HumbleBrag Thread

[Gustaran]

You call 20 kills, 17 assists and 100-smth cs ghastly? I was roaming most of the game so it was kinda hard to stop and farm while making plays and carrying the team to victory. :/

What people forget is that CS gold is huge. I will give you one example: If by the 25 minute mark you and your opponent are still 0-0-0 and you have 50 CS and he has 200 CS that translates roughly to a 10 kill advantage in gold for him!
However, while you can read very often "Oh man, we are losing, champion X is super fed, he has 10 kills", nobody in the lower leagues seems to understand that a 150 CS advantage is basically the same thing.

[Jowy]

Jungler Taric ain't bad. Even fits perfectly with the meta: a tanky support jungler with cc. Nothing wrong in using unusual champs as long as they actually work in a way that fits the role. You guys are right about cs being way low of course, but that's just normal. CSing is the biggest difference between the top 5% (Gold) and the top 0.1%. If you wanna improve, the best way is to get better at farming. But yeah it's not exactly unusual to see low farm numbers at Silver I, or even higher. I even get regularly flamed for having high farm, that's at high Gold rankings. Just some time ago I had the most kills and the most assists in my team, but because my farm was way higher than anyone else's, I got flamed and reported for being "useless".

[Voldymort]

i've been having some back and forth messaging with Terror Incognita and Sullla about my Taric play choices, and, following whet they replied, we decided to post them here because they turned out to be most interesting.

So here is mine(it was originally intended just for Sullla's eyes so forgive me if some of it looks unfamiliar):
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First of all I wasn’t listening to the stream while playing, and I’m not curious enough to do it now! The first reason is that playing from Europe all the way to NA gets the ping overly-high enough even without the stream consuming bandwidth. The second is the fact that you were going on and on about what a bad ideea it was to Taric top and it got most annoying after the first 10 seconds. When someone spams stuff like that in the chat I usually hit the bubble in the in-game scores window and silence him so I can focus on the game. So I closed the stream and secretly wished to win top as I had done before against Darius, Rivens and Garens (no i am not kidding). I will explain the problem behind while I lost later.
I hope I didn’t offend you with annoying above but I would like to think that you don’t like people who spamm negativity either!smile

If you recall back when we had that Lux vs Swain game where i was going "whoop whoop whoop" (:D) you were saying in the loading screen that you "don't know if Lux is like a main for Prottoshoggoth or not..." and i told you on the following day that i dont have mains.
What i do have is Favorite Champions!
I haven't played all the champions in the game. I have only played what is within my purchases, and even there the games range from 0 (see below) to 56 (Taric currently has 32 wins and 24 losses) and I will get to that in a moment. For instance i bought Gragas and Anivia at one point(because they were cheap) and haven't got around to play them yet.
What is in my list is about a quarter of the available champions but it might actually be lower than that because they keep adding champions over and over with no end in sight. I think that at one point we are going to have gamenights where in each and every game we will have different champions. It may take a while but we will get there if they keep adding stuff.
But I digress!
What I mean by favorite champions is not necessarily what everyone does : only play with a select few from the list over and over and not touch anything else. I mean there is that; but the favorite champions I am referring to are the ones that upon my discovery of them, I will tend to play continuously until I start getting annoying loosing streaks (Taric hasn’t disappointed me that hard yet). At that point they get added to the “I prefer these” champion pool and I try to find my next interesting champion. I did this with Jax ( if you remember my Jax jungle game from far back), Janna (that game soooo far back, that I couldn’t get you to cast because it was too long) and Lux (that Swain game was within the time slot reserved for maining her). There are more but these are the only ones that come to mind at the moment.

So now why Taric top/jungle?
First of all that I find the ideea of Taric support the most monotonous and uninteresting thing to play. Heal, stun and ult when pushing towers….that is all he does and I find that too monotonous to play! I mean, granted, I have done that in the past (and I have that YouTube video where im putting points in the stun to prove it!:D ) but it’s too boring to do in my opinion.
About 1.5-2 months ago I came across a YouTube video about Taric jungle. I don’t remember who was doing it or from what time period it was. I know that Scarra wasn’t the one because he only does mid’s for the most part and Gman Bob doesn’t do weird stuff like that.
I looked it up on Mobafire and Youtube to get the basic ideea of what seemed interesting to try out (in normals at the time). The basic ideea they all shared was that you would skill him just like when supporting: first point in the shield, second in the heal, third in stun (and leave it there), 4th and 5th in the shield….. basically max the shield and heal (ult when it’s up is a given on any champion, with the exception of Udyr and the like) and level up the stun when you have no other choice. I didn’t pay much attention to the items they suggested as I got my own way of building him through trial and error (I will get to the items in that game with you in a moment just bare with me).
Play>> player vs AI>> intermediate>> solo. The most fun experience I ever had followed!
The thing about supporting Taric is that his heal is only used at Half of it’s capacity. What his heal does besides…healing (obviously) is his autoattacks on champions decrease this spell's cooldown by 3 seconds each or by 1 second if hitting non-champions(kind of like Tryndamere’s spin resets by 2 seconds on each crit or Nunu gets a free spell after 5 basic attacks or Ahri gets spellvamp after 9 charges ). This feature is NEVER used when supporting. You can’t do it because the adc doesn’t like it when you hit the minions and therefore it is not used for the most part. I mean ,given , you have it in mind and try to make use of it from time to time but for the most part it stays unused. Now imagine jungling or soloing top and auto attacking over and over! Sustain-o-rama! After you get blue you have no reason to go back and heal because it gets off cd 2-3 times during each major camp (blue buff, red buff and golems). I have had that happen to me in a game actually at some point. It was 10 or so minutes in and I only had the Macete on me and no reason to go back except to buy. If i remember it right i eventually died with 4k gold on me. :D
His shield and ultimate give bonus defensive and offensive stats to allies when active. Excellent for supporting, I agree! They also give underestimated damage bursts!!!:D
I will take this opportunity to say that Taric top (believe it or not; I have some screenshots on RBF to prove it) owns Darius, Riven and AD Yi. In that image on <<Realms Beyond Forums>> you say that I shouldn’t brag about a replay where Hecarim rushes Hydra first. What you don’t realize is that I was top vs that AD Yi who had Infinity Edge, Bloodthirster, and everything else. He was unstoppable when I wasn’t there, getting triple kill after triple kill! At the end of the game he had “tons of damage” and I had 400 armor and 100 or so damage and he was running away from me every single time it was 1v1!:D
Taric has the uncanny ability to counter every single melee ad champ that comes to mind (zed is semi ad and has wayyyy too many escapes so he doesn’t count).

The replay of that match is below if you’re interested to cast a “what is going on in silver” video.I hope it works! (lolrecorder is unpredictible sometimes as you already know all too well)

http://www.leaguereplays.com/replays/match/3324974/

The only downside is that he looses to ap and ranged champs; and that Singed was AP. As I assume it’s most obvious, I haven’t gone around to finding a fix for this yet, which explains the item purchases for that game you whitnessed. I was originally going to build my usual items but half way through the first item I realized he was building ap and I got stuck. I kept buying and afterwards selling pointless items and then finally deciding to go tanky with accents on magic resist. Looking back I should’ve just built what I usually do and that might have gotten me better results. But I think I would’ve lost either way!
He looses to Teemo and Nida but he owns Darius and Riven! From this point of view he is at the very least marginally interesting to at least try out before rulling him out completely (not that I would expect you to do it after what happened).

At the beginning, when I first started maining him top and jungle I got negativity like the one you were spamming (again no offence intended) thrown at me every single game and I had the pleasure to prove it was misplaced 2 out of 3 matches (you can’t win them all).
Nowadays I still get it sometimes but it is far reduced compared to the beginning. People in my skill range have gradually accepted it as being what it is (even tho I have seen no one else doing it): An underestimated anomaly that wins games most of the time; like AP Trynda used to be before they nerfed him!
Check my European lolking page for details on that while keeping in mind that before I was doing it I was Silver 5 and now I am Silver 1! Coincidence? Maybe...but if it ain't broke why fix it?
I use the “Trigun” runes regardless top or jungle, “Taric in the Dark” masteries if jungle and “Taric by Design” if top.( If you know the references, here have my like:D)

This has gone on far enough but I think I covered about every point! If I’ve missed anything feel free to ask and I will try to respond as fully as possible! (tho’ I hope, for both our sakes, not in so many words:D)

Thanks for bearing with me, with this manifest! :D
Have a wonderful day!

Voldy/Protto

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Next one is Terror's:

Hey,

Interesting. Definitely a lot of thoughts there.

I think you’ve mostly identified why it works at your level, and it’s very similar to what I said in the thread a little earlier this morning. Taric in a solo lane works specifically against melee AD champions (armor aura, hard CC, sustain). He doesn’t work against AP champions.

There’s some things you’re missing:
1) Top laners at higher elo (usually once you get out of mid-silver) do not build pure damage, as a general rule. I’ve just started ranked on my EUW account, and I’m in mid-gold mmr (~1600), though still only Silver I league, as I’ve just started. I’m starting to see tankier champions being played top. At lower levels, you’ll see a lot of pure damage ADs, which Taric does very well against. As such, he works as a useful counterpick. There’s also the element of surprise; people will underestimate Taric, so you’ll be able to pick up cheap kills that way. Higher elo players are not as likely to make this mistake.
2) Often, lower tier games do not have supports. I mean obviously someone lanes with the AD, but they’re not always playing it as a support, either in terms of items or mentality. I’m sure you’re familiar with the terror of an AP Nidalee support who starts Doran’s Ring and no wards. In this sort of team, having a support in top lane is often beneficial. You saw that on Wednesday, when your team had an actual support in the bottom lane, building Sightstone/Aegis wasn’t so beneficial.
3) Taric does not scale into late game. Even Taric as support has this issue -- he doesn’t scale as well as pretty much any other support (even Leona scales ok because of her W). Taric is strong early game and weak late game, whether he has items or not. You’re simply not going to be as helpful as a Lee Sin or a Jarvan in major teamfights.

As you move higher, I’d suggest thinking about some other champions top that do similar things. Sulla mentioned Jarvan as a good example; he does roughly the same things that Taric does, only better -- armor aura, shield -- but he does more damage, more utility and has a more useful ult. I agree completely that Taric support is boring, btw.

The other thing of course is: if you enjoy it, keep playing it! Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the pros or the diamond/plat players are missing something that you’re not. They’re not.

Terror

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and Sullla will follow up with his own.

[Sullla]

Terror has done a good job of rebutting this already, so I'll just add on a few more thoughts.

The argument in that long post above basically boils down to "I've played Taric in top lane and jungle, and I've won with it, so that means that it works." The whole post also lists all of the various different things that Taric can do as a champion. The problem is that this misses the point of evaluating one champion against another; every champion can do various different things. The question is not "can Taric contribute to a team in top lane / jungle?", the question is "can Taric fulfill these roles BETTER than another champion?" And that's where this solo lane Taric stuff falls apart. Watch, I can do this with any champion:

"Malzahar is an awesome champion! His passive gives him a little minion that adds free damage. His Q lets you silence people, his W does percentage based damage, and his E is one of the best tools at farming minion waves in the game. And his ult lets you lock up somebody and get easy kills! I went 20-10-25 with him in a Bronze game and he's so much fun to play. I don't understand why he's not more popular!"

Again, it's not about what a champ does necessarily, but what they offer compared to another champion who could fill the same role. Malzahar is considered one of the weakest AP mids in the game because his ult locks himself in place and other champs are simply much better at bursting someone down 100 to 0 (e.g. Zed in the current version). In order to understand why people don't play Taric as a solo laner, we need to look at his kit in more detail:

Passive: Basic attacks deal bonus magic damage equal to 2% of maximum mana. It's a strange and awkward passive, since in order to make this effect, Taric has to build additional mana. But then he also needs to itemize attack speed and some magic penetration to make this useful, and all on a melee champion. Overall, it makes Frozen Heart a very good item on Taric, but it's hard to see this being very useful otherwise. (Also keep in mind that 2% is not a lot of extra damage. With 2000 mana, that's 40 bonus magic damage per auto - the same as a Sunfire Cape tick.)

Imbue (Q): A heal that can self-target or target allies. The heal is 40% higher if used on self. The very long cooldown (20-16 seconds with more points in skill) gets reduced when auto attacking. This one is pretty simple, a skill that provides a heal and not really anything else. It's a major argument AGAINST putting Taric in a solo lane, since the heal is significantly better when cast on an ally. Provides moderate sustain, but there are many other champions with better ways of sustaining themselves in lane (why not play top lane Zac or Vlad or Rengar etc.) This is an obvious support skill that works poorly in other roles.

Shatter (W): Provides bonus armor to self and nearby allies, can be broken to deal magic damage and reduce armor of enemies at a very short distance (range 200). Also scales off of total armor (12%) giving an incentive to build more armor. This is easily Taric's best skill, but once again, most of the benefit is wasted by sticking him up in top lane where he's isolated from the rest of the team. Shatter's damage output is very low (210 at max rank) and the main benefit is the armor aura. It makes little sense to stick Taric in the two places on the map (top/jungle) where he will rarely be around other champs during the laning phase.

Dazzle (E): Point and click stun with low damage, low range, and medium duration. Taric's only form of crowd control, very strong early in the game but scales poorly as the game progresses. Always a useful skill, but single target and at best usable twice in a team fight due to longish (14-10 second) cooldown.

Radiance ®: Deals magic damage in the immediate area while granting self and nearby allies AD and AP for the next 10 seconds. Another aura skill which has far less effectiveness when isolated on the map. An obvious support skill intended for use with teammates.

So, when we look at Taric's skills, 3 of the 4 options function much better with teammates around to benefit from their auras / extra functionality. We also have to keep the following things in mind:

* Taric has terrible wave clearing power. Shatter and auto attacks are his only tools. This makes him an extremely slow jungler and easily abusable in a solo lane. Good players with more standard champions with simply push you to tower with their wave clear and then go roam or farm the jungle, easily pulling ahead. (Prime example, the Taric vs Singed lane we had on Wednesday.)

* Taric is an early game champ who scales very poorly into the lategame. This is why he is an ideal support: he doesn't need much gold or experience to be effective. Putting him into a solo lane and giving Taric a large portion of the available gold and experience is a weak use of the available resources on the map. Maybe this doesn't matter at low levels of play where most of those resources are getting ignored/wasted anyway, but it matters a lot as the skill level goes up.

* Taric is awful against anyone who isn't a melee AD, and this mean that he is very easily counterpicked in lane. Not a good thing as the skill of players goes up and people begin to take counterpicks seriously.

* Taric has little to no kill pressure in lane. Even with Ignite, how do you ever kill the opposing solo laner? Q is a heal. E's damage is laughable with one point in the skill. W is better, but still below average compared to most other skills. You need the jungler to show up to have any kill pressure at all. I mean, sure this probably works at low skill levels where people don't ward against junglers and repeated use of E-W-one auto attack combos will slowly tick away at someone's life, but you can't rely on that against good players. They'll just shove you to tower and back when their health pots run out, never giving you a chance to kill them.

* Taric is laughably easy to counterjungle. How do you stop someone from stealing everything if they want to do so? Taric's clear rate is atrocious, and he certainly can't duel Lee Sin or Udyr or whatever. Taric has no mobility skills, which means that Nunu or Jarvan or Lee can run circles around him in the jungle. Expect to see better players do this and cripple the Taric jungler.

* Most important point: there are simply better champs at doing the exact same role as Taric. Jarvan jungle clears 10x faster and offers infinitely more to the team in the same role. If you want "tanky top lane champ who is anti-AD and scales off armor", then Malphite is a vastly superior option. If you want "support champ in top with great sustain", then laning Nunu is waaaaaaaay better, both at bullying the other laner and providing an awesome aura effect for the AD later in the game. Taric was heavily nerfed in patches a few months ago. He is not viable in any role right now other than support, and there are much better support choices as well. Don't play him at all if you're serious about winning.

I'll finish by looking back at the example of a "good" Taric top game, this one:



This actually demonstrates why Taric should not be played in this role. We've already mentioned the farming: terrible. This is hide your face awful. I'm sorry, but it's the truth. It's simply not acceptable to have 115 CS as a solo laner in a 43 minute game. This goes directly back to Taric's awful wave clear as a champion, something that is easy to exploit.

Next, this is a weakish build for a frontline melee champ. Yes, you've stacked a lot of mana and armor to take advantage of Taric's passive and W aura. However, you've failed to itemize any health beyond a Sightstone and the modest amount that comes from Bulwark. You've got something like 300 armor and only 2300 health. The correct item to build here was Randuin's; one should essentially never build Thornmail over Randuins pretty much ever. You've also only built a single damage item, and even that is a minor damage item in the form of Iceborn Gauntlet. Your Taric deals almost nothing in the way of damage, which is fine for certain teamcomps, but a bad choice for this game where Rammus also went pure armor tank. Ezreal and Casseopeia are the only ones who deal any damage on this team, but I expect that the other team stupidly sat there attacking the pure tank Taric and Rammus the whole time. Good thing the enemy team was pants-on-head retarded in this game, with 4 squishy all-damage champs... and a Hecarim who also went full damage instead of survivability. Plus, there's the Cait and Yi who didn't bother to build a single armor pen item against a team stacking armor. Yes, keep building that IE/PD/BT, who needs a Last Whisper?

Finally, the argument that this build somehow stopped the enemy team's Master Yi is completely incorrect. What the replay screen shows is the weakness of Taric top lane: Taric top could not stop the enemy Yi that it laned against from farming like crazy and becoming super fed. That Yi had 284 CS to the Taric's 115 CS. And this is supposed to be an argument in favor of Taric top?! It shows the opposite: Taric can't stop a melee AD on the other team from farming up a storm. You guys won not because Taric top is a great strat, but because the other team had an idiotic comp and build their champions like retards.

Well, this has gone on too long, but it comes down to what I posted yesterday: you are deliberately handicapping yourself by picking Taric in these non-support roles. I would strongly encourage you to rethink this idea. You have not discovered something hidden that has escaped the attention of professional players. You are simply beating bad players who don't know what they're doing, and that allows you to get away with suboptimal choices. You'll have way more success with more standardized picks for these roles.

[Jowy]

Always playing the OP champs will temporarily get you higher in ratings, but is worse in the long run than playing, learning and understanding all champs.

[Gustaran]

I think Sullla has put it together very well. I mean if you want to play sub par champiopns because you have fun with them be my guest, but then keep in mind that posting these screenshots in this thread how well you do leaves a rather funny impression.

There are invalid points I hear over and over again:

a) "Champion X helps me win 2/3 of my games".
Yes, but it's not because of this champion, but despite playing the champion.

b) "I got to Silver 1 playing champion X"
Awesome, but you might be already in gold league with another pick.

c) "I recently beat champion Y."
Yes, and you can stay in the base for 5 minutes and then start playing and still win against some Jax with 700 ELO. Doesn't mean staying in the base is the best strategy against Jax. In short: Personal experience is never a complete substitute for facts and statistics.

d) "People don't know how to counter champion x / build y".
I am sure they don't. The problem is: The higher you climb, the more likely it is people WILL punish you for substandard picks and builds. Let's say you make it to gold 1: Suddenly your Taric pick gets blown apart every game. But because you have played it all the time - it was working so well - you lack practice with more sensible choices.

Look, you get this in other games all the time: In chess every beginner learns the Scholar's mate and from then on tries to win with a cheap trick in 4 moves. You will achieve some quick victories over other unskilled players, but as soon as you start to climb the ladder and still try it, you end up with an inferior position every time because the opening is easy to refute.
So every chess teacher will make sure his students do not play an opening that will prove unsound in the future even if this means not getting some easy early wins.

Now, by all means I am certainly a proponent of unusual choices fom time to time, but it becomes problematic if you lack the understanding how and why your choices are substandard. So it's always good to have something solid in your repertoire that doesn't put you at a disadvantage from the start.

[Krill]

I think it's unreasonable to make the statement "Taric is unviable as anything but support" because in certain team comps, a jungle Taric can be a reasonable choice. One that is roaming and help push down towers can donate jungle farm to the carries, is around other team members a lot anyway because they are pushing waves, or is against an all AD team comp would bring useful skills to the team that other champs wouldn't.

That said, I'm not advocating that it's a generally good pick, just that it has a niche where it can work.

[Sullla]

Anything has a niche where it "can work." Protective trait in Civ4 has a niche where it can work. That doesn't mean it's a viable choice compared to better alternatives. I'm struggling to think of a situation where Taric jungle would be a better choice compared to Jarvan jungle (all around better in all ways) or Nunu jungle (support/counterjungle) or Malphite jungle (tanky/scales off AD).

[Voldymort]

How about if those three that you just mentioned are banned?

[Sullla]

Play any other strong jungler?

* Xin Zhao's early game ganks are at least as good as Taric's, and he clears the jungle far better.

* Nocturne's level 6+ ganks are a hundred times better than anything Taric will ever offer.

* Maokai is another choice who offers better ganking pressure than Taric, better clear speed, and similar team-aura synergy.

* Zac has equally good if not better sustain, with better jungle clear times and a godly initiation/movement skill.

* Cho'gath's sustains better yet, clears fast, and offers outstanding buff control post-6, plus more crowd control than Taric.

* Amumu and Sejuani have easy to use area of effect (AOE) ultimates that dominate lower skill levels.

* Rammus does way better at the "heavy armor anti-AD" role in the jungle, with terrifying ganks during the laning phase.

* Lee Sin and Elise are high skill cap junglers who have been staples of the pro scene for months/years.

* See also: Hecarim, Fiddlesticks, Udyr, Vi, Volibear, etc.

There has to be close to two dozen junglers who are all significantly better in that role than Taric. You shouldn't be getting banned out.