Why is Zoe Broken?

With the addition to the new Champion Zoe into League of Legends, people are already begging for nerfs. From the Champion designer that created Yasuo and Kalista, CertainlyT has created another annoying and awful champion to play against. Zoe’s Q is a two part skill shot. On first cast, a star is thrown a short distance and can be reactivated to a new location doing area of effect damage based on distance traveled. Zoe W allows her to pick up orbs on the ground containing summoner spells like flash, heal, and teleport as well as item actives like protobelt and gunblade. This ability is described as RNG (Random Number Generator). Typical Riot Games has been firmly against adding this into the game because of the unhealthy nature of winning or losing based off of chance, but for some odd reason they thought this would be fun to play against. Zoe’s E is a new type of crowd control called drowsy/sleep. She shoots a bubble that will make the first target it hits drowsy and after a short delay make them fall asleep. However, this also amplifies the damage from Zoe’s next ability. This ability combined with her Q can one shot most targets. Now for most champions this kind of damage is gated by long cool-downs which punishes missing abilities, but Zoe is able to spam these abilities left and right. There is only so much dodging a person can do before the get hit. especially since Zoe’s e leaves a very large area of effect on the ground if she missed her initial target. I hope Riot Games nerfs her hard.

Preseason Changes: Tahm Kench

With season 7 ending, rune reforged has finally arrived. The new runes have made some champions very oppressive, and the games lengths are the shortest they have ever been. The changes made the games very snowball oriented. This is defined as a small lead spiraling into a bigger lead with a tiny chance of the enemy coming back. After playing a few games with old favorites and new, I wanted to share my favorite champion to play at the moment. Tahm Kench excels at being an anti-carry champion. This is amazing because right now assassins and ability power burst champions are very strong. Tahm Kench can safely remove his allies from danger, but this is not anything new. What I want to talk about are the new runes that make him very dangerous offensively and oppressive defensively. I use the resolve tree taking aftershock as my keystone. Aftershock is guaranteed damage since Tahm’s activates this any time he eats are lashes an opponent. Tahm’s Q and W also work well with Font of Life which allows allies to heal from movement impaired enemies. Next, I take Conditioning since I do not think the other options are all the great. Getting free stats at 10 minutes is amazing. I then take overgrowth which gives bonus health every time a minion dies near me. Since Tahm’s damage scales with health this is a must. In the second tree I take Domination. The biggest reason is Cheap Shot which lets Tahm do true damage to movement impaired enemies. This means Tahm’s Q and W do bonus damage. Since Tahm does around 30% max health when using W adding true damage to this makes him quite scary. Give this build a try. You will not be disappointed

Preseason Problems

With season seven coming to an end in early November, all the balance changes planned for the preseason are bound to shake up the state of the game. As a viewer of North American League of Legends Championship Series, I am excited about all the new popular champions and revolutionary tactics these changes might bring about in pro play. however, as a frequent player of League of Legends Ranked solo que I believe I might hold off on doing my placements for awhile so the broken items, champions, and runes reforged changes balance out after a few patched. The reason being is when season 8 begins not only will all players from every rank be reset, but I will not have the knowledge needed to play at the highest level possible. Since ranked solo que is influenced by a hidden value called MMR which is calculated by wins and losses, possibly losing a lot of placement games against more knowledgeable and skilled players would tank a players MMR. Fixing this initial drop in MMR can cause a player to waste a lot of time trying to climb back up to where they were before everyone’s rank was reset. Secondly with the drastic changes to runes and mastery pages their is bound to be very unbalanced play styles and champions that I wont catch in time to practice against  or abuse it myself since I have a small champion pool. So for the start of season 8 I will wait a few weeks for everyone’s MMR to settle and for Riot to fix the balancing issues with the game. This way I better my chances of starting off the season right.

How to Overcome the Ardent Censer Meta

With the changes to coin and ardent censer in patch 7.19, hyper carries as well as healing and shielding supports are the go to choices for the bot lane. Coin gives more gold then the other support items while also having no easy way to punish those that take it. Ardent censer gives a ridiculous number of stats which if not taken handicaps your team significantly. This has pushed tank supports out of the meta and creates a very boring and non-interactive play-style. The current counter to this is ability power based supports capable of bursting the squishy ardent abusers, but these ability power supports typically lack engage potential. Since I am a tank support player, I had to find a unique solution to this passive bot lane. Gragas is typically played as a tank either in the top lane or in the jungle, but he also has large ability power ratios. He struggles early game due to mana problems, but since he does not have to farm as a support, it is not a concern. He can not be punished by these passive supports, and with his ultimate ability he can engage and combo the enemy carries and support for an instant one shot. His innate tank stats allow him a wide range of item choices. If your team needs you to, you can even go tank Gragas instead of full ability power. I have had great success and fun with this strategy, and I hope you do as well.

Gragas Mid is not Dead.

In the popular computer game League of Legends, a character named Gragas has gone through an identity crisis over the years. In his current state in season 7, he is mainly picked in the Jungle or in the Top Lane. However, back in season 3 his was picked in the Mid lane because of an easily abused combo utilizing his barrel roll and explosive cast. As an example, a player called Kerp scored a double kill against CLG in the Battle of the Atlantic. This was decided to be unhealthy game play and was subsequently nerfed pushing him out of the mid lane. Despite the nerfs two notable vanguards Panunu and Woody Fruity have brought back Gragas to mid lane. Although spouting different combos and itemization Gragas still dishes out high damage and is incredibly fun to play. The changes to Gragas made it so his barrel role is weak unless it is allowed to sit and ferment where it deals significantly more damage. Because of this, players like Panunu and Woody Fruity developed new combos using Gragas’s other abilities to throw enemies in his charged up barrel role. Although harder to pull off then the original combo shown off by Kerp, players do not expect it since the chances of them playing against this new play style is minimal. After watching these Gragas masters, I became fascinated with the concept and attempted to learn the play style for myself. I had so much fun the first YouTube video I made was a Gragas Montage. If you are interested in learning Gragas Mid and the combos required to play him check out the guide I made to help anyone trying to pick him up.