October 2012 – Page 2 – League of Stories

Are Ranked 3s Viable for Janna Skin?

Leave a comment

A fellow redditor contacted me yesterday with a message asking me to play Ranked 3s with his team. I felt very honored. The goal: achieve Gold status in Ranked 3s to acquire the War Hero Janna skin.

Now, there’s been a lot of traffic lately on forums and reddit about elo boosting. I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t playing on someone else’s account, I was simply assisting their team.

My next concern was “Is this a viable strategy to reach Gold status?” I had seen Aphromoo do it, I had heard of others doing it, so why not me? How competitive could Ranked 3s be? I decided to try it first-hand and then let you know if it’s something that you can do, or if you should give up now.

I had a couple friends fight for Gold in solo queue. They hated it. There were literally thousands (7% of player base) of other players trying to go for the same goal. I wanted to be able to help these friends, and the thousands of other players out there going for the same goal. To you Silver players out there aspiring for more, this post is for you.

Our team comp was focused around nothing. In Champion Select I actually started messaging friends and asking them if they knew anything that works on Twisted Treeline. The most consistent answer that I ran into was “double bruiser with an AP”. I was actually surprised that no AD carries were mentioned. Our first game showed me why. Mr. “Brasil es #1 hue” himself. Mordekaiser was a force to be reckoned with. He could farm, he could push, he could roam, he could burst. Combined with crowd control from Malphite, Mordekaiser turned into a monster AP carry.

We decided to play Malphite and Yorick every game. We only got Malphite once and played Jarvan IV in every other game. Malphite’s a popular guy in Ranked 3s. He’s safe, dangerous (safe and dangerous? How can this be?!), tanky, mobile; he does a lot for a team. I got to fill the AP role each game, which was quite entertaining. Due to my recent addiction of causing people to hate their lives, I played Teemo. Teemo brings a lot to the table in lane and on a map with constricted walkways, as you can probably imagine. We jumped out and won our first couple of games. In the third ranked game I decided to play some Mordekaiser. We were down in kills, but my friend who was spectating my game said that we were still ahead in gold, thanks to Morde’s ridiculous ability to eat up creeps. Also, combining Yorick’s ultimate and Morde’s ultimate felt like cheating.

We did have some close games, some not so close, but we had a good time. After our five placement matches we were able to see our elo. We had managed to go 5-0 and moved our elo up to 1368. I really thought we would move up quicker than that. However, someone quickly pointed out that Silver started at 1450 elo. This leaves us needing 82 elo in order to reach our golden dream.

After I finished playing with the guys for the night they kept the same team composition and tried for one more game. They lost. Now, our perfect 5-0 rating is a measly 5-1 and we have to win one more game in order to reach our ultimate goal.

Games are going to be played later tonight, probably after 6:00 PM PST. I have a stream and I’m willing to use it if you want to see what to expect if you’re working your way to Gold in Ranked 3s.

In the end, I think it’s very possible to make a Ranked 3s team and get yourself to Gold. You just need a decent team comp and players who can play well together.

I will update this story tomorrow after we see how the games go. Hopefully in five or six short games we’ll have reached our goal. Wish us luck!

“Eve”rly Aggressive

Leave a comment

I had a beginner’s luck game with Evelynn where nothing went wrong. I was like a super hero, providing relief for the struggling metropolis that was the Fields of Justice; its denizens, my team mates. I had about as many assists as Kobe that game.

My next experience with Evelynn wasn’t exactly the same story. I died seven times! I felt like a huge feeder. I was coming from behind, the enemy Rengar was super fed off my top lane, things were definitely not going smoothly. I only got two triple kills that game.

Last night I spent some time practicing some champions for top lane with Hunterofthetiki. After we got tired of killing each other we decided to play a normal. I DID NOT insta-lock Evelynn. Mid was the last role available. I calmly picked Evelynn. It was such a sigh of relief that it’s no longer a pavlovic trigger for my team to enter a rage and call me a troll when I play a champion like Evelynn.

I play too aggressively on Evelynn. I shouldn’t play that way against a Kat, and I learned that the hard way. She could get outside of my range much too quickly. I was eating daggers while being forced to be melee and I could see the blood in her eyes. Another thing that gets me depressed in mid is when the enemy has a jungler who can gank at level two and my jungler can gank at level six. I have never been so wrong. Hunterofthetiki was in bot lane and kept saying “This Warwick is SO good.” He was good, so good he beat me in total gold. In the jungle. On Warwick.

Despite getting beat by Kat early I just roamed top, picked up an assist on Darius, froze the lane for my Riven and then sprinted back mid to push before Kat could return. With mid pushed, and playing as Evelynn, I sprinted to bot lane to cause some trouble. Maokai cleverly tried to counter gank, but with the assistance of Warwick I managed to pick up a quick triple kill and move back to mid to catch the wave on it’s way back. After a 0-1-0 start I managed to hit Legendary and didn’t die again until I had nine kills.

My biggest mistake of this game was trying to kill Darius 1v4 and then Riven said, “He has Maw.” That’s all she said. Darius, top versus Riven, rushed a Maw of Maltorius. Warwick on the other hand had a finished Madred’s before he had finished his boots. With movespeed quints and Blood Scent he always had a ridiculous movement speed. Stacking Madred’s, Malady, and Wit’s End on Warwick must be OP.

All in all, my total K/D/A with Evelynn is something like 50/11/20 over three games averaging 16.3/3.6/6.6 if I do the math in my head.

After game score screen:

Game 1

Game 2

Game 3

Provocative Thought

Leave a comment

I don’t want to stray too far from my main-stream theme of League of Legends games. However, I do want to spend some time talking about simple things like the meta and parallel universes.

I was conversing with a friend about how the meta has evolved, but in every region the meta remains the same. You will always have a support with an AD carry, two solo lanes with champions who can survive or sustain or escape, as well as a jungler rounding out their party of five.

Now what happens when we put humans into this game without biased opinions or spoiled conceptualizations of the League; people with no prior knowledge of lanes, jungles, meta. I’m talking about a full civilization playing League without being tainted by the current player base or the meta. Things would be very similar, but who would they send mid, bot, top, and into the jungle?

I’m posing these questions to you looking for answers. If a new player base was introduced into League with no previous knowledge and played games for years, where would different roles end up? Would they develop something on their own or would the meta eventually evolve into what we have now?

Thoughts?

Goats and Trolls

Leave a comment

The history of goats and trolls is long and involved. Luckily, as history tells us the goats beat trolls. I had picked Taric support as Fiora and Jayce fought over top lane. Neither were willing to budge. At the last minute, I knew the secret weakness of the trolls. I swapped to the goat-legged woman.

Soraka is great for trolls. What she adds for a double bruiser double melee top lane is the added armor and the spike of health they need to survive after they dive. However, we had to make it to that stage in the game. Meanwhile, I was babysitting one of the worst AD carries I’ve ever been put in lane with. We had a huge advantage in bot lane as Varus started with Doran’s Blade and Janna never got boots. Without a way to sustain in lane all we had to do was poke, disengage, poke, disengage, etc. It would be a really easy lane, especially with Graves abusing his mana pool, relying on Soraka to top it off.

Unfortunately, I had to start wishing that this Graves would have to leave for something urgent and go AFK. He was a liability in every situation. I actually remember Graves walking towards Yi when Graves had ~150 HP left. Yi hit Highlander to charge at Graves because he was a free kill. Graves didn’t even get an auto onto that full HP Yi.

Luckily, our Viktor was a prodigy. I orchestrated a level 1 blue golem for our Viktor so he’d have a huge advantage, because otherwise the mummy would have just taken our jungle anyway. He also had solo experience from the blue golem, so he showed up in lane level 2 with a full blue buff. It was pretty rad. It let him stay one-step ahead of Yi. Also, Viktor’s kit seems like it would be a perfect counter to Master Yi’s. Master Yi would need to ult to escape the big ugly bubble of time-stoppingness or he’d get stuck in it and take a ton of damage. Also, if Yi started to meditate Viktor could cancel the channel with his ult which would decimate champions.

I started with the soopa koopa green shell of healths and ended up getting an Abyssal. I realized that Viktor loses an item slot to his upgrade so seeing the amount of magic damage on the other team I started building Abyssal. I honestly wasn’t casting Q too much in team fight situations, but even one cast of Starcall coupled with the Magic Resist reduction coming from Abyssal Scepter was making a huge difference for this Viktor. I had to support Viktor as much as possible because Jayce was too busy proving to Fiora that he was going to win top and Fiora would dive three champions by herself to prove that she should have been the one top.

The goat prevails. Now you know, if you get stuck in a queue with four strangers and they are turning into trolls just pick a goat.

The PAX Arcade Sona Skin Giveaway

9 Comments

Special thanks goes to Sugafly for going to PAX and donating some Sona skins for me to give out! Without him, none of you would have a shot at getting a skin from me!

Here’s the rules:

Post the play you liked most from the Season Two World Championships in the comments section below this post. If you want to be a winner include an email that works or your IGN so that I can contact you if you win. I don’t want things to get too crazy on here so I’m only going to look at the first 100 comments. This isn’t the only promotion I’ll be doing, so if you miss the first 100 comments, don’t lose hope!

Here’s an example of a play I liked. It was when Alex Ich got to play Eve for the first time and his team also ran Xin Zhao top, two rather abnormal picks for competitive play. They were slightly behind and going into a Baron fight. In an amazing feat of skill Xin and Lee both pounced on Ezreal as Evelynn came around the back side. They quickly erased Ezreal off the map and set their team up for some easy kills. If I would have tried to dive on Ezreal I would have gotten eaten alive, but they managed to make it work and just melted his health bar. It took planning and perfect execution. I love that kind of team play.

That’s just an example. Write as much or as little as you’d like about your play, just so long as we know which one you’re talking about. If you want extra brownie points find a clip of it on YouTube and throw it in along with your submission. I’m more interested in what you liked personally about the plays than the plays themselves.

Best of luck to all the submitters! The winner will be decided hopefully by a non-biased poll. I am technically the winner because I’ll get to read all your fun comments!

« Previous Page