Reign of Gaming

If all five of you take Smite that's 2,450 (5x490) true damage right off the bat. I believe Dragon begins with 3,500 health, so you can immediately drop him to 1,050 health. I don't think it will be very difficult to polish him off from there, no matter what your team composition is.

Mind you, I understand that your goal is simply to kill the dragon right when it spawns, and nothing else about your match is really important... right? So this, to me, is the path of least resistance to accomplishing the stated goal. Once you do it, you can probably work to improve efficiency by, say, everyone taking heal or developing your team composition.

I've yet to ADC with a Nami I was excited about. I mean, maybe I'm just getting bad ones, but I've not seen anything phenomenal from any of them.

I say kill the dragon as many times as you can (so in your situation, kill it instead of the tower) as you are only going to kill that tower once in the entire game. Dragon yields more gold during the course of the game than the tower.

Great post.

I'm extremely glad to see you posted this and demonstrated what diminishing returns truly are and how they really work.

LoL doesn't bother much with true diminishing returns, which is why I think there is such confusion among the playerbase.

Stonewall, I'd commented as a reply to another comment, but I'm gonna double post because I'm genuinely curious about a particular aspect of this situation. I've been following you (loosely) and been familiar with your jungle guides/videos even since before RoG (that I'm aware of anyway, going back at least two years): I'm not knocking you or your article. I'm really trying to understand a particular dynamic you reference which is non-existent in my low elo play. I'm just gonna copy and paste rather than trim anything down:

I actually only understood about 75% of the article, though I didn't mind reading it. Most of it made sense, as I think I've got as good of an understanding about the matchmaking system as one can probably have, but what I'm missing is how these teams are knowing who they are queuing up against. Are you all on each others' friends list, or all sitting in the same channel, or..? And if so, why? While I understand the camaraderie aspect of whatever it is that's allowing this knowledge to be shared, as far as I can tell its detrimental to the system and the high elo players this article deals with are experiencing the detrimental reasons first-hand.

Outside of tournament/custom game matches you're not supposed to know who you are going against - if somehow yall are knowing this, your undermining the system in my opinion. It's one thing to be able to guess or have a good idea, but its something else to know, which is how I'm reading your article.

Now, I am not criticizing here or denying that there is a problem, but it sounds somewhat self-inflicted as the queuing the rest of us do 24/7 isn't anything at all like what you've described, and the contrasting component isn't skill but knowledge. In my queues in champion select the only knowledge I've got is of my own teammates and what champions my opponents are banning/picking, but not who my opponents are.

It sounds to me like somehow the high elo players found a way to see into that blind spot and created a problem for themselves which is more than likely irreversible.

I actually only understood about 75% of the article, though I didn't mind reading it. Most of it made sense, as I think I've got as good of an understanding about the matchmaking system as one can probably have, but what I'm missing is how these teams are knowing who they are queuing up against. Are you all on each others' friends list, or all sitting in the same channel, or..? And if so, why? While I understand the camaraderie aspect of whatever it is that's allowing this knowledge to be shared, as far as I can tell its detrimental to the system and the high elo players this article deals with are experiencing the detrimental reasons first-hand.

Outside of tournament/custom game matches you're not supposed to know who you are going against - if somehow yall are knowing this, your undermining the system in my opinion. It's one thing to be able to guess or have a good idea, but its something else to know, which is how I'm reading your article.

Now, I am not criticizing here or denying that there is a problem, but it sounds somewhat self-inflicted as the queuing the rest of us do 24/7 isn't anything at all like what you've described, and the contrasting component isn't skill but knowledge. In my queues in champion select the only knowledge I've got is of my own teammates and what champions my opponents are banning/picking, but not who my opponents are.

It sounds to me like somehow the high elo players found a way to see into that blind spot and created a problem for themselves which is more than likely irreversible.

Holy crap why isn't this truncated on the front page.

I think what curbs me from buying SS is that the effect just feels so... underwhelming. I can have fun grabbing it on Sivir for some hardcore push action (though I hardly ever play her anymore because it's just hard to justify picking her over stronger more versatile ADC's), but on Corki (who I'm playing the most now) the effects from BC, BT, or PD are just so much more appealing. And on top of that - as I hinted at earlier this week - I've really kinda fallen in love with Hurricane what with triple on-hit applies (particularly with BT or BC). Lately on Corki I've been rushing a BT for the sustain, picking up either a BC or IE or both, and then seeing about grabbing a Hurricane.

Is all this just a placebo effect in my head?

EDIT: I still think Sivir is strong, she just gets caught too easily and I still feel like they need to either increase her range further or at least speed up her attack animation.

At risk of sounding harsh, I think using the locked camera is putting you at a severe disadvantage. I'd recommend playing bot games and learning to scroll by placing your cursor at the edge of your screen when you need to scroll. Eventually this will feel natural and you'll wonder how you played locked.

I press spacebar to center on my champion during intense teamfights if I lose track of where I am, but the only other time I might use space is to hold it when I'm running back to my lane and checking the scoreboard, shop, etc. That let's you be right on your champ just in case someone jumps out of the jungle or something crazy (unlikely).