LoL Talk: First Ranked Games

I hadn't played any ranked until recently for a variety of reasons.  First, I couldn't be bothered to buy the necessary Champions.  Second, all that wait time before a game begins.

This past week I played some duo queue ranked with my friend Glyphic21.  Overall, a sad experience.  Ranked is a lot like normals, except with exponentially increased whining.

Winning and losing hardly matters to me. Starcraft beat that out of me long ago. I play individual games for the purpose of improving/practice.  Oh, and fun. A particular ranked loss isn't going to ruin anyone's lives, but you'd hardly notice that with some of the attitudes on display.

I was whined to about my performance by people with more than 6 deaths.  I was accused of going AP Ezreal because I had the 30 AP from Trinity Force.  Bloodthirster and Last Whisper must be standard AP Ezreal, then, because those were my other items.

I was told I should dive the enemy ADC in team fights, again, as Ezreal.  While an enemy Vi licked her lips and dared me to try it.  This was by our jungler, a bruiser.

So Ranked: a long setup time whine fest.  I'm determined to make it work, though, since it's probably the best avenue for improvement.

Osu Passive Health Drain

I've played some of the mouse game Osu, and I really cannot understand why passive health drain exists.  It doesn't make sense.

In Osu, the little failure meter, you know, the thing on Guitar Hero that you have to keep above a certain threshold, constantly goes down.  Whether you miss notes or not.

This serves no purpose but to be infuriating.  The bar goes down as the song continues anyway if you miss notes, there's no reason for it to just go down for nothing.

All it serves to do is punish you for breaks in songs.  That's right, it just takes it to you because the song has pauses.  You have to recover from a loss simply because there weren't that many notes in a section.

Games shouldn't punish the player for no reason at all. It just makes me give your beatmap a low rating. Stop with the fake difficulty, Osu's hard enough. People can use the mods if they want a stupid challenge.

LoL Talk: Vamp Scepter Rush

As my last post indicated, I usually play ADC.  That just because I like to play Ezreal, rather than particularly enjoying the ADC role.  Still, since I play Ezreal the most, and he is predominantly an ADC, I need to look into how that role works from time to time.

You'll notice that many ADC rush Vamp Scepter.  It's a sustain item with a bit of AD.  The main benefit of it as a first buy is to allow you to stay in lane longer than someone who doesn't have one.  For high ranking ADC, this is a standard first buy.

Me, I haven't been rushing it.  That may possibly explain some of my ranked performance of late, but I'm not entirely convinced that you MUST have a vamp scepter for the laning phase.  As in, your very first buy along with boots.

I'm going to start getting it, to see what the difference is.  However, I'll only buy it when I'm starting to fall a bit behind.  To me, that makes the most sense when looking at the sustain it provides.  Sustain is a form of defense, and if you're overwhelming them with your attacks anyway, you won't need too much of it.

Otherwise, I'm going to continue with Triforce, although I may start getting Sheen before Phage.

LoL Talk: My Ezreal Build

I said I was going to start this series yesterday, but that didn't happen.  Instead, we're going to start it off today with what I build on Ezreal and why.

A disclaimer first.  I'm terrible at League of Legends.  I have, however, spent the vast majority of my few hundred games playing Ezreal as an ADC.  I've played him in other positions too, but that's not my focus here.  I get a bit of pushback on my build in more than a few games, so I'm just going to outline why I build some of the things that I do.

Triforce

This pick gets the most people riled up by far.  Most ADC don't get this item, so most just assume it's a lackluster buy.  Truly, this item isn't the best on most ADC, but that has nothing to do with Ezreal in particular.

Triforce offers a lot of different stats.  In particular, the Sheen AP, mana, and spell blade don't work on all ADC.  Meanwhile, it is great on Ezreal.  The spell blade passive gives a huge damage boost to Mystic Shot, Ezreal's harass and poke tool, as well as a major source of burst damage when building AD.

This boost, provided you can hit your Mystic Shot, outperforms most other common ADC buys on Ezreal.

Blood Thirster

A common pick on ADC, but still bears explanation, particularly when compared to Blade of the Ruined King.  These two items are actually quite similar when it comes to their stats.  Blade is more effective on ADC that scale well with attack speed.

While Ezreal gets quite a bit out of attack speed, he gains more from the raw AD of Blood Thirster.  In fact, it only takes a moderate amount of stacks for it to surpass Blade's damage.

The numbers support Blood Thirster, as long as the other team doesn't have particularly fed tanks.  In that case, Blade's % damage may be the better route.

I'll be putting up more League content worth discussing as I come across it.

The Twilight Zone

Woof.

There, now that that's done, we can talk about the first twilight section.  It's pretty straightforward, really.  You have to work your way through a few obstacle courses as wolf Link.

Down The Drain

The sewers are pretty unremarkable, as they always are.  This section just serves as an introduction to wolf Link and what he can do.  Short answer: not a lot.  Besides his incredibly context sensitive jumping powers, he's more or less a downgrade from regular old Link.

The emphasis here is on navigation.  You have to find tucked away little holes and switches to progress for a bit, then you run around on the roof for a while.  Some combat is on display, but it's quite easy to avoid fights due to wolf Link's speed.

So, linear segement with emphasis on the "where do I go?" question.

A couple of people have told me this section lost their interest, and I understand that sentiment.  It's a stale section, with the main reward being getting out of it.

Story-wise, important, though.

Let There Be Light

Then, you gather light tears (or something) in the forest.  Could be nonlinear: "find these things in whatever order," but suffers from Faron Woods being a linear area anyway.

Maybe these tear missions get better.  I can't remember for the life of me. It's hard to quantify, but this was far less interesting than saving the kids, even though they're the same quest if you strip away the context.

Let this be a lesson: the more impactful the thing is, the more rewarding it will be to find.

Still More on the Way

I really held off on the Skyward Sword comparisons again.  They were glaring me in the face, but don't belong in this post.

Twilight Princess is a long game, so more of these articles are coming up.