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If by perchance you've been following my ranked thread you'll notice it looks like I'm on the wrong end of a blood bath.
The only time I manage to eek out a win is pretty much when my entire team does well or at a minimum two people on our team pub stomp.
Feels bad.
I'm not sure what all the dynamics are here. I haven't taken a break. I was climbing steadily in pre-season. Then ranked resets and WTF. I go 2-8 in placements on my main and 3-7 on my alt account. IIRC correctly only 1 of the games was competitive . My team either stomped or lost. From the record you can see it was mostly lost.
Post placements it has been pretty nasty in the trenches as well.
My thoughts on this.
1) You need to win lane hard now and quickly and start rotating because you can't count on your other lanes being able to be effective if they get even marginally behind. Stalling the game out to let them catch up rarely works now. I've picked up 2-3 kills in lanes and it doesn't matter if you don't translate that into a tower and other objectives before you get 3-5 man dove under you own tower.
2) People are queuing up in groups with voice com. If your 3-4 man pre-made is better than their 3-4 man pre-made, you win. If not you lose. I've had supports flat leave me alone from the start of laning phase so they can help out their buddies in other lanes. I'm okay supports roaming, but jeebus, put your ADC in a spot where they can farm reasonably well before ditching them.
3) I seem to get my secondary role (Bot/ADC) more than my primary role (jungle). I've heard others express similar outcomes. Riot needs to change that to something like 75% / 25%. I'll wait a little longer to get my primary role thanks. I prefer jungle because I feel like 1) I can have an easier time impacting the early game and 2) I can more easily match my team's needs as far as damage type and character archetype (tank, bruiser, etc.,.) than I can as ADC which basically revolves around the choice of
Corki (for when your team goes all AD) or all the other ADCs.
4) I find champion intent to be an annoying feature of the Dynamic Queue system. Initially it worked. People showed who they wanted to play. Now I more often get people showing no one, 5 Blitzcranks, or some "troll" picks that make me want to consider dodging.
The idea of knowing who your team is going to pick is actually useful, but the way it is implemented and being gamed by the players makes it anti-useful. Not sure how Riot could fix it other than maybe an IP boost if you stick with your intended champion, but even that may not help as if you are in the neighborhood of 1000 games played, you may not want or need any more IP.
Okay, so that was a bit of a meandering complaint/rant.
What I'm going to do about it. I may actually back out of ranked until they implement a true solo queue. Alternatively I could look for a team to play with, but I'm considering changing my schedule around so that may not be feasible.
In the interim, I plan to pick a few key champions that have good snowball potential and get good with them in normals so that I take them into ranked and win my lane/position hard so that we can get the rotations going.
The only time I manage to eek out a win is pretty much when my entire team does well or at a minimum two people on our team pub stomp.
Feels bad.
I'm not sure what all the dynamics are here. I haven't taken a break. I was climbing steadily in pre-season. Then ranked resets and WTF. I go 2-8 in placements on my main and 3-7 on my alt account. IIRC correctly only 1 of the games was competitive . My team either stomped or lost. From the record you can see it was mostly lost.
Post placements it has been pretty nasty in the trenches as well.
My thoughts on this.
1) You need to win lane hard now and quickly and start rotating because you can't count on your other lanes being able to be effective if they get even marginally behind. Stalling the game out to let them catch up rarely works now. I've picked up 2-3 kills in lanes and it doesn't matter if you don't translate that into a tower and other objectives before you get 3-5 man dove under you own tower.
2) People are queuing up in groups with voice com. If your 3-4 man pre-made is better than their 3-4 man pre-made, you win. If not you lose. I've had supports flat leave me alone from the start of laning phase so they can help out their buddies in other lanes. I'm okay supports roaming, but jeebus, put your ADC in a spot where they can farm reasonably well before ditching them.
3) I seem to get my secondary role (Bot/ADC) more than my primary role (jungle). I've heard others express similar outcomes. Riot needs to change that to something like 75% / 25%. I'll wait a little longer to get my primary role thanks. I prefer jungle because I feel like 1) I can have an easier time impacting the early game and 2) I can more easily match my team's needs as far as damage type and character archetype (tank, bruiser, etc.,.) than I can as ADC which basically revolves around the choice of
Corki (for when your team goes all AD) or all the other ADCs.4) I find champion intent to be an annoying feature of the Dynamic Queue system. Initially it worked. People showed who they wanted to play. Now I more often get people showing no one, 5
Blitzcranks, or some "troll" picks that make me want to consider dodging.The idea of knowing who your team is going to pick is actually useful, but the way it is implemented and being gamed by the players makes it anti-useful. Not sure how Riot could fix it other than maybe an IP boost if you stick with your intended champion, but even that may not help as if you are in the neighborhood of 1000 games played, you may not want or need any more IP.
Okay, so that was a bit of a meandering complaint/rant.
What I'm going to do about it. I may actually back out of ranked until they implement a true solo queue. Alternatively I could look for a team to play with, but I'm considering changing my schedule around so that may not be feasible.
In the interim, I plan to pick a few key champions that have good snowball potential and get good with them in normals so that I take them into ranked and win my lane/position hard so that we can get the rotations going.
I did manage to intentionally use
A loss, but not horribly shabby for my first game of
His early clear is a bit on the sketch side, but i picked up a few tips by watching some Ekko How To vids.
Runes: 9 Atk Spd, 9 Arm, 6 CDR + 3sCDR, 3 AP Quints (40% CDR with items)
Maseries: 12-0-18 (
Start
Start W,
Skill leveling preference is R > Q > E > W
Farming Skill Order: W, Q, Q, E
Ganking Skill Order: W, Q, E, Q
Ganking: look for low mobility targets that will have trouble dodging
One trick for ensuring that you hit Q is to dash to the target and use Q at the same time. I believe the blinks cancels the Q animation. The first hit of Q gives you one stack of Z-Drive Resonance, your blink auto gives you a 2nd, and the come back damage or an additional auto gives you a 3rd stack which procs for big damage especially if they are below 30% health, it slows them, and gives you a speed boost to help you stick with them. Very nasty combo.
For melee champions you wan to wait until they are trading with your laner and then drop
I'm still working on Mid game and Late game Ekko strats. I think a lot depends on how you are building him. E.g. buiser, glass cannon, tank. And if you have a
I haven't talked about
It can certainly used as an "I effed up" button, but you miss out on the damage portion with the silly high scaling (130% of your AP). I've seen glass cannon Ekko's delete entire teams with well time ultimates.
Build wise if you go bruiser Ekko wit the build I've got depicted, you do good damage and have very good surviveability.
Okay, why Ekko? Well, when I asked myself who my favorite champs to play are, it really comes down to the fact that I like champions that have good re-positioning tools. Being a solo queue player I really don't trust my teams to tank properly or peel properly so my two favorite champions to play are
On top of that I've been looking for a champion that can take over a game and
I also like the fact that Ekko has pretty good wave clear and poke with his Q. There aren't actually a lot of junglers with that combination. E.g.
So 1 game down. More guide reading and watching to be done and perhaps 20ish more normals to go on getting a feel for The Boy Who Shattered Time. At some point I'll also try laning with him as that has requirements like last hitting that aren't as much of a concern in the jungle.
Insightful post. I agree, if it wasn't before it is now, with the state of League if you get an advantage you have to abuse it, and usually the team who has the advantage at the start of the game automatically wins since there's no room to catch up when falling behind.
Thanks, MrMade2000. The margin for error certainly feels smaller.
Other things I've noticed is that there are quite a few people that were Gold last season still sitting in Bronze. Silver 2 is the highest I've ever gotten.
I've also done placement matches where the lowest number of ranked Wins on the enemy team was 22. WTF?
So there are definitely what I feel are some oddities with the match making system at the moment.
Hopefully things will shake out soon and I'll see some forward movement even if it is incremental.