tanks should be mid, and support should have the best slows/cc. And protective effects (sans healing) like jana's shield could use a buff. The defensive tree could also use a buff, I should want to use that tree on all my characters (if I like it), including mages and carries. That's how they designed them. But that's obviously not how they work. Mages (9/0/21) have a spec, tanks (0/21/9) have a spec, and carries (21/0/9) have a spec.

PS Oh and one more solution would be to decrease the death timer and decrease gold and EXP gain on kills. Death timer is already fairly short so I wouldn't shorten that too much if at all. But gold and especially **EXP** gain from kills should totally be nerfed. Talk about snowballing effect, twitch kills 10 people and is now 18 while everyone else is still 9-11 and also now has gold for IE and something else (actually happened yesterday, he also got center lane). He can now 3-5 shot the entire team with ult. GG. WTF? Since when should 10% decide an entire game?

Jozrael

No offense, but a lot of what you suggested has (imho) very negative effects on the competitive metagame. Let's parse!

First off, biggest suggestion I have to you is /ignore and /mute (I never remember which is permanent). The instant an enemy says something that affects my mood, they're /ignore'd. I give more leeway to allies, but I'd rather ignore them than let them rain on my mood all game, even if it means I miss info.

I'm not sure how to help you with leavers/discers, etc. All I can say is that literally less than 5% of my games have a problem with that. Trying a new champ, eh, I don't see the big deal. To me what draws me back to a game over and over is friends and community. Sorry that a bunch of us aren't around, but try to make friends in random games that you can at least premade with. Maybe you have some RL friends who'd be interested.

Personally I don't feel offense is too high; I was very happy when they nerfed survivability items across the board. However, support champs are too weak. The reason they aren't designing anymore atm is the current ones aren't played enough. They want to figure out what they're doing wrong and fix that first before they make new ones. The patch notes for the patch today are a godsend IMO (with a handful of exceptions...really Riot? Pirate needed a harass buff?), with critdmg runes being nerfed. Personally I think they need to redesign that mechanic, but time will tell.

Re: tower diving. The problem here is that people want different things. I personally love that tower diving is so easy. It makes harassment effective. If you've been harassed out of your lane, you've been harassed out of your lane. Call for backup and heal up. If they're pushing and they're going to take the tower, they deserve it imo. Tower diving from full to zero is considerably less rare; generally tower diving happens when people judge they have enough hp to remain in lane, and their opponents can burst them down. I view towers as a strategic element, not a zone of safety. Again, this is all very subjective. But making towers much more effective at defending champions will really restrict aggressive play in the meta, which I view as beneficial.

Re: masteries. Being completely redesigned. Guinsoo feels your pain and he's working on them. They look AWESOME and much more fun (there's going to be several viable builds per tree, with multiple top tier elements to choose amongst, I believe you only get one).

XP gain on death streaks is being reduced, not sure when (or if already). Also keep in mind that kill xp is dependent on the one dying. It's 3/4 of that level (i.e. if it takes 3000 xp to go from level 5 to 6 and you kill someone at that level, you get 2250 XP). This means that there are many mechanics to limit boundless snowballing.

Also, snowballing is a Good Thing. It can be taken too far, but games that can't be closed are no fun, nor is it fun to significantly outplay a team for 20 minutes and then just get stomped from one bad team fight. I don't really understand what you mean by 10% deciding an entire game, or how much you played DotA: carries are FAR more tolerable than they were there (where it was possible to literally 5v1 with no gimmicks).

That being said, if you're getting tired of LoL, take a break! (But please come back later). I'm so damn excited for season 1 you have no idea. Riot's had a lot of what we've been asking for done for awhile, but they're going to release it all in one big celebration.

(That being said, todays patch had probbblems, we were way too busy on #lolsupport ><. I hope season 1 release is smoother, and somewhat soon).

Zeraph

I actually have quite a few LOL friends. Usually 8 or so are on at a time. But its hard to set up games unless you don't mind waiting an hour an watching your list like a hawk since people jump into games so quickly. Usually only 1-2 are available, and most of the time they're far below my elo. Fine to play with sometimes, but we almost always get killed. Not helping my problem.

Wow, you're lucky. I seriously tend to get 1/5 of my games have leavers or ppl with serious connection issues.

Glad we agree support is too weak, and riot does too? Groovy. What's to ponder though? Just buff their abilities.

Well, I don't have a problem with tower diving normally. In even games and such where everyone knows what they're doing. But like I said, I'm trying to think of ideas where lopsided games have more of a chance to be even. This was just an idea. Cause I'm really sick of flippin Yis and Warwhicks (or from leavers, when you add in all that, its like nearly 1/3 of my solo queue games) leaving me with a champ that shouldn't solo soloing 2v1 and getting bashed the crap out of and no one will come to help me. So I end up leveling slowly, and get no gold at all.

I wrote it before I noticed the patch, yay.

Yay masteries being worked on.

10% as in 1 champ (out of 10) can decide a team game. In that game I mentioned I was actually doing well as fiddle and had 5 kills at around the 20 minute mark. Twitch, the next highest, only had another 5 kills than I yet he was 6 levels higher and could destroy whole teams from safety. In other words, 5 kills and one champ should never decide a game. This is a team game.

Shrug, in my games snowballing is a bad thing. Right now about 40% of my games are decided in about 15 minutes. Maybe 20. Well before the surrender mark. They often go to 30-35 minutes because solo queues don't know how to push and this game let's you defend a bit too easily if anything, but it doesn't keep the games from being decided any earlier.

I think we're having a bit of a communication issue. If anything I want it to be easier to push. i just want the rewards for killing champs to be toned way down. Right now that's the main objective of the game for the first 25 minutes or more, yet taking down buildings to win should be.

Vaultboy

Heard there was an update, so I dl'ed it and played last night. Weird thing is my ingame ping went from a normal 170-ish (150-180) to a stable 240 last night. MY FPS rate also fluctuated too much: from 38-60 FPS, which it doesn't normally do either (not since the Morgana bug). Made it untolerable. I checked my connection ping and its still the same as usual. Did they make changes to the map or something to increase the ping?

__________________
"Failing tastes of bile and dog vomit. Pity any man that gets used to that taste."