Windows Bit-tech League of Legends thread

TBH Invisibility as a whole is something that Riot isn't happy with atm.

It's an "OP Low ELO", "UP High ELO" situation, where ELO can also be substituted for "Competence".

Wards and Oracle's do effectively shutdown the majority if not all Stealth champion, it's only to what extent (i.e. Evelynn more than others).

With Oracle's against Shaco, you can usually catch him before he deceives, and still see where he is after (that is, when he comes into a teamfight). There are champions that you want to catch before a teamfight (Evelynn, Twitch) and there are those you use Oracle's to catch during a teamfight (Akali, Shaco). It's not about trying to catch him whilst he runs away (although that is, obviously useful).

 

Two things first I didn't say I chouldn't mute people I said I wished there was a mute all command to make muting people easier.

Second, Shaco is actually Better when the teamfights start then before the problem is if Shaco is in the teamfight itself your doing it wrong. Some champs should never be in a team fight at all and AD Shaco is number one among them,given it's a totally different story for AP Shaco who should never miss a teamfight. What Shaco is best at is pushing a lane and taking out the tower with my normal 20-30 minute build he can take out entire minion waves in a second or two and tank full health towers fairly easily. Given a line of JitBs in the lane behind him with Deceive Boots of Mobility and a Phantom dancer he's almost impossible to catch.

Shaco is just not a direct champ and shouldn't be played that way. He shouldn't be at the front line with Alistar or Tryn he needs to be always on the move laying JitBs for his team to escape, Ganking anyone alone and pushing towers. In fights he's best left to toss a JitBs behind to lead an escape and then moveing in to turn the carry to mince meat. Deceive behind them to get the passive bonus get the crit drop a JitBs and then Two Shiv it's normally enough to get all attention on you so when the Box goes off your team can finish the carry off while you go to push.

And I started rambling a while ago but I have alot of things to say about Shaco since he's been my main since he came out and I have about 700~ games in as him and have tried about every play style and build there is. Wow I have no idea if I should be proud or sad about that number.

 

So me and 2 friends decided to have a "troll" game after having some bad luck in ranked games. I decided to go AD kennen which isn't REALLY trolling, it's actually pretty funny though. My friends went AP Malphite and AD Amumu. Anywho, the team we played was bad but I really think AD kennen could work. The attack speed stacking with the charges = stuns, plus kennen's aoe stun makes him pretty damn useful. Here's a screenshot from the game. I had most kills, least deaths and most assists. I was short elixirs but built was complete. The 3 deaths came early game / from being stunned by sion and Irelia just did work to me.

 

Clearly you know the character better than me. From my experience however, I'm just not that impressed with him. When I see him on the other team in a character loading screen, I think 'thats going to be irritating' but nothing more. When i see the likes of Vlad, or Kassadin, or Karthus, I think 'This could get very painful very fast'. I don't really think of him from a BD/pushing point of view though, which is probably why, though I will start to now. Also, though I realise you didn't say you played him as such, I rank AP Shaco alongside AP Yi (please don't get me started on AP Yi); completely stupid. After the first 5 minutes if people are still face checking bushes and walking into 5 JitBs then they deserve to lose. Last hitting with Shiv is nice, but your damage is really limited to hitting with lichbane, boxes, shiv, and your ult blowing up in peoples' faces.

Another example of how broken invisibility is occured to me last night as well by the way. We were playing against an AP shaco, so whenever anyone saw him they would poke him down and not chase him (obviously), and then as soon as he deceived, our TF would ult on him and get the kill. I know it is an ult, but really it seemed unfair on the shaco (though he was trying to troll us after going 3-0 in 15 mins, so we weren't that concerned for him)

Mansueto, that is excellent. I can't believe you did so well with an AD build on Kennen. AD Amumu? That is definitely trolling. By right you guys should have lost

We played a game last night against a team of trolls (not that unusual of an occurrance, I appreciate) They went Alistair, Garen, Singed, Maokai and Jarvan. I hate tank teams with a passion, they are so broken it is ridiculous. Fortunately we played defensively for the first 20 minutes or so, being about 3-11 down on kills and having lost 3 towers before turning it around. The combination of Karthus' wall, Corki with black cleaver and me with Rammus turned fights to our advantage very swiftly, I think i ended up with around 25 assists. I'm loving Rammus at the moment. His /t is just amazing too

Edit: I'd just like to say that I'm loving this thread. I spend a lot of time on League of Legends each week, so I thoroughly enjoy discussing the game reasonably with you guys without people coming in and wrecking the thread ala riot forums.

 

TBH I think your post says it all with regards to Shaco's utility as a whole.

If the best strategy for him is to "avoid teamfights" and instead push lanes and towers then you're effectively leaving your team with a 4v5 every fight. If you try to come in and mop up after your team has lost, the chances of you successfully taking on a 1v3/4/5 isn't particularly high if you aren't uber fed since he's very squishy.

TBH you may as well just take a somewhat lacking Carry and have them farm up in said sidelane push... someone like TF or Sivir who can still escape so long as they're competent. That way in teamfights they can still put out useful DPS from the start.

I'm not saying that i don't agree that he shouldn't be in the thick of teamfights, he's an assassin after all, however the fact is that IMO there are more useful Assassins in the current game, especially in a meta where Assassin's are that strong atm.

Funnily enough, when Kennen first came out the only way to play him at high ELO was AD. This was due to his AP ratios being rather terrible (they got buffed) and he'd effectively become a stun bot with his combo and the AD stacking meant his Passive E proc hit like a truck.

It's not quite as viable as before since now AP Kennen is rather strong, but it certainly didn't lose any of its strength from back then.

 

I really enjoyed playing kennen as AD. I want to try it out some more in regular games. I also finally gave morde a try. I've had him for ages but never bothered to play him. I think he's a good hero but being played as a tank / hybrid tank / dps is difficult since he has no "real" initiating spell. I spent most of my game being trolled by a failwick, sorry laning magewick that kept saying I couldn't do anything to him as he could heal himself to full very quickly with hungering strike. It all started after I killed him 3 or 4 times in a row and he started calling Morde broken and cheap and himself amazing.

This is the reason LoL is really annoying, people are really immature and are sore losers imo. To your shako arguement, I've never used him but when you play squishy characters he's normally a threat constantly, especially if your on your own. If you can stop him early game however he seems to snowball.

I also want to rage about fail elo games, My elo is soo fricken low right now because of leavers and such. Last game I called warwick and my team agreed with me, the guy ahead of me takes warwick, doesn't say anything to anybody, than afk's. He spends a good minute afk, so he's already screwed. Everyone knows jungles that fall behind normally snowball hard. Anywho, he decides to get blue first... with no items. after he almost died he decided to start somewhere else. By the 4-5 minute mark he was only level 3 and was killed by a shako who was also jungling. It was pitiful. If your going to try new heroes out, do it in normal games, not ranked!

 

The thing of it is the game isn't won in kills You can be 20 kills ahead and still lose your Nexus first. Given that fighting 4v5 isn't something that lends it's self an easy win but it can be done and it takes sometime which a good Shaco will use to drop a tower or two.

Look at it this way. The enemy has won the fight and your the last alive the enemy is most likely down a champ or two so they have two choices try and push your towers giving you free reign to take out a few of there's or coming to kill you wasting the chance to push and giving you Tenish seconds free to push before running out. Now most of the time one of the enemy team will back to defend while the rest push when this meaning they get to walk into a 1v1 against you which for a carry is a bad idea since you can kill them and keep pushing. If it's a tank or someone that could take you ghost out and rush to push another of their towers.

As always that was a rambling mess so I'll try and sum up.

Yes a good Shaco makes his team fight 4v5 but it makes the enemy team either take the time to fight that letting you take out towers or waster their time coming to chase while to your team does the pushing. Most times someone will try and stop you from pushing coming in solo to do it putting you in a 1v1 where Shaco fights best.

 

Unfortunately, he doesn't push as well as Yi or Sivir. If you were to make a team under the premise of 4v5 fights and someone pushing the towers down, I'd take Yi. In the given situation he can switch from lane to lane far faster than shaco can and he will happily plough through two or even three enemies if they try to stop him with less than full life, having come from the 5v4.

He also has the ability to mix it up, so that on the third or 4th time the enemy attempts to force a team fight, expecting you to push their towers down, you can pop in to the fight after all their CC has been blown and easily rack up a triple kill or more.

 

I know what you're trying to get at and ultimately i don't think we'll agree here simply because of game mentality.

You are completely right in that Towers win games, don't have any problem with that.

However whilst i concede that point, i disagree that the best way to take towers is split pushing (which is traditionally considered a very "EU" mentality"). IMO the most efficient way of winning a game is forcing a teamfight and pushing when the enemy is dead (the "US" mentality).

I know you stated your "counter" here for that situation however:

If you force your team to engage 4v5, you're increasing the enemy team's chances of survival. Two kills is probably an ideal situation but in all likelihood it will (and should) be a single kill. At which point, and i've seen this so many times, no matter how fast Shaco pushes, a team of 4 will push faster than you.

As for sending someone back, that will obviously make you play on the defensive. With regards to sending a Carry back, they usually have Tower advantage so i wouldn't be that confident in engaging them (we're talking about you being on even footing here, not fed up the ass). Even then, a competent team would never send their Physical Carry back since they push the fastest. More likely is that they send an Assassin, Mage or Tanky DPS. The Tank stays since he can Tank a tower if needs be and AD Chars stay since they're the ones who do damage.

Also, with regards to "ghost out and take another tower", the fact you're going to have to swap lanes means you've wasted crucial time.

Ultimately i'll some this up with a real world example:

WCG2010 finals with CLG (US) vs. SK. Gaming (EU), The first game CLG were destroyed by the EU who had a TF combo who kept split pushing and kept CLG on the defensive. CLG was all over the place trying to defend and every teamfight they had was out of position. This was despite having the "best" team comp at the time built around Kog'Maw, Galio and Janna (i think).

However CLG quickly learned from the first game and had a comp. built around forcing teamfights. They made sure lanes were pushed out when they were ready to engage, and the minute TF decided to split push, they leapt on SK taking advantage of the 4v5 (even tower diving them at one point). They won each teamfight with very few losses and ultimately pushed harder than TF did forcing him to either go back to defend or freely give up more towers in exchange.

In the end, CLG won 2-1 with the second game being almost as dominant.

 

And you just proved my point.

 

Forgive me if I've missed something, I'm a HoN player who just pops by for fun, but it would seem like he proved the exact opposite. Pushing lanes worked once by being something the other team wasn't used to but once the two teams were on more open ground CLG won two in a row.

HoN, being very similar, faces the exact same metagame differences, though I never play EU so I can't say if it's a cultural thing. Leaving one free to push can work, there are characters who are extremely good at pushing lanes, but it's putting a lot of emphasis on the enemy team being crippled following the team fight. This isn't always the case in both games. Three, four, maybe even five enemies live from the teamfight and they'll just push faster than you. Additionally, a good team will press their advantage and force team fights as often as they can to ensure that your team is dead as often as possible. This just gets worse over time as they will start pulling ahead in gold and experience while your team suffers. Pushing is a rush strategy that, while able to win dominating victories, falls apart with proper resistance.

 

I must not have stated my point correctly then since it should have disproved it.

My point was that real world applications showed that (admittedly in that instance):

- Split pushing caused 4v5 teamfights.

- A competent team can force a teamfight when they have the advantage in numbers.

- Even if the Team of 4 is competent, the disadvantage means they lose.

- The remaining members of the Team of 5 will push faster than the Split Pusher and should be unharassable by said Split Pusher due to numbers.

Thus, Split Pushing isn't IMO a more viable strategy than forcing teamfights.

 

I've been toying with movement speed quints over the last couple of days. I'm still undecided on them, because I'm still a big fan of health quints on most of my characters. However, ghost+Ghostblade+contaminate on trundle with them is hilariously good fun, over 600 movement speed!

My main thinking behind them was for when I'm running Rammus or Amumu, allowing me to get boots other than swiftness while still keeping up with runners. What is your opinion on them?

Also, I figured if I wanted to start playing Garen some more (team build allowing) then it makes for even more spin to win goodness.

 

It worked the first time because CLG wasn't expecting it. I highly doubt any strategy will work against a team that has both geared it's champ picks and tactics specificity to counter it. It's a strategy based on surprise trying to use it on the same team twice in a row is basically moronic.


It's a strategy that needs the enemy to not be prepared for it which shy of coming up against Batman means most teams.
Yeah the best way to counter it the massively annoying Tank DPS meta is to force a teamfight there are ways to counter that even 4v5 Teamfights against Galio Amumu Nunu and Gangplank tend to be very very painful.

 

Whilst i agree it relies on the element of surprise, i would say that it's one of the easiest strategies to counter.

Unless you're specifically going for a split-pushing comp, most comps in general should be designed to handle teamfights. And invariably

As such it's then just the problem of convincing your team that you need to force a teamfight once it's a 5v4.

Whoah, i completely disagree here.

IMO the best way to counter a Tanky DPS comp is to split push.

Tanky DPSs excel in Teamfights simply because they can take the brunt of having 5 people wailing on them longer than a Carry whilst still being able to put out a decent amount of damage. When in teamfights this amounts to being able to stand with your enemy longer than he can stand with you. Forcing a teamfight against them would be playing to their strengths (IMO).

The thing about Tanky DPS chars however is that they don't tend to be good pushers and as such rely on winning those teamfights in order to push without interruption.

IMO there are a few ways to deal with Tanky DPS comps although both rely on different strengths:

"Burst" Early Game Comp - Whilst Tanky DPS are tough to kill, the weakest part of their game is the early game. As such, you can try to take advantage of this weakness by fielding a Comp which specialises in dominating the early game. Characters like Annie, Akali etc. are designed around controlling the early game and preventing enemies from farming and/or levelling. You really need to keep the pressure on and win early with this with this Comp since lategame Burst usually tapers off with survivability (as it's designed to counter Carries).

Split Push + Heal/Poke/Turtling Comp - This Comp relies more on the mid-late game and avoiding teamfights.
::When it's 4v5 the Poke Comp will try to kite out and poke them so if they were to engage they'd be at HP disadvantage. You can combine this with a Heal Comp so you have more sustainability than they do when Poking since decent Pokers are usually squishy. It's riskier however since they're still squishy, have less DPS and can be shut down more easily now (healing debuffs).
:: Turtling Comp is just a very defensive comp that punishes people who want to teamfight. Either by going Tank/Tanky DPS themselves or simply having people like Janna/Gragas who can easily disband a teamfight.

Pushing Comp - This would be similar to a split pushing comp, however the "split" is divided up such that there is no "remaining" team per se to engage. You push out all lanes and force the Tanky DPSs to defend on multiple fronts, thus removing the teamfight element. Although this is also risky since Tanky DPSs can usually take on the "mini teamfights" that you've split up into.

And so after reading that you're probably thinking:

"Aha, so basically you've just said that

a) The best counter to a team that excels in teamfights is to split push.

Whilst at the same time,

b) The best way to counter a split push is to have a comp that excels at teamfights WTFBBQ etc. etc."

Pretty much, however a) was specifically referring to Tanky DPS comps rather than Teamfight Comps as a whole.

Also, i would say that it's much easier to force a teamfight than it is to avoid one. Because ultimately if you kite further and further away, you're going to eventually end up at your tower, somewhere they want to be. If you try to defend the tower they can then counter engage and then you've just started yjsy teamfight you didn't want.

MS Quints are really nice, however i wouldn't use them on the first two Chars you specified.

Rammus already has the best speed up in the game so IMO quints aren't essential on him. As for Amumu, he's already got Bandage Toss to cover distances so i feel as if they aren't vital on him either.

People i do run MS Quints on however are:

AP Ezreal - This was the reason i bought MS Quints in the first place... his base movespeed is low and he heavily relies on kiting during teamfights. I found that the extra speed of this meant that with E and Flash, i was harder to catch if anyone did decide to go for me.

Singed - Since he has no distance closer, he thrives on pure Movement Speed alone in tandem with his Ult and Ghost. He should also get Treads for extra MR and CC Reduction (stacking with his Ult) and the MS Quints help compensate for the decreased MS. Also with a FoN you're laughing again with the extra MR, HP Regen and MS.

Garen isn't a bad choice however, although now you can Q during his E, it's a rather nice boost in itself.

//End of Massive Post.

 

This is completely unrelated to the previous mammoth post, so apologies for that...

My mate and I almost got a win streak of 10 matches yesterday but lost the last match. Is there any bonus for doing so or does it merely make you feel good when looking at match history?

 

Wow! Total thread revival!

Split pushing is a suitable tactic, and it can be very good for solo queue.

Shaco is the second best split pusher in the game behind TF.

All those mammoth posts are too long to read with a hangover...

 

No worries! Variety of conversation is good =].

I don't believe you get extra IP for a win streak, i think there's already enough of a bonus from winning . Especially with the amount of rage League players have, i wouldn't want to give them even more incentive to keep winning lol .

There used to be a small IP reward for having played consecutive games without leaving, although i'm not sure if that's still there after the IP reward overhaul they did a few months back.

Oh look at who's resurfaced after all this time . Finally decided to grace us with your presence? The High ELO crowd getting a little too competitive? .

And you would just bat aside my last post with a casual remark wouldn't you .

With regards to viable split pushers, i think it's dependent on what you're looking for. With regards to actual tower taking and speed of Lane Pushing then i'd say Shaco or Sivir are very strong.

With regards to actual mobility around the map however, Pantheon or TF would be better.

 

Aye the advantage Shaco has over Sivir though is he is much easier to escape with if they suddenly show up with 4 players.

As much as i <3 Pantheon, TF just outshines him for split laning, he does it alot more safely. I find Pantheon's ulti to be a much better tool for forcing fights where you isolate some enemies.

Dreamhack this weekend!

 

Funnily enough we (me and 2 friends) played against a Split Push TF yesterday who would constantly Split Push whenever we moved anywhere past our own river.

It was fairly touch and go with regards to who was actually winning since we were winning the teamfights but failing to capitalise afterwards which meant TF would invariably edge out on the Towers.

Ultimately after losing bottom Inhib (and a single nexus tower) to his split push we did the proper thing, pushed out bottom lane and then pushed straight up mid to force them to defend. When TF returned to split push out again we engaged and took them out quickly. Swain then went B and took care of TF and we got Morde to Tank Nexus turrets whilst me (Corki) and Jax took them down quickly.

TBH if TF was smart he should have bought a Ward and gotten their Ezreal to teleport to it. With both of them and TF's Lich Bane (he was very fed and farmed) they could/should have easily taken the last Nexus Tower to win the game. Thank god they weren't that smart.