A lot of the guides I've read say flat armor is more beneficial than flat MR when it comes to runes. I guess it depends on the champion, to some extent. If you're a melee then yeah, you might be up front eating more spells. If you're ranged, you should not be getting poked constantly... early boots can help mitigate that even further.

Well the best flat armor runes are yellows and the best flat MR runes are blues, so you can get both really.

I just find flat MR Blues more useful overall than scaling MP/5 Regen because some champions don't even have Mana. :<

i think i've figured out its because half of the people play either with their shitty friends all the time or do a.i. games and eventually get to high levels

but are actually no better than a level 13 player

when we all get to level 30 i'm excited to be the tank/support specialist for our team. tried out shen last night and he is SO COOL. don't even care if he doesn't do much damage your job is to keep your team from getting killed and you can directly do it like all the time with ult and taunt and even vorpal blade's healing

holy crap i love to tank but i hate shen. at least with amumu, rammus, and cho you're doing some damage once and a while.

Hearing HotshotGG rant/cry about the Nidalee nerfs on his stream is some funny shit.

there were some pretty significant changes to her =) i've been getting cut up by her in lane a lot lately, so i'm ok with it.

if there's one thing i hate its a bad team that blames their tank for dying

also my brother just got home from his naval base in CA for his friend's wedding and saw me playing so i just put him in an AI game it was so funny to watch

on the other hand he is 6'6 and built like a greek god so i dare not laugh at his ineptitude

talon is so fun

but buy a thornmail and he's fucked

Good thing most people in normal queue are too stupid to do that!

I just tried the new Soraka.

Holy crap Starcall is SO GOOD now.

this is hilarious.

Ahahahaha.

Soraka's role was always meant to be lane pusher, she just got too caught up in being a support to properly do that.

Well, she's pretty 'eh' as a support now, but damn she can cause some damage between Starcall and Infuse.

just played a game with amumu, irelia, garen, karthus, and annie. i went 7-1-22 as amumu, with a final build of FoN, merc treads, thornmail, abyssal scepter, and warmogs. didn't have time for the rylai's.

i had philosophers and heart of gold for almost the entirety of the match, and it made a huge difference. i'm not a great farmer as most of you know, but amumu's AoE damage abilities make it really easy to chew through waves of creeps. i laned and roamed with karthus and annie (hence the scepter), and by the end of the game i was able to sit in a teamfight and take virtually no damage when focused. we aced them twice with no losses to our own under one of their turrets, and after my initiation and tower aggro we were able to just melt them almost instantly.

it was a good game on a day full of bad games =)

i also picked up udyr yesterday and went 4-4 with him on the day (with one of those losses involving me disconnecting at 4 minutes thanks to client issues). in the losses, we got pushed hard early and lost several towers before 20 minutes, minimizing my effectiveness ganking. in the games where we were able to hold towers for a reasonable amount of time (as in, solo top didn't suck), i went 2-6-15 (primary tank) and 7-2-8 (offtank).

he's such a great bruiser, able to wade in, stun everything, deal some crazy damage with tiger and phoenix stance, and then get out and heal up almost instantly with turtle. as i'm getting the hang of his abilities, i'm really learning how to build him in different situations, and i'm liking it. he's got so much versatility in the jungle, too - he can start with regrowth pennant, longsword, vampiric scepter, cloth armor, or dagger and be totally comfortable. i still need to try him in lane from level 1 as either melee DPS or tank (likely tank, since i'm terrible at judging timings in-lane for a melee DPS character), but either way he still winds up being an awesome ganker, has excellent staying power in the lane from turtle, and is easily able to chase anyone in the game, ghost or not.

i've never heard of or even seen an udyr in lane

i don't think its what he's meant for

It was recently popularized in the latest major LoL tourney. It's quite effective.

In more serious and important matters: I raise your funny vid for this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hPU9Ru1ftw

They nerfed the hell out of Turtle Stance this last patch, just to try and keep him out of lane.

He's not meant for laning, but with Turtle he can basically lane forever with no problems.

even with the nerf to his turtle stance - which returns way less mana now, not enough to sustain it indefinitely - he's still very viable in lane. i'm interested in trying him starting in lane with either a mana manipulator (if laning with a character with heavy mana requirements) or a meki pendant and two blue pots, and having him going back to grab philosophers stone and boots on his first back. since he can hop in the jungle basically whenever he pleases to regenerate mana and health, i think he'd dominate in the lane near the blue golem. he can get it without smite at level 1 without a leash, so i'm assuming that he could just sustain indefinitely either way.

laning him with any ranged AD carry would be domination, because he can just keep stunning and doing his DoT Q while the carry just pokes away.

i think this got posted already but it was worth watching again for the dunk'd blazblue song

also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrYsQ...eature=related

double edit: i've never played trundle but now i want to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N3lr...eature=related

the nidalee one had me laughing so hard.

OR....

laning with a zliean that already has a mana manipulator?

i sense an experiment coming on

zil would be a riot, because of udyr's stun/DoT from tiger stance combined with two zilbombs dealing stupid damage early and mid game. not to mention that udyr could lane and farm pretty hard. i outfarmed our teemo in lane, so it'd definitely be doable.

just had a great fiddles game, first with the pirate skin. went 18-13-19, with most of those deaths happening in teamfights where i'd crowstorm in, use zhonya's, and then immediately die. got a triple kill post-mortem, which was awesome. i spend 20% of the match dead, which was not awesome.

i had rabbadon's, zhonya's hourglass, rod of ages, rylai's, morello's, and sold my spellpen boots for a rod (ideally going towards void staff). i was well over 800ap, but i only had 319 movespeed =) i would stand in the middle of the map, wait for both teams to show up, and cacawcacaw into them. i had to use both ghost and flash to keep up with them, but i was doing 2000+ damage to everyone on their team except singed.

it was pretty hysterical. my team had to escort me around the map because i was going to be melted if i got attacked. if they got too close and udyr or nas got in first, though, it was insta-die for them. very fun, considering we got aced twice and almost didn't survive long enough to push back.

we got lucky, but it was a good game. survived early feeders to win, which always feels really good.

i just had a really good fiddles game too

then at the end of laning phase our vlad 1v1ed veigar and lost. 5 times

we ended up losing

Trying to branch out from Sona, I've been trying Lux out enjoying her quite a bit. It's nice being able to do a lot more burst damage, instead of Sona's small burst, then constnat sustain damage.

Also, apparently, Cait's, Nidalee's and Teemo's traps are bugged so that their AOE radius is rather extended. Karthus and Lux's AOE on their spells have also got a slight increase due to the bug. Cait's are rather noticeable, since she can effectively block jungle routes completely thanks to it.

that's not really a bug it's just riot being bad at programming

so ryze is the easiest character ever

pretty much build tear of the goddess and you're a monster by the end of the game the rest doesn't even matter

The rest does matter. The fact that most of the mana items in the game are defensive items makes him an absolute pain to deal with. I can honestly say he's one of my most hated mages to mid against.

(Especially since every time I play against a Ryze he always has that damnass Uncle Sam skin.)

Oh hi, my name is Ryze, I have an AA, and 5 RoAs. Good-bye.

on that note i bought him because he costs nothing and is sweet

my 3rd game my record was ridiculous

i'm not much of a mage player - my only AP carry is fiddles, who i play because he's a jungler - but i think that i'd like ryze. he's so obnoxiously dangerous if you are a melee character, because he can root, pop all his spells, and be gone by the time you can move again.

im the same way i actually don't play any other mages but if ryze is any indication maybe i should

thinking about giving soraka a try she's still pretty supporty

He's easy, but he has some weaknesses.

1. He's slow and fragile at the start.
2. He has no good pokes, and by that I mean that his ranges are quite short compared to other AP casters.
3. He has no stun, only a snare.
4. Both early and very late game he doesn't have a lot of utility.

Now, compare to a champ like Brand. Brand has just as much damage output with four very damaging nukes, including one AOE and two chaining AOEs. He also has a stun and a passive that makes his spells do % of max HP damage. Not to mention his ranges are outstanding, meaning he can out-poke almost any other champion. All other things equal, Brand will beat Ryze mid pretty handily, because Ryze has to move in to cast his spells whereas Brand can chip and burst him at range.

Or look at Morgana, who some don't even consider to be that powerful. She has a long-range nuke/snare with great AP scaling along with a massive AOE DOT which combined with the snare makes her a GREAT zoner. She's less susceptible to ganks because of the ranged snare and self-shield, which also gives her more utility. Her ult can AOE stun besides doing lots of damage. And so on and so forth.

I don't really think any champions in LoL are bad, with the exceptions of Dr. Mundo and Eve. But Ryze is a case where I think his lack of range, stun and scaling utility hurts him in relation to other APs.

Haha, well after seeing Zero wreck face with Twitch my faith was renewed in him. The thing is, even though his stealth is kinda useless and easily countered, he still has some nasty splash damage, big range and expunge. Eve can't do anything unless she's literally right next to you and even then her damage is single target and ultra low.

I feel this is the same way with Eve (because I feel she is still a solid hero but just takes a lot more effort to do what she used to) as well but as long as you are better than your opponent as long as you have stealth you're going to win. Twitch is honestly a pretty bad hero but he's takes less effort than say Sivir or Ezreal so that does give him an edge.

Don't you think Zero would have wrecked face even if he played Eve? I think you're confusing individual player skill with how viable a champion is. If a player can dominate with Twitch, I'm pretty sure they can dominate even more with 'top-tier' champions that fulfill a similar role.

In a vaccuum, no Champion is outright bad, but there's just a shitton of overlap in roles, and some Champions completely outperform others (like Annie/Orianna vs. LeBlanc)

The stealth update and the changes to his skills are going to make him quite strong, I think. Have you seen them yet? Shurelia previewed them on the forums a while back.

No, I actually think Eve is downright awful and wouldn't be able to do the same thing. Twitch is sort of a hypercarry in that if the enemy team is grouped up fighting your team, you can just walk to the edge of your range and ult away at really high attack speed and splash them with ultra strong attacks (and then Expunge.) With Eve you have to attack one person at a time.