Adding to this:

i think we'd all agree that if a random locks in Brand support, Quinn top, or Viktor mid, we'd be a little "eh i'm not so sure about this". The thing is, we know each other, and we know that Apoz is godlike, Karl's Brand support is legit, and psydragon is literally the only good Quinn in the world.

The problem is that literally every champ warps the team into behaving a certain way.

Leona forces botlane to be aggro, even if they just want to sit back and take it easy. Kog'maw alone creates "protect the Kog", even if there are many ways to play a PTK comp. An enemy picking Ryze top or Kass mid requires your jungler to be proactive about ganking those lanes pre-6 or else they're done for. And neglecting other lanes in the meantime.

Like the discussion we had less week or whatever, mid + jungle picks along completely dictate the pacing of your teamcomp for the first 15 minutes.

Overall, perhaps this entire conflict could be resolved by just playing Ranked 5s. At least then everyone is coerced into trying hard

Another alternative (as benevolant!leader!pacov) that you could do is just start hosting more games on TeamBuilder. Let teambuilder be your "okay fuck around and do whatever" queue and then draft is more serious. :shrug:.

i know that you've been supporting a ton recently, and it's pretty natural to want a more "Authentic" game when you don't have to support. i think that's perfectly natural (and going Nidalee in the Nid/Eve thing was probably fine). But if there's one person every game who is in "fug it mode, i'm playing Teemo jungle" every single queue, these issues are going to continue persist.

Either everyone needs to care about team comp and try to make a dedicated effort (and that means more than just your lane matchup), or no one should.

Well, I think if we have 5 of us on the ranked 5's team available, then we should be able to sort out composition in advance as long as we are talking.  Even with that, I think we have some room for improvement in that we don't generally talk about composition.  We just pick specific champs that we want to play and then pick something that fits with that.  I can't really think of a time where we go in saying, let's play protect the kog - what's a good fit for that strat? Or a poke comp, etc.  These are just things we don't talk about and then we decide on the fly.  Probably something we could talk some about here.

I don't know how team builder would work.  I generally just like using that so I can get w/e role I want if I'm playing with just 1 or 2 peeps.  That could help us sort through comps visually, though, without time constraints. 

yeah, but if we've just added some fella that has the strangest list of champs he plays (our eve said he could play eve jungle, or 2 supports, or 1 random mid or something), I have no idea.  One of the problems with MC (in my mind) is that when I reach out and try to get new folks playing with us, I often have no idea of their skill level, etc.  Which usually only translates into us playing a game with them and me not inviting in the future.  Bleh.

also... when the crap are you going to join us again for games Hedgie?

"by just playing Ranked 5s"

This needs to happen more often.

my internet is pretty crappy sporadically. Frequently during the hours y'all are on.

Erm, Top Nidalee.  Jungle Shaco.  Jungle Tryndamere.  Jungle superfarm FF Udyr.  Pretty much all of your recent projects require that your team act/pick in really really specific ways.  Thats all fine, but its odd for you to say that you dislike picks that require specific play styles, then pretty much exclusively develop champs that require specific playstyles by your team.

I'll freely admit that something like Mid WW is an odd pick.  But what it requires is that the jungler ganks when their mid inevitably pushes.  Thats not really something that forces the jungler to act in an abnormal way - most junglers would pretty much automatically do this anyway.  So for a jungler, mid WW isn't a big deal (its usually easy mode actually, I've played jungle with several mid WWs before).  WW mid does have other implications for team play style though.

WW jungle (especially as I play him where I don't farm up a FF post 6) warps teamcomps/team play a lot less than a top Nid does IMO.

You pretty much covered exactly why I made the comment re: ww.  We reach the same conclusion - its not necessarily bad, mind you, but it requires adaptation.  You also note that most of those champs I don't currently play.  Worked through them, did a bunch of math, testing, playthroughs, etc.  Decided to drop most of them BECAUSE of the adaptation required. 

One game where you played ww mid, other lanes were struggling quite a bit and I wanted to try to get them back into it.  But then there's mr ww at mid wanting a gank because he can't do anything without one.  Champs that can't do anything without a gank are weaker than champs that can solo.  Again, it ain't a bad thing, per se, because that ww comes in handy later on and, at the least, can typically hold his lane.  But that also removes a bunch of damage from the team comp which means other lanes need to do well so there is more dmg to compensate. 

I agree re: ww jungle warping team comps less than nid... kinda anyway. 

Something I would like to push a few of us toward is learning some new champions:

Currently our ranked team suffers slightly from people with narrow champion pools. I would specifically like to point my finger at Karl and Bryff. Bryff's Irelia top and Kassadin mid are usually good picks but what if Irelia is picked by the other team and Kassadin is banned? I think Bryff would greatly benefit if he/we could broaden his champion pool. I think a Renekton/Lulu/Ryze/Kayle/Malphite/J4 would all be really good champions for bryff to pick up. They all fufill a different role than Irelia does. I know how to play all of these champions to a mediocre to advanced level and would be more than willing to help bryff out for 1 or 2 games with build orders and bad match ups.

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Karls champion pool lacks a strong AOE CC initiator (yes you play amumu but not to my liking). Last night the last game when I played Kass was an excellant example of what-are-we-supposed-to-do-without-an-initiation team comp. We didn't have the forsight to see this problem but now it will be easier to catch in champ select. If Karl was on something like Malphite/j4/sejauni/amumu/hecarim/zac/wukong we could have started team fights from long range. We had problems getting onto the squishy lux/lucian because of our short-range initiation. I think the jungle role is the place to fix this problem (or leona/annie support).

Now lets address my problem with your amumu play. In general you play the champion just fine but my problem is your build order. You like to build damage. Yes I know it is perfectly fine to do that but it causes problems late into the game when we need peel/longevity in team fights. You go in pop ult and die. What we need is you to go in pop ult/randuins and not to die in 2 seconds, and come back to peel for carries if they need it and this all preferably happens as a dive after we poke them down while seiging. Playing a more supportive/initaitor role is what is needed more than the extra damage.

The big 3 (lee sin, elise, eve) would also be nice for karl to pick up but that would again leave bryff as our tank/initiator. Unless Karl develops godlike Cacoon and Lee sin ward hoping->flash->ult skills.

If anyone else has ideas for what we might be missing/need it would be nice to hear it.

Played a couple ranked last night.  

Got my Plat 1 back c:

I can play Sej/Amumu whenever you want.  But if you want pretty much any of the champions you list played (other than J4), you need to have Lee Sin banned, because if we play Sej/Amumu against a Diamond level Lee Sin, the lanes are going to have a bad time.

Last night, we actually had a Morgana, who is a great initiator with Dark Binding (followed by Bryff jumping onto it).

I play Amumu builds every which way.  In solo queueish type games, I tend to build a lot of damage, but I certainly build tanky in other games if I feel like it (I always start the AP jungle item since its way better on Amumu, but after that I can build anything).  So yeah, I don't have a problem building a tanky Amumu (or Sejuani, who is really pretty much the same thing) if people want it.  We just need to remove Lee Sin first.

Eve isn't much of an option since I don't get much of a chance to play non bruiser/tanks with the people we play with.  I'm not really mechanically good enough to be a great Lee player, unfortunately (I've tried, it didn't go well).

"Got my Plat 1 back c:"

YAWN... when you are you going to sack up and grind out diamond? We could try duoing a few times again if you want some one that isn't terrible 75% of the time.

Morgana as an initiator:

I have always thought of her as more of a pick specialist with her Q or a go in 2nd type of champion with her ultimate. She is not reliable for starting fights. Flash+Ult+Zhonyas to start a fight is very unrealiable when compared to all the champions I listed (not to mention only possible late into the game). Pretty much all the champions I listed require only two spells to do the same thing without using flash (but it can be used if necessary). She is strong at getting picks and pooring on the CC after a fight has already started but not at being the heart and soul of our team fight engage.

Banning lee singah:

Sounds like a plan.

I wasn't thinking of Flash+Ult as the initiate.  I was thinking Binding + Irelia.  Binding is very long range and lasts FOREVER.  While the other team is worried about the Irelia, the Morgana has time to walk in and press R without always having to flash.  Pro teams use stuff like that as initiations from what I've seen.

I agree that its not as good as Amumu or whatever, but Amumu brings a lot of potential weaknesses (especially since we all tend to lean toward late game champs, which can't protect against Amumu's weaknesses).  I mean, I'm not opposed to playing Amumu at all.  I like Amumu.  I'm just saying that people have to be aware that while Amumu does some things very well, he sucks at a lot of things too (Sej and most of the other "real" tanks too - its why they aren't played much).

You're a much better jungler than I am Karl, but I've had some experience playing Lee and have a talent for kicking dangerous enemies towards Pacov and Hedgie when they're low on health.  I will teach you.

I think Eve is built pretty tanky nowadays after her SotEL right?  I'd disagree that your jungle stable is an huge issue though.  You don't play the big three but you do play their counters like Udyr...

"I'd disagree that your jungle stable is an huge issue though."

I wasn't really implying that karl was a massive flaw in our ranked 5's team. I mean we won pretty decisively after we had a nice pick in that kassadin, kog, udyr, morg, irelia game (it just took a lot longer than I wanted it to and it felt like we didn't really control the tempo of the game). It would be nice to have more options for us to dictate when we fight instead of waiting to get initiated on (and in general you lose more fights if you are the team getting intiated on) or get that lucky pick.

I also think it is much easier to win for us by going for big 5v5 team fights with a lot of lock down HERP DERP CC ults than it is for us to win trying to get a lucky morgana q, elise q, thresh hook, random pick or what have you on an important target (not the 4000 HP sejauni/mundo/nasus/whatever).