Life on the Fields of Justice

League of Stories

Tag Archives: Carry

Tie Goes to the Prophet

Leave a comment

This game sucked.

I hate games that go well for me yet are miserable for everyone else on my team.  This was one of those games.

It makes it very difficult to snowball a game when I am stuck playing mid but bottom and top both keep dying.  When I would try to gank for bot Kennen would just zip away and when I went top Jayce died for free in a three-man dive on Garen.  Jayce, just step out, no need to tank turret!  That’s what your two team mates are for!

Kennen knew I was trouble, and I knew that Kennen was going to be a problem.  Kennen acknowledged this in the game and said “gj Malz” one time after I caught him and killed him.  “You can carry this game” is all that he said after that.  I wasn’t quite sure.  Jayce was way behind to the point that he was just about useless.  Bot lane had fed Kennen to the point that he could just press R and be immune to me because I would be forced to run away.  Luckily, AD Kennen has to pick his targets, he can’t melt a full team like AP Kennen does with his ultimate and his burst damage.

As this game went longer I started getting closer to a finished build.  I was very fed.  Malefic Visions has this way of picking up kills because of how it ticks.  I didn’t mind.  I loved having the gold.  Better me than Jayce in this game.  I knew that if I could just get ahold of that silly rat Kennen I could win this game.

We had won a small team fight that gave us the advantage we needed to push up and take a tower.  We were still clawing our way back from being behind this enemy team.  They were down a man or two which meant that we would probably get the inhibitor for free.  I let my team know that I was going to grab Kennen the first chance that I got.  My opportunity came so I Flashed in and grabbed Kennen with Nether Grasp.  His health bar was melting at an intense rate.  Hecarim ulted to close the gap and get on Kennen and disrupted Vi and Garen’s attempts to stop my channel.  Kennen was dead, the inhibitor was down, and the game was too late to salvage.  The enemy team had no way to battle my Rylai’s slow and the sheer damage output of being down their most fed carry.

Even though the game was a tie, in this case the tie goes to the prophet!

1060 Malzahar

A Demacian Does Not Retreat

Leave a comment

We had a LAN at the Rymer’s this weekend, which was a new experience for me.  This game we decided to play roles that we weren’t very familiar with.  In this case we had Goldboat on support which never happens, Iggie playing top lane which is also very rare, Choppes running the AD carry role, and myself in the jungle.

If I had to count all the times I had played jungle since I started this blog, or even in the last year, it would probably be once.  I just don’t get into the trees very much.  I had not jungled since the Season Three changes, so this was going to be an interesting experience.

All I remember about this game was coming from being down in kills and gold to try to win.  I remember Sivir and Diana doing immense damage and forcing me to get as much health as possible.

Xin felt ridiculous.  I felt like my damage was way too high based on my items.  I felt like my cooldowns were extremely low and that my kill potential was high because of the high base damages of my abilities.  After I had Frozen Mallet combined with the slow of my Audacious Charge I could stick on anyone.

In team fights I would zone Sivir and Diana until my team could clean up everyone else.  In many of those situations, Sivir and Diana would spend more time running away than fighting me, resulting in me just getting free damage onto them.  Because of this I finished with most kills, fewest deaths, and most assists. It felt great.

The only negative side-effect of this game was that I now ban Xin Zhao in every Ranked game I play because I’m scared to see him emerge from the jungle!  It was probably when I got caught by five people on the enemy team and still managed to escape with Ghost that made me so intimidated.  That’s the one time that I broke the Demacian Rule:  A Demacian Does Not Retreat!

1057 Xin Zhao

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.

1047 Ezreal

My First Twitch Win

1 Comment

Earlier, you heard my wonderful story about playing as Twitch and doing really well and then losing the game.  Well, not this time!  This game I got big.  Don’t take that out of context, I was a monster.  Last time I was 4.8k gold ahead of second place.  This time I was a whopping 6.8k ahead of second place on my team and 7.3k gold ahead of anyone on the enemy team.  I was a League of Legends R.O.U.S.!

But it gets better.  We had two double kills in bot lane, but not us killing them, but the enemy getting double kills on us.  This is a sad thing.  The first time we had both of the enemy champs down to one hit.  It was really sad to think that I had used Ignite on Lulu, only to see her walk away without any damage ticking on her.  Sadness.  The second double kill for them was an Amumu gank.  It was really bad for us, really great for them.  We weren’t even close.

However, we had a trusty late-game comp of Twitch, Nunu, and Morgana.  Morgana locks them down with an ult and gives me a spell shield.  Nunu uses Blood Boil on me and slows the enemy team with his ultimate.  Twitch does some crazy damage.  Despite losing bot lane (I think it’s fair to say that) I was ahead by more than 30 CS in the laning phase.  I was behind, but I was not behind, especially with a Blood Boil.

Now the most humorous part of this game was Steve’s champion pick.  He picked up Akali.  Why?  To take my CS and my kills.  Period.  For real!  He told us on Skype and we just laughed about it.

A team fight breaks out mid.  I call out for Blood Boil, and the second it hits me I see the most wonderful sight: a Volibear charging the enemy team’s carry.  Voli Flashes and pops someone back to us.  I see Lulu melting and notice a Black Shield on me from Morgana.  I turn on my ultimate and start laying waste to the enemy team as a whole.  I get the last hit on Lulu and then turn my attention to Swain.  The fewer Swains in the world, the better.  I’ve already seen Swain Gretzky, Bruce Swain, and probably more.  Swain melts to the tune of a double kill.  I get the last hit on Ezreal, triple kill.  Amumu decides to be a hero and I shoot him down.  The last member, the final piece to this story is Mundo.  Fleeing like the Madman of Zaun that he is, I use Flash to get inside range.  My auto takes him critically low and I’m certain that I won’t get to attack before he’s down.  However, thanks to Blood Boil, my movement and attack speed are ridiculous.  I keep up with Mundo and get the last auto in.  I see the kill call out and I wait for the glorious announcement…

Penta Twitch

PENTA KILL!

After hundreds of games as Ezreal, Corki, and Tristana, I get only my second Penta kill as an ADC and it’s with the ADC I probably have the least amount of experience with.  Oh, the irony!

I was so ecstatic in the moment that all I could do was laugh.  I went to push and actually held TAB to see who was up on the enemy team.  We ended up tanking towers to get to their inhib.

That wasn’t the end of the game, but it didn’t get much prettier.  I caught Amumu walking out to protect their tier two turret in top lane so I just started auto attacking him.  He used Flash to get away from me, so I hit E, and he didn’t die.  Well, not right then.  He let the poison tick down on him and finish him off.  I heard Jack say, “Oh, that’s just the worst, when you get away but still die.  Poor Amumu.”  Then something about hating Amumu.

Eventually I was standing just off their fountain just shooting whoever wanted to walk far enough down towards me.  At this point I was life-stealing off their team faster than they could hurt me.  Here’s the final damage:

1011 Twitch Penta

The Scimitar saved my bacon so hard after I got caught later in the game.  I didn’t have it yet, but if I would have gotten another chance to go back and buy it would have been my next purchase guaranteed.  Mummy ult was just too deadly.  If I got caught in it when I didn’t have assistance from Morgana then I was one sad rodent.

I can still hear it now… PENTA KILL!

Good Start

1 Comment

Season Three preseason is in full swing, so when Thursday rolled around we were ready to get some Ranked games played.

I felt like this was really the first time our team bothered to counter-pick a lane.  When the enemy team first-picked Malphite we decided to run a Vayne top.  This isn’t a champion that Dan has extensive experience with, but we figured it would be better to have a ranged dps late game.

When we were banning I remembered having a Caitlyn in bottom lane that just destroyed the kill lane that we normally use.  I honestly thought about banning her out.  Her range is very strong and her net really breaks a melee Mantheon as he tries to run at her.  However, I didn’t ban her, because what are the chances the other team is going to pick Caitlyn?

It wasn’t until they had picked their whole team that I realized I was going to be matched against Zed in mid lane.  This should be interesting.  Glad I watched the spotlight and saw when Phreak took Veigar down from 100 to 0 before Veigar could react.  Veigar has an AoE stun while LeBlanc has a silence.  Luckily, I never really got to see Zed in action because the game was only 61 minutes long.

I got first blood on Zed and then his game plan was to try to last hit with his ninja star ability.  This was fine because it kept him back far enough to be safe from my harass, but there were a couple flaws with his game plan.  His shuriken was dealing minimal damage because he didn’t seem to be maxing it first, and it would push the wave.  So he was missing CS, and zoning himself by pushing the creeps to my side of the lane.  Every now and then I would just push him away from creeps and call MIA.  More than half the time I was standing in mid lane I was by myself.  This let me get WAY ahead in creep kills and experience.  When the lane finally started to push (because Zed had been gone for so long) I killed him from about half health under his turret.

When I went back to get my Soul Stealer the enemy jungler showed up and pushed mid lane!  Not to my turret, he just pushed it out a little bit so my creeps caught it and started to lose, meaning I’d be able to freeze the lane again!  I guess he didn’t realize that I was level nine and Zed was just hitting level six because I had the zoned Zed with lane control.  Maybe Zed thought that he was doing his team mates a favor by keeping me in mid so I wasn’t roaming, I was just last-hitting.  However, with the best late game ADC in the top lane, and a kill lane setup in the bottom lane, I knew we would have a smooth early, mid, and late game regardless of how well I did in mid.  I just got to farm!

After I bought Soul Stealer I shot off to a 15-0 start in this game.  For whatever reason saying 15-0 start sounds better than saying 23-2.  I think if someone went 8-2 I would still say that’s a good game, but finishing 8-2 after starting 15-0 just didn’t feel as good.

In all reality I should have died 10 times in that game.  However, I was six item and had 5k gold, so I sold some items to get other items to even my build out.  With 20 stacks and Athene’s Grail my cooldown reduction was looking really good.  Zhonyas let me ignore more of Amumu’s and Malphite’s damage.  This is actually the item that kept me alive the most.  I made big mistakes around Amumu that let him catch me out away from my team.  He would Flash into a bandage toss and then ult immediately, even if he only caught me.  Once I had control of my character I would pop my Zhonyas and assess my options.  Normally I would be able to clone my blink with my ult or I would have my Flash up.  In a 61 minute game I never took damage from a Malphite ult.  I almost felt sorry for the poor guy.

The game was won in a Baron fight.  Pantheon jumped into the middle of the enemy team, Lux gave us some vision with her spells, and we picked them off one by one, never giving them a chance to combo multiple members of our team.  Our only casualty was Pantheon who knew he was jumping to his death.  We won the fight and immediately ran to the enemy base and finished it off.

So far my average stats for Season Three look like 23 kills, 2 deaths, 11 assists and 363 cs per game.  That is what I would consider to be a good start.

Gold difference at the end of the game:  94.9k vs 76.8k