League of Legends Immersion

[Radii]

Time to find out if we have enough MOBA fans here to support something like this. I've been an avid League of Legends (often referred to as LOL or LoL, expect me to start doing the same) player for 2 1/2+ years now, and in the last year I've also become an avid fan of Competitive League of Legends. A Forbes article yesterday revealed some numbers indicating that LoL is the most played PC game in the world right now. So hopefully there will be some interest in a dynasty here.

Purpose

I'm going to level up a new account and enter ranked play to see what kind of rating I can attain without spending any money. I already have an account, and I already play some ranked, but the idea of a completely F2P journey sounds enticing.


Dynasty Goals

I view this a lot like the poker dynasties of old we had around here. Writing down information about my play forced me to think more about it and to learn and become a better player. There are an immense number of comparisons that can be made between LoL and poker. A lot of times your actions have limited impact on the results (because their are 9 other real people playing the game). Its easy to blame others and ignore your own mistakes and be completely blind to ways you can improve. Lots of people are just screwing around and having fun while some are being very serious and playing their best, leading to hilarious/enraging results.

So I'm hoping to get out of this dynasty what i did out of my poker dynasties nearly a decade ago now... drum up some interest around here in the game, and force myself to examine my game more so that I can improve.

I'm not great at this game. My current rating on my main account is 1292 (using an elo system similar to that found in chess). Two ways to look at that... one is that its better than large amounts of the LoL community, I'm probably in the top 20%... the other is that its a very average rating and there are tens of thousands of players rated 1400-1800 and hundreds rated 2k+. I think I can be better than I am, and that's the goal here, to get better.


Other Key Dynasty Components

-- I'll try to include some replays of my play here and there, things I do well, things I don't do well and want to work on.

-- I'll introduce all the parts of the game as I go, the champions, rune pages, masteries, etc, so hopefully you don't have to be an expert on the game to follow.

-- I follow the pro scene like it was a legit sport. I watch more NFL than anything... but after that? LoL. I watch more LoL than I do college basketball at this point. I watch my favorite pros play solo queue and I love all of the tournaments that are broadcast. I'll share my favorite streams or my thoughts on big tournaments, big news in the pro scene, etc, and see if it drums up any conversation.


Any interest? Lets see where this goes.

[Poli]

Don't give up on FM, otherwise good luck!

[Radii]

Hah I'm an idiot, I had a giant "tutorial" type post typed up introducing game elements and refreshed the page by accident and lost it all. So instead I'm going to spread that out a bit. :P

If you have 45 minutes to kill, here's TotalBiscuit's "WTF is LoL" youtube video which provides an excellent introduction to the game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_78J6FEouM

[Atocep]

I'll be following. I've played a ton of League (enough to get 2 accounts to 30) and a friend of mine was hired by Riot a couple of years ago so I get to complain about my issues with the game to him quite a bit. Before season 1 started I was sitting at around 1900 in normal ELO. I was never really able to get into ranked all that heavily because of frustration each time I'd play (15 or so games and a 1450ish rating in season 1 and no ranked since) so I'm definitely interested to see how you do in this, especially with the F2P approach.

Best of luck on your journey!

[Radii]

I'm Rhiow2. My main summoner, shockingly, is named Rhiow.

For this game I selected Cho'Gath, one of my favorites and a free champ this week.

The early games until I (hopefully) win a few and get more balanced competition are going to be an adventure. In this match the Master Yi for the other team never showed up, and Miss Fortune quit about 15 minutes in.

Jungle: Lee Sin vs No One
Top: Tryndamere vs Tristsana/Warwick
Mid: Morgana vs Ryze
Bot: Kog Maw/Cho vs Miss Fortune

So that's all fucked up for anyone that knows the game heh. I should have gone top but Trynd was one of those that never spoke and just went where he wanted, and this game is all about getting along sometimes so I went bottom with Kog and let him farm. The other team's Trist and Warwick clearly knew what they were doing and abused Trynd. Once it was apparent their 5th wasn't going to show I tried to help elsewhere.

I think they would have won 4v5 because Trist and ww got so far ahead but their Miss Fortune quit as well. This happens less at higher levels, but it happens.

I'm not gonna type all that stuff up for a worthless 5v3 too often, but hey, first game


Champion - Cho'Gath

If we have less experienced people reading I'll try to introduce people to champs as I play them.

Riot does Champion Spotlight's for each character, here's the spotlight for Cho: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ8QI_7puvU

Cho'Gath is considered a tanky mage. He typically goes top lane in the normal meta, he can be jungled as well. Cho has two powerful forms of crowd control, his Q ability (Rupture) is placed on the ground and after a short delay knocks everyone up in the air who are in the location selected. This is a difficult skill to land because of the delay, but the knockup is one of the strongest CC's around. His W ability is a cone shaped AOE silence. Silence is an incredibly strong crowd control ability in League, its impossible to use abilities and even some summoner spells are disabled while silenced. Cho's ultimate, Feast, deals large amounts of true damage (true damage means that resists are ignored and none of the damage is mitigated) and is lots of fun, with an audible "NOM NOM NOM" as the animation goes off.

Some people build Cho full AP (magic) and I've seen that work very very well, but I always prefer a mix, focusing on being a scary tank in the late game. This game I rushed Frozen Heart since the other team had two AD Carries (Frozen Heart provides armor against physical damage and also has an aura that slows the attack speed of everyone nearby).

[Radii]

Originally Posted by Atocep

I'll be following. I've played a ton of League (enough to get 2 accounts to 30) and a friend of mine was hired by Riot a couple of years ago so I get to complain about my issues with the game to him quite a bit. Before season 1 started I was sitting at around 1900 in normal ELO. I was never really able to get into ranked all that heavily because of frustration each time I'd play (15 or so games and a 1450ish rating in season 1 and no ranked since) so I'm definitely interested to see how you do in this, especially with the F2P approach.

Best of luck on your journey!

Thanks! I really have no idea if this will work well in dynasty format, but I wanna find out. I think my normal elo is usually in the 1450-1500 range, its always well higher than my ranked (I didn't know it could be tracked, a friend that I play with a lot was using a site that tracked it though and told me). My highest ever ranked elo was 1450 but that didn't last long at all, its been in the 1200s for a long time.

In season 1 I rushed into ranked having no idea what I was doing. I dropped to 900 before I started learning anything and eventually climbed up towards 1200 at the end of the season. In S2 I've at least been above 1200 the whole time.

When I say "had no idea what I was doing" its crazy to look back and realize how clueless I was. I didn't understand what last hitting was, or anything at all about lane control, for 500+ games. I just duo'd with a buddy all day in normals, I was Yi, he was Fiddle almost eery game, and we tried to kill people. It wasn't until last year when I started watching some streams that I started to realize how deep the strategy could be and how little I knew about even fundamental concepts in the game.

[Atocep]

Originally Posted by Radii

Thanks! I really have no idea if this will work well in dynasty format, but I wanna find out. I think my normal elo is usually in the 1450-1500 range, its always well higher than my ranked (I didn't know it could be tracked, a friend that I play with a lot was using a site that tracked it though and told me). My highest ever ranked elo was 1450 but that didn't last long at all, its been in the 1200s for a long time.

In season 1 I rushed into ranked having no idea what I was doing. I dropped to 900 before I started learning anything and eventually climbed up towards 1200 at the end of the season. In S2 I've at least been above 1200 the whole time.

When I say "had no idea what I was doing" its crazy to look back and realize how clueless I was. I didn't understand what last hitting was, or anything at all about lane control, for 500+ games. I just duo'd with a buddy all day in normals, I was Yi, he was Fiddle almost eery game, and we tried to kill people. It wasn't until last year when I started watching some streams that I started to realize how deep the strategy could be and how little I knew about even fundamental concepts in the game.

Before Season 1 there was a .txt file that updated every time you logged out and it had your normal ELO buried in it. They fixed it after word began to spread. I was using it to test ELO gains/loses and smurf detection since before season 1 everything was hidden.

I found that once smurf detection flags you it boosts you 100 ELO per game until it finds a good spot for you. I was curious to see how how high I could get a smurf at the time.

A couple months after I started playing League a guy that I had played WoW with for a couple years got in touch with me and it turns out he was a top 50 ELO player from beta. I started playing with him and that helped me more than anything else. Queuing with him got me in quite a few games with some of the popular streamers way before they were popular. Those games made me realize how little I knew about the game.

[Neon_Chaos]

MAOOOOOOKAI.

[Radii]

Fucking smurfs ruining games! Teehee. I played Kog'Maw, another free champion this week. Once again our team had a jungler and the other team did not. Somehow I ended up top lane, which would not normally work out well, Kog'Maw is very squishy and immobile, he's not built to 1v2, but the matchups are still really random at this point and I laned against their Master Yi and Renekton and neither were all that good.

Yi checked our blue buff by himself at level 1, but shockingly myself and twisted fate had gone with Amumu to protect it, free first blood. Yi then tried to tower dive me at level 2 and I killed him again, and I was off to the races. I finish the game with 21 kills and 1 death.

Top: Kog vs Renekton/Master Yi
Mid: Twisted fate vs Ziggs
Bot: Poppy/Yi vs Miss Fortune/Jax
Jungle: Amumu vs no one

Kog'Maw

Kog'Maw the Mouth of the Abyss - League of Legends Wiki - Champions, Items, Strategies, and many more!

Kog's Champion Spotlight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uZ1ltl-qPM <-- Dear lord was this the first spotlight Phreak ever did? He sounds really depressed here!

Kog'Maw is an extremely squishy ranged champion. He can be built to do physical damage or magic damage, filling either the AD or AP Carry role. I don't play Kog often, he's not a favorite of mine at all, but I'm limited by the free champs. I prefer to play him as AD Carry and was able to in this game. Kog'Maw's W ability, Bio-Arcane Barrage, increases his range significantly for a brief period of time and allows his auto attacks to do % Damage, ie Bonus Damage based on the maximum health the enemy has, starting at 2% and increasing to 6% once maxxed out. Kog's Ultimate, Living Artillary, spits out acid at a very long range, doing AE damage where it lands. This ability has virtually no cooldown and can be spammed, but it costs more mana every time its used in succession.

AD Carries like Kog Maw have to play very safely, positioning is *everything* in fights. Kog must stay behind the tankier members of his team and be aware of the ways the enemy can try to get through the tank line to kill him. His W and R allow him to do huge damage from very safe distances if played correctly.

[Radii]

The Map



This is an overhead view of the primary map in LoL, Summoners Rift. Blue dots and purple dots are the towers for each team. The yellow dots are NPC Jungle camps, while the areas highlighted in green are the brush. By default, opponents cannot see inside the brush, unless someone on their team is standing in it as well. This allows teams to hide and wait for unsuspecting victims to come by for ambushes. Players combat this by buying wards, items that can be placed on the ground that grant vision for 3 minutes. Map vision is critical in the game and knowing where your enemies are is a massive advantage.

[Radii]

Originally Posted by Neon_Chaos

MAOOOOOOKAI.

I'm SOOOOOOOOO bad at Maokai. But if there's a good Maokai jungle on my team its so good.

[Radii]

25:47 Victory

My Champion: Kog'Maw - 7/3/10 (that's 7 kills, 3 deaths, 10 assists), 135 cs (only champ in the game over 100, farm numbers always low in these games b/c everyone is just trying to kill each other).

Bot: Kog'Maw/Amumu
Mid: Annie
Top: Morgana/Sion

I don't list the matchups b/c they were trying some gimmicky stuff. Their team was Sion, Renekton, Miss Fortune, Teemo and Ziggs. All 5 of them showed up mid at level 1 and killed Annie. They were trying to 5 man push down the mid tower. Our team responded well. Our top lane pushed hard unopposed while myself and Amumu went mid to defend. We didn't let them take our tower and we took one. They tried to move around ganking as a group but we always responded well, dying some but pushing whatever they left open.

Not a bad strategy on their part tbh, if our team had a couple legitimately new guys they would probably have just folded and not known what to do. They needed to abandon that strat immediately once we repelled it and just go to lanes though.



Mastery Pages

I'm level 3 (like most RPGs, the early levels go fast, the later ones take awhile). This gives me 3 points to assign to masteries. Here's what the interface looks like:



Standard talent tree, lots of games do something similar.

Eventually I'll start changing up masteries depending on the character I play, but early on I just go with easy, generic talents that help me no matter who I play.

I run ghost and exhaust summoner spells on pretty much everything at low levels (more on summoner spell options later), at least until flash/ignite open up, my point in the offense tree enhances both of my summoner spells. The points in the utility tree increase my maximum mana. There are characters in the game that have other mechanics besides mana, but none of the ones that I play are free right now.


Free RP!

RP, or Riot Points, are the microtransaction currency in the game. $5 buys you 650 RP, with some scaling options upward up to $50 which buys you 7200 RP. On my main I've made more than a couple $35 or $50 purcahses, my rule with that has always been as long as my monthly $$ spent is less than if I were playing an MMO, I'm ok. These days all I buy with RP are skins anyway (graphical changes to champions that are for fun only). I have in the past though bought a champion bundle, bought champs when they go on sale, and bought additional rune pages. Anyway... enough of that, none of that is relevant to this account.

So anyway, $5 buys you 650 RP. At level 3, you gain 400 RP in your account. There are 10 champs who cost less than 400 RP, so maybe I'll buy a champion one of these days, I'm good with the free ones for now though.

[Radii]

On the chance that anyone who doesn't play LoL is still reading, I took one of my replays from a game I played last night on my main account with two friends and made a little clip of us getting a kill on their bottom lane. I'm Rhiow, the ranged character (Corki) riding the manatee (my favorite skin). Corki is my favorite AD Carry and one of my two or three favorite champs. The yellow bull is Alistar, a tanky support. He is the one that initiates the fight and knocks the enemies into the air at the start. The 3rd guy that comes in on our team is the jungler. This kill shouldn't have happened. The other team should have had a ward down that would have shown our jungler walking down on the minimap (in the bottom right) and they could have just walked away.

Anyway, just a little something to show some gameplay.



The shitty quality in video is due to my shareware copy of fraps, the actual game looks a lot nicer.

[Radii]

37:36 Defeat

Cho'Gath - 3/10/13 - 117 cs

Top: Cho/Kog vs Kog/Renekton
Mid: Ryze vs Heimer
Bot: Sion vs Yi/Sion
Jungle: Yi vs No One

The lesson from this one is basically not to go along with your teammates if your teammates are making horrible decisions. In my lane Kog wouldn't follow up with damage when I landed a stun, I took two deaths before I realized that and stopped trying to trade with the other team at all. Once laning broke down Kog and Yi wouldn't group up so we just ended up in a ton of 3v4 and 3v5 fights that were unwinnable. Yi wanted to split push which could have been ok if we had a little coordination, but we didn't.

Second Cho game in a row where I thought I was going to have a solo lane but then the AD Carry wanders top, whoops

[Radii]

35:31 Victory

Morgana - 4/4/18 - 146 cs

Top: Sion/Amumu vs Yi/Tristana
Mid: Morgana vs Heimerdinger
Bot: Miss Fortune/Renekton vs Ashe/Amumu

Heimerdinger did what he does, push like crazy with his turrets. Morgana's pool does a pretty nice job of countering that. When I hit 6 I pushed to tower and ganked bottom and Renekton got a kill. Next time ult was up again ganked bot again and Renekton got a double kill. While I was away though Heimer kept pushing and took my turret. We teamfought just a bit better than them though (we actually had 5v5 fights which was fun). I hit a couple nice bindings in a later teamfight, but I missed way too often, I don't really play Morg. I should practice her since she's so strong.


Morgana

Morgana is an AP Carry who almost always takes the middle lane (AP Carry = Ability Power aka Magic Damage). Other magic users may do more damage but few can match the utility Morgana offers. Her Q is a skillshot single target root, E is a shield that prevents magical abilities from hitting while its up (can cast on teammates), and her ultimate does damage attaches a tether to all nearby opponents. If Morgana is still in tether range after a couple seconds bonus damage is done and the enemies are stunned. Two forms of CC and a shield along with high damage is really strong.

[Radii]

22:00 Victory

Singed: 6/0/6 (130 cs)

Top: Singed/Soraka vs Wukong/Mundo
Mid: Tristana vs Soraka
Bot: Brand/Ezreal vs Galio/Ezreal

Our Soraka was planning on supporting the AD Carry(soraka is a pure healer) until Brand and ezreal announced they were laning together. We crushed our lane when we took their tower about 13 minutes in I was 2/0/3 and Soraka was 3/0/2 and we had at least 4x their creep score (cs, or minions killed, a stat tracked in game that is critical).

I earned 7.8k gold in this game, over 1.5k more than anyone else on either team. Their Soraka started 5/0 (while a great support, Soraka can also be an absolute early game terror solo mid), but I killed her twice and was trying to pushed towers hard and they surrendered pretty early on. Soraka and I had taken two towers top, we had taken their bottom tower and we grouped up as 5 to take the middle one. I was way stronger than everyone from my early game success and a strong singed is very very hard to deal with. I was able to ult and tower dive them and we aced them and they immediately surrendered.

Singed is one of my two or three most played champions ever. I haven't played him on my main recently because its very hard for him to farm well top against ranged champs and there are lots of them around these days, but I absolutely love Singed and will probably instalock him for awhile since he's free this week.


Singed

Singed's is the ultimate troll champion. His Q leaves a poison trail behind him whenever he runs, W throws a puddle onto the ground that slows enemies that touch it, E flings an enemy over his shoulder, and his ultimate is an all around great steroid for, drastically increasing health regen, mana regen, armor, magic resist, run speed and crowd control reduction for 25 seconds. Singed is an incredibly disruptive tank. He's hard to kill, can use fling to toss enemies into your team or away from it, and with his poison and ultimate, singed just charges into your team and runs around, you cant kill him and you're slowly dying from poison.

I typically get some AP (usually rush rod of ages) but then go tanky (this game I got force of nature for extra runspeed and MR b/c their soraka was hurting).

The #1 Rule of League of Legends: Don't Chase Singed. Two of my six kills this game were from people chasing me while I was low health, thinking they would be able to kill me, but instead dying to my poison first.


I'm thinking about doing this once I get enough IP to buy Nidalee:

I'm doing an experiment to see if I can make my 1400 elo friend a better player in two weeks. : leagueoflegends

I'm sure its mostly my skill level (and age and reflexes) that keeps me from getting a higher elo than I do for the most part, and I do limit my champion pool somewhat, but I do enjoy the players that are just super well known for one champion that they played hundreds and hundreds of games with. Nidalee is a great champ for that, and I really like Nidalee, so once I get 3150 IP I may buy Nidalee and just pick her every game while I'm leveling and see if i can get really good with her.

[Radii]

Also, I'm wondering if I was up against a 4-man premade last match or if its just crazy random luck. My opponents names were:

Juice Chipotle
Suprising Taco
Chili Diarrhea
EpicGuacamoli

and a random name.

[Radii]

22:32 Defeat

Singed: 0/7/1 (53 cs)

Top: Singed/Ezreal vs Wukong/Vayne
Mid: Kassadin vs Soraka
Bot: Graves/Soraka vs Ezreal/Galio

My first completely terrible embarrassing game, it was bound to happen. Their Vayne was very good about auto attacking me anytime I got remotely close to a creep. My first death was just me being stupid thinking I could chase her down and kill her before she killed me. Maybe not stupid, but not safe... she lived with less than 20 hp. And it snowballed horribly from there. Second death was 100% lag which is sad, the next three deaths were just getting dove. I kinda want to bitch about Ezreal a little, but to be fair it was mostly just me not reacting well to having a decent ranged guy in my lane. My 3rd death when we got dove I did fling Vayne behind the turret while the turret was hitting her... and Ezreal ran instead of attacking. But meh, I could have reacted a lot better to the way the Vayne was playing against me.

[Radii]

20:00 Defeat

Graves: 3/3/2 (76 cs)


Top: Poppy vs Ashe/Akali
Mid: Brand vs Galio
Bot: Graves/Mundo vs Tryndamere/Brand
Jungle: Eve vs Elder Lizard

Eve died to the lizard at level 1, twice, afk'd for a couple minutes, then went top lane and died some more. Poppy got overrun 1v2 and without any threat from the jungle that tower died real fast. After that they sent 5 players bottom and killed me and Mundo. Mundo afk'd. That left about 8 minutes to kill time until we could surrender at 20.

Pre-6 Mundo hit tons of axes and I got first blood and we completely zoned out Trynd/Brand (a weird bot lane combo even at level 5). Without my AD runes I miss too much cs though, I only had 60 at 12 minutes despite no harassment at all. 100 is the goal there.


Graves

A strong AD Carry with a couple AE damage abilities, a smokescreen that enemies can't see out of (really disorienting and annoying to play against). His passive has him gaining armor every time he auto attacks, adding some tankyness that most AD Carries don't get.

Graves is great, but not a champ I'm good with (I'll take Corki, Caitlyn and Sivir into a ranked match any time, past those three I'm lacking). If it were one of those other AD Carries that were free I'd have my 85+ cs at 12 minutes and I'd have my BF Sword much earlier, in this game probably not enough to turn it around with the AFK'ers, but in a closer match it would have mattered a lot.

[Radii]

Ick, two games in a row with a leaver, this doesn't happen often at all at level 30 anymore (thx tribunal). I played Galio "support" bottom with an Ashe, but our top lane Wukong died 3 times in 5 minutes and quit. Game over!

Switched over to main account to practice 1v1 laning.

[Radii]

I haven't been playing on this account too much, but I did start knocking out bot games to get myself the 3150 IP I needed to get Nidalee. That turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected. When you're level 6 with no runes and playing with other people your level against Intermediate bots, its always a challenge, and sometimes you just get stomped. At least.. I do. I'm not good at last hitting without runes, and the bots get items at a set time so even if you can shut down your lane the bots still get strong. Had multiple games where 3 people quit before the 20 minute mark, a couple games where two people went 1/10 or worse, so trying to win those was a challenge.

But anyway, I got up to 3150 IP and bought nidalee and after one more bot game went back to normals. I'm going to pick Nidalee every match, if I go mid I'll AP, if I end up in a support type situation I'll get GP10s, try harder to ward, and buy AP if I'm able, and if I end up solo top I'll probably go AD/bruiser/tanky.

I've played 5 Nidalee games so far:

11/6/20 victory - AP Mid - went Rabadons -> Lich Bane -> Void Staff -> Rageblade

6/2/6 victory - AP Mid - Magic Pen boots/Rabadons is all I got done before they surrendered

5/1/6 victory - Support - laned with a Vayne bottom. Philo Stone/Kages Pick/Heart of Gold then started working towards Rabadons. Blatant KS's on two of my kills that I should have tried to give to carries.

7/4/4 victory - Support - no jungler this game, laned w/ a trynd top in a 2v1 situation. I let him get the cs and built my GP10's.

2/4/1 loss - AD Top - I laned against a Kayle. Kayle is annoying as shit. With no defensive runes his ranged attack ability hurts so bad early. I went 2/1 against him in lane phase but he outfarmed me pretty heavily. This was all irrelevant as far as the game went, we had an Eve that was 0/2 3 minutes in and quit. Couldn't surrender fast enough.

[Radii]

A few more games, Nidalee unless otherwise mentioned

2/2/9 Win - AP Mid - laned against a LeBlanc, her burst damage is ridiculous so my general strategy against Leblanc's is to buy MR and just not feed her, and I'll be stronger later on. Abyssal not so great on Nid since you're far away throwing spears mostly (so the MR reduction isn't going to help), but meh, it gave me the MR.

2/4/2 loss - Support - Two leavers, stall til 20.

0/5/4 Alistar loss - Support - two people invade their blue. They are defending and kill one of them. Tryndamere: "good call, noob", quits 2:10 into game. Hooray!

8/5/12 loss - AP Mid - Fairly close game, the other team was more coordinated. We had 3 fairly toxic teammates, the type who never say anything constructive and just shit on everyone everytime anything bad happens. Lots of 3v4's and 4v5 fights and people doing their own thing unfortunately.

I'm level 9 now with ~1300 IP saved up (after spending the 3150 on Nidalee).

[Radii]

Ok so screw this. Turns out...

leveling up another account isn't fun
playing without runes and masteries isn't fun
playing without all summoners and champions isn't fun

I mean, doing it the first time was, progression and all that. But this as a dynasty isn't interesting, and the stated goals weren't holding my interest.


New Purpose

I'm going to specialize into the AD Carry Role, I think its what I'm best suited towards (also I have friends that I play with a few times a week who are focused into the jungle and top roles, and another guy we play with some who is a far better AP Carry than I will ever be, so it fits).


Replay Analysis

I've been using the Fraps demo for a long time now in FM and this dynasty, finally paid for the full version. LOLReplay now has spectator mode for all games which is light years better than the old replays it generated. I intend to post a ton of crap to youtube to look over lane situations and teamfight situations that I think I can learn from.

Lets start with a giant embarrassment, shall we?



In this game we give up this early double kill, a jungle gank later ends in a horrible triple kill and the other team's AD Carry gets off to a 10/0 start and the game is over very early.

I've been trying to practice harrassing and trading damage better early game, that's tough against a well played Ezreal, but my support (Sona) has a lot of poke too and we are wearing them down well here very early in the game.

0:10 - Ezreal lets me get off two auto attacks, Sona starts to move in

0:12 - I turn away, I'm just poking. One thing in my head: I don't want to fight them in a full creep wave where I'm going to take minion damage and he won't. Something I didn't notice at the time but noticed watching the replay... Ezreal hit 3, I'm still level 2. That's HUGE.

0:14 - Well shit, Sona poke is good, isn't it? If I had stayed in the fight we would have simply killed him, shit, better make up for my mistake and dive in. Also, Nunu and Ezreal are dumping all their damage on Sona.

0:15 - I valkyrie in, maybe an ok thing to do against most champions but Ezreal has so much mobility. In hindsight, I *should* have moved over to Sona, which would have guarenteed that either we trade kills 1 for 1 (if Ezreal wants to dive onto Sona I easily kill him) or Sona walks away and starts to heal up.

0:17 - Well, bye Sona, Ezreal blinks up and kills her, oops.

0:20 - I was intent on landing my Q (Phosphorous Bomb) on Ezreal and I missed an auto attack. Missed as in enough time has passed here where I shoudl have landed another auto attack on Ezreal but due to being a complete moron I didn't. Ezreal flashes over my Q and I look stupid.

0:22 - RHIOW WAI U TURN AWAY WTF NOOB. I got so mad at myself here watching the replay. My flash and Valkyrie are down, I'm not getting back to the tower. But I can finish Ezreal off with one more auto attack. But for some reason I turned to run, and gave Ezreal a double kill.


After this the lane was lost, but they did a great job of snowballing it super hard.

When I watch others play I can spot these things pretty easily, but in game its easy to focus on something silly or get the wrong idea in my head or simply have my hands not properly do what my head knows is the right sequence of skill usage/clicks. This is a situation where I made like 5 little mistakes in a 20 second period and it basically lost us the game. If we trade 1 for 1, or even if Ezreal still gets the double but I kill him, it has the potential to be a very different game.


I'm not always this bad I carry my share of games and Corki is my most played AD.



Anyway, I hope to look at more situations like this, both in lane and in teamfights as I play more.


At my level I'm comfortable with Corki and Caitlyn in ranked play, and if I am unable to get this role I can play a couple chars in every other role. I'm not actually back playing ranked yet, these are normal draft games for now. I want to add Graves to my arsenal and then will start queuing for ranked again and this thread will be a mix of tracking my ELO progress (or lack thereof), and replay review.


still not sure this is an interesting enough thing for the demographics of this forum, but this becomes a more interesting think for me at least, which hopefully makes this a better read.