what's that?  Low elo ragebuild tristana losses inc?  already got one.  

I get it though - I get all pumped to play things and try out stuff after watching streams.  Unlocked cait on my lowest elo alt, so I'm working on that.  

So, can anyone explain why cait with ruanaan's hurricane is a more common build now?  I'm not sure why its very often taken on her instead of the other zeal items upgrades (static, phantom, etc).  

I am in no way an expert in the ranked system, but I've been keeping track of teammates and opponents in my climb.

The best way I can put it: it comes in waves (or resets).

Last week from thurs-fri I went up more than a whole division ~20lp s2 - 100lp s1.

I had about a 75% win rate those two days playing top, supp, and jungle (descending order).

The combined mmr/ranking was about even to my team being a little on the lower end (about 50% of my games was duo+ queue).

I played saturday night completely solo and went 0-4 (promos + one game).

The matchmaking was a disaster. On average, 2 teammates weren't even ranked, and the remaining did not make up for the difference (opponents averaged gold 4ish).  

You'll just kicked me out the family it seems. I finally return to lol after a while, say high to some new group chat with you guys that I didn't even know existed and then the next time I log in, I'm just kicked out.

synn - you crazy.  Folks made a bunch of clubs when the club system 1st came out.  Folks like me, also have created and deleted like 6 different clubs (you can't do name change AND you can't own more than 1 clubs, so you actually have to fully drop your club to make a new one).  I likely invited you to one and then killed the club when you were offline and booted ya out (so as to delete the club).  No offense was intended, buddy.  Hope that explains things for ya.  I've personally been playing on lots of different alt accounts I own, which likely also explains why I haven't seen you online.

I think that Riot was listening to Peter's screams when he was playing Malz a few days ago with us.  That new passive.

http://oce.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/patch/patch-68-notes

Yeah just reading through now.

Also, anyone else just get a summoner icon from rito?  Just logged into my main and saw this:

edit ah i see - here's what karl was talking about:  http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/featured/mid-season-magic

If this is unchanged I will main jungle malzahar whenever he is not banned. 

also

"Yep. Enemies will see your buff respawns no matter what. Prepare for invades accordingly."

Lots of crazy shit inc... devourer removed/replaced 

more info about jungle timers

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/4fks8p/the_new_jungle_timers_will_destroy_jungler/

Edit also WTFHELL

http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/a9gcgfzV-elemental-dragons-what-were-doing-and-why?comment=001f0000

We've got some Rift Herald changes coming too, a context post on those should be up sometime this afternoon. Short version is that Rift Herald will spawn later, won't ever respawn after being killed and will offer a really, really long duration (~20 minutes) buff that gives combat power when not near other allies.

 don't play muh anymore, I only came back to play aurelion sol since I'm obsessed with dragons, but wtf? Why are they changing space aids?

They are reworking a bunch of the mages that don't get alot of play and changing the dynamic to mages that have mana pool limitations vs mages with tons of mana regen (eg less sustain=less up time)

So, I had my first major tilty night in quite some time 2 nights ago since I stopped playing w/ some folks.   Tracking this and jibbering on about it more for my benefit than anyone else's.  OK - so up to this point, I think I've gone a few weeks at least without any tilted incidents.  Generally quite a bit more positive.  

I noticed that when I'm playing on one of my lower elo alt accounts, I was getting really frustrated with folks (not pals, mind you - just Puggers).  The reason being was that I was expecting higher level player from folks that aren't at a higher level.  Plat decision making shouldn't exist in games like these (folks aren't plat), so it was quite unreasonable for me to expect that and get pissed when it wasn't present.  Anyway, I figured this out and came up with a good solution.  I remind myself every time I get on the lower elo accounts that I choose to play in this elo.  These folks are not plat/high gold.  Don't expect that crap - as its stupid to do so. Just focus on what you're here to do (which for me is currently to put in a ton of reps into adc to get better with positioning, etc - that's going well, btw). Anyway, I solved that problem just by focusing in on that before starting playing.

So, tilty night... starts out where I queue up with a few folks I met around this elo that are kind of smeh, but I don't mind playing with as it SHOULD guarantee I get to play adc every game.  Anyway, I, like a dummo, screw up and put support as a secondary and get it.  There is NOTHING I dislike more currently than to play support in low elo games like these.  It feels like a colossal waste of time especially considering I'm only in these games to work on adc.  Anyway, someone dodges the queue.  I'm a dumbass and requeue without changing... I'm support again.  Now I'm tilt leaning because I'm already annoyed. Anyway, I play through game.  Can't remember if we win or lose and I don't care. 

Anyway, game ends and I end up queueing up with pete/hunny/boaz.  Now, I'm pretty used to shooting the crap with boaz/hunny, but I don't play with pete as often and he's also someone that can get me all fired up in the past. We queue.  Pete does his I won't join voice chat crap again.  I'm hosting and everyone won't select enough unique roles. I ask pete to change up.  He refuses by going silent for like 4 minutes.  Boaz finally sucks it up and selects support as his role.  So now I've got sejuani as support.  Anyway, I'm all amped up at this point and now almost fully tilted.  I'm getting assists on like every kill.  I learn at 22 minutes that boaz hasn't even bought a sightstone.  During lane we miss engage after engage, most of the time because boaz would tunnel in and autoattack the cannon minion like 12 times to try to get a relic proc.  Now, I'm full tilt.  No perspective - god of omfgbbq has arrived.  Sad.  ><  Anyway, I revert to pisser form for a bit. I'm good for awhile and mute myself, but I'm a bit off the planet.  

All said and done, I reflect on all that.  The tilting was 100% self inflicted.  First by me foolishly getting game 1 as a support - my own fault.  Then by choosing to start a game with PDT after I'm already heavily tilt leaning - knowing I'll be having a sej support as well (though I feel I'm not totally crazy to assume we might have a sightstone by 22 min... hue).  Anyway, all could have been avoided by 1 - making sure I got my adc role which would have kept me from leaning tilt and 2 - skipping out on PDT once I was a leaning.

Anyway, yesterday I played and was back in normal form.  Had a lot of fun.  Played with PDT/boaz + 2 of the lower elo folks I mentioned earlier that run support for me intermittently.   No tilt and all fun again. 

On the topic of new folks, we met a really cool new fella yesterday that I think I might be playing a ton with in the future. Didn't gauge his age, but I'm guessing similar and that he'd fit in well.  Top main.  Gold elo.  His goal is hitting plat.  Anyway, had a really good personality and was fun to play with.  Will be roping him in again in the future.

Then, we got on voice chat with 1 of the lower elo fellas I mentioned that runs support.  That proved to be... interesting.  He's more annoying than me... I know... crazy, right?  Super chatty.  Then he completely DEMOLISHED our voice chat. By that I mean, he started talking about skins and having a bunch, so we all gibber about that for a min.  Then he says his wife has all the skins for champs she plays.  Then he says she died awhile back.  So we're like.... fuggggggggggggggggggggg.  Good times.  Guy has a pretty hardcore lisp when he talks and does a steady stream of mostly irrelevant dialog.  Anyway, seriously though - first time on voice chat with that fella.  I feel like I might avoid that in the future.       

Random off topic - don't know how often you folks cook, but my wife and I started using hello fresh.  It's a service where they send you 3 meals for 2 each week.  It's not like a calorie thing or crap like that.  You just pick from a list of like 6 entrees each week, they send you the stuff you need to make it, and you cook.  Kind of an easy way to try out new things and learn new recipes of stuff.  There's also blue apron as well, which is a little cheaper.  I think both give you a discount on your first week and you can cancel pretty easily if its not your bag.  The

Here's what we had this week:

https://www.hellofresh.com/recipe/week/current/

Trying the vegetable spaghetti Bolognese tonight.  Anyway, just a random heads up in case anyone is into this sort of thing. Only made 1 meal so far, but it was something new and was pretty good.  

Looking forward to not playing taric tonight and watching everyone ban him.

Does the mighty koral have any jungle thoughts as of yet?  If I get to play some t-rock I'll provide some feedback her later.

We've got what, new jungle item w/ devouring gone.  Not sure how that will go.  The crazy dragon and rift herald things.  Honestly, a lane swap might be in order depending on how valuable that buff is.  You'd still want to hand it off to the top laner though... elemental random drakes.

cow... and thoughts about wtf is going on with the mage update?  soo many things.

OK - so I got to spend some time playing Taric.  Here are my initial thoughts.

So, I tried him out 1st vs bots.  One thing becomes clear very quickly - dudes got high cool downs. You need to use his dbl hit passive to drive down the cooldowns.  Even with like 25% cdr, its still pretty rough UNLESS you are using the passive.

He's fun and fairly intuitive to use.  Doesn't take you long to get familiar with how he works.  The real problem is getting other folks on your team to know how he works.  Think like when kench came out and no one would hop in his mouth to go for picks/ganks, etc.  People just don't understand what his kit does yet I think. 

Anyway, I fired him up and played him in a few ranked games.  The biggest problem again was folks having how his interactions work.  For instance, I can heal/shield someone and toss out a stun.  I'd see clear opportunities for a kill if my adc would continue moving forward instead of retreating.  It's mostly that sort of thing.  You see a clear all in and people not used to him have no idea that you could easily get a kill.  

Same thing goes for his ult.  Folks just don't know what to do.   I will say this - the time it takes for his ult to go off is a little long, but that's probably fair.  He doesn't feel OP though, which is good.  I'm curious how the win rate will pan out and how folks will be once they start to get his kit.  I think he works well with most adcs but probably would be best suited with lucian.  Lucian is like 100% certain to land tarics stun on dash which means a free trade if the support is not close enough to back him off.  

Ex lucian dashes to the side of an adc, while he's dashing, I fire up the stun.  Lucian lands, dbl taps, stun goes off, gets a free q.  Anyway, looking forward to playing him more.  

I think the summoner icon stuff was for Draven Day. There were a few different quests for that event. 

Mage stuff. Hard to tell what will happen. I think there will be a few that are OP and some that are really bad. Probably some nerfs/buffs happening really fast with the changes. Malz seems like he will be a good jungler unless they change how the voidlings spawn. It will be wild times mid lane for sure. Also good luck queuing up for mid at all. Shit will be even harder to get for a while. 

I think Taric is very very strong now. His stun is super good in lane and during roams. Excellant tower diving potential with his ulti. Huge team fight presences with the ultimate (although you might not notice it he mitagates a massive amount of damage with it). His biggest weakness in my opinion is his complete and total lack of damage. Give him a month and his winnrate will be very high. 

prob right - its super hit/miss with folks knowing what to do now.  30 days it is.