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The Official League of Legends Thread!

So I ranked yesterday with Gnar... In the Jungle. We won XD

I want that Firecracker Jinx SO bad. Played it in PBE. Too good. If you're a fan of Wind Waker style effects, FCJinx brings it =3
 
I really can't wait till next payday. I'll finally be able to have my first limited skin. And its with Ahri, a champ I love.

also, I AM SO CLOSE TO FINALLY BEING ABLE TO PLAY IN RANKED!

;A; yet still so far! level 26!
 
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I just realized how difficult it would be to ask everyone here for their Summoner Name... So... Everyone just add me xD My Summoner Name is the same as my username here
ADD ME PLS
 
my EU summoner name is the same as my account name here. ArmageddonD11 instead for my NA account.
 
gamzee said:
im so mad they are getting rid of dfg
but i like seeing ahri and lb players suffer
it's not like there's 3 other similar items though.

just get a blackfire torch.
 
Rynozilla said:
You can have two accounts, on different servers.... Wut.
Course you can. How else am I supposed to play with my American peeps?
 
@gold163
I only started playing League in season 4 but for what it's worth I can see why the game might get repetitive. If it weren't for the fact that I primarily play this game with friends I don't see myself playing as much as I do. But because I spent more time playing with friends and less time with random players I don't really find the league community as toxic as I hear. I still get the usual pricks that showed up when I played counter strike or Left 4 dead and I have long since grown a thick enough skin to ignore those kinds of people. Also muting is a thing and I use it when the situation arises.

RE: redesigns. Prior to his rework I would never have purchased Sion. But having done the stun brothers bot lane with him (pre-rework) and taric I can see why a design rework was needed. Post-rework Sion is one of my main champions and I pick him up whenever I need to break a losing streak or I just want to have fun charging down lane to wreck some players. I like his new look and they kept just enough of his old goofy self (his dance and such) to make him unique.

I do agree with the whole boobs thing though. Kayle's newest splash art has "boob armor" and it bothers me to no end because all of her other splash arts, and her character model have actual breast plating. Tristana's rework also reeks of trying to sexualize a character that previously didn't have that trait to them. I understand reworking mechanics and updating visuals but I do worry that Riot is resorting to pandering with some of their new choices.

Lastly, I like the new jungle a bit more than the old one. My friend explained that the new jungle was designed to introduce more tactical and strategic thinking and I think Riot actually succeeded on that one. Whenever I jungle I have to decide which clear path to take in the start, and when to use smite for bonuses or to save my own life. The raptor buff has so much use mid/late game since it's a free sweepers lense and with enough speed you can check an entire section of the map.
 
A lot of the new characters/VUs lately have been really good, like, exceptionally good.
I appreciate all the designs and stuff lately.
I love how Rek'sai doesn't talk at all and is just completely feral

Sion's VU was like the best thing ever.

I'm eager to see what other VU/New champs we'll get in 2015.

Also Azir is the best
 
how have we gone this long without talking about how Tristana's new VU has made her even more adorable
 
buccaneer tristana finally DOESNT look like a garbage skin!
 
Jutsei said:
My friend got Firefighter Tristana for her Mystery Gift for being nice on League.
2 Weeks later Tristana VU
And it's finally decent.
Let's just say she's fine with that skin now
I got that skin for xmas in a mystery gift. I'm pretty excite to try the new trist (just did FCJinx cause she's my main). I love sticky bombs and the new kit sounds fun
 
yo, have you seen her little march?

cute as fuck.
 
Tristana Classic Splash Art
MyHmQBp.jpg

Firecracker Jinx Splash Art
QGYuU6k.jpg

Warring Kingdoms Katarina Splash Art
LEkrPoS.jpg

Warring Kingdoms Nidalee Splash Art
nw89GeU.jpg

Arclight Velkoz Splash Art
knVtZiy.jpg

Sweetheart Annie Splash Art
4ZyEZDt.jpg
 
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dat splash art face for trist is just....
tumblr_n62g4llpks1tof9kfo3_500.png

something about it feels off.
 
SanoBaron said:
dat splash art face for trist is just....
tumblr_n62g4llpks1tof9kfo3_500.png

something about it feels off.
Welcome to my world. I don't even play with her that much but I feel like Rito is doing something wrong. From what I read they also gave her lore the Shurima treatment so...at least her e has a cool new effect.
 
@Rynozilla Spawn timers aren't really what I'm talking about; in fact I think they're a really useful, long overdue UI functionality.

No offense, I'm not trying to talk down to you or anything or act elitist here. I took a look at your summoner profile and you're not level 30 yet, and what that tells me is that a lot of what I have to say next might just go over your head until you've played the game for long enough for you to realize that Riot is going to eventually kill everything you love.

I guess I can't really speak from a new player's experience after all but from my standpoint I just think the game is needlessly cluttered and I would think (but could be wrong) that it makes it more difficult for newer players to understand. The game feels very convoluted today was what I was really getting at. Most of this is just "boo hoo the game is different now".

You have to understand, at one point League of Legends was the laughingstock kusoge of a yet-nonexistent genre consisting practically solely of LoL and Dota (and HoN, which was basically Dota, and any other WC3 mods that weren't stupidly popular). While the biggest criticism against LoL was that it was simplistic this was also its greatest strength. Champions felt unique and distinct from each other, and the poor slipshod design of the game engine and characters allowed for some hilariously broken shit to happen in game, but that was part of it. As the game left beta and became popular in a competitive sense it never fixed any of its problems (such as the idiotic noob trap Summoner Rune system, the fact that there is no reason not to choose Flash as a Summoner spell) and instead just kept adding more.

There's a lot I want to say about this but having been away from the game for a long time I'm struggling to bring up specific historic examples to illustrate my point. What I was getting at is the true nature of a match of League of Legends has become obscured by a bunch of auxiliary mechanics and the experience is no longer focused like it used to be. Instead of there just being a handful of champions with temporary invulnerability OR revival and this being the core gimmick of that champ's design, we now have champions that can do BOTH (cough Aatrox) and from an objective standpoint some champions have more utility in one ability than old champion designs used to have in four. Feature bloat where one catch-all ability can be used for a dozen different situations and champions are no longer specialized (and as a result are more self-sufficient, and thus teamwork in terms of individual contribution is less important).

At one point Rammus' taunt lasted like 5 seconds whereas now it lasts like 2 and so does every other taunt in the game. At one point Pantheon could ult into the opposing team's fountain from his team's own fountain. At one point support heals were actually useful and there was a huge difference between a champ suited for lane sustain and a champ suited for clutch heals. You used to be able to scale most abilities as a function of both Attack Damage and Ability Power, so you could choose from a wider variety of item builds, even if they were inefficient. This actually changes the nature of the game dramatically and as such the way the game plays today is largely different from how it used to play when LoL was still more widely regarded as janky kusoge for raging losers who can't Starcraft.

What I want to highlight is this: Back then, roles such as "Fighter", "Tank", "Mage" etc. did not exist and were mainly informal terminology used by fans to describe certain aspects of a champion's gameplay design. But it was a very fluid language that was meant to reflect how the game currently played and not the other way around. At one point Riot swore that they would never prescribe to a set "meta", and it was great. Champions were just champions and you had more freedom to play in a lot of creative, surprising ways to varying degrees of effectiveness, but most importantly a good enough player could make a shitty build look good. As the years went on Riot gave in and decided to cement the solo top, solo mid, aggressive ganking jungle/counter-jungle, support + adc bot lane meta that is the most common and most effective today. Years ago they didn't have to do this, because if you wanted to circumvent the meta there were a few specific compositions that could do that. These days pretty much any champion can do anything and there are so many champions that you can make almost any team comp work, but in general one player is always going to have to give up last hits in the bot lane to feed the carry (aggressive repurposed supports like Zyra or Orianna), the jungler is always expected to get their farm either entirely from the jungle or from ganks, and the solo top usually doesn't care what happens until late game. Bot lane is duo because dragon is more important early game than Baron, and there are no surprises like the entire team using Rally to take down the first Mid tower before the minions even spawn.

Back then you could still use wards to spell out obscene messages. Now you can only place a max of 3 on the entire map and your team is expected to ward as well... even though they don't anyway because 80% of the player population still consists of egotistical yoloqers who think k/d is more important than killing Nexus or helping a teammate.

All of the champions are the same now and the way items work is a large part of it. Every champion has a skill shot. Every champion has mobility. Every champion has AoE. Every champion has some sort of stacking self-buff. Every champion has sustain and every champion has CC. Every champion can be tanky, every champion can deal crazy damage, every champion has DoT or teleport or clone, etc. The only real reason to pick a certain champion over another is because you simply prefer their abilities in that moment. This is of course an exaggeration but compared to how champions used to be designed I'd argue it's largely true. Riot nerfed champions that were unique and now champion design is mostly variations on the same kind of gameplay.


@PaperBag_Sniper

It used to be that jungling was an extreme specialization that only a few of champs were efficient at, and each were junglers in a different way (some cleared fast and could gank, some cleared slowly but geared up for late game, etc.) Because each champion was different, even if the route seemed similar in terms of clearing order, how you actually played that champion would feel very different. The reason why Riot redid the jungle was because they accidentally made it so that every single jungler played in exactly the same way and pretty much any champion could become an efficient jungler.

Beyond a point I mostly played with friends because I felt the community was too filled with uncooperative people to make playing a match actually feel rewarding. This helps but it also serves to highlight how unplayable the game is with random people in Summoner's Rift. Dom and ARAMs aren't really like that because they're not overdesigned modes like SR is. The community is still terrible because by nature MOBAs are the type of game where you can easily blame your teammates for a mistake you made yourself. Even in games that probably have worse communities like Counter-Strike, a terrible community is less of a problem because you're not investing 50 minutes of your time into a single match where you know you've lost in the first 15 minutes because two of your teammates don't speak English and one guy muted you because he couldn't forgive you for dying in the first five minutes. League of Legends' community may not actually be worse but it has a larger effect on individual players than in other games. You can block that idiot who sends you stupid messages on PSN when you win in Skullgirls and the game will be the same. If you mute all of your LoL teammates you've kind of cemented your own loss. League of Legends is the first community I've heard described as "toxic", and the only one where it apparently matters enough. I've played plenty of games with worse communities where it didn't really bother me, and that's the strange part. I should be able to put up with this crap in any other game, but not LoL for some reason.

Regarding Sion and tying this back into my whole tirade about champion design, maybe you not ever picking Sion before was a good thing after all -- it meant that he was a champion for a specific playstyle that just didn't mesh with yours. As cheap as some lane comps with old Sion might have felt there were ways for smart players to mitigate the effects and the whole point of a situationally powerful comp is to keep the game dynamic by forcing players to change their strategies based on the circumstances.

As for widespread sex appeal, again, this doesn't bother me in almost any other game (I play Skullgirls ffs). Even Leona's whole stoic, anti-trope design is a trope in of itself and it's overall just a very lazy character design compared to the sort of variety the game had when the champion roster consisted of a bald blue mage, a little girl with pink hair, a werewolf, a masked frog thing holding a lamp post, a yeti, a ninja hamster, etc. Let's look at Akali; her art used to make her look like a short person but now her new art gives her the same build and body type as every other female character in the game. Trundle looks like Willump. Everybody looks the same.

League of Legends used to feel really ambitious and now it is just a very safe, very boring, and very frustrating game to me. Beyond the gameplay, Riot really stepped their game up in terms of the presentation; the new artwork and voice acting is superb, but this was at the cost of a very quirky and unique lore (now everything is retconned to universal plot constants) as well as distinctive character designs. The problem with making the story consistent is it highlights how bad Riot is at writing when unique backstories used to hide that. These days every champion is some other champion's brother/sister. As for the art, the amount of detail on Varus' abs is remarkable but that doesn't stop him from looking exactly like every other stupid dark bishie asshole Warcraft reject with glowing eyes in the game, of which there are like two dozen.
 
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@gold163
I might not have been clear about Sion. I did have a chance to play old sion (in the aformentioned stun brothers lane. As well as soloing with him for a short time prior to his rework.) but he had a huge problem with unfocused gameplay. He could be an AP burst champ or late game AD powerhouse but neither felt fully fleshed out. In short, his kit was a mess and I can see why he had such a niche appeal. His AP scaling shield is probably the only reason I would play him aside from his point-and-click stun which made his engage pretty scary.

New Sion however is very much so focused around his kit and it shows. He's a AD bruiser with inherent tankiness (much like his old iteration) and a much more useful Ult (his ult was basically useless in his old AP builds since it granted bonus AD and attack speed). His passive is a huge improvement over his old one and it can't be stated enough that his new ult is so satisfying to pull off right.

As for jungling, I'm the guy who doesn't use any of the Standard junglers except for Fiddlesticks. My main jungles in S4 to pre-S5 were reworked Sion, Karthus, Leona, Taric, and Fiddles. I also enjoy playing "off-meta" positions so I see a huge problem with having a region of the map that only a few characters are good in. If the jungle of S3 and back was dominated by just Yi's and Warwicks I probably wouldn't want to play SR as much since it's boring seeing the same champs in the same position.

If I had any major complaint about the community prior to the new summoners rift it's that people were (and realistically still are) more interested in kills rather than objectives. As a support main it sucks being the only person on most randomly arranged teams who will ward the jungle but that seems to be changing with the new jungle. Maybe it's because I only know the last two major iterations of SR but I think for at least the new jungle, Riot got things right. Dragon means something more than just global money. Baron isn't a game ender. And it forces a more objective based mentality into a game where I constantly see people fighting for kills.

As for sex appeal. Yeah, I play skullgirls too but I've always been vocal about my problems with some of the more gratuitous cheesecake put into the game. Doesn't stop me from playing and enjoying the game overall but it means that it's something that really sticks out to me when I see it.
 
Omg. Annie's gonna fucking kill us with a Pissed off CAREBEAR!

Edit: I hope Firecracker Jinx is the Lunar event Login animation. It'd so going onto my dash!
 
I thought I could play other roles besides support... I was wroooong.... e.e'
Anyway, I can't see any of the splash arts and stuff, thanks to my current internet connection. I'm so excited to see them once I get home...
 
Rynozilla said:
I thought I could play other roles besides support... I was wroooong.... e.e'
Anyway, I can't see any of the splash arts and stuff, thanks to my current internet connection. I'm so excited to see them once I get home...
you're not missing much with Trist. it's just her current splash art reworked. the face is a bit wonky. kinda would love to see how it looks with her current ones' face.

but i don't own photoshop. ;-;
 
@gold163
I agree with you completely on some fronts, I used to play LoL all the time with my friends and have been playing just enough ranked over the summer to get to Gold so I can get all the pretty rewards just in case I meet some people who want to play 5's.

edit: whoops I didn't scroll down all the way, this is targeted at your first-ish post on this page.

I just wanted to address what you said one by one I guess:
First Paragraph: People don't know how to ACTUALLY play LoL to WIN GAMES. Even I don't. In order to efficiently win a game without dragging on forever your team needs to make correct decisions depending on your team comp, the other team's comp, what map objectives are important/worthless, and respond to how the other team conducts themselves. Example: All the time in solo Q 2 people on the enemy team show themselves bottom when your team is 5 middle and baron is up. 90% of the time the correct decision is to go to baron, but your team may think that pushing for the middle inhibitor is the correct decision. So the 4 people who think the inhib is the better decision drag along the other guy, the 2 people bot teleport back, and your team gets killed 5v5 trying to get the inhib and it prolongs the game. This happens ALL THE TIME because people, including myself, cannot make correct decisions within the game.

Second Paragraph: What they've been doing is trying to make the game more objective based. Giving all players the access to simple timers and giving Baron and Dragon buffs that give your team more than just gold makes them more of an incentive than they were before, which I'm fine with. If the game was more objective based, you would see less 50 minute games because teams would be focused more on towers and dragons to help them take towers rather than getting 500 kills in one game. Last hitting is important, though. It is a skill that separates players that is somewhat necessary as a learning curve. It makes the game more skill-based so players who are more skilled can shine in lane and gain advantages over their opponents. Go play TOME if you want to see how well MOBA's work without last hitting. (In my opinion, not very well.)

Third: Meh, no real comment. I can see where you're coming from though, but I care 0% about that.
 
@Xephyr I see what they're trying to do and while I respect the decisions they're making I don't agree that they're the right ones. Again, I don't have a problem with timers, but adding in new objectives such as Scuttlebug, etc. and incentivizing Dragon/Baron for more than just early/mid game gold/end game buff needlessly makes the game convoluted imo, and I don't agree that it helps shorten games by giving normally uncooperative players a reason to participate. The thing is, if a team got Baron, the match was pretty much over and this was a GOOD thing because a team that can't hold off against another team that has Baron probably deserved to lose the match ten minutes earlier. Dragon being useless end-game was a good thing because it meant that instead of everybody grouping to do Dragon when nobody needs it they'd focus on more important objectives such as Baron and towers. Nowadays everybody just wants buffs and there are plenty of ways to get them. The game just feels like a clusterfuck of overlapping and redundant mechanics that aren't as transparent as the older, simpler LoL used to be.

I have found that with the changes a normal blind pick game on Summoner's Rift does not typically last any longer or shorter than what it used to, except there are fewer situations in which a decisive victory happens quicky due to the tacked-on comeback mechanics that tediously drag the game out, and the situations in which a match lasts longer are even more excruciating because now the team as a whole has a million different things to worry about late-game rather than focusing exclusively on one or two lanes. The game is exciting to watch as a spectator sport but boring to actually play at lower skill levels of play.

As for last-hitting, I'm not advocating for the removal of it, I was just pointing out that as far as required skills to play a game go last-hitting is possibly the least-exciting, least rewarding and least intuitive skill ever. I'm not saying it's a bad mechanic, but that it's abused as a metric for how good players are at a game. It's like when people look at fighting games and think they're exclusively about flashy combos and don't see why mixups are important. Last-hitting is necessary to play games like LoL and Dota but between the two LoL puts more emphasis on menial repetition rather than skilled decision-making, and this has only gotten worse since I started playing in mid-2010 despite assertions to the contrary from the lead developers telling people things about the game that simply aren't true in practice.

Last-hitting may have been a more impressive skill back when more than half the champion roster didn't easily have access to some AoE farming ability, but these days last-hitting is pretty meaningless and if you mis-time a last hit it doesn't feel like you messed up, it feels like the game cheated you. Even with last-hitting and the absurd front-loading of required game knowledge that MOBAs/ARTS have they're still widely regarded as skill-less jokes by people who play games like FPS/RTS for a reason. They're just really shallow games and after over five years of development there's no excuse for this.

You argue that nobody actually knows how to play LoL to win games but I'd argue that in the leaner, streamlined LoL circa 2010-2011 that I played, it was a lot easier to see the flow of a match because there was a lot less distracting fancy bullshit that obscures the true nature of the game and instead refocuses matches on more frequent but shorter and less strategic team engagements. The game as it is pretty much exclusively focuses on AoE teamfight clusterfucks or isolating certain enemies to cement a significant advantage for the next two minutes. Every tactical decision only matters from a short-term standpoint.
 
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Rynozilla said:
D-Do I add all three...? ;w;
Ye. Its better this way.
People tend to complain that I'm never online, when I'm just on a smurf.
 
just lettin' everyone know now

I am a bad ADC.

Sharpie can vouch for me....
 
Rynozilla said:
Have you SEEN Ahri's new splash? I got her confused with the Crimson Chin at first.
waitwhat.gif


Rynozilla said:
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhshshshsshhssh. I have a friend that can help you with Ez, if you'd like. And I blame myself for not being a good enough support.... ;w;
no, I'm just not good against champs like Vayne WHO WILL JUST CHASE YOU DOWN! and all I want to do is farm!
 
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