League Of Legends

Warwick is going to get dumpstered, and it feels like you are now going to be able to keep up with the duo lane and not the solos anymore even if you are super efficient.

Okay dragon is pretty awesome. Got to a 5 stack with the dragon buff and dear lord, the double stat bonus + true dmg is just like...wtfmate. How awesome would it be to have a 5x on each side!!!! Yes, extremely unlikely since it'd have to be at least a ~70+ min game but lol. Everybody glowing orange, moving fast, true damage etc etc.

Ahri mid is pretty awesome still.

At first glance it seems like once you have a few stacks Dragon is quite a bit more important than Baron. Baron looks like something you just do when you are ahead and trying to win the game which is kind of crappy. No more sneaking in a Baron kill to turn the tide.

Game seems overall more snowbally.

The Baron buff's effect on minions is really big. Cannon minions auto from outside tower range, shit does more damage, it's resistant to damage making it harder for the enemy to wave clear, and it's still got bonus AD and AP. Still, trading towers for dragons is going to be really sketchy and might put you in a position late where you absolutely 100% cannot give your enemies anymore dragon stacks.

But coming back from just being down a bunch of dragons in an ugly game is going to be really difficult. It's going to be a bunch of ground you just can't make up where before it was just gold.

Yeah. Seems dragon is much better to fight over early where as baron is more of a "let's finish the game" kinda buff. Although, the only problem I see with all these changes is that now early game snowbally champions are just so much more beneficial. It was already a problem before this patch and it's a huuuge problem now. That Rumble who will basically go even in lane and win you that early dragon fight = gg. Any competitive team with a first dragon (8% more ad & ap dmg) will probably be unstoppable imo. Early game junglers? Counter jungle hard or just gank hard and get the enemy jungler behind and then he's useless because how tough the jungle is. Just...I dunno.

Also, fuck league sometimes. I play like 5 or 6 normals & team builders to get use to the new game. Then the first ranked I play...."firewall issues" when it tries to load into the game. Fuck that. alt f4, reconnect to league client, now it loads up. dammit riot.

I think I would be fine with the buff that dragon provided if soloing it early really wasn't something you could do. It's pretty damned terrifying of a proposition to be down two dragons at 15 minutes because your bot lane didn't do their part in maintaining vision.

I was a little wrong. Baron will absolutely save your base if you get it while under siege. The minion effect is huge.

Late in the game a cannon minion spawns every wave which when combined with the baron buff is enough to get you back into the game if you can steal it or capitalize on a mistake.

Just got plat 1. Diamond here I come!!!! And then...preseason reset....fuuuuuuuuuuu. hahaha. TF Mid still pretty awesome. I might just start to main him again, I did in s3. He's so strong with his wave clear and his ~3sec stun when you get some levels/items.

Arbitrary_sl said:

I think I would be fine with the buff that dragon provided if soloing it early really wasn't something you could do. It's pretty damned terrifying of a proposition to be down two dragons at 15 minutes because your bot lane didn't do their part in maintaining vision.

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Yup, if enemy has nunu/panth/ww you need to keep that vision up. Dragon I feel is going to be a bigger point of contention then Baron if they keep things as they are. The way things stand Baron is basically a break the base/save the base option while Dragon is stats and passives all over the place.

You should be getting more XP in the jungle on any reasonable jungler. I played a pretty terrible game on WW earlier and I was still ahead of the top and mid lanes by a level or two at mid game (on both sides).

I know people are just going to always buy Devourer on WW because "OMG ON HIT", but Warrior is going to be a better buy like 70%+ of the time, Juggernaut any time you want to be tankier. Devourer is situational on WW at best. You don't need the IAS, the CDR and ArP are more useful than IAS and some magic on-hit damage. If you get it up to like +120 damage sure it's hilarious but that will never happen. If you plan on buying BotRK Warriors iseven betterbecause the ArP makes the Blade proc do more and that's even more the IAS from Devourer's is wasted.

You do need Skirmisher's though. Basically no reason to not get that on WW. Adds like 300 True Damage to your ult plus any swings you get off before/after it (which should be plenty with W and BotRK and Red) AND 20% less damage from either whoever you're dueling (awesome) or their carry (also awesome).

In my terribad WW game, it was Kalista vs. Kalista because obviously, new champ (and Vlad vs. Vlad for some reason). Even with me not being ahead and them having more dragons (2 more I think?), I could destroy her pretty easily in team fights. She rarely got to swing at anyone but me and when she swung at me she just lost unless Rammus peeled for her. Her passive is annoying but it's fairly easy to play around below like Diamond I'm thinking.

Furry_sl said:

Don't get me started on kalista. That kit is stupid, her designer is stupid. No adc should have that much mobility, and her level 2 engage is terrifying, even after they nerfed level 2 engages hard. Its really fucking awful design in general. Shes a character I consider atm to be fundamentally broken.

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I enjoy playing with her, but I can already see Riot throwing her down a well by reducing her range to Urgot levels.

Devourer WW isn't really any different than the old "gank at 6 rush Madred's Bloodrazor" Warwicks of years past. Tank WW actually ascends to godhood if the game goes long enough. Blowing someone up with a WW ult is funny and all but it's really, really shitty unless you are already bonkers ahead (at which point it doesn't actually matter what you buy).

Amzin_sl said:

You should be getting more XP in the jungle on any reasonable jungler. I played a pretty terrible game on WW earlier and I was still ahead of the top and mid lanes by a level or two at mid game (on both sides).

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In my experience this is patently false. If you soaked any lane exp at all you could hit 6 pre-buff respawn easily in the old jungle. Now if you gank and don't accomplish anything you may be hitting 5 off that buff respawn. Additionally, if one bot lane gives a smiteless to their jungler and the other doesn't it can snowball the whole game. With a smiteless you can still gank top or mid at 3:10 because you can go buff to buff and smite the second one, and then just take one small camp. That doesn't work with a normal or no leash because smite's cooldown is longer and you take more damage and only have two pots. I watched quite a few challenger streams tonight and I saw plenty of level 4 junglers at 8 minutes, and plenty of times the losing jungler would end up 3-4 levels behind the winning team's midlaner by the 20 minute mark. Buffs camps give 60 less exp overall but have more health, and the way the new exp scaling works if you outlevel a camp(ie, don't do a full clear at level one) your second clear is going to have massively diminished returns in exp. The other camps give more exp, but have the dimished scaling issue and take longer to spawn while taking longer to kill. Unless you are a farming monster who spends more time walking than he does killing camps this is going to be a net loss of exp and gold for the jungler, period.

Right now it feels like Pant , Xin, and Lee are the best early gankers, WW is far and away the best scaler, and Elise is 100% going to be pick or ban again in competitive just because she's always 100% health and she scraps really hard early. Kha has it rough, even if you max his W. Fiddle might be better off skipping a jungle item entirely. Every rengar I've seen gets obliterated early unless they get smiteless first buff. Rammus has a really hard time. I also think with the importance of dragon Nasus might make a return. He can't solo it at 3 like the others but he sustains like a beast in the jungle and his objective control is still ridiculous. I also want to try Sion because his slow attack speed isn't a negative with the new machete(takes two seconds to go off anyway) and his lack of early ganking may be less problematic now that there are less early ganks in general.He smashes the jungle and does so at pretty much full health with a couple of points in his shield.

Early game is slower in the jungle, yea. That's why I said mid-game. You can kind of "rubberband" ahead if you either get a few decent ganks (not sitting out of xp range camping in a bush) or just grind down the jungle, although if there's constant team fights / skirmishes happening you're going to fall behind if you're not there obviously.

All the old junglers from S4 appear to still be major contenders, even Kha and Rengu. Elise definitely is stronger relative to where she was, as are Fiddle and some of the tank junglers.

Mana is for sure more scarce. You don't really want to use your less effective spells anymore unless you're planning to go back anyway, or have blue. Combine that with wanting to save smite to use in certain camps OR on enemies (depending), and there's a lot of camps you just walk up to and swing at while you scroll around the map. Moreso than before

I'm not trying to argue that the jungle is perfectly balanced or anything, there's clearly a ton of balance tweaks that are going to come in. But overall, based on some of the jungles I've seen, it's more a case of "it's new and we don't understand it" than anything inherently broken with the jungle.

No one is saying it's broken. They explicitly stated they didn't feel comfortable with junglers outleveling laners and by making that impossible for the farm heavy ones it also makes it pretty much impossible for the non-farm heavy ones to even keep up. This was a conscious design decision. It's not quite season two all over again, but it's pretty damn close. I expect a lot of low econ sightstone rushes again and it's going to be very hard for any farm heavy jungler to do work in the new jungle. Pretty sure I will be going sightstone every game on Zac and I would expect Elise to do so as well.