The other day I wasn’t too successful with my placement games in League, so I decided to play more ranked two days ago as well as yesterday. We finished on two losses last time and ended up with four losses and three wins this time around with only two more games to go. My current placement ranked is Silver 2, which is alright. If I get two more wins I’ll gain another 76 LP, bringing me rather close to Silver 1 or potentially even the gold promos.
Anyways, in the first game, we played an MF+Zyra bot lane against an AP Twitch Support and a Crit-Jhin. Our team was mostly owning the enemy lanes. Our Ornn in the top lane went 3/2/10 by the end of the game, completely shutting down the 1/11/4 Darius until the very end of the game. With the feed from Top Lane, Diana got rather strong and ended up with a score of 13/13/5 by the end of the game, dealing the second most damage on our team. Our Ekko did alright. He got one out of five dragons and ganked a fair amount in mid and top lane, ending with a score of 7/10/9… Problem was the enemy bot lane, though. Jhin didn’t really do too much until the late game and my MF was rather strong, dealing the highest damage in the game… The problem we had, however, was the enemy Twitch. Twitch Support shouldn’t really be a thing but thanks to a lot of buffs to his AP scalings and thanks to some AP items working really well on him, it is a thing. The Twitch had the second highest damage in the game and while I was poking from afar using my plants and poking him down and everything, he just ended up getting a lot of kills onto me. Once I picked up my Liandry’s, I was able to deal decent damage and even kill two targets, but most of the time I was wondering if I had gone colourblind since my screen was constantly grey.
With 15 deaths and the second-lowest amount of gold in the game, I wasn’t too proud of this game… but we still managed to win somehow. My biggest concern here was that there is little to no counterplay to Twitch. He doesn’t get revealed until he attacks you. He just one-shots you… and then he goes invisible again. His Damage-Over-Time effects deal true damage but thanks to Night Harvester they also deal an additional 125 (+15% Ability Power) magic damage, per tick. Night Harvester also works on Auto-Attacks, which is why Nashor’s is so good… and generally, this build is no fun at all, which is why I started banning Twitch until that build gets nerfed again.
In the next game, I played Vel’Koz together with my Tristana against a Maokai + Kai’Sa lane. Our biggest problem was that Nidalee would hang around bot lane and chase us down relentlessly. Her spears were really accurate and it’s just rare to see a Nidalee, let alone a good one, in your games, so I underestimated the damage most of the times that she’s able to deal with no items. Later on, her spears would nearly one-shot you and it was just an annoying match overall. Our Brand wasn’t doing too good while our Volibear didn’t deal a whole lot either in the game. Meanwhile, the enemy Maokai would constantly get poked down by me in the lane, only to get rescued by a Kai’Sa-Heal or a Shen-Ult. They eventually ended up grouping rendering our fed Kha’Zix useless in most scenarios… and we ended up losing a game that felt like an even game even when it really was not. It was more of a Jungle vs. Jungle game and eventually, Kai’Sa popped off, too, when they started grouping, leading to our defeat.
Nothing to do about that loss. Was just a bummer. Go next, I guess.
In the next game, we played as Lux + Vayne against MF + Seraphine. Since I didn’t expect any early kills, I opted in for a Guardian build with Imperial Mandate. I then built the Zhonya’s to protect me a fair few times against the enemy Yasuo, Garen or MF. Eventually, I picked up an Oblivion Orb before buying my Watchful Wardstone. With a score of 3/7/23, I felt as if I didn’t do too badly. Sure, I could have died less but in the end, we lost the game because of other reasons, really, and the enemy team just ended up farming us in our base, so those deaths weren’t really my problem…
The biggest issue in this game was that I did basically no damage at all. It at least felt underwhelming even though I did more than Zac, Seraphine and Elise and nearly as much as Malzahar. My bindings were good and with a 42 vs. 48 kills game, it was actually quite close. Sadly our Malzahar was not doing too good, struggling quite hard against Yasuo, and while our Gragas ruined the Garen in top lane early on, Garen eventually was just unstoppable with this Bruiser-build of his that allowed him to tank for ages while cashing out damage like an assassin. In the end, MF actually also got a bunch of kills but she didn’t really pose a threat, in my opinion. I think if I had opted in for Luden’s Tempest instead of Imperial Mandate, I might have been able to actually one-shot her among the other squishies. It was just unlucky that Seraphine landed some really good ultimates on us, giving them the win. This was especially frustrating as we lost while having a 4k gold lead at one point of the game.
The next game we played was a Xerath + Draven lane against a Vel’Koz + Varus lane. This was a bit more of a stomp, to be honest, with Diana scoring 23 kills and with Shaco popping off with his 16 kills. Our Draven wasn’t doing too good, so I ended up roaming a bunch and securing kills in mid lane. Eventually, we ended the game with 55 kills and 38 deaths, as a team.
This game, we actually nearly threw the game as they kept winning team fights while grouping while we didn’t go for picks when our comp is all about picking off enemies. Our Diana said that they have no late game and that we’re winning this for sure, but it was getting rather close, despite us having a rather big lead. Luckily, we ended soon after that. Despite having the lowest gold in our team (I often didn’t get assists for kills that I assisted at), I actually dealt decent damage. In the actual damage graphs, it doesn’t really show it but my ultimate shots were able to chunk away quite well at the enemies, securing us a bunch of kills… so I’m quite proud of that.
Alas, in the last game, I had to first-pick so I decided to go for Leona. I’m not too confident on her but since our team didn’t hover anything, I had to go with something with CC and Tank capabilities. We faced off against Alistar and Vayne, which isn’t the scariest matchup, especially as I can E to the Vayne to stun her and Samira can just E to her and juggle her up for two stacks of her passive. I kinda fucked up by not buying items at the beginning of the game, giving them a free level 2 with no engage from us but we then just killed them a whole bunch and were snowballing out of control. Our Syndra wasn’t too good at the game but our Top+Jungle were just godlike. Poppy played 11 games of Poppy this season with a 100% win rate. Volibear also had a high win rate in a similar amount of games. They ended up doing their job and we snowballed in bot lane and the enemy Ryze wasn’t too scary. We won the game quite easily, despite the hickups with coming to lane with no items, etc.
Here and there I tried pushing the lane and ended up stealing a cannon minion from Syndra. Syndra then would ping “?” on me, then flash on the spot and recall. I decided to apologise for it… but then it happened another time and they just stood still for a minute or two, potentially raging IRL. I’ll have to be careful about stuff like that in the future. Apart from that, I enjoyed using this build with the Solari into Zeke’s. My next item would have been Abyssal Mask. Honestly, I’m not sure if Zeke’s is really that worth it but I’ll have to check the damage on that again next time. Abyssal Mask would have given me the MR against Gragas and Ryze that I really needed on top of amplifying the damage my teammates did by 10% whenever I cc’d enemies.
Oh well, that brings us to the end of those play sessions. I’ll just have to continue banning Twitch and playing the champs I’m good at while being careful about my positioning. Playing CC was alright that game… but as you can see I had only about 9k gold at the end of the game and tank items are expensive. Playing tank isn’t that rewarding, in my opinion.
Looking forward to reaching gold somewhat soon and potentially climbing up higher. Hope you liked this update.
Cheers!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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