Reign of Gaming

I was gonna whine about the part where you call the removal of MP/5 from Nashor's a "buff", but the amount of truth in the "Final thoughts" is too overwhelming. So many players need to read this thing.

Yer I love experimenting with stuff and reinventing builds/champions. Here's a list off the top of my head.

Crucible is underrated (so many people don't seem to realise the active is self-target'able..) and I have no clue why... Hard counter to any CC burst champs. Blitzcrank jungle is underrated (but perma-banned anyway). Sion top/jungle is underrated, his enrage is broken right now!

You'd seriously list Irelia alongside Janna and Evelynn in the "overnerfed" category?  She's almost always tourney viable, even after she's received how many consecutive nerfs?

However, you have my thanks for scrutinizing lolking stats.  Too often people use winrate in a vacuum to determine champ strength.  Orianna and Olaf were sub-50% but tourney favorites - were they underpowered?  Janna and Teemo had winrates above 50% recently, but never saw tourney play - were they overpowered?  The answer in both cases is "no", despite what taking lolking as gospel would suggest.  I think the whole winrate argument is crap, but at the very least you have to consider the difference between a champ's strength in a coordinated 5v5 environment vs that of solo queue.

Quote from Krebstarr »

You'd seriously list Irelia alongside Janna and Evelynn in the "overnerf" category?  She's almost always tourney viable, even after she's receive how many consecutive nerfs?

 

However, you have my thanks for scrutinizing lolking stats.  Too often people use winrate in a vacuum to determine champ strength.  Orianna and Olaf were sub-50% but tourney favorites - were they underpowered?  Janna and Teemo had winrates above 50% recently, but never saw tourney play - were they overpowered?  The answer in both cases is "no", despite what taking lolking as gospel would suggest.  I think the whole winrate argument is crap, but at the very least you have to consider the difference between a champ's strength in a coordinated 5v5 environment vs that of solo queue.

The answer is: they were both underpowered, gimmicky champions that could work extremely well with certain team composition in a highly coordinated environment but failed miserably in solo queue. 

Another example of such a champion is Gragas who has horrendous win/loss but could in theory work very well in poke comps.

Maybe that's an OK explanation for Olaf (failing to see the "gimmick" about targeted true damage nukes and CC immunity, however), but Orianna?  Please.  She has a stellar kit with or without coordination, decent laning, and good scaling.  Her downfall?  Skill floor.  If you'd ask me, that's the obvious reason Ori's winrate was never above 50%.  Past that, though, winrate isn't a great indicator of balance. Beyond the issue of team coordination that you've already brought up, there's the question of what's in play. Say (in a completely hypothetical scenario) that Katarina is re-released in an OP state and gets played in every single game.  If mid laners grow used to seeing Kat and start playing champions who lane well against her, are you still going to be surprised if her winrate dips below 50%, when she's always laning against counters?  I'm not saying this was the case with Ori, but it's another example of how winrate doesn't exist in a vacuum.

You have to realize that tourny play is a lot different compared to solo que...

One of Olaf's greatest strengths was that he could handle a 2v1 really really well. You toss him a blue buff level 1 and he can toss axes at mobs all day and sustain him self with the free lifesteal and attack speed. Then you tossed two most cost effective items in the game (at the time) the warmogs and locket on him and he's suddenly way ahead of his rival.

But in solo que, his 2v1 potential is not a factor...

I used to go out and find counterpicks to all the fotm champions and post them in champion feedback, and it was pretty effective sometimes the counter would be some obscure champion like Swain who completely hard countered and sometimes it would be a hard counter who didn't even need to lane against that champion like Nautilus vs Ahri, but I have stopped doing that.

It's gotten impossible to do, because flavor of the month has become flavor of the week. By the time I saw an ap Tryndamere in a game it was my friend playing him the night before the patch came out nerfing it. He completely dominated with him, but there was no reason to figure out a counter, because it was gone the next morning.

I am not complaing that Riot balances the game too quickly and I certainly did not like Ap tryndamere, but I wonder if they are balancing quickly because they are still dealing with all the unintended effects of the season 3 patch to champions and items or is this just gonna be the norm from now on.

Things do get nerfed before people bother to find counters which is kind of unfortunate from the standpoint of people who like to counterpick and find ways around strong picks. My friend was going on about how overpowered Garen was in champion select after the enemy team first picked him and I said "just use Gangplank he hard counters Garen". "Gangplank can't beat Garen." "just use him and if we lose it'll be my fault." Fed Atmog's Trinity force Gangplank carries our team.

I had lost hard to a Gangplank before the Garen rework, and I looked up the statistics of Garen vs Gangplank to make sure it was just player skill and low and behold Gangplank hard counters Garen.

That is a good moment for a theory crafter to have researched and experimented with something and then to be able to roll that into a win for your team and I think moments like that have been lacking when everyone knows they just need to wait a week for Garen to get nerfed.

They're probably just dealing with unintended S3 effects. Those tend to be about bruisers/free stats.

Yeah Riot has said bruisers are the strongest class in the game and that they are going to try and bring them into line with the other classes.

Obviously it takes a lot of patches and a lot of nerfs to weaken an entire class.

That's the reasons why I use lolking stats to determine if a champ is OP or not. Irelia feels OP, but stats PROVE otherwise. On the contrary, I cant even understand the Prolaf nerfs because his win rate was under 50% before anyways. Now he is at like 40-42%...

I LOVE the frozen gauntlet item, I only wish there was an equivalent item for manaless champions.

"Take what we read with a grain of salt, but decide things for yourself."

Thank you. This I think is something everyone needs to see more often.

how is removing a stat from Nashor's a buff?

the popularity of the item has dropped heavily with only an item nerf

 

Why do you say "only" like it wasn't a huge nerf? I still use it because I don't like the bell thing most of the time and I love having infinite mana on certain champs so to me this item is still relevant simply because I still want chalice and I might as well upgrade it at some point.

They removed the mana regen stat, but they reduced the cost as well to compensate. Essentially, it makes Nashor's a better option for a larger pool of champions than it was before. For example, the mana regen was wasted on AP Trynd, but now that it's cheaper and the irrelevant stat was removed, it's a much stronger pick on him.