9 pots made so-called "weak" early game champs that scaled strongly into late game pretty fucking OP. Champs like Akali, Gragas, Diana, Kassadin, etc are the Vayne's of mid-lane (idk anything about top though), in the sense that if they stay even in farm and don't feed, then they've flat-out won the lane because they outscale you pretty damn hard. Once you both hit 6, that "weak" champ is going to roll your face in. 9 pots negated the weak early game of these "weak early/strong late" champs.

And no, ignite is not how you counter 9 pots, because at most you just gimped half of 1 pot with your 3-minute cooldown summoner. Like, in case it wasn't clear, ignite counters sustain when you're trying to kill somebody -- not sustain when you're trying to LANE against somebody.

Some people say, well if they buy 9 pots and you start with [insert whatever item here], then they've delayed their build and that puts you at an advantage. That would be a legit argument, if the benefits of 9 pot didn't outscale the benefits of, say, a dorans ring or amp tome or boots or whatever. Unless you're mad good at getting hit by absolutely nothing, ever, then stacking pots is usually going to be the best start, regardless of whether or not you're an early or late game champ, and then we get right back to the original issue of 9-pot late game champ is going to wreck 9-pot early game champ once both hit 6.

 

What Asian said. Ignite doesn't counter super-sustain over the course of a lane, it counters someone out-sustaining your damage during a fight/trade. Be that either to live when they shouldn't, or to flat out win the fight. If you want to counter sustain laners you have to take someone with grievous wounds or build an item for that early. All your options are pretty awkward though unless you're fizz vs vlad.

I disagree with you about the Gragas thing though. I've never built 9 pots on him, and I never want to. Gragas should go for a balance of AP and HP early. D-Ring ---> Boots ---> D-Ring or D-Ringx2 depending on how the lane goes. It gives him the ability to spam his spells to as to keep his passive regen going.

Gragas never needed nine-pots. I've only ever taken a super-sustain-start on him vs someone who hard-counters him.

 

People need to stop playing Gragas. I need a hipster Gragas skin because I've played him since before he was cool, for sure.

I prefer chalice/roa on him in a lot of games now, just because I have 0 faith in my junglers for ever getting me a blue buff. For that reason I skip dorans rings and start faeriecharms+pots or singlecharm+pots. You lose a lot of that bursty power, but it takes a lot of effort to kill you and you're mostly immune to 2v1 ganks.

Personally, I was fine with 9 pot starts and I would've rather they made early game buying options more diverse and viable instead of nerfing the pots.

 

(from the patch notes)

:awesome

 

Regarding the health pot change, it does suck pretty hard but it made top lane such a dull place to be if you were equally skilled and kept beating each other in trades, nobody would shift.

That said, you can still start 1x ward, 5x health pot & a rejuv bead. No idea if the rejuv bead would be at all useful (probably not) but it's something I suppose. Kinda sad about the red pot nerf as I never did get to try an all in involving it on anyone, only face them and miraculously survive on Nasus/Singed.

 

On a side note, apparently there will be a hidden passive regarding Freljord girls such as Lissandra, Ashe and Sejuani. Or at least two of those and a third girl. While patching 'Three Sisters' appeared along with three names. I didn't catch all three, but I think these were them.
Anyone know something more about this?

 

There's an in-game quest like the Rengar/Kha'zix one that pops up when two of the Freljord girls (Ashe, Sejuani, Lissandra) are on opposite sides. Kill the other, become Queen of the Freljord.

I have no idea what that means.

 

Not sure if I like the new ARAM map. It's awesome, I love the vendors, the aesthetic & theme of it all, but... it's a tad retarded.

What I mean is, you're zoomed out further than you normally would be, so everything seems a little off at first, you can scroll in as per normal but it obviously gives you less to look at.

Secondly, some skins/skillshots are now stupidly hard to dodge (Diana's alternate skin, Xerath's abilities in general - both in a game I just played and I couldn't see them all too often, too much snow). THat said, IP gain remains the same, though the reroll thing is kinda cool if you're not one of those people that owns an account exclusively for ARAM.

 

Don't press continue after you win an aram, wait for a while.

 

Hidden passive is that if you play as any of the Three Sisters with another Sister on the opposing team, you get a shiny little crown floating over your head if you kill them. Also, feed the one of the poros in ARAM. Everyone. On both teams. Lulz will ensue.

I'm a big fan of this patch, can't think of anything I didn't really like. Except for Nunu's new splash. Damn, he looks rapey.

 

I'd like to start watching some pro League of Legends games to try to improve my own game. Can anyone recommend/link to some old educational matches?

 

The videos here showcase some awesome plays and you might learn a lot about the capabilities of different champions, unfortunately it's in Korean. OGN is on every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday at 2:30 am pst and it shows some of the best players in the world. Otherwise you can search around for the Chinese LCS videos, it's called LPL or something, they have a lot of good matches too. If you're up for it I recommend searching for these people, they're almost all Asian and it will probably take time to find the players listed, but they are/were the best at what they played.

Pdd (top for IG), Shy (top for CJ Frost), Flame (top for CJ Blaze), Repeared (top for SKT T1 #1), Stanley (top for TPA), Maknoon (top for Najin Sword), Expression (top for Najin Shield)

CloudTemplar (jungle for CJ Frost), Mokuza (old jungle for Najin Shield), LM Wayoff (jungle for Livermore), Diamondprox (jungle for Moscow 5, now Gambit Gaming), Insec (jungle for KT Rolster B)

Rapidstar (mid for CJ Frost), Zzitai (mid for IG), Froggen (mid for Clg.eu, now Evil Geniuses), Ryu (mid for KT Rolster B), Faker (mid for SKT T1 #2), Alex Ich (mid for Moscow 5, now Gamibt), Misaya (mid for World Elite), xPeke (mid for Fnatic), Bigfatlp (season 1 only), Ssong (mid for Najin Shield)

Madlife (support for CJ Frost), Chauster (season 2), Fzzf (support for World Elite), Edward/Gosu Pepper (support for Moscow 5/Gambit)

Doublelift (season 2 only), Wei Xiao (ad for World Elite), Uzi (ad for OMG I think), Devil (ad for Positive Energy), Pray (ad for Najin Sword), Kid (ad for IG) and maybe Score (ad for KT Rolster B)

 

I can't, but going to solomid.net and checking the streams there can be a pretty good educational tool. Find a streamer who does some commentary for the lane you want to learn who is active. Wingsofdeath does very in depth top commentary, Scarra does great mid commentary, Oddone does great jungle commentary.

There are tons of others as well, and they are entertaining as well as informative.

 

As others have said, it all depends on what you want to watch but there's a wide variety of matches available both in terms of competitive teams as well as solo streamers.

Like Churchey said, solomid.net or lolking.net are great for finding popular streamers online with in-depth commentary (usually) - the 3 he mentioned stream fairly often (Scarra less so, though me being in the UK probably means I miss a lot of his streams whereas Wings & Oddone tend to stream fairly early).

If you want live or VoDs of competitive teamplay with commentary provided by some amazing casting duo's, it depends on the scene you want to watch/follow.

For Korea, there's the OGN championships which you can find on twitch or their own site, OGNchampions or something - usually there's a post on reddit prior to matches starting. Of course with it being Korea, it's difficult to watch live as they started between 2 & 5am for you Americans & I believe you have to pay for VoDs, though I could be wrong.

For NA/EU - Currently there's the LCS, you've just missed the spring split though the summer one starts fairly soon I think (June maybe? the worldwide AllStar tournament is something like May 26th - 28th so, that'll be great to watch... albeit it's in China).

To watch NA/EU LCS you can just google Lolesports and you'll find them streaming there on the weekends, the schedule shifts to include Friday sometimes too but generally you get 4 matches a day with an 8 team round-robin with a total of 28 games for each team across the split (10 weeks).

Of course with the spring split over, we're currently having the relegation/promotion matches here in the EU, 8 new teams vying to face the bottom 4 teams from the spring split to fight for 4 positions available in the summer split. Today (Friday) is the 8 amateur teams battling it out in four best of 3's, tomorrow & Sunday is when the 4 winners face-off against their seeded 'pro' team for one of the 4 available spots in the Summer LCS.

If you want VoDs of the LCS or other big LoL events (recent MLG & ESL events) then I would thoroughly reccommend the LoLVoD subreddit on reddit, or of course lolplay.tv which has all VoDs including links to game start times, picks & bans etc - though sometimes they're in 240p if uploaded fairly recently so, quality can vary.

 

For the VODs you have to subscribe to their Twitch.tv channel, $5.99 a month. It's well worth it in my opinion, where else are you going to see support mordekaiser?

EDIT: Also, Support Anivia is being played right now versus some kind of double jungle. OGN is crazy.

 

Yeah that's not a bad deal at all if you've got disposable income or y'know, prefer a whole bunch of LoL matches to eating at Subway one day a month, can't argue with that for value.

More recently (today I believe) there's a site popped up if you're interested in specific champion match-up's played by pro players too - prololmatchups.com

 

Thanks everyone! I found a few streams on Solomid that look pretty cool. I also tried watching the first match of the past LCS spring championship finals, and while it was entertaining, I don't feel like I learned much that could help in solo queue.

I'll check out those people Lb13 recommended after I run through the streams I found on Solomid. OGN looks interesting, and I saved a bookmark to that YouTube page. Finally, prololmatchups looks very useful for getting better with a specific champion. If only they had some kind of reputation system so I could find the better quality videos easier.

All in all, this will keep me busy for quite a while. Thanks again.

 

That awkward moment when you realize your ranked team has dropped from Platinum to Gold because of inactiveness.