...So I decided to default to a blog about League. I could talk more about TFT, but instead, I decided to add to the list of trollish builds. Specifically, two opposite builds, only possible if the enemy team is all-AD or all-AP (respectively).
I actually ran into a game where the enemy team was all-AD once, but I didn't know what to have in runes/items to punish them properly for that. I built Ninja Tabi and a GA and then Trinity Force and just that was enough to have them never kill me but I felt inspired by that, to improve on it, to make a build which while dealing absolutely zero damage would make the enemy team absolutely MISERABLE. What I came up with was the following. For a full-tank Ashe, run the runes of Grasp of the Undying + Shield Bash + Conditioning + Overgrowth + Overheal + Legend:Bloodline (this gives you shielding + lifesteal); I believe the best runes are adaptive force + armor + health here, though the second health might also be better to be armor. For items, ninja tabi for movespeed + armor, GA for some attack damage + the revive + the armor, then build into Frozen Heart (the item with the highest armor in the game, 100), then Thornmail (second highest), finishing with Randuin's Omen and Iceborn Gauntlet. Haven't tested out how much health that'll give you and how much armor it'll give you, but against an all-AD team...in theory you should never die. Obviously, this is still not an optimal build against even an all-AD team because sure, you might never die and be invincible, healing faster than they can deal damage to you...but like, armor penetration/lethality can still hurt you and you deal no damage so it's not like the build is really good. But, in one specific instance of facing an all-AD enemy team, it could be fun to try out. A similar idea which I've thrown around was based around "how to beat Eve in a 1v1 against her", but works against a full enemy team comp of AP damage dealers. The best I can figure out for that: Aery (the Sorc primary rune) seems like the best primary keystone, with Nullifying Orb as a MUST from the sorc tree--even if you ran something else as the primary tree, Sorcery would need to be the secondary for that rune. I chose Bone Plating + Revitalize as my secondary runes, since it seemed to be decent. Obviously, Adaptive Force + double MR for the flex runes. As far as items go, the items to build would actually be actual adc situationally-built items for the most part: Merc Treads, Maw of Malmortius, Mercurial Scimitar, Wit's End; these give attack damage, healing, and attack speed, while also having passives which interact with receiving magic damage. Spirit Visage is a good anti-AP/anti-assassin addition to this, which leaves a final item slot for either Banshee's Veil or Adaptive Helm. So this comp is obviously not an ideal adc build, but it at least deals reasonable dps. Not maxed dps, but okay dps. But the goal here is to do the same as tank-Ashe above does to an all-AD team, against an all-AP team: the goal is not to deal damage as an adc, the goal is to make the enemy team not have a fun time by your absolute refusal to die. Obviously, they have magic penetration items to ruin the build, but if you stack mr faster than they stack magic pen, I think that the damage reduction still can at least partially work. Like the above, it ONLY works if, SOMEHOW, the entirety of the enemy team has ONE damage profile, this time magic damage rather than physical damage. So it's not something you'd get the chance to build very often at all. And even if you did, it's still a little trollish to build because uh...yeah. Not an optimal adc build, not a build which synergizes well with Ashe. But while a bit trollish, and making the enemy team miserable, and probably getting your team to call "Ashe, what the hell are you doing?", it's something I can see as being incredibly fun to do if you actually did get the chance to try it out. I immediately found a couple of strong combos.
The most obvious: Ocean-Mage-Mountain-Warden. This combo relies on Vladimir, Syndra, Taliyah, Thresh, Nautilus, and Malphite--ideally building into Veigar, LeBlanc, and Brand. This combo works fairly well. Ocean 4 gives your units a ton of free mana. Warden 4 (not hard to get a Warden's vest, but if you can't get the six mage dream, it's not hard to field a fourth warden) gives you a tanky frontline. Mage 3 gives your mages a chance to doublecast (and you can get the mage item to turn, sayyyyy...Malphite into a mage. Turns out that AP Malphite is just as devastating in tft as he is in League), and mage 6 gives you a guarantee that they do. If you get a T3 Veigar, whose ability to instadelete non-T3s remains the same...well. He gets a ton of free mana and can doublecast so aint no MR in the world which can save the enemy comp, he still instantly deletes any non-T3 unit. (To be fair, in the current meta, it feels like a ton of people actually DO get T3 units.) Mountain gives an absurd shield to a random unit. Vladimir is basically Swaine. Now, Swaine's ability dealt damage twice and healed continuously and targeted everyone, whereas Vladimir's ability deals damage to one target, healing once, and damaging once. So he's weaker. But there's a key difference. Swaine was a 5* unit. Vladimir is a ONE star unit. A similarly strong combo is Druid Woodland Mage, building into basically the same comp. Not quite as strong in my opinion, but works just as well overall. Druids are basically a free Warmogs. Woodland can copy any woodland champion at the start of combat--minus their items unfortunately, but otherwise keeping their stats and synergies. Can be quite useful. Thresh/Ivern both work similarly to Kayle--not actual invincibility, but with a strong shield to an ally, it makes allies virtually impossible to kill. A combo which I want to make strong but haven't managed to figure out yet is Light 6. I heard from a stream apparently the way to go is to rush T3 on all light units and hope for a Lux and that your T3 Vayne is the last light unit left alive, but I don't know how well that will work since I haven't tried it out. I feel like playing through Yorick and building Light 6 Summoner could also potentially be good, but haven't gotten the chance to try it out yet. I also know that there's a strong combo involving rangers, infernals, poison, crystal, predator, and a bunch of synergies like it (the comp had a ton of synergies, maybe had steel too?). Kog'maw was the key carry unit in that comp, but it was a comp that I didn't think of fielding because I thought it'd be way too squishy, a glass cannon comp dealing a metric boatload of damage but being able to be instadeleted. Except they were still hard to kill. I wish I could remember the exact combo it had. Scarner, Ashe, Varus, Kindred, maybe it was Ezreal as the fourth ranger, with Kog'maw, some third predator (was it Rek'sai?), something like that. It's something which I can try playing around with at some point, though I do remember it took the infernal spatula item to get the infernal boost. So, there are broken combos in the game already, these were just the ones I saw from like one day of playing. I will say though: the ocean drake is pretty worthless since it's a one-time boost to mana at the start of combat. The mountain drake is OP since it's a permanent health boost to a unit and it doesn't take much to find a unit that is good on. The infernal one can be good; the cloud one is good when paired with defensive sparring glove items. Speaking of items tho: they are basically a joke. Items are basically worthless, contributing virtually nothing to the combat. Combat is more decided by the innate attributes of the champions. Items have never made a difference in combat. Like, they might contribute to like...1% of a victory, or in the case of a Zephyr taking out your mountain unit by luck a 10% contribution to the victory off of luck, but the strength isn't in putting items on one unit or multiple units. The strength is in the synergies and the innate properties of the champions. I've yet to see a champion who wasn't great without items be broken with items; I've yet to see a champion who with items performs notably better than they do without items. So, items are not very useful right now. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to use them to their max. Broken items are still going to be good. The items which were good on Vayne are still good on her as she's one of the only units to remain basically unchanged; the items which were good on Brand are still good on him as he's one of the only units to remain basically unchanged; the items which were good on Veigar are still good on him as he's one of the only units to remain basically unchanged; the items which were good in general are still good in general as generic boosts. It's just that items won't win you the game. They might help with like...5% of a victory, pushing a close fight which you'd normally lose into a win, but they won't give you a dominating lead. Have to say, I am impressed and I am having fun. There's a few comps I don't see any reason to really run (desert for armor reduction might be the intended counter to wardens, but wardens are never the carry units in a warden comp so I think that synergy doesn't add much; mystics might be the intended counter to mages, but the problem with that is, half the mystics are 5g units requiring level 7, a third mystic is 4g requiring level 5, you're not likely to get them and by the time you DO get them your comp is probably built in a way where you can't even use them--which is why, while mages might have a counter in the form of mystics, mages are still kinda broken because nobody ACTUALLY runs mystics because mystics are just too hard to get, to name a couple of them), but that was always the case with tft and will continue to always be the case. I was planning on talking about these changes before they went live, but apparently, they're live now. (I thought they were going live next week. WHOOPS. My bad.) I haven't played a match since the new changes, so bear in mind this will have a "Complaining About Shows They Don't Watch" vibe to it on the surface but keep in mind what I end the blog with.
So for those not in the know. Well. I'm not sure how I can explain this to you simply. But basically this patch made some absolutely HUGE changes to everything. Many, many, many of these changes, I feel are for the better--while I'm sad that the cursed blade item is being removed, it was mostly a niche item mostly only useful for Veigar comps or gunslinger comps, and in the case of a gunslinger comp, you want to save your recurved bows for Blade of the Ruined Kings (or rageblades) anyway so it really only had use for Veigar comps or as a "I'm never getting a spatula" gunslinger comps. But it makes sense to have Runaan's Hurricane not be a spatula item. It being a spatula item meant that every time, it was basically the most complete and total utter waste of a spatula item. Any synergy, any double stats, any extra unit, beats building a Runaan's Hurricane--but with it being a negatron cloak and a recurved bow, well...there's a lot of good to be had with it. The change in board size is good, too; it allows for a lot. The addition of elemental spots is neat. The addition of extra items from the boss monsters is another good one as well. And there were a TON of new units added into the game and a TON of new synergies added into the game. All of this good. There's also lots of changes which I don't care too much about. Champion pool, mana generation, no problems to me and makes sense. Is a little bit of a fun-killer I'll say because if you're aiming to play TFT for fun rather than aiming to play TFT to win...well tough luck. You can't anymore because if someone else is running what you wanted to run for fun, and/or your luck sucks...too bad! With two exceptions, don't care about the item tweaks and think that they're fine for adjusting balance. Decreased item drop rate I feel sucks because items are half of what make the game fun but I can live with their drop rate being lower. But then there's the changes I'm not so fond of. Giant's Slayer having it's 5% max health true damage changed to 8% current health in physical damage ruins the item. It went from the best anti-healing/anti-tank item in the game to...literally worthless. Physical damage mitigation impacts it, current health means it progressively deals less and less damage the further the enemy's health bar is, and between those two, the very thing it as an item is designed to do (be anti-tank/anti-healing)...it doesn't sound like it can actually do? Spatulas dropping less often and no longer granting double stats means that building them for anything other than force of nature is basically a waste now...AND, more than that, spatulas being a MUST GRAB in the carousel is now much much higher. Like, before this patch went live, I could afford to give away a spatula in a carousel if there was a champion and/or item that I wanted more, with the understanding that spatulas would drop just enough often that I wouldn't be gamethrowing. Now? Now it would be gamethrowing to give them up. But my biggest gripe? They added a TON of new champions and synergies... ...At the cost of removing just about every synergy they previously had, and about half the champions they had, with the champions that remaining being completely retooled. That would be equivalent to them doing a rework of every League of Legends champion in the game, at the same time--not one by one, not two, not minor balance changes. Literally reworking every single champion in the game from scratch. Changing every ability they have, changing their passives, their ratios, their everything, giving them different effects than they had before, leaving almost nothing the same. That's how big of a change this is. Adding things is one thing. Minor reworks is one thing. Minor tweaks is one thing. Adding elements to the game which weren't there before is one thing. Completely and totally removing basically everything you had in the game, and then replacing those things with something new? Well basically. What I am expecting from this is. Most of the players who were playing TFT will be alienated by the changes. Because the game they were playing, is no longer the game that they'd play now. There's no way to say otherwise. The items are more or less the same. There's new aspects to the game, like the terrain and such. Adjusting those, adding those? Not something which makes a completely new game. But completely removing half the champions and almost every existing synergy from the game, when champions and their synergies are THE core mechanic, even more of a core mechanic than the items were? You can't claim it's the same game when you remove basically everything which was in the game before, and replace it with something which wasn't in the game before. It's a completely different game--so I am expecting most of the existing playerbase, myself included, to be alienated. And a large number of people who were devoted TFT players will quit as a result because the game they were playing is no longer the TFT they can play. There's never been a change to Teamfight Tactics like this. Like, before, changes were along the lines of... Reworking an existing synergy, e.g. Demons being reworked two, three times. Tweaking the balance of champions. Changing the ways synergies worked, e.g. adjusting shapeshifters. Adding extra tiers to synergies, e.g. 6-->9. Adding extra champions, one at a time, to the game. You know--basically the sort of changes you'd see in League of Legends games. Where individual aspects are changed, and maybe one or two big things are changed. (Like, say, changing dragons, changing summoner's rift terrain, changing an item or two, those are still things which in spite of being 'big', are still in the grander scale of things, small.) If those were the sorts of changes being made, there's no way you could in good faith say, "This game isn't the game I was playing anymore", because small changes like that aren't big deals and are just small additions to the existing game, small tweaks to the existing game, and so on and so forth. Except removing most of what made the game be what it is, and replacing it with something entirely different, DOES mean it's not the same game anymore. Everyone has to relearn the game from scratch--there's no knowledge of the game as it was, which will help you with the game as it currently is. This isn't relearning one specific aspect; this is relearning the whole entire game at its fundamental nature. There's no experience which will help you. There's no experience which will give you an edge, aside from having played on the pbe server before these changes went live. Playing there obviously means you know what to do when playing these changes now. But what I am saying is, anyone who knew what they were doing, without having played the pbe to see the changes, will no longer know what they are doing--no matter what they were doing before. No matter what they were good at, no matter what their skills were, they have no basis from which to know, to understand, the new synergies...and the only way to practice, to figure it out, is to do it under the time crunch of a live match. You can read about the changes, but you can't understand them without being in a live match--teamfight tactics, unlike League, has no practice tool. If there were a practice tool, you could understand the changes by seeing them for yourself. But because the only way to see the changes and understand them is to play...again. All of your prior experience in the game is meaningless. It does you nothing. Like, you'll know what item components make what finished items (with the exception of spatula items because almost every synergy they built into was removed and thus you need to relearn what spatula items build into which synergies), but you won't know which items are good in what comps, which items are good on what champions, and so on and so forth. There's no such paradigm shift in the changes for League of Legends. Which is why I can say that it is an entirely different game. All my favorite comps, out the window. All my favorite combinations, out the window. All the things I wanted to build for fun, out the window. All the things which I wanted to test out, out the window. All the things I did, out the window. In favor of relearning from scratch, everything. Which like I said. Alienates the existing players who have played tft from the beginning. A tft player who was playing from the beginning but put the game aside until yesterday, would, as of yesterday, still be able to play the game and more or less know exactly what to do--the game as it was from the beginning was similar enough to know more or less what to do. A tft player who was playing from the beginning and played every day until yesterday would know what to do...until today. And as of today with this patch, no longer know what to do. A brand new player and a player who had played from the beginning would be equal--the veteran player might actually be at a disadvantage in fact. So the players who WERE good, will find themselves not being able to navigate the new game nearly as well, and this will cause a large number of them to quit. And I think that was a mistake. I think that was a bad move. And I am not happy about it. Because the game that I liked to play and played almost every day, is no longer the game that I have available to play. That having been said--and this is why I said you needed to read the whole blog to see the ending part. I understand the direction they are going in. These changes are, overall, a change for the better. These changes will bring in a TON of new players who weren't playing before--and lots of them will stay! And it's not like everyone who was playing, will quit. I am among the players who were playing, that will keep playing the new game and as soon as I publish this blog intend to do exactly that. Play the game. The people who were playing before, I expect are almost universally going to share my dissatisfaction...but the people who were playing before, myself included...will adjust. We'll adapt. We'll get used to it. We'll get the hang of it. All the existing comps that we liked to run are gone, but they will be replaced by new comps that we end up loving just as much. For instance, I COULD be mistaken...but I BELIEVE that the new Light synergy works a lot like the old now-removed Noble synergy? (Including having Vayne, my favorite unit in the game, be one of its components for the completed set.) So it'll take a lot of time. But I'll find a way to fall in love with the new TFT as much as I did the old one. Which apparently means an extra hour of sleep apparently? And also adjusting the clock, presumably an hour back?
Guess so. The two options: go to bed earlier and get an extra hour of sleep, or stay up an extra hour later than I normally would. I'm tired enough for the former, but want to do the latter to be honest. |
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