So I think I found a build on Aatrox that I like. If you think you are going to be team fighting early then get Guinsoo's Rageblade after your jungle item + Enchantment: Devourer. If you are still going to be ganking individual champions then get Death's Dance after Devourer. The thing about Guinsoo’s is that you have to stack it before it is doing AoE splash damage. Death’s Dance makes Dark Flight and the bonus damage from Blood Price heal you so you can pretty much leave [[Blood... Read More

So our Jhin was winning lane against their Wukong. To the point that he eventually even got their Inner Mid tower. Good work Jhin! At that point there was really nothing safe for him to do in Mid. Our Top lane Garen was getting their arse handed to him by their Fiora. Bronze 1 vs a Plat 5. Not too surprising, especially when we learn that this was only the 2nd time they had played Garen. Which is fine. This was normals. I was only playing Gragas (my try hard ranked champion of... Read More

Basically a note for myself. Or YMV.

The ranked season kicked off in 2016 on January 2016. Riot warned everyone that the would probably end up lower than the did last year. Okay fine, everyone ends up lower. Good to know where to set the bar.

Placements were brutal. I went 3-7 and 2-8 on two different accounts respectively.

I'm sure there were any number of reasons for this. I've touched on some of my thoughts around this in previous posts so I'm not going to go over them again here.

Suffice to say I didn't feel like things smoothed out until late February. So I'm... Read More

Pick a champion with a fairly healthy three camp clear.

Pick a jungle champion with some crowd control.

Pick a jungler with gap closer.

Pick a jungler with some damage.

Pick a jungler with decent jungle camp clearing speed.

A good jungler combines the following traits: Good sustain. Crowd Control. Gap closer. Good damage. If they have all of these traits they can gank practically any lane and more importantly they have options as to how they want to influence the map.

Gank
Countergank
Farm
Counterjungle

If your jungler lacks the sustain to get through three... Read More

Watching LCS games and lots of guides on how to be better at the game, if I had three pieces of advise for someone just starting out with ranked or someone toiling in Bronze/Silver like me they would be this:

1. Don’t die.
2. Don’t go places where you don’t have vision.
3. Keep an eye on the mini-map.

Every death is time you aren’t on the map earning gold, XP, or countering the other teams attempts to take objectives.

Treat every bush like it is a death trap with however many members of the enemy team you can’t see sitting in it waiting to ambush you. (I still screw this... Read More