That feel when a new champion tears your face off.

So after taking a short break from playing League of Legends, I return to Diana and Rengar. Such a nice way to welcome me back by stuffing two stupidly hard to deal with champions into the game. Riot are so wonderful, pumping out champions that are always above the bar to get you to splash out on some Riot points. At least they retain a semi-money-grubbing status instead of going full on EA games.

That feel.

Upon my first returning match of League, I pick Evelynn. As the loading screen appears, my friends decide to inform me that the opposing Diana and Rengar are going to eat me. Nothing I can do right? Blind pick, so I just have to suck it up and deal with it. I get dumped solo top against Rengar, with Diana ganking me every couple of minutes since level 2. Fun.

The worst part is not taking some time to research the new characters abilities before the match started. When you're up against somebody and you have no idea what kind of rape they will throw at you, sitting back and giving them some berth is the only logical option left. That, or play Yorick.

If you don't ward your own base, you're bad mkay.

Thank god they're giving Diana a nerf soon, her burst feels too high for someone with a fairly reliable shield ability. Getting hit by a fed Diana is more devastating than a fed Veigar or Leblanc, purely because you actually get to see Veigar and Leblanc actually land a couple of abilities on you before you die. With Diana, your screen goes grey and then the notification that she killed you appears.

As for Rengar, he's strong but looks quite balanced in the full scale of things. He has nice burst, a fair amount of utility and his clear speed looks pretty damn fast too. I haven't played against somebody who can use him properly yet though, so I shall reserve at least some judgement.

So what do you guys think about these two new champions? Balanced? Or stupid overpowered?

News update

So what's been happening this week at Riot?

They have finally announced the release of Jarvan IV, the long awaited Exemplar of Demacia. Xin Zhao is this guys bodyguard, so surely he's going to be overpowered. Here is the only picture that has been released of Jarvan, a long time ago. This is the only interesting news Riot have posted this week, apart from the various skin price reductions and summoner showcase.

He is allegedly a dps character, hence the giant spear. However, to me he looks like he could easily be implemented as another skin for Xin Zhao. Riot are going to have to be careful with his skills, or he could just end up as Xin mark II.

So what else happened this week? The european servers were horribly broken for the better part of the week, with countless chat and ingame errors. It seems to have cleared up now though, so congratulations EU players, it's a shame you had so much downtime.

I saw some freedom fighters on the EU forums who decided since their forums and client weren't working properly, they thought they could fix the problem by spamming the US servers until they broke down. This was pretty damn funny, because I can't see a grain of logic behind that inspired plan.

Derp.

The free champions of the week have inspired a lot of QQ on the forums throughout the week, namely about Irelia. I don't have any problem with her balance whatsoever, but since the casuals do; Irelia players buckle down for the incoming nerf.

Other than that, this week has been incredibly baaawring for LoL, maybe they've decided to keep some cards up their sleeve instead of drooling them all over the table which seems to be the usual plan.

I personally am working for a couple more interviews, so hopefully you'll get to see those in the next couple of days. Until then, have a good weekend folks, or what's left of it.

Patch Preview #4

So, the new preview is out, with a lack of video this time. Not that anyone really cares about that, nobody likes to hear the Riot devs talking crap anyway. Oh and a reminder to those that think I'm hating on Riot. I enjoy League of Legends, it's an excellent game that I've spent plenty of hours on.

But you can't consistently praise them, they aren't anyway near perfect, and there's plenty of pitfalls within the game that need to be changed. Besides, who reads a blog that thinks the sun shines out of Riot's arses anyway?

So, moving on. Let us take a look at what they have mentioned in this preview:

Survivability and Items

For this patch, we’re taking a look at survivability items that provide a ton of cooldown reduction. Due to the higher base damages of bruiser-style characters, this combination of CDR and damage mitigation was particularly powerful. We ultimately found that many items had excessively inexpensive CDR. With this in mind, we took a swipe at Spirit Visage, Frozen Heart, Glacial Shroud and Soul Shroud to bring these values more in line. This isn’t the only change to tanky DPS that we have in mind, and you can expect more comprehensive adjustments for a future patch.

Well, this doesn't seem like a very logical change to me. If the bruisers damage is too much with cooldown reduction, why not just reduce the bruisers damage at higher levels? What if a "none-bruiser" wants to stack CDR? It won't be as viable. I think instead of confronting the issue indirectly through the items, they should just nip the problem in the bud.

It's that time again. What's next? NERFS!


Champions Changes

Vladimir remains a problematic champion who -- while not explicitly overpowered -- nullifies a lot of meaningful interactions between players and tends to snowball more heavily than others due to the gold value multiplier of his passive. We reduced this value, along with making Sanguine Pool a little less of a “get-out-of-gank-free” card, while retaining its anti-focus-fire mechanic. This included some long-awaited bug-fixes to Sanguine Pool, which should affect his pre-level 6 tower diving.

The only change I see as justified here, is the sanguine pool nerf. Vlad can get out of anything with it, which isn't exactly fair, since if he plays cautious he's positively ungankable. The rest of the nerfs just seem a little overkill to me.Well, not overkill, it's the haters on the forums ruining a pretty balanced class. Vlad has been steadily nerfed since his release, and the only reason is he has this "get out of jail free card" on such a short cooldown.

Also, while we’d done some smaller nerfs to Rammus over the last couple patches, we decided to hit the speed on powerball by 15% in order to make his chase/CC combination a little bit less of a sure thing. We’ll be keeping an eye on this change over the course of the patch, and evaluating it to see if this has the intended impact.

Rammus has steadily been nerfed into the ground for the last month. To be honest, I hate that damn powerball, so I'm happy with this. Even so, a little overkill again. They should have done this earlier instead of the other nerfs. Rammus will still be banned in ranked, but I think that will be due to the past fear of him, instead of the present.

Anivia’s lane harass was proving too easy to pull off for too high of a reward. To address this, we increased the mana cost of pulsing (quickly activating and deactivating) Glacial Storm and lessening the slow duration. This will reward leaving it down longer a little more, but make her R-to-E lane harassment less of a free-be.

This change is very good, Bird, as I like to call her, is damn overpowered and needs a slap. I think she'll be recieving more than this over the next month, if only because of the forum QQ. What I dislike about Anivia, isn't the pulsing, it's more the incredible burst that she can pull off at low level. However, I don't think it should be changed, I believe Anivia is in a good stage right now, it's the other champs that need bringing up to her level. 

So, what's last but most definetly not least on Riot's preview?


Ryze: A Legend Reborn

Finally, we took time to give Ryze a needed overhaul, updating his design to make his gameplay more unique.
Ryze has always had a ton of burst damage potential, along with a repeatable, single-target. However even with a very powerful ultimate and a substantial amount of AoE damage he wasn’t reliable enough as a champion. Players didn’t have an incentive to select Ryze when alternatives such as Annie have a stronger upfront burst.
With Ryze we decided to attempt a new type of champion design: a ranged, caster-carry. We worked to turn him into a champion that dished out sustained DPS and has a powercurve similar to a standard ranged physical carry. In essence, Ryze would become the Ashe of magic.
In order to achieve this, we started by dropping the base damage of Ryze’s spells across the board. To compensate, we added scaling along a stat that increases with each level (in this case mana), since champions don’t gain ability power with level. Next, we reduced his cooldowns significantly, turning him into a sort of spell machine gun. Finally, we increased the range on his abilities in order to give him better options for kiting strategy.
Ultimately, we wanted to create a character that would thrill those players looking for a high skill-cap champion with an active, fast-paced play style.

When I read this, I raged. Why, you ask? BECAUSE RYZE IS ALREADY OFF HIS BOX! I hope this is a troll, I really do. Have you seen Ryze hit the enemy team with his ulti up? It practically kills the lot of them! I sense a disturbance in the force, because Ryze is the new jedi in town, and he's five Luke Skywalkers rolled into one. I wouldn't say he's unbalanced, he's one of the only mages without a skillshot though, which makes him very easy to play compared to the other mages.

I'm glad to see Riot kicking it up a notch and finally doing a revamp. They should be doing this more frequently!


So everyone, thoughts?