LeBlanc Archives - League of Stories

Solo Queue Troll

Leave a comment

We’ve all experienced this guy, but this story actually covers two games. I had just played as Tristana in a game where my support decided to suicide at level one to the enemy bot lane. After he died, I got zoned from creeps and had to recall. Level one, two cs, lost lane. When the game went late I was forced to deal with a legendary Irelia and Akali on the enemy team. My team decided to chase the enemy Twitch, who didn’t even have a bounty, through unmapped and unwarded territory. Unsurprisingly, my entire team died, and left me to defend the base against five fed champs. Then I get blamed for the loss. That’s fine, I’m hardly losing any LP at all for losses. The people on my team deserved to lose, and they lost. Let’s move on. I get back into queue, and my feeding support from last game is on my team. That solo queue troll has returned.

There is no feature to ignore in champion select. I have to listen to what this kid says. He calls support again. The largest problem for me is that he’s actually bad at playing support. He doesn’t know how to help the ADC last hit under turret. He didn’t ward properly. He didn’t do anything to help me win bot lane, not to mention survive in bot lane. Now he wants to play support again? Great. Well one thing is for sure, I’m not playing in bot lane with him.

I choose LeBlanc with my first pick and lock in. The enemy team countered with Karthus. Karthus can have a huge impact on a game if it goes late. His damage just scales well and is hard to avoid. This Karthus chooses to run the Phant0ml0rd Karthus strategy of Revive and Teleport. This let me be a huge lane bully.

I died early. It was a tad embarrassing. I committed to fighting Karthus behind his creeps. It was a mistake. My burst wasn’t quite enough to finish him off, and my jungler wasn’t nearby so I shouldn’t have been picking a fight. Lesson learned. I was still 1-1-0, but felt dumb for having that death on my record.

The game progressed and I started roaming. I was everywhere on the map. I was picking up kills and assisting with kills in all lanes. We could dive any champion, any situation. Skarner was a threat because his ultimate could lock someone down, but he didn’t have enough damage to be relevant, and he wasn’t tanky enough to prevent me from hurting him either.

Eventually the announcer was screaming “Legendary!” and we were rolling to a 33-10 lead. There was even a play that Leona made that I complimented because they were in the right place at the right time. While we didn’t get a kill out of the deal, it was still good positioning for sieging.

I didn’t have any amazing jukes in this game. I had some narrow escapes, but my Zhonya’s was enough to save me in a couple of sticky situations from Karthus and other damage sources.

Duo Party

Leave a comment

I finally broke down and let my little brother duo queue with me. It’s actually a high risk because I feel like being in a duo queue lowers your chance at winning. However, this wasn’t a standard duo queue, this was a duo party, because I had the PartyPooper.

I figured that PartyPooper would play top lane because that’s what he usually does. His mains are champions like Lee Sin, Rengar, and Xin Zhao. However, because we were the last two picks in the game I didn’t know how things would go. We ended up choosing between Support and Mid. PartyPooper promptly volunteered for Support. I asked if he wanted to play as Lee Sin because the enemy mid lane was Lux. He said no thanks and then picked Janna. At least I got last pick, so I knew what I would be up against.

I think Lux is a fine pick. Fine until she gets matched up against higher damage output. The changes they made to LeBlanc affected her level one in a negative manner. The changes also turn her into a complete monster at level two and three. I could almost guarantee a kill or at least completely zoning a lane if I know where the jungler is.

Tryndamere beat me to first blood in this game. He can fight at level one, and LeBlanc can’t do that and expect to win. If Tryndamere has 35% chance to crit he can expect to win his lane trading auto attacks with the enemy top laner.

This game was wild. I had Warwick use his ultimate on me a number of times, only to witness me walk away from him later. I did have a couple nasty encounters with Lux laser. Luckily, I was recording so you can see that the laser clearly misses me, and yet I still die from its damage. What’s up with that, Riot?

If you didn’t have at least four deaths this game then you really weren’t part of the party club. Caitlyn didn’t like to party. She did like to eat the enemy bot lane alive. Her only death was completely my fault. Her and I were diving the enemy Graves under his turret. She went from behind and tanked turret. When I stepped in to nuke him I saw that I was getting flanked and just had to turn and run. Caitlyn got surrounded after tanking turret fire and died. She told me thank you after that, I must have taught her a valuable lesson in trust. Or something else.

I qualified for a series! I checked my MMR tonight using http://op.gg/mmr and entering my account name. Its response was very gracious. It felt like I deserved to be leagues higher than I am currently in. It said my hidden score was 1,785. Not bad! PartyPooper’s score was close with an 1836. I can’t believe that I’m only 51 points behind someone a full division ahead of me. Maybe division isn’t the right term, but I’m in Gold II and he’s in Platinum II. Now you understand the concept I was trying to convey!

This game ended when Tryndamere got finished build and Janna’s killing spree was ended. Also, Warwick’s name… almost made me want to report him.

VOD:

LeBlanc is Back!

Leave a comment

I felt like I hadn’t played LeBlanc in awhile. We were getting into a normal game and I was fairly low on the pick order. This was the time. I needed to see if LeBlanc is still good. You be the judge if LeBlanc is back.

I panicked for a minute because I didn’t know how well LeBlanc would lane against Zyra. I figured that Zyra would have great harass, better range, and wave clear. I hadn’t played this lane match-up yet, so I was a bit skeptical going in. It didn’t help that I hadn’t played LeBlanc in awhile, but that was just like riding a bike.

I definitely had enough misplays in this first game back as LeBlanc that I don’t want to talk about all of them. Just missed Ignites in my combos before I blinked back with Distortion, or badly timed abilities cost me a few kills, but I was picking up steam fast.

I noticed that some of her level one damage was gone, so it wasn’t really worth it to trade even a single ability until level two. I was impressed with her level two burst. I came out about even on the trade with Zyra, but shortly afterwards I got a gank from Maokai and the lane started rolling.

Iggie and I ruled this map with an iron fist. When Kha’Zix came to gank my lane I just killed him and took his buffs, which didn’t make life any easier for Zyra. We snowballed into a really ugly map presence where we could walk through the enemy jungle and do what we liked as we were up double in kills.

After that game ended we definitely wanted to do another, so that’s getting coupled right into this post. I just had a great LeBlanc game, so why not try it again?

We were doing draft pick again and I saw the other team pick Ahri and knew that I could beat Ahri in mid as LeBlanc. What I didn’t realize was that Ahri was going to help her Twitch get first blood and then pick me up as second blood shortly afterwards. I lost my 1v1 duel with the enemy mid laner. I was definitely kicking myself. I picked LeBlanc to counter Ahri, and she had just beaten me in a direct fight. Bad LeBlanc is bad.

The biggest problem in this game was the Twitch who was eating our bottom lane alive. The fact that he is Diamond I didn’t help nubehound to not get intimidated. However, he had every right to be scared because this Twitch was super scary. I opted not to get Soul Stealer, which I ended up regretting. After starting 0-1-0 against a 1-0-1 Ahri I made a slight comeback.

I remember Choppes and I tied at kills at 11, but then I stopped letting him have kills and just gave him some assists. Renekton actually fit in really well in this comp because if the enemy team didn’t focus me I could do some serious work, and Renekton makes enough of a mess in a team fight that he has to be respected. I would see people Flash away from Renekton and just go pick up an easy kill that couldn’t juke.

I made Twitch’s head spin a couple of times when I would catch him and just evaporate him off the map. Two different times I had to hit him with a blind snare to finish him off when he had used stealth.

I had a very near-death experience, but luckily I caught some footage of it. Just enjoy how many summoners and abilities were used to make sure that I die!

That game definitely went longer than we ever wanted it to. We eventually sealed the win. I did my best to prevent Choppes from getting any more kills.

In-house ARAMs

1 Comment

Just before the release of the new ARAM map we started our 1v1 tournament for the players at work. Every night, either before games or after, we played an in-house ARAM or two. This has really helped support the tournament because if someone comes out just for the ARAM they still cheer their co-workers on.

Last night we had an exceptionally close and exciting game that qualified for a blog post.

In Champion Select I saw that Choppes got LeBlanc. This definitely caused some worry on my team, as they had seen LeBlanc and knew what she was capable of. He was already feared as the best player on the enemy team, and now he had a champion that he could really make work in an ARAM.

To make matters worse (for my team) they also had two of the absolute best picks for ARAM; Master Yi and Nidalee. But that’s not all! Wait, there’s more! They also included two champions who work super well in ARAM thanks to their poke! They had Mundo Cleavers and Anivia Flash Frosts in their arsenal as well. Sounds like this is gonna be a fun game!

Sambev and myself quietly hid behind our tank front-line of Nasus, Singed, and Warwick (which is a pretty nasty nightmare for most squishies) and waited for our time to strike. Our whole strategy revolved around Fiddle ulting into a team fight, I would throw my ball on him, and then I’d flip the whole team and keep them locked in his ultimate.

The first time we put this strategy to use was very effective. Fiddle surprised most of the enemy team, my ball was already on him, I just pressed R and Shockwave worked its magic. We quickly melted three people on the enemy team, and turned the game around in our favor. Then we realized the sad, sad truth about our ultimate combo. Fiddlesticks ultimate cooldown was our bottleneck. We would have to wait for his ultimate to be available before we could effectively team fight again.

We basically had to turtle down and get picked on and poked at. If I tried to place my ball in the bush for vision I would get bursted down by LeBlanc, be forced to use Command: Protect on myself, and I would have achieved nothing. We were waiting for Fiddlestick’s ultimate, and then we’d be fine.

The second attempt at our strategy was bad. I won’t say OK, I’ll say bad. I had my ball on him, but by the time he went there was no one to flip with Shockwave. We scared the enemy team off for a bit. It seemed like we hit a patch of bad luck, because the next couple of ultimates from Fiddle were less than productive. There was actually one where he started channeling his ultimate and Nidalee landed a max-range spear to finish him off. Sadness!

In the downtime we managed to perform a fairly effective combination that used Warwick as the proxy for the ball carrier. It worked once or twice that way. One time we did it and Fiddlesticks was waiting in the wings, so the team collapsed on Warwick, I flung everyone around and Sambev flanked in from the side. It was pretty spectacular to not suffer any counter attack because the team is watching their health bars evaporate.

When the game went late we had a perfect shot to close up the game. Sambev channeled his ultimate, and popped out on four members of the enemy team. I had Orianna’s mechanical ball on him, so I bounced the enemy team as they tried to escape from the horror of Fiddlesticks’ Crowstorm. The damage was massive. People instantly melted. Only Nidalee escaped.

It was a close game that we won using teamwork. Sambev was thrilled to have a positive KD in a game that he ended up winning. Choppes hopefully learned not to try to burst the person with Zhonya’s on the enemy team when playing LeBlanc. You think I don’t see that burst coming? I think Choppes only had five of my six deaths.

VOD

AHGL: Zenimax

Leave a comment

There was a lot of hype leading into this game. People were all waiting for our AHGL match against Zenimax. We had managed to go undefeated, and they had accomplished the same feat until the previous week when they fell to Twitch. This was going to be the clash of the titans, and we were super excited to have such fierce competition in the league.

The first game started with some interesting bans. They targeted Lux, which made sense because we use her a lot. They banned out LeBlanc which does make perfect sense when you look at my ranked stats. The last ban was targeted at Senor Choppes with a Jayce ban. I could see the logic in all of these bans as we normally play a very poke-based comp and try to wear a team down with the poke from Lux and Jayce, and they didn’t want to experiment with LeBlanc’s trickery.

We decided to run double globals. I still wish we would have picked up Pantheon for that triple threat, but with Riven in top lane we knew that we would win that lane for free. I picked up Twisted Fate and Czarni jungled Shen. This gave us the ability to pressure their team regardless of where they were on the map. However, Unit02 got to pick his comfort pick of Maokai, and GoTWooD got to try to counter pick Twisted Fate with Talon. I’m not sure that Talon is a counter to Twisted Fate. Ultimately, I only have one ability that I can’t cast when silenced, and before Talon pounces on me I can lock a gold card anyway. Plus, my ultimate reveals him when he tries to stealth using his own, and his movement speed boost is completed wasted by the fact that I can teleport to his location after he uses his ultimate. Ultimately, Talon was probably a bad pick, but it just allowed him to be aggressive early.

All three games had Maokai camping mid early game. GoTWooD basically got free lane pressure in every game because of his dedicated jungler working to shut me down. It definitely worked early in this first game. I tried to apply pressure bot, but my assists weren’t making my 0-2 score look any better.

We started to fall behind in this first game, but just as we were making our comeback nubehound’s computer died. Complete shut down. When he tried to boot he was greeted with a number of errors telling him that he couldn’t boot back up. We were in a bit of a panic. I called nubehound and he asked “Do you have a computer I could play on?” Sadly, I didn’t. I didn’t have League installed on another machine. However, after another restart his computer booted normally and we went on our merry way. It felt like we were starting a second game, because we had waited more than 13 minutes for him to get back online.

As soon as we unpaused Zenimax disappeared from their grouping in the mid lane. I saw them heading towards our blue. Nubehound must have seen it too, because he walked over there to see what they were up to. His death pushed the score to 7-6, with us ahead by just one kill.

Then the game was over. We started winning some pivotal team fights, and we never looked back. We literally didn’t die after that point. We really got to flex our team work muscles. I did have some fun plays and got to do the Twisted Fate split push thing. Once Twisted Fate gets to that tipping point where his abilities clear out a full creep wave he gets very entertaining to try to play against. I actually had Maokai, Darius, and Talon chasing me to stop me from split-pushing, but while they chased me down bot lane my team took middle inhibitor and then I chased Darius down to hear the announcer yell “Legendary!” Oh how I love that sound.

The second game never happened. Katarina got to spiral out of control and pick up kill after kill. It got to the point that we should have just surrendered. We had a few ways to take Katarina out of her ultimate, but Katarina isn’t built around that ultimate anymore. She can lane with just health potions, and she never has to leave lane and Xerath has no kill potential against her because of her Shun Po. Again, GoTWooD got a free counter pick against me after they banned out LeBlanc and Twisted Fate this game.

This game was a total flop. We decided to go poke comp because we had the Jayce and Elise picks both up. I picked a super harassing mid with great poke and then our ADC was Caitlyn, so we had good poke from our AD with good disengage with her traps. For support we probably needed another way to put pressure on the enemy team, like a Zyra, Morgana, Blitz, Thresh, or any other champion that has a long skill-shot ability. Instead, we got Taric, a melee, aura-based champion. It just didn’t fit the play style of poke.

However, Zenimax had the chance to counter pick our poke with WuKong and Katarina anyway. It didn’t look like a game we could win, because we just wouldn’t have the tools to deal with their dunk engage.

This leads us into the third and final game of our best of three series!

Going into the third game we knew the pressure was on. We had to win to keep our undefeated streak alive. For the third game we again saw LeBlanc, Twisted Fate, and Lux bans. They really didn’t want to have any fun with my mid champs! Also, for the third game in a row I let GoTWooD counter pick me. When he picked Orianna I breathed the largest sigh of relief. I don’t know where people are getting that counter pick information, but this wasn’t the first Orianna to get picked against my Malz. Oh and I love the match up.

Of course, Maokai camped mid again. I actually walked over to ward the bushes at level three and thought better of it, so I walked around and warded over the wall. Of course, Mao was standing right there. He eventually left, and just walked around to the other side of mid. That’s when Czarni got sandwiched between Maokai and Orianna and gave up First Blood and gave Orianna Red Buff. Oh fun! This was just the tip of the ice berg for where this game was going. We started spiraling down hill fast.

This is where my lane opponent was when the game was looking most grim. That’s a 6-0 kill stealing Orianna ruining my fun in mid lane. I guess GoTWooD wanted a repeat of the previous game, but we weren’t going to let that happen. It was at this point that we knew we needed to rally together and start putting pressure down on the map to get the global gold lead back in our favor.

We grouped in top lane and started to fight back. Very quickly we got ahead and started flexing our muscles in team fights. The next time we forced a Dragon fight we went into the battle up, 8-13, and left at 8-18. The game didn’t get much closer than that, as we finished 32-10, but in the final moments of the game Choppes called out “SNIPE BLITZA!” which was a request that Caitlyn more than obliged to fulfill. Czarni dodged the bullet to make sure that Blitzcrank would die to the Caitlyn ultimate. It was so funny to watch. It was a humorous ending to a true show of teamwork and rallying under pressure.

Great games, Zenimax!