I’ve been playing a handful of games with my buddies lately on League of Legends, and I’ve decided to go back and do a bit of analysis on the games to see what went wrong (or right).

I was going to do this anyway, so I decided I might as well do this and publish the results publicly so other people might be able to benefit from it as well.

The ordering of the champions are top laner, jungler, mid laner, attack damage carry, and support. The champion I was playing and the score I got is in bold; the [R] before some champions designates they were random people found through matchmaking, and not one of my friends.

Victory: Sion, Nocturne (12/1/8), [R] Teemo, [R] Master Yi and Soraka vs. Pantheon, Amumu, Ryze, Miss Fortune and Nidalee

• I got at least a kill or an assist every time I ganked a lane
• I got lucky with an early-game counter jungle, and took advantage of my lead to snowball for the rest of the game
• It didn’t matter how my allies were doing because I was never farming my own jungle, I was always going from lane to lane ganking and helping them that even the worst players would passively win their lane
• I was in such a dominating lead that I was building towards Trinity Force after finishing Spirit of the Ancient Golem and Ruby Sighstone

Defeat: Sion, Nocturne (3/6/3), [R] Talon, Graves and Kayle vs. Cho’Gath, Jarvan IV, Katarina, Caitlyn and Soraka

• My Internet connection randomly dropped at the beginning during initial loading, and I entered the game at 2:31
• I was about two minutes late starting my jungle route, and got no help from my allies because laning phase had already begun, which put me even more behind
• All three lanes lost, and there was nothing I could do to help because I was so far behind
• The enemy team had a quick and relatively dominating victory

Defeat: [R] Renekton, Olaf, LeBlanc (10/3/1), Ezreal and Soraka vs. Nidalee, Shaco, Ahri, Ashe and Sona

• Our Renekton gave away first blood, then rage quit about three minutes into the game
• Our jungler did not instantly start covering top, which gave Nidalee a chance to get free farm and snowball in strength
• I destroyed Ahri in mid lane and literally killed her two seconds after she would return to lane
• Ahri decided after dying to me in that manner three times that she would instead roam and feed off bot lane
• Nidalee constantly split pushed and made her way into our base, attacking our Nexus turrets
• There was nothing I could do because the minions were dealing more damage to me than Nidalee, and I was passively dying trying to kill her; I couldn’t clear the minions because I’m LeBlanc
• All of our top turrets were down (including the base turret and inhibitor), but our first-tier bottom turret was still up, so it was not absolutely clear to the ADC and support that their help was needed in our base
• Nidalee pretty much single-handedly won the game for her team

Victory: Morgana, [R] Maokai, Zyra (12/2/5), Graves and Kayle vs. Shen, Malphite, Veigar, Caitlyn and Soraka

• We invaded their blue and I got first blood off their ADC
• We did a lane swap that allowed our ADC and support to kill the top turret about five minutes into the game, while Morgana was able to hold bottom
• I got an early kill on Veigar and took advantage of the lead to prevent him from farming (which is crucial for Veigar in order to get stronger by last-hitting with his Q)
• I adapted my build and went for early Rabaddon’s Deathcap and Zhonya’s Hourglass, allowing me to chunk down people’s health to half with a single Q
• We started playing hyper-aggressively and got a dominating and easy victory

A few of you have been checking out my stats on LoLKing and have noticed that I haven’t been using my signature summoner spell combo of Heal and Ignite anymore. I was confronted by a few people about this, and decided it would be worth addressing.

The main issue is that Heal got nerfed too much. Before Preseason 3, Heal scaled off your level by 25; now, Heal scales off your level by only 15 (that’s a 40% nerf). The counterbalance to this is that Heal now heals surrounding allies by 100% of its strength rather than only 50%. Basically, Heal got turned into a support spell, and ended up becoming too weak for my needs.

A valid alternative for Heal is Barrier, which has a base protection value of 20 higher than Heal (95 vs. 75), and scales off each level by 20 (which is a 33% improvement from Heal). However, the effects of Barrier only last for two seconds. So, if you’re trying to bait your enemies into over-committing, you better find a solution within two seconds, or your health bar is going to go right back down to where it was before.

In summary, neither Heal nor Barrier is, in my opinion, effective enough at baiting with a high-enough projected success rate.

Of course, these are all numbers, but how do they work in practice? As most of you probably know, I play on the Public Beta Environment, which means I was able to experience Preseason 3 changes weeks before they went live on the main servers. During that time, I tested out the new Heal and Barrier extensively. Overall, without changing any other play styles or strategies, I ended up failing my baits more, and Heal and Barrier just weren’t enough to keep me alive in tight situations.

After these two spells, I concluded that the next best option is Flash. Although I hate Flash as a summoner spell and feel it should be removed, I still can’t deny the extreme utility it provides in a wide variety of situations.

It seems like it will be to my benefit to start learning how to use Flash effectively, and adapting my the way I play such that I still continue to use psychological manipulation and trickery as the fundamental core of my play style, but now use Flash to do it instead of Heal or Barrier.

One of the main reasons I haven’t ever used Flash is because I suck at using it. More often than not, when I try to Flash, I either Flash in the wrong direction, or Flash into a wall. But, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is eventually something I can get better at with practice, and I can even use fail Flashes as a strategy.

For example, in a game where I was playing Zyra, while we were pushing down one of the enemy’s inner turrets, we just couldn’t get good positioning to attack the turret or kill the enemies. So, I set up a scenario where I purposely overextended, baiting the enemies’ attention. Then, I intentionally Flashed into a wall, which made the enemies think that I thought I was in danger and was trying to get out.

Seizing the “opportunity,” all five of the enemies came forward to try and pick me off. While all of them converged towards me and began to clump up, I hit a majority of them with my roots, threw out two seeds, hit them with my thorns, spawned two plants, then caught all five of them in my knock-up ultimate. I ended up dying because I had no escape mechanism after using my Flash as bait, but I hit about three of them with my passive before fully dying.

Seconds later, my team swept forward and cleaned up the rest of the enemy team’s health bars, giving me five assists and pushing for the victory.

Of course, things like that are really difficult to pull off, but with enough practice, I’m pretty sure I can get as good with Flash as I was with Heal in Season 2.

A lot of people have been complaining about the new Preseason 3 shop in League of Legends, claiming that it’s hard to use and impossible to find anything efficiently.

First of all, the glaring problem with the shop being difficult to navigate is just because people aren’t used to it. But, that’s not the point of this blog post – to me, regardless of how hard it is to find items in the new shop, I still actually like it. The screenshot below will explain why:

(Click to enlarge)

Yes, that is the recommended items section of the shop for Zyra, my main champion.

Using some software called LoLStudio, I was able to customize all of my recommended items and categories.

There were options available for the Season 2 shop to customize the recommended items as well, but you would only be able to select six items. In the new shop, you can literally have as many recommended items as you want.

So, I went ahead and customized it so every single item I would possibly ever consider purchasing on Zyra is right at my fingertips. No matter what role I’m playing or who my opponents are, I have everything I could possibly want (literally) a single screen away.

In ranked games where victories and defeats matter, and every split second counts, I recommend using this software to set custom recommended item builds for all the champions you regularly play competitively. Not only will it save you time, but it will help you stay focused on the game rather than having to struggle through navigating an unfamiliar shop every time you return to base.

Last week, I posted that I was having issues with my apartment’s Internet and I wasn’t able to stream or play League of Legends.

A few people questioned the degree to which this problem was affecting me, and most people thought that I was exaggerating when I said the connection dropped every 10-15 minutes.

I decided to share a little screenshot I took while I was playing League of Legends today. It will make more sense if you’re a LoL player – pay close attention to the top-right corner where it shows my ping.

(Click to enlarge)

Yes, that does, in fact, say that my ping is 10888.

That means that when I click on something, it takes almost 11 seconds for my character to respond to my input.

This is usually what happens when my Internet connection is “dropped” – it doesn’t fully disconnect, it just spikes up the ping to an abnormally high number.

This is actually worse than a regular disconnect, because with regular disconnects, the server notices that you’re gone and makes an attempt to port or walk your character back to base so you won’t die. In my situation, my character just stands there doing nothing, because for whatever reason, the server thinks I’m still connected but just experiencing high latency.

So, there is my proof that this is happening – if you look up my match history, you’ll see that I died over ten times in that particular game I played as Kayle, a majority of which were caused by these disconnects.

(Also, for the record, no, I do not usually take W first on Kayle, but I had to in that game because I needed it to get away from three enemies after getting caught in the jungle and not wanting to give away first blood. Yes, it did work, because I managed to get away with about 50 HP.)

This is an announcement post regarding League of Legends, a game many of you probably know that I stream quite frequently on my Twitch.TV channel.

First, before we begin, I want to clarify that I did not come to this conclusion out of emotion as a result of a few bad games or a losing streak. I’ve considered doing this for quite a while, now, and felt like this was the right time to follow through with my thoughts.

I am officially retiring from competitive League of Legends in the sense of solo/duo queue on Summoner’s Rift.

If you happened to have read my post from mid-to-late October regarding my first solo queue experiences, you know that it’s been pretty negative. I am a very competitive person and consider statistics and records to be very important. One thing that frustrates me most in life is if something outside of my control degrades my reputation or anything related to me in general. Clearly, these two things are playing a huge role in solo queue – my match results in no way reflect my capabilities as an individual player, and this is caused by other players who are playing in such a way that harms my ability to perform my best.

Overall, this is causing a severely detrimental effect on my mental well-being. Even when I win, I still become frustrated because of how the game ended up, and all the things that went wrong while we were playing.

I feel it is completely unnecessary for me to voluntarily put myself through this as a result of a game, so I have decided that ranked solo and duo queue on Summoner’s Rift is not for me.

Does this mean I’m quitting ranked play in general? Of course not. I am still willing to play team ranked games where I am able to select who my allies are, and I know that they are going to try their best.

In the mean time, to basically “cool off” from this, I am going to orient myself towards more single-player style games until I am able to find enough people with whom I can make ranked teams. As demonstrated by my blog post from late October, I already started playing and streaming Pokémon White 2; I am also looking into trying out RuneScape again (which I haven’t played for several months) because there is about to be a massive update released on RuneScape that is supposed to revolutionize combat, and I’m interested in trying it out.

There will inevitably be more information regarding this coming up in the future, so be sure to check my blog in the future for some updates.

I’ve recently received quite an influx of people asking me during my League of Legends stream or games if I’m trying to copy SilSol.

At first, I had no idea what that even meant, and initially didn’t even realize that SilSol was a person. However, after a few minutes of Googling for information, I discovered that SilSol is a Korean League of Legends player who has an extremely high solo/duo queue Summoner’s Rift elo, but is known for feeding a majority of his games. One particular characteristic of his is that he always takes the summoner spells Ignite and Heal.

Seeing as I just found out about this player, it’s obvious that I’m not trying to copy him, and I’m not implementing any of his strategies into my game play intentionally. However, I did a bit of research on him to see if we had any unintended resemblances with each other.

I conveniently found a thread on Reddit explaining what kind of player SilSol is. (I’m assuming this is also the reason why people suddenly knew about SilSol and suddenly started asking me if I was trying to copy him.) SilSol generally plays in a stupidly aggressive manner. The adjective of “stupidly” is not being added in there myself as my own opinion – any neutral third party would look at his play and think that he is stupidly aggressive. He apparently doesn’t care if he does, and takes huge risks and gambles to get kills, even if it means turret diving at level 3. This usually ends up getting him killed, which is why it seems like he feeds every game. However, he still manages to get up to a really high elo.

This is because his stupidly aggressive play helps out his teammates. If he constantly puts extreme pressure on his laning opponents, this either forces the enemy jungler to camp SilSol’s lane, or makes SilSol’s laning opponent frightened (especially if they’re American, because Americans tend not to be able to deal with excessive aggression) and force them to play more defensively, decreasing their opportunities of snowballing.

The primary reason this works in high-elo play is that SilSol’s allies are able to take advantage of this situation to the fullest and coordinate well-enough to win the game off of it. It doesn’t work in lower-elo play because nobody is intelligent enough to organize around someone like SilSol.

Taking Ignite and Heal helps SilSol in his purpose because he is able to Ignite his opponent to get the extra damage on them to help achieve the kill, and Heal himself so he’s able to increase his chances of survival after executing the aggression.