**OLD THREAD** League of Legends - F2P MOBA (like DOTA)

[BlahBlahYouToo]

what's better?
HoN, LoL or WC3 DOTA?

 

[v8envy]

what's better?
HoN, LoL or WC3 DOTA?

Just a guess, but people in this thread prefer (and play) LoL.

 

[crownjules]

what's better?
HoN, LoL or WC3 DOTA?

HoN is pretty much WC3 DotA with modern graphics. It's also less noob friendly due to some of the unintuitive tactics that are employed, such as denying (I have to kill my own guys to prevent the enemy from getting gold?). LoL is of course free to play but you're limited to the free character rotation until you get enough IP to buy a few or spend real $$$ on RP and buy some that way.

 

[crownjules]

I don't know if you guys are aware, but the latest patch on the test realm has a very significant change to the way ArPen/MagPen works.

Right now, there's reduction and flat pen. The patch changes everything so it's percentage and everyone is capped at 50% pen. But that's not where it stops. Rather then reduce the armor/MR amount by that percentage, it actually reduces the PERCENTAGE of reduction of the armor/MR. Let me illustrate the difference.

Old system:

100AR/MR = 100 / (100+100) = 50% reduction
250AR/MR = 250 / (100 + 250) = 71% reduction

So if you have a Last Whisper/Void Staff (both 40% reduction of their respective type) and then 10 pen runes, it'd go like this.

(100 * 0.6) - 10 = 50 effective AR/MR, or only 33% damage blocked (down from 50%)
(250 * 0.6) - 10 = 140 effective AR/MR, or 58% damage blocked (down from 71%)

Under the new system, this is actually what happens. I'm sure the pen runes will be reworked, but we'll assume they're maxed and we've hit the cap of 50% penetration.

100AR/MR = 50% reduction * 0.5 (pen) = 25% reduction (effectively 34 armor)
250AR/MR = 71% reduction * 0.5 (pen) = 35.5% reduction (effectively 55 armor)

So as you can see, the proposed changes punishes you for having more resistance and actually promotes that the DPS classes never get it. This will also gimp tanks like Rammus and Morde who depend on those resistances as opposed to Alistar or Shen who mainly tank through abilities. Supposedly, the change in the system is to address the specific concern of penetration being too powerful in the first few levels. To which I say, why not simply scale back penetration runes? I think armor ones are way overpowered anyway.

edit: Of course, this doesn't take into account that maybe Riot is a little smart and rework penetration stats so Last Whisper/Void Staff only gives 10-15% instead of 40%. But that might give them a little too much credit.

 

[v8envy]

This is interesting news. On the face of it, nobody will go armor/armor pen and everyone will pile on HP instead. And dps instead of armor / magic pen.

Because you can see what others are packing it'd be trivial to get ONE item of armor/magic pen and cancel an entire resist based build on the off chance the tank is going for surprise factor of high resists.

And yeah, I see Shen becoming ever more popular.

 

[AbAbber2k]

The Ar/Mr Pen changes are not finalized and will not be going through with the next live patch. They are in the process of balancing it so that it is no longer possible to 100% negate AR/MR, while still making penetration effective against tanks (but not so much that AR/MR is ineffective vs pure HP stacking). There is a thread on the test forums started by one of the devs detailing how they intend to look at the stat of defense pen and balance it.

 

[crownjules]

Make no mistake - that system would have been pushed through if there hadn't been a ton of backlash against it from the community at large. Riot is now talking about locking down the PTR forums so only testers can access it and it will be covered by an NDA. So any new changes will be hidden from the player base at large until it's pushed through on the live servers. This is also one of the very few times that a PTR change has actually been reversed. Riot largely ignores the criticisms/suggestions the PTR players make.

As a customer who has given them money, I find that unacceptable. I understand that the PTR has limited connections and therefore a limited amount of players are given access. But as was the case with this proposed change, anyone could see the effects it would have. And with Riot's track record, we know it will most likely be weeks before something on the live servers is reverted or fixed in a sufficient way. I don't know why Riot is acting like petulant children when the player's who are invested and the source of their income just saved their asses from a near blunder.

 

[zebano]

I'd seen those test realm changes and I have been curious what they're doing to items/runes and if penetration caps at certain percentage. I know a lot of people were QQing about the end of tanks (or being forced to go straight HP which is countered by items like deathfire & madreds) but without seeing it in action I'm curious what Riot thinks they're solving by doing this; Generally tanks that stack that much armor/mr do very little damage.

Edit: Anyone familiar with digital rights and how it affects the skins / characters that Riot can create? For instance Shaco uses lines from the Joker in the Dark Knight but they haven't created a matching skin. I would like to see them create an Ultmecia (Final Fantasy 8) or Melissa/Eve (Parasite Eve) skin for Morgana.

 

[Rhoxed]

Seems the matchmaking has changed a bit, I'm lvl 30, but my gf is 24 and her little brother is ~18 - when i used to play with them, they were way out of their league (usually all 30's on the other team due to premade matchmaking)

Lately the games have been much more even, seeing 1-2 30's and ranges from 18-25 for the others on opposite team, which has really helped out (we all have pretty bad W/L ratio due to always playing premade) But we were able to go 7-1 last night, and the loss was due to a 4v5 (we had 4) that lasted a good 1hr 20min before we finally got overrun.

So my new record with twitch is 1256 kills 725 deaths and 887 assists. (going 175-51 in my last 8 games)

 

[Onita]

Rhoxed - Sorry I've missed your few messages for games. I have a habit of just leaving the room after a game and leaving LoL up.

EDIT: One reason of the changing runes is that ArPen was jacked up. It was better than crit strike runes 100% of the time for any champ.

 

[zebano]

Rhoxed - Sorry I've missed your few messages for games. I have a habit of just leaving the room after a game and leaving LoL up.

ditto.

 

[xCxStylex]

Going to have to disagree with your blanket statement. ;P

I play GP with full crit runes, 20% crit total.

Although you could argue that armor pen results in greater DPS, GP (at least until late game) is not about DPS, he is about LOL PARLEY BURST CRIT DMG.


But yeah, for general physical dps autoattackers, armor pen is the best rune you can use.

EDIT: One reason of the changing runes is that ArPen was jacked up. It was better than crit strike runes 100% of the time for any champ.

 

[zebano]

Read the test realm notes this morning and it looks like Riot put the brakes on their % penetration change. Instead they had 5 ideas they were considering the first of which is "flat penetration applies before % penetration" and I believe this is live on the test realm now. This clearly doesn't address the problem they were originally looking at (that armor pent. runes effectively cancel all armor at lvl 1) but it seems sensible.

 

[v8envy]

I think I'm done with LoL. Lost a few games trying new champs which tanked my elo. MM then matched me with 5 leavers in a row, which tanked my elo even further. Now just about every game has at least one leaver, on my side or the other. This is absolutely zero fun -- being steamrolled or steamrolling purely through numbers is neither entertaining nor good gameplay, it's simply a random and stupid timewaster.

Last game was a 3 on 4 which my side (the 3) somehow won. In another game I went 24/3/17 and we still (barely) lost after 1 hour 10 minutes.

Until there's some way to not be teamed with habitual leavers (in the 5 in a row every leaver had 50+ leaves) it's just frustrating and pointless.

 

[Saga]

I think I'm done with LoL. Lost a few games trying new champs which tanked my elo. MM then matched me with 5 leavers in a row, which tanked my elo even further. Now just about every game has at least one leaver, on my side or the other. This is absolutely zero fun -- being steamrolled or steamrolling purely through numbers is neither entertaining nor good gameplay, it's simply a random and stupid timewaster.

Last game was a 3 on 4 which my side (the 3) somehow won. In another game I went 24/3/17 and we still (barely) lost after 1 hour 10 minutes.

Until there's some way to not be teamed with habitual leavers (in the 5 in a row every leaver had 50+ leaves) it's just frustrating and pointless.

Biiiiiingo. HoN stats system includes a leaver percentage which includes both general disconnects (5 minutes to reconnect to the game so if you get netdropped for any reason you can always get back into the game if you want to) and vote-kicks. If someone is generally belligerent in a game, all the remaining players must vote yes to pass a vote-kick and that player gets a kick and leaver on their record. Most HoN games I play are "no leaver" games, where anyone with a 5% or more leave ratio cannot join - so habitual crybabies or just general assholes are VERY uncommon.

When you start out you tend to be in a few games with leavers because thats what the 1500's are all about, but the more you play the less it happens and I haven't had a leaver in a game in over 100 games at this point. S2 SERIOUSLY put a lot of time, thought, and effort into the stats and rankings system to make the games fun.

HoN basically took all the best aspects of DotA and improved upon the system and engine problems. LoL just turned it into a cartoony WoW version of DotA with the same user flaws.

 

[xCxStylex]

v8 - sorry to hear about your troubles, but that is true of any ELO ladder game, especially in a free game where new accounts can be created. One really needs to play a lot more games to get your ELO to a fair level where you can have ok games without leavers.

 

[crownjules]

A game I played last night had Morde (me), Mundo, Amumu, Singed, and Soraka for a team. Team fights would usually start with them initiating, blowing all their CDs to bring us down to half health, then us wading in as our health started going back up and killing them.

 

[v8envy]

v8 - sorry to hear about your troubles, but that is true of any ELO ladder game, especially in a free game where new accounts can be created. One really needs to play a lot more games to get your ELO to a fair level where you can have ok games without leavers.

I have something like 500 games played and a more than half of that won (much better w/l with my main since I had to overcome the ~30 game loss deficit from being a newbie), and I've been level 30 for a couple of months. *shrug*. 11 leavers in 8 games could have just been terrible luck, but it was enough to make me swear off the game.

Sounds like HoN has really addressed the problem and I'll give that a shot. A simple *choice* not to be MMd with people with a high leave percentage would fix the problem, but is apparently way too hard for Riot to clone.

 

[zebano]

I played a few games in a row with Rhoxed and co. last week and wow did we (they) steamroll the competition. Not only was the 5 man premade nice in that we had a well balanced team, but when I asked for a gank in the bottom lane, my teammates came through (also initiating with Amumu and having your teammates follow you in and stay there = win)!!!! A premade naturally doesn't have to worry about leavers either.

Secondly I have now gone into the positive at 110 wins to 104 losses last I looked!! I've been playing Amumu and Pantheon.

Despite my success with Rhoxed's group, when I pair with my brother we sucked (and a panth + AP sion lane should kick ass). I think we just don't play well together which is really weird.

 

[imaheadcase]

I tried to get into this game, but its just, well boring. Highest level player wins. game over.

I played maybe 20 games, %75 of them people just left game when they died first time so it was uneven. So everyone else left.

 

[zebano]

I tried to get into this game, but its just, well boring. Highest level player wins. game over.

I played maybe 20 games, %75 of them people just left game when they died first time so it was uneven. So everyone else left.

Absolutely false. Early on there is a steep learning curve of when do I fight and when do I run, but you also should not be matched with people that are much higher level than you (2-4 levels makes almost no difference and most games are won by the team that coordinates best). Leaving is a problem, but much less so once you pass level 10.

 

[crownjules]

I tried to get into this game, but its just, well boring. Highest level player wins. game over.

I played maybe 20 games, %75 of them people just left game when they died first time so it was uneven. So everyone else left.

Like Zebano already mentioned, there is a bit of a learning curve to overcome. In addition to learning the strategies and the dos and don'ts, there are 52 champions and more being planned. That's a lot of abilities to remember and many strengths and weaknesses to figure out.

Leaving is only rampant in the early levels of the game. You've got high level/skill players using new accounts to play at the lower levels and they don't care about trashing the account.

 

[v8envy]

Update: since I stopped caring about doing well in LoL I made a smurf account.

Oh. My. God. What fun! Face-stomping on demand. And if by some miracle the opposing team does well *bam* I'm a leaver. I told others I used to play with about it and they're also smurfing it up.

Yup, I'm definitely going to be part of the problem. But it makes the game worth playing, and may even encourage Riot to fix the leaver/smurf bullshit.

I swear to god my next account will be named LeaverSmurf. If it isn't already taken.

 

[ivan2]

this new hero malzahar looks mean! will be a buy for me.

 

[xCxStylex]

He does look pretty cool, but that void silencing thing takes too much skill to time right and nail like in that phreak video.

I've been playing jungle shaco since this weekend and i absolutely love it.