• Mindset of an AD Carry

    Gentleman Gustaf here to try something a little different. I talk a lot about AD Carries. In part, it's because they're easy to do math on; they really only have one priority (dps), and they don't have vastly differing kits (for the most part). Kog Maw may have % health damage, but you can still compare it to Caitlyn's damage, in a way that you can't really compare the value of 66% more CC, and how much more worthwhile 66% more Silence time is than 66% more knockup time. In part, it's because it's the role I play for my ranked team, so it was the role I was mathing personally anyway. But largely, it's because I think it has the weirdest learning curve of any role.

  • An in Depth Look at ADC Builds

     

     

    AD Carries are at least the simplest role to talk about itemization for. Why? Because they really have no priorities except for sheer damage (well, Ezreal can be a utility caster, and Urgot is a bruisery-fellow, but for the most part, ADCs are just walking killing machines.).

    Really, ADCs have three overlapping qualities that matter, auto-attackers (dps), AD Spells (burst), and range/kiting (survivability):

  • KDA isn't Everything (but it is Something)

    We've all seen the forum threads "this game is uncarryable! I have a KDA of 2.5 every game and I still can't win!" This article is not going to be about Elo Hell, however, but about what exactly KDA means. After all, it does seem somewhat reasonable to consider KDA to be somewhat important. Shouldn't a higher KDA lead to more wins? It doesn't help that game commentators like me tend to minimize the value of KDA; we'll say 'don't focus on kills, focus on objectives', and other pieces of advice. And ultimately, these are true. However, this does not mean that KDA is unimportant. IN this article, I will argue that there is a clear correlation between KDA and Win%, but that this correlation has more to do with a low death count and a high assist count than a high kill count, thus preserving the value of 'don't focus on kills' advice.

  • When "Luck" isn't lucky at all.

    Gentleman Gustaf here to talk about luck. If you play LoL long enough, you'll hear somebody saying "Lucky!" or some variant thereof after they die. On the other hand, if you look through the stats of LoL, you see two random stats in the whole game: crit chance, and the Phage proc. So where does all this luck come from? Turns out that it doesn't, and that most of the time what somebody should actually mean when they say "you got lucky" is "I made a mistake". Today, I'm going to talk about a few mistakes that people make that they chalk up to luck.

  • Basic Builds for Every Position and Role

    Gentleman Gustaf here, and I thought today I'd go with a post for players who just feel overwhelmed with the number of choices they have. After all, there are 5 "lanes" in the game, and each "lane" can be filled with many different types of champions and they all build differently. As if that weren't complicated enough, you have to learn to PLAY these champions, so you can't really tell if you're just bad at the champion and need to get better, or building wrong, or just having a bad few games! Luckily, itemization is simpler than you'd think, and you can follow a few simple rules.