slow night - got some games in with bryff, then 2 in with karl and salvan (pal from the older gamers). Hopefully things pick up this w/e. 

Besides late-night (i work 2p-10p central time all week) I won't be free until Monday/Tuesday which I'm totally free atm.

Some interesting win rate info on a few of the champs that were nerfed in the last patch.

http://www.stateoflol.net/4f86c4598dfd

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

It will take a little while for all the Jayce band-wagoners to realize that they have to find another uncounterable/ungankable champ to play every game.

After they've moved on, the good Jayce players that pick him only when it's advantageous, will bring his win percentage back up IMO.

Well, with jayce, I actually feel pretty comfortable top in just about any matchup.  His damage output is down, sure, but he still has all the utility - you just need to be a smidge more mana conscious.  As long as he's at least viewed as less of a threat, then great, so hopefully we keep seeing fewer folks playing him.  I definitely feel like the nerfs were a move in the right direction for him.  One that they didn't show in the graph is sona - she hit a high with a 55% win rate pre-patch and is now down to 50.4%

pacov wonders if he can still steal big wraith - methinks prob not

"We’ve made some jungle changes in the coming patch, aimed mostly at easing the early game pressure on the lanes and opening up the roster of viable junglers. I’m Statikk, and I was the primary designer on the preseason jungle changes. Here’s an in-depth look at how we plan on accomplishing these goals.

Reducing early game pressure

Season Two opened up more opportunities for junglers to create early game action through ganking lanes. Although this had an overall positive effect on the game, the current rate and effectiveness of early jungle ganking (particularly through brush camping) applies an overwhelming amount of pressure to the lanes. This significantly reduces the number of champions that can lane effectively by requiring them to either be able to farm from a very safe distance or have a reliable means of quick escape.

To alleviate some of this early pressure, we want to make early ganking from the jungle a more difficult, conscious choice that will require constant monitoring of the risks involved. To accomplish this, we are increasing the damage dealt by jungle monsters. This means that junglers who gank early will likely be at lower health and not equipped with Boots of Speed unless they’re specialized or have made tradeoffs in other areas.

To combat this spike in jungle difficulty, we’re introducing several jungle-specific items to the game. For example, Hunter’s Machete is a great starting item which can be purchased at the beginning of the game to help you efficiently clear jungle. It also eventually upgrades into multiple build paths that include several of your favorite mid game jungle items such as Madred’s Razor and Wriggle’s Lantern.

Increasing Jungle diversity

In Season Two, strong junglers were typically characterized by high area-of-effect damage, utility skills, and early ganking presence. During the preseason, we want to increase the diversity of viable junglers by ensuring that champions with other strengths can also shine.

Firstly, we are going to reduce the emphasis on area-of-effect damage dealers by re-balancing more of the health and damage into the large monster in each of the camps. This allows single-target damage dealers such as Gangplank to have more competitive clear times.

Next, we’re also going to significantly increase the rewards (gold and XP) and scaling difficulty (health and damage that the monsters gain over time) of the jungle as a game progresses. This way junglers who shift their focus toward farming the jungle efficiently can acquire gold and experience faster. This opens up the jungle to many of the more damage-focused and gold-reliant champions like Master Yi who need to scale into the later parts of the game.

Lastly, as we mentioned earlier, we’re going to increase the damage dealt by monsters in the jungle. This should allow high-sustain junglers such as Warwick or Fiddlesticks to break back into rotation by giving them an edge over the competition.

The new items will also be a factor here by opening up build paths for champions who previously had poor jungle itemization such as mages and attack damage casters.

Quality of Life and Meta Adjustments

We are also making many other smaller adjustments to the jungle, including:

• Jungle monsters now attack the nearest target rather than attempting to chase their original attacker to make their behavior more consistent
• Wraith camp gold rewards have been reduced and golem and wolf camp gold rewards have been increased to better match their respective difficulty and convenience
• The wraiths have reduced attack range and the large wraith has been repositioned within the camp to force mid laners to commit more when farming them for extra gold
• The golem camps monsters have increased movement speed to make them less vulnerable to kiting, especially early on by the blue side bottom lane

Overall, we hope these preseason changes will make the jungle a place where more varied champions, roles, and playstyles are viable. We don’t intend to remove any of the junglers that are currently viable – only add to the lineup.

As usual, we’re open to making changes as things develop, and we want to hear your feedback on both new junglers and your standbys as you experiment. Don’t hesitate to leave us a comment once you’ve hit the Fields of Justice!

in case you are curious about the zed patch being delayed, this thread will give you an idea of the bugs they are trying to fix.

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=31075706#31075706

Note - I don't believe any preseason changes will be in the zed patch.  The new jungle is not on the pbe, etc. 

and more news...

Hey guys. Continuing from my initial discussion of preseason itemization changes, which you can read here, I wanted to talk about new alternatives to items that are getting removed as part of the overall rework.

As you know we have a lot of old items that exist in a weird twilight space between useful and confusing, and it¢s traditionally been very hard to find a place for these items to exist and be satisfying to use in the current environment. In a lot of cases, we¢ve decide to remove items that were either identified as having pretty negative consequences for the game or warped freedom of itemization around themselves. While making these items better or more satisfying to use might have been an option, if the core purpose of the item seemed flawed it was targeted for removal.

I¢ll walk through some of the more sweeping changes and try to explain our thoughts behind them as well as what replacements achieve a similar functionality.


Meki Pendant & Rejuvenation Bead – Removed

These items have been removed because they were mostly superfluous item paths that constrained early game purchases and mid-game upgrades. Everything that builds out of Meki Pendant and Rejuvenation Bead has been modified to build out of Regrowth Pendant and Faerie Charm.

Alternative: Regrowth Pendant and Faerie Charm

These items will sit at a much smaller price-point but build into many more items overall, allowing players to have much greater flexibility when building items out of regeneration items.


Madred¢s Bloodrazor - Removed

Madred¢s Bloodrazor has traditionally been a weak pick overall. On the surface, it appears to counter high health targets. However, its odd build path and the fact that it does magical damage make the Bloodrazor awkward in many situations. It doesn¢t do as much damage as other alternatives to high hit point targets, nor is the build path something lenient enough to let you quickly build it to counter high health targets. As a jungle control item it is surpassed by Wriggle¢s Lantern in many ways, especially for sustains, invades and jungle vision.

Alternative: Blade of the Ruined King

This item first debuted in Twisted Treeline, and was meant to be the ¡high health counter¢ for ranged attackers. Against moderate DPS / high health targets, Blade of the Ruined King attacks these characters where it hurts the most – the fact that their DPS is consistent over time. By draining a percentage of their current health on every strike, Blade of the Ruined King seeks to burn down high health targets by both outlasting and kiting them.

Blade of the Ruined King also works well for on-hit ranged attackers, providing them a form of combat sustain that is independent of the amount of damage done by their main attack. On-hit Teemo or On-hit Kog¢maws have traditionally fared poorly in being able to output sustained damage in a fight because life steal was so anti-synergistic with their builds. Blade of the Ruined King not only fits the % damage profile that Madred¢s Bloodrazor once occupied but also supplies life steal for these character builds.


Force of Nature - Removed

Force of Nature has been the go-to high MR item for tanks who want to counter magic damage. The item, however, is kind of confusing. Is it a movement speed option for fighters and tanks? Or is it meant to be a regeneration item in sieges? Force of Nature¢s odd stat combination made it particularly difficult to make it feel like a quality purchase. One of its attributes was probably redundant or unnecessary on your character.

Alternative: Spirit Visage

Spirit Visage is getting a slight touch up for the preseason. It will now build out of Negatron Cloak instead of Null Magic Mantle, and Spirit Visage¢s passive is getting a bump in power. Additionally, there are a lot more Tier 2.5 items that offer Magic Resistance, allowing you to more easily spec into Magic Resistance without wasting slot efficiency.


Ionic Spark – Removed

Ionic Spark is a bit of a confusing item right now. Ionic Spark only fully synergizes with one or two champions (Shen, Gangplank), but it¢s good to have an effective wave clearing option for characters that lack an innate ability to quickly deal with waves of minions. For a proc-build, Ionic Spark is awkward because it grants a very inconsistent proc that does some damage but is inferior to Wit¢s End in a lot of cases.

Alternative: Statikk Shiv, Tiamat, Wit¢s End

Tiamat has been vastly upgraded as a passive wave clearing item, while Wit¢s End has always been the traditionally stronger option for Attack Speed / On-hit builds.


Elixir of Agility – Removed

Right now Elixir of Agility serves a single purpose in the game – to make the winning hyper-carry exponentially more powerful than the losing one. This has some general negative effects: Due to the multiplicative factor of attack speed and critical strike, the raw DPS increase is always better for the winner than the loser in this case. It also strongly pigeonholes viable end-game carry builds to take advantage of critical strike, as it is the cheapest and most powerful form of DPS boost.

Alternative: None

We don¢t want an item in the game whose sole purpose is to pigeonhole end-game carry builds and provide exponential damage increase to a single class. While there should be purchasable buffs that help close out the game, a 250 Gold item that typically only benefits a single player on the winning team seemed a bit superfluous.


Heart of Gold – Removed

Heart of Gold is a deeply conflicted item. Gold over Time items are designed to be a tradeoff of early game power versus reliable scaling further on in the game. However, Heart of Gold is a Health item, a statistic that is primarily dominant early game rather than late game. It helps create a lot to passivity, but worst of all it contributes to passive snowballing. While the intent of the item was to help out gold-starved characters that were traditionally weak, there are much better ways to solve this than an item that also makes their direct competitors stronger.

Alternative: The other Gold per 10 items

We don¢t want to see an item in the game that lets you passively win your lane and close off options for your opponent. The other 3 Gold per 10 items have all been upgraded with either much more flexible build paths in terms of what they can build into or additional ways to generate real and imagined incomes. From Gold per 10 upgrades that let you keep the Gold per 10 when fully upgraded to alternate gold gain passives, the other 3 Gold per 10 items have become much more flexible in their final builds.

-Xypherous

• Preseason Itemization Preview
• Item Preview – Tons of Mana, just one Tear

The stuff on the jungle cracks me up.  "We think that the changes to the season 2 jungle improved the game.  But we are going back to a season 1 style to further improve the game".  Lol.

Basically the season 2 changes did the exact opposite of their stated goals.  They wanted to open up the jungle so that there would be tons of viable junglers.  Instead they closed it down so that there were even fewer truly viable junglers, although I suppose that more champs could do a crappy job in jungle than before.

Anyway, I'm going to murder people with jungle WW if they actually make the changes.

Also, I'm glad that they are removing Peter's favorite ADC item Madred's Bloodrazor.  I'm just so shocked that he was in love with an item that immediately got removed for being so crappy that no reasonable person would buy it.

hey - if anyone wants to join me, I'm going to check out the free to play game AirMech.  It's on steam - download is only like 100 meg.  Just played a quick game - happy to give it a go if you want to play a little.  Doubt it will keep my interest long, but its fun.  I might stream a little of it.  Anyway, if you do pick it up and want to play sometime in the next hour or so, add me - 1pacov1.

also - um - YES

Sightstone (650 Gold)
+125 Health
Unique Passive - Refresh (Ward) : Starts with 4 charges and refills each time you stop by your shop.
Unique Active - Ghost Ward: Consumes a charge to place an invisible ward that reveals the surrounding area for 3 minutes. You may have a maximum of 2 wards from this item at once.

Upgrades to...

*is dragged away by internal Riot teams*

tis real.

very good read about the new jungle

http://www.surrenderat20.net/2012/11/statikk-discusses-preseason-jungle.html

Really suggest reading the link in reply 1992 - looks like they added more info.  It's a pretty big q/a with actual details about the jungle.  Leashing won't exist anymore, jungles will likely start with a jungle specific item (not boots), etc.  worth a read.

More info today:

"Yeah, Phantom Dancer has had its' statistics extensively readjusted. It lost a *lot* of movement speed and a little bit of attack speed. It's also slightly cheaper and thus less slot-efficient.

It's been known for a while that Phantom Dancer was just too good but nerfing it would've caused a drastic effect on AD carry mobility / balance for a while. We've shifted some statistics around into other items that AD carries can easily fit into their builds and now PD doesn't have to be the king of both AS, Crit and MS.

On the plus side, it now has Ignore Unit Collision on it though. How useful that passive is, I'm not sure - but it is something that people have been asking for quite a while on their carries."

This change is interesting.  On draven, its always my number 2 item after blood thirster.  This could change things up a little based on the actual stats.  Consider an item that gets you away from all that shitty creep blocking in any lane.  If the price is good enough, there might be ways to work that in.  Curious to see how that goes.  I'd pay money to not be yelling about creeps blocking me...

 also

"Locket of the Iron Solari is getting slightly better in Season 3 - while it loses a bit from the Heart of Gold removal, it has gained CDR and a lot more health than before at roughly the same cost as before."

"We're doing a change (or a bugfix, depending on your point of view) on both Warwick and Malzahar. Their ultimates will be treated like leashes... because they kind of are. (You can't QSS leashes. You can only break them via distance.)

What this means is that QSS will break the stunning effect on you but until you get out of range of them, it won't cancel the damage and other effects these characters will be doing. Malzahar will get his full Nether Grasp until they break the leash and Warwick typically gets 2 (maybe 3) more swipes before the target walks away."

uh oh Malz buff... Peter is gonna rape season 3

and here's what a good team looks like...

Trolls.  Feeders.  Noobs.  I think I've gotten lost in that place.