You might like lux then. They are basically the same except instead of an aoe stun ult she has an aoe long range nuke.

You're amazing.

Oh god I hate normal games.

P.S. I'm in a land far far away so I won't be able to play until early September.

Canada?

I'm gonna have to look you guys up on LOL. I don't have the connection problems in that game that I get in DG.

I play mostly casters Vieger, Karthus, Malzahar, and some AD characters. I like to do the damage

add me, I am Cowbuttzex once again!

Do it.  Add a few of us and hit us up when you are online next. 

I never asked you - did someone force you to change your name to omg_zex in DG?  I always wondered. 

OK.  So I've started to learn some advanced tactics from playing some games with more experienced folk and watching some replays.  I figure I'll share some of what I've learned here and you folks can chime in with your own tips or tell me if perhaps I have the wrong ideas.

Game openers - apparently the higher level games can be a bit more heated first thing and this should impact the first skill you begin with.  I was laned with jona (jax) as morgana.  I always chose to get my AOE attack first because I rarely took a shot at a gank until level 2 (when I got my stun).  This way, I'd just work the creeps over and help push the troops along.  Well, apparently pushing the troops along early isn't the best idea.  In fact, it seems that the ONLY time early that you should be even AAing the troops is for last hits.  In the replays and live streams I've watched, that seems to be how most everyone plays. Jona also indicated that for morgana I should always take my stun first, followed by shield.  If I had gone this route with him using jax, there are pretty good odds we'd have scored an almost immediate kill.  So, I'll likely change my build up to go this way in the future.  The way we were playing was that I'd go for a stun, jona would jump in and dmg the enemy up, and then I'd shield jona so he could push a little further.  I'm not used to playing with jona and that cost us 2-3 kills/deaths, but it ended up being an easy win.  Jona was good at barking out orders which was useful though.

Denying exp - in the scenario I described, it was jona and I vs 1 solo enemy up top.  As we were pretty aggressively harassing him, that meant we could deny him exp and last hit gold  by keeping him a certain distance from the creeps and then only last hitting ourselves.  This really only would work if its 2v1 or 1v1 and you have a nice health adv over your enemy, but the goal is to keep the enemy far enough away from the creeps.  You should NOT aa the enemy creeps so that the creep fights take place near you and not your enemy. 

Another denying exp thing I learned was through a replay.  It was a dr mundo vs chogath in the top lane.  Mundo eventually wore down chogath and cho had to recall to base.  Mundo rushes up to the tower with a creep wave and gets the tower down to maybe 10% hp.  But then he retreats with the tower still alive.  He did this so that his creep wave would get destroyed by the tower (while his creeps also did dmg to the tower).  If he had continued killing the tower himself, the enemy chogath, which would have been back 10-15 seconds later, would have gotten the exp from that creep wave (eg the wave that would still be alive if mundo killed the tower off.  So, using this method, he got the tower down to about 2% hp, an entire creep wave died off which kept chogath from getting additional xp/gold.  And with the tower so low, it wasn't going to take a super long time to kill off that tower.  Anyway, I think it was a pretty solid tactic as chogath lost xp by being forced to base, then lost more due to keeping the tower alive.

Anyone else have any useful tips or suggestions?

your mundo example: I actually use this strategy in demigod. I'm not a fan of killing the enemy tower fast. First waste a lot of mana/health and you will force the enemy to lose their creep waves on (cat), if he's not quick enough. Otherwise without a tower you rarely will miss a creep wave.

However in LoL, the entire team gets gold for killing a tower. And towers are very hard to destroy with an enemy champion around, that you usually want to kill the tower as fast as possible. less towers less map control, less buffs, loss of more towers.

yeah - perhaps in the replay I was watching his actual goal was to have the creeps take out the tower, but get killed off in the process.  So that would deny exp and kill off most of the creep wave. 

Allot of the creep pushing depends on the matchup you have and the character you are playing, but the pretty much standard rule of thumb is to stay on your side of the river. If you are pushing past that early on your gonna be in trouble unless you are getting a kill right at that moment.

Push, get kill, get ganked, get killed. Solution - ward so you don't get ganked and killed. Also if you push and you see ganker waiting to gank you, then you might be outzoned from creeps for a while.

I sooo want to be able to play shen well, but I'm apparently crap with him for now.  There are some characters I can at least do halfway decent with having no experience... others... not so much.  Shens a character that just feels like he's begging for you to use voice chat - mostly because of his ult and your teammates not knowing if its safe to stick around if they are low and you are about to hop in. 

Anyway, jebus... I am really finding those 5v5 games with all of us on the same team very challenging.  All of you jerks with your level 30 making this difficult for me.    I find that pugging is getting much easier and playing with just 1 or 2 of you on a team is generally pretty easy as well.  But when we get to that 5v5 level... ouch lately.  The vs AI games have gotten fairly boring to me now, but its a nice place to try out new characters.

I do think it would be a blast to try to get a 3v3 going on that smaller map (the one I've never played before ).  And by that, I mean 3 of us vs 3 of us if there are ever 6 total available. 

It think my next unlock is going to be amumumumumumumumumu.  Been watching quite a few replays there and I think I know how I'd like to play it. 

Other thoughts - I absolutely SUCK with flash.  Any tips?  It might just be we being lousy at hitting that key to bounce out quickly.  Are the buttons mappable or does anyone have any ideas?  I generally know when I should flash to safety, but I'm lacking the level of coordination I need at this point to pull if off quickly. 

Another question - that lantern item that allows you to place a ward - what does it detect?  Just line of sight or what? 

always put flash on "D". And i hope you use the keyboard shortcuts? So you walk in one direction and press D to flash in that direction. Also to jump over walls  walk very close to the wall then press D. I also recommend smart cast for all your other spells. It doesn't work for every champion but for most of them.

And the thing with shen you need tank runes to compete with the lvl 30s. And another biggie is map awareness. I find myself looking on the little minimap more than the actual game. Sigh I wish they had the demigod camera!