Really well played tonight everyone. Great last game. 

Was def nice to go 4/0 for the night including 3 ranked wins anyway.  Gotta say I was pretty pleased with how I did as nidalee last night.  Went 8/2/5 in game 1 (vs a plat 3 vayne) and 5/0/2 in game 2 (vs baddy mcbad gold V syndra).  1st off, I floated around 140-160 ping for most of the night.  Made last hitting mechanics a little more difficult, but I kept pace in both games at least. 

I'm really enjoying trying to figure out the best way to handle various opponents in lane.  That irelia from the other night is still the toughest nut to crack for me as I'm not sure how best to trade.  It might come down to just trying to keep up aaing her and then sucking up some damage when she lunges forward then slows and perhaps try to get a trap underneath myself whens he does that so I can trade at higher dmg.  Haven't got a chance to try that out.

Vayne was a little annoying to figure out.  My opponent was particularly good at always landing an aa anytime I moved up to get an aa on her during laning.  This meant that her trade potential went way up as she'd position herself behind her creeps very well.  So, I couldn't follow up with a spear and if I tried to do anything keeping with that aggressive posture, she'd land 3 hits and I'd end up a bit more chunked/unsafe for the next fight.  Anyway, she did a good job dictating the pace of the lane and didn't make a ton of mistakes.  That said, the moment she'd try to go for an all in (eg run past the creeps to try to get meh), I'd go for a spear which hits and then run my burst combo.  This resets our posture to some degree as I'm chunked a bit and she is as well. 

She made some really aggressive attempts to try to kill me, but I managed to get out safely for the most part.  Having tp meant that if that happened, I'd just heal and port back with very little loss.  Now, where I outplayed the crap out of her is what I'm proud of.  I had multiple instances where I used brief vision outages to reset my positioning, hunt procs, and cooldowns. I had at least 4-5 kills last night where I was low and picked up kills due to outplaying folks. 

re: syndra v nid matchup.  Syndra has nice wave clear, but cannot fight you up and close.  You just bide for your time for a little bit. Stay mobile while you are csing and poke as possible.  Once I figured out her pattern, I started to just walk towards her at an angle so there would be no creep wave between us and forced her into bad spots.  I think I went dorans, phage, boots and then merc treads immediately to mitigate dmg/cc so I could easily all in.  Nid's big adv vs syndra is her mobility.  You just hop over her, stay close and keep moving around and you can avoid the cc pretty easily when you engage.  And if she doesn't land much on you, her ult can't take you out. 

anyway, I'm learning quite a bit and have a ton to learn.  So far I've played vs jax/rene/irel/synd/vayne... off the top of my head.  The only one that gave me problems re: figuring out trades was irel. 

side note - I think I'll be geting off work early today and will def be checking this out on PBE

Doom Bots of Doom Enabled on PBE!

I wont be around until Monday night. I am going on a small vacation. Feel free to play ranked games of Twisted Treeline or 5's without me. I think we have enough people that know how to play twisted treeline now that people could play it without me *cough* Brad, Karl, bryff, pacov *cough*. Have a nice 4th of July weekend everyone!

Have a good weekend dr cow! 

k - streaming now - about to try out the new game mode on pbe 

Ok - so I played a game of DOOM bots on pbe.  1st off - super buggy arse on pbe right now.  People said that if you chat after 12 minutes in game, the game crashes.  The bots also do some weird, unintentional things.  zyra, for instance, when killed would not cast use her passive until she hit like level 6.

There are 3 difficulty modes, but you have to unlock them.  The ai's are about as smart as they always have been, so no real improvement there imo. 

Let me give you some examples of the abilities and what's going on.  1st - zyra auto casts her seedlings, 2 at a time, very close to you or right behind you at a crazy distance.  When fiddle ults, ghosts of fiddle appear and start to ult in what appear to be random locations on the map.  Lux's ult laser shoots in all direction around her (you can dodge as its all straight lines, but its about 9 lasers or something.  Morg's snare is beastly - it shoots in multiple directions, multiple shots at once - one of them appears to home in on you if possible.  Amumu's ult is close to the full size of the screen. And, I'm not sure, but they seemed to take out towers very quickly when allowed to do so.  They might just have normal damage for that though. 

Anyway, that is what a level 1 game was like.  It was interesting and I enjoyed yelling a bit when horrible things happened to me (placed into cc hell for a bit), etc.  Kind of fun - probably something I'll play a few times and move along.  While the mode felt like a little bit of a mess, its clear riot's been working on some things as it looks like a bunch of custom coding that's all champion specific.  Must have been in dev for a bit. 

Here's a vid of the playthrough if anyone cares - uploading to youtube as well:  http://www.twitch.tv/1pacov1/c/4589108

I tried out both of the new mecha skins:  malph and aatrox.  Both looked really good.  I really liked the malphite skin.  When your armor shield is active, you are the color blue.  When it is off, you turn reddish orange.  When you press your w, there's a brass knuckle (more or less) animation that is added.  The animation is a bit long I think, but its cool.  When he presses b, he turns into a drill and drills back to base.  His skin looks really, really good imo. 

Here's a link to the malphite game I played where I checked out all his animations, etc: http://www.twitch.tv/1pacov1/c/4589193

Been on LAN mostly tonight.  Do you guys not enjoy leveling accounts at all?  I assume I'm a little weird, but I like leveling up accounts from time to time to mix things up.  Always feels good when you unlock a new mastery point, etc. 

I enjoy playing on my level 30 smurf account when I'm not stomping so bad that I don't feel good about it or when my allies are so bad that it doesn't matter how fed I get.  It's fun to play games where you're almost guaranteed to be the best player in the game cause it forces you to remember that when you have all the teams gold, you have to play carefully.  It's also great to be able to unlock champs again!

But no, leveling up smurf account is just a chore I did cause a few old high school buds of mine got into the game at the same time.  I can't stand being in games where I don't have as many runes an masteries as I normally would, feels like it totally throws me off for when I play a regular game.  Why play to make yourself worse?

So, this is pretty much the twitch build now imo:  1 dorans + health bot + trinket ward.  Botrk > berserkers > ghostblade > ie > lw > variable.  The powerspike when you get ghost is pretty sick.  Best for team fights, ofc, but it if its up, lets you take towers really easy. 

I add in a second dorans if it seems like I need it (cait lane for instance). 

things I say on lan that might mean what I think: cualquier cosa menos de la selva

Anywhere but jungle = nidalee low lev

Saw this idea over on reddit - not a terrible idea as long as you aren't looking to invade. 

got in some games with dr karl tonight.  Not super fun for either of us.  We laughed it off, but were playing with a few so so folks (one that wanted to jungle and the other that wanted to support).  Went about how I thought it would. A bunch of people dropped for the last lobby except  karl/pacov/level 19 player.  I decided to call it a night to give karl an out (figured the last game would be the same stuff).  Anyway, really nice fellas we met with the exception of the super talkative guy that wanted to be called mam or something that karl eventually pissed off enough to get them to leave the chat.  hue. 

reminder for me - both hunny and dan stated playing in tourneys with another group - dan said he won 1600 rp.  Post on reddit recently said admins f'd him in the butt by the group that runs tourney.. bakckl top lan