Reign of Gaming

I think this development is awesome and makes the early stages of matches really interesting. In season 2 early game was just about which lane your jungler was gonna camp first, and the interesting interaction was between great junglers second guessing each other (watch any Snoopeh vs. CloudTemplar game in S2 to see what I mean). Now though, ADs, supports, and even mids are involved in the early machinations. Do we pick aggressive poke/push champs? Do we try to find out which lane they're going to and pre-swap them with early invades/warding so we match them up evenly? Can the mid laner roam up (see KTB Ryu picking up a double kill on Ori against Gambit Gaming as they tried an early tower dive)? Do we try to counter-gank them or stall them out? So teams with the greatest understanding of the game and co-ordination are able to generate advantages out of these early manoevers and come up with new openings (see CJ Blaze going for Cait/Lulu mid, shoving hard and controlling the enemy jungle whenever they can). This is exactly as it should be. I will concede that some champions with weak early lane phases (like Jax) are near completely frozen out in favour of champions like Kayle and Elise, who can hold, harass and push more easily, and that's unfortunate. It's worth pointing out that one of the starting points for swapping top and bot was red side wanting to avoid the disadvantage of hitting level 2 second thanks to golems. I found it pretty boring to watch blue side win bot lane at level 2 every other game.

Another thing this item gives is IMMENSE baron killing potential. I've seen several sub 25 minute barons with two or three BotRK wielding champions. Throw in a Kayle or Elise and things get even crazier - baron will die in about 10-15 seconds even fairly early in the game. Essentially, the enemy has to keep constant vision and presence on baron or they lose it for free.

Season two wasn't much better though - mixed damage trumped single-type damage every time, which is why top lane was Jax, Olaf and Irelia nearly every single pro game, mixed in with some splitpushers like Shen and Nidalee (also a mixed damage champion when bruiser). Well, Jayce was actually played a lot at Worlds, because his melee E was a massive AD scaling magic damage nuke (he's since received huge nerfs to it of course). All they really need to do is tune champion kits to have less armor/mr shred so that stacking Jarvan/Kayle/Xin/Renekton/Taric/Vi/MF w/ cleaver isn't super strong.

You better inform Voyboy of how difficult it is to carry from the top lane. He seems to have other ideas.

Giants' aggression and relentless split pushing against GG really impressed me. Remined me of Najin Sword breaking Frost down with how out of shape GG were getting in response. A few more performances like that and they'll be a big feature of the EU scene.

I've been spamming 9 pots/2 wards (and encouraging my friends to do the same, with varying success!) and have found it to pretty much crush everything else. Even on weak early game champions you can get nearly every cs and not worry about harass at all with even halfway decent positioning/timing. On strong champions, against someone who bought an item, you can force the first back near 100% of the time. And with 2 wards, you're immune to ganks unless you derp.

Watching Najin Sword vs. KTRB yesterday was a bit sad. There was an incredible amount of tankiness on both teams and, outside of games where assassins reached an uncontrollable point (SSong on Eve, MakNooN and Ryu on KhaZix), very little death. The joke about counting the number of Giants Belts on each team to see who's ahead rang true. Game 4 in particular... oh dear. Damage needs to be made more rewarding for champions other than penetration stacking assassins, or, them aside, we're just going to see more full tank w/ good base damage Shens/Olafs/Renektons/Nocturnes/Elises/Nidalees grinding each other down or splitpushing, mixed in with some safe/tanky DPS champions like Ryze (tanky), Urgot (tanky), Ezreal (safe), Ahri (safe). The other option that the best teams have been using in S3 is the old "farm for full build Cait or Kog/Nunu and nuke everything" which isn't much fun to watch either, even if it does outscale both the HP stacking tanky DPS and the penetration stacking assassins (or MF w/ BC) approaches. I understand why they made health more efficient than resistances - resistance stacking being the most efficient choice meant champions with mixed damage like Jax and Irelia were strictly superior to other choices - but I think they need to make damage more efficient vs. health too. They've acknowledge this though, and that APs need stronger mid-late itemisation options, so I think things will work out in the end.

One thing I would say is to be very careful of doing a dragon while an enemy Amumu is up (and not known to be in no position to fight it). Even if his team is down a man or two, if he snares your entire sortie in the dragon pit and his team has any good AoE damage/CC whatsoever available you could easily feed a bunch of kills and objectives. Generally, if it's very early game I find dragon is the better choice to go for, but after about 15 minutes or so I look to take turrets and ward aggressively at any opportunity if I'm the jungler (or support). If a team goes up 3 or 4-0 in turrets I very rarely see them lose in solo Q. The passive map control is so powerful.

What I always find interesting about the winrate charts is how little influence which role a champion plays has on their chance of being a high winrate champion. Like, right now the top fifteen winrate champions (all with a winrate of over 52.5%) can be (roughly) divided like so: Top: Singed (3), Rumble (7), Wukong (12) Mid: Evelynn (1), Talon (6), Twisted Fate (9) Jungle: Amumu (4), Shaco (5), Xin Zhao (13), Sejuani* (15) AD Carry: Miss Fortune (8) Support: Taric (2), Sona (11), Janna (14) *Though she has a popularity of only 1.6% so this may be an anomaly. The above gives pretty much an even split across every role except AD, although Ezreal's in the top 20 too.

I've found Nidalee has a fairly easy time once she gets a Chalice, cougar form. and (parts of) a Spirit Visage, as long as she hasn't fallen behind. I think the "first outsustain, then outfight" approach which this exemplifies is the more reliable against her, but if you want to snowball and don't mind taking a risk, Xin Zhao might be a good pick for the "burst" approach. One thing to remember is that her escapes are pretty weak outside of her skillshot stun. Rappel makes her untargetable but unless there's an enemy minion or champion to drop to close to her turret it doesn't help her. There's a reason you see Stanley recommending Shurelya's Reverie on her, but almost no one in solo queue will ever build that item on Elise, so she's very vulnerable to ganks and being forced into fights she doesn't want.