League of Legends – Page 14 – League of Stories

AHGL: Poking Down Zappos

Leave a comment

In our third and final game against Zappos we decided to run a poke comp. It was a slight deviation from our regular poke because I was playing ADC instead of mid, but we had a good idea and we wanted to run with it. To replace Morgana we decided to pick up Kayle. We figured Kayle would have solid range, good poke on her Q, and provide a bit of sustain, which is something we’re normally lacking.

We discussed on the Skype call that we would lane until the side lanes were level six, and then we would immediately group. We won our lanes (despite watching Corki escape with two HP), and then called to group at level six. The first tower that we sieged was bot lane’s. However, while we were pushing bot lane down, Vladimir started to push top. Luckily for us our team pushes quite a bit better than a Vlad does!

After we had taken the second turret we returned to base to stop the Vlad push, but not before picking up Dragon. We marched down mid and started to siege the enemy base. We took tower after tower, just brute-forcing down the enemy team. At one point I got caught where Ashe and Blitz were between myself and my team. I was doing my best just to avoid the Blitz hook and Ashe volley, but I knew they would eventually catch me out. Just then Jeff said “Come towards me!” I stepped into range of Jeff and he landed his ult on me. I turned and started pumping out the damage. I knew I was still going to die, but at least this time I got to DPS and then use my passive to contribute towards the team fight a bit more. We cleaned up easily, going four for one.

When I respawned I sprinted down mid to join the push. It was only a matter of time until we had their middle inhibitor. The push continued. We pressed our advantage further and further.

Finally we were pressuring top lane. We had a wonderful idea. The only person who had been helping to counter our poke composition was Blitzcrank, because if he lands a hook on an important team mate, then that really shuts down what we’re able to do in our pushing. We decided that Mundo should try to get hooked intentionally, then pull tower aggro, and then we would use Kayle ult on Mundo. This happened over and over again. It got to the point we could almost hear the enemy team saying “Ugh, not this guy again” as Mundo would go flying into enemy territory, turn on Burning Agony and pop his ultimate and start to tank the world.

It was in our final push in top lane that Mundo got hooked into the enemy team, they scattered like mice, and we cleaned up for the win. We were ecstatic to come back against such a strong team and win two games in a row! We had survived against one of our stronger competitors! Our poke comp actually netted us a better KDA than our OP champ picks! I was really impressed by that performance! Excellent work, team!

PS: I think Jake helped us all to see the truth. Thank you, Jake. We all realize now that Elise is OP.

AHGL: The Zappos Scare

Leave a comment

As part of our After Hours Gaming League we played against Zappos this past Sunday. At the very last minute they agreed to a best-of-three series. It’s a really good thing they did!

Our first game could not have gone worse. That’s all I will say about that game.

Our second game we knew the pressure was on us to win or suffer a loss. None of us wanted to ruin our untarnished record, so we played our most OP combination: Lux, Panth, LeBlanc, Mundo, Malphite!

I “accidentally” stole red buff from our Mundo at level one. It hurt our Mundo a lot, but it was a necessary theft. Well, actually it was 100% unintentional. I was auto-attacking red buff and Steve used smite and red had a few hit points left, so my super strong auto attack stole it. Whoops. However, I did hit level two almost immediately in lane, which helped me pick on Kassadin more than I normally would have.

I never hit 20 stacks in this game, but I still felt like it was a strong LeBlanc game. The highlight of this game was when I dove Kassadin and then outplayed Xin with a huge juke. We did goof off a bit at the end of this game, but it was still a solid win that set us up for our next game… but that’s a story for next time!

Most Recent Ranked Fives

Leave a comment

We recently had a chance to play Ranked Fives, which was a nice change of pace because it had been awhile since we had all five members of our Ranked team online. I’m only going to give a short synopsis of each one because most of them were painful.

The first game I’ll write about is the game that got us to our highest ranked elo ever. I really don’t know if this is the highest we’ve ever been, but it’s the highest we’ve been in a long while. This game was really funny because the enemy team decided to run a five-man gank squad to bot lane at level one. I think they got first blood out of it, but we got something in return:

This is a picture of the game 6:36 in. You’ll notice that the enemy mid Katarina player had ZERO CS. I had recalled and bought a Tear of the Goddess! I was back to standing in lane! She didn’t try for a single creep! Enjoy your first blood, because it’s the only highlight you’ll get this game.

Our next game was just us being silly. For some reason Jack said that I should play Singed top. I am hypothetically experienced with Singed, but I haven’t played him in so long there is no way I could say I’m practiced or current with him. I should have just said no! Instead, I went up against Olaf, who actually got whooped by me. The enemy team’s Lee Sin was actually a really good player, and he caught me behind Olaf’s turret a couple of times. As I would try to escape he would reduce my health to zero, which caused problems in top lane.

Other than my blunders in top lane, bot decided to swap roles, which didn’t help our cause, and Jack lost to Anivia mid who didn’t have Ignite. Not a pretty game for SM!

For our next game we tried to pull in the reins and try a proven strategy called “Protect the Kog”. Here’s how it works: my team plays champs that can keep Kog’Maw alive and peel for Kog. The best options are Taric, Lulu, Soraka, and Nunu. Instead, my team picked those roles, but refused to play them. We probably wasted 22 minutes of our lives in this game, but it’s hard to know beforehand if no one is going to follow the game plan.

After dropping that much elo we needed a win. I was complaining in chat to Adobe’s team captain, Tai Feng and he responded with “Just play LeBlanc.” Well, that’s a grand idea. I’ve only had one experience where I broke 20 kills with LeBlanc and still managed to lose, but I knew that game was a fluke and it probably wouldn’t happen again. Now, all I needed to do was break 20 kills. At 19:23 in this game I had 508 Ability Power. I was so obnoxiously strong in this game that it was shocking that the enemy team didn’t surrender at 20. I can understand if the enemy team LeBlanc has 10 kills and you think “if we can just shut her down we can win”, but this was 22 kills. I had 20 stacks on my Soul Stealer. Everyone on my team had a 2:1 KD, except for me, I was 7:1. You lost. Surrender. Heck, even if you think you can pull it back and win, surrender anyway! Do that LeBlanc performance a favor and compliment her with a surrender vote. Otherwise, it’s your Ranked KDA on the line.

Once again people didn’t know how to play roles. I ended up face-tanking mid tower in a dedicated poke comp. This game was thoroughly embarrassing. I felt like I was playing in 900 elo. The enemy team didn’t have a jungler, yet controlled all the buffs and dragons. They ran double ADC, and still managed to make it work. They managed to out-poke our team with Varus and Cho alone. I think Fiddle was the flaw to this game. His ultimate is too commit-based because of his ultimate and doesn’t have any effective poke. I think if we would have had Steve on Mundo, Jack on Cait, and Jeff on Lux we would have been in a much better situation. The enemy Cho did add me after this game and complimented me on how well I did laning against him. What I didn’t realize was that Cho was farming wolves and wraiths between waves to get himself a CS advantage. Then he lost to me in CS even though his team won. He was really impressed by that.

At this point Ranked queues broke. Thus ends this article due to games being over.

Typical Pick

Leave a comment

They recently upgraded match making to take into account the number of games played. To me, this means that I’ll be playing with more people around 1000 wins.

The first thing I hear after getting into this game is the other team complaining about my Ezreal pick. They are saying that it’s FOTM and cliche. That’s all well and good, but I’ve been playing Ezreal for longer than some of these people have even been playing! It’s not fair for them to attack my champion pick unless I turn out to suck with him! Time to prove all the haters wrong.

0/6/1 Vayne speaks volumes about how bot lane went. I would have killed to have a Nunu support, but Taric ended up doing just fine.

Our mid lane got really fed, so not as much responsibility was left on my shoulders to deal all the damages, and Kayle was also building ADC, so I decided to go Frozen Fist and Static Shiv, which is what I like to call “the fun build”. It’s honestly not so much about dealing sustained damage. However, you still have a considerable amount of damage. This build is about kiting with Q. If you land one Q then the whole enemy team is slowed. That means you get another one for free. However, landing the first Q drops your cooldowns by one second. Chaining multiple Qs means that your abilities have no cooldown. With the cooldown reduction from Frozen Fist, combined with each Q landing lowering the cooldowns, it feels very spammable. You can escape from anyone chasing you except for Riven. She’s still broken because she doesn’t have to walk, she just uses abilities to catch you. If Cristina Vee wasn’t so cool I would hate the guts out of Riven.

I had a really sick snipe this game too. Lee Sin got away from Diana with just a speck of health. I shot my ult from bot lane at their middle inhibitor and saw as it tagged Lee Sin. He started to rage about how that hadn’t hit him. Later, he wanted to report me for “hax” as I was able to hit him with Q three times blindly as he ran in the fog of war. I love it when people think I cheat. It makes not cheating that much better.

AHGL vs Adobe

3 Comments

This best-of-three series had a lot of people nervous going into the second game. Even though SecurityMetrics had bested Adobe in game one, many people were fearful that changing up our team’s roles could result in a loss. I had multiple people message me to ask if I was nervous spectating game two. While I did want our boys to win, I also was in the lucky spot of not caring if they lost. A loss simply meant a game three tie-breaker where I would have the chance to get subbed in to ~~show off~~ play.

This game really showed some strong aspects of the team. Garen managed to dominate in top lane. The poor Jayce in his lane didn’t bother to include Flash as one of his Summoner Spells. I don’t know if Flash would have helped in this match up, but it seems like a necessary spell on most champs due to the ability to escape over a wall. Brand also was a hot spot on the team. His 5-0 start really set the mood for how mid lane would be handled. I actually heard him apologize for killing Malzahar mid when Olaf came to gank. I think the kill money was better used on him than anyone else! Brand became a major factor in this game. Olaf’s stats are deceiving. Despite being a huge feeder, Olaf actually participated in 23 of the 28 team kills. This is a huge stat that shows what kind of plays he was making. Now, had Choppes been playing Nunu instead, he probably would have ended up with 15 accidental kills!

My wife commented while watching the game and said “If they don’t start pressuring top lane and taking towers then they can’t win this game.” I passed the message along. I was really impressed that my cute wife knew what needed to be done. Adobe had taken middle lane almost for free. They had managed to take down middle inhibitor, and eventually got to bottom inhibitor after some lost team fights.

The game was getting late, death timers had risen to a dangerous level. One step in the wrong direction could spell disaster. It was at this moment that SecurityMetrics realized that Adobe was probably at Baron, because SM didn’t have any vision of the Baron pit. They ran in a mad rush there. It was strange to watch from spectator view, because Adobe had transitioned down to bottom lane to push it out and take the inhibitor. Just as SecurityMetrics arrived at Baron to not find Adobe there, Adobe stepped into bot lane, threatening to end the game. Garen immediately started to recall, but the rest of SM stayed to slay Baron Nashor.

Bottom inhibitor was destroyed. Middle inhibitor was destroyed. Baron Nashor was slain. Garen was the only thing between Adobe and our Nexus towers. But as they say in Olde English: “Yay, lest we forget the forthcomings of Homeguard boots that our children may wallow in pity for our souls.” They only say that because while Adobe tried to pick off Garen a viking moving at the speed of light came streaking (with clothes on) into the fight. Adobe unleashed a massive combo of damage and crowd control on Garen, dropping him to 0 health. Olaf fought frantically to avenge his friend, and the rest of SecurityMetrics came pouring into the team fight.

As Garen fell it was as if time stood still. The wisp of white surrounding his body made one final revolution and then poured back into his soul, granting him the life to fight on. As Garen stood back up, cheating death, the enemy team’s morale was destroyed. They knew they wouldn’t have anything for the ensuing team fight.

The enemy team was almost wiped out. The few remaining souls fled down mid lane. They were chased by a Sona with Shurelya’s Reverie and a bonus movement speed ability, along with the other four members of Team SecurityMetrics. None survived on the enemy team. SecurityMetrics started to take towers, starting with the tier two turret in mid lane. It was at this point I heard Sona volunteer to go back to defend against the two inhibs that were down in their base. I told him to stay. He couldn’t fight off super minions, and they were counter-pushing mid lane anyway.

After the tier two turret fell, SM stepped up and dropped the inhibitor turret. Realizing that they still had time they walked into the base to take the Nexus turrets. It was in this moment that they realized the game was theirs. They had almost 20 seconds left on death timers for the enemy team. They would be able to finish off the entire base before the enemy team could spawn. Cheers went out, celebration had begun! SecurityMetrics had bested Adobe in one of the most bizarre push-to-win fashions ever imagined! This come-from-behind effort showed the amount of teamwork that anyone could exemplify. All parties involved were satisfied.

« Previous Page