Got an idea for a skin a few days ago, and figured an image is worth a thousand words. I’d definitely buy this skin. How about you?
It would be extra awesome if his Null Sphere (Q) was throwing small death stars. May the Force Pulse be with you.
Do we really need all these new mechanics?
I just finished watching Orianna’s champion spotlight and simply put, I’m confused. Not so much by her abilities (which frankly are confusing at first), but by the fact that seemingly every other new champion gets his own new mechanic. This trend started relatively recently and it makes me wonder how the game will look in 6-12 months from now.
When the game first came out we had simple mana based champions (with a few exceptions) with easy to understand abilities that didn’t take long to learn. Over time we’ve seen the addition of some other mechanics but none that really had a significant impact. And now we have mana champions, some that use health to cast spells, some that are limited only by cooldowns, energy champions, and two recent champion additions with Fury and Heat — the latter, Rumble, also has a unique ultimate targeting system (wow that sounds weird). Then we also have Karma that works a bit differently than other champions with her Mantra. There’s also now a bunch of champions that have double effects on their abilities, like Lee Sin, Renekton and again Karma. It used to be just Udyr and Nidalee. And this latest addition, Orianna with her ball.
Overall, there are both positive and negative impacts on the game by adding all these new mechanics. The negative being that new players might have a harder time adjusting to all the different mechanics, and honestly most of them aren’t really necessary. Sure, the champions are balanced around the mechanics but it would be much simpler to make some champions more or less effective if the abilities were simpler.
The good side is that some of these champions have a higher skill cap than others. If you want to play a champion as effectively as possible you do have to keep track of the amount of Fury on Renekton, make sure you don’t overheat with Rumble, etc. It’s good for the game and the players to have champions that are harder to play, but more rewarding when you play them correctly.
Should Vladimir be nerfed?
As a followup to my previous post, one of the hot topics for many months now is whether or not Vladimir is overpowered. It’s been about 10 months since he was released and has been a strong pick in both normal and ranked games, regardless of ELO. He’s often carrying games, whether in my favor or not, and frequently he’s extremely hard to kill.
Vladimir did receive a few nerfs over the past months, but none were of any real significance. Just last patch, his Transfusion (Q) spell got a slight nerf to the healing received, but it’s such a small change that will not impact him at all. Riot has been really careful with him in the past and apparently is afraid to make any significant changes to balance him, while at the same time they’re making stupid decisions for other champions and then revert it the next patch (take the AP Alistar for example).
The question of Vladimir being OP is a difficult one, as he doesn’t by default have any wonder-skills able to one-shot players, but his ability to harass, heal and deal sustained magic damage is certainly one of the best in the game. Let’s take a closer look at his abilities first.
Abilities
Q – Transfusion
At earlier levels Vlad’s Q is not as powerful due to the rather long cooldown, but as I’m sure you’ve noticed before, after level 9 he becomes a real beast with a 3-second cooldown. At max rank this spell deals 250 damage, and scales with ability power at a .6 ratio. Additionally Transfusion heals Vladimir for a not so insignificant amount: given enough ability power (say Rabadon’s Deathcap), a Hextech Revolver and/or a Spirit Visage, he often heals for 1/4 of his total HP. He can be especially annoying with cooldown reduction boots or even a blue buff, as the frequency of his “Q” spam is nearly impossible to handle.
W – Sanguine Pool
Sanguine Pool is no doubt one of the best escape abilities currently in this game. While seemingly the health cost to cast it is high, it pales due to its usefulness, and besides he rarely needs to cast it while on full HP, so the actual health cost is often healed by a single “Q” afterwards. While in Sanguine Pool Vlad can’t be targetted, he can dodge projectiles and spells already cast on him, and he can even dodge Karthus’ ultimate. Granted, he can be killed by DoTs like Ignite while in Pool. However, there’s more to this ability: it also heals Vlad for 12,5% of the damage dealt (scales with his max HP, which is often pretty high), and as if it wasn’t enough it also slows enemies on top of it, making it a great offensive ability as well.
You can use it to escape ganks, deal extra damage, give yourself 2 seconds — often enough for another “Q”, and slow down enemies while chasing. Lots of utility in a single spell, comparable to a 3000-gold worth of Zhonya’s Hourglass, but even better. The spell also used to speed up Vladimir while in it: it was never in the spell description, and I think it got removed a few patches back, but I’m honestly not sure if it’s still there or not.
E – Tides of Blood
Tides of Blood is also a powerful spell, dealing quite a bit of AoE damage as well as increasing his healing on subsequent casts. While the 70 health cost at max rank might seem high, it’s really not. Again, “Q” heals for quite a bit. The spell scales rather low at .45, but with the damage increase on multiple casts it can be really, really painful. Also helps him farm minion waves extremely fast, not like he needs any more help.
R – Hemoplague
Hemoplague, his ultimate, is insanely good as well. At rank 1 it deals 150 damage which granted isn’t a lot, but it also debuffs his target(s) to receive 14% extra damage from ALL sources for 5 seconds. In case you haven’t caught it, Vladimir and his whole team will deal 14% bonus damage to the targets affected. Since he can often catch 3-4 opponents with Hemoplague, the damage dealt by the spell and by subsequent casts by him and teammates can be more than deadly.
Passive – Crimson Pact
His passive, Crimson Pact, is also where the problem lies. If you’ve ever seen a well-farmed lategame Vladimir with 700 ability power and 4000 health, you know what I’m talking about. While most casters have to build some sort of defense and health items, Vladimir gets is completely free. Health pool without any resistances ain’t much of a defense if you’re being focused, but still it’s different when you DPS a Malzahar with barely 2000 HP, and Vladimir who maybe has a Rylai’s Crystal Scepter and over 3000 HP. Not to mention the fact he can Sanguine Pool away from harm.
Example time. I did a test and as a comparison, with Rylai’s and Rabadon, Annie has 2300 health, while Vladimir has 3000. Before you flame, yes, I realize it’s not the ideal build for Annie.
When I compare Vladimir’s abilities to those of Annie, Veigar and similar AP carries, he does indeed seem a bit overpowered. Not necessarily by damage and AP ratios, but by the ability to sustain himself, push lanes, farm extremely well, harass like a boss and consistently escape ganks. Most other champions don’t have that luxury.
What to Nerf?
So in order to tune his abilities to be more in line, I suggest some or all of the following:
1. Make his “Q” not heal him at all
Think about it: why would it grant him free healing? Mordekeiser uses health for his abilities as well, but I don’t see any of his abilities healing, unless he builds some spell vamp. Make Hextech Revolver a decent, upgradeable AP item and make it a core build for Vladimir, essentially giving him healing on his abilities via spell vamp stat. It would be especially fair for him to have to build a Hextech because he doesn’t need to invest any gold in mana regen items, unlike a lot of other champions. Certain ability costs would obviously have to be adjusted accordingly, but it could work.
2. Make projectiles hit Vlad in Sanguine Pool
I can’t remember any ability currently in game that allows you to dodge projectiles. If you locked a stun or something on Vladimir, regardless of Pool it should still hit him.
3. Nerf the passive
Seriously, this is one of the best passive abilities you can have. There are some similar passives in the game but I don’t find them nearly as strong:
- Singed’s Emepowerd Bulwark: Increases Singed’s health by 2.5 for each 10 points of mana he has.
- Nearly useless because you can’t exactly build Archangel’s Staves on him
- Rammus’ Spiked Shell: Rammus gains additional damage as his shell becomes reinforced, converting 25% of his armor into attack damage.
- A more than decent passive, but doesn’t give him anything gamebreaking
- Galio’s Runic Skin: Galio converts 50% of his total Magic Resistance into additional Ability Power
- Helps him poke you and farm better, but again nothing gamebreaking
Building a Rylai’s Crystal Scepter and a Rabadon’s Deathcap gives Vladimir about 400 ability power, a useful slow on his abilities (most notably the spammable “Q”, essentially making him slow you all the time), and almost 800 bonus health from passive, not counting the +500 HP Scepter bonus. I’ll do the math for you: it’s about 3000 HP.
100 ability power = 100 bonus health sounds far more reasonable. As far as I know there is no other caster (or champion for that matter) that can build pure damage items and get defense at the same time, at least not as a passive ability (Sion’s “W” springs to mind, but hardly comparable to a passive).
Would it make him bad?
I honestly don’t think so. It would make him play more carefully and build an additional item (Hextech), but he would still be a strong pick just as he has been since the day he was released. Some of his abilities wouldn’t have additional (unnecessary) utility, but they would still deal the same damage with my suggestions. It might make him less good, but definitely not bad.
What are his strengths?
- He can harass extremely well
- Farming is easy with 2 AoE spells and a strong single-target nuke
- He is very hard to gank, especially if he uses Ghost and Flash as summoner spells
- He doesn’t need to build mana regen runes or items (essentially enabling him to invest into either ability power or defensive stats)
- Very sustainable with “Q”, especially after level 5-7
- Decent team fight utility with the debuff on ultimate
- High health pool
- Really easy to farm and lasthit minions
- Quite often able to dodge tower hits with Sanguine Pool
Can he be countered?
Of course he can. I’ve found Malzahar, Swain, and Cassiopeia to be effective against him. Not only can Vladimir be countered, but there are currently several other more viable AP carries that are played in high ELO because they fit the team composition better. Still, Vladimir is in fact a frequent pick regardless. On the other hand, I think it takes far more skill to play the aforementioned champions, unlike Vlad who is fairly easy.
Needless to say on low/mid ELO ranked and even normal games, he stomps players with ease. So do many other champions, but Tryndamere and Master Yi don’t exactly work in ranked games, and are extremely rarely played vs. any decent players.
I know there’s tons of Vlad fans out there who may or may not realize it, but their favorite champion needs some adjustments, not to make him useless, but just enough to put him in line with other champions. All the aforementioned gives him great strength and it takes more than a -5% healing on “Q” to change it. If we can only pool our efforts, Riot might finally stop being negative and give Vladimir a well-deserved nerf.
As a final note, I do play Vladimir.
Patch Notes 1.0.0.118b thoughts
Although it’s rare, every once in awhile there comes a patch that’s just full of awesome changes. Necessary nerfs and buffs, and some new additions to our favorite game that make playing it just a little bit more enjoyable. This is one of those patches.
Mastery Pages
First (in my opinion) the most important change, the addition of multiple mastery setups. You can now create up to 10 mastery pages and switch them during champion selection. Battling with time is a thing of the past, and I for one am really happy to see this long-awaited feature implemented.
The best part is that it’s completely free. Unlike rune pages you don’t have to purchase any RP or IP to get additional mastery pages. I must admit, unexpected.
Summoner Name Change
Another question that has been plaguing me for awhile was why there’s no name change option in LoL. Fortunately, from now on for a rather small amount of RP you can purchase a one-time name change. I’m happy with my name currently, but I always hated the fact it doesn’t start with a capital letter, and might actually change that now.
Patch Notes
And last but not least, the full patch notes, along with my thoughts about the changes. Note that my thoughts aren’t based on any high-ELO experience.
Alistar
- Health per level reduced to 102 from 110
- Pulverize
- Ability power ratio reduced to .6 from .8
- Reduced the chance of failed knockups near terrain
- Headbutt
- Base damage reduced to 85/130/175/220/265 from 85/135/185/235/285
- Ability power ratio reduced to .8 from 1
I’ve found Alistar to be extremely strong since the last buffs. He’s melting faces all around, partly due to his lane dominance, sustainability, ability to harass, and impressive AP scaling on abilities. No longer though, as this patch reduces his base damage as well as AP ratios to a more reasonable number. Whether it’ll turn out well we’ll see, but I’m hoping he’ll revert to the previous roaming/tanking role, and leave DPS to others.
Annie
- Disintegrate
- Ability power ratio increased to .75 from .6
- Damage reduced to 90/130/170/210/250 from 80/125/170/215/260
- Mana cost reduced to 60/70/80/90/100 from 60/75/90/105/120
- Incinerate
- Ability power ratio increased to .8 from .6
- Damage reduced to 85/135/185/235/285 from 85/145/205/265/325
- Mana cost reduced to 80/95/110/125/140 from 80/100/120/140/160
- Summon: Tibbers
- Mana cost reduced to 125/175/225 from 150/200/250
- No longer gives experience on death
- Gold bounty increased to 50 from 15
- Now gains health per rank: 1200/1600/2000
- Now gains armor per rank: 30/50/70
- Now gains magic resist per rank: 25/45/65
- Lowered the duration to 45 seconds from 60 seconds
- Area-of-effect burn damage is now 35 at all ranks from 40/60/80, but now has a 0.2 ability power ratio
- Restored old animation (skip hop run) to Annie
I’ve never been a big fan of Annie, but her late-game damage was a bit lackluster. Hopefully this patch will fix some of her issues so we can get to see her more often.
Cho’Gath
- Reduced the chance of Rupture failing to knock up the target
Galio
- Idol Of Durand’s damage range now matches the taunt range
Irelia
- Bladesurge damage reduced to 20/50/80/110/140 from 20/55/90/125/160
- Transcendent Blades
- Now heals for 10% vs minions, and 20% vs champions.
- Ability Power ratio increased to 0.5 from 0.4
- Deals physical damage instead of magic damage.
- Scales with attack damage and ability power
Irelia nerf was for me unexpected, but at the same time completely necessary. Whether it’s low or mid or high ELO, she works amazingly well. Hard to gank, hard to harass, and overall great damage potential, survivability and sustainability made her one of the best, if not the best solo lane champions currently in the game. The worst part is that I feel these nerfs still won’t be enough.
Kog’Maw
- Updated recommended items
- Caustic Spittle
- Cast range increased to 625 from 600
- Now lowers both magic resist and armor
- Bio-Arcane Barrage cooldown decreased to 15 seconds from 17
- Living Artillery now scales with attack damage and ability power at a 0.5 ratio
- Void Ooze width increased slightly
In my opinion Kog’Maw has other problems, most of which aren’t addressed in this patch. Most notable his bad movement speed and lack of overall mobility/survivability. He makes up for some of it with his often massive range, but it just isn’t enough. Also, the fact he almost always has to build Madred’s Bloodrazor in order to do significant damage hurts him, as building magic resist works very well against him.
Rumble
- Junkyard Titan bonus damage on basic attacks no longer procs Rylais or works with Spell Vamp
- Flamespitter cooldown increased by 1 second
- Fixed a bug where Rumble’s ultimate would display the wrong team indicator on some machines with low graphics settings
I guess he doesn’t really work on high-elo as an AP carry, but he might need some adjustments (nerfs) to his abilities. The damage he can sometimes put out is insane, at least from my observations. I played him once but found him extremely boring for some reason, so I can’t really speak from his perspective.
Sivir
- Boomerang Blade
- Missile speed increased to 1350 from 1200
- Attack damage ratio increased to 1 from .95
- Base damage increased to 80/125/170/215/260 from 75/120/165/210/255
Once an average champion, that turned into a late-game monster, and now again (below) average. If you’re in need of an AD carry, Sivir is definitely a rare choice. This change won’t help with that I’m afraid.
Vayne
- Movement speed reduced to 305 from 310
- Range decreased to 550 from 555
- Tumble mana cost increased to 40 from 35.
- Silver Bolts base damage reduced to 20/30/40/50/60 from 30/40/50/60/70
- Condemn base damage reduced to 50/90/130/170/210 from 60/100/140/180/220
And another champion that I find boring to play for some reason, Vayne does deal quite a lot of damage, and is able to harass quite well at times. Overall damage will now be clearly lower, but I don’t see her popularity dropping significantly. Not yet at least.
Vladimir
- Transfusion heal reduced to 15/25/35/45/55 from 17.5/28.75/40/51.25/62.5
Ever since he came out I felt that Vladimir needed a nerf. And he got several in fact, but none of them were of any real consequence, and neither is this. Healing on “Q” spell is just a small part of his problems IMO, which I think I might make a full post about soon. Stay tuned.
Items
- Moonflair Spellblade combine cost lowered to 340 from 430
- Hextech Revolver’s Spell Vamp component is now Unique
Hextech stacking was just a dumb mechanic in my opinion, and something that Riot never intended. Plus, Vladimir’s “Q” was healing for insane amounts when he had 4, which I’ve seen pretty often.
General
- Only very long-range abilities such as Enchanted Crystal Arrow will cast using the minimap, other spells will no longer cast using the minimap.
- Cursor-cast spells, which cast at the location of your mouse cursor without requiring a left-click, will cast through parts of the UI (including the minimap) as though you were targeting the ground underneath
- The Havoc mastery now increases total physical and magic damage dealt by 4%, instead of increasing base physical and magic damage dealt by 5%
The first change is possibly because of the upcoming global ultimate nerfs. Right now I feel it only hurts Twisted Fate, as it takes him a split second more to use his ultimate. As for Ashe, I personally never fired an arrow by using the minimap, so I don’t care.
As for the Havoc mastery, I never even knew it worked that way. What a noob.
All in all there’s a lot of positive changes in this patch. I like it, and that doesn’t happen very often. If you have any opinions of your own, the comments box below is always available. Now, if they could only fix this…
Heroes of Newerth – a decent alternative?
These days mark the first anniversary for League of Legend’s rival Heroes of Newerth. The game garnered a lot of fans in the past year, although not nearly as many players as LoL. One of the biggest issues with HoN is the fact it costs $30, which certainly doesn’t help in getting new players, but the game is F2P during this anniversary (until tomorrow), so if you want to try it out now’s your chance.
I’m not really looking for an alternative to League of Legends, despite some of its flaws. But recently I’ve tried Rise of Immortals, another upcoming MOBA as well so I decided to give a shot at HoN as well. It was a very short experience for me, but enough to not make me want to pay for this game… ever.
I’ve played a total of one match. It’s unfair to judge a game by one single match, but any game that I’ve previously played I either liked immediately or didn’t like at all, so I felt it was enough to make a final judgement. I don’t like the game, and I won’t be playing it. There are players (fanboys?) who swear it’s a lot better than LoL or any other MOBA game out there and that it takes way more skill, but frankly I don’t care: if it’s not fun, it ain’t for me.
Granted, there are some positive things I’ve found from my short time with HoN. I did the tutorial and it was pretty well done: for example in the laning phase part of the tutorial it tells you not to autoattack the creeps and push the wave too much, something that players I see at 1500 rating in LoL still don’t seem to understand. It also tells you about lasthitting minions, which is again a very important aspect of LoL as well but very underrated at low ELO. The tutorial, while overall not extremely helpful, was nicely done, up to the point where the game froze and I had to ALT+F4 out of it.
HoN doesn’t use Adobe Air, which at least for me is a big plus. The client seems a lot better and more stable, and there’s no queues. The game also features built-in VoIP, which personally I don’t care about, but also a replay system which is something that LoL desperately needs: it’s coming soon though. In the one match that I did play, I admit I was rather confused: I ended up feeding with a total score of 2:19, and for some reason got matchmaked with players with way more experience than myself. Buying items was rather confusing as well, despite my previous (limited) DotA experience. Graphics are nice, interface is nicer, the map is a lot bigger than the one in LoL, or at least felt like it. And that’s about it.
While my impressions are short and not overly helpful, I just don’t see a reason why any LoL player would switch to HoN. I’m sure the game has it’s charms, but it simply didn’t get my attention. If you want to try it out, you can still sign up and play for free until tomorrow.
Riot, please fix this
I’m pretty sure you can afford to upgrade your servers, and there’s nothing “unusual” about a large number of logins because this is happening every single day for quite awhile now.
Fix it already.
Rise of Immortals – can it hurt League of Legends?
Rise of Immortals is a new MOBA genre game that recently entered the closed beta. I managed to sneak in to try it out and see if it brings anything new to the genre, and unfortunately I don’t have much positive to say, and it’s not just because of the NDA.
Basically, the game needs plenty of work still. There are like 9 available champions so far, and rather than selecting one before the game you actually select a character you want to play with before the queue. There are a couple of things that I did found interesting however, and would perhaps like to see something like it developed in League of Legends as well.
Firstly, the “social hub”. When you enter the game with your hero you can actually see him and other players, walk around, and queue for games. It’s kind of cool to see your character and others, making the game a lot more social than LoL is, but that doesn’t really have any gameplay impact. Rise of Immortals also has will have a PvE aspect, which I’m not yet sure how it’ll work but sounds interesting for a change.
And that’s about it. The gameplay itself didn’t feel any better or improved in any way, hero abilities felt kind of boring to me and overall I don’t see RoI becoming a force in the MOBA community. Dota 2 maybe, but RoI as it is now probably won’t take any sizeable chunk of players from LoL.
That being said, when I first tried League of Legends during the beta, I didn’t like it either, so perhaps I’m totally wrong. In fact I do hope the game turns out to be decent as I wouldn’t mind some worthy competition to LoL: might make Riot implement new features faster at least.
If you want to try Rise of Immortals, you can get beta keys from Alienware and GetBetaKeys.
Do you really need a jungler?
This post will go over some benefits of having a jungler in your team, and hopefully make you realize the importance of having one. I just lost a ranked game partly due to not having one and despite my low rating, I’m frustrated how people still don’t understand how vital jungling is to a successful team comp.
Hopefully this post will get you to consider playing one.
Why jungle
1. Jungle gets you same experience as laning
An efficient jungler should be close to the solo lane in terms of levels. You can even be a couple of levels behind and still do well.
2. You don’t have to worry about CS
It’s simple: being in a jungle means you won’t have to worry about other players harassing you, and you can kill every single minion. You do have to worry about counter-jungling though so don’t just afk farm, but jungle is often the safest place to be.
3. You get to choose when to fight
Nothing’s forcing you to come gank a lane. If you think you can score some kills or if someone needs help, or just defending the tower while they heal, by all means go. But if the lanes are pushed and there aren’t any opportunities to gank, often you don’t have to bother at all: keep getting that free gold and experience.
4. You can often steal enemy team buffs
If you see the other team’s jungler ganking somewhere and you’re too far to help, it’s a great chance to invade the opposing teams forest and try to steal the lizard or golem buff from them. Even stealing the wraith camp can set the enemy jungler behind, so take that into account as well. Once you get the feel for the spawn timers and such you’ll get better and better at it. And if the other team doesn’t even have a jungler, all the better: make sure the other team doesn’t get their buffs, ever.
5. Your top lane gets more experience
Another extremely useful fact about jungling is that one of your teammates will get a lot more experience and gold if he’s solo lane, usually top. If you’re asking why top, it’s typically because of dragon control.
6. You can set back enemies by ganking
Even if you don’t score any kills, just doing damage to the enemy champions or forcing them to use summoner spells to escape is still a success. You just opened a new gank opportunity or at least made it easier and safer for your team to farm. If you can make the opponent go heal, they most likely lost some XP and gold, which is again setting them back more than yourself.
7. You can easily help push turrets
Most frequently after getting kills or making the enemy team go heal, you can help push towers quickly, or try to backdoor them alone if there’s an opportunity.
8. You can get dragon
When an opportunity arises, such as getting a kill in mid or bot lane, you can go and kill the dragon. It gives a decent amount of experience and gold, the latter to the whole team. It’s an important map objective early and mid game and you should make sure you get it whenever possible (and safe); it’s worth about 2 champion kills in terms of gold.
What NOT to do as a jungler
1. Don’t die
That goes for any champion or role, but it’s sometimes extremely important for a jungler as well for several reasons:
- the enemy can easily get dragon/baron because they know they don’t have to worry about your Smite, besides having a 4v5
- dying in early ganks will frequently give your buffs to the other team. Going one-for-one is in most cases not worth it
2. Don’t take your team’s farm
We’ve all seen this happen: a jungler comes to a lane, fails a gank and then unnecessarily sticks around for a couple of minutes pushing the lane, taking your gold and XP. Unless you’re going to push or defend the tower, there’s usually no reason to stick around.
3. Don’t forget to take Smite
Yes I realize Warwick, Fiddlesticks and some other champions can jungle without the help of Smite, and yes sometimes having Ignite or Exhaust helps as well, but smite is the bread and butter of junglers. Here’s a few main reasons why you need Smite:
- Your jungling will be way faster – having a 400+ damage spell on a less than a minute cooldown speeds things up significantly
- You can’t get your buffs stolen – I’ve done it to others countless times already and it’s quite frustrating when it happens to you
- You can ensure Dragon/Baron kills – Smiting the monsters is a great way to burst/kill it quickly and ensuring nobody can steal it
4. Don’t fail with Smite
Just yesterday I’ve stolen a baron in two separate games from the other team with Lux’s ultimate, not because their jungler didn’t have Smite, but rather because he failed. Use it to finish off a creep, not earlier. Don’t smite early, not even when going for buffs in your own jungle: always asusme my Lux will be waiting just behind the corner and will laugh at your idiocy.
5. Don’t forget to gank
Sometimes there really isn’t a viable ganking opportunity, but more than often I see junglers who aren’t even trying. Always watch the lanes and make sure to be in the vicinity and take advantage of the situation.
6. Don’t forget to control Dragon
It’s extremely important that you make sure the other team doesn’t get a free dragon kill. While you can’t always prevent it from happening, you can frequently force the other team to give up on it or even gank them if you have a ward there. You may even be able to steal it with a well-timed Smite, assuming you took my previous advice and took it.
7. And don’t forget Wards
Dragon should almost always be a priority for a ward, but there are also other places that should be warded frequently as well. Great map control frequently wins games, and even if you have a support champion that buys wards all the time it doesn’t mean you don’t have to help out. In fact, it’s up to the whole team to buy and place wards, regardless of whether they have a support champion or not. You however are in a really good position to place them where necessary as you’re wandering around the map frequently, and you’re most likely to take advantage of them.
So there you go. In short this is a small list of the 8 main advantages a jungler brings to a game, which I’m hoping someone will read and perhaps benefit from it. While I don’t think I’ll be writing any detailed step-by-step jungling guides as there are plenty out there, if you keep these few tips in mind I’m sure you and your team will have a nice game. If you’re a noob and want to start jungling, Warwick and Nunu are pretty good choices to start with.
Got any questions or tips of your own? Add them below.
If you like the game, buy it
I was about level 10 or so when I figured out I really like League of Legends and knew I’ll be playing it for awhile. I gave Riot like $150 so far which is far more than what you’d normally pay for a game, but despite LoL being free if you really intend to play it then you’ll have to pay for it eventually.
I’m not all for the “support the developers” cause and whatnot, but I paid for the game because I want to be able to play what I want and how I want, and unfortunately it wouldn’t be possible otherwise. So far I bought both champion bundles, three 2-week IP boosts and about a dozen skins, typically when they were on sale. And since I’ve been playing for a year and a half now, I finally have (almost) all runes I want, 11 rune pages, and over 70 champions.
If you’re a new player that really likes this game and you think you’ll be playing it for awhile, buy some Riot Points. Buy the two champion bundles at least, because you’ll get 40 champions that would otherwise take quite awhile to buy. Most of the bundled champions cost 450-3150 IP points, meaning you’ll have to play like 30 games just to get one of those more expensive ones. It’s quite a lot and if you decide to buy them all with IP you will never, ever buy them all no matter how much you play.
Additionally, most of the newer champions are way more expensive as well, from 3150 IP to a whooping 6300 IP. Currently there’s 76 champions in the game: I’m far too lazy to do the exact calculation but if we take an average cost of 3150 IP that equals to almost 240,000 IP, or about 2400 games played. And that doesn’t include the high rune costs, additional rune pages or champions that will get released in the next 2 years which is how long it will probably take you to amass that many influence points.
The point of this story, don’t be cheap like some of my LoL buddies and consider buying champion bundles. Most of them are really fun to play and you’ll often need to have them to trade with other players in ranked games. If you ever played an MMO and paid a $20/month subscription, you got far less than what you’ll be paying for League of Legends.
Here’s what I recommend buying:
Patch Preview 1.0.0.118
Riot just posted the patch preview of the upcoming patch 1.0.0.118, bring us a new champion Vayne as well as a number of additional changes to champions and items. Also, a new stat is introduced called Tenacity.
Here’s my take on the latest changes.
Items
Tenacity
Tenacity is a new stat that will replace the existing crowd control reduction effect on Mercury Threads. I’ve been having this problem in almost every game: most of the time you simply have to build Merc Threads for the CC reduction, and the added magic resistances help a ton as well. Whether I’m playing a tank, carry or support these boots are usually what I build, and by adding three new items with the Tenacity stat we’ll now have some alternatives:
- Cloak and Dagger (Cloak of Agility + Dagger + 200g = 1450g) +20% AtkSpd, +20% Crit Chance, +25 Tenacity
- Moonflair Spellblade (Blasting Wand + 430g = 1290g) +50 AP, +25 Tenacity
- Eleisa’s Miracle (Philosopher’s Stone + 400g = 1200g) +25 HP/5, +20 MRgn/5, +25 Tenacity
While I like the change and think Tenacity is indeed a great stat to have, unfortunately I typically won’t be building these items. Personally I’m not a big fan of cheap items as more than often I’ll need the extra inventory slots for something far better. These items are just dirt cheap and there’s no reason to build them aside from getting Tenacity, which just in case you were wondering doesn’t stack. Merc Threads even have +35 Tenacity, making it a better investment anyway. While these last two items might actually be built often on support champions, I simply don’t see a carry or melee DPS making the Cloak and Dagger item; what’s the alternative, Berserker Greaves?
Sunfire Cape
Sunfire Cape is having it’s passive damage nerfed by 5. Not sure where this change is coming from or why this item was OP, but in terms of stat per gold cost it wasn’t really worth building for quite some time now. The most benefit you get is that you get more assist gold in team fights as a tank.
Wit’s End
Here’s a change I actually like: Wit’s End now doesn’t steal mana but rather stacks magic resistance per attack (5 MR per attack to a total of 20 MR). I rarely built this item and when I did it was mostly because of magic resistance, so adding more will be great.
Champion Changes
- Shen‘s Ki Strike and Vorpal Blades nerfed, but the ratio on Ki Strike is doubled and now scales off of max health
- I guess Riot’s waiting to nerf all ultimates at once
- Nerf to tanky Jarvan
- Nocturne‘s damage being reduced
- Good change in my opinion because he deals surprisingly high damage even with most tanky items, much like Jarvan. Even though tanky Renekton was nerfed last patch, I feel he’s still a bit too strong.
Karthus passive duration nerfed by 1 second, and AP ratio on ultimate reduced by .1
- Karthus surprisingly (?) gained popularity in the past few weeks and I’ve had a tough time dealing with him sometimes in solo queue. Being able to DPS people while dead seems a bit OP and in my opinion completely unnecessary: if you ask me that passive should be completely removed. His ability to farm is extremely high and fighting against him late game can be a real bitch: there’s no amount of magic resist that helps against his 700-1000 ability power I often see. Also if you look at it from this perspective, Karthus’ ultimate is the highest damaging spell in game right now, so the AP ratio reduction may not even be enough.
- Gangplank attack speed and armor per level buffed, more melee attack range, lower cooldowns on Remove Scurvy (W) and Cannon Barrage (R)
- Sometimes I get the feeling that Riot simply doesn’t know what to do with Gangplank.
And what didn’t make it in this patch preview but is about to happen are some interesting Kayle changes:
- Nerf to passive
- Righteous Fury now 100% uptime and adds 40% cooldown reduction, and a slight range buff
- “Q” spell debuff now applies to whole team and not just Kayle (reminder: increases damage done to the target by /10/12/14/16%, depending on spell rank)
- I’m guessing these numbers will be nerfed
- Some mana cost and ratio changes
Note that this is still subject to change and might not make it in this form. Unfortunately her ultimate will not be changes, which in my opinion is what needs most work.
Overall there’s some positive changes and some confusing ones, but as usual we’ll have to wait and see how it turns out.