Reign of Gaming

Typically, your level should stick somewhere between the solo laners and your ADC (if either of your teammates gets ahead on bot lane, it'll be them).

You might be ganking too often, or waiting too long for ganks to happen. You should almost always be doing something - waiting around for an opportunity to gank might or might not work for your team's benefit, but if you grab a camp near the lane you want to hit, you'll keep even while still being around for most opportunities.

If your laners end up needing to recall, that should take priority over jungle camps - you'll get more gold and XP that way. If the other laner recalls too, you can get some damage on the tower and force the other team to lose that XP or pull in something from another area. If they waste a global ult to clear it, you win. If they have their jungler come over to defend the tower, you also win, because you just took gank pressure off your other lanes completely for a little while. Basically, as long as you don't die in the lane, you just created a small victory for your team by doing something so simple.

For the specific junglers you list, Sejuani, Amumu and Nocturne should have no problem keeping up with the laners at all. Maokai can have trouble with mana after you lose that first blue, which drastically reduces his ability to farm, so I always rush to level 4 with him to maximize my farm time with the buff, and at a minimum get a Spirit Stone and T1 Boots (750 gold) on the first back to keep my mana up. After that first clear, it's one stop at golems with smite, and a gank on the lane closest - there's something good to be said for the kind of efficiency others have mentioned in their posts.

I think you thought your snare would save you, but J4's flag pull will still move him even when he's immobilized. This means, lots of the time, he doesn't care at all if you hit him with Light Binding - if you're in range of his flag you're still screwed.

MvC2, Starcraft, and most other games lack an element present in LoL though. Once those games shipped, they added no new gameplay elements. LoL has constant champion releases, while Starcraft had one expansion pack which added units, and wasn't modified except by balance changes for many, many years afterwords. The same goes for MvC2, which never had an expansion released, and StarCraft 2 looks to be shaping up similarly.

By adding champions on a regular basis, League has positioned itself differently than the other games. It does require at least a minor level of constant innovation to succeed, which is something that most of the other games played competitively don't have to nearly the same degree.

Another awesome post by Hash, but I don't agree with the third point. I think that if the system is inherently based around the idea that sometimes you get to pick first and sometimes you don't, that's fine. However, fit he system is biased in some way, it doesn't quite hold true. For example, duo queue is much less likely to get high picks because of the way picks are sorted by MMR, and if they consider pick order > call order based on your logic, the system should be designed such that the order is random rather than determined by some other factors.

Why wouldn't you buy Tear on Singed?

You can stack it about as fast as it's possible to stack Tear, and builds into Archangel's/Seraph's which gives him another scale on mana. On top of that, you're typically building a pair of items that have mana on him anyway (Rod of Ages and Frozen Heart are standards) with a couple of situational items, and by building Tear/Seraph's, you're adding that extra multiplicativity into a stat he already uses pretty well. His base at level 18 is 1025, then when you add in the 1150 from FH and RoA, and another 1000 from Seraph's, you're talking an extra 95 AP on top of the base 60 AP from Seraph's, and an extra 250 HP (just from Seraph's, the rest applies anyway) as a nice bonus.

That 155 AP turns into 46 per tick of poison, and entices the other team to focus you because now you really hurt a hell of a lot. That's a simple way to make yourself into a better tank - you become a real, formidable "either kill me or I'll kill you" threat to anyone on their team, but they're still not going to be able to take you down easily.

Even without Deathcap, which makes the deal even sweeter (although at that point, you're more of an AP carry than a tank), it seems like a solid way to boost your damage quite a lot while providing needed sustain in lane and not eating up tons of slots.

To be truthful, that slow is more effective than the tools that many other junglers have. It's really long, and a huge percentage, and on a pretty short CD at level 1. That's not to mention the fact that his base move speed is pretty high, and his damage after a few minutes is significant if you semi-farm his Q, and his % health damage from his ult.

Damn Hash, your semi-ramble/rant style really works well with satire. This is the best article you've written since I started reading RoG by a longshot!

I like his insight, but his writing is terrible and his tone is just as bad. He needs, at a minimum, someone to proofread his stuff before it goes up, because there's serious flaws in basic spelling and grammar everywhere. All over the place in the real world, there's tons of people with great insight who get ignored because of simple spelling errors, typos and overall tone. Ignoring that these aspects of his writing are flawed ignores that publishing stuff like this, solidly grounded but poorly executed, reduces the credibility of RoG as a whole.

I'll take burning 2 or 3 flashes for a 20 sec CD ability any day.

Considering you haven't even gotten into the different types of backlighting for LCD monitors, or the different types of monitors, I'm calling BS. Every one has different light characteristics, and you can't say they all have a "co emission" (which is a word you made up) of one specific light frequency with any reasonable certainty because of the different lighting characteristics of LEDs vs cathode ray tubes vs cold cathodes, let alone individual variance in phosphors between specific cathodes and the exact frequency ranges that specific LEDs output.