zircon

That's what I mean though! You won even though they were fed. This can happen because people forget how to actually win the game. Lategame, positioning and map awareness is so important. Their 15-0-10 Akali or Tryndamere getting caught or not being in a teamfight at minute 50 might seal the deal.

People forget that the game isn't about kills. It's not about your ratio. It's not about how hard you ganked, or how bad your team is feeding. It is about destroying the opponent's nexus. It is possible to pull out games with a 15-20 kill lead, sometimes even worse. It's also possible for the kills to be even but the game to be completely one-sided since one team might be getting all the buffs, pushing towers, getting dragon/baron and farming way harder. Thus I am almost never in favor of surrender.

Still filling out runepages? Check out the Tier2 Quintessences during this Halloween event. You can get some pretty fantastic runes (almost as good as Tier 3) for ~500 IP each.

Wow, a big congrats! Amazing what the internet + talent can do for people.

Their Maokai got over 30 kills If not for him, we would have won, I think.

The difference is that all your skills are tied to the positioning of an object other than yourself. So, you have to manage your position relative to the ball, and the ball's position relative to who you want to hit. Since the ball doesn't travel instantly, this also requires some leading. If you need to shield an ally, you're potentially disrupting your offensive capability unless that ally also happens to be exactly where you want to attack. Likewise, unlike other casters, you can't use your Q to nuke an area way in front and then your W to nuke one way in back. You have to think about things a little more.

Have you ever played Orianna? She's not that easy, though I would say champs like Brand, Morgana and Lux are all slightly harder (due to having linear skillshots.)

I think all the champions in the game are viable... though Mundo is so bad he's practically in a tier of his own. Player skill has more to do with winning than what champion you pick, but that doesn't mean there aren't differences in champion effectiveness.

My first big jump in mixing ability, where I reached a professional level (eg. my music could be licensed and used in productions w/ no further work), was after about 2 years of music making. It was a combination of collaboration with tefnek (observing his techniques), better listening equipment (headphones) and critical listening to other tracks for comparison. I've improved since then but it has been more gradual.

Check my ELO bro: 1334! Also, wow. I just played with a Tryndamere in Ranked that went 23-1-10 or so. I've never seen anyone do that well in a non-bot game. It was unreal; he had a near-perfect creep score too in the first ten minutes (~80).

Wow, very cool, particularly the track right after the middle point with the very jazzy piano and chord progressions. Love that stuff.

But in the meantime, fill out your rune pages with Tier 1. They are about half as good as tier 3, at 1/10 the price.

It will get better as you level up, as you can get Mana per 5 second runes (or MP/5 per level) and mana masteries. You shouldn't need more than Philosopher's Stone and Frozen Heart for mana. There's no harm in backing out to the fountain, especially later in the game where you're not really laning much anyway. You shouldn't upgrade Philo stone for awhile as you get a lot of gold from that (Kage's Lucky Pick or Heart of Gold are also good options.)

Agreed, he definitely does not need that much mana. I usually run caster runes and masteries with Alistar, which gives you about 10-20 extra mp/5, 5% extra mana pool, etc. Like Cho'gath, it's not too useful to stack tank items, runes or masteries because he is so innately tanky. You generally benefit more from aura items (like Tensei said), Sheen and pure AP. Edit: Both Manamune and Archangel's give you way more mana than you need, which is why I wouldn't recommend it on him. He is also NOT an auto-attack hero and does not need AD. None of his skills scale off AD. If you stack AP instead (Rabadon's Deathcap being the prime item) then all of your skills and his passive are benefited.

Merged offtopic thread with Community thread. Also, I don't think him working really hard had much to do with it... cancer does not discriminate

Yeah, I think runes & masteries are great. It's simply a balance issue. There is a legitimate choice of runes in most builds, though reds are obviously one-sided (armor pen is basically always better, mpen is a no-brainer for casters.) Masteries are more imbalanced, with the defense tree being sort of underpowered and the utility tree being really strong. Like Brad said, I think it's interesting to try an all-AP/offense Morgana vs. a tanky Morgana with HP/armor/MR runes instead of AP/CDR and mana regen.

Sure, but once you hit 30 don't you generally play against other 30s anyway? I guess I'm about to find out.

Level doesn't need to be an indicator of skill because that's what ELO is for. Level is just a measure of how much time you've played. I'm sure that does have some kind of correlation to player skill, but obviously time played is not the same thing as wins v losses, which is what ELO measures.

I'll play.

It's fine to 4-cap if you've just killed a bunch of them and you're applying pressure to build up an advantage. The reason why you shouldn't just sit on 3 is because of quests. Getting a quest point is a huge bonus and can turn the tides. Additionally, sometimes the enemy overcommits to a given point and you can capitalize on their mistake by capping 1-2. It is very hard to win by doing nothing but turtle.

Too squishy IMO. I've found that in Dominion, you need to have champs that can 1v1 very well. Almost none of those champs can, if any of them. Karthus (along with Heimer, Anivia, Gragas) are better at 1v2 or 1v3 where they're not gonna win, but they'll hold people off for awhile. Ideal composition *from my experience* is: * 1 very strong defender (Karthus, Heimerdinger, Anivia, Gragas, Vladimir is good also) * 3 fighters (tanky DPS, bruisers, assassins.. a strong mix), one of whom should have strong disruption (AOE like Gangplank, Akali) * 1 highly mobile capper (Rammus, Singed, Master Yi, Teemo, Zilean) that won't be totally useless 'lategame'. Pure MS builds don't work against competent teams so Dunk Yi and MS Teemo/Zil are basically out. You need to be able to survive.

That just sounds like an intense phaser with lowpass filter and a bit of manual panning.

Yeah and probably throw in some AD/AP quints too. You just want to hit the breakpoints for her passive to kick in ASAP.

This is a great idea. All FL users should check this out!

What do you have now Brad? Here are the most important ones imo: Red: Magic pen, armor pen Yellow: MP/5 per level, flat armor Blue: Magic resist per level, cooldown reduction Quints: Movespeed, flat HP, armor pen Other good ones: Red: Flat AD Yellow: Dodge, HP/5 per level Blue: AP, AP/level Quints: Flat AP, AP/lvl Of these I have full T3 magic pen, AD, mp/5 per level, armor, mr/level, ap/level and 2/3 MS quints.