Stealth is fucking broken.

I know I sound like a whiny noob, but there's nothing more frustrating than laning against Sion mid and buying multiple pink wards- and still having a jungle Twitch find a way to get past them and rape your face.

Fuck Stealth.

 

A good Stealth user will always find a way, even if it's freaking Eve they're using.

 

Which is why Eve has been nerfed into near-uselessness and Twitch, while nowhere near as bad as Eve, is a shadow of his former self.

 

Near-uselessness? The only use I've ever seen from her is owning noobs that chase her down at low health.

 

Which is a use. Therefore: near-uselessness.

 

I just bought Gangplank and was wondering how you build him. I've been going Brawler's -> Avarice -> Boots -> Zeal -> Pickaxe/B.F. Sword -> Giant's Belt -> Sheen/Phage -> Treads/Lucidity Boots/Tabi -> I.E. -> T.Force -> Atmogs then swap out the Avarice Blade to meet the situation. I change up the build to match the situation, but this is the general order of items I buy. If you guys could tell me if I'm building him like an idiot or not that would be awesome.

Anyway DLP 5 v 5s were awesome and both of Shezza's accents are top tier.

 

Ew. Just Ew.

Boots + pots always. Never a situation where you'll want something else unless you feel liek you're gonna get massacred.

Phage + Sheen + Vamp Scepter. You're still laning. You want the ability to poke harder and live longer so you can farm, not an all-out slug fest and rely on crits. GP's one of those special bruisers that already have pretty nice base stats and strongish pokes, so you don't need to stack more damage ASAP.

Infinity Edge. Now you get into the big guns. Laning is over now, so it's time to start smacking people around.

Boots 2 + Giant's Belt + Chain Mail + TForce. And it's time to round out the defenses here. This is about the point where your natural bulk and Phage won't be enough to save your scrawny ass any more. You'll also be needing to pack stronger hits and move faster at this phase.

Warmog's + Atma's. Yes, it comes late, but you're still crazy good at stacking this by spamming E in fights. Tapping R to snag an assist also helps stack it up fast.

 

Interesting build, most of it makes sense, but why pick up the Chain Vest instead of the Cloak of Agility? Is it more of a situational buy where you buy it if you're getting melted fast versus needed more damage? Also I assume you swap out the Vamp Scepter for a Last Whisper if they stack armor.

By the way what runes would you recommend? I'm thinking of using AD marks or Crit Chance Marks. Because there's the off chance that you may crit since you have an 8% chance, but the extra 9 damage from the AD marks help a lot too.

 

Chain Mail because the only real threat to you is the AD.

APs can try to nuke you, but between Orange Heal, your high HP pool, relatively decent Mres off of runes + masteries + scaling, and anti-CC from Oranges again, it's going to be incredibly hard. Also, APs won't be targeting the bruisers unless they have no other choice or are extremely fed anyways.

The people that can go toe to toe with you, though, are largely all the AD DPSers The range carries that can stay out of your reach and the melee ADs with high inherent sustain. Chain mail does a very nice job of curbing their own regen while making yours off Vamp scepter matter that much more.

And no, you don't need to build LW on GP. His ability to build tanky carry for massive damage and durability already negates the need for LW vs the majority of the bruisers.

The reason carries and other bruisers get LW is because they're either:

1) Squishy as fuck, so they need to burn down the enemy faster before they're caught, aka Ashe, Caitlyn, Etc...

2) Have no significant sustain or reliance on auto-attacks in their build, so life steal doesn't benefit them that much compared to just killing people, aka Wukong and Talon.


GP doesn't have either of these problems with a Vamp Scepter. He's durable enough to go through a massive slug-fest and his main combat strategies all involve him using Q and autos frequently.

While yes, the LW might be nice if they're hitting into the 180+ Armor areas, you're not going to be focusing those guys often and your mages should be able to burn them. If your mages can't, then those guys won't be targets anyways since they're the tanks.


And besides, you can turn the Scepter into Zeke's, which gives you nice CDR, more HP for damage on Atma's, a team Life Steal aura for your carry to abuse, and an atk spd aura for faster tower kills.

---------- Post automerged at 11:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:10 PM ----------

For Runes:

Standard Blind Pick for top lane and jungle options:

3x Flat AD Quints
6x Ar Pen Marks
1x Crit Chance Mark
2x Flat AD Marks
9x Flat Armor Seals
Flat Mana Regen or Magic Resist Glyphs. Mix and Match glyphs as you please.

1 Crit makes a lot of difference early on, but it's not worth sacrificing a lot of AD for. With a 1% chance, if you get lucky then you get lucky. If you don't, then it won't have hurt you in any way.

The combination of Ar Pen and AD runes gives the best combination of early game damage possible for both killing creeps and harassing.

Armor seals because you'll tend to either be fighting physical enemies top or be jungling.


Personally, I play GP mid since he's a very strong harasser and has good sustain with Vamp Scepter, so I tailor the runes even more for that:

Marks and Quints are the same.
9x HP/Lvl Seals
9x Flat MRes Glyphs

This optimizes my survivability early game against mages. I don't use Mana regen glyphs because I will only use parley to harass the enemy, rarely ever farming with it. None of your other skills should ever see large use unless you're getting burst down and need to escape or ulting another area.

I tend to run Exhaust/Ignite + Flash in mid. GP can easily harass out many enemies in mid, so they'll often blow their flash. Because you have W + E + R, you can easily catch up after they flash and blow their CC, unless it's Ahri with triple flash or something.

Exhaust lets you catch up even easier and scales really well into late-game while Ignite augments your early power a ton and lets you pick up many kills you'd otherwise have missed.

 

I like the way Riot operates right now. Nerfs to champions, but minor buffs in other areas to stop QQers

 

I just picked up Karma and am having a grand old time with her. I don't really see how people can call her the second worst champ in the league - she's got versatility out the ass, and if you have good reflexes it's hard to die. Not to mention her passive and ult make her like a off-AP carry. Her AP-ratios in the meantime are fantastic.

Playing her with avarice quints is HI-larious with her support masteries and gp5s. I can afford a full casters build on a support's farm salary and it only makes me support-ier. Put her in mid and shit gets silly. I had philo, kages, lucidity boots and deathcap at 15-18 minutes with no kills (did I mention that deathcap affects her passive? It does.:awesome). And I only have two gold quints. Getting the third is going to be lulzy.

My biggest annoyance is my teammates never sitting still enough for me to fucking heal them with my q. I suspect that in a premade with skype on that Karma will get goddamn ridiculous.

 

Karma is generally designed around supporting Melee characters with little in the way of gap closers. Like Darius, Sion, Mundo, etc etc. She's got great ratios, yes, and her shieldbombing is annoying, but the range on her heal isn't that long (though it is nicely wide).

Generally though, just about anything she can do some other support can do better. Janna's shields are better, soraka's heals are better, lulu's slows are better, etc etc.

Also, she lacks a true ultimate, meaning that she has no clutch-save ability.

 

Also she doesn't scale well into late game. I have to assume you've been doing well and ending games early because if you've ever had a game go over 30 minutes, Karma does pretty much nothing.

She just doesn't have any reason to play her.

 

Karma doesn't scale well into late game? She does fine and probably truly shines then. In fact, she is really ridiculously strong as soon as team fights begin. To be honest, there is only one point in the game where Karma is weak, and that is around level 6-8 laning phase where you have to worry about the enemy AP mid bursting you down instantly. (Very hard to do though if your reflexes are good enough, or if you have blue buff by that point you can just push the wave and take wraiths).

Her AP ratios as other said are great. If the skill set only revolves around QWE, then Karma outclasses most AP mids. But of course, ults are far too important to ignore, but Karma's utility offsets that. People do have to remember her W chain does damage and applies a slow to all enemies that passes through it. Hard to do in teamfights, but devastating in its own right. Her AOE heal is very strong, but it's hard to find the right situation for it. I usually save the mantra for an extra shield bomb for more damage output, unless my heal can get at least two other teammates or it's a clutch heal. It's always fun for your team to go baron after a won team fight, and leave the area at full health for everyone ^^

@Lamora, I usually don't rush a Deathcap on Karma though, and Philosopher stone is a maybe. Going Catalyst>ROA works much better imo since Karma usually does not have the burst to bring people from 100>0 and does far better constantly poking, denying cs, and farm all day. Once enemy is below 50% of their health, that's when you can aim for the kill if you went with ignite, or get them low enough so they have to b.

However, like Walkingdisaster said, playing her as a normal support is just stupid. She's just plain no good in that area.

 

Karma does work as a support and she actually scales really well, but she doesn't work at all with a traditional support build. Karma needs AP. Instead of building Shurelia's and Locket like most supports would, get things like Morello's Evil Tome and Will of the Ancients.

It's more expensive, but that's the trade off for having another AP carry on your team.

 

You don't play Karma as support until mid-late game. End of story.

Unless the enemy is stupid, Karma support early game and zero CS support don't work.

---------- Post automerged at 07:43 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:03 PM ----------

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K2eXVRrJVo

Draven Skill Demo

First champ that actively promotes stutter stepping.

 

29/7/13 on a team with 49 total kills.

I fucking love Fizz.

 

MLG Spring Championship is live. As if most of you don't already know.

Also, anyone have thoughts on Draven? I haven't played much lately, and mostly Cassiopeia when I have, but his gameplay looked like a ton of fun.

 

Hackers are at it again - they've stolen some player account data. Change your passwords if you're playing on EUW or EUNE.

Hilariously: