But I still want to write blogs.
Not gonna lie--not really in the mood to blog today, I was more in the mood yesterday...but then I did the thing which I was going to blog about me wanting to do yet not having done yet and while I constantly, constantly got screwed over either by getting the absolutely worst random luck and by the time I was turning it around, got eliminated by those with better luck just before I could make the comeback...
...Or, I was getting godly good luck early, but in the lategame, the key units that I needed in order to not get massacred just. wouldn't spawn. Quite often, NOBODY had them. Not on their boards, not on their fields. Not a single person had them, and yet in spite of spending upwards of 100 gold in rerolls, I couldn't get them.
It was incredibly frustrating, but eventually, I did get it to work well.
To explain what I am building: I am more or less playing around with Druids, Lunars, Mountain (specifically, Malphite), and Nami. There are multiple comps that I wanted to run and I have at least partially run most of them.
My dream of dreamteam comps:
Malphite with spear of Shojin, Morellonomicon, then any third item but usually a defensive item of some sort, buffed by Karma's shield.
Plus Nami with spear of Shojin, Morellonomicon, then any third item but ideally Warden's Mail.
And Neeko with Seraph's, Morellonomicon, then any third item but ideally a defensive one.
Get Taliyah for Mountain.
Leona for Warden 2/4 and Lunar.
Karma for Mystic 2 and Lunar.
And then that leaves me with three units.
Option one: Ocean 4: Thresh, Nautilus, Vladimir.
Option two: Mystic 4 plus one spare unit (or a redundant Mystic 5): two of {Yi, Janna, Soraka}. Soraka for her ult to stop the enemy's mana; Janna to heal your team; Yi to heal himself and deal damage.
Option three: Druids into woodland, with one spare unit: Ivern and Maokai.
Option four: SHIELDS SHIELDS SHIELDS! Add in Thresh and then two of Ivern/Diana/Scarner.
There are five shielding units in the game:
Thresh and Ivern were staples. (Ivern got nerfed into oblivion but still can help.) Diana also got nerfed, but Scarner got buffed. (That said, Diana's ult deals guaranteed damage, whereas Scarner's ult gives attack speed while he's shielded; the former is usually more helpful than the latter to be honest.) And Karma is now the fifth.
A comp I ran was to try for all five, plus Leona for Lunar, plus the mountains for eight, and then leaving open the ninth unit as ideally either Nautilus (for Ocean 2/Warden 4 and Nautilus's ult giving CC), Taric (for Crystal 2/Warden 4 and his ult giving immortality), or Nami (for Ocean 2/Mystic 2 and Nami's ult giving whole board CC, healing, and such to the whole team).
That comp is a comp that you can probably see the problem of--it has basically no synergies until much later in the game and most of the units for it are high-cost meaning you have trouble obtaining them and the units are usually fairly contested. So I don't want to try running it again unless I get very specific luck that makes it viable--but I did pull it off!
So basically, right now I am running pretty much every single game, Druid/Woodland + Mountain/Warden + Ocean 2 + Mystic 2, trying to get a Morello ideally on Malphite or Nami but settling for Neeko, too, and ideally with them also having a spear of shojin.
The reason for this is pretty obvious.
The comp, as a Druid comp, is amazingly strong earlygame.
A problem with Druid comps is that they are usually tremendously weak lategame, outscaled by other comps.
But by using Nami, Malphite, and the Lunar trait, they don't get outscaled. Well, they can be if you get screwed over, can't get all the units you need, most of your units aren't T2, you have no T3s, don't get the right items, etc.
But if they get the right items and if you get most of your units especially key ones to T2, they aren't outscaled.
They CAN lose, still.
The comp isn't unbeatable, it's just difficult to beat and a bit RNG-based--if your Malphite with a morello chooses to ult an isolated unit rather than the group of six, seven units, that round will not be a good time for you. Depending on who your units aggro and who your enemies aggro, you can win matches against players, barely win matches against players, barely lose matches against players, or get hard-stomped against players.
Which, while frustrating, is still overall fair in my opinion. The comp is OP. Ridiculously OP. But every comp which makes it to the lategame is OP; they wouldn't make it to the lategame otherwise. And when one OP comp faces a different OP comp, one of the OP comps has to lose. And usually it's a lot due to luck.
The core reason the comp works is quite obvious, too. In the current meta, red buff is almost worthless for most units because the unit needs to be heavily autoattacking to make use of it. Most units don't make good use of it, though there are some niche exceptions. (For instance, I commonly see it on Vayne. I don't think that's the optimal item for her but I also think it's a good item on her even if others are better.)
Morellonomicon is better in most situations. A TON of comps make heavy use of healing. Any Olaf comp, any Druid comp, any Braum comp, and more. Morello cuts it down if you place it on the right unit. Units who heavily, heavily use spells due to really low spellcost can get mileage out of it, and units who are really really hard to kill get heavy mileage out of it, and units which are both are the best. (This would be why Vladimir is a common Morello user; he casts his spell constantly and it keeps him alive.)
But better than both of those are units whose spells are aoe and can potentially hit the entire enemy team, basically nullifying their healing and dealing 18% of their max HP over time guaranteed from one single cast--so if you cast it 3 times in a fight...that's almost 60% of the whole enemy team's HP gone.
Nami and Malphite are the best because of this AOE application, with the added bonus of applying CC to the whole board, so that this burn damage cannot be healed, cannot be prevented, cannot be dealt with. By stunning the entire board, and applying anti-healing to the entire board, and applying burn damage to the entire board, they can basically set up the rest of the team to burst down the enemy ridiculously well.
Neeko's ult isn't quite as good, but she's the third-best item for good reason: she's hard to kill, she's got a low mana cost so she can spam her spell, and it's aoe. The reasons she's not as good as Nami/Malphite for it but is still good are more or less:
-Neeko needs to be T2 minimum to be effective, whereas Malphite/Nami while stronger as T2 don't need to be T2 unless you're facing Veigar. (In which case all your units need to be T2.)
-Neeko's aoe applies three times in a wider radius each time, but this delay in the attacks means that her ult takes too long to apply the damage.
-Neeko's ult has atrocious targeting, where frequently the first and second blossoms hit thin air with only the third actually hitting anyone.
-Neeko's ult is blocked by Braum's shield (and plenty of people are running Braum even without Glacial/Warden comps for whatever reason). Malphite and Nami's ults are not.
-Even if Neeko's ult was targeted not at thin air, it synergizes poorly with Taliyah's ability and similar, where enemies which were in range of it are knocked out of range. This isn't a problem on Nami/Malphite.
-Due to the delay, Neeko's ult frequently is aimed at targets that are at low health and are dead before the ult connects, leading to it hitting thin air altogether. This can happen on Malphite but is incredibly rare, whereas on Neeko it is incredibly common. It is almost unheard of on Nami.
-Neeko has less scaling than Malphite/Nami. She's strong earlygame, but she's weaker lategame.
That's probably an incomplete list to be honest.
There's likely more.
Still: Neeko's not a bad choice for Morello if I need an immediate powerspike. To keep a winstreak that I am afraid I will otherwise lose when I haven't had the ability to find Malphite yet, or to put a halt to a losestreak which would leave me with too little HP to make a comeback.
Heck, a dream of dreams on Neeko would be an AP Neeko. Full-damage would be Gunblade, Deathcap, then either Luden's or Morello, full-MP would be Seraph's + Magecap; actual AP build would be Seraph's, Gunblade, and then either Morello (if Neeko's more of a support-carry or if she needs to cut down healing more than she needs damage) or Deathcap (if Neeko is the carry carry or if she needs damage more than she needs to cut down on healing).
It's just that anything Neeko can do, Malphite does overall better.
She's more fun, Malphite's more pragmatic.
What's better, I can run this comp basically every game.
There is one annoying thing though.
During the first carousel, it used to be that everyone saw the champions/items at the same exact time: almost immediately after the game began, before the shield had fallen.
Now, it is very very VERY obviously not the case: I am not seeing the items or champions until the exact second the shield falls, give or take a second (that is to say, the shield can sometimes BE FULLY DOWN AND I CAN'T SEE WHAT TO GRAB), whereas I can see the other little legends gunning for areas of the map at the time that it used to be visible, meaning that THEY are still seeing it at the time it used to be.
But *I* am getting royally screwed over because the first carousel can set the tone for the rest of the game particularly on Mountain maps.
And I can do nothing to fix this.
This has...rather negatively impacted my enjoyment of the game to say the least.
It's not fun to not be able to choose how you start the game and be locked into lousy starts.
I have played the game often enough that I know how to position my little legend to vie for control of a champion/item I want to grab on the first carousel. It's a skill I have practiced. Do I get it every time, no, but I get it most times.
Except now I can't.
Because by the time I actually see what I want to grab, everyone is in position already to grab it.
In a sense, this forces me to go for things that are off-meta, low-priorities, things that are strong that people don't realize are strong.
Since apparently people think other things are strong than what I go for, that helps me a lot.
But it's just.
Frustrating.
It used to be painfully obvious that everyone saw the first carousel at the same time. Literally everyone, every single match, started moving towards the spot they wanted, at the same time.
It is painfully obvious that nobody sees the carousel at the same time anymore. Literally everyone starts moving at a different time, every single match. Whoever sees things first, gets an unfair advantage because by the time the person who sees things second, sees them, the person who sees things first is in the ideal position.
And so on and so forth.
And I suspect it is ping-related.
I play on 200 ping so I am consistently 8th in seeing things (which is where the ping-related seeing things suspicion comes from).
This was NOT a change for the better.
Everyone seeing things at the same time left it open to skill.
Everyone seeing things based on who has the lowest ping means that there is no skill to be had.
Just better internet and better luck.