BardicKnowledge

Count me in for this whenever I can -- great idea!

You're out of luck, as the roster is known. Guile/Charlie sucks in VS games anyway though, dunno why you'd want him.

Assuming that you have top and the two on your side, I agree. If you ninja cap a far point for 3, you should actively be trying to cap/trade for the top point, as IMO two (your) side + top is the ideal grouping to hold.

I'm back at 7:30 my time and will be playing a TON of games -- <3 dominion.

Edit: Up top because it's more important than my agreement and happiness that Flash sucks below. In case others weren't aware, the improved jungle buff Utility mastery works for Dominion quests, shield, and the movespeed shrines. Therefore almost every single character should take both points in it -- this is why some characters are beat you to windmill even when you burn your ghost early. Flash's most important use, as escape mechanism, just isn't important in Dominion. Flash away through that wall? Good, then I've got this point -- cheers. Because people won't (or at least shouldn't) bother to chase you, Flash becomes really worthless very quickly -- just disengage and you're home free 80% of the time, assuming you broke off the fight at 40% HP or more.

The map is so small that imo CV is a waste of time. Garrison allows for so much more offense on the point that if you play a character designed to engage the enemy (Irelia, Xin Zhao, Twitch, etc) then imo you should be running it. This ties into the most important concept for Dominion... The single worst thing you can do in Dominion is have one of those stalled out fights around a point the enemy controls while they are ahead. If you see two people at a point and cannot _immediately_ dive them, go somewhere else and don't waste time. Edit: In case you (like me) usually play these games with your music off, do yourself a favor and listen to the Dominion music in game sometime...or here at

What are people running for summoner skills? I think that Garrison is more useful overall than Promote. On defense garrison is obvious -- on offense, Garrison lets anyone dive a tower and get kills. Promote is okay but not great. Similarly, Ignite ramps down much quicker, making Exhaust look better on many heroes. The arguments for Ghost over Flash are all in favor of Ghost here, though I would argue that if you need to burn Ghost to a point in time you probably were in the wrong place to begin with...except at the very start, where two ghosted people charging the windmill is very powerful. Also, another new topic to discuss: How do people like the Dominion-specific items? Prospector's items are good, I've been starting the Blade on anyone that can make use of it. On Irelia and Xin Zhao I really like Ionic Spark early, followed by Entropy for big damage. On anyone who is best played as a point-sweeper, Priscilla's Blessing is easily the best item. You'd be surprised how much faster it makes you at capping, and saving 2 seconds is usually the difference between stealth capping and only getting 80%. What new items are other people using? Lightbringer and Hextech Sweeper seem only worth getting against two or more invis heroes...

I think that Tastosis and Seth Killian are the best commentators on their respective games, with Day9 and James Chen just beneath them (but still good). One point that will eventually have to happen: The best commentators are often not top players. Get people in there for their ability to speak clearly and make a game exciting, not because they happen to click the mouse / move the joystick around the best. (Of course, they have to know their stuff, but that's a separate issue).

I find the beginning of each of those games boring, but it quickly picks up as laning / getting to 11 supply ends. Is it just the beginning you have issue with or the whole game? Edit: Similarly, level 1 fights and all-ins are super exciting early on.

Gradius V is well worth your time to track down, incidentally -- it's better balanced than III, and has the fun factor that IV lacks. After you finish the first loop you unlock all of III's weapon options to utilize also Edit: The ways it uses the options is also extremely slick.

Honestly, amumu is a smart ban -- he should definitely be in people's top three bans every game. Then, because tanky DPS seems to be the best overall character archetype, we see people like cho, rammus, garen, lee sin, and xin zhao (in order roughly) banned. Time to learn a hard AD/AP hero, prophet?

A fair point, and one I agree with you on, though 3rd Strike is still worth comparison. The big difference is that you have to block in SF3 to win; blocking in DoA is basically non-existant since you should just try to grab every single hit.

Third Strike and parrying says hi.

What really differentiated Morrowind from Oblivion for me is that when you leave the prison in Oblivion, everyone is cordial towards you, you can immediately join whatever faction you want, etc. In Morrowind, you are shit. Literally, people walk by you, glare, and say: "Scum." Similarly, if you show up at a Telvanni town, not only do the quest givers treat you like a dog (if that), but so do the townspeople. In Vivec and Mournhold, the guards also treat you like you are about to stab someone -- this is refreshing from having every single guard sound helpful and innocent. Racial differences are a huge deal in Morrowind -- in Oblivion I feel like it's never brought up. That Dunmer blacksmith treats me the same as any other one, which was strange to me after playing Morrowind. Hopefully Skyrim addresses this...

If you counter well enough you can play as anyone and just destroy -- what makes DoA unique is how much it favors defensive play (due to the strength of the counter, especially as a ninja).

Voted for you, as more tenors need to make the top 20 for sure. Best of luck!

Glad to see this -- imo SCIV's music was a letdown, and the release of the (vastly superior) SC1 music as DLC kinda makes me think that the dev team didn't think highly of the score either.

Tensei, that article definitely shows some bias: First of all, it's hard to argue that more action in lane with more casting isn't more exciting than less casting (putting other lane mechanics such as denying aside). Second, the vast majority of the champions that use energy or raw cooldowns are very well balanced to do so -- otherwise we'd be seeing all ninja + Garen teams in competitive play and we don't. He makes no mention of the idea that the champions aren't totally broken by a mechanic that differs from DotA. This is a _good_ idea that LoL has to prevent snowballing, something the entire genre suffers from greatly. Why attack it solely because it's different? Tablet of Command says hi, not to mention using a blink dagger to get yourself out when you see trouble coming before you get snared. I agree with some overall point that Flash needs to be toned down (Cleanse is also under assault here, but doesn't seem as big of a deal), but the idea of saying HoN/DotA offers no escape mechanics is a biased way of presenting the information since he doesn't provide sufficient context. This I largely agree with, though there are _definitely_ some neat tricks you can do by utilizing the brush, especially in combination with Ghost or Flash. I'd say that the ability to cut down trees only rarely comes into play -- it's the LoL equivalent of brush-juking by running out the way you came in, and works about as well (which is to say you get a slight gain from point blank, and if you were going to make it out anyway then you're just being needlessly fancy). He doesn't consider the concept that no buybacks in LoL makes every fight count for more, since you can't ever just have enough gold to respawn. While I like the buyback concept, it's MUCH easier to lose two guys and get over-run in LoL than it is in HoN because if you lose a carry in LoL, they aren't coming back even with 500 ck. I agree that LoL's heroes suck overall compared to HoN and DotA, but it's interesting to me that he list the Anivia (from LoL) egg mechanic as something unique and interesting to DotA. On summoner spells, he mentions that Ghost, Cleanse, Flash, and Exhaust are escapes. If you use Ghost and Exhaust to get out of a problem, then you can't use them to gank, which is what they're for. Flash the same but more problematic as it does create ungankable situations (unlike the others), and Cleanse is well balanced for LoL imo and can't be used offensively, so you're giving up a bunch of power by taking it. Team composition is more versatile mostly as a result of lack of differentiation amongst the hero pool in LoL. Worth mentioning that not every team takes a healer. Lane compositions he pretty much nails it, LoL is well behind there and there's no defending it. I could potentially see running 1-2-1 + jungle as a means of disrupting a particularly dangerous mid hero, but you've gotta be able to fight for dragon. On rune spawns vs. jungle buffs, it is outright comical to see him defending random chance as part of a competitive game. Not saying that LoL is outright superior here, but not recognizing this as biased at best is outrageous. He also ignores the fact that a good team will prevent opponents from getting buffs -- stealing blue early is very common even at our pub level, about as common as fighting over the 2:00 rune is. Regarding denying and last hitting he defends DotA/HoN's variable damage, which is thankfully being addressed by DotA 2 (not to mention LoL). This is also biased and just stupid on his part. I do agree that the denying mechanic makes laning more interesting though, even as its removal makes gameplay more inviting to new players. Creep pulling is an awesome mechanic -- I'm surprised that you can't do that with golems in LoL, but you can't and therefore there is an element of gameplay complexity that simply doesn't exist there for the worse. Good observation by him. Ganking is more viable in HoN/DotA than in LoL but not for the reasons he mentions. It's not so much about the dearth of entrances but instead about tower damage (which he does say but does not focus on). Bringing up Striders is stupid when the exact same item exists in LoL. The debate about wards is interesting because he mentions that LoL wards last only 1/2 the time that HoN/DotA wards do. He does not mention that they also cost less to make up for it. I do agree that Oracle is cheaper than it should be, and taking up an inventory slot is a big deal. Dropping on death is NOT a big deal, since 90% of the time you're going to destroy the Gem when you get it (which is the same as having the effect end on death). LoL doesn't have nearly the carry structure that HoN/DotA do -- this is more because everyone continues to be viable due to AP scaling than to the idea that you can keep someone down due to killing them. Whether this is good or bad comes down to team structure, where we already agree than HoN/DotA provide more options (all pusher teams, etc). LoL is currently much bigger than HoN, and I don't see that changing. It also features newer prize pools, information that was available to this author but obviously he chose to not include it to make his point look better. I would agree with his overall point that DotA is the most competitive atm, incidentally. Having to buy heroes/runes does not strongly effect anyone I've seen at level 30. Complaining about this is a joke -- get over it, and get used to the new payment model (which isn't paying at all, necessarily!) Overall, a decent writeup but one with obvious biases against LoL that are inserted for no reason.

Jill is my favorite of the female vocalists -- there's a dude in the top 10 that has a good idea running call and response to the piano sound. Interesting take on it -- I think my ideal would be the essence of his material but having Jill sing it.

Voted -- safe travels to both of you this week!

I don't think the items do enough. The only extremely interesting active ability on an item that I can think of atm is Shurelya's, which gives a big speed burst to the team. Where are activated effects -- Stormspirit, Tablet, Hex, Kuldra's, Astrolabe, etc.? They are on summoner spells kinda (Heal, Ignite fill these types of roles) but more things like them would be great. Tablet (the ability to push characters around the map) seems like an especially big gap...there's nothing more fun than jumping the river.

More interesting to me than who wrote what is what unique stylistic elements emerge as part of the collab that don't appear on other tracks. The bass on Buzzsaw (especially during the bridge section as the Pac-Man cameo makes its appearence) is one of those things, for instance.

Very true. The game mechanics limit how varied heroes can be though, since roaming and ganking is not really viable. I'd like to see a hero with a long 4-5 second channeled disable e.g. Electrician or Polly -- I think it would add a lot.

How do you unlock the two hidden chars?

They had better include FFX _and_ FFX-2, as I'm not paying for both of them separately again. Similarly, without International features (and then some!) I will also pass. The graphics are good enough that new textures won't wow me in the way that 3D FF6, or HD FF7 would, so that will not be nearly enough.