Well dang, that was the change I was most looking forward to.

 

Athene's Unholy Grail is going to be dirty as fuck on Blitzcrank. Never run out of mana + more AP for his ult AND more CD for his abilities, with some decent MR for tankiness on the side. Grab a Tear, tape your W key down, and lollercaust your way to 200 AD/AP with a Manamune or Archangels (or both, if you're steamrolling particularly hard), cackling madly as your spam your Q and E without ever endangering the integrity of your mana shield, blasting minion waves with your ult every thirty seconds.

I assume it'll become standard on Anivia too. What mana problems? With Athene's and the mana she'll get naturally from other items, she'll be able to ult literally forever.

 

Stealth remake, why you so hard?

Not that I think it is necessary, but it would be nice if a champion I played got buffed for once. Twitch is in a good place already, he snowballs very hard and is an amazing glass Canon. He doesn't fit in the current meta, which is fine by me, because bad Twitch feed a ton. Don't know about Eve, never played her, but whenever I do see her I accept this game as a loss. If I see a Twitch bot, I still think there is a chance we could win.

 

Everything about this Ryze buff is going to make him be a contender again, even against champions like Fizz or LeBlanc. The passive mana lost isn't a huge deal, considering that Ryze is already so mana heavy losing 225 mana isn't a big deal.

Overload's range getting reduced isn't even a problem, considering that it still out-ranges just about every other AP Mid's comparable spell.

The "nerf" on Rune Prison is going to be laughably ineffective. When have you ever actually needed the full timer on someone you were intending to kill when you trapped them? The ratio drop is intriguing, though.

Mishie already talked the ratio increase on Spell Flux, so, I'm going to move on to this.

The mana cost drop across the board means that Ryze is going to have even more sustain in lane, simply by virtue of not needing to take Clarity, now. Just buy mana pots and you're good.

EDIT:

This makes no sense. Kage's costs less than the Blasting Wand, unless they decided to factor in the gold per 10.

I like this change, because it means Haunting Guise is going to be viable on more champions. I wouldn't be surprised if it started becoming a staple on AP Assassins like LeBlanc.

This is interesting. I'm curious as to why they did this. Unless it's because every Vlad ever gets it, and they usually get it ASAP. Or because Morg's Spell Vamp would become OP as shit with this. Has anyone tried out a WotA on Morg?

As far as Athene's goes, that's going to be a bitching item on mana heavy tanks. Someone should try it out on (Insert AP Mid here), see if it's viable. Obviously I mean mids that actually have mana.

 

How much of this shit have you and I run into so far, lmfao!

 

I know right? Its been driving me up the wall, all five of the matches I played today I was lucky if one person spoke English. I had fun trying out Ahri though, its silly how easy it is to waste people who Tower Dive on her.

 

Those Annie buffs put a smile on my face. Particularly since she's pretty much the only AP mid that I play with any degree of consistency. Incinerate's cost reduction means that I'll be able to throw it out more often, and molten shield can be used to charge pyromania far more effectively now. I might even decide to take a point in it earlier now. I just hope they don't decide to scale them back before it goes live.

 

The ratio drop on Overload doesn't look too pretty.

You just explained it yourself - Kage's is cheaper (and has gold/time), so the combine cost went up to compensate.

 

The ratio drop is from 5% to 4.5%. While I am fully aware that early on that's going to make a big difference, later it shouldn't be as noticeable. And another thing, why does Spell Flux bounce off Ryze? It seems like getting hit by your own spell would be a bad idea, unless it's meant for dueling, like you could throw it down and have it bounce off the both of you.

 

if phoenix udyr is slapping you in the face, would you rather have your spell flux hit him once or three times?
(the magic reduction doesnt stack i just checked lol)

if brand's ult could bounce off himself for no damage he could 100-0 tanks lol

nice try

 

Alternatively, if Brand's ult could only bounce off champions - or at least preferred them - he wouldn't suck.

 

So I just won a 4v5.
Tryndamere dominated Fizz top, and I dominated Ahri mid.
Fizz and Rammus started ganking my lane hard since I was annie with no escape, but ended up feeding me more because a level 4 fizz is more or less one shot by tibbers.

One thing I want to point out though is that our DC maokai, who never joined the game at all, had 5kg earned compared to their blitzcrank's 5.2k. Just shows how much of farm comes from global objectives like turrets/baron/dragon. Remember the game is about pushing and there is great power in taking turrets down.

http://i.imgur.com/OUjK7.jpg
Screen is from Juede since I DCd and couldn't get into the lobby.

 

Another obvious reason for the price of Morello's is the added Unique Active:

Now, I have only rarely built Morello's before(Read:almost never), but I suppose it could be used as a counter item to mid mages such as Vlad, Ahri and Morgana. That, or even simply as an extra pseudo-ignite on an item with comparatively useful final build stats, rather than an AD Carry holding onto an Execution's Calling, if your team is lacking Ignites and/or Champions with heal-reduction abilities against a team that you need it for.

As for Athene's, I could see it being quite useful on a bunch of mana-using AP's. Mres to counter your opponent, a viable amount of AP, cdr, flat and unique passive mana regen and a circumstantially quite useful percentage mana regen passive on kill/assist(not listed as unique, but stacking the item just for it seems wasteful). Combine it with an Archangel's Staff for truly (near)unlimited mana sustain. For example, it would be quite useful on a hardcore mana-spammer like an AP-Kog'Maw, to recuperate a chunk of mana on kill/assist, allowing a few more Ult shots which could make all the difference in a sustained fight.

Haunting Guise seems like an unusual change, but I could see it being built more often as an early-mid item now I suppose. I've never had occasion to build one myself, so...
WotA cost might have been modified to represent the utility of the aura on a Multi-AP team, or some such. Deathfire is debatedly more useful, with a slightly weaker active(which is about 143 AP difference for the scaling effect, 123 if you include the increased AP on the item itself), but more sustained increased AP for your normal ability usage. It goes both ways, I think.

-----

Not really going to comment on the other Champions, but it was interesting to notice the potentially increased viability for an AP/Aspd Varus build. While 24 + .25 AP bonus damage per shot is less than Teemo's total of 165 + .7, for a single shot, the per shot damage is certainly comparable to Teemo's initial 45 +.14 AP(and perhaps around 15 + .07 AP from the DoT effect for a total of 60 + .21, presuming about half a second has passed between attacks). That and using an ability to burst the stacks on Blighted Quiver.
(I forget... I know that Rylai's affects Cho'Gath's W damage, but does it affect Teemo's passive poison DoT? I know that Cho's is technically a Toggle, so that might make the difference.)
The increased mana costs and decreased damage across the board for his AD abilities would slightly help the case. I know that an AD build is still going to be the standard though. Well, just something that I want to try out at least once.

 

Probably because the old stats it gave were more beneficial to champions like Vlad or Nautilus.

AP, HP, and Spell Pen. There's few champions who benefit from that unique mix, although it just became a viable item to get Merc Treads instead of Sorc Shoes (which it was before, but now even moreso).

Now it gives AP, Move Speed, and Spell Pen, hence my comment about AP Assassins like LeBlanc.

 

Honestly, move speed is a commodity that a lot of heroes want, even if they don't realize it. 8% ms is a pretty big boost after boots, and on some heroes that already love move speed and do spell damage, this item is wanted. Skarner, for instance, I'll probably pick it up on. Boots, Trinity, and Guise will give me the same MS as when I had to spend 2.7k on FoN, and now my spell damage will hit a bit harder. True, I net about 400 gold over all, but if you can get the MS on Skarner faster, it'll help his game a lot.

 

I've got a new peeve about being invited to games in League. If this is a game we aren't taking seriously, I should damn well be informed. I wasn't on the Skype call that they were on, which is fucking glorious in and of itself, but not only that, I was kept so out of the loop that I might as well not even have been playing.

For the record, I was playing support Alistair. As the game went on, I started getting tank items like Aegis of the Legion, Sunfire Cape, etc. Half the team fights we had I wasn't involved in, they actually started 4 v 5 fights when I was off making sure one of our towers didn't get over-ran by minions. No pings, no heads-up in chat, not a damn thing.

Every single one of my deaths was done to ensure that one of them could get away, and they inevitably decided to turn around and start fighting again because I rolled in and heabutted/pulverized their entire team. Me pinging my team to run away didn't help, so I just gave up and decided it was a lost cause.

I've played with bad teams. I've played with teams consisting solely of Brazilians. I've played with teams who didn't communicate. But y'know what irked me the most? I wasn't informed of the fact that this was a fuck-around game, so I took things seriously and naturally got pissed when someone would turn around and get themselves killed, or they'd initiate 4 v 5s, or any of the other host of things I've listed off.

And when I was there for team fights, they didn't fucking fight when I initiated. So yeah, I feel your pain on the initiation thing. I probably sound like Evan Tide/Prometheius at this point, but I take my League seriously.

I want to stream. I want to be good enough that people will watch me play, and this is the kind of shit that makes me not want to play.

EDIT: And another thing. Our Garen was tanking early-game, which is fine and goddamn dandy, but when I start buying tank items, you should probably switch to damage dealing so that you actually have a presence in team fights. It is not difficult to hit the tab key and find out what your teammates are building. It was something like a 60 minute game, so it's not like he didn't have the gold to spare.

 

Feel my pain.

 

Wasn't that me? Pretty sure you guys got angry at me because I was farming when you guys had given up and were goofing off