Waiting to Patch

Alright, while I'm waiting for this patch to squeeze through my horrible internet connection I guess I'll do a quick post about some of the patch notes.

Akali: Mark of the assassin (her q) now properly returns energy when getting the killing blow. Not a huge deal.

Alistar: OH THE NERFS, his base movement speed is hit the slightest bit, down to 300 from 305, but more importantly his headbutt range has been nerfed. His cast range has been reduced to 600 from 650. I don't know how much this will affect him but it's clearly, just like his last nerf, a jungle nerf. And thank god, fuck jungle alistar. Like a cow belongs in the jungle.

Corki: He's getting some nerfs, a whole slew of nerfs actually. First his Hextech Shrapnel can no longer proc a critical strike, his Valkyrie cooldown is being increased  to 26/23/20/17/14 seconds from 20/18/16/14/12. On top of both those nerfs his missile recharge time is also going to take two seconds later.

Honestly, Okay with the Corki nerfs, been seeing him almost every game lately, he was definitely very strong and even worse then that, I couldn't play him well so it was all the more frustrating. 

Diana: Now who didn't see this coming? Of course she's being BUFFED!!!!!

Jokes, she's being nerfed, a LOT. 

Her base health regen is going down from 10 to 7. Her crescent strike damage is being reduced to 70/110/150/190/230 from 80/125/170/215/260. If that wasn't enough the ability power ratio is being hit as well, going to 0.7 from 0.8. 

On top of that her shield damage has also been hit, with each orb doing  20/34/48/62/76 damage from 20/36/52/68/84 damage before.

And lastly, her ultimates cooldown has been nerfed,  increased to 25/20/15 seconds from 20/16/12.

So yeah, you won't be stomping with Diana anymore. But she was clearly OP, more so than a lot of previous release champions. 

Alright now for my favorite buffs, and if you've played against my Evelynn in the past you're already shaking reading these buffs MUHAHAHAHAHA. 

Her Shadow Walks radius has been reduced, meaning you have to be closer to see her, which is awesome because I already didn't have a problem with that at all. 

Her Hate Spikes mana cost has been reduced which is amazing, she was so blue dependant in the jungle before it was borderline crippling if you didn't have a manaless mid. Now she'll only be really blue dependant. It's being reduced to 14/18/22/26/30 from 19/23/27/31/35.

Also her Dark Frenzy, the movement speed boost, is going to ignore unit collision so you can just dive through creeps to hit your target, and it's cooldown is being reduced by five seconds. 

Her Ravage's cast range has been increased, to 225 from 180. If you can't tell by now you should be terrified of Evelynn.

Also her Ultimate ability's cooldown has been very slightly reduced. At lvl 1 it isn't different at all, lvl 2 it's ten seconds shorter, and level 3 it's twenty seconds shorter.

So you should be scared, very scared if you are in the 1500-1600 normal ELO range or 1300 ranked range because my Eve is coming out in full force. 

Ezreal is being more tweaked then outright nerfed or buffed, his mana costs are going down on his mystic shot, allowing you to spam that in lane more easily, so that'll be more fun. But then his W is getting nerfed in a couple ways, but buffed in another. First they increased the AP ratio on it, but reduced the damage, and on top of all that reduced the size of the abilities hit box making it harder to land.

So basically I have NO IDEA what's going to happen with Ezreal, if we'll see him more or less, stronger or weaker, we're just going to have to wait and see.

Gragas is being nerfed. Didn't really see this coming, but I have seen a lot of Gragas lately and they have all wrecked face, may have become stronger due to "reverse power creep" where everyone else gets nerfed so he got stronger.

Either way, his charge speed is being reduced to 900 from 1050, the mana cost is increased by 25, and his ultimate cooldown is being increased to 100/90/80 seconds from 90/75/60. 

I like these changes, a big problem against Gragas was his ultimate being up seemingly constantly, and with it's insanely strong displacement that was pretty broken. 

Graves is being nerfed! Thank god, I'm sick of seeing this bastard every game. His base attack speed is being reduced to 0.625 from 0.638, and his quickdraw attack speed is being nerfed to 30/40/50/60/70% from 40/50/60/70/80%, which makes sense, I always considered him to be the "burst"  AD carry out of all of them, and having a lot of attack speed is counter intuitive to that. I hope they buff either his Q or W base damage in the future to be more in line with the feeling of a shotgun blast. On release he felt like that, but that's because he was overpowered, hopefully they can find a way to balance that.

Jarvan IV is getting a bit of a bug fix, basically it's going to be a little easier to cast his standard, instead of running to where you click the standard it'll instead fire off at it's max range, making his combo a little easier to pull off.

Karthus is having his wall fixed, it no longer reduces armor, and instead of reducing by flat magic resist it's going to reduce 15% of magic resist. 

Katarina is also getting a huge slew of changes, her passive is going to give 5 seconds more cooldown reduction on kills and assists, her base damage is being increased on bouncing blades but all their AP ratios are being reduced making it stronger early game, as it should be to make laning easier, getting another AP ratio nerf on her sinister steel, her Shunpo is also being buffed, with more base damage and less cooldowns. So all those people crying how the remake was a nerf should be a little happier now. 

Mordekaiser is getting bigger. Cool I guess. Havn't seen it yet, hoping he's as big as 6 stack Cho'Gath now. 

Nunu's Ice blast is slowing for one second less then before, for three seconds instead of four.

Rengar is getting some bug fixes, Unseen Predator now leaps on the target and his bola  won't misfire. He still sucks though so don't play him.

Shen is getting a nerf out of nowhere, his Shadow dash is having the cooldown increased,  to 16/14/12/10/8 seconds from 10/9.5/9/8.5/8. Seems like a pretty big nerf for someone who wasn't that strong already.

Teemos toxic shot is being fixed again, thought they fixed this but his toxic shot will now deal the correct damage at higher attack speeds. 

Twitchs expunge is being buffed, which is good because we still never saw him after the re-work, Base damage increased to 40/50/60/70/80 from 20/35/50/65/80, and his Mana cost reduced to 50/60/70/80/90 from 70/75/80/85/90. Hopefully this makes him more viable, I'm not going to hold my breath though.

Warwicks getting a quality of life change, his passive will now correctly show in the bottom and show the stack amount.

Abyssal Scepter's range is being reduced on the aura. I'm still going to buy it.

Wards will now show an indicator if being placed in a bush or not, which is awesome. Also items with cooldowns will now show the cooldowns on the item, so things like tri-force, sheen, maw, you won't have to guess the cooldowns anymore. An awesome quality of life change. 

Oh and wards are getting a HUGE NERF. I can't believe they even did this, but they NO LONGER HAVE 20 ATTACK DAMAGE.

Be right back, going to go whine in the forums about my ward damage.

The Saddest Mummy Holds Great Power

Holy shit! Look at that! I figured out how to add a picture to this blog! I sometimes get people thinking I'm much more technically proficient then I am, but besides league of legends my computer skills are quite limited. And just as limited if playing Nidalee.

But I want to talk about something I've been using to carry ranked lately. I gained 300 ELO, starting at 1000 last week and now sitting at 1319, or something similar.

I achieved this using mainly Maokai jungle, and the lesser seen AP Amumu.

Oh you can only imagine the rage, but you just have to ignore it, because he is an early game ganking beast, and a borderline hypercarry late game.

Basically you start with your boots and three pots. Get three dorans rings and moba boots and gank like crazy. If you can't land mummys skill shot, go play Mao, that's what I do when I can't land a skillshot to save my life.

After that deathcap. That's right deathcap. You want this ASAP after your dorans rings because thats all your early game ganking power. The reason this is strong is that even tank mummys ganks are terrifying, add that initial tiny stun nuke, then the much larger nuke (level e first) going off every five seconds, faster if they turn on you, plus dmg over time from your w, you are terrifying. You're doing like late game karthus level damage pre-20 minutes in AOE form.

And then he falls off, hard. Until you finish the full build you are going to feel very, very squishy. So you need to get Zhonyas after deathcap so you can use the active whenever they try to turn on you, and they will. I get focused a lot as AP amumu. After that Rylais for some health+slow, then Abyssal for the MR you're lacking. After that I'd prob go guardian angel, although this build is so freaking expensive you'll never make it that far.

Also if you have a duo buddy that likes to play Yorick, TheWillrus and I found a neat trick entirely by accident. Turns out if you blow mummy ult, then yorick ults you and you die, you come "back to life" with another mummy ult ready to go. Not that gamebreaking on tank mummy, but on AP mummy that's a gigantic AOE stun nuke that takes out easily half of their entire teams health if played correctly. We pulled that in a ranked without knowing what would happen, and boy did THAT take everyone by surprise. I mean that was more surprising then, uh... something. Not Rengar for sure, he kinda sucks.

So to anyone stuck in the 1000 ELO, remember that ANYTHING can carry you out, as long as you can play it well. It's not about finding a champ that can carry, it's about finding a champ that YOU carry with. For me, AP mummy has been working. For you, it could be AD Ryze.

Yeah..... Right.

Curse and Dignitas VS MLG

Last weekend was MLG Raleigh, and for those of you who got to tune in you probably got a bit of a surprise towards the end of the tournament.

The two finalists were Team Curse and Team Dignitas. Right now everything is very convoluted as to what actually happened, some people think they were disqualified because they played an ARAM, and some think it's because they rigged the game, or that it wasn't even rigged and they just agreed to split the first and second place winning.

Anyways if you want to see Team Cusre looking like a bunch of sad puppies, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujijaucr4Yw&feature=plcp

That's a link to their "apology" video, and I say apology in quotes because they start by saying they didn't do anything besides play an ARAM, and then spend the second half of the video apologizing for the nothing they did.

Team Dignitas had an even vaguer press release on their website, basically saying they'll address it later.

Now it doesn't seem to me that they intentionally threw the game, or that they had any motives besides hiding some of their strategies for upcoming tournaments. So the two teams agreed for the first game of the finals to do an All Random, All mid game type set on the proving grounds.

Normally I would have no problem with this except it was a tournament, and it was a summoners rift tournament. No one was tuning in to see them have fun in an ARAM, they wanted to see the startegies, the teamwork, all that stuff that doesn't occur in an ARAM. Not to mention they failed to mention it to their hosts, MLG, that they intended to do this. So I definitely agree they deserved the DQ, or if not the DQ, they should at least have had to play an actual match. Even so I feel this has been blown way out of context, a lot of forum people (which will henceforth be known as swamp people) have unleashed the rage gates, and at the end of the day this is still just a video game, and the objective is fun. They fucked up, but it's not like they found the cure for cancer and then brought it to a crazy party and Jimi Hendrix snorted it thinking it was coke (historically accurate reference, look it up), they just didn't want to show all their cards, and the way to do that was an ARAM. I think if they had spoken to the hosts of the tournament about this there may have not been a problem, or if there was at least they would learn before and not have to deal with the consequences. Better to ask permission then beg for forgiveness, as Curse seems to be doing in that video.

Anyways, still two of my favorite teams on the North American circuit, and I hope they can learn from this and make a better showing with a little less controversy in the next tournament.

Go Team Curse and Team Dignitas! Just don't do ARAM anymore.

If you want to read more about this, here's an excellent Forbes article talking about what happened. http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/08/27/yes-esports-needs-sportsmanship-too/

Entering the ring

Say hello to your newest League of Legends team!

Alright, well we haven't started practicing, many of our solo que ELO is lackluster and we don't have a full roster yet.

But... we have a blog so fuck yeah! We're halfway there!

So say hello to Team Canada! (tCa)

On our roster so far we have,

Oskjuvatn: Ad carry and soon to be our main streamer.

TheWillrus: Top laner who can beat everything but teemo. But really who doesn't hate teemo.

Nydushermain: Support, and our pro player, not sure his highest ELO but he was at 2222 earlier this week, if you've heard or seen of any of us before this, it was him.

Mid: ????

Yeah mids the only position we're missing right now but everyone (Nydus excluded) is working on our solo que ELO and trying to get it to a more respectable place. Although we all admit it would be awesome to have a bunch of 1200 ELO scrubs playing in a tournament.

Oh, and I guess you're wondering what's going to be in this blog? Well brave traveler, we will include articles about general play and how to get better, posts from other league of legends website we think you'll find interesting, and some guides we made ourselves as well as posting when we're eventually streaming.

So to start of the festivities I have two guides for you, one a serious one from our AD carry Osk. He mained mid way before AD so he made an awesome Cassiopeia guide I recommend checking out if you want to try the snake lady. http://www.solomid.net/guides.php?g=30524

And for the second guide, one made by yours truly, the trolliest of trolls, a fun guide for messing around in normal games. http://www.solomid.net/guides.php?g=32526

That's what we got so far! Obviously a thank you to Team Solomid for making such an awesome guide making site. Obviously check out Mobafire too if you are looking for guides, or the more recent Lolpro.com hosted by Team Curse. We'll make sure to keep this guide regularly updated with new guides, posts, vids, whatever league of legends related thing we think you'd find awesome. Also feel free to find us on the NA servers, if we're not doing ranked we're usually looking for people to premade 5 with, or if you have a team and want to do some scrims message us, hopefully we'll have a full roster soon!