League Of Legends

Try Leona. I'd say she's a tanky support and incredibly fun.

Leona is one of my favorite supports, tanky, good CC and not a one trick pony like that faggot Taric.

Leona is OP in lower brackets

Fawe_sl said:

Thresh is a very good champ to practice and has a very high skill cap. You can pull off some amazing stuff with the lantern... unfortunately it is unlikely many players will take advantage of your lantern toss while leveling, but you can still hook/flay and create havoc with his other abilities. I would definitely recommend him, especially if you like Supporting. Thresh is banned maybe 50% of the time.

As mentioned above, Leona is also very good support, tanky, great cc and great initiations.

Thresh & Leona are similar in that both are tanky, have tons of CC and can both Initiate fights. That said, both can "carry" a team once you get good with them. Leona is never banned.

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Banned more than that

When I duo as support/adc, I will often make a point to ban Leona if I'm ban picker. But not always, depends on what support/adc they are able to steal first. Usually I want to block her out because she throws a real wrench in the works of any aggressive game plan.

WhatsAmmataU_sl said:

hehe well, not sure if serious, but I don't see many people complain about a top building defense ; ) BOTRK is my 3rd item at latest though, often second after tabi.

I guess I place an extremely high value on not dieing. I've found I can bully my opponent out of the lane easily with this approach and still be extremely hard to kill in a gank. As a metric, I like to check opponent cs vs mine when I hit 100 cs, and pretty consistently find I'm 20-30 ahead. That's another thing about trundle, extremely easy cs'ing. So, anyway, even without an early kill I can still build a big advantage through defense.

If you just ignore the 2 normal matches there (Stack brothers 4tl), I've died 9 times in the past 8 ranked games. That's a teammate you want, imho.

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Ronne is biased against early defense, I wouldn't necessarily listen to that advice Although if you're winning your lane, I would definitely prioritize botrk > elder lizard by a mile, lizard doesn't scale well with Trundles W, but it lets you trade with uber tanks top if you are in more of a passive lane. Obviously prioritize defense if you're losing.

But yea, mid/top, a lot of people underestimate an early defensive item, even just grabbing a negatron mid and coming back to lane, you start auto-winning trades half the time. Match up dependent but it's great sometimes.

Don't need defense if they are dead or running from you.

Draegen, if you haven't, check out the guide in my sig.

Ronne_sl said:

Don't need defense if they are dead or running from you.

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General rule of thumb for top at least, from personal experience and watching wings/dryus/Voyboy, is that you go for the offensive item first if you are winning lane and the defensive items first if you need to turtle a bit. Winning lane is an early kill advantage before first buy or being up 20 or more cs (which is effectively a kill). The reasoning behind this is pretty obvious, if you get ahead then you can force them out of lane with that early kill capability, while if you need to survive just to farm then you can't afford to be squishy.

So Ronne is mostly right. However getting BoTRK for instance on trundle 2nd after boots isn't really delaying the offense. Especially on a champ that is naturally a killer and tanky. This also fits nicely because he doesn't have synergy all that well with any offensive item aside from BoTRK and the item is all thats really needed to make him a threat. So boots --- BoTRK --- tanky item or two is perfect for that particular characters playstyle.

I'd go the offensive route on character like lee sin though if I had the early advantage in a heartbeat. Those Q-Ignite-R-Q comboes at level eleven with a hydra or BB and a brutalizer are just too powerful to pass up.


edit: Of course then you have a character like Jayce who builds offensive no matter what (if they want to be effective) so one way of looking at character building isn't always the right way.

Generally my rule of thumb is to not build defensive if I'm behind unless I am playing a tanky champion or a champion with high base damage. The reason is that in pretty much all other scenarios if I'm behind, defense is not going to help me catch up. If I'm against a smart opponent they'll freeze the lane and then, even with my defensive items I likely won't be able to get near to CS since they'll be building damage and able to still come out on top of any damage trade. Now if I'm ahead defense can help immediately by shutting down the little damage they already do to me or if I'm worried about being focused down in team fights.

So I managed to play a few games with Thresh last night. Great champ but holy shit does Thresh feel useless early if you don't have a good carry to work with. I had Graves on bot and he couldn't decide between jungling and staying at bot. Once Thresh gets enough souls mind to late he starts getting tanking enough to move across the map and assist.

I just hate being a noob level and no one knows how to play, no lane discipline, no sense of when to push. Too many hesitant players that either don't attack or just run away all the time, or don't make pushes. Like, we had both the buffs and the mid lane was down to the last tower before the inhibitor and the guys just ran in random directions back to their lanes to farm at like late mid.

So frustrating when you can't do much damage yourself going with a tanky build.

Just play mid to get out of the early bracket. If mid is unavailable go jungle.

Xalara_sl said:

Generally my rule of thumb is to not build defensive if I'm behind unless I am playing a tanky champion or a champion with high base damage. The reason is that in pretty much all other scenarios if I'm behind, defense is not going to help me catch up. If I'm against a smart opponent they'll freeze the lane and then, even with my defensive items I likely won't be able to get near to CS since they'll be building damage and able to still come out on top of any damage trade. Now if I'm ahead defense can help immediately by shutting down the little damage they already do to me or if I'm worried about being focused down in team fights.

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Behind being relative and of course it has a lot to do with what the champ match up already is. If you're playing top lane and your opponent has a kill on you and a thirty cs lead then nothing you do is bringing you back in the lane or letting you farm safely unless your jungle ganks at the perfect moment and it results in a kill. However (champ/match up dependent of course) if they only have a kill on you and the farm is relatively even or they are only up a kills worth of farm but haven't actually killed you yet then the proper defensive item early will reset the lane effectively and at least let you last hit when possible and under tower. Freezing lane is not an indefinite thing. After a wave or two depending on how well they do it they minions will creep back to your side where you can freeze. Go do your double golems and wraiths, or wolves depending on side and look to toss some lane pressure mid or coordinate with your jungle for an invade to use the free time you have while the enemy does freeze.

Penance_sl said:

Just play mid to get out of the early bracket. If mid is unavailable go jungle.

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Keep in mind with this advice, as I'm not sure what level you are.. but jungling is actually HARD on most champions at low levels, made doubly so because newbies don't know to leash or even help out since it's not every game that there's a jungler (this persists until level 18-20+ from what I've seen). A few champs that are exceptional at jungling at low levels even w/out leashes is Nunu, Fiddle, and Warwick, mainly because they all can sustain really well to keep themselves healthy in the jungle. Nunu just got some jungle changes recently where consuming certain types of jungle mobs gives him unique temporary buffs too.

Draegan_sl said:

So I managed to play a few games with Thresh last night. Great champ but holy shit does Thresh feel useless early if you don't have a good carry to work with. I had Graves on bot and he couldn't decide between jungling and staying at bot. Once Thresh gets enough souls mind to late he starts getting tanking enough to move across the map and assist.

I just hate being a noob level and no one knows how to play, no lane discipline, no sense of when to push. Too many hesitant players that either don't attack or just run away all the time, or don't make pushes. Like, we had both the buffs and the mid lane was down to the last tower before the inhibitor and the guys just ran in random directions back to their lanes to farm at like late mid.

So frustrating when you can't do much damage yourself going with a tanky build.

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Supporting at low levels is going to be frustrating, skill disparity really makes it so hard to predict whether or not your random partner in lane is competent enough to follow up on plays you make, and to also not constantly make an excess of mistakes that throws away leads you build too. Once you get to 30 and even moreso with a bit of higher MMR, it's not as painful.. but still, duo queueing or more is probably the way to go. I have a smurf I play on occassionally, "GoEasyOnUs" - lvl 19 iirc, add me sometime on that name maybe we can queue a bit so it's less annoying for ya.

Draegan_sl said:

I just hate being a noob level and no one knows how to play, no lane discipline, no sense of when to push. Too many hesitant players that either don't attack or just run away all the time, or don't make pushes. Like, we had both the buffs and the mid lane was down to the last tower before the inhibitor and the guys just ran in random directions back to their lanes to farm at like late mid.

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I understand this perfectly, it was a strange day when I realised that this never changes. There's always going to be games where people just want to fuck with the system, troll or just do stupid shit. Being level 30 doesn't make any difference at all. Lower down you get a TON of smurfs playing with genuine newbies and they like to do the craziest of shit because they think they can get away with it, some can, but most just end up feeding and shit talking.

I played support while leveling mostly, it was the only slot that was regularly open and jungling was too hard without leashes and decent runes.

I focused on last hitting, map awareness, team fight synergies and not dying (re: taking stupid risks to dive a tower or chase someone and finding their entire team in a bush).

It's mainly about playing a shit load of games, playing different champs, playing against different champs and keeping up with the item meta. Oh, and playing a shit load more games.

Playing a dedicated support at low levels is almost entirely pointless unless you're duoing with your ADC. You'd probably be better off going for a kill lane (like taking a bruiser) or taking a 'support' that you just build AP on (nidalee, nunu, ori, lux). Thresh is an outstanding support but he just doesn't scale with anything enough to not rely on your team all game.

I've been playing mostly with my brother in law who carrys, but last night he was away (he's also higher level). So it was my first time experience solo queue.

Hell, you're lucky to even have a jungler most low level games.