3141

Haha, yeah I’ve been there.
You can see the surrender votes flying around when you are knocking down towers left and right and they try to conceive what’s happening.

3142

So when they announced the awards, I had slipped from ~1300 down to 1222… so I vowed to get back to bronze where I belonged.

Then came a slip down to 1130… oooof.

So I switched champions. One game in normal, and then I rolled the dice. Urgot took me back to 1256 and there was much rejoicing. Now I’m not touching solo ranked queue again until Season 2 :P

Things I learned while playing Urgot:

  • Proper use of his ult is actually hard, but can win fights
  • He can zone Malzahar, one of the most notorious lane winning mids
  • This Build rocks. Rush manamune, then boots, then brutalizer. If you don’t have a few kills by then for shame!
  • He’s actually hard to NOT push lanes. I typically do a single auto attack + q in order to last hit and doing that moves lanes along right quick.
  • People simply don’t know how to play against him
  • Janna makes for a good lane mate (her bubble powers Q /drool).
  • Waiting for a gank target to blow flash then ultting them = win.

Good hunting to those of you fighting for one of the award thresholds!

~C~

3143

Ugh, Merc Treads.

3144

Merc treads are there for the MR mostly. With the masteries and runes, this build levels up armor and MR fairly evenly. So I don’t have a hole.

~C~

3145

As Jarvan and Irelia, I eat Morde alive. Attack him before he reaches creeps; do significant damage before he has the opportunity to get his shield up, make him back off–because without his shield, he loses. If he puts his shield on a creep, hit him hard; without those resistances, he loses. With both champions, serious harassment begins at level 2, murder begins at level 3. You get him down, you keep him down.

Any champion with a strong early game should eat Morde alive; Renek, Lee Sin, whoever.

3146

Speaking of Irelia, I was reading Chaox’s Queen of Blades guide on her. She’s fun but using her ult while moving is hard. I am building Doran’s Shield, Merc Treads, Philio Stone, Triforce. Any other suggestions to that build?

3147

You can get away with skipping Philo, so try that.

After TF, the answer is always opposition-appropriate tank items. Possibly a wit’s end first if you’re doing well.

3148

Or you could skip Doran’s Shield and start with Philo for mana regens. And yes, tank items all over Irelia.

3149

Either get a Philo or a Dorans Shield, not both. And fire the Ult in pulses, if that helps (hard to explain), as it makes it far easier to aim and move. Moving back and firing forward is still one of the trickiest things to do though :)

3150

I think I play to chicken early on and that gives the enemy an advantage. Learning to be more aggressive is going to result in a few deaths, I think!

3151

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It’s exactly like the game me and Chiffy played as Wukong/Leona top. Good stuff.

3152

According to my match history, my record in the last game (Janna) was 6 kills, 3 deaths, and 37 assists. At one point our team was no less than 20 kills up on the opposition, and indeed we were still up on them when the game ended. Yet next to my lil’ Janna picture is the word “defeat”.

Why did that happen? How did it happen? As far as I can tell, this last game was perfectly illustrative of how very, very important team cooperation is in LoL. Their team acted in concert, was always one step ahead of us, and systematically burned our towers and raided our inhibitors. Our team squabbled, verbally attacked each other, and had absolutely no strategic direction, with individuals pushing lanes solo as they pleased, failing to respond to enemy incursions (they farmed as the barn burned), and just generally acting like a mess. In spite of this we kept winning team fights, ganking enemies, and buying items, but our towers still fell.

From this I infer two things:

  1. Teamwork is the single most important thing to winning games of LoL.
  2. Towers are the heart of the game.

This may seem obvious to pros out there, but let me ask y’all: am I right about this? Am I missing something else equally as important? What broad strategic steps are necessary to winning a game of LoL?

I’d like to see that score again, but I’d really like it to be next to a green “Victory” next time.

Thanks in advance!

3153

Do any of you ever play practice games? Like, just you and a buddy vs each other on a lane? I think it might help my game.

Meanwhile, Irelia is fun! Built TF, cooldown boots, Warmog’s, Atma’s, FON and had a Yomumus underway when we lost, our aniv and Ashe fed hard, unfortunately, but they were scared of Irelia!

Only thing is I wasn’t sure where to be in a team fight? Perhaps at the front, but that did require everyone not to focus Rammus, which was a hard ask it seems!

3154

I’m pretty secure in sharing some replays of my Urgot and Brand victories in laning if anyone wants it. Right now LoLReplay is sorta bugging out on newly recorded replays for some reason, but when it gets fixed feel free to ask for my replays. I just owned an Orianna mid, one of the hardest mids in the game. She wasn’t great, but I shielded the damage from most of her orb shots, and my last-hitting was probably one of the best I’ve ever done (like 65 creeps at 10 minutes).

Yeap. The people at the top of the ranked ladder aren’t just there because they know how to play a carry and dominate the lane, they are also there because throughout their ascent they gave the right orders and map pings to their teammates.

It’s easy to forget how important towers are. The whole laning strategy revolves around towers, really. Eventually you sort of get the hang of how creep waves work, how if you kill all their creeps while they went back to base, your creeps push up to their tower, do damage, and get killed. That’s experience and gold lost for them. Eventually you want that tower to fall, so in general pushing the creep wave through auto-attacks (and still last hitting of course) after you kill them is a sound strategy. This is assuming you’ve warded your river bush and are capable of not getting slaughtered by a jungle (if you have low health, don’t bother without life stealing items or abilities).

I did this as Akali twice… 1v1 versus Copet’s Annie, and versus Idrisz’ Udyr. Akali sucks at laning against either of those champs so I got pretty soundly defeated.

3155

Why? Merc takes you from 40% cc reduction to 75%. That’s fucking huge.

3156

I did twice when I first started playing. LeBlanc vs Gangplank and then LeBlanc vs Nasus. Made me slightly less bad. :)

3157

Yep, you often see comments like “you couldn’t 1v1 me”. For solo queue, many people seem to think the be all and end all is PvP duels and a KDR ratio.

I often take a tower pusher (Teemo, Al) because at least then you aren’t dependent on someone else to take turrets.

Enjoying playing Heim at the moment. Yes, is a weak choice for AP carry, but is a fun one.

3158

Um… Because I am bad and forgot about her passive =)

Even so, they were short on CC. They just weren’t as bad as my team mates - yeah, three of us should constantly push their inner towers while we can’t see any of them! I just lol’d, waited at base, and kept farming.

3159

Not weak, but not the strongest. He holds mid like a champ, takes blue like a champ, can fight off a gank, and farms like a champ, and ranking his W first absolutely hurts.

You need to leverage what he is good at into a win.

3160

Cheers Pogo. I definitely need to remember to grab blue more often. Had worked out the “max W poke”.