League of Legends: The New Thread

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In other news, Twitch is the best ban in every single MMR according to best bans.

Yes, but Nidalee is the best ban in every game where anyone wants to have fun.

The beauty of ten bans: you can ban them both and

still

get rid of Zed so that your ADC doesn't ragequit two minutes in.

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Unless your banning nidalee from your team there is no point.

39.5% win rate on Nidalee, and it only goes to 40.41% in plat and above.

Yup. Which doesn't make her any less aggravating, regardless of ELO. Champ is absolute cancer.

I did say "have fun" for a reason.

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My goal with ranked is to win, so I'm not banning a 40% win rate champion.

And frankly I don't see why Nidalee is considered unfun to play against.

Spammable, costless mobility and self-healing, mostly. She aggravates the hell out of me in any game she's in, whether I win or lose, because there's always going to be that one impossible escape, so I prefer to ban her across the board, ranked or otherwise. The tilt just isn't worth it.

Admittedly, this is just a pet peeve, and I don't expect others to share it. I also don't mind using a ban on her in ranked because I'm sitting in low Platinum, and if I can't carry out of there as whatever champion

against

whatever champion, then I don't think I deserved to climb in the first place.

I might feel differently about it if I were a solo laner, but as a jungle main, I don't really care too much about counterpicks. If one of my laners has a specific matchup they want to avoid, I'll ban it for them; if they don't, I just policy-ban Nidalee to save myself the tilt. Beyond that, I'm happy to let people play whatever. It's Plat. Doesn't matter what champion the enemy picked. I just have to wait for the inevitable screw-up.

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ADC teamfighting at high levels is difficult af

adc teamfighting at low levels is fairly hard. at silver people have figured out how to focus the adc but not to protect them. You basically have to do nothing but kite until someone ccs their divers ehich is usually 4 or 5 seconds.

Ehhhhh. I mean, I'm sure it's rough for Silver AD players, but that's why they're Silver.

For anyone higher than Silver, Silver teamfights are incredibly easy, whatever role you're in. They mostly just consist of people aping out and walking towards the enemy backline. Sometimes they'll Flash, or have a gapcloser, but that's really all it is. Once you recognize that this is what's happening, it's incredibly easy to just keep walking backwards and let them kill themselves walking through your constant barrage of attacks. This applies for AD players as much as anyone else - more so, I'd say, in fact, since kiting is the most absolutely fundamental skill to AD carries (other than CSing, obviously) and you really should be able to kite backwards without thinking about it.

Now, there are

other

problems that AD carry players have in Silver - mostly to do with no one knowing when or how to initiate a teamfight, or how to deal with snowballing assassins - but I wouldn't say teamfighting is particularly difficult there.

I should also mention: my most frequent duo partner is a Plat II AD carry main. His advice: Mercurial Scimitar is your best friend. He gets it as his third item on almost every ADC.

Now, whether or not that's particularly great advice for actual high-level play in, say, Diamond I, I couldn't tell you. Haven't been there. But it seems to work out pretty well down here in the trenches.

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You are a carry, it's

fine

to wait out threats. If you are the first or second in, you are in too soon. Get to a spot where you can shoot safely, then fire away, your single target damage is unmatched to the point where you can spend 4 or 5 seconds just getting the occasional bullet in on your closest assailant without getting the most of your attackspeed and still have a damage chart that will tell you you did your part. And it's silver, they say they focus the adc. They mostly focus the thing that is closest that they can hit. If you are in 3rd/4th, half the enemy team is too busy to notice you the first second you shoot them. It's fine to be patient.

This is very true.

The AD carry's job is not to be the first into the fight. It is also not to be the one who runs down the enemy carries. It is just to stay alive and keep autoattacking. You are about sustained damage, not picks.

In Silver, your team will whine about you attacking the tank and screech about "FOCUS ADC NOOB".

Your team is wrong.

So long as you are safe and autoattacking, you are doing your job. You do not have to run past the Renekton in your face to throw one auto at the Jinx on the other end of the river.

Now, there are times when you

can

do that, but that gets into tracking cooldowns and everything, and you really don't need to worry about that at a Silver level. For now, just focus on staying alive, but autoing as much as you can while staying safe. This very basic mechanical skill is enough to get you through Silver and up to, I'd say, somewhere around Gold I.

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what would it look like if a role were harder than the others?

Less ability to carry means fewer games won.

At anything but the highest ELO, this would probably be indistinguishable from statistical noise. At the very highest levels, though - Challenger, and maybe Master - you would see more players attaining that rank who mained strong roles and fewer players that mained weak ones.

If I remember correctly, the two roles that have the most representation in Challenger are AD carry and jungle, while support has the least - but it's been a while since I last checked, and it's a pain in the ass to do so. I don't think anyone actually maintains a list of how many people main each role in Challenger, so I just ended up trawling LOLking and writing it all down by hand. Wasn't that massive of a difference anyway, so it may also come down to the fact that there are just fewer support mains than AD carry mains.

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A brief trawl of the leaderboards indicates that the top fifty or so Challenger spots on the North American servers are pretty much top > jungle > AD carry > support = mid.

Granted, this is a very small sample, and the numbers will probably shift around if you were to look through all Challenger spots across all servers. But that's a very rough breakdown of the system as it stands at the moment.

It's also worth noting that, while there are more top laners than junglers there, the junglers tended to have the higher spots - but, again, small sample size.

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not really convinced by that reasoning

By what reasoning? That roles that can more easily carry will win more games, and thus get higher on the leaderboards, as player skill increases?

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i feel like focusing on the roles of the top challenger players only illuminates their skill ceilings not necessarily how easy it is to be effective with those roles - which sounds a lot like the meaning of skill floor?

Ah. We're asking two different questions.

I'm talking specifically about the skill ceiling for a given role, yes. The higher the skill ceiling, the more effective that role can be if you're good at it. If a certain role has a higher skill ceiling than others, then it's better able to carry assuming that all roles are played to their maximum potential. It would win more games at the highest levels of play, since, as the role with the highest potential, it would be the determining factor in more games than other roles. It would therefore occupy more spaces in the Challenger ladder, like I said.

On the other hand, if a certain role has a higher skill

floor

, like you said, it would... honestly be extremely hard to tell. Down in the levels of play where skill floors matter, players are so universally terrible that you can't really distinguish between what losses are due to "this role is hard" rather than "this player is just bad".

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i feel like you're misdefining skill ceiling a little too
the assumption that other roles are played to their maximum potential isn't really part of the concept

I'm aware. I didn't say that it was. My point is that, at higher levels of play - the upper end of Challenger, say - you can safely assume that they will be. That's why they're in Challenger.

Which means that, again, the role with the highest skill ceiling - that is, the role with the most impact when played to its maximum potential - will be the determining factor in more games, and thus win more, and thus turn up more consistently on the ladder.

It's not the

definition

of skill ceiling. It's just a logical consequence of it.

Of course, this is a deliberate simplification, and there are other matters to consider, primarily when it comes to metagame. Thresh has a much higher skill ceiling than Alistar, for example, but there are times when Alistar is a more consistently powerful support pick than Thresh because of the meta. The carry potential of various roles can be expected to shift as the metagame does; sometimes top lane is a carry position, and other times it's a tankfest. Sometimes mid is utility-focused and sometimes mid is assassin-focused. And so on.

That's just really more detail than I have the time or inclination to go into when trawling the leaderboards, is all. So I gave the simple explanation.

yah
one other problem strongly limiting research is that highly skilled players play with totally different people than less skilled players
it might be better to ask questions about role efficacy/easiness for each tier rather than overall

Generally, I'd say that, if you're looking to carry in low-level games, go top, AD carry, or jungle, in that order. And preferably an AD damage dealer or bruiser.

Top is an island. If you work on your mechanical skill, you can basically just dumpster your opponent in the Rage In The Cage matchup, snowball the lane, and shove down towers all day. AD carry is the same thing, but slightly more team-dependent. Jungle is still more team-dependent, but can work the same way. Alternately, if you're absolutely determined not to do the carrying yourself, jungle has access to a lot of tanks or utility champions who can still absolutely wreck house in teamfights (hello, Ivern).

Mid and support tend to be more difficult to win low-level games with. Support isn't strictly harder than the other roles, but it does require an entirely different skillset and frame of mind to play effectively. Mid, meanwhile, is usually AP, and just doesn't push all that hard with most champions.

And that's the main thing. In low-level solo queue, it really doesn't matter what role you're in so long as you can push towers. Pushing wins games, and at that level, nobody really knows how to stop you from doing it. If you can reliably get two or three kills up and then just start knocking down towers, no one's really going to stop you.

Rammus jungle 4/0/11 is A-. WTF rito

Post-game ranking is pretty heavily weighted by farm. Gank-heavy junglers tend to get lower scores in that regard.

It's weird, but if I remember correctly, Riot has said that they're looking at ways to address this. Same thing for supports.

Now, whether or not they actually will, and whether or not it will actually work if they do, is another question entirely. But there you go.

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A lot of people complain about their favorite roles being frustrating. Hell, I complain about jungle being frustrating sometimes because, in some games, your lanes just get completely dumpstered. All of them. Forever. And there's really nothing you can do to salvage the game when your lanes are 0/4 across the board before fifteen minutes, no matter how many ganks you get off or how hard you powerfarm.

ADCs do tend to say that they're frustrated a little more than other roles, but I think that's due to a combination of the role being kind of binary by design and the low-level players not really being good at executing it.

AD carries are, by design, vulnerable if they get caught. If someone gets close to them, they are in danger; if someone gets

on top

of them, they're probably going to have to Flash at minimum, and are more likely just dead outright. This means positioning is key. If you have good positioning, you're going to enjoy playing AD carry. If you don't... well, suddenly

everyone on the enemy team

can get on top of you, consistently and repeatedly, and you're going to get frustrated.

Since low-level players have bad positioning almost by definition, this means that a lot of low-level AD carry players are going to get very frustrated very often. This is multiplied by the fact that low-level AD carry players also don't really understand the concept of peel, and tend to blame their teams for them simply getting caught out. Granted, there

are

times when your team should peel for you and doesn't (they're low-level too), but it's much more often, at Silver and below, just a case of you being in a bad spot.

So... yeah. Sort of an inherently frustrating role, for low-level players. The role's primary weakness is that it relies on good positioning and kiting to stay alive, which low-level players can't do. Meanwhile, champions like Darius and Olaf

thrive

and are much less frustrating at low levels, because their primary weaknesses generally revolve around getting kited, which no one knows how to do.

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A lot of people complain about their favorite roles being frustrating. Hell, I complain about jungle being frustrating sometimes because, in some games, your lanes just get completely dumpstered. All of them. Forever. And there's really nothing you can do to salvage the game when your lanes are 0/4 across the board before fifteen minutes, no matter how many ganks you get off or how hard you powerfarm.

i get flamed for lanes getting fucked as a jungler probably 25% of the time in high plat

i should just play fucking yi or something and powerfarm while spam pinging people. at least i wouldn't have the stress of explaining to people that i can't do shit if they die every 2 mins

> tfw starting your initial clear and your top lane dies before you've taken your first buff
> tfw they tp back to lane and immediately die again
> tfw they flame you for writing their lane off as lost when they die a third time just as you finish your initial clear

p much why i have this avatar really

jungle flashbacks

worse than nam

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thanks for the advice! I think that my biggest issue is always wanting to kill people in a fight rather than just output damage.

No problem. It's a weird idea for a lot of new players; the idea that your goal isn't necessarily to outright kill your opponents is a bit counterintuitive. But it's true. The AD carry's job isn't to secure kills, though if you can do so

safely

you absolutely should. Your job is to put out as much damage as possible and stay alive. That's really it.

Keep in mind that, if you die, it becomes much harder for your team to take objectives. Unless there is another champion on the team who really puts out good sustained physical damage, preferably at range, it's very,

very

difficult to siege down a tower without your AD carry, and taking objectives like Baron and Elder Dragon can be pretty difficult as well depending on team comp.

Survival is generally priority number one. This is kind of a good rule for any role, not just AD carry, but AD carries in particular need to be mindful of it.

(This is part of why Ivern is so strong right now. Once he's built Redemption and Athene's, his ability to keep people alive is almost unmatched, and he can absolutely thrash people in teamfights with his constant crowd control. He's

incredibly

good at peeling. It's very hard to die with a decent Ivern on your team.)

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I should just learn to jungle.

> implying you have to learn shit to jungle

son

i

got to plat jungling

a dead rat with a keyboard could do this

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isn't camille just lissandra if she were raised in the mafia instead of the tundra

also +5 to

H I P S