November 2012 - League of Stories

Responsibilty

2 Comments

Sometimes you have to take responsibility for your actions. I will admit that sometimes I am at fault and will face the music for my actions.

Part of the problem was the fact that I was smurfing, but having three games in a row that a person on my team quits, leaves, or AFKs is just too fun of a dataset to ignore!

The oldest game was the Sion one. I had called mid, but then Katarina called mid. She wasn’t willing to play any other lane. Even Wu Kong on my team said “Kat’s a better mid” and I just ignored them. Kat quit and never left spawn. I told that Wu Kong “this won’t be the first 4v5 that I’ve won.” That poor Lux. It was possibly my fault that Kat wouldn’t play with us because I was the one who wouldn’t let her mid.

The next game I played as Kog’Maw and our 5th player didn’t quit until he tried to invade the enemy red at level five and get surrounded by three people, who he mocked in all-chat, then they killed him and he quit. I’ve already written about this game, so I won’t go into any more detail. Shaco was probably angry that I didn’t kill the three people chasing him through the enemy jungle. Yup, my bad.

The latest game was when our Master Yi refused to tell me where he was going in Champion Select. I ended up as “support” Nidalee with Vayne. Ya, I can boost her attack speed! This should work well! However, when I picked up First Blood on Jax, and then finished off Riven and Fiddle in our lane to start the game 3-0 Vayne said “ff you nid i quit” and she literally quit the game. My team mates were pretty ecstatic; it’s one thing to cause someone to rage quit on the other team, but getting someone to quit on your own team while you keep them alive now that takes talent. I used my heal on her to save her from Riven and accidentally picked that kill up with an auto. There’s not much else level three Nidalee can do when someone is diving through creeps. I guess I did something wrote auto attacking the champion who was diving my AD carry.

In all three of these games I went on to have the most kills and my team won. So Rendow, EatDatP00poo, and Dabronie, go die in a fire. You’re useless, I don’t need you, and I hope your accounts get banned.

Love,

AdyEndrus

Why I Hate Darius

2 Comments

Darius was poor game design. Who, in their right mind, gives a tank an executing ultimate that comes off cooldown if it gets a kill? This was poorly designed, and something that the League didn’t need. Thankfully, Darius gets wrecked late game by Mordekaiser. Heck, early game I was pushing him around, but after three Fiora ganks before I was level six really set me back. I was so abused by the jungler that I was actually falling behind in creep score. At one point I remember seeing that it was 137 for me to 154 for Darius. Good job having your jungler win you the early game. Maybe go back to the drawing board in development and fix Darius.

Our Skarner wasn’t on Skype with us and we definitely felt it. It was annoying to not be able to communicate a re-engage or when to impale and who to impale. After the enemy team had Baron and our inhibitor down and was up in kills I figured it was over. However, our Vayne was ahead by a full Bloodthirster on the enemy Vayne! Darius couldn’t kill us anymore because Riven, Vayne, and myself all had Guardian Angel. When I got GA second item a couple people in the call said “oh hey, that’s a really good idea. That shuts down Darius hard!”

My favorite part about this game was my 49 magic pen hitting Fiora’s 0 magic resist. She does have 24 from runes, two more from masteries, and 52.5 at level 18 for a grand total of 78.5 MR. That helped me late game as she would just melt with only 22% magic damage reduction.

A Fiora ghost is a valuable ally. When they fought us in our base I actually managed to tank three people’s damage while staying just around 100 HP while they dropped. When they finally killed me I ran my Fiora ghost around and it healed me while my GA was bringing me back. I just laughed at the ridiculous damage and spell vamp from that Fiora ghost! We did as much damage to their base as we could, but didn’t want to lose for staying too long.

When the next Baron popped Riven and I were in bot lane. We started running to Baron but we knew we wouldn’t get there in time. Nunu tried to run in and ult to steal it, but got interrupted from his ultimate. His Consume wasn’t enough, and the enemy team secured Baron. However, Riven, Morde, and Vayne were ready to rumble. We caught them before they could get out of the Baron pit. Taking Fiora as a ghost we were able to clean up the enemy team quickly.

We use a Fiora ghost to tank both mid turrets while fighting an angry bird. After we had the inhibitor down the enemy team started filing out one at a time. This was our chance to capitalize on the enemy team throw. We turn and go all out. The enemy tries to react but Vayne is too much for them. I fall after getting as much damage out as possible. Vayne kills Darius. Vayne kills Anivia. Vayne kills Fiora. Vayne is killing Vladimir and Nunu’s ultimate finishes channeling and steals the fourth kill. Vayne kills Vayne and starts crying on the inside for missing the Penta. Not Vayne’s fault, and it’s hard to blame Nunu when he was doing the right thing to slow the entire enemy team. Still, a Penta is a Penta, and Vayne was robbed of hers.

Lucky Queue

Leave a comment

I was queuing with Obscene Tangerin and I ran into someone else from my friend’s list on our team. Obscene was blown away. He said that has never happened to him. I just let him know that it’s happened to me multiple times in the past. I told him that most of the people on my friend’s list are people who were around the same elo as I was so it makes sense for me to get matched up with them in games.

The person I ran into was scottnasty, who I used to queue with back in Season Two. However, I stopped queuing with him and I dropped to ~1550 and he went up to ~2100. Five of his top seven most-played champions in Season Two were supports, which is a great testament to his level of team play. Also, he was in queue with a sexy chick, or SexyChickqT, who he described as his brother. We got a Skype call going and had four of our five team members on Skype in a blind pick Normal! What an advantage! Now I’m sure we’re going to do well.

Obscene Tangerin decided to play Sivir, but I don’t remember why. I have nothing against Sivir, she was just the best counter for the lane we were going up against, so that was another spot of luck in our already lucky game. Jarvan and Leona in bot lane. It’s the dumbest parlor trick I’ve ever heard of. It’s a kill lane with two ridiculously tanky champs that can’t be harassed out of lane. Super frustrating! I could throw hundreds of bananas, zero effect. It was not a good time in bot lane.

However, we need to address the elephant in the room. Master Yi was the ONLY person on our team who wasn’t in our Skype call. So what did he build? Did he play a traditional AD Yi to wait for the end game and split-push potential? Nope. Did he go the slightly accepted method of AP Yi that dominates lane and can get some slick kills later in the game? Nope. Did he go on-hit Yi which has never been done by anyone ever? Yup. Did he also build a Void Staff? Uh huh. Let’s move through his items one at a time so that my brain has time to puke this out without exploding.

First item: Berserker’s Greaves. This is a VERY traditional item on AD Master Yi, at least until he gets his third Phantom Dancer and sells his boots.

Second item: Malady. This is a fairly standard item in on-hit builds because it lets the magic damage done by the items do more damage. It makes sense. For on-hit.

Third item: Madred’s Bloodrazers. Again, this item was very popular back in the day of on-hit Teemo builds. However, it’s very expensive and gets negated easily due to magic resist, unless someone buys a…

Fourth item: Void Staff. Yup, he did it. In the interest of having the highest amount of magic resist shred possible he built a Void Staff AND Malady. This guy is serious about his magic pen.

Fifth item: Bloodthirster. We made a build almost entirely based around magic damage and then he build a life steal and attack damage item. Brilliant. Why not?

The reason I had to break these items down was because of Yi’s insane number of kills. I don’t know if this guy is just a Master Yi master, or if he just wanted to try something so people would get mad at him, but the enemy team was chanting “YI MVP!” in all-chat when he managed a Quadra kill while fighting 1v4. His Alpha Strike did surprising damage with that much magic pen, and his autos definitely hurt. Meanwhile, his meditiate still gave him a 4.0 AP ratio (which is unrivaled in the League). He was a glass cannon of on-hit, magical, and physical damage. You couldn’t build magic resist to counter him and armor would do very little for you. Our random fifth actually turned out to be one of the luckiest picks for our team!

As a side note, that Lee Sin saved us in bot lane. Once he showed up and shut down Jarvan and Leona to put him on a rampage we were able to stabilize in the lane, force Leona or Jarvan to blow ult and then turn and fight and win. Good times in the solo queue!

Double Jungle: New Meta

Smurfing Because I Can

Leave a comment

To Smurf – to play on an account below one’s level to purposefully annihilate other player’s hopes of winning.

I don’t smurf very often. That is probably apparent based on the number of games played and the account creation date. However, lately my cousin has been trying to learn how to play League and so I’ve been playing some games with him so that we both have a good time. It’s fun to play with people you know!

I think it always tickles people’s brains at low level when I tell them I’m going mid, especially with picks like Kog and Xin. The main problem is I can beat people at this level 1v1, but don’t want to have to rely on a jungler or a support player. This game really paid off for having that mindset because our jungler was Shaco, and the worst. He was probably level five when he tried to invade the enemy team’s red buff. However, Ryze and Nocturne showed up to make his life miserable. He blinked into the Baron pit, but Ryze and Nocturne matched his blink with Flash and he wrote in all-chat “nice Flash!” Then they killed him, to which he replied “bai!” and R-R-R-R-R-R-R-RAGE QUIT!

Morde had already been running his mouth. It would be worth it to paste the chat log into this blog, and that might happen eventually (*shakes head*), but for now we’ll have to be content with paraphrasing. Morde is telling us how the game is over, how he’s smart because he knows Shaco is only good as a split-pusher and as an early-game ganker, and this Shaco did neither. Morde is telling us that it’s been “gg” since the beginning. He probably knew this, but this kind of behavior infuriated me. I was having a decent game, I could push Morde right out of mid lane with about half my mana pool and then let it recharge while I pushed his lane into his tower. I was ahead in CS. Of everyone. I was getting my items. I was farming multiple lanes, and trying my best not to get caught.

I was bot lane with Sona and I told her that with the items I had the two of us could fight the whole other team, except for Morde. I told her that we would stand and fight anyone we saw, except for Morde. She said OK. I had seen Morde top as I had started to push this lane, I figured we would be OK. I felt even better about that when I saw four members of the enemy team standing bottom to defend the bot turret. OK, game time. Then Morde came walking out behind us. Sigh. 2v5? Ya, probably not going to happen. I melted in an instant. Sona followed shortly after.

Sona starts laughing and I try to keep her optimistic. Our Gragas was oddly silent, so I knew that if we lost Sona we wouldn’t have a chance. However, I have the money for Infinity Edge, so now the game is real.

The enemy team must have realized that they had a man advantage and they started pressing it. They pressured bot lane right to our second turret. I tried to tell our Mundo and Gragas to wave-clear so that the enemy couldn’t siege the turret. We could stall them out, just give us time. Then the enemy team stepped up towards double golems. Morde split from the team to walk towards red buff. I activated W and killed him in three shots and turned on his team. Dropping an ult into the bush near doubles gave me vision of everyone. A nasty fight broke out. I cleaned up Ryze for a quick Double, Gangplank for the Triple, and Mundo for the Quadra kill. Nocturne was the only one left. With just a couple hundred points of life left he popped his ultimate so I lost vision of him. I had to wait for my ult to drop off the mana cooldown. By the time it came back up I had closed most of the gap on Nocturne. I walked up and auto’d him twice for the Ace and unofficial Pentakill. What a jerk move to pop his ult defensively after a team fight just to make me miss out on my penta!

Now I started retaliating to Morde. I called him out for being out of position and losing his team that fight. He didn’t respond, but his team did with cheers of “report Morde” which was like music to my ears. But this game wasn’t over. We had won the battle, but we hadn’t won the war.

Baron was next. We knew we had to get it before the other team did. I picked up my Bloodthirster and ran for the big purple wurm. On my way there I found a Mundo trying to attack my poor, defenseless creeps, so I killed him. With Mundo down I knew we had our best shot at taking Baron evenly. Before we had a chance to clear wards Gragas starting head-butting Baron. I jumped in and started DPSing as best I could, but then darkness fell. I knew he would come for me, so I stepped into the back of the pit in case I needed to Flash the wall. He hopped onto me, but showed up alone. I dropped Nocturne before he had a chance to react. Then Morde came around the corner. He popped ult on me, which I quickly removed with my Quicksilver Sash. Without that percentage damage on me he dropped almost as quickly as Nocturne. Then we finished off Baron.

With Baron buff and three of the enemy team dead we were able to take a middle inhibitor. We wisely retreated after pressuring their base so that we could clear out their jungle, spend some hard-earned cash, and prepare for wrecking Morde’s day.

The final team fight never happened. They ran into Kog with red buff one at a time and didn’t get a chance to group. I can’t remember if they surrendered or if we took their base, because I was ecstatic over beating a terrible person on a smurf account. As lame as that sounds, the feeling of winning a 4v5 after your jungler abandoned you and the enemy team talked smack was very satisfying. I had to take a break from playing League for awhile after this game because it just pushed my stress levels to a new high. It felt like so much was riding on winning this game and showing Morde that he doesn’t know when a game is over and it was foolish of him to talk smack in a game so young.

Here’s to the players with more kills than the enemy team! I salute you!