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

[Taejin]

If you get a Locket on Sona, Clarity should not be necessary... a better summoner spell would be Clairvoyance. Way more useful and game-changing, I think.

edit: And a Mejai's after the locket/boots should be a core item. Mejai's pays for itself at 8 stacks in terms of the AP/gold ratio, and Sona if nothing else will receive many assists.

 

[crownjules]

If you get a Locket on Sona, Clarity should not be necessary... a better summoner spell would be Clairvoyance. Way more useful and game-changing, I think.

edit: And a Mejai's after the locket/boots should be a core item. Mejai's pays for itself at 8 stacks in terms of the AP/gold ratio, and Sona if nothing else will receive many assists.

That's how I always build my Sona. If you're team is doing well, you should be racking up assists like crazy on Sona and pumping that Mejai. Though I thought it was only 5 stacks. And not enough people take Clairvoyance or Fortify when they're playing a tank/support character. Those spells are powerful and more useful to the team than yet another Flash/Ignite/Exhaust.

 

[HumblePie]

The problem is the early lane phase with Sona where she needs clarity. Late game it's a bit of a waste, but not really. I can keep my team full health and full mana with it. Which means when a team member might have ported back to base because they were OOM, now they wont have to. Which means my team can really push during team fights and last longer because of it.

Still it is not without merit to get either fortify or clairvoyance either. I would also argue that neither Clairvoyance or Fortify are really good late game summoner spells either. The power of Clairvoyance is to check bushes in the early laning phase, find the enemy jungler, and check for ganks. Late game it's only primary use is to check on baron real quick if there isn't a ward up. Wards are much easier to come by late game, but even those aren't as needed since by then most teams should be sticking together. Which means if you see one person, they should all be nearby. Clairvoyance is useful, but not needed late game as I've seen. Fortify is about the same. It's great early game, but once teams start pushing towers, it's just not going to stop them anymore.

As for the soulstealer item. Yep, that's a great one to get on Sona. Only reason I had not picked it up when I played that early is because I needed to HP to stay alive. Without the rod of ages and locket I was sitting at only 800 hps by level 9. That pretty much meant I died in 3 hits from most dps champs.

 

[ivan2]

conserve your mana early game and u dont need clarity on sona. Once she gets blue buff and tears she can max it out so easily. i use flash on her because she has no escape and went for pure AP.

 

[LurkerPrime]

my little brother plays sona all the time. He goes full AP on her with a lichbane. her poke (Q I think) plus her passive plus lichbane and she is quickly turned into a very formidable burst damage champion. Not to mention Sona by herself is the queen of assists (karthus is probably the king), if you don't have 15+ assists either your playing her wrong or your team didn't get 15 kills.

I personally own her, but I don't like playing her that much, since she's really squishy and has a pretty hard time farming during the laning phase. If I have the urge to play support, I'll play taric, him with any other competant laning mate and you'll most likely own your lane pretty easily.

 

[kehlsi]

i love sona. sona is just fine in the laning phase. i can't read it atm b/c i am at work, but i believe her description says she is a pusher. that's entirely untrue as many have stated in this thread. she is more than capable of leveling regardless of what she is matched with, however. i suggest laning with someone though; always. mejal's is definitely a top priority item after tear and boots. generally i purchase sorce boots and a tear. zhonya's is typically my 4th full build item. she is perfectly capable of getting early kills if you are laned with a capable teammate and if you play correctly. clarovoyance is strong no matter the level and i always choose dash and claro on sona as well. there has not been a game that i played with sona where i scored fewer than 15-20 assists and at the very least 6 kill shots. i have never been in a game that lasted long enough to finish my build items on her either. i would LOVE to see how strong she is with a full set of items. i build her exactly like i build veigar minues the boots.

 

[kehlsi]

i will also mention that if we have competent group members on my team when i play sona, end game always shifts in our favor as a result of how strong sona is as a support.

 

[Obsoleet]

Tankish: (no taunt, but lots of HP usually if built that way and hard to kill)
Mordekaiser
Dr. Mundo
Garen
Sion (can also be AP)

I'm sure i'm going to get some shit for leaving off someones favorite character. (I put xin and aniva on there, so I'm safe from the two more active posters at least).

Hah. Anivia does do amazing burst DPS, and as battle support is amazing in competent hands. 20 assists is not uncommon. I get tired of playing her though because it's a lot of work, and that work is wasted if the team falls apart.

On your tankish list, Sion has a stun while I don't believe the others do. A team with most or all of the members having some CC is huge. He's the most tank I play right now, and I picked him over the other tankish choices because of this.

Really cannot stress what lurker said enough. Play the free heroes till you find the ones YOU like. Save your IP for runes at this point, and maybe your favorite 1 or 2 champs if you don't wanna buy riot points. But there is no way to know your favorite champs until you have really played them all or at least a large majority.

Also as mentioned earlier in the thread, you don't really understand how to beat a champion until you have played as that champion and know how their abilities work. So, for play them all! Your time won't be wasted.

I'm lvl26 now and can vouch for this. Save ALL your IP until you get into the 20s. Play the free champs every week and learn as much as you can. It's true, even if you are bad with a champ, trying them out allows you to learn their abilities and makes you so much better later on. If you find yourself on a certain week where you don't like any of the champs that are free, buy your favorite 450IP champ. That's a harmless purchase. Never buy tier 1 or 2 runes.

I have all my IP from lvl1-26 and have an excellent full tier 3 runepage that fits all casters in the game. I'm saving up another 2,000IP to buy my physical damage page.

Someone posted this for me when I first posted here and it has made a huge difference in game comprehension for me regarding runes. Can't thank the AT LOL community enough honestly. http://runeterra.com/forums/index.php?topic=1137 Reposting to be sure others don't miss out on it.

I like your choices for Garen/Mundo / non mana using DPSer. With mana you could consider MP5/lvl yellows though dodge may still be better. You could change the quints to flat HP if you so desired but that is a personal preference, I personally bought them because I like the extra survivability early on coupled with the fact that I don't need to buy separate quints for AP and AD champs.

I should have noted that while I have my 2 pages figured out for magic/physical damage, I'm picking up the Seals of Clarity (+1.8 Mana Regen / 5sec) eventually too for a hybrid rune page where a little magic regen would do the trick instead of an item. Someone like Ashe seems to do well with those.

 

[Taejin]

The problem is the early lane phase with Sona where she needs clarity. Late game it's a bit of a waste, but not really. I can keep my team full health and full mana with it. Which means when a team member might have ported back to base because they were OOM, now they wont have to. Which means my team can really push during team fights and last longer because of it.

Still it is not without merit to get either fortify or clairvoyance either. I would also argue that neither Clairvoyance or Fortify are really good late game summoner spells either. The power of Clairvoyance is to check bushes in the early laning phase, find the enemy jungler, and check for ganks. Late game it's only primary use is to check on baron real quick if there isn't a ward up. Wards are much easier to come by late game, but even those aren't as needed since by then most teams should be sticking together. Which means if you see one person, they should all be nearby. Clairvoyance is useful, but not needed late game as I've seen. Fortify is about the same. It's great early game, but once teams start pushing towers, it's just not going to stop them anymore.

As for the soulstealer item. Yep, that's a great one to get on Sona. Only reason I had not picked it up when I played that early is because I needed to HP to stay alive. Without the rod of ages and locket I was sitting at only 800 hps by level 9. That pretty much meant I died in 3 hits from most dps champs.

Taking a summoner spell solely for early gaming laning is the definition of waste. Clairvoyance is extremely important at _all_ stages of the game... I don't understand how being able to check where the enemy is located is ever less useful over time. Checking bushes, checking to see if enemy is out of position, checking to see if enemy is taking buffs, dragon or baron can mean the difference between getting one member of your team picked off and then losing your nexus or keeping yourself in the game.

Someone posted this for me when I first posted here and it has made a huge difference in game comprehension for me regarding runes. Can't thank the AT LOL community enough honestly. http://runeterra.com/forums/index.php?topic=1137 Reposting to be sure others don't miss out on it.

Pretty sure it was me . I'd like to also direct you to Roku's livestream at
http://www.own3d.tv/live/441
He usually streams games starting at 10:30pm PST. He's 1800+ ELO, solid solid player. Have seen him play many different characters, but mostly see him play MF, Mundo and Morgana. You guys will learn a thing or two from him =).

 

[LurkerPrime]

well I had an epic game yesterday that lasted an hour and 15 minutes, that thank the lord ended in a victory. I was playing karthas and ended up around 20-15-18. The kill tally was 62-64 with us down by 2 deaths, but we were able to take baron 3 times, not to mention kill the dragon countless times over the course of the game to make up for slightly less kills. In the end both teams were pretty evenly matched and it came down to skill and a better team makeup, since everyone had enough gold to by any items they wanted. (I had over 5k gold surplus)

I had over 800AP on karthus and a lichbane, and I could basically keep defile on constantly. You can imagine how painful it was to even be close to me with defile doing over 300 damage per second and my ult would do over 1000 damage. Neither team could secure an ace, and it was really hard for the enemy team to push a turret, since I'm still kickin for 8 seconds after you kill me, and my ult plus defile radiating around my turret basically kills a push.

I guess in the end I can thank our kamakazying pantheon, which would jump on turrets when the rest of thier team was distracted and try to take them down as much as possible. He died at least 5 times doing this, but he got thier back turrets down this way, if it wasn't for that, we might have been at an eternal stalemate till people started to quit.

 

[ImpulsE69]

The other day I was in a game where 1 person on our team left less than a minute in (DC i think). Then 5 minutes in another person left At this point we were down 0-3. So here it is 3v5 early on and we discussed surrendering and decided we'd mess around and see how much of a challenge it was. We completely obliterated the other team. Final score when we won was something like 40-7. It was nice to see that on occasion people leaving doesn't totally throw the game. Both teams talked about it afterwards and their strategy had been to keep split up on the lanes to keep us from pushing and gank us if they spotted one of us alone, but somehow we would win the battles(unfortunately I don't remember the team makeups off hand).

As for chars, I play Anivia now almost exclusively. I do "ok to pretty well" with her. I find that if I make a mistake and die early in the game or play someone who's good at keeping me from last hitting minions it sets me back and I have a horrible game with her and end up being a big detriment to the team and will go like 2-8. Like someone else mentioned though, it seems like with this character, if the rest of your team isn't up to snuff, you're pretty much doomed. There seem to be a few characters that could pretty much carry the other 4 regardless of how bad they suck. I'm not sure if this is one of them even though I'm repeatedly told Anivia is OP. I don't think she is, she starts out SOO slow, and really, in order to get your AP up you have to pretty much forgo HP and Armor.

 

[alkemyst]

What I hate is the stat whores that just go for kill count and as soon as they get ganked a few times want to surrender or just quit.

Also lately are the kids that just log in to talk to each other like chat usually about 'who is sleeping with who' as if they'd have girlfriends.

Kamakazee approaches are very smart on inhibitors. Often a couple good deaths get you the super minion backup that cinches the deal. Nothing sucks worse than having an inhibitor down in about 1-2 secs and have two teammates run when they see the other team respawn.

 

[ivan2]

if you are already down to the inhibitor, you don't need to suicide, since you already won the turret, roll a 5 man group to them will most likely win the fight. i did had a suicidal yi one time with some 25 deaths took down the mid lane by himself. All he does is die, rez run to tower and die. With us helping the push a little we eventually won the game LOL.

 

[nanobreath]

Also lately are the kids that just log in to talk to each other like chat usually about 'who is sleeping with who' as if they'd have girlfriends.

You know you're just jealous!!!

Kamakazee approaches are very smart on inhibitors. Often a couple good deaths get you the super minion backup that cinches the deal. Nothing sucks worse than having an inhibitor down in about 1-2 secs and have two teammates run when they see the other team respawn.

Inhibitors are absolutely worth the death of a few people, but not the whole team. People need to be able to judge whether you will get aced if you stay. I.E. 4 on 5 with everybody already at half health and no tank...get the hell out of there and win the next team fight and finish off the inhibitor. It will be super easy to take out with no tower guarding it.

Losing too many people defeats the purpose of taking out an inhibitor. You cannot take advantage of the super minion at all because most everybody is dead.

 

[alkemyst]

down for anyone else?

 

[Obsoleet]

A 1300 AP karthas does around 700 damage on ult if you have 100MR. A 300-400 AP Fiddlesticks does 800+ damage. Just an fyi.

Was rereading some old posts and found this interesting, as I've been trying Karthus a lot this week. Really great champ. Fiddle def is better in skilled hands tho IMO. I am not said skilled hands as when I tried fiddle I failed miserably.
Went 17/9/17 first game with Karthus tho.

As for chars, I play Anivia now almost exclusively. I do "ok to pretty well" with her. I find that if I make a mistake and die early in the game or play someone who's good at keeping me from last hitting minions it sets me back and I have a horrible game with her and end up being a big detriment to the team and will go like 2-8. Like someone else mentioned though, it seems like with this character, if the rest of your team isn't up to snuff, you're pretty much doomed. There seem to be a few characters that could pretty much carry the other 4 regardless of how bad they suck. I'm not sure if this is one of them even though I'm repeatedly told Anivia is OP. I don't think she is, she starts out SOO slow, and really, in order to get your AP up you have to pretty much forgo HP and Armor.

Anivia is "OP" like Ashe is "OP". Noobs cant handle either one of them under someone knowledgeable about the game and with skilled hands. The only reason there's less feeding Anivias than Ashes is because shes so expensive.

I'm a diehard Anivia fan as well. I've won game against moderately skilled teams with a lackluster team using her, as long as they are decent bodybags sucking up some damage for me. If so, she has enough DPS, escape, and team protection that you can almost singlehandedly destroy the enemy team. There's just too much utility there. She has a stun, DD nuke, AOE and of course the wall. If the champ can't be stunned like Olaf (and I think Yi ultied), then use ice wall to achieve what your escape or your pin down. I enjoy using both, dropping a 700+AP AOE and nuking them. I don't play her as much as I used to, as I've needed to play more champs to get better at my favorites. But she is my choice anytime I get the opportunity to take a 1v2 lane or we need a ranged/caster. I play with some decent Anivia's tho, so I have a shortlist of other champs I prefer for other situations. Having a jungler, giving the carry mid and taking a 1v2 lane is the only way to fly.

 

[alkemyst]

Thing with karthus is you hit anywhere. Fiddle has to be on top of the targets.

A good karthus is constantly watching the other teams overall health and getting updates of when to pop them.

 

[Rhoxed]

Finally broke out of a HORRIBLE losing streak (2-18 over 20 games) i am now 8-2 last 10.

I really hate how MMing works....

 

[LurkerPrime]

Finally broke out of a HORRIBLE losing streak (2-18 over 20 games) i am now 8-2 last 10.

I really hate how MMing works....

well congrats on finally breaking your losing streak. You playing normal or ranked games?

 

[Rhoxed]

normal, always playing with 2-5 people and always hard to find 5 you trust for ranked.

 

[ivan2]

i figure that if you want to win, always pick some hard tank in normal, many games when i pick carry and end up with no good tanks. in ranked u can talk to them and decide but usually people will know about the picks.

 

[nanobreath]

In normal games usually me or my brother ends up picking a tank. Last few games we've been playing me as Garen and him as Rammus. Those two lane together pretty damn well. Powerball + Taunt keeping them in my judgement is awesome. We almost always get first blood with these two. Not bad at all for the tank and offtank laning together!

 

[LurkerPrime]

i figure that if you want to win, always pick some hard tank in normal, many games when i pick carry and end up with no good tanks. in ranked u can talk to them and decide but usually people will know about the picks.

In normal games I usually end up being Olaf b/c no one else wants to go jungle. I should probably unlock amumu and just jungle with him, that way I can kill 2 birds with one stone. Olaf is just too much damn fun in the late game or if I get fed some. My solo triple kill last night would have been a penta kill if it wasn't for damn exhaust.

Also had one of my worst games yesterday with Olaf, going 1-7. Would have been much better if every time I killed zillian he didn't have his ult on and then respawn and run the fuck away. Not to mention they snatched some of my jungle at the start, which just fucks up the whole rhythm.

 

[ImpulsE69]

I've had it out with a few junglers at times. It seems many of them don't understand that if the enemy starts grouping early in the game (like lvl's 8-10) and forcing team battles, then jungling should take a back seat imo. I've pissed a few junglers off by taking the blue buff when this happens, but the way I figure it, I'm actually using it to not die and have some sort of advantage, whereas they are still just running npc to npc trying to level and not taking any part in team fights until much later in the game.

 

[crownjules]

I played in a game a week or so back with a WW who basically jungled all the way through the game. Occasionally he would pop out to gank. But once the game turned into the team fight and push phase, he would never be with the team. So we'd be forced to engage 4v5 because he never came with us and we'd generally do well in the fights, and then he'd come in at the very end and clean up all the stragglers. We'd of course have lost 2-3 of our team though since we were always a man down and so pushing after winning the fight was very slow.

We called him out and told him the game would have been won if he'd stick with us. He kept responding saying how he helped the team plenty by making a few early ganks and killing the dragon 3 times in the early part of the game. So finally our team just decided to follow our WW around wherever he went and he kinda got the point.