Irelia - The Floating Blade Master

Recently Alice and I have switched our priority from focusing on trying out new champions and testing Dominion out back to trying out Classic games however that is proving more difficult than we thought but we're still focusing on that primarily rather than Dominion. However I managed to make some time for practicing Irelia in Dominion as well when Alice isn't able to play.

I first had the idea to try her out a long time ago before I knew a lot about the game and I wanted to switch to a melee champion rather than trying out various ranged champions, and she was the most appealing to me as her outfit wasn't very risque, and I hardly ever saw her in action. I ended up not purchasing her however and instead I bought cheaper champions to try out. Actually I think I just bought Akali instead, what actually happened escapes me at the moment. However, since then I still didn't really see much of Irelia in Classic mode, I think I only saw her once or twice in fact, but that changed when Dominion came out. I'm pretty sure the first Dominion game I played when it was still in the open Beta phase, had someone playing Irelia in it, as well as a few of the games after that. The Irelia trend continued onto nowadays and while I see her less frequently, she is still around quite often in Dominion, and far more than she is in Classic.

This week, or rather the last week now, had Irelia as one of the free champions in the rotation and I decided to try her out, I first practiced using her in a custom match with just me and bots just so I could get used to her abilities and how she would perform with a full item build. During that I also decided to mess around to see her death animation which I read about, which is actually probably one of the most shocking deaths in the game, similar to Trynadamere's. Back onto the main point however, I started off with using a Mobafire build that used :

-Mercury’s Treads

-Trinity Force

-Force of Nature

-Shurelya's Reverie

-Randuin's Omen

-Guardian Angel

I personally thought that it both made sense and was completely otherworldly. For supporting it, based off of her skill set, she is very much centered around having DPS, and more durability than most other Assassins do, while other Assassins have extra damage skills whereas Irelia has a passive healing ability through her Hiten Style, and a sort of damaging healing skill through Transcendent Blades. So in short, due to her additional survivability and already good damage, all of the defensive oriented items would compliment that.

Against the build however is the fact that she is still a damage dealer and not a tank, Trinity Force is literally the only item in the build that increases her damage, and while it does do that, it also naturally spreads all of it's effectiveness into all stats including additional defensive ones, which, with all of the other defensive items, I doubt she is in dire need of.

When I tried this build out in Dominion I wasn't able to make any item after the Trinity Force pretty much because the game ended so quickly, although I'm sure that with a more complete build it would be much more viable than I saw it was, I need to do more testing on that in the future.

Back on track however, I found out a few things about Irelia in that custom game, one is that she does quite a bit of burst damage even with the survivability build, two is that her auto attacking damage even with Hiten Style is nearly nonexistent with that build, and three, Irelia's abilities seem to be focused on being able to get into the fight quickly and then unlike other champions, it doesn't really have a clear path from then on, she can lock enemies down but only if they're at higher health than her, she can heal off enemies and hit multiple targets with her Transcendent Blades, and finally she can of course, just auto attack away. All of these things and trying out the defensive build in a Dominion match led me to believe that another build is in order, one with more offense.

I found that quickly too of course, just below a few of the more popular guides which had the survivability build which does make me think that it's viable somehow, probably much more in Classic mode than Dominion. In any case however, this is the offensive build, and the build that I'm currently liking and using the most.

-Mercury’s Treads or Ninja Tabi depending on enemy team composition

-Trinity Force

-Stark's Fervor

-Infinity Edge

-Banshee's Veil/Odyn's Veil

-Phantom Dancer or Guardian Angel or the Black Cleaver or Hextech Revolver

For Dominion I personally switched it around to this order, with a slight modification in items.

-Mercery's Treads or Ninja Tabi

-Trinity Force

-Infinity Edge

-Defensive item based on enemy team (usually I ended up getting a Randuin's Omen)

-Stark's Fervor

-Hextech Gunblade

Of course, I hardly was able to get past the Infinity Edge in most cases, gold always seems to be a problem in Dominion and I need to figure out if that's possible to rectify somehow, maybe through minion farming. In any case however, the Infinity Edge allows Irelia to be a very good auto attacker after charging into battle, everything else that's different from the survivability build such as Stark's Fervor or Hextech Gunblade is designed to work with Irelia's healing ability, which requires her to be in melee combat anyway, so adding more life steal or spell vamp even increases her healing ability even more. The survivability build however is much tougher than this build, although this build in most cases allows Irelia to win 1v1s easily, and with a good team backing her up, she can easily win more numerous fights as well with her high burst and locking down abilities, at the very least at least 90% of the time if you target someone who isn't very durable like a Ranged Carry, they'll die in split seconds as is the goal of all Assassin characters.

Anyways it is difficult to build upon Irelia's character because her skill set allows her to do multiple things but none of them exceedingly well, such as how Trynadamere's abilities allow him to be a better auto attacker along with survivability, or how LeBlanc's skillset is focused on doing high magical damage burst with some escaping power. Irelia on the other hand as Hiten Style which allows her to auto attack more effectively, Bladesurge which is a good farming tool as it refunds mana if it kills something and resets it's cooldown, it's more commonly used as a gap closer though and it also does a high amount of AD damage. Then there's her passive which reduces the durations of crowd control effects on herself, depending on how many enemy champions are nearby, starting at 10% for 1 then 25% for 2, and finally 40% for 3. She also has Equilibrium Strike which does a high amount of damage except it has a AP modifier, and it also slows the target, or if they have a higher health percentage than Irelia, it stuns them instead, and it's duration of both effects increases as it's leveled up. Finally Transcendent Blades do somewhat low base damage but to further emphasize the point that Irelia is hard to itemize, it has both a AD and AP modifier, so if she has a lot of both, then her Transcendent Blades will do quite a bit of damage, it also heals her for 25% of the damage it does to enemy champions, or 10% to enemy minions, and passes through enemies, I personally like this ability a lot once I figured out how to use it because it's good enough to be a ranged ability almost for a melee character, not to the extent of Gangplank's Parrrley, but it's close to being just as good, it's probably more useful too as it also heals whereas Parrrley does not.

So in short, Irelia can be confusing to build since she can use almost every stat well, more so than many other characters, what I've learned and just thought of now is that every time a character comes along with a situation like that such as Jax, the solution is to give them hybrid items which I haven't tried out yet, but I think I'll try it out now before the free rotation ends.

As for wrapping this post up, Irelia is a very good champion to use in Dominion and is somewhat similar to Jax or Xin Zhao in how she functions in the game mode. As with most champions, the real solution to using her well I think in Dominion lies with her item build, and while I haven't tested out the survivability build much, the offensive build works fine and it's time without Infinity Edge is noticeable but it's not dreadful like other champions who use it. So, if you like an Assassin Champion that can be built many different ways even into an off tank apparently, as well as one that has a good gap closer, and offensive skills, then Irelia fits all of those roles and can be quite a fun champion to play in general.

Jarvan IV, The Prince of Dominion?

Not quite in my opinion. After doing some more build testing and research into item builds for Jarvan and then proceeding to test him out on Dominion, I've had somewhat more successful results than yesterday's trial but they still were not spectacular.

The first and foremost thing I tried out was building Jarvan pure DPS first focusing on a build very similar to one that I used to Trynadamere or Garen which included these items but not in this particular order.

1. Berserker's Greaves
2. Atma's Impaler
3. Infinity Edge
4. The Brutalizer
5. The Black Cleaver
6. Phantom Dancer

It became apparent to me however that it wasn't working as well as I hoped, as not only did it take quite awhile to build up to it's full power, it was only at that point where Jarvan IV actually became only somewhat good, even with 5/6 of the items listed (I believe the only one I wasn't able to purchase before the game ended was The Black Cleaver) I still couldn't really hold a candle up to a true DPS character. So while it takes a very long time to reach a point where Jarvan actually does good damage, normal DPS characters such as Master Yi or Trynadamere start to see results after purchasing Infinity Edge or a Phantom Dancer, and hardly anything else, everything else onward only makes them stronger, but the point where they can really start to shine is after one of those mentioned items. With the disappointment of the DPS build aside (although in it's defense I hardly tested it out on more than 3 games before marking it as a lost cause as I can't really see any future testing producing different results) I persevered and moved onto the more defensive oriented builds.

I had the idea to try him out as more defensive oriented after thinking about what kind of tanks worked in Dominion, I did try him out as a offtank once but I really didn't understand his character all that well at the time, and I believe it was around when I first started playing him, so I gave it another shot. To me, I believe nearly all characters can be successful in Dominion with differing challenges because all characters are not built for Dominion and are instead built with Classic mode in mind, so Dominion requires at least a few changes somewhere, although some characters require more change than others. Tanks are a good example of this, due to the small conflict nature of Dominion I don't believe any tank that does not have a taunt should actually build themselves as a full tank as the entire point of a full tank is to take the brunt of a assault for a group, but rarely is there actually a “group” to take damage for in Dominion. Tanks in general need other people around to be effective, they are most effective in League of Legends of course in a 5v5 scenario or even 4v4, however that diminishes as the conflicts get smaller such as in a 3v3 where if I saw a main tank and I was not forced to attack him someway, and I had multiple ways to get around him, I would definitely do so even if that tank entered combat first, if they build purely as a tank they will hardly produce any actual threat compared to their team mates. So, in short I believe if a tank does not have a taunt they do not have a surefire way of actually tanking for anybody, tauntless tanks in 4v4s or 5v5s function because they are able to cause enough havoc to lure people to focusing them anyway and furthermore in the Classic modes' maps, it is harder to get around them. I won't say that it's impossible to play a full tank without a taunt however, as there are a few exceptions where you can force enemies to attack you, mainly involving CC, but even then for characters such as Cho'gath or Jarvan (especially in this case) where they are tanks because they can go into 5 people and be a actual threat as well as take a bunch of damage, they can easily be sidestepped in Dominion in favor of killing their allies.

One role that full tanks can excell at in Dominion however is holding towers but even then there are DPS characters who can also do the role very well too, but they are more susceptible to tower diving than a full tank would be. So, while I believe main tanks aren't totally viable in every situation Dominion can throw at them, I had the idea to try out offtanking.

Offtanking would allow one to basically get the best of both worlds if they wanted to play a character that was specifically suited towards a tanking role as Jarvan is, and still be suitable for Dominion. He is pretty much purely an initiator, his CC and initiation skills can easily turn the tide of a fight or give the upper hand to the team that initiates at the start, the problem is getting to a point where that would be possible in Dominion. To counter the small group combat issue for a tank, the tank must have a bigger presence in the fight that would still allow him to tank to an extent, giving them DPS items and building them almost half and half allows that to happen. The smaller amount of players in combat also offsets the lack of defensive items to a degree as while a main tank would potentially be taking the damage from five people, in a smaller encounter, an offtank would only be taking the damage of one, two , or three usually.

So with that said, the best build thus far I've found for using Jarvan IV in a Dominion game is an offtank build consisting of :

1. Berserker's Greaves
2. Trinity Force
3. Youmuu's Ghostblade
4. Randuin's Omen
5. Odyn's Veil
6. Atma's Impaler

Jarvan can really start to shine after getting Trinity Force in his offtank role, and from experience from that point on when I entered a fight with at least 1 team mate, we would either end up winning or killing or heavily injuring 2 of them depending on how many we were fighting against. His performance DPSwise only improves from that point with a Youmuu's Ghostblade that pretty much will let him win any 1v1 encounter with a non-melee carry, although even then if you did engage a melee carry at this point you probably could win with some ability usage, plus possibly exhaust. I start building on his defensive side again afterward to allow his current damage to be able to overtake any enemy as they won't be able to keep up with his superior defensive power while still dishing out some damage. Randuin's Omen seems to be a good all around choice as it adds plenty of anti AD capabilities,, and to round him out Odyn's Veil afterward takes care of AP users. Finally to add a bit more offense and defense, Atma's Impaler is always good for that. Of course items are subject to change depending on the enemy team, like for example if they happened to be all AD I would not get a Odyn's Veil and probably replace it with Thornmail.

All in all Jarvan IV can work in Dominion and can work well but he's not exactly the easiest champion to pick up and play in fact he's far from it in this game mode. He is very very dependent on his team, and of the characters I've played thus far, I would say that he is the most dependent on his team in order to do well. This isn't too different than in Classic mode however apparently as Jarvan is also very dependent on this team there as well, but due to how often team fights happen there it isn't as bad as Dominion for Jarvan where if he doesn't enter a fight with a team mate, he is at a severe disadvantage. That isn't to say he isn't a completely unfun champion to play as he has a very unique play style compared to most other champions and can be a game changer against other game changers in Dominion if used properly. From being able to disable an entire attacking force on a tower to using his Cataclysm to his team's advantage, I can't emphasize enough how dependent he is on his team mates, but with a good team I would say he is not only a blast to play but also a great boon to the team that he's on.

The Prince Part 2

I was able to do a few games with Jarvan IV in League of Legends but it's quite honestly somewhat demoralizing at least in Dominion. I don't really understand why but I've lost every game since I started playing Jarvan in Dominion, in most of them I feel like I did fairly well sticking to what I believe are his strengths which are to initiate fights so I always tried to be with a team mate when possible, as well as taking hits for them, and defending nodes because to me, his Ultimate, Cataclysm is perfect for getting rid of attackers since it is able to trap them within turret range where the turret will easily finish them off along with your attacks. Despite that, I found that Jarvan IV is not good at 1v1s in any situation unless it's against a ranged AD carry or a Mage, in which case he has superior mobility in almost every way; however against another meleer no matter how I tried to build him, it doesn't seem like his damage output can rival other off-tank DPS characters such as Jax or Sion, in fact his damage doesn't even come close to those two in particular, but then again it might be more of my problem in that I don't really know how to build him.

As for item builds I tried out a few different things from using a standard guide build which suits him for a initiator role with things like Mercury’s Treads, Warmog's Armor, Trinity Force, Atma's Impaler, Banshee's Veil (or Odyn's Veil), and Youmuu's Ghost Blade. I found out that this doesn't seem to work out that well in Dominion because as much as I try, there will always be times when I'm forced into a 1v1 scenario, and as I can't really get my full build, it's hard to see if it's truly efficient or not, but with half a build usually, I end up losing in that situation.

I tried to move onto one with my own alterations building a Trinity Force, Mercury’s Treads, Phantom Dancer, and Youmuu's Ghostblade before the match ended. This gave Jarvan a good amount of everything from Trinity Force as always, some Magic Resistance and Tenacity from Mercury's Treads, Attack Speed and Critical Strike Chance from Phantom Dancer, and finally I personally haven't ever really had successful results from Youmuu's Ghostblade except for on Trynadamere, but I decided to try that out anyway. When I felt like things were going in our favor, as there actually was a enemy Jarvan IV in this game and I was doing far better than him for most of the game, we ended up losing again. On the other hand, I found out that Jarvan can Critical Hit just as hard as any other character, and his Attack Speed Bonus from Demacian Standard might make him viable for that then I think. In the end however it still leaves me back at sqaure one and kind of distraught about still not winning a single game with Jarvan IV.

I think what I'm going to try to do for further investigations on Jarvan is get rid of Trinity Force in favor of an Infinity Edge or Warmog's Armor, and probably get Atma's Impaler instead of Youmuu's Ghostblade. Possibly also replacing the Mercury's Treads with Berserker's Greaves for more Attack Speed too. In any case however, here are my results thus far with Jarvan which aren't the most positive things in the world.

So while my stats aren't the best and I hardly did any games with Jarvan, I still think if I could learn how to use him well he could be a fairly good Dominion Champion, I will update as I have more experience as him, or have found a item combination that would work well. Also on that note I don't doubt that he would be extremely good for the classic mode as all of his abilities would create pure havoc in a team fight while also buffing his own team. Alas, it's harder to take advantage of such havoc in Dominion or even end up in a situation where creating it would be possible.

Princes and Princesses

I haven't posted anything for somewhat of a long time and while I have been meaning to do so, I've had certain real life issues preventing me from doing much that was really worth writing about. However, now that I'm here and I'm in a fairly good mindset to start writing again I'll start off with a few small notes as usual.

The Prince of Demacia

Today after playing a few games with Sion mostly in Dominion and only one in the Classic mode with the goal of farming Influence Points to buy Nocturne and try him out, and also to get the limited edition Halloween “harrowing” skin, if I like playing him anyways but back onto the main topic; I decided I felt like trying one of the new champions in this week's rotation, and that ended up being Jarvan IV since many of the other free champions don't appeal to me that much. Honestly, I haven't really heard that many good things about Jarvan IV either, nor have I seen him perform that well in games, it is my understanding that he was apparently very strong but he went through a series of patch changes that brought his power level down quite a bit. So, while I won't be able to experience the popular Jarvan IV, I still can see how he plays currently. I've only done one game with him, deciding to skip Coop mode practice again to see how off-put I would be on a PvP Dominion match without knowing anything at all, and it turns the answer is “quite a bit”. I currently haven't played him enough to make any true statements about him yet, however I do know that one of his main CC combos which involves throwing his standard down and then charging to it, which in the process, knocks up all enemies that are in the way, is somewhat difficult to pull off, moreso than most champions with a skill shot that I've played, mainly because it is very difficult to get more than one champion in path before charging, although I somewhat wonder if I'm overestimating what my role is in a fight, and I should just go for knocking up one champion.

In any case I will be writing more about Jarvan IV possibly in a more indepth post about how he performs in dominion specifically and possibly in the classic mode too since both modes seem to be rather Jarvanless.

Yggdra Union

In other news, I've also been playing a Playstation Portable game called Yggdra Union which is a turn based strategy game designed by Sting. It has a very animeish art style to it, and it's graphics aren't amazing, although I haven't really played many PSP games at all and I don't really know if there's a standard for “amazing” graphics on any hand held system. It is also a port from a GBA game but from my research it has a few improvements such as replacing the old music with more “modern” sounding themes although make no mistake, while I haven't played the GBA version myself, I have compared the PSP and GBA soundtracks for a few of the scores in the game, and they do carry basically the same tone and even rhythm, but the PSP does things like changing the instruments used or even slightly changing the tune in a few of the tracks. It also has added a few characters, and tactics cards which kind of goes onto what I wanted to say next in a way, the actual gameplay.

The game play is a combination of a standard turn based strategy game like Fire Emblem as well as adding cards to it. The cards are called tactics cards and they determine how much damage you do to the enemy, how many spaces you can move for your entire team, what abilities you are able to execute, and what type of weapon a unit has to have to be able to use that ability. This all is a lot of information for just seemingly one aspect of the game, but the tactics cards are pretty much the only drastic difference from most similar games. You still take turns with your enemy, you move units one by one but unlike most games and as kind of mentioned slightly before, your units share movement spaces and the total number of movement spaces is determined by the card rather than the type of unit itself, this also limits battlefield mobility severely. Other than that however, there's also a weapon triangle a lot like in Fire Emblem except that it adds magic rods and bows into the triangle, and there are various landmarks on the battlefield that you can take advantage of such as visiting villages or simply a fort that when you fight on it, it gives you positional advantages. One last thing that I'll mention that it does add that I've never seen a game do before is the use of formations which lead into unions; these are essential that you learn early in the game which require units to be in certain positions from each other when initiating an attack, or defending from an engagement. There are only two formations even though I'm sure the developers wanted to go for something crazier than that, but in any case, the two formations are diagonal and cross, and the unit that is one who is first attacked or attacks is how the two formations are chosen from. From then on if an allied unit is either across or diagonal from the main unit, they will join that unit in combat, utilizing this is important for two reasons : one, that you can only attack one per turn, period, not once per unit like most games. The other reason is that if a unit is forced to take another round in battle due to one side having more units in their union than the other, that specific unit enters the battle at less strength, this allows you to weaken the enemy in a way.

So, while that sounds like a lot of things for one game, it isn't too hard to get into the swing of things. The real deterrence of the game is that it allows for almost no mistakes or else it will punish you in some form, in fact I have literally not gotten everything on a single level while at the same time knowing full well of everything that is on the level. The game also rarely forces you to choose between rewards to take in that fashion either, it simply presents the opportunities at times that unless you've played the map a considerable amount of times, or have leveled your units in a way in previous maps, you simply will miss it. Another way to put it is that the game is very anti-perfectionist, and even if you retry maps constantly, the game handles things in a somewhat random fashion where it won't be possible to have a guaranteed shot at everything even with the most perfect planning.

None of that is to say the game isn't fun however, I really enjoy the story although it seems remarkably close to the story of Fire Emblem : The Scared Stones, on the other hand I like the characters much more than most of the characters in the game, but I also liked characters in the previous Fire Emblem (The Blazing Sword) more than The Scared Stones as well. I will be talking more about the story in a later post, and probably more about the game as I go through it, but as of now I'm about 14 hours played, and uncountable times retried because of my perfectionist mindset which I want to get rid of.

Conclusion

That's about it for today's post, I will be trying to post more often as I do more things that are actually worth posting about hopefully, and I apologize for the lack of posts recently.

The Spartan

Pantheon was one of the characters that has been around in League of Legends for quite awhile, I remember him being around when I first tried the game out about a year ago or maybe a little longer than that. However he's one of the characters that I found interesting because a lot of the characters at the time seemed unique in their own way and then there's a completely random spartan looking guy amongst the portraits. It wasn't until today and last night that I actually started to try him out though, so without further ado, this is what I've deducted.

Unlike most champions I tried the testing phase out differently this time, rather than practice in the
Coop mode even though I feel like I should have still, I went straight to playing Blind Pick Dominion games. It was a completely new experience for me because not only did I have to figure out how to use his abilities even though I had glanced through them beforehand, but I also had to find out how to use them effectively. Luckily like most champions in the game his abilities weren't the most complex things to figure out, using them on the other hand was a different story.

First he has a passive that allows him to fully block an attack for every 4 spells and attacks that he does, the use of this I'm sure can be controlled by experienced Pantheon players to make him very deadly. However, as I found out, it doesn't block everything like I thought it would, instead it's limited to turret attacks and auto attacks. That doesn't diminish it's usefulness as he can effectively get rid a great amount of damage from people that focus on large hitting auto attacks such as Trynadamere or Vayne. This passive is also triggered by another ability called Aegis of Zeonia which allows Pantheon to leap a short distance towards his enemy and stun them for a second, doing minor damage, and it also immediately puts his passive shield up, letting him block the next attack. With how much Pantheon attacks and triggers the shield, it does block quite a bit of damage, however that is because Pantheon despite looking very intimidating and having a shield, is very squishy.

Like most squishy characters, he has the damage to make up for that instead of simply having damage reducing spells and CC spells. The other two skills that I didn't mention yet are Spear Shot which does quite a bit of base damage, and it has a full 100% attack damage modifier, allowing it to really start to shine when he gains more AD. The last one and his main attack for the most part is Heartseeker Strike, this is a aimed short cone attack that is channeled, it does 3 attacks with a good amount of AD modifiers as well as doing double damage to enemy champions, this is his main burst and it has a fairly short cool down, allowing him to back off if he so chooses to refresh it and burst again. It also has a secondary effect, allowing him to always perform a critical strike on targets that are under 15% with auto attacks, furthermore spear shot does more damage to enemies that are also within this health range, making Pantheon a very effective executioner.

So while all of these sound quite impressive, there are hidden draw backs of course. Pantheon isn't good at a single thing like most other melee champions are such as how Akali and Katarina have strong burst damage abilities, while Trynadamere and Master Yi are good auto attackers. This means he is at a considerable disadvantage constantly and the player must make up for that with a good item build that would allow him to have good auto-attack damage while also having high burst with his abilities. That is much harder to do in Dominion than it is in normal games because after doing a lot of both Classic, and Dominion, I can honestly say it's easier to get gold in Classic not only because matches last longer, but because last hitting minions is a much more abundant and reliable source of gold rather than the enhanced passive gold stream, and gold from getting kills or assists on champions. Furthermore, it is fairly rare to have a Dominion game where you are able to get more than 3 endgame items, even 2 is sometimes stretching it, and most champions such as Pantheon don't reach their full potential until they're able to have all 6 items. That is a overall disadvantage for everyone though of course, so in the end it could also work out to Pantheon's favor.

In any case, what I did for Pantheon's item build were a number of things different from the first few guides on Mobafire.

1. Berserker's Greaves
2. The Brutalizer
3. Trinity Force
4. Infinity Edge
5. Sanguine Blade
6. Youmuu's Ghost Blade
7. Atma's Impaler or Frozen Mallet

Honestly all of the items in my list seem to work fairly well with him, however the real key to making him effective I found out is prioritizing which items to get first regardless of it's cost because of the short duration of Dominion games. I believe Berserker's Greaves can also be changed out for either Mercery's Treads or Ionian Boots of Lucditiy for either CC reduction or Cooldown reduction allowing Pantheon to burst more. The Bloodthirster of the normal Classic mode is easily replaced by Sanguine Blade which only has 5 less AD and it's also somewhat cheaper, it's also much easier to use unlike the Bloodthrister because it doesn't require you to build stacks off killing things and it simply stacks off hitting things, of which pantheon will build up the maximum amount of stacks very quickly. The defensive item is somewhat iffy for me, as defense doesn't really seem to be much of a priority in Dominion at all as while there are death penalties they're fairly minor. In regards of defensive items however, I still wanted to get one that would improve Pantheon's offensive capabilities so that led me to either Atma's Impaler for armor and critical strike along with some extra AD from his health, or Frozen Mallet which is health, AD again, and a more reliable snare. On the other hand however, Trinity Force is pretty useful even though it's snare isn't a guaranteed effect like it is on Frozen Mallet, but with Trinity Force you do still have a snare meaning that having two snares that don't stack isn't the most effective thing around. Also of course, you could replace the defensive item with a situational defensive item which I probably would do anyway like getting Thornmail for auto attacking teams or Warmog's armor if you wanted more health, and so on.

So with all of this aside, Pantheon's performance on the battle field is quite impressive actually, he is able to cut most people up very fast with a Spear Shot, Aegis of Zeonia, and then Heartseeker Strike at the same time however, it's somewhat hard to make sure that people do stand in the Heartseeker Strike for it's full duration to get the most damage out of it, in fact most people will quickly move aside after their stun is over and it'll waste a few of the strikes. It also has a shorter cool down than Aegis of Zeonia and you'll be able to use it before your stun is back up so if you want to use it during that time, it has to be completely aimed without keeping anyone in place. After all of his attacks are done he can either back off or auto attack, and from what I've seen with a fairly strong auto attack build, pantheon is actually a decent auto attacker being able to stand up to other champions like Sion, and Wukong, and definitely able to stand up to other assassin characters like Akali as after the initial burst, they should be low on health anyway. As for backing off to wait for cooldowns, that can be much harder than it seems as Pantheon has no escape abilities other than simply running away, so in general, bursting hard first then finishing the enemy off with auto attacks or at least softening them up and surviving long enough for another round of burst is the way to go for pantheon, and in the end if you get someone to 15% or lower they're basically dead anyway because of his 100% chance to critical strike on enemies that low.

One last tactic that Pantheon can utilize is similar to Gangplank, he is able to use Spear Shot to poke and harass his enemies before going in for a full brunt melee. This is much more effective in Classic mode of course as for the most part all Dominion engagements are full brunt assaults but I did use the poke tactic with Spear Shot now and then.

So, in the end Pantheon is a fairly viable champion in Dominion but like all champions, requires some getting used to, I would say somewhat more than champions such as Jax or Master Yi.

  

LeBlanc

While playing League of Legends which of course is a team game with different character options that fit different “classes”, I have always been trying to find a few characters that I could focus on mastering which had different classes, but so far I haven't really found any at all even in my normal specialty of melee characters in most games. With that, as someone who likes melee in games, I especially found it even more difficult that I also want to choose a ranged character that I could be more proficient in as well as one that melees. I have played quite a few ranged champions from ranged carries like Tristana, Ashe, Miss Fortune, Corki, and Ezreal and Support champions such as Soraka or Karma, but only a few Mages. All of the mentioned characters I have tried in more than a few practice games and sometimes onto PvP matches but I have never really tried a Mage character more than once in a practice match until LeBlanc.

What drew me to LeBlanc is that I played against a player who was very good at her and it surprised me a great deal as I hardly ever see LeBlanc played at all, furthermore she was able to do quite literally insane burst damage, which is really the core of what intrigued me about her. As I found out, and experienced, LeBlanc is basically a glass cannon, she has extremely high burst that lets her take out most champions in only 2-3 spells and if they survive that, they're very very low on health, I really like burst damage in games, and while I personally played a Mage in World of Warcraft, and ended up not liking it, I still have an idea to give the characters who are masters of burst damage a chance in various games.

As usual I started off with a Coop practice game with Alice where we tried something kind of weird out and tried to lane together with her playing Cassopeia whom she has experience with, and me as LeBlanc who was completely new to me. We probably made it harder on our selves than it should be but it was a learning experience nevertheless, I quickly found out that LeBlanc's main attack, Sigil of Silence does quite a bit of damage, and it only gets better as she gains levels. I had trouble getting used to her blink at first as I've been playing characters where I would pretty much just hit all of the spells as soon as they came up and that “spamy” attitude was not that great when her blink also teleported me back to my original position if I hit it again within 3 seconds, which I did mistakenly more than once during the practice match. As with all skill shots, I found it difficult to aim her Ethereal Chains around minions, but when it did get off, it was pretty easy to stay within range of my afflicted target to trigger the immobilization effect and thus in most situations, resulting in a kill. Finally her damage output simply sky rockets when she gains her ultimate which mimics the last spell she casts and inflicts more damage based on the rank, using it after casting Sigil of Silence is her main burst and it's very effective, it simply decimates the enemy's health in most situations. I ended up not getting many kills but plenty of assists because I wasn't able to chain my spells together effectively enough which I learned later on, but again nevertheless, it was an enjoyable and relaxing experience.

So while practice was fun despite a few drawbacks, it made me like LeBlanc and try her out in Dominion. Like most champions I've been trying out recently, Dominion is a completely different game almost and it kind of shines in LeBlanc's favor and against her at the same time. The first thing I noticed and probably one of the bigger problems that I'm still trying to deal with is that Mejai's Soulstealer is not available in Dominion, that is very bad for LeBlanc as it is the highest base AP item before percentage modifiers around, and also in regards to money, it's also the cheapest and so far from what I've seen, there is no Dominion only equivalent. So, that led me to experiment with items which I've been trying to do for many characters anyway, I ended up with a buying order like this :

1. Sorcerer's Boots
2. Fiendish Codex
3. Morello's Evil Tome
4. Will of the Ancients
5. Rabadon's Deathcap
6. Zhonya's Hourglass
7. Archangel's Staff
8. Void Staff

I don't entirely know what the caps for magic resistance and magic penetration are yet, but for the most part I was just trying to get as much ability power as possible without spending that much money. I actually ended up changing the buying pattern to this :

1. Sorcerer's Boots
2. Fiendish Codex
3. Morello's Evil Tome
4. Rabadon's Deathcap (at which point the game usually ends, and I don't really have a solid build afterward however I usually end up doing something like this)
5. Void Staff
6. Sheen
7. Lichbane

I don't really know if Lichbane is worth it for LeBlanc yet and it's very difficult to tell what exactly is working or not while playing the game for me, however I read in a guide that it might “possibly” work, so I figured why not. Really the only thing I feel like I could change is having Archangel's staff sooner, maybe replacing Morello's Evil Tome or Void Staff with it. However, I need to have the most AP as soon as possible to be effective essentially so I feel like the third end item that I'll always get no matter what is Rabadon's Deathcap as it adds so much AP.

Onto the next thing about LeBlanc in Dominion however, as it is very close combat focused, you need to literally have very fast reflexes to use LeBlanc effectively as most champions can kill her just as fast as she can kill them, this point is lessened when you have group support as when you come in from behind other people, it lets you quickly burst a enemy down and make the fight that much easier for the rest of the team. On the note of using her effectively, as Dominion really forces you to adapt quickly it's great for learning how to use a champion in individual or small group combat situations. At first I was doing a lot of dumb mistakes that irritated me like using mimic on a spell I didn't want to because I was casting my spells frantically instead of precisely and it ended up doing things like copying my blink and having me blink into the enemy which got me killed very quickly. However, as I played more games I feel like now I can be a contributing force in a team and beat most champions in duels or small group fights. One more note on abilities, it is very easy to kite meleers in Dominion with the use of Ethereal Chains, and basically if you or they stay in range while the chains are on them, they'll die once the immobilization effect triggers as you'll be able to just turn around and burst them down quickly.

As for standard Dominion play I found that being a roamer at all times is the best strategy, while you “could” defend and you're actually very good at interrupting captures and escaping through the use of LeBlanc's blink, I personally didn't even have the survivability of a Ryze or a Kassadin who are both very squishy champions; so to defend nodes you have to be confident in beating 1v1s and also accept that you will die most of the time to a 1v2. That is what makes LeBlanc a ineffective defender, unless you're able to somehow kill a single champion quickly enough which will require all of your abilities, and not have their team mate assist on attacking you, you won't be able to defend yourself against a second person's onslaught even if the first person is blown apart. With that said, there is something that comes to mind that I haven't tried yet, which is using Flash instead of Ghost which will let you escape and have time for your cooldowns to recharge. So that's something for me to try out later. Regardless of that however, LeBlanc is amazing at offense pushes or roaming defense as you will hardly ever be the target when you arrive to a fight and even the split second of an element of surprise lets you get into the fray, quickly burst a target down, and escape which will turn most fights into your team's favor, and even if your team loses, you'll still be able to finish the enemy off most of the time.

Like Wukong I've only started playing LeBlanc today pretty much, and it's very interesting but also frustrating at times, I in general wonder about LeBlanc's viability in Dominion because while I pretty much got the most kills/assists on my team at all times, I was still unable to turn the tide into winning a lot of matches. I think I'll be doing a lot more experimenting with LeBlanc and possibly become better at her, I still don't know the exact cause of why my games weren't as successful as mine were when I played melee champions, my personal score wasn't ever horrendous, and I felt like I did good in all of my games personally, but the fact is that I had hardly any wins as LeBlanc compared to even Wukong and definitely compared to Jax and Trynadamere.

"Okay!" and Wukong

“Okay!”

Alright, I finally got around to finding a good image hosting service as I previously used Photobucket but they have a “viewed” limit where if you exceed a certain amount of views from visitors, it replaces your pictures everywhere they're shown at with a small box saying basically to upgrade to see it again. I originally was going to use Photobucket anyway but then that came to mind and for the purpose of the blog and my current funds, I've decided to look for an alternative. I found one (by Adam's suggestion) in Imgur which I never really considered as all I see from the site are joke pictures. Not to my surprise, right on the front it also claims that it has the funniest pictures on the internet. However, while I haven't posted a picture yet, I have uploaded a few that I will be trying to show here in someway after I finish writing this, and basically it gives the same options as Photobucket does at least the ones that I used frequently such as providing links to put the picture into various formats on the web, and of course allowing you to sort the pictures into different albums.

So in short, I'll be able to get a album up for the blog soon which will make things a lot more exciting.

Wukong - Nimbus Striker

Today I spent pretty much all of my time trying Wukong out and trying to figure out how he plays, his strengths and weaknesses, and in general to see how he performs in Dominion.

In a Coop game that I started out with like usual for all of my new champions, I thought that Wukong was pretty strong actually, he has very strong harassment abilities and he's able to escape quickly afterward. Last hitting was also very easy with Wukong as after about.. I'd say level 4-5 and definitely higher than that, he has more than enough mana for any of his spells, so you're able to easily use his main strike to aid in last hits on minions without any mana problems at all. So from the laning phase my impression was that Wukong is very strong, he actually even gets better in team fights where he actually becomes more armored and resistant as more enemy champions are around him, and his ult is a AoE knock up as well as heavy damage leading to you basically being able to give your entire team free hits while the enemies are in the air. In summary, Wukong is very good in the classic mode, however the main goal of my experimentation was to find out just how well that holds up in Dominion.

Dominion simply put, is where his usefulness diminishes. His burst damage is still very strong in the early and mid game phases, but he simply can't hold a candle up to Champions with high auto attack end game potential such as Trynadamere or Jax. That isn't to say that he isn't good however, I personally have beaten many Trynadamere and Jax players 1v1 on Dominion through the use of hit and runs, however both of those champions are also capable of multikilling players, Wukong is not unless all of the enemies are at low health.

Onto more positive news about Wukong though, his burst potential does still shine through out the game, and he'll be able to dispose of low armored people very easily as he can out maneuver them and close in quickly to do burst then escape, repeating the process afterward. He can also beat most meleers in small group combat as well, although it requires a lot more mobility than simply running in and attacking, Wukong will always need to use hit and run tactics to be effective in Dominion. The last positive thing is that today is only my first day of actually playing him so I'm very new to him and I don't really know him well enough to create a solid min-max build for him that would possibly put him on the same level as Trynadamere or Jax. While I was also playing Wukong, I saw people playing champions who I normally consider weak such as Shaco, Twitch, and Miss Fortune, and they basically turned them into killing machines that could easily out kill Jax (I also fought a Ashe who did the same thing as Jax, but I was able to get rid of her quickly, but still she hurt quite a bit) so, I suppose more experience is the only way to tell for certain, but for now, Wukong is kind of not exactly a “pick up and get a decent score” champion, at least in Dominion.

Here's a few of the results of the games I played with Wukong, I don't really know if it was me performing poorly individually, or the enemy team was simply outplaying my team, but the results aren't exactly the most positive things around, but all in all, I'm happy with how I did in most of the games.

So in the end, I guess only time will tell, it'll also tell if I want to keep playing Wukong myself or move onto another champion. He's pretty fun honestly, and the fun did override the difficulty for a little bit, but there's only so much of getting one shot that I can take.

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.

Dominion Early Trial

Today to my surprise when I logged on Alice and Adam told me that Riot allowed the public to play the new League of Legends game type Dominion for “a short time”, little did I know that this time was only for 2 hours but I was lucky enough to wake up early to play 2 matches of it, and in short, it left me wanting to do it a lot more.

As someone who read very little about Dominion but still enough to know that it was putting the focus on having champions engage in quick and fast battles, I was very surprised at how well Dominion has executed on it. For those that don't know, Dominion shifts the goal away from destroying towers to capturing towers instead, it does keep the 3 lane map scheme to an extent, but for the most part it's 2 groups splitting up at the start and then meeting the enemy's two groups at the middle of a node. With 5 nodes, it's capture and hold basically, however the placement of the towers is somewhat curious for me, instead of having 2 of each side and 1 in the middle or something similar it's basically 4 corners and then one at the top in between two more, I think this somewhat inspires people to focus more of their forces on the top lane instead of the bottom as it gives a bigger lead if you can manage to win the battle that'll ensue.

There are also random buffs placed around the map which are fairly easy to figure out, I personally didn't know buffs would take that form as I didn't read about it, however they're marked with boots and health icons, so someone with even one match-worth of experience will know what both of those indicate, boots being speed, and health being minor healing. Finally there is a third buff in the center of the map called a Storm Shield, there are two of them and they are reserved for their respective teams apparently, what the shield does is that it seems like a simple shield that absorbs a great amount of damage, much larger than most shields certain player characters are able to create. I only got the buff once, and that's the only effect that I saw, however the name Storm Shield almost makes me think that it would provide a offensive benefit as well. So, while the map is very interesting but fairly standard if you've played a lot of video games in the past, it's a huge change on the game play that one expects from League of Legends.

In my first match Alice and I took both of the bottom towers fairly easily against 3 players, I was playing Garen and she was Lux. Right off the bat I noticed that an item that I've become somewhat dependent on was unavailable, that being Doran's Blade, however I just decided to go for boots of speed and try to build up a Phage into Frozen Mallet as soon as possible as that was still around. When we got into combat, actually fighting players was a lot different as well as the overall feeling felt a lot more offensive rather than running away and doing small harassment to the enemy, the three that we fought against made no effort to harass at all until we killed 2 of them and only one was left, I also noticed that killing players affected the overall score which is called the Nexus Health in Dominion, so with controlling more towers affecting the Nexus Health, and killing players also affecting it, the goal of course was to still bring the enemy Nexus down before yours.

Despite having the excellent start, the midgame somewhat became a bit more iffy, while our team wasn't doing poorly by any means, I simply concentrated on offense too much, and there were many times when I did something I shouldn't have, simply because I didn't know about it, such as fighting around a enemy tower. As I was a fairly high level at the time, I didn't think the enemy tower would be that bad and the enemy I was targeting was at low health as it was, so, being used to the damage that normal towers in the classic game mode do, I rushed in of course. To my misfortune and surprise, the towers hit very hard, probably harder than most of all of the towers in the classic mode other than the spawn position towers. Furthermore, I later found out that the proper way to “rush” a node is to have someone channel a capture on the tower to prevent it from firing, at which point you can kill other players while at least one player is channeling without fear of the tower's wrath. Regardless of that however, I simply did not contribute to the team capturing nodes enough and our first game was a loss.

Our second however was much better as I was more knowledgeable about the game mode. We did a 3 top and 2 bottom start, where only one person went bottom against us on their team, so we disposed of them quickly and headed up top where our team was actually winning, in fact by the time I arrived most of the enemy team was dead and I only helped finish off one of the retreating players. The game was pretty one sided with a lot of memorable moments for me, at one point, and this is the point where I figured out how capturing a tower works, I was capturing a tower with an Irelia and a enemy came to try to stop us. She got off the tower and went to intercept them and they were literally fighting like 2 inches away, the fight was pretty even but I felt so bad knowing that I could just turn and kill them but then the tower might have posed a problem even in that short time, so I had to just watch without being able to do anything. She managed to win though, and afterward a enemy player that came to help him showed up, since the capture was done I was able to charge them gleefully.

Another moment that I really liked was when after I killed a enemy I was at pretty low health, but Singed was still around with roughly the same amount of health. Seeing that my ultimate was up, I ran into the bush with the plan to try to burst him down quickly, he came to try to finish me off and I quickly hit decisive strike and Demacian justice which managed to kill him, thankful that it worked I quickly recalled since I didn't want to get into any other fights before healing up. Finally while there were a lot of good awesome moments done by Alice and I, and the team in general, they weren't as funny or interesting as these, including this one. Alice was defending a tower from a Master Yi and was winning, since he was near a wall he tried to escape, however I showed up at that moment and then seeing me, he turned around, but then he also saw Alice there as well, so he was effectively cut off and of course we cut him down.

In short, Dominion is awesome if you're like me and not good at the farming part of classic Defense of the Ancients; it's arguably less strategic but I'm sure there will be parts where both teams group up and fight each other in normal league of legends fashion. In the end though, it's simply replacing minion farming with more PvP combat essentially, and I think that both champions and players that prefer to attack players instead of minions and towers will have a good place with League of Legends now.

League of Legends - Negative Players

I have been playing quite a bit of League of Legends recently (or Leagends as Alice and I like to call it because we don't really like saying LoL for it) and while I primarily did Coop matches, Alice and I have started to get into playing PvP matches more often. This of course has led to finding people that aren't the greatest teammates ever fairly quickly and not in the skill department either, it's that they are simply negative jerks. The most recent one I've had was when I was practicing Amumu on my own while Alice wasn't around to play with and so I could be able to play well with her when she does have time, but that's getting offtrack, so back to the main point; the most recent and probably the inspiration of the post was someone did the following :

1. Arrogantly said “you're welcome” every time they helped with a kill
2. Complained about kill stealing
3. Didn't like that they weren't doing well and said that they were “sucking” which I normally don't have a problem with, however, they also wanted to surrender because of this (the fact that they weren't doing well), right after we killed the entire enemy team which made no sense at all to me.

We ended up winning the match anyway, but it still wasn't exactly the most enlightening thing to see, especially because in just the game before that, I also had a very similar teammate who did the exact same thing, I'm pretty sure they weren't the same person. While we're on a list mode, I've also seen people that :

-Have wanted to surrender after dying once

-Complained about kill stealing (of course)

-On the above point, also complained about kill stealing after winning (because of help) a losing duel between themselves and someone else

-Complained about others while not doing well themselves in a completely unrelated lane

-Not select a champion at the start and not leave the match setup, so they end up just AFKing/Idling the entire match or disconnecting while the game is in progress

-Purposely run in and die against the enemy team to level them up

-(I didn't personally see this one but Adam apparently has) Sit in the main friendly base and use wards to make smiley faces

-And many other things I haven't seen yet

Normally I would be used to this because of my World of Warcraft Battlegrounds experience, however it seems to be much more rampant here, and not only that but for sure, having a “bad” team mate impact the rest of the team much, much more in League of Legends. For those who haven't played the game (which I still recommend trying even if you don't like it to start off with), having a bad team mate I would say... increases the chance of a loss by at least 30% if not more, because if the enemy team is good, there are many more things a team with 5 team mates could do as opposed to one with 4.

In the end however, having bad team mates isn't that great for a non-social person like me who doesn't like communicating with strangers in the first place, but I try to do it as much as possible to be polite or to help the team, at the very least to help the team in any case. It's very disheartening, frustrating, and annoying to try to say something even like “garen mia, possibly going to mid” and then to get a dumb response in return. For me even, it's a huge deterrence to just see other people argue and complain to each other or make fun of each other when a team mate makes a mistake somewhere.

I suppose it's because League of Legends is a Free to Play game and from what I've seen a majority of the F2P (no offense to anyone of course) communities are very bad. World of Warcraft doesn't seem to be much of an improvement, but I've at least had reasonable conversations with WoW players now and then, whereas it almost feels like a lost cause for League of Legends.

However, I can't do much to change that, and the fun factor along with wanting to be better at League of Legends offsets the “dumb” players factor pretty well, in fact despite this entire post right after it I plan on playing another game with Amumu for even more practice, so overall I guess while it is annoying, it's just something that you have to deal with, and this isn't to say all League of Legends players are like that, it's just that a majority seem to be, but of course, only time will tell.

League of Legends / Defense of the Ancients : History of ups and downs

I have or had a casual history with League of Legends and the Defense of the Ancients and it's successors (or spin offs) in general but that has recently changed thanks to Alice. I first heard about DotA in one of the World of Warcraft guilds I was a member of where it was somewhat mentioned, and after listening to talk about it, it made somewhat more sense but it was still fairly haze. Furthermore, I was surprised to find out that it had something to do with Warcraft 3. It wasn't until a magazine article (I think) that I found out what kind of gameplay Defense of the Ancients actually had, and even then I didn't try it out until my World of Warcraft subscription had expired and it came up to mind on things I could try out.

So, with that situation I ended up looking it up and I at first was immediately turned off by the fact that the search result that came up for it was called something like “Defense of the Ancients Championship edition” and anything under that were past releases, so I ended up just downloading that. I didn't like the fact that it had the words “Championship” in it because it meant that I would need other people to play it fully rather than having some sort of bot system. Even knowing that I decided to start it up and try it out, I immediately thought it was fun being able to choose a hero and control literally no one but that, and I set out to explore the map a little bit. It wasn't too long until I discovered the enemy minions and decided to farm them, leading up to me messing around with the towers which were fairly easy to take down without any player interference. Since I wasn't really playing with anyone the main purpose of my exploration was to just see what it was like, I ended up really liking the hero I chose because it was a Fel Guard, and I thought they were neat from having spent so many hours in World of Warcraft. The Fel Guard's abilities were also a blast to mess with, I immediately drew the comparison to how it was similar to playing a hero in the normal Warcraft game modes, and that ideal without the addition of having to control things like units, research, and buildings at the same time was really appealing to me, since I loved the hero character aspect of Warcraft, but I was never really good at the normal RTS parts.

Regardless of all of that however, my exploration came to a close after I completely roamed the map and leveled my character out, with giving him the most expensive items. I didn't really feel like going onto the multiplayer aspect of it and that single incursion basically while fun, ended my DotA experience, until somewhat recently.

As someone who follows video game releases fairly frequently, it was very hard to miss the release and launch of titles such as Demigod, League of Legends, and Heroes of Newerth. At least two of them distinctly aim to be the “Defense of the Ancients 2” and those are League of Legends, and Heroes of Newrth. I can't speak on Demigod's behalf as I didn't really look into much information about it, I do know that it's multiplayer oriented with the same style of as DotA though, however the other two titles overshadow it in popularity and how similar they are to the DotA formula. With all of that in mind, the only one I've actually had experience with is League of Legends and that's because a friend of mine Adam also played it and I decided to give it a try.

Actually playing League of Legends was interesting, I was able to draw a lot of similarities right off the bat to how DotA was from the 3 lanes, stores in bases, and of course things like controlling one hero, and uncontrollable minions going down lanes at will. The main difference was actually playing the game with other players be they human or bot, playing as it was meant to be played completely changed my experience with it, and perception of the series in general.

When I first started playing League of Legends the literal only two ways to play were against basic bots which didn't really prove much of a problem to the extent of being unfun, or against players. As a generally antisocial person the first thing I didn't like was the fact that it was a small team based game where coordinating with other people is for the most part very essential, or so I had thought at the time. The next was that because of the item shop and the game had experience and levels, I thought the game was very cut and paste from the start to the finish, to the extent of if someone out levels you, you might as well surrender. That part is probably more of me being a sore loser myself, but it's also true to an extent as I learned later, but it was one of the main deterrences of the game. I also did not like that simply choosing a character that you like would possibly not be the best one for you, because all of the characters have set roles and abilites. With things like item building, and skill orders there is a minimal amount of character customization to an extent, but it's simply not efficient to play a character a less than optimal way. That leads to my final dislike of League of Legends in that right from the start it is a very competitive game not un-similar to World of Warcraft's arenas which I also didn't like. The last reason combined with all of the other reasons brought a quick halt to my playing in the League of Legends, until recently anyways.

Alice and I had been playing Warcraft 3 lately and playing a bunch of the skirmish mode against bots which I found fun, it also reminded me that I really liked the hero units of WC3 and it gave me the idea that maybe we could try League of Legends out, to at least so we could experience it together. So of course, we went on to try it out; after doing a few things to set up like tutorials, looking up the free champions and so on, we ended up inviting Adam and then we got started. Since the last time I played, and something I'm thankful for, is that the developers decided to create a Coop mode where it's 5 players, no more no less which I thought was kind of lame but I got used to it, it sets you up with random players of course if you don't have enough, against 5 bots which even on the lowest difficulty level are much smarter than basic bots you can use in custom games. We started out on the highest difficulty of which there are only two so there's not much of a choice, but we ended up doing that because Adam made the game and he decided that was a better choice.

In any case, I started off as Maokai simply because I wanted a character who could go into a lane with Alice, and she was forced to start off with Annie even though her first choice was Lux but someone took that before her and she wasn't familiar with the lock in process. In the actual game we ended up not doing fantastic but we started off fairly well which surprised me, not in that we couldn't do it, in that it happened that way on it's own. However the thing that really messed us up was when a bot from another lane came to assist the ones in our lane and we didn't expect that, resulting in us quickly getting wiped out in our lane. The bot that did this in particular was also a much higher level than us. This particular event is something that I found out happens in every game, but back onto the main topic, despite being underleveled after having our lane wiped out, we ended up pushing two lanes and assisting the middle one mainly where by then I had gotten used to using Maokai as a fight starter and using him to root enemies who are in a good position for all of my teammates to quickly turn and burn them down. At the same time however, I was disappointed in being killed instantly by a single champion such as Ryze or Annie, I'm still unsure of the cause of that especially as a tank character, but it doesn't bother me so much anymore. We ended up winning the match even though we personally didn't do as good as we normally could do when first stepping into different types of games such as Call of Duty, or Left 4 dead, which was new for us, and kind of a disappointment for me because again, I'm a sore loser.

Like I said I was somewhat disappointed in our performance but I was encouraged with Alice being with me too, I enjoyed most of the game except towards the end where things seemed too powerful to even hurt because of being underleveled, but overall, I enjoyed it a lot more than I would alone that's for sure. Alice also had similar thoughts on the game, and wanted to learn more about it, leading up to me agreeing with her, it's been a few days since then, while we haven't been playing League of Legends constantly because of other matters to attend to in our lives, we do play it quite a bit.

I've learned a few things since then the main thing is that Adam showed us a website where we could see guides of characters which I normally don't like doing, and I still don't but I realize that a lot like with World of Warcraft reading, as the game is very copy and paste from game to game, it's important to have a general idea of what your character's role is, and what items to get. I know I could probably get the same information from looking up literally all of the items and knowing what a specific character could use more of or is good at and then improving those ways, but I personally don't really want to spend the time to do that, nor do I enjoy the game as much as I do as opposed to something like World of Warcraft where I did do tests, and experiments with different items and specs (which cost tons of gold) to see what works out the best. That isn't to say I don't enjoy League of Legends, I'm still in the process of getting to the point where I would really like it, here's a few things I've noticed about the four characters I've played so far :

Maokai

-Good at using saplings like greandes to mess the enemy up

-Good at rooting

-Not good at everything else

-Former main champion, stopped using because I don't know how to play him even with guides because no guide is very specific and I wanted to be a better supporter

-Because I like Maokai as a character, I possibly will go back to him someday and by then I should know more about the game

Warwick

-Good 1v1

-Very high regenerative ability

-Very good movement

-I would probably play him some more just for fun to see how he can be in a lane without jungling

Zilean

-Good passive

-Good at setting up kills

-Ultimate seems useful in theory but because it completely immobilizes the champion who dies and then raises them without full health at which point unless they're in a situation where they won't be focused they will die, in most cases except for team fights it seems to have very limited uses

Soraka

-My new main champion

-Good at healing

-Bad at damage

-Bad at escaping without summoner abilities

-I've only just started playing Soraka yesterday but with Alice as an Ashe I feel like as long as we're good at the start and we don't let the enemy outfarm us we'll do good in the end

With all of that said my general view of League of Legends has changed dramatically from playing with Alice, and while my dislike of it did come up now and then, it hasn't ever completely shut me out of wanting to play the game, and I do feel like I could enjoy the game more as I learn more about it. So in the end, I want to learn more about it, and from what I've seen, that'll make the game us better at the game, and in general it'll remove the idea that something we don't know is causing us to not do as well as we could be doing.