Jax in the Box

Well, today will be another short note day since I wanted to write about something but I couldn't really figure out what to write about, so without further delay, here's what comes to mind.

Dominion Released

As all of the League of Legends players know, and only after about... maybe a full week or so, of open public testing, the new game type Dominion has released, I wrote about it a few days ago and I enjoyed it a lot then. Since then, I've found myself wanting to play Dominion more than the Classic game type which I guess is apparently just called “Classic”, and I wanted to do that for a few but important reasons.

1. I'm okay at the early lane phases but I don't really enjoy them that much
2. I prefer the champion fighting
3. It's shorter which is kind of a half like and half dislike point for me as I was one of the people that enjoyed Alterac Valley when it was hours or even days long, however I believe the League of Legends community (generally speaking is very bad, so when getting random people, the duration for which you have to deal with undesirable people is lessened. Finally onto the last one
4. I am much better at Dominion

All of these reasons make Dominion a much more enjoyable experience for me, even though it's not the type of gameplay that the developers are used to. It definitely shows to an extent as Dominion isn't as balanced as it could be for certain champions (I'd also argue that Classic isn't either) . However at the same time Dominion is way more balanced than Capture and Hold game types in other titles such as World of Warcraft. In said game, usually a lot of the games are one sided in terms of which side wins because your team's total points still drained down as long as you held a base.In Dominion, even if you have one point left and the enemy has 300, you can still win so long as you don't allow them to control more bases. It basically creates a game type where as long as you have players, you have a chance of winning essentially even if the enemy team is a lot better at combat than your team is.

In summary, Dominion is fun for me, and while I do still like the Classic mode, right now Dominion is so much better at capturing my attention, and I don't see myself losing it for awhile.

Jax

I've recently been playing mostly melee champions in Dominion, and Tristana but that's another story, playing melee champions of course made me eventually run into Jax who I didn't really see played that much, but when I did run into him as Garen* or Trynadamere who both are auto attackers, I ended up usually losing to him unless I had a advantage somehow in player numbers or health-wise which made me curious about him. I honestly thought Trynadamere was overpowered but it's actually kind of hard to play him in Dominion because he's so item dependent and income is actually slower in Dominion I believe than in Classic, at least in terms of how it scales with level. Jax on the other hand is someone who I didn't think was that overpowered until I played against him, and I actually wanted to play as him because I knew he was strong but like Trynadamere, I was thinking that there would be some challenge to playing him. I found out that I wasn't wrong in a sense.

After spending a whole day with Alice playing as Trynadamere and learning a ton about him, I was tempted into trying Jax out. We started off with a bot game to try out new characters as usual and I ended up thinking that Jax wasn't as strong as he seemed, that was before I started to get starting items however, and I was able to 1v1 most champions later on fairly easily. The results of that test however were kind of iffy and it didn't really seem that fun to play Jax, so I ended up trying him out in Dominion for a few games before I turned in for the night.

It was literally a different experience which by now I could expect, in fact I would argue that fighting bots in generally much harder if they didn't do stupid things on purpose. Back to the main point, what I found out that Jax's early game is stronger than Trynadamere's but he's by no means godly at this point, he does become that later on though with his opening ability (Leap Strike) and his powering up ability (Empower) being able to take most people without defenses down to 30-60% health letting him quickly finish them off with his auto attacks. Furthermore, he also has a defensive Counter Strike that when he dodges an attack, he is able to strike back, doing minor damage but more importantly stunning everything in a short distance around him, and his ultimate allows him to do extra damage every 4^th hit and it speeds up his attack speed passively, it can also be activated to provide magical resistance. Basically, he starts off somewhat weak but by no means the weakest, and then he starts to hit very hard. On the defensive side of things however, he can be countered by simply buying an item that prevents Jax from dodging the user's attacks, thus rendering counter strike unusable, while it's not the end of the world, and I personally have beaten someone using the item 1v1, it definitely hurts Jax quite a bit. The other part is that Jax is fairly vulnerable to ranged attacks, and melee attacks too for that matter as he's not the most durable character around, and like every character in the game, he can be killed very quickly when he's focused. So while Jax is strong, so are many of the other characters in the game, and he still has specific items, and skills that counter him very well.

Right now I'm kind of iffy about if I want to keep playing him or switch to another champion to try them out, I Still haven't really figured out a couple of champions that I want to play a lot, practice with them, and I guess in a sense “master” them.

*When I played Garen I followed a build that starts off with him being a “spinner” and then after he gains a Phantom Dancer, he relys on auto-attacks.