Since after season 2, I’ve had an abusive relationship with League of Legends. A lot of things about the game annoyed me – I was infuriated that such a popular game would have so many problems with it – but I still had to play and keep up with it because it was the world’s biggest game, and I was a content pro­ducer and advisor.

Around seasons 4 and 5, I waned down my LoL gameplay to almost none, and mostly just kept up with it from an eSports perspective. I figured that there was no reason to play a “game” when all it does is frus­trate me, and I can gather all my research by watching others, without actually playing myself.

With preseason 6 rolling around, something I noticed a lot of people saying was how short the games were becoming. Most professional players said that their solo queue games used to be around 35 minutes on average, but now they were about 20.

If a game ends in 20 minutes, it obviously means that it’s saturated with action (or else one team wouldn’t be able to reach the Nexus in that time). I’m all about high-action gameplay, so I decided to give League of Legends another chance in preseason 6.

After going into a game, I noticed that there was a new Doran’s Ring alternative that was added to the shop – The Dark Seal. It gives +100 mana, +15 AP, and +25% healing from potions. It also had a passive effect – Dread / Do or Die – which grants +6 AP per kill, +3 AP per assist, and -12 AP per death (flooring at +0 AP and maxing at +30 AP).

If you watched my stream back in 2012-13 when I regularly streamed, you know that I am an extremely aggressive player who loves beating down my laning opponent and making them feel weak and vul­nerable. Even though I outwardly say that last-hitting minions is almost always the most important thing to do in lane, I will still forego farming in order to harass my laning opponent in order to assert my dom­i­nance in lane.

After I saw the Dark Seal, I realized that this ring was pretty much custom-designed for me.

It gives me a larger mana pool so I can use more abilities. It gives a decent chunk of ability power. It gives me a little bit more sustain in exchange for not having the +60 HP from Doran’s Ring. But most im­por­tantly, it rewards my hyperaggressive playstyle. If I manage to get a kill in lane, which happens very of­ten, I start stacking up ability power.

One important thing I tell people I coach is to not stay in lane for too long, even if you have full health and mana, because your laning opponent might have already bought items, and now has a power spike over you.

If you manage to send your laning opponent back to base through a kill, you’re going to start scaling up in power without having to return to base. Not only did you gain +6 AP from the kill, but you also got experience from the kill, and you’re soaking experience from the minion wave while your opponent is not. This almost lets you completely keep up with their item buys, without having to go back to base yourself.

During mid-game, I’m known to make majestically large errors that throw the game and bring my team into a downward spiral (and when I used to play ranked 5v5s, our jungler almost always stayed very close to me and acted as my pseudo-support to make sure I wouldn’t do this). This generally happens as a result of overconfidence – I smash my lane so hard that I forget that I’m still not strong enough to win in 1v3 fights.

The fact that this is a stacking item, and I lose stacks on death, is always in the back of my mind. I have a constant reminder in my inventory to carefully calculate my movements and decisions before making them. Although this isn’t going to make me any less confident in my play, it’s there to make sure that, if there’s a fuzzy line as to whether or not I will win an engage, I will choose not to engage at all (and not risk throwing my lead).

And finally, this item scales well into the mid-game, and is worth keeping in an inventory slot during the earlier late game. Without its passive, the Dark Seal provides 466.25 gold’s worth of stats for 400 gold. However, if you manage to hold on to max stacks, its gold worth skyrockets to 1,118.75 gold – that’s 280% gold efficiency.

So, the results of my Dark Seal games so far? They’ve mostly gone pretty well.

You may already know that I used to be a diamond-level player in season 2, so yes, this isn’t exactly too impressive (and if anything, it’s expected), seeing as my account is currently in low gold rank.

But, the point here is, a champion like Zyra, who is extremely vulnerable to death (especially when every champion and their mom has a gap closer nowadays), can still work extremely well with the Dark Seal, simply because of how good of an item it is for an aggressive playstyle.

I’m an extremely calculated player, and I’ll constantly be running a ton of numbers through my head dur­ing the entire game. There have been times when the Dark Seal has given me so much of a damage bo­nus that I miscalculate my damage, throw out my abilities to apply Rylai’s and Flash away, only to realize that I could’ve just held my ground and gotten a 1v4 quadra kill.

Now, as we can see by my defeat, what the Dark Seal doesn’t do is make you invulnerable to Warwick’s Infinite Duress, comboed with Jarvan IV’s Demacian Standard, Dragon Strike, and Cataclysm.

… That was a rough game.

(This post isn’t endorsed by Riot Games and doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of Riot Games or any­one officially involved in producing or managing League of Legends. League of Legends and Riot Games are trade­marks or registered trademarks of Riot Games, Inc. League of Legends © Riot Games, Inc.)