Bay 12 Games Forum

Regardless of where your division placing is your MMR determines who you play with, so if you have the MMR to get into, say, plat, you'll be playing with people in plat regardless of whether or not your division says plat 4, gold 1, or bronze 5. You may as well just let your placing go as high as it can because you'll be dealing with whatever players and toxicity are at that level regardless unless you deliberately throw games to drop your MMR.

My point is Nasus roams terribly (ok wither is good, but you don't have the waveclear/lane presence early to give you good chances to do it), and that makes him reliant on the rest of the team to not fall on their faces because it takes a while before he can get big enough to try and swing a game, compared to something which can roam well and affect the rest of the map much earlier if need be.

Also who builds AD Nasus? The general build is triforce/iceborn gauntlet (both for sticking to people+sheen procs) and a buttload of tank items, letting the Q stacks do the damage for you.

The main problem with playing Nasus is you're entirely reliant on how the rest of your team does. If you're playing him top and the rest of your team ends up losing you're screwed, since Nasus doesn't start winning lane against about anything until level 9+ which is enough time for the other team members lose hard enough that either you can't make up for it or it bleeds to your lane as well.

My honest suggestion if you want to carry games as top lane is pick any strong lane bully and just learn how to roam effectively. My preferred is Renekton just because his kit is so damn strong in any kind of fight even if you aren't crushing that game. What I do is once my lane dominance starts to drop I just start flash clearing the wave with tiamat+Q and constantly gank mid lane and roam. Usually the other laner will stay top thinking you've given up (if they're starting to out-scale you) or yay free farm (if you're ahead) and you can force a 5v4 around mid lane/drag/bot lane and crush people with your kit and then force objectives so that your whole team gets stronger. It works really well regardless of whether you win or lose the lane or what item build you go.

For instance had a game a short while ago where our team was losing like 4-11 in kills and I was facing a Jax who I couldn't get a big enough lead on to stop him overpowering me level 9-ish, so I just shoved lane in, finished my tower which was low and then abandoned top lane. By the time Jax had started moving out of top himself I'd been around mid for 5 mins or so and provided enough power to win a bunch of small fights and I'd managed to help even the kills and get a bunch of towers/dragons and then we steamrolled them.

Basically for top lane to carry you either have to crush your lane so hard that you can 1v2+ the enemy and essentially become god (not reliable), or know how to impact the rest of the map. If you're good at forcing objectives and numbers advantaged for your team and helping the rest of them get strong it doesn't matter if you've gone full tank or something that isn't some uber god of destruction, you'll still win.

To move discussion on to something different, in the past 5(?) or so months since I last had a go at the game has the balance started shifting away from being designed away from screwing over ranged and/or squishy characters? Love the game, played it a lot but I just can't bring myself to play it again since my preferred playstyle is basically intended to not be viable.

Before anyone jumps on me for that comment (I don't expect people to here, but I know for a fact if I said that on the official forums I'd be instantly dogpiled), my main character has been each time I've played a full glass-cannon fireball witch (hey, it's fun). Started in closed beta, had no real problems with that build once I'd played it a lot and I was probably the only high-ish level person doing such a thing, certainly the only one without minion totems (I used dual shock nova totems of all things, required some damn good positioning to use well). Running maps was a matter of knowing how to position, how to place totems correctly, how to advance safely, how to utilise all my spells and where one slip meant dead. And that's not counting some absurd things I ran across (flicker strike map boss that could 1-shot me was hilarious, I managed to kill him only dying once but that was damn hard). Wasn't easy, but enough experience meant I got good at doing all of that and eventually I could do most stuff without too much worry.

Skip forward ages to about when act 3X came out and I figure I'll jump into the game again (starting from scratch, same-ish build but I had to relent to skele totem since dual was no longer possible, thus my previous strategy was rendered invalid) and the shift in design was damn obvious. Non-expansion act 3 wasn't bad at all in that regard actually, Piety took a few goes before I figured out how to do her safely but overall it was fine. Act 3X and some of the new maps? That shit got rediculous. The new maps weren't that bad, except for boss areas full of mobs that you have to take a portal to, so it's basically a check of "can you survive being dropped into the middle of 20-ish enemies" which for a character designed to kite and not take hits means dead. But whatever, I can trade bad maps away, fine.

The real problem is a bunch of enemies introduced that force you to be in melee range (no, being a ranged character is not fun when you run into the bubble guys, it simply isn't) and others that punish you for trying to take the style of avoiding being hit rather than tanking the damage. The prime example of both of these being Dominus, the worst-designed fight I've ever seen because his final form is basically "you stand within my melee range or die in 2 seconds, btw my minions will swarm you as well and you can't run away from them this time because of blood rain". Like ugh, the only way I could beat that fight solo was to drag him down the stairs to the arena entrance by dying repeatedly, and then distract him to face the other way from you so I could actually attack without being swarmed from all directions.

That... was much rantier than I meant to make it, sorry, but I was pretty upset to see the balance with regards to character builds go so heavily towards "be tanky and melee or go away", when it didn't used to be anything like that.

As a top laner Gnar looks so freaking fun, looks like I'm saving up 6300 IP for a third time in a row (just bought Jayce and then Rengar in succession). >.<

While his kit has a lot put into it, I do reckon it's not as bad as it looks if you're just listing out all his benefits because it also looks like it's going to take a LOT of skill and practice on him to be able to use it all anywhere near well. Remember this isn't a Nidalee or Elise, so even if he has 7 skills there's only going to be very brief moments where he can use skills from both forms in succession, and with little control over transforming you might not be in the right form at the right time to utilise them well (his AoE ult means nothing if your team is engaged on when he's at 0 rage).

I'd say it's better to look at his kit as: 1 line slow, % max hp damage, gap closer/escape + possible stun OR 1 slow, 1 AoE stun, short gapcloser/escape, AoE condemn

And it all depends on how his numbers end up anyways. I'd probably expect his big form to be ideally geared towards disruption and tankiness more than massive amounts of damage while little Gnar will be pokey and hurt more, but most of that is loaded onto his W passive, as the boomerang doesn't look like it'll hurt much unless he builds really squishy.

I see Essence Reaver mostly as a thing for ranged Manamune users (ie Jayce and Ezreal), because you can just leave it on all day and get the mana from your autos back. Everything else, nah. Non-Manamune champs get it too late in laning to really help, or would get more out of other items. Melee Manamune users don't use autos enough for it to matter, and thus don't actually run into mana problems that Essence Reaver would help with.

I'm going to raise the question of how many non-Sona players actually know and remember what her auras do? I certainly don't and I actually play a lot of support. As far as I ever remember her skills are: heal people, poke people, something I don't remember at all, and crescendo. I don't remember the passive auras at all. And the few games I play that have Sona in them I'm usually either the support against her (so can't check my bar for the effects) or playing top lane (so I'm likely not near her if she's on my team) so checking what her auras does in-game is a bit hard, if I remember at all.

Now, consider the other auras in the game are either items that everyone can buy (and thus will probably remember say what an aegis does) or are a standalone part of a champs kit (zilean and janna, also being their only auras which helps remember them). The difference between Sona and all these other examples is that her kit has three extra effects beyond the obvious actives, which makes them much harder to remember. Remembering "oh, Nasus has passive lifesteal" is easier then "Sona's Q does this and also gives this aura, her W does this and gives a different aura, ect".