Nami has too much clothes on! >:[

 

Bruiser Alistar is pretty fun.

The only damage items were iceborn and atmas but holy shit he just smacked people to death. Probably helped that it was an all AD team and it took them focusing like crazy to kill me. But then it opened them up to be raped by Riven and Kayle.

Man that was a fun game.

 

Xerath Rework Info (WIP)

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=38302893#post38302893

TL;DR:

Passive: %Spell Pen based on Max Mana
Q = Laser. Same as current.
W = His Current Ulti. You get a single shot up to 1k range away.
E = New. Laser that stuns targets for .75-1.25s.
R = Locus of Power. Drains X mana a second. All spells have zero cost during Locus. All spells get bonus 600/1k/2k range added. All spells get bigger hitboxes. All spells do more damage.

In other words, a Xerath in Ulti can stun and snipe down someone from Lux Ulti range.

 

Great, now they just need to work on Viktor, he clearly isn't strong enough yet... :awesome

 

If some pro just decided to pick Viktor up, I have every confidence that the augment death version would at least get toned down. I mean, a Viktor player who actually understands the use of the laser is fucking terrifying already.

 

Speaking as a guy who still plays Viktor on occasion, this. Laser is incredibly cost-efficient for what it does, especially when you add in Augment: Death. You can use laser to bush-check because it grants vision of the path it travels down. He's deceptively bursty as well. WRQE is almost a guaranteed kill if you get the stun. If it isn't, why the fuck are you focusing the tank?

Furthermore, with Viktor, a little HP goes a long way. Rylai's and Liandry's will put you around 2.6k or a little higher, add in the fact that Q's shield scales off the damage done (even if the AP ratio isn't that great...) and there's a pretty decent chance that you'll get away from, at the least, a 3 v 1. I've gotten away from 5 v 1, but that's because I flashed into dragon pit.

To be honest, I don't think they'll touch his augments, unless they go through with the idea of being able to combine two of them. Augment: Death is the only reason his damage is relevant. Hex Core is, essentially, a crappier version of Rengar's necklace. It takes up a slot, and the only thing it provides is AP per level and an augment that gives your laser a DoT. I seriously cannot think of a situation, outside of support/feeding, to pick up any other augment.

 

Augment: Power is pretty damn amazing for kiting and making plays. It's not as power efficient as Death but the huge move speed boost allows some hilariously BS kiting, especially vs skill shots.

 

Well Xerath is going to be even more broken after the update than he is now. He is 100% going to get nerfed the patch after he's rolled out.

 

Xerath isn't broken now. His win rate is close to 50% across all elos and a little higher in diamond/challenger elos, but still close to 50%. His pick and ban rate is 2nd lowest for all mages, iirc.

And I don't really see the strength to Viktor. In practice it feels like a different playstyle, but he's quite similar to annie.

His Q is 25 range shorter with very similar damage (15 damage vs .05 ap ratio) on a scaling CD that Annie's flat CD beats at all levels. The shield scaling is decent, but Annie's shield 20/60 armor and mr she gets from it can mitigate the same amount of damage, depending on how many hits you take. Viktor's is better for harass, but Annie's is probably more beneficial in a gank situation.

His W functions the same as her passive in teamfights, while giving some zone control in engages and ganks. In ganks though, it works the same. Being chased, drop it behind you, run. Being chased on Annie, turn and aoe stun, run.

His death ray is one of the best spells in the game, once upgraded, but still has the same role as Annie's W. AOE damage. The trade off is 280+.75 vs 325+.91, once again with scaling cds vs flat on Annie. 8 seconds all ranks vs 10 seconds max rank. Viktor's range is slightly better, estimated at 700 vs 625, but the cast range is 425. Annie's is instant vs the laser travel time, then there's the cone effect vs line damage. Viktor's is better, but situationally Annie's can be better and either way it's close.

Then there are ults. They are basically the same damn thing. Viktor's moves faster if he is close by, but tibbers isn't horridly slow. Viktor's ult damage is 350+.55 initial with a total of 910+2.23 over 7 seconds. Annie's ult damage is 450+.7 initial with a total of 695+2.1. It also has autoattacks of 120, so the damage could go back in Tibber's favor if he gets to auto a few times. Tibbers also lasts for 45 seconds, can tank towers/buffs/dragon/baron, help push/clear waves, and can stun on landing in conjunction with the passive.

Viktor is just...odd. His whole kit is a bit delayed. His stun is delayed, his laser and ult damage are slightly delayed, and he lacks an escape. That doesn't make him too weak to play or anything, but just makes it hard for people to like playing him, methinks.

But he's not really OP, because his single and aoe burst aren't that high. IMO, he's very comparable to Annie, who is a very mid-grade mage. I would go as far as to say that your perceived strength on Viktor is due to your opponents not knowing how to play against a character they only see once in a blue moon, with a 1.25% popularity and a .06% ban rate.

 

What I'd really like to see, and I think this would be game-changing for Viktor, is if the laser moved as you do. Since laser is actually still being cast (to some extent) while you're moving, I think it'd be really cool if, say, your opponent juked laser and you follow them, dragging the laser's path with you. Naturally, it wouldn't be something drastic like a 90 degree turn, but it would allow for some really cool plays, like stopping the laser's path altogether to do more damage to a specific target when you move backwards.

 

Viktor's issue is that he's excessively complex to learn and play, but there's no kind of reward for doing it properly. Why would you ever bother putting all that effort into aiming the laser properly when you can just point and click with Annie and get the same effect?

 

Viktor and Swain were the first AP champions that I really learned to play because I loved the lore of both of them. I quickly discovered that many players simply don't pick them because they feel that the two are underwhelming in the face of other AP carries.

Most of what has been said isn't exactly wrong, but not necessarily something I agree with. While Annie's kit, looking at what it can do based on the AP ratios, etc, appears to be stronger in everyway compared to Viktor, I personally disagree.

Viktor's strength comes from his laning phase. In the lane, with a fairly low cost Q and E, he excels at bullying his opponent. I've faced everything from Ahri and Akali, to Diana and Orianna, and I can consistently outfarm, outpoke and outzone them. His shield is a nuke that returns with a shield which prevents most opponent's attempts to trade at the same level and expect them to come out on top (strictly laning phase remember). Learning to land his E is a big piece as well considering it's his main damage source and his bread and butter skill. When one combines Augment: Death with Liandrylai's, it can deal obscene amounts of damage.

But as others have stated, he suffers from some crippling weaknesses. He is difficult to learn and play well, he lacks an escape, and the augments could use some tweaking. I also think that his W needs some work.

As for Augments, you always choose Death because of increased damage output. The other two simply don't fit into what Viktor is supposed to do. However, that being said, I have played him as a support with Fenraellis as Cait on multiple occasions. Somebody steps on a trap, you land the stun cage right on top of them for more harass/kills. Therefore, I would take the augment for boosts to his W. But that is really the only reason I have taken an augment other than Death.

His W needs some tweaks, as the slow stacks don't seem to operate very efficiently. It can be aggravating to have an Akali jump on your face and get away because the W doesn't apply stacks correctly. Also, when Master Yi can run through it because he is immune to slows, so the stacks don't apply and he never gets stunned.

Overall, the augments and his W are my biggest complaints, as I appreciate what his Q and E can achieve.

 

But this is the problem with LOL across the board? The "harder" heroes are only hard for the sake of being so. Ashe (or Caitlyn) is probably the easiest ranged carry, there's little point in mastering Twitch at this point. And don't try to tell me that Ezreal is "hard and rewarding" - he has three skill shots, but basically no cooldowns, making him very easy to pick up and play.

Viktor is an overcomplicated Veigar/Annie hybrid. All of his attacks require too much set up or have shitty range and don't do enough damage to justify it.

I play LOL off and on at this point, I've kind of given up at the game and only continue to log on to play ARAM. The itemization is a mess, it's the worst it's ever been these days. They've nerfed or removed every fun strategy I ever enjoyed, and I'm really, really starting to loathe runes/masteries. I started a new account yesterday, and I've realized LOL is a lot more engaging when there's no flash and nobody has any runes or masteries set up.

Let me go on my soap box for a bit, about the mastery trees. It's a little convoluted, but basically, Riot has really taken two steps back on this system, it seems like it gets worse with every new iteration.

1. The masteries individually don't contribute hardly anything anymore (+6 life/5 when it's a full moon, +5% increased damage every time you blow your nose, +0.5% increased mana regeneration, +10 maximum health).
2. The masteries don't really encourage a particular style of play.
3. There isn't any real choice to make. The offense tree has two paths - AD or AP hero. The defensive tree offers no choice whatsoever. The utility tree offers a lot of useless, meaningless shit and a few strong stats (I only ever put points in it for +lifesteal/spellvamp).

Of course, the question is, should masteries really offer significant impact? It could imbalance the game, if masteries had a big impact on how your play your hero, right? I honestly, I don't think the system belongs in a DOTA-like, but I could see it working if you tried really hard to make it interesting/engaging.

But as it currently stands, everyone uses the same masteries, but even if they don't, they provide so little impact that it doesn't matter.

If you're going to do a talent tree, each individual point should matter. There are only 30 points to be spent, so it wouldn't be that hard to do it, but Riot just doesn't care? As long as there's an illusion of balance, who cares of the game has any depth or strategy to it. That's why they've taken out or nerfed every alternative way of play since the beginning. It's why SR is 1 top 1 mid 2 bot 1 jungle and will continue to be so until the game dies a justified death.

DOTA has multiple strategies from full-blown 5 man roaming at the start to trilanes and everything inbetween. LOL used to support some of these strategies, but Riot has adjusted experience gain and creep life to the point where it's basically impossible to make an early gambit and come out ahead. Champions with interesting, alternative strategies, like Shaco or Evelynn, have either been nerfed every other patch, or have been remade many times to "fix" these things, using words like "toxic" to justify them doing so (hey Riot, everything in the world is toxic under the right quantities; I'd say the current 'meta' has persisted long enough to be the very definition of it).

But yeah, I shouldn't really interject my whining into this thread. Just ignore this post, I'm ranting.

 

Some of them are, sure. But there are also high skill cap champions like Orianna and Lee Sin who do have a payoff for being played well. Same goes for the AD carries you mentioned. Yes, Ashe and Caitlyn are easier to play, but harder champions like Twitch, Draven or Vayne have higher potential damage.

(Although let's be honest, keeping the enemy at just the right distance to properly abuse Caitlyn's extra range does take some skill.)

DotA also has some of the most broken, unintuitive gameplay in any game ever created, which Riot have done a good job of getting rid of. You complained about LoL champions being hard for the sake of being hard? DOTA suffers from the exact same thing except it's actually worse because it also extends to the game mechanics. Even the controls are needlessly difficult!

If you really feel like it's OK to put up with bullshit like mana burn and denying just to feel like you have some freedom in lane matchups, well, good luck to you. I'll continue going duo mid and having fun in LoL.

 

Regarding masteries being ineffective...I definitely felt the opposite when playing mana hungry mids. My friend jacked my original account for some quality smurfing time during his 2-week ban, so I was leveling up a fresh account, and I wanted to just roll over and eat my toes while being mastery-deprived.

 

Masteries were aimed at improving a player's early game, with only same abilities scaling into mid game and late game. They wanted to implement a system that would affect how you played early in lane and that's where the snowballing can possibly start.

As for the current SR position meta, it mainly holds true only for NA and EU. Take a look at Korea, Southeast Asia, China, etc and you'll see duo top, duo mid, double jungle, a jungler who spends the same amount of time in mid as the "mid", or a stealth who roams and ganks with the jungler running a solo lane top and a solo lane bot. These things are supported, just not seen very often on NA or EU servers because apparently we're all unoriginal fucks while the Asians come up with innovative tactics.

 

Guys, i'm good at this game! Gold V!

 

Not gonna argue about the relative skill of heroes in LoL, as I think it's hard to mathematically show the "hard" ranged carries outperform the "easy" ones. I will say that I don't think Lee Sin is "hard" hero to play at all, he has 2 mobility skills and a knockback ultimate. He can pretty much do whatever the hell he wants to. Pulling off tricky maneuvers with champions who have less mobility takes significantly more skill. Lee Sin has so much "free" damage that everyone builds him tank, to boot.

Please, DotA's esoteric elements are not significant enough in number to counter some of the more wildly unintuitive mechanics in other games. Look at League of Legends - why is it intuitive that experience gain in a lane is exponentially reduced the more heroes that sit in it? Why is it intuitive to last hit minions instead of just killing them outright? Why is it intuitive to play passive and farm all game long, instead of taking risky ventures? Why is it intuitive to build tank on certain heroes and to build AP on others? When it comes down to it, intuitiveness is a rather vague thing to be critical about, when you realize that the average user has very little intuition about games at all. The average user these days couldn't figure out a game like Fallout 2, yet I would not hesitate to say that a majority of Fallout 2's mechanics trump the "intuitive" mechanics of Fallout 3.

I guess I see a pretty big difference between Leoric-the-noob-hero and Invoker-the-versatile. One is mindblowingly easy to play and hard to fuck up, while the other is not. I'd argue Leoric can't hold a candle to the Invoker in terms of potential, as well. I think most of the more difficult heroes in DotA outperform the easier ones.

Denying is just as much bullshit as last hitting, ward-spamming, utility-heroes-cannot-farm, and passivity. Hell, LoL still has denying in it, Riot hasn't removed it at all. Why do you think you last hit minions? It's so you can be in a position to deny experience. Pushing the lane is intuitive to new players, but all it does is make them vulnerable to ganks and give the enemy team "free farm". There's also denying yourself through execution, which is another unintuitive mechanic.

Manaburn is a perfectly fair tactic when Alistar can single-handedly fuck up a team and is nigh unkillable with his ultimate on. It's why it seems every other patch they're nerfing him in some manner. If mana burn were still in the game, guess what? They wouldn't need to brute force balance everything. The counter to Alistar would be mana burn, and if mana burn is such a big deal, then give players a means to counter it.

I've found most of Riot's balance decisions to not only be questionable, but deprived me of what little enjoyment I found in the game, every new iteration. If you can be satisfied with how they manage the game, I can't change that, but I still say that Riot's justifications (intuitiveness, toxicity) are just bullshit misdirection. The average person who picks up LOL for the first time will have no chance of grasping the mechanics of the game. DotA is a fair bit harder to get into if you really want to get good, but new players vs new players is just as intuitive as LOL - you go to lanes, you kill people for gold, the game ends.

(furthermore, Riot has only just recently, finally gotten many of its critical elements 'intuitive', gold gained from gold/5 finally tell you how much gold you earned from them, items like RoA finally tell you how much charge they've acquired; spellvamp interacts with skills differently than lifesteal - that's hardly intuitive; why does movement speed have diminishing returns over 400? that's not said anywhere; the new player tutorials sucked for lol for the longest time and I don't know if they've imroved them; lol still doesn't offically support replays, a critical element of cultivnating the 'intuitiveness' of skills, strategies and mechanics; lol is one of the most popular and successful games in the last few years and yet riot has done very little to improve the intuitiveness of its mechanics or provide players with important integral features DotA2 has had since the beginning)

Toxicity is Riot's vague definition of, "Flavor of the month builds are bad." Only, they never seem to realize FOTMs come about not because things are too strong, but buecause there are no mechanics to deal with them. When Irelia was dominating toplane every game, it wasn't because she was too good (she wasn't, though her kit is stupid), it was because the 'metagame' gives players very little choice in dealing with her. There were also no items that effectively countered her - old madreds cost a bazillion gold and did magic damage, when no easily available mpen AD carry/TDPS items were (and still are not) available. If she wasn't stacking health, penetration items were (and still are) grossly expensive for their performance. And since you couldn't deny her farm or deprive her of gold short of calling your jungler up every ten seconds, she just snowballed. Because denying doesn't exist in LOL in the same capacity as DOTA, if you want to prevent a hero from getting gold early game, you have to kill them outright (which thanks to flash and wards is pretty much impossible most of the time) or the other player has to overextend/make a mistake and-

I'm ranting again. I don't really want to argue with this, as I did so for months on the LOL forums to no effect. I certainly won't change any minds here, and even if I do, it won't produce the desired effect. I got plenty of Riot posts for my analyses on core problems, but Riot doesn't see things the same way as I do. I'm convinced they don't see LOL as an ARTS - they see it as as something else.

But LOL is a strategy game. That's my problem with it. It's a strategy game where there is very little strategy. Everyone follows the optimized recommended item builds, everyone plays the same goddamn way every match, if you want to "try something different" you get reported/banned/harassed by players, and any successful, unforeseen strategy you come up with is quickly patched out of the game.

(And don't get me wrong here, I'm not asking Riot to make "harder champions better" or "put in denying" because I know they want to differentiate LoL from DotA and that they WANT it seen as a "moba", a "casualer friendlier funner game than Dota2" even if it isn't most of those things, all I want is diversified strategy instead of homogeneity. That can be easily accomplshed by not hamfisting balance patches, but Riot doesn't seem to understand what that entails. It's obvious to me - stop removing strategy and start adding some.)