League of Legends General Discussion Thread

[Cull]

Did anyone watch MLG Anaheim? Any games that were good? I wasn't able to see any of the games.

Edit: Found interesting site on Stats for the event. https://elobuff.com/events/2012-mlg-anaheim

Grand Finals really good. CLG.EU v TSM, CLG.NA v CLG.EU(meh on the goodness in game 1) good.

[Dantski]

Here's a preview of what Proving Grounds will look like really soon. Enjoy.

Not sure what to make of this, on the one hand its good that they're finally releasing the 1 lane map as an option, however they have certainly tried to put their own spin on it with health shrines like Dominion has, no healing from fountain which will probably shorten games considerably (although this is offset by lack of minions from other lanes streaming in), 1 less tower, and a mix of items from dominion allowed.

Not sure when they are proposing to release it (soon?) but I'll reserve judgement until then.

[spellman]

No heal/buy rule is a common one. You can't return to fountain to buy/heal unless killed. They've merely enforced it in the gameplay. Also, blocking snowball items (Mejai's, Leviathan) is common. As for the Dominion items.... meh?

[Dantski]

spellman I play a LOT of all mid games and know about how it works. Typically once the inhibitor is down you can go back and buy/heal whenever you like until its back up again. Making it so you can't heal is an interesting change and given the other changes its not easy to predict if a losing team will lose faster to the snowball the other team built up or whether they can hold out longer because they don't have to deal with other lanes pushing in.

I also just thought a bit more about health shrines, I hope they don't scale into lategame. If they do the attacking team will have access to all of them once one team has been pushed back.

[sunrise089]

@Dantski - Why do the side lanes push in once the mid turret is down on Summoners Rift?

[spellman]

@Dantski - Why do the side lanes push in once the mid turret is down on Summoners Rift?

I think he's referring to when the inhib goes down. All of your creeps, including the ones in other lanes, get a buff. And that particular lane gets the super minions.

[Dantski]

What spellman said, if team A's inhibitor is destroyed, team B's minions will be buffed and start winning the side lanes. After the inhib has been taken down multiple times the minions will start pushing side inhibs and once those are down its virtually impossible for team A to win. Even if its a tight game and towers aren't going down in middle (typically when there's a lack of CC and strong ranged poke), the side lines will slowly push down towers with a kind of seesaw effect. In this case though I've never seen the side lane minions take down an inhib tower before the middle inhib is destroyed, it would eventually happen though.

[sunrise089]

Gotcha (sort of). Didn't know other lane minions got a buff when an inhib goes down.

Why though would a bot/top inhib eventually go down if the mid inhib was still up?

[spellman]

Gotcha (sort of). Didn't know other lane minions got a buff when an inhib goes down.

Why though would a bot/top inhib eventually go down if the mid inhib was still up?

By the nature of the unstable equilibrium of minions slowly pushing back and forth. There is no (OK, just super unlikely) mutual destruction, so one side or the other will naturally have 1 or more minions left over from an even battle of minions. This extra damage/health will carry over to the next set of minion fights, altering the equality of the matchup.

Eventually one group will develop a slight advantage and the minion mob will slowly push forward, gaining more and more minions and streamrolling the opponent's minions. This mob then gets to a tower and gets annihilated, but in the off chance the timing is right (no opposing minions) or they are big enough to kill the enemy wave before the towers kills all of them, they also do damage to the tower. Get a big enough mob or enough little dents and the towers will fall.

This unstable equilibrium is intentional to prevent stalemates, and also probably a residual of the old WC3 setup and how stuff is done. But it's also super slow. In a regular ARAM game sometimes the outer side towers will fall eventually, but I've never seen the 2nd nor base towers go down before an inhib.

[Dantski]

The other thing I forgot to mention was the passive gold + xp gain. The boost doesn't seem quite as high as it is in dominion but its still a major change to how an all mid game plays. First off you start with more gold and having more gold ticking over devalues GP/10 items significantly. Because sustain has typically been so important, Philo Stone was a solid choice for most mana using champions. Now champions don't need GP/10 items since it would be such a minor boost compared to their default passive income. Given the extra gold you accumulate from all the kills/assists, I think people will finish item builds several minutes faster than before.

Passive XP also speeds the game up and will help champions that become more effective at level 6. Suddenly the game is less about strong poke and more about a strong teamfight. I played a game yesterday where the enemy team got Nidalee and Urgot and poked really hard and put their team ahead, however once a couple of towers went down our team was able to force fights and the team composition was vastly in our favour. In this new map, I'd see this happening more often as early game poke while giving a temporary advantage, would lose out once the enemy teams Amumu/Galio/AP Yi hits 6.