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you were just mixing his posts up with mine. I was the only one who mentioned Mallet and Starks and those were in the context of games where I felt pressured into more of a tanky role due to too many ranged dps/squishy casters. Might still be best to go balls to the walls DPS in those games, but playing a high firepower team vs. another high firepower team, I do find myself needing to fill more of a support role with some survivability. This might be trying to force a square peg into a circular hole, but I suppose that's just the sort of player I am... I see a gap in our team, I try to fill it rather than work towards my champion's goals.
And once again, I'd never get anything (other than possibly experimenting with brutalizer) before my first BF Sword anymore. Those items were in reference to the mid stage of the game after my core build (boot -> BF Sword -> merc treads + Bloodthirster).
For what it's worth, I think you should get Bloodthirster into your build before the 2nd BF Sword. 2nd BF just lets you bounce back from deaths easier, but Bloodthirster lets you farm like a machine and keep your life up to follow through with a push after winning team fights. It also results in the same total damage buff if you farm effectively with it (easy to do as you murder creeps with an uncharged thirster, + you get lifesteal to boot) and costs 500 less. Just my 2 cents, but I've tried both and swear by bloodthirster at this point.
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Mallet Starks XD I tried doing that with Udyr for a while and then cried tears of blood.
And went back to Malady Phage.
Anyways, yeah I'm just talking about BF sword Pantheon. Probably just might be the Udyr + Stun factor, then.
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he should be waiting for you to get stunned or stunning you with his shield first... then again, I don't really fuck with tanks as panth anyway and udyr is tanky enough that I'll only even fuck with him while chasing. It tends to be more effective to set it up on squishier DPS heros that you'll at least put into auto-crit range.
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Did everything just go down for you guys???
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On February 27 2010 10:48 Mogwai wrote:
he should be waiting for you to get stunned or stunning you with his shield first... then again, I don't really fuck with tanks as panth anyway and udyr is tanky enough that I'll only even fuck with him while chasing. It tends to be more effective to set it up on squishier DPS heros that you'll at least put into auto-crit range.
With panth, I stun in, heartseek, then use exhaust right when the stun wears off. It doesn't work vs a hero with a direct stun like Sion, but it works really well vs a hero like Blitz or Udyr who have to successfully hit to stun. Also, the exhaust slows him so he takes the full damage from heartseek.
And I typically angle the heartseek to hit them with just the side of the cone, but the rest of the cone covers his angle of retreat. So to get away he's forced to walk through the rest of the cone. Usually makes it so that they take the full damage which is horrible death. THen after I autoattack chase them and keep casting spear. It's rare that I don't get the kill after a successful heartseek unless he has a crazy escape mechanism like Shaco's deceive or Kassadin port or Corki firepath thingimajig.
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I actually havent seen Pantheon at all these few weeks. Mostly Fiddles, Sivirs, and Alistars
Game gets less variety the higher ELO you go :/
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On February 27 2010 14:12 pokeyAA wrote:
I actually havent seen Pantheon at all these few weeks. Mostly Fiddles, Sivirs, and Alistars
Game gets less variety the higher ELO you go :/
I still see plenty of variety in terms of dps, but yeah the basic core of fiddle/sivir/ali/tf always remain. In general though, I'll go on a W/L/W/L streak for awhile just because I'm trying out new heroes and my ELO probably drops considerably even with the 50% win rate. Then I'll go back to playing Sivir and just farm ELO for 10 games or some shit with 80% win ratio. The game balance is just that gay right now.
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I'm just going to keep playing Mundo and use that as my reason I don't have high ELO. (join liquidparty)
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I have a 4:1 ratio with Soraka haha (44 wins, 10 losses)
People in my games were screaming how OP she is now that Executioner Calling doesnt auto rape her
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uhg, I've been getting terrible teams lately...
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Yeah actually I played against a soraka/alistar/3 tank team the other day and got completely decimated. It turns out that tower pushing is the best way to forcibly underlevel the other team, even if they do pull a kill or two here and there.
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On February 27 2010 16:54 ZERG_RUSSIAN wrote:
Yeah actually I played against a soraka/alistar/3 tank team the other day and got completely decimated. It turns out that tower pushing is the best way to forcibly underlevel the other team, even if they do pull a kill or two here and there.
Man, I just played a game where I was a 16-1 pantheon with 2 BTs and a banshee veil at 25 minutes.
We also had a fed teemo and a fed ashe a dumb rammus who went rylai's scepter and a crappy nidalee. Still, we were up 25 kills and we managed to LOSE THE GAME vs a SOraka/Zilean/Alistar/Yi/Corki combo.
Can you guys believe that shit?!?!
This is how it went down. Every single fight, Ali would flash stun ram ult near the beginning.
The corki would stand behind and shoot his shit. The Yi would chase one of our ranged heroes off.
I would rape zilean, soraka, AND corki on my own. Yet, every single time, they'd start to run away, and either Soraka would heal them for FIFTEEN HUNDRED hp, or Zilean would just fking ult them. It was insane. Zilean kept slowing me, ulting the people I beat up, while Soraka refilled his mana and healed herself or anyone else.
There was this one time where I had ghost walk up and chasing Soraka 1v1. This was with me having 2 full BT's, a phantom dancer, and a stark's, and starting the chase with her at a quarter life. I chased her ALL the way from our mid rax to their mid rax and was stun, heartseeker, spear tossing the entire way. Even with 370 base damage, this bitch healed through the entire chase and showed up at her base with 3/4ths life. MORE life than when I started chasing her down. WTF IS THAT SHIT.
In the end we lost the game simply because I had to choose between chasing Yi or Corki. If I chased Yi, then Corki and Alistar would rape all the other DPS. If I chased Corki, then Yi and Alistar would rape the rest.
Ofc, I got plenty of kills in the team fights, but towards the end, it was our team just being utterly raped. Rammus wasn't tanking much at all and wasn't scaring anyone with his rylai/guardian angel build. Our teemo instadied vs Yi exhaust + zilean slow. Our ashe would die a few seconds after that. And our nidalee flailed about being utterly useless.
I should render my apologies to Southlight now because that game perfectly illustrated his point. Even a super fed Panth couldn't do jack versus such an imba team combination. Lol our 4 huge dpsers melted against an all thornmail team who got to auto revive their players constantly, do full life heals instantly, and have a ridiculous tank/healer in Alistar. God heal is just SO insane now -____-. Even funnier when they buy spirit visage!
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Heals are nowhere near insane as they used to be. You used to be able to chain heal for full effect. Now it gives you a lot lower diminishing returns, ignite cancels out your heal almost completely, executioners call still counters it somewhat, etc.
The only change is now that executioners isnt a "instawin against heal characters" buy and forget weapon, people forget how to play against support heal characters. And i love it!
case in point, you guys had 3 dps, 2 of which were ranged AND fed, and I bet all 3 went straight out damage/crit items. Probably would have owned them if you 3 picked up a Exec calling and gotten more health/resist items. You do NOT need 2 stacked bloodthirsters, stark, and a phantom dancer.
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Frank assessment of lineup:
You guys only had 1 tank, and had a grand total of one target stun (Ashe), one CC (Rammus) and a semi-useful stun (Pantheon). Oh and a Blind, I guess, for whatever it's worth against Treads.
The other team had an AoE stun (Alistar), a utility disable (Alistar), a snare (Zilean), a silence (Soraka), and a essentially a second tank (Zil ult).
Goes back with what I said about the lack of true teamfight utility. Also Ashe is an inferior DPS to Corki (she's a crappy ranged support, Corki's a teamfight DPS with an amazing four AoE spells to go with the 10?% boost to autoattack), and his armor reduc works well with a babysat Yi.
Essentially, the only true DPS character your team had was Nidalee; Teemo and Ashe are "heroes that turn into DPS because they can't really do anything else." They had heroes that were the best at what they do, and that probably gave them the edge. Is how I'd see it, without knowing the player skill level of any of the players. Replace Teemo (at least Ashe has a pre-nerf Gold Card) with like a ranged AP character with a strong disable (preferably Annie because of AoE stun) and you should have won, IMO, assuming relatively equal skill level.
\o/
I hate when something like that happens, though, especially if I think the players on my team aren't bad players. Nothing's more annoying than losing because you "weren't abusing heroes as hard." Not that using "stronger heroes" is bad, mind you, that's just how this sort of game has always been, and will continue to be. Just demoralizing.
On a completely unrelated note I hate using Sivir. I keep using her because it leads to wins and she fulfills a niche that's hard to fill otherwise (1v2 solo ranged dps) but guhhh I hate playing her.
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On February 27 2010 17:56 Southlight wrote:
Frank assessment of lineup:
You guys only had 1 tank, and had a grand total of one target stun (Ashe), one CC (Rammus) and a semi-useful stun (Pantheon). Oh and a Blind, I guess, for whatever it's worth against Treads.
The other team had an AoE stun (Alistar), a utility disable (Alistar), a snare (Zilean), a silence (Soraka), and a essentially a second tank (Zil ult).
Goes back with what I said about the lack of true teamfight utility. Also Ashe is an inferior DPS to Corki (she's a crappy ranged support, Corki's a teamfight DPS with an amazing four AoE spells to go with the 10?% boost to autoattack), and his armor reduc works well with a babysat Yi.
Essentially, the only true DPS character your team had was Nidalee; Teemo and Ashe are "heroes that turn into DPS because they can't really do anything else." They had heroes that were the best at what they do, and that probably gave them the edge. Is how I'd see it, without knowing the player skill level of any of the players. Replace Teemo (at least Ashe has a pre-nerf Gold Card) with like a ranged AP character with a strong disable (preferably Annie because of AoE stun) and you should have won, IMO, assuming relatively equal skill level.
\o/
Yeah I understand full well how mismatched the teams were. The ridiculous part is that even with that mismatch we were +25 kills ahead with their mid rax down while only having lost 3 towers and them with about half the farm of our team and we ended up losing literally because of one bad team fight and then after that they got enough items to just steam roll us with their team composition. We can talk all day about Corki being awesome DPS etc, but when the corki has nothing but a sheen phage and I've got 2 BTs and Starks and Banshee veil... it's a pretty sad thing that kind of advantage is surmounted purely by what abilities the opposing heroes come built in with.
It's no different than if there were a racial imbalance in Starcraft like "oh, I picked Protoss so you must lose as Terran even if I suicide my first five dragoons and reaver shuttle while killing nothing." It's a horrible imbalance and it's not even about teamwork, etc because there's hardly any skill involved in spamming those AoEs with corki and flash/stunning with Alistar. It's no-brainer play. The problem is that the "top-tier" in LoL consists mostly of just having a good premade who are all on board with picking top tier combos and warding shit so everyone has map hack and running around killing each other's wards with clarity and then trying to gank in grass. It's not fun at all.
LoL needs to do a better job of balancing their heroes if you ask me. I understand that this isn't pro level, captain pick with bans etc, but at this rate it's become nearly impossible to get any semblance of balance in the matches. There's no way to know what the other team picks. Can't even dodge a shitty team anymore. And nearly half the heroes in the game are so crappy that even if you utterly OWN with them, they still lose if it stretches to late game at all. It's just plain sad.
I'm probably going to quit the game pretty soon if they don't implement some better matchmaking features because I can't be fucked playing the same few heroes over and over, while hoping that I'm stuck with a group of people who aren't utter retards going AP sivir or smite/avarice blade stacking tryndameres. It just gets really old. I don't have the luxury of sitting around waiting for 5 friends who all play well together to show up and then get a good game going and then someone has to go pick up their gf or get dinner or whatever, so then we're stuck running with a noob pug who ruins the game etc. If I wanted that kind of shitty experience I'd go play WoW and try to run 5-man instances all day and have the same kind of button mashing no brainer style play because that's how LoL feels to me nowadays. There's no point being good at micro and lasthitting/ganking/farming well and understanding the metagame perfectly, when I'm stuck with X amount of chobos every fucking game. And in the rare game I'm not stuck with an utter retard, the OTHER team is, and so it's a lopsided rape the other way. LoL is such a miserable experience nowadays, that even when someone on the team leaves or intentionally feeds, I'm happy! Because hey, 2 games ago that retard was on my team giving me a loss! So I'm just getting my free win back to make up for that free loss I had to give.
Sorry to rant. I'm just getting really fed up with the quality of games in LoL nowadays. Since beta until release, I've seen virtually zero improvement in the game quality. The metagame from beta is the metagame of now. At top tier it's boring ward/aoe spam. At the lower tiers, it's suffering through games with pure chobos, while hoping the other team didn't pick a top tier team composition to rape us with because I wanted to play some random hero for once like Jax/Mundo/Taric because I'm tired of TF/Sivir/Crow every game.
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Unfortunately, the same problems have existed since DotA and probably AoS. I'm not sure how balance is in HoN, but it would not surprise me if it were the same.
The core of the problem in DotA was that it's too hard to balance heroes because there will inevitably a "most efficient way to go about things." In DotA, the problem was that 1/4 the heroes had built-in disables. Obviously, this means almost all of 3/4 the heroes are completely ineffective in any competitive setting because they don't have a disable.
Take, for instance, the concept of a tank in LoL. It's very simple. You need a guy that goes in, can soak up any amount of damage, disable their team, and then be able to continue to output that sort of irritation/threat level to punish the other team for ignoring you. There happens to be one hero that does all of this, and does it well, on a spammable cooldown. That would be Alistar, he of the I-don't-need-any-items-to-tank and the double disable, along with an AoE heal. The very existence of Alistar inevitably renders every single other tank useless, and really, there's not much you can do about the concept of a tank anyways. There're only a handful of useful disables, and there're only a handful of ways to tank. Aside from the pinnacle of this archetype, everything begins to look like a bastard child.
I mean, Ashe has a stun. So does Sion. So does Annie. So does Amumu. So does Anivia. But if I talk about a character with "high damage and a stun" you'll probably immediately think of Annie, and it's hardly a contest. But what can you do about it. Say you adjust Annie, so that only fireball stuns. Well then she starts looking a whole lot like a Ryze, and probably starts playing like Ryze, too. The only difference is that Ryze's spell sometimes goes in a bizarre direction, but then you'd just be comparing the cooldowns and damage, and after like 5 seconds you'd probably be able to conclude one hero is better. The only real solution it so axe the hero-count down to just the archetypes, but that's probably not going to happen, and it would also make the game a lot more stale.
I mean I mentioned it before, part of the problem I have with the game is that, when you play this sort of game (DotA/HoN/LoL) competitively, you'll inevitably be forced into a metagame where a select few, archetypical heroes begin to dominate. Because they're simply the best at what they do. I found a lot of joy playing DotA casually, just pick up games with friends and pubbies, where none of my friends really fixated on any hero nor a hero's perceived strength, and we'd randomly do stupid shit (like combining a hero with Mordekeiser's swirling iron shell thingy and a hero that spawns invisible watcher units - put the shell on invisible unit and right-click the unit onto an enemy hero, it is funny watching them react). But LoL has no casual setup. You're forced into a ladder, where you can't help but get matched up against a select number of people who are dead-set on winning, a select number of people who are out to have fun, etc. It's stressful, draining, and not particularly fun after a while, especially when you get forced to metagame.
Baikin and I often just enter a practice game with people of all skill levels and dick around with "crappy" heroes using retarded builds. Because it's loose, no one cares, we don't care if teammates suck (we usually stack against ourselves), and we can do stupid, funny crap that would end in a stream of rage in an "actual game." But it's more fun that way. It feels more like - dare I say it on TL? - more like I'm playing a game for leisure that way.
DPS Karthus for the win?
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On February 27 2010 18:45 Southlight wrote:
Unfortunately, the same problems have existed since DotA and probably AoS. I'm not sure how balance is in HoN, but it would not surprise me if it were the same.
The core of the problem in DotA was that it's too hard to balance heroes because there will inevitably a "most efficient way to go about things." In DotA, the problem was that 1/4 the heroes had built-in disables. Obviously, this means almost all of 3/4 the heroes are completely ineffective in any competitive setting because they don't have a disable.
Take, for instance, the concept of a tank in LoL. It's very simple. You need a guy that goes in, can soak up any amount of damage, disable their team, and then be able to continue to output that sort of irritation/threat level to punish the other team for ignoring you. There happens to be one hero that does all of this, and does it well, on a spammable cooldown. That would be Alistar, he of the I-don't-need-any-items-to-tank and the double disable, along with an AoE heal. The very existence of Alistar inevitably renders every single other tank useless, and really, there's not much you can do about the concept of a tank anyways. There're only a handful of useful disables, and there're only a handful of ways to tank. Aside from the pinnacle of this archetype, everything begins to look like a bastard child.
I mean, Ashe has a stun. So does Sion. So does Annie. So does Amumu. So does Anivia. But if I talk about a character with "high damage and a stun" you'll probably immediately think of Annie, and it's hardly a contest. But what can you do about it. Say you adjust Annie, so that only fireball stuns. Well then she starts looking a whole lot like a Ryze, and probably starts playing like Ryze, too. The only difference is that Ryze's spell sometimes goes in a bizarre direction, but then you'd just be comparing the cooldowns and damage, and after like 5 seconds you'd probably be able to conclude one hero is better. The only real solution it so axe the hero-count down to just the archetypes, but that's probably not going to happen, and it would also make the game a lot more stale.
I mean I mentioned it before, part of the problem I have with the game is that, when you play this sort of game (DotA/HoN/LoL) competitively, you'll inevitably be forced into a metagame where a select few, archetypical heroes begin to dominate. Because they're simply the best at what they do. I found a lot of joy playing DotA casually, just pick up games with friends and pubbies, where none of my friends really fixated on any hero nor a hero's perceived strength, and we'd randomly do stupid shit (like combining a hero with Mordekeiser's swirling iron shell thingy and a hero that spawns invisible watcher units - put the shell on invisible unit and right-click the unit onto an enemy hero, it is funny watching them react). But LoL has no casual setup. You're forced into a ladder, where you can't help but get matched up against a select number of people who are dead-set on winning, a select number of people who are out to have fun, etc. It's stressful, draining, and not particularly fun after a while, especially when you get forced to metagame.
Baikin and I often just enter a practice game with people of all skill levels and dick around with "crappy" heroes using retarded builds. Because it's loose, no one cares, we don't care if teammates suck (we usually stack against ourselves), and we can do stupid, funny crap that would end in a stream of rage in an "actual game." But it's more fun that way. It feels more like - dare I say it on TL? - more like I'm playing a game for leisure that way.
DPS Karthus for the win?
Great post, Southlight. I completely agree with your points.
In fact, I have thought of a possible solution to the current metagame and solo queue crisis. I posted it on the LoL forums and rather than paste it all here, I'll just link it as it's rather big:
Idea on balancing metagame
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I don't like it that much :\ I know nothing of high level gameplay, so this might be an improvement there. I don't think it would improve Mundo-level solo queue though.
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I finaly bought Annie, she's so sweet :D I think I have a pretty good build with her aswell and it's been going great since I got her!
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EPT
