League of Legends XXXII: Cupcakes and Kittens and Squirrels. Oh my!

[Eldariel]

It's official: Supercarry is back.

[toasty]

It's official: Supercarry is back.

Kinda sad to see it come to this. I really hope Riot nerfs Kog hard. Of all the metas that LoL has ever produced, Super carry is the stupidest and most boring way to play video games.

[Nadevoc]

Kog needs to be nerfed IMO. Given the about of DPS he has he's just too good. Yes, he can get exploded, but if you don't explode Kog'maw you lose. I dislike such binary states of gameplay.

Kog really just sort of multiplies the AD ranged carry's strengths and weaknesses. But since standard AD ranged carry can get so crazy strong, multiplying that strength gets stupid crazy - and their weaknesses are mostly negated by good skills and teamwork. I could definitely see Kog getting some nerfs, but I think it'll have to be small nerfs and see how things go from there.

That team fight at baron... I Will Dominate led by just enough that it looked like too much of CLG was like, "He's almost dead, finish him off real quick..." Even once the full team engaged, there was a lot of focus on Mundo, and his natural survivability plus all his team's heals/buffs just let him hang around in the middle of the fight.

[Mirrinus]

Varus, the upcoming archer champion, had his abilities revealed in a sneak peek at PAX East just now. Here's the video.

Spoiler

Show

Passive: Living Vengeance - Temporarily gets bonus attack speed on minion kills, and double the value on champion kills.

Q: Piercing Arrow - First activation: begins charging, increasing the skill's range and damage, can still move while charging but will be slightly slowed. Second activation: fires a piercing skillshot. When fully charged, it's the "longest ranged non-ultimate skill in the game".

W: Blighted Quiver - Passive: your auto-attacks apply a stacking debuff called Blight. When an enemy is hit with your skills, the debuffs are consumed to deal % of target's max HP as damage for each stack.

E: Hail of Arrows - Deals damage in an area and leaves a debuff, slowing and reducing healing effects of enemy champs in the area.

R: Chain of Corruption - Skillshot that damages and snares the first enemy champ it hits, then will spread to nearby enemy champs to damage and snare them as well.

[toasty]

Kog really just sort of multiplies the AD ranged carry's strengths and weaknesses. But since standard AD ranged carry can get so crazy strong, multiplying that strength gets stupid crazy - and their weaknesses are mostly negated by good skills and teamwork. I could definitely see Kog getting some nerfs, but I think it'll have to be small nerfs and see how things go from there.

You're probably right, but there are two areas that I really don't care how Riot deals with heroes: Ones that have stupid multiplicative scaling (Vlad, Kog) or ones that have Stealth Mechanics. If Riot removed Shaco, Twitch and Eve from the game permanently I would probably jump up and down a lot. In joy. If Riot nerfs Kog'maw to uselessness I will be a little sad since I like the champions physical appearance in the game, but I would be happy because I hate Super-carry meta. Its boring. Its binary. Its stupid. Especially the way Dig is playing it with double heal+shield comp.

edit: CLG expecting the Kog pick. let's see what they do this time.

edit #2: they picked Vayne. Hell yes. inb4 Zilean+Yorick

[Boowells]

It's official: Supercarry is back.

Part of the problem was the teamcomps, to be honest. I'm no expert, but it seemed like CLG had a poke composition, which really has no effect on the sustain composition of Dignitas.

AOE comps can defeat sustain because it can't withstand the combined damage. Sustain comps beat poke comps because the poke is negligible in comparison to the sustain. Poke comps beat AOE comps because the AOE champs enter the fight already at a disadvantage.

This depends mostly on the skill. These advantages/disadvantages are mostly moot if the disadvantaged team manages to catch an important champion and kill them.

Just a theory.

[ex cathedra]

I think the entire event is double elimination.

I know that, but I wasn't thinking and I totally forgot that Dignitas 2-0'd Mono after they lost the first game.

It's official: Supercarry is back.

Yup. It's been sitting at the sidelines for about a year, as far as I recall, but Yorick and Zilean dropped off in popularity while Kog'Maw has consistently become more popular as this season has developed.

Soraka's rework + Lulu release + heal summoner rework = perfect storm, I think, for this Dig comp. Like, what do you do when Kog'Maw literally gets an extra ~6000 eHP?

Varus, the upcoming archer champion, had his abilities revealed in a sneak peek at PAX East just now.

Seriously? I was like, "Wow, what could this champion possibly bring to the game that isn't already covered by Vayne/Ashe archetypes?" And then Riot was like, "nothing."

[Eldariel]

Kinda sad to see it come to this. I really hope Riot nerfs Kog hard. Of all the metas that LoL has ever produced, Super carry is the stupidest and most boring way to play video games.

Well, they did the same with Corki earlier. Really, any AD Carry can function in supercarry; Kog just has some of the best scaling (up there with Vayne and Twitch). The important part is the support framework; you need both, that mid Soraka and that Lulu to make it work. I daresay it hasn't been the same before the release of Lulu - Janna or Morgana doesn't quite offer the same amount of shields/healing from a sololane.

Part of the problem was the teamcomps, to be honest. I'm no expert, but it seemed like CLG had a poke composition, which really has no effect on the sustain composition of Dignitas.

AOE comps can defeat sustain because it can't withstand the combined damage. Sustain comps beat poke comps because the poke is negligible in comparison to the sustain. Poke comps beat AOE comps because the AOE champs enter the fight already at a disadvantage.

This depends mostly on the skill. These advantages/disadvantages are mostly moot if the disadvantaged team manages to catch an important champion and kill them.

Just a theory.

CLG comp was really more of a modern bruiser comp which are just plain, kinda, bad far as teamfighting goes. They don't really do anything like supercarry or AOE or even poke does.

[Boowells]

Varus, the upcoming archer champion, had his abilities revealed in a sneak peek at PAX East just now. Here's the video.

Spoiler

Show

Passive: Living Vengeance - Temporarily gets bonus attack speed on minion kills, and double the value on champion kills.

Q: Piercing Arrow - First activation: begins charging, increasing the skill's range and damage, can still move while charging but will be slightly slowed. Second activation: fires a piercing skillshot. When fully charged, it's the "longest ranged non-ultimate skill in the game".

W: Blighted Quiver - Passive: your auto-attacks apply a stacking debuff called Blight. When an enemy is hit with your skills, the debuffs are consumed to deal % of target's max HP as damage for each stack.

E: Hail of Arrows - Deals damage in an area and leaves a debuff, slowing and reducing healing effects of enemy champs in the area.

R: Chain of Corruption - Skillshot that damages and snares the first enemy champ it hits, then will spread to nearby enemy champs to damage and snare them as well.

I love this. SO MUCH. I mean, Ez's ult is on a pretty low cooldown considering Mystic Shot, but this... oh my gog.

[Mirrinus]

Seriously? I was like, "Wow, what could this champion possibly bring to the game that isn't already covered by Vayne/Ashe archetypes?" And then Riot was like, "nothing."

I dunno, that Q is pretty unique. It looks rather cool to see your skillshot cursor grow longer and longer even as you're aiming it. We don't really see many abilities that can be charged like that, do we?

His R also has a pretty unique way of spreading. Rather than an instant AoE effect like Sejuani's, it appears to work more like Brand's ult.

[toasty]

Well, they did the same with Corki earlier. Really, any AD Carry can function in supercarry; Kog just has some of the best scaling (up there with Vayne and Twitch). The important part is the support framework; you need both, that mid Soraka and that Lulu to make it work. I daresay it hasn't been possible before the release of Lulu - Janna or Morgana doesn't quite offer the same amount of shields/healing from a sololane.

Yeah, I suppose this is true. And if this is the case I get to once again toot my horn and point out that Riot STILL has no business designing support champions. Not a single support champion designed by riot has not, at some point, been broken OP and/or reworked.

Either way: I dislike the supercarry meta. I don't think its fun and I think that its an artifact from DotA that Riot should work very hard to remove. I don't care if multiple hyper carries are viable. I don't like Hypercarry 1v5 teamcomps. They are boring to play if you are not the AD (and I don't play AD), and they are boring to watch (oh look, Kog didn't die. Oh look. The other team lost).

[Eldariel]

I get to watch Jiji suck some more on Anivia. Yay

[Arbitrarity]

Varus, the upcoming archer champion, had his abilities revealed in a sneak peek at PAX East just now. Here's the video.

Spoiler

Show

Passive: Living Vengeance - Temporarily gets bonus attack speed on minion kills, and double the value on champion kills.

Q: Piercing Arrow - First activation: begins charging, increasing the skill's range and damage, can still move while charging but will be slightly slowed. Second activation: fires a piercing skillshot. When fully charged, it's the "longest ranged non-ultimate skill in the game".

W: Blighted Quiver - Passive: your auto-attacks apply a stacking debuff called Blight. When an enemy is hit with your skills, the debuffs are consumed to deal % of target's max HP as damage for each stack.

E: Hail of Arrows - Deals damage in an area and leaves a debuff, slowing and reducing healing effects of enemy champs in the area.

R: Chain of Corruption - Skillshot that damages and snares the first enemy champ it hits, then will spread to nearby enemy champs to damage and snare them as well.

Spoiler

Show

Hm, scaling range up to 1750+. Interesting. (Janna nados are 1700. Assuming we aren't counting Hawkshot range). Probably used as a finisher on engages, to consume Blight stacks, Expunge style.
Hail of arrows looks like a fairly regular Make it Rain clone, with added heal debuff. Looks useful, good way to apply a heal debuff. Probably has solid range.
Chain of Corruption is probably going to end up being like Glacial Prison, interestingly. Ashe-style initiation utility... surprises me. Admittedly, snares don't have much on stuns, and it's not going to be global by any means, but a big AOE damage+snare is... strong.

[Eldariel]

Once again: Play junglers where you can allow your team to take and gift those first blues people! That'll win you 2v1 lanes!

EDIT: And then Voyboy forgets he needs Wards or enemy jungler position to be aggressive and dies with bluebuff. Nice.

EDIT: Holy **** Voy. If you willingly take 2v1 lane, don't go around gifting doublebuffs...

EDIT: I must say to his credit that Jiji has improved his Anivia-play a lot. Though he missed that Wall that coulda trapped Mundo for the kill or at least forced Flash.

[ex cathedra]

I dunno, that Q is pretty unique. It looks rather cool to see your skillshot cursor grow longer and longer even as you're aiming it. We don't really see many abilities that can be charged like that, do we?

His R also has a pretty unique way of spreading. Rather than an instant AoE effect like Sejuani's, it appears to work more like Brand's ult.

His Q is unique, but consider:
W is a more or less a passive steroid that does percentage HP damage.
E is volley. It's name is even synonymous for volley.
R is a ranged skillshot that applies AoE CC.

Artistically and thematically, he's pretty much Vayne with Ashe's bow and more arcane elements.

[Nadevoc]

Varus, the upcoming archer champion, had his abilities revealed in a sneak peek at PAX East just now. Here's the video.

Spoiler

Show

Passive: Living Vengeance - Temporarily gets bonus attack speed on minion kills, and double the value on champion kills.

Q: Piercing Arrow - First activation: begins charging, increasing the skill's range and damage, can still move while charging but will be slightly slowed. Second activation: fires a piercing skillshot. When fully charged, it's the "longest ranged non-ultimate skill in the game".

W: Blighted Quiver - Passive: your auto-attacks apply a stacking debuff called Blight. When an enemy is hit with your skills, the debuffs are consumed to deal % of target's max HP as damage for each stack.

E: Hail of Arrows - Deals damage in an area and leaves a debuff, slowing and reducing healing effects of enemy champs in the area.

R: Chain of Corruption - Skillshot that damages and snares the first enemy champ it hits, then will spread to nearby enemy champs to damage and snare them as well.

Sweet, thanks for that. I remember awhile back Morello said, "Hey, we know we've been getting complaints about boring champ designs so we're going to be stepping it up, starting with Ziggs", and I think they've managed it. My initial impression of Varus was, "Meh. Angsty elf dude with a bow. What? He's not an elf? Yes, he is, be quiet". But his skillset's actually looking pretty cool.

Either way: I dislike the supercarry meta. I don't think its fun and I think that its an artifact from DotA that Riot should work very hard to remove. I don't care if multiple hyper carries are viable. I don't like Hypercarry 1v5 teamcomps. They are boring to play if you are not the AD (and I don't play AD), and they are boring to watch (oh look, Kog didn't die. Oh look. The other team lost).

LoL doesn't really have any 1v5 carries. Kog and other AD carries can take out the entire enemy team, but they do need a few champs defending them and taking the heat. I think AD carries serve a purpose in forcing games to end. Once you reach a certain point (30 minutes or so), they can really force stuff to happen.

[Mirrinus]

E is actually Make It Rain, not Volley. But I get your point. Still, you can play this game with pretty much any new champ nowadays. One very unique ability is already decent enough in my book, especially if you simplify everything down into "ranged initiation skill", "offensive steroid", etc.

[ex cathedra]

E is actually Make It Rain, not Volley. But I get your point. Still, you can play this game with pretty much any new champ nowadays. One very unique ability is already decent enough in my book, especially if you simplify everything down into "ranged initiation skill", "offensive steroid", etc.

Yeah, but it's not just that the skills are similar, it's that the champ has similar skills and is thematically similar to those two. Like, that "Know this, dogs of Noxus..." thing could have come straight out of Vayne.

[9mm]

super carry hmmm? how long till we get double ad/support again as a counter?

Varus, the upcoming archer champion, had his abilities revealed in a sneak peek at PAX East just now. Here's the video.

Spoiler

Show

Passive: Living Vengeance - Temporarily gets bonus attack speed on minion kills, and double the value on champion kills.

Q: Piercing Arrow - First activation: begins charging, increasing the skill's range and damage, can still move while charging but will be slightly slowed. Second activation: fires a piercing skillshot. When fully charged, it's the "longest ranged non-ultimate skill in the game".

W: Blighted Quiver - Passive: your auto-attacks apply a stacking debuff called Blight. When an enemy is hit with your skills, the debuffs are consumed to deal % of target's max HP as damage for each stack.

E: Hail of Arrows - Deals damage in an area and leaves a debuff, slowing and reducing healing effects of enemy champs in the area.

R: Chain of Corruption - Skillshot that damages and snares the first enemy champ it hits, then will spread to nearby enemy champs to damage and snare them as well.

Windrunner, is that you?

[Duos]

CLG loses to supercarry comp

Lets dignitas take the SAME COMP

whyyyyyyy. They're gonna lose this one, calling it now. Every single fight is just healshealsheals. They can't poke, they can't engage profitably....

[Eldariel]

Huh. That fight was poorly fought by CLG; need to burst people down, not to split damage. They very nearly had that; if they were all in position with cooldowns (Anivia CDs were not up immediately) they woulda won that fight.

super carry hmmm? how long till we get double ad/support again as a counter?

People are already doing that as a counter to bruisers.

[Boowells]

Yeah, Dignitas running heal comp again versus CLG. On one hand, yeah, it is sort of boring with all the heals.

But it's working. And it's not traditional. I'm liking how Dignitas and M5 are innovating and it's working against more traditional compositions. M5 running Mundo jungle, Nunu support. Dignitas running AP Soraka.

EDIT: Or maybe it's just CLG being bad. None of them have the proper defenses. Most of them have no defenses aside from health against Kog'Maw percentile damage.

[Eldariel]

Holy ****, Jiji just missed a free kill wall on Kog'Maw. HURTS!

[toasty]

Yeah, Dignitas running heal comp again versus CLG. On one hand, yeah, it is sort of boring with all the heals.

But it's working. And it's not traditional. I'm liking how Dignitas and M5 are innovating and it's working against more traditional compositions. M5 running Mundo jungle, Nunu support. Dignitas running AP Soraka.

EDIT: Or maybe it's just CLG being bad. None of them have the proper defenses. Most of them have no defenses aside from health against Kog'Maw percentile damage.

Nothing we are seeing is untraditional. Its simply a new incarnation of the same comp. A year ago CLG was running Twitch with various low-damage heroes that offered good peel, CC and heal. Now people are doing the same with Kog'maw.

[ex cathedra]

But it's working. And it's not traditional. I'm liking how Dignitas and M5 are innovating and it's working against more traditional compositions. M5 running Mundo jungle, Nunu support. Dignitas running AP Soraka.

You can argue that M5 popularized Shyvana, simply because they first used her to success in tournament play, even though players like saintvicious played her long before M5 arrived on the scene (but Hotshot wouldn't let him play Shyv in tournaments because she was, and I quote, "solo queue poison" ), but Mundo didn't have anything to do with M5. If anything he emerged as a counter to jungle Shyvana, and he enjoyed a decent amount of popularity in the NA solo queue ladder. Hell, if I recall correctly, M5 banned out Mundo at some points because they didn't know how to deal with SV's jungle Mundo, but I could be wrong. Support Nunu was also already a thing, wasn't it?

[toasty]

You can argue that M5 popularized Shyvana, simply because they first used her to success in tournament play, even though players like saintvicious played her long before M5 arrived on the scene (but Hotshot wouldn't let him play Shyv in tournaments because she was, and I quote, "solo queue poison" ), but Mundo didn't have anything to do with M5. If anything he emerged as a counter to jungle Shyvana, and he enjoyed a decent amount of popularity in the NA solo queue ladder. Hell, if I recall correctly, M5 banned out Mundo at some points because they didn't know how to deal with SV's jungle Mundo, but I could be wrong. Support Nunu was also already a thing, wasn't it?

The first person to play Mundo jungle that I saw was M5's jungler. Even though Jatt instantly saw it as something that should be very strong, M5 was the first team to do it in a tourenment (it was the King's of Europe Final, and they failed miserably when they did a level 2 invade and tried to focus down Anivia. It was hilariously stupid of them )

[Boowells]

Support Nunu was also already a thing, wasn't it?

It might've been. But I hadn't really seen it anytime else and the meta, from my understanding, was that Nunu was a pretty bad jungler (in comparison to other junglers).

EDIT: Muting the stream. I mean no judgment on those who listen to KPop, but this is...err...disgruntling my ears.

[ex cathedra]

It might've been. But I hadn't really seen it anytime else and the meta, from my understanding, was that Nunu was a pretty bad jungler (in comparison to other junglers).

Nunu was a good jungler who got nerfed fairly hard after Dreamhack and became almost completely worthless along with the most recent jungle remake.

Re:Mundo, I know that Rincent played him in solo queue pretty early and I don't think that anyone was surprised that he became a strong jungler after his W change, so it really isn't much of a surprise. Shyvana's popularity was already in full swing and he was pretty much a second Shyvana that did more damage lategame, was tankier, had better ganks, and it didn't hurt that was one of the champions that Shyvana just couldn't counterjungle. And then Shyvana ate a huge nerf so that's where we are today.

[toasty]

EDIT: Muting the stream. I mean no judgment on those who listen to KPop, but this is...err...disgruntling my ears.

Its funny because these girls are so much sexier than most American Pop I feel like. I dunno. Maybe I apparently have a fetish.

edit: though to be fair I muted it after the first song too.

edit: HSGG says Lulu isn't A) a support B) she is OP. Riot, listen to this man. Stop trying to make viable supports. Its impossible. Apparently.

[Nadevoc]

"So, Teemo's getting buffed--"
Dyrus: "Oh god..."

All pros on panel: "I don't like Teemo. He is annoying."




This amuses me greatly.