5521

I’ve never actually played him but it doesn’t feel like Malph deserves to get banned every game anymore. It wasn’t that long ago that most people didn’t even consider him really viable as a main tank. I like Amumu a lot and I just picked up Singed since I’ve seen him dominate a bunch of games recently. Shen is also good but his initiation is kinda meh. I haven’t played Alistar in forever and I’ve never actually seen the tree guy in a game yet.

5522

Well Amumu, Malph, Shen, and Rammus are all a highly probable ban in ranked
right now it seems.

Clearly if one of them slips through they are worth grabbing.

I personally feel Alistar may be under appreciated right now and have been practicing a bit with hime. I’d say Maokai, Cho, Alistar, Blitz, and Singed are all good choices to add to a team to fill in the tank role. Mundo and Morde might be good choices to throw on a team depending on comp but I wouldn’t pick them up as the primary tank, neither one has any kind of hard CC or disruption.

5523

I think we went with Cho, Singed or Amumu.

I’ve seen the tree guy, and he doesn’t seem tanky, though maybe he just wasn’t built it. But you know how some tanks, they don’t even have to build straight tanky to get HP? Well, the tree definitely isn’t one of those guys.

It’s one of the things I like about Singed, he gets Health from his Mana, so he can take AP + mana items and get some respectable health.

5524

Oh yeah, I always forget Cho. I’m not sure I’ve ever played him either, although I did get him for free with a skin through some promotion.

5525

I tend to share your opinion. It is hard to know what the differences between normal and ranked are until you start playing them, tho.

5526

Damn, I was under the impression that Kas had some tankiness. We really where stuffed then! Still won fortunately.

Building Ken tanky. That probably would have been a good idea. Other than Rylaos and BV, what woul you add? The hourglass for armor etc and then? Never seen a tanky Ken.

5527

Everyone has the fucking skin except me! Bastards.

5528

Bear in mind I’m still waaaaay new, but from my experience:

My maokai play improved by a lot when I started building him tanky and ignoring shit like RoA. Thing is from what I’ve read endgame he turns almost exclusively support with his ult. He has no real way to make people focus him, no taunts, and his damage is pitiful. He has his awesome self heal so he’s survivable, but he’s an Instant IQ Test: if your opponents are focussing him, they’re morons waiting to lose.

Of course, at the level I play at, he’s gold. Lots of people do focus him, his ult is really nice (not for the damage of course) and with his awesome laning ability he’s normally higher than the opposing team. I like to play him a lot, but I don’t think the general consensus is that he’s any good.

5529

Well typically you’re always a moron if you’re focusing the tanks. Remember only 3 characters in the game actually have a way to pull focus those being Shen, Rammus and Galileo. Maokai does have a blink snare and a kockback/slow so he can fit the role as disrupter pretty well and can do a good job pulling a guy off of a carry or rooting someone down.

5530

I’ve never seen tanky Kennen, but Zhonyas is pretty important on him. Rush in, pop your ult, pop Zhonyas.

I guess you could be weird and build:

Randuins
Zhonya
FoN
Abyssal
Rylais

on him. That would make you pretty tanky and give you an AoE slow to go with your AoE ult that requires you to be in melee range.

5531

You’ve never seen a tanky Kennen? And yet you do realize Kennen’s core items are Rylais, Hourglass and Abyssal Scepter…

Just saying ;)

5532

I’ve seen it and it seems like it can be successful. I don’t remember the guys
full build but I know he had a fully stacked warmogs. For team fights he was pretty much serving as an init/stunner and not really bringing the big damage.
The trick with these alternate tanky builds is no one expects them to be tanky. So on a team of folks not checking their items the instinct was to always try and focus down Kennen but he had a ton of health and resists, combined with his high mobility he was really freaking hard to kill.

5533

It’s a snowballing effect of bruised ego when that happens too. People see that they’re not doing much damage to something like a tanky Kennen or Irelia, they get pissed off, they focus them even more next team fight.

Of course, tanky Irelia is becoming commonplace so that’s less an issue. But in reverse it works sometimes as well… I will play an AP Cho in a game where he’s not focused at all.

5534

Also, I’m liking MobaFire a lot more for guides now:

It’s much cleaner than Leaguecraft and at least it keeps all of its item and ability info updated and easy to check out.

5535

Building survivability on a squishy caster isn’t the same in my mind as being out and out tanky, it’s just common sense. Especially one who has to get up close and personal like Kennen.

5536

From the Tree Eskimo feed I learned something about laning I’d never really thought of. If you’re in a 1v1 lane and your opponent recalls, if you keep last hitting and try to park his creeps right before they get into your tower range (so the tower doesn’t kill them), that will deny him the most experience. If you try to push and kill his creeps (which is what I usually do if the other guy is missing and I’m not scared of their jungler), then his thinned out creep line won’t kill as many of your creeps and he’ll be able to get the experience for them when he comes back. I think there’s still a time and place for pushing and trying to get some hits in on his tower, but that was a take I’d never really thought of. I guess pushing them into his tower would do the same thing but sometimes you don’t have time for that.

5537

if you can it’s best to push your creeps into his tower which will kill your creeps much faster than his creep will do on their own.

also once you have push your creep wave to their tower, it’s best to go back at that point and purchase. since you have about 1 wave of time to get back to your tower.

5538

I almost always block enemy creeps from my tower range. It takes a little while to get used to tower ranges, but I have no problem taking several hundred points of damage if it means that I get every single creep kill instead of letting my tower kill them.

Of course, if they are full health melee creeps, you may as well let the tower do some of the work assuming your own creeps aren’t coming in and about to offset the balance of melee creep health. The tower does precisely two shots at a 100%hp melee creep and leaves them with one auto-attack worth of health left so you can last hit. It’s much tougher on ranged creeps though, as one tower shot takes them down to about 40% health, which at lower levels is more than two auto attacks worth of damage you have to do before the tower kills it.

5539

Every single one of those items is a tank item. Sure I can understand getting one of them as “survivability” but all of them? That’s tanky.

I mean I’m not scrutinizing it, there’s a serious reason that Kennen has to build tanky. In fact with the Zhonya changes I’d argue Kennen is even better as a tanky initiator rather then a pure damage caster.

5540

This video of a Veigar combo is so entertaining to me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8jJTrQ-KzA