So, a while ago, I made some posts on League of Legends and my goal of reaching Gold IV or higher. I enjoy playing the game every now and then and figured it’d be a lot of fun to try to improve at it and reach a higher rank… The problems, however, were that there was just way too much damage in the game. ADCs that were balanced around low mobility suddenly had a dash with an attack attached to it thanks to Galeforce. Assassins that usually wouldn’t have that would suddenly have invisibility in their kit thanks to Duskblade. Any champion would be able to execute any champion at 5% of their health with any damage they dealt. It’s just not that healthy for the game really and mostly, the game felt as if it was more of a stomp than usual. On top of that, while more champions were viable early on, the support changed more and more as time went on and eventually, it just felt as if I didn’t have any impact anymore.
For starters, champions like Xerath and Vel’Koz finally felt very good again in the Support Meta at the beginning of the season with Luden’s Tempest and Horizon Focus. You were able to burst down enemies from afar but had to watch your positioning quite heavily. Brand, Zyra and Morgana could go for the two burn items Liandry’s Anguish and Demonic Embrace to essentially whittle down at tanks slowly. Relatively quickly, I’d be able to see that quick burst with the former combo wasn’t that good because a lot of tanks were in the game… meanwhile, the double-burn combo was great against squishy teams as well since you’d just half-health them with one spell. Eventually, I’d just move away from those supports anyways since the meta evolved more and more into a tank meta, which generally speaking is just bad. Amumu was suddenly overpowered. Tanks were unkillable and the damage that tanks would deal was unbeatable really. Similarly, mages and enchanters were useless really in the bot lane… but tank items were too expensive for tanks to buy and I just hated playing tanks. Hence, I just played a lot of Senna with Eclipse and Collector… essentially one-shotting enemies… including tanks at times.
Eventually, tanks and Eclipse were nerfed. Senna got nerfed. Double-burn was nerfed. I’d end up playing a lot of Imperial Mandate enchanters like Nami and Yuumi… then, Imperial Mandate got nerfed a lot as well since mages in the mid lane would play it and we suddenly had the Moonstaff meta where you pick up Moonstone and Staff of Flowing Water on any champion with a lot of heals/damage. Brand? Suddenly deals a lot of damage but also heals a lot. J4? Suddenly an enchanter. Morgana? Moonstaff is op. It was insane. Eventually, that got nerfed and the meta was left a bit willy-nilly… I ended up playing a little bit of Moonstaff enchanters again with the new Chemtech Putrifier or double burn mages… Then I played Thresh a lot because I had a lot of fun with Solari and Zeke’s on him… Yuumi was still quite a lot of fun… Zilean and Morgana with the nerfed Imperial Mandate still dealt a lot of damage and provided a lot of utility but even if we did really well in the bot lane, we’d end up losing in the promos.
So, either way, most of the time, I banned Twitch because AP Twitch felt unfair most of the time and I didn’t want to play tanks. Today, I played one game to get into the promos and four games during the promos (3 Wins, 1 Loss), resulting in me finally getting to gold. It was actually quite hard… This time around I checked people’s mains and banned Yasuo since a lot of my mid laners in the lobby had a lot of games on Yasuo with low win rates and a lot of deaths. One of them played seven Yasuo games in the last 30 days in ranked with a 0% winrate. So, banning Yasuo was actually a great choice as it increased my potential winrate a lot. Sadly, two games were extraordinarily hard as our jungler in one of the games, Kha’Zix, decided to play for the KDA instead of the actual game itself, often waiting in bushes until everyone in our team died, only to then clean up afterwards… He had most of the kills in our team but never participated in fights and it was just incredibly hard to win that game, but we made it. In the other game, we had a Seraphine in our mid lane that would constantly flame us for “feeding Katarina”… but Katarina already got two kills from her and then was perma-roaming to bot lane together with Hecarim, resulting in four people diving us in bot lane. Despite Katarina permanently roaming, Seraphine still managed to be behind in farm and get killed by Hecarim… I just muted her eventually and despite having a bit of a comeback eventually, we ended up losing since frankly, everyone gave up in our team. Seraphine would run it down but refuse to surrender. Gnar was useless but still flamed me. I did more damage than top and mid lane despite having a rough game myself. Overall, that was quite frustrating.
After a quick break, though, I ended up winning the next three games. In the first two games, I played Zyra and Brand with Luden’s Tempest since that’s kind of strong right now… in the third and final win, we ended up snowballing with Draven+Morgan. The Brand and Zyra games were quite hard to win actually… but at last, we had a bit of a stomp in our last game with Morgana where I landed most of my Qs… I missed two or three near the end but we just kind of stomped the bot lane and everyone else was winning, too, and the enemies just opened up.
Overall, this season sucked. The MMR was broken, resulting in me losing more MMR than I was winning, even in my placement games. Similarly, the game was broken with a lot of champions just healing a lot and bursting you down in no time at all with zero counterplay. Support felt weak and with the frequent changes, it just sucked to main the support role… Jungle could have been my secondary role here but with Riot Games removing the catch-up experience system, you basically had to get ahead and ruin someone else’s game and then snowball from there… or you’d get counter-jungled, counter-ganked and farmed by the enemy jungle while your team does everything in their might to ruin your day even more and to tilt you to the point where you can’t come back at all but also can’t survive and nobody wants to surrender and you obviously don’t want to AFK because you’ll get banned but everyone takes your camps and… you get what I mean.
League of Legends because the League of Frustration this season. While I enjoyed it a fair bit at the beginning, it quickly turned into an annoying mess and I’m honestly not sure if I’ll play much more of it next season unless there are a lot of changes to the game, to the burst damage that assassins deal, to the amounts of damage that tanks deal and to the healing that makes it frankly impossible to get kills or assists since anti-heal is basically useless at this point.
The worst part about this season was probably that none of the items available to me really worked with Bard… And with a lot of my friends quitting League, I ended up not enjoying it as much anymore anyways. Unless people pick it up again, I may actually uninstall it. At least, I got Gold this season and won’t have to play ranked anymore. Time to troll in normal games. :)
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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