To LoL or not to LoL

So due to several reasons, I feel motivated to write this:

1) League of Legends is down. wtf.
2) Procrastinating is the best way to tin-foil hat all the stress from an upcoming cs midterm.

TODAY WE GON TALK BOUT DIS GAEM RITE ERE:

So basically it’s a MOBA – a multiplayer online BATTLE ARENA. SOUNDS COOL AMIRITE.

So as of right now, pretty sure the known vutalers known to play this is Pirkid, Arladerus, Dustin, FunnyFroggy, Lithium, and like another person I can’t remember. :/ Oh and me. Which is pretty much all of vutales at this point.

SO ESSENTIALLY THE GOAL OF THIS GAME IS TO WORK WITH 4 OTHER PEOPLE, AND DESTROY THEIR NEXUS.

But because it’s teamplay, on some bad days, you have to deal with crap like this:
Yes, a 9gag post. dealwithit.jpg

SO WHAT I RECOMMEND IS
1) PLAY WITH US
2) FIND OTHER FRIENDS TO PLAY WITH

or otherwise, solo q (meaning you find games, and play by yourself) is real terror. Meaning you’ll get stressed out, flamed at, abused, slapped, kicked down, punched in the gut, kicked in the balls, or all of the above. It’s pretty bad.

It doesn’t mean that you consistently need 4 other people to play with. In fact, one other person is often the best result. Or 2 other people. I find that the chances of losing grows if you play in a premade 5, especially if one or two of your 5 is not up to par in terms of skill level.

Anyway, enough about that, let’s move on to the core mechanics.

The basic premise of the game is fairly simple, you select a champion, right click to move it to an area, left click to select any targets after pressing keys. This is usually the method to use skills, unless you smartcast, which means you hover your mouse button over the other person and press the skill, and it will automatically try to cast it for you, if it’s in range, etc.

As of right now, there’s 99 champions, with the 100th champion coming -soon-.

Champs are divided roughly into 5 distinct areas, but a champion may excel in more than one area.

We have the following:

AP Carry – Ability power carry, or mages, such as:

Ryze, a very standard mage.

In the current META-GAME (commonly accepted anyway), AP (Ability Power, in layman terms: magic) casters belong in the MIDDLE lane. Some may prefer to go top lane, although that’s rare in North America.

AP casters scale the best with levels – the stronger (more leveled up) their spells, the more damage they do. Items help with their damage.

The top lane is where you will usually see AD/AP bruisers. There are exceptions, but most are melee, with a gap-closer/escape, a crowd control skill, and some form of steroid. These champions are inherently/to be built tanky, and is meant to stick to the opposing teams heavy damage dealers, either the fed AP or AD carry.

Top lane: Renekton

AD carry, or Attack-Damage carry, belongs in the bottom lane. Because of the nature of AD carries, they scale the best with items. The more attack damage they have, the more sustained damage they deal, as opposed to AP casters, who can often deal high amounts of burst damage. Since AD carries are so squishy and often don’t have strong escaping skills, they usually lane with some type of support character. Support characters are exactly what they sound like – their job is to peel for the AD carry, disrupt the enemy team, and alert the team on objectives.

Example of a standard AD carry: Ashe

Supports ward/counter ward the map, giving vision of key areas, which prevents mostly plays made by the jungler. The support also -should- peel for the ad carry at all times, disrupt the enemy team with crowd control, support teammates with shields, heals, summoner spells, etc.

Janna, master support:

The Jungler is usually a melee bruiser that kills neutral camps of minions that won’t attack a champion unless engaged upon. There’s a jungle on either side, with 2 important BUFF camps that either grant mana regenration + cool down reduction, or basic attack slow + burn damage per second. These buffs usually decide early game. There’s also 2 major neutral monsters, each unique. There’s the Drake/Dragon, a neutral monster that, if killed, grants 190 gold +25 to the person that killed it, to each member of the killing team. Then there’s Baron Nashor, a monster that is very hard to kill, but once killed grants 300 gold/member and a buff that gives % based attack, armor, and mana regeneration.

A very good jungler: Lee Sin

There are towers on each of the lanes, and they get stronger with each tower. There’s 3 towers that must be destroyed before the inhibitor becomes “naked”, and can be taken down to buff all minions in that lane, as well as spawn super-creeps, minions that have very high hp and attack damage.

Goal of the game is to take down the inhibitors, then destroy the NEXUS turrets, and finally the enemy nexus to win the game.

To help you on this quest, you must last-hit creeps/minions for extra gold. Gold allows you to buy items from the store, usually to to upgrade your base stats, or for unique passives/actives that you can use in teamfights.

1 more 9gag post on teamfighting

So essentially, most characters come down to their ‘r’ ability. R is an ultimate skill, a skill that can only be leveled up at 6, 11, and 16. Each iteration makes the ability more powerful, but level 6 is where an entire teamfight could change because an ultimate was used. Some are very powerful, such as the AP caster mage Karthas – whose ultimate deals a set amount of magic damage to all alive enemy members, a very powerful finisher and easy to land ultimate (impossible to miss unless you are disrupted while you are channeling the skill).

Oh, and when you kill other champions you get bonus gold. You also get bonus from assists (meaning you helped kill a champion but you did not deal the finishing blow).

If you die you get one death and contribute to the enemies gold count. Dying consecutively without killing any other champions will lower your bounty/worth – making it less and less worthwhile to kill you.

Good scores usually revolve around your role. Tanks/Supports should have few kills ~1-5, with a high ratio of assists and relatively as few deaths as possible. In the case of squishy supports, they often should have no deaths at all.

AP carries revolve around high risk high reward plays, and should have a high–kill but also high–death ratio. The same applies to bruisers. Unless you get fed early kills, in which case you buy enough items to snowball the effect and dominate the game.

AD carries should have very few deaths, but a high amount of kills as they deal the most consistent damage throughout the game.

Both AP, AD, and Top laners should have the highest amount of CS (creep score/minion kills) on each team. The jungler should follow, while the support should have the least amount of CS. AD carry takes most/all of the CS in bottom lane, supports in current meta rely on Gold-per-10 second items for income. Because they’re not item reliant, they usually just buy wards and maybe finish 3-4 items, even into late game. Wards are a big part of a support’s inventory, and a support should always have wards. Other team members as well, but into the late game where some characters have 6-item builds, they have no slots for wards.

That basically covers the basics (lol). The game is hard to get into at first, but quite addicting once you do, so beware.