October 2012 - League of Stories

What Do I Say?

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My brother asked me why I hadn’t written about this game yet. I told him the reason I hadn’t written about it was because I didn’t know what to say! I’ve given it a fair amount of thought and I think it would be best to go through the chronological order of what happened, what I bought, and how the other team died.

Morgana lost lane at level one. I haven’t checked the replay to see what she was doing. Maybe it was an extra strong leash for her jungler, maybe she was still in base and was AFK, I’m not sure. What I do know is that if you show up as a level one Morgana against a level two LeBlanc you had better be willing to eat some free harass. Morgana ate two spells and an auto attack when she showed up to lane. Silenced, no counter attacks. Another Q put her down to ~125 HP. She was under her turret while I last hit minions. I rolled up to level three and Morgana was still level one. I had 45 CS to Morgana’s 25. She would cast her puddle from under her turret and then just hide there again. This was great because it pushed the lane! I could keep it balanced and just abuse the space to zone Morgana!

I had about 2500 gold when I went back to shop. This was a big decision for me. Normally, AP mids go back rather frequently to replenish mana, buy wards, get potions, etc. I didn’t have any kills, but I was well ahead. I justified a risky purchase. I bought myself a Mejai’s Soul Stealer. Without any kills I knew I had to start farming champions in order to snow ball this game in a way that I wouldn’t fall off late game.

Morgana kept her distance from me. I was wary of her jungle Malphite because his ult combined with her ult could kill me. Then Morgana made a mistake. Her jungler was top and she rushed me. She hadn’t hit me with a snare in the game up to this point, but she figured she would just go for me and hope for the best. The combo hurt. I saw myself drop to about 150 HP. I was starting to panic. Morgana was critically low, but her ult was about to get its second tick and finish me off. With no alternative I hit Morgana with everything I have. My last desperation Sigil of Silence finishes Morgana off and I survive to see another day. Two stacks.

The only other time I came that close to death was when I over-extended and ate some mean damage. I was walking away with ~1/4 HP. I start to recall and see as Caitlyn starts to ult me! I have no idea how much damage this ultimate is going to do to me. I look at my pathetic health pool and try to calculate my chance of survival. With no way to make my passive proc and no team mates nearby the bullet crashes into me taking me to ~30 HP. Sweet! I start walking back towards creeps from mid tower and my whole team starts freaking out on me. Ok, they’re right, I should go back and heal!

There were a couple highlights from this game. One was the fact that I dodged three Malphite ultimates. He was a good sport about it, claiming after the game “I pride myself in those ults” and acknowledging that he had messed up a couple times. The last one I dodged actually caught one of my team mates. It was as we were diving the fountain to get 45 more gold out of Maokai. I blinked past Malphite to full combo Maokai and as I returned to my initial position Malphite ulted my team mates. They were sacrifices to the lazer gods.

The other highlight that I thoroughly enjoyed was when we were sieging the enemy base. We were standing in mid lane and the enemy team knew we would eventually get their base if they didn’t make a stand. Yorick, being the brave soul he is, led the charge for his team. We all stepped back from this strange act of aggression by the other team. Well, not all of us. I hit Yorick with a full combo. He walked into my range, he showed signs of aggression, so he deserved it. I was already at 20 stacks by this point, but my DFG was a huge initiation, and the ridiculous burst from Sigil of Silence followed by an ultimate version of Sigil dropped him to just a few hundred HP, which quickly disintegrated when I blinked forward on top of him. The enemy team immediately started to retreat. That was a great battle!

After they let us take their middle tower I just abused the walls of their base to pick people off. I was so fed I could blink over the wall, lead with DFG and gib someone in less than a second. This accounted for most of Caitlyn’s deaths.

This was the best score that I can remember getting in a Ranked game. I was very nervous picking LeBlanc early and getting counter-picked with a tanky team comp and Morgana. It’s very intimidating to see the enemy team picking champions like Yorick, Malphite, and Maokai because I know they are going to be inherently tanky and difficult for me to kill. Last item would have been Void Staff and I think I even had the cash for it, just didn’t get a chance to go back and buy.

Also, for the record, Lux/Panth beats Cait/Mao.

Good Game Lost

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Put it in the record books: Shen support beats Blitz support. Blitz was looking at making the “big play” all game. That’s why he started mana crystal instead of boots. So level 1 Shen and Sivir just ran at me, Blitz whiffed his hook and then tried to play catch-up.

I don’t even need to go into detail about this game. I was +8 kills over deaths. No one else on my team was positive. Next best was top who was only -2 as Jayce. So pathetic. In team fights Renekton and Diana would just throw themselves at me. It just made me laugh that even if I used Arcane Shift and Flash I would still have a bruiser on top of me and my team would be looking at making “big plays”. I was stuck attacking Renekton through his Guardian Angel and Diana through her ridiculousness.

I asked my team to peel for me. Blitz said he would. I said I needed Darius to be peeling for me in fights as well. We never had another team fight. People just got caught out and died and the game was over. I tried to pass a surrender vote, but instead two people voted no so we waited an extra 20 seconds to watch them physically destroy our base. I don’t know if people just wanted to give the other team the satisfaction of destroying more buildings or if they were too stupid to realize that the team they had fed for the last 36 minutes wouldn’t be able to drop our base that fast. No one spawned before the base was destroyed except for our AFK Elise.

This was a normal game, but I’m pretty sure this is what elo hell feels like; people not knowing what they should be doing and just wanting to make “big plays” but they just fall behind in gold. Sivir did pass me in gold, but that was after I had wrecked her in laning phase. She managed to pick up four kills right near the end of the game as my team got caught out. She had a better team, I had a better K/D.

/ff

Item Discussion: Executioner’s Calling

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Just a small foreword of who I am: I did four years of accounting stretched across both High School and College. I was accused of cheating on math tests twice by authorities. I completed Stats 2040 in College when I was 18 years old and haven’t touched math as a subject in school since. I have played League since beta. I love everything dealing with numbers and good discussion. If I have a mistake in here please point it out. I would much rather discuss items and their value than have false information up here and be leading people astray! Thank you, and enjoy!

I recently saw Executioner’s Calling be built in a tournament game and I felt a bit sheepish. Of course I know what it does! It’s the lifesteal crit chance one. Sure, it’s cheap. Is it cost effective? How should I know? I’ve never bought it before!

I don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of. It doesn’t provide any real defensive stats, so it can’t be considered a bruiser item. It only costs 1350 gold to finish, so it can’t be a late game carry item. It doesn’t look like it fits a class, so I disregarded it completely and forgot that it exists.

Now that I’ve learned the error of my ways I want to do a bit of math to see if I can justify this purchase on an AD carry. I picture this item on Draven. The crit chance matches perfectly with his passive. The damage over time matches perfectly with his passive. The life steal is extremely high for the gold cost. So let’s do math and see what we can find.

First, let’s just see if it’s gold efficient. Life Steal as a stat costs 45 gold per 1 percent Life Steal, or 450 gold for 10% Life Steal on a Vampiric Scepter. Brawler’s Gloves are slightly less gold efficient than Cloak of Agility (gloves are 50 per 1%, cloak is 46.11 per 1%), but are close enough that value isn’t lost. The adjusted values for Life Steal and Crit Chance are 42.27 and 45.55 per 1% respectively.

The completion cost of the item is also quite low at only 500 gold, putting the completed item at a measly 1350 gold.

Now I’m going to be looking at the 117th line of this spreadsheet (you may have to pick a tab at the bottom) that I graciously thank rayshu86 for. He says that the item has efficiency of 94.03. To take a closer look at this let’s multiply the values that Executioner’s Calling gives by the values that we know the values for.

18% Life Steal X 42.27 = 760.86 gold

and

15% Crit Chance X 45.55 = 683.25 gold

which is 1444.11 gold. So, this item is actually worth more than you pay for it, and that’s probably where the high efficiency rating comes in.

Something else I wanted to mention that probably not many people know: Life Steal and Crit Chance are the two most expensive stats that a player can purchase in League of Legends with their respective values. The next closest is Attack Damage at 38.61 and Cooldown Reduction at 32.95. You’ll notice that this is dropping surprisingly fast compared to the 42 and 45 costs we used in our equation.

I can’t make any conclusive findings with this simple math that I’ve done. Eventually the item only sells for 945 gold, which means that if you do buy it and end up selling it you would lost 500 gold. However, one cannot argue the value of Life Steal as popular carries have recently been rushing to get a Bloodthirster to have that added lane sustain and traction in a duel. Also, with relatively new changes to key items I believe that Life Steal has more value than we give it credit for. It’s up to you whether or not Executioner’s Calling makes a comeback into our current bot-lane meta.

Penta-Honored!

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I am going to show you the score screen from this game, but I don’t want you to get mad at me. I specifically gave this post this title to show you that the other team was having a good time too. I got five honor from this game, three of it coming from the other team.

We were having a LAN at my place to practice up for a future AHGL tournament and I needed to have fun. Having fun is an important part of a LAN. We had some good games, I’ll post about that double quadra-kill later, but for this game I had a short discussion with my fellow LAN players. I suggested that each of us play the strongest possible champion for our lane.

Team comp was Pantheon with Lux in bot lane. This was something that Jake and Jeff had done time and again. They always love it. I picked LeBlanc for mid. We had Teemo go top. We had Shen in the jungle. Kill lane bot. Ridiculous burst mid. Annoying shrooms top. Over-powered ultimate in the jungle. We knew we would have a good time. Let’s see what we’re up against. This is when my heart began to sink.

Pause for effect…

The other team looked nasty. Akali and Rumble. How can they have both?! Don’t both of those play top? I know Akali is going to kill me mercilessly late game, but I don’t know how I feel about Rumble. Bot lane for the enemy team is Taric and Vayne. Taric has a clean disengage with his stun. Vayne has a great distance creator with her E. Vayne is also running cleanse. The enemy team has a Riven jungle, who also scared me, as she is highly mobile, and normally too thick to burst down quickly. This Riven had won ten of her last ten games as reported by lolking. I was discouraged. Bot lane was discouraged. This game is starting to look better and better.

If bot lane could get their feet set I knew it would be a race to most kills. I managed to get First Blood from Rumble. I normally would recall after getting a kill that early, but I hadn’t burnt through my potions yet, so I stayed in lane. By the time Rumble was back I was level four and he was still level two. I took advantage of this level discrepancy and killed him again. However, despite my success in mid lane I didn’t have anyone on my back. By the time I got my third kill on Rumble bot lane was legendary. They had gone to work on Vayne and were just destroying her.

This bot lane quickly escalated into late game by keeping Vayne at a monstrous 0-15. I had managed to zone Rumble completely from creeps, keeping him from precious gold and even more precious experience. However, Akali, as expected, was able to take me from full health to completely dead in less than two seconds. My triple blink potential wasn’t enough to keep her off me. I had ventured top once or twice to help secure some kills in top lane, but Akali’s late game is very fun to witness.

It was around the middle of this game that we had a nasty revelation; Vayne wasn’t worth any money. We found that it wasn’t worth a summoner spell or an ultimate to kill her. She was only granting us about 15 gold per kill. We knew what needed to be done. We needed to sacrifice Lux to the feeder.

Vayne felt very comfortable around us by this point. Earlier in the game we had actually cornered her, murdered her support, dropped her to ~150 HP, and then walked around bot jungle with her. Lux, Pantheon, LeBlanc, and Vayne, a lovely looking posse. Lux was in a constant panic after I shouted out “don’t attack her!” to the guys in the room. Vayne eventually stopped walking and just started to recall, three enemies within a ranged auto attack’s distance. I tried to tell her to stop, then just gave Pantheon the go-ahead. He stepped forward and used the pointy end of his spear to cancel her recall. It also awarded him 15 gold.

Now we wanted to have a similar situation; Vayne caught by herself so she wouldn’t be able to escape or bring her team mates into battle, and have her attack Lux. Eventually the situation arose and Vayne took the bait. However, immediately after finishing off Lux she ulted, rolled, and then flashed to get distance from a then 10-2 LeBlanc. I had no intention to kill her, we simply needed Vayne to be worth money again. I congratulated Vayne on her heroic ability to run away so cleverly, and Riven interrupted to tell Vayne, in all-chat, that we let her have a kill so that she would be worth money again. I scolded Riven for having such a terrible idea. Of course we wouldn’t do such a thing! Vayne simply outplayed three very fed champions while she was 0-16! It could happen! Don’t crush her dreams!

The feast continued. We were chatting with the other team, they were chatting with us. We were apologizing that the game got so skewed so fast. They were very understanding. However, the wouldn’t surrender. We never asked them to, it just seemed strange to be down so many kills and not surrender. So we developed some more games.

I started to let Taric stun me. It started when I was attacking tower with a creep wave nearby. Taric came to defend. Knowing that I could kill him he bravely walked forward and used Dazzle on me. I stood still for a second or two as he retreated as quickly as fabulously possible. I continued to attack the turret and simply wrote “ow!” to which he responded, “I can’t do anything!” From that point on I would let Taric Dazzle me without any repercussions. I felt bad for the support in that game. I’m sure he did all he could for his AD, but Vayne going 2-25 was anything but his fault.

Rumble remained frustrated all game. I could understand his frustration, LeBlanc can be a strong pick for a blind pick game. Being melee versus LeBlanc is not something people enjoy. Congratulations to Akali for going positive in a game this one-sided. Thanks to everyone else on the team for staying positive and not raging.

First Time Champion in Ranked

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Last night I was playing with a friend who said “I’ve only played champion X twice, but both times were in a Ranked game…” which raised some alarm for me. I thought that people who did that were the minority of the League, a small population of trolls and perturbed fanatics who wanted to inflict pain to others.

I don’t have stats on how often this happens, but with the popularity of sites like lolking.net it seems like the ability to see if someone has played a champion before is at our fingertips.

I don’t feel that players should be allowed to play champions that they have almost no experience with in solo queue. I feel as though this isn’t giving the summoner ample opportunity to learn different match-ups and how to operate as part of a team as that champion. I have a lot of experience with many different champions and I would be one of the first to argue that most spell mechanics are the same. I would say that if I was trying a new champion in any game I would want to see how they operate in team fights and against different lane opponents.

I think Riot should instigate a rule that players need to finish a certain number of Normal games with a champion before they can use them in Ranked. It would almost be like unlocking the champion again. When you completed three to five games as each champion you would get a pop-up, much like the new Honor pop-ups, that would tell you that you may now play that champion in Ranked.

What would this do for the community? This would encourage players to actually learn each champion they wanted to compete with in Ranked. This would encourage players to play in Normal games and see how a champion operates in a team mechanic. This could help people re-discover champions that may have been forgotten, helping us move away from Flavor of the Month champions. Sometimes I forget about champions only because there are more than 100 to choose from. If I was forced to go back and play each champion to prove that I’m capable of using them in Ranked I would learn a lot more match ups, and have experience playing each champion in up to five different match-ups.

Before I ramble too long I want your insight. Should Riot implement something like this or do you feel it would be too restricting? If good players would just do this anyway, wouldn’t making each player do this make them slightly better?