Not really.  Remember that winning a lane is not that same as killing.  Getting towers and CS are also a big deal, and TP is a massive deal is both of those.

If you want to play aggressively, you can push your opponent under tower, back, shop, TP, then be back in lane while losing minimal CS and be up an entire item.  That more than makes up for the ignite in lane.  This is what a lot of high level tops do.  They just constantly pressure the top tower, get an item advantage, and if the opponent ever backs to shop, its free tower.  There is never an opportunity to use the ignite since the person is always playing at a disadvantage due to the item disadvantage.

If the jungler gets involved to hold things, then the map is open for free dragon type plays (especially since a TP can be used to help secure that...).

If you want to play defensively, its also very simple.  Just sit under your tower, play safe, and you get cheap shops with TP.  You can't do those shops if you don't take TP or you lose towers.

But anyway, the larger point is that TP can very easily be used to get a substantial early item advantage with extra shops, which negates any advantage that ignite gives.  The only real way of playing around this if you take ignite is to play extremely aggressive top lanes to prevent the top from pushing you under towers.  As I said last night, if you have enough early aggression from top and push hard and try and kill hard, ignite is not unreasonable.  But that wasn't relevant to the conversation since that is not how Bryff plays.  I like his Irelia, but he isn't going to be pushing a Renekton hard early.

And not to be unkind to your MadCast team's top, but I don't really factor in his opinion that much.  He is by far the weakest player and your team (IMO) and I question his decision making.

Personally, I think you are over simplifying things way too much.  That said, I'll put this question out before anything else - someone mentioned that TP is being targeted for a nerf soon.  If so, what is the nerf?  I don't remember reading about this.

Anyway, I'm fine with simplifying the discussion by saying that its generally better in a team setting (premade) to run TP for all the reasons you and I can likely think of.  In solo queue, I can think of plenty of reasons to take ignite on various champs in top lane over tp.  BUT - in an optimal setting (best players/best team), TP is obviously a more efficient and useful spell. 

In the example of the top in my premade, I don't think he uses tp optimally and has trouble adjusting to not having ignite in his kit. 

Knocking 40 seconds off the CD reduction from going to a turret.

Just checking in!  Still without internet for most of the month!  Hope all is well for everybody!

Come back soon, swan!

In other news, rise of nations was released today... sooo... cya nerds isn't the right thing to say here... but... cya nerds... for a bit

#TP:

Your top laner was also playing Renekton. Renekton is one of those champs who actually does makes sense to take ignite because that's the only way he is going to be able to do his job. Even then, there are games where higher Elo players will take TP.

(also Bryff takes like pure scaling runes and so it makes zero sense for him to take ignite zzz).

And even in high kill-potential lanes, people are taking TP. TP is partially the reason stuff like Kass top works.

But yeah, Ignite "can" help you win a lane and snowball it. TP "always" allows you to draw a lane and farm it out.

I agree with Hedgie and Karl.  I've had a couple of recent Ignite VS TP matchups and been on both sides of it and am leaning more and more to TP... at least until it's nerfed. Then we'll have to see.

Just too many instances where you use up the ignite and almost get the kill... so they TP back at full health/mana and the advantage is theirs.  Even worse is when you get a gank, use ignite to get the kill and then say in all chat:  "That's right bitch!  Real men take ignite."  And then they TP right back into lane and farm all the creeps that they used to miss out on when top laners took ignite.  So even if the ignite "gamble" works out, you dont' gain nearly as much as you used to which is probably why high solo queue players have been taking TP even on champs like Riven.

summary of the night.

1 ranked game - was gold V.  promoted to gold III.  So, I'm pretty happy about that. Any skipping means less work and less time i have to put into getting back to plat.  So - good news for me there.

Played some norms with karl.  Had fun with that at any rate.

Played 1 more ranked game - this time solo queue.  Annoyed with my support, but I did my job and we won the game without too much effort (would have been a ton easier with a normal support imo (the twitch adc on the other team was crap).  Got 27 lp for the win.  I'm not super expecting to get bumped from gold III to gold I, but we'll see.  If I go on a streak, its probable I'd think.  I'm on a 70-80% win rate setup my last 10 ranked games at any rate.

Anyway, hopefully we'll get into more ranked 5's soon.  Was nice when everything magically aligned yesterday and we had 5 of us on at the same time. 

Also - rise of nations, while I'm having fun with it, is pretty buggy.  One game the icons indicating what you can build (house, library, etc) were all not present (just gray boxes)... and there are more than a few options so that was... special. Another time I was running full screen and needed to alt tab... when I swapped back, the video was on the other monitor (dual monitor extended setup), the main monitor was black... and moving my mouse on the blank screen controlled things.  Was... special.  Anyway, barring the bugs (all resolved by just restarting the game incidentally), its a fun old game.  Hopefully that stuff will be patched before too long.  Bad sign when I've played for like 2 hours total... if even... and encountered even 2 very noticeable bugs. 

VOD of the exhibition match from today on the updated SR

Was going through a thread on reddit today that explained some masteries that you might not fully understand.  Worth a read imo. Going to list 1 and link the article:  http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/284hxm/some_mastery_tips_you_may_not_know/

Oppression: Reduces damage taken from enemies with impaired movement or reduced attack speed by 3%.

Reducing attack speed will proc this as well. Just having a frozen heart will essentially give you a permanent 3% reduced damage (excluding poke battles).

So, if you are getting a frozen heart on any build, I'd think this is a very valuable item. 

Oh - and one I knew  - inspiration in the utility tree is pretty much very worth it.  Just... not good and should be removed... kind of like runic blessing. 

Oppression is extremely crazy powerful. It's one of the most underrated mastery points in the game.

For a single point, you basically gain 3 un-pentratable Armor and MR + another 3 Arm/MR for every 100 Arm/MR you have. In addition, it's a massive mitigation when it comes to jungling (because of Red buff and the fact many junglers have spammable AoE slows in their kit).

Technically, it's slightly better than the 3% flat HP gained, espiecially once you factor in the plentiful sources of % hp damage. But, 3% hp is always "on" and also blocks true damage. So, it's a better 9th point. But Oppression is the best 10th point in the mastery tree until you get to the 2nd to last tier.

Good feedback -thx!

Off to bed.

So, fast recap.  Busy most of the day, late start.  Played 2 ranked games.  Game 1 was stupid.  We won against some guy that had his support dc'd for about 20 minutes.  While I feel bad for that sort of thing, I'm not willing to throw a game to help someone out that has a dc on their team (just as good odds I'll have that crap on my team).  So, we zoned and then pushed down tower after a bit.  Easy win, but ofc, you'd hope that would be the case with a 4v5.  So, nothing special here, but I did a decent job with my mechanics anyway.

Game 2 - I'm duo'd.  I have 2nd pick.  Some other guy requests adc.  At first, I'm going to tell him I'm taking it.  Then I see his stats.  He's putting up similar stuff to me for KDA in ranked... but he appears to really only be ok with lucian (didn't notice that at the time).  So, Braums open and I decide to support for him.  The other team picks up lucian.  He gets corki and is crap with him.  I do a good job and go 3/3/20 with braum.  He does.. less good.  Both my jungler and my adc were kind of awful players.  The jungler complains when he makes mistakes (blaming on others).  My adc doesn't complain, but literally does 2 tower dives... pointless tower dives during laning and dies... my jungler also does 1.  Anyway, the enemy team was nothing special, but my team was a barrel of monkeys. 

We have a slight problem now as well.  My duo queue buddy is now quite a bit below me in elo.  I'm gold III, he's gold IV.  My mmr is quite a bit higher.  He's bringing down the quality of player we get atm.  If you think about that, that might sound like a good thing.  But it seems difficult to have both of us get carry roles.  If he's not able to carry with me, I'd rather have folks at the same elo as me (as the odds go up, imo, of having better players on my team). 

Oh - funny story.  Loss prevention on that loss due to the major server issues.  My team definitely deserved the loss.  I made 1 error during the game that was bad at the end, though. 

Anyway, I went off to team builder after that and played graggy as support (been wanting to give that a go for a bit).  Let's just say that boozed up pacov should.... not do that.  Went 1/1 in team builder.  I did have 1 great play (in both of those games) that got us 2 towers and an inhib... and  then about 20 other wtf plays.  I had fun, but I was really, really bad.  Pretty sure I can come up with a way to actually make that work as a support, but I'd need to get quite a few reps in.  Still, graggy as a support can bring a lot to the team - if you hit your ult properly.  Might be worth it for that. 

Got into 2 solo queue ranked games last night.  Game 1 I had to fill and went jungle... which would have been a bit more fine if every lane wasn't getting wrecked.  I got a bit flustered when the team started pinging for help in all lanes at the same time early... anyway, definitely not my best game and certainly not much fun.  Loss there.  Played a second game as lucian and won pretty easily.  My mechanics were way off for last hitting, sadly, but not so much that it cost us laning.  My team was a little bit hurr durr, but I managed to get the team to close out the game when we should.  

I really enjoyed that game. We had this crazy miracle moment at one point as well.  My team (including me a bit) makes a mistake and decides to steal the enemy blue buff instead of taking an uncontested dragon (either blue or dragon were going to be free, not both).  Anyway, we have to break off dragon and the enemy team gets it after a wee bit (most of us were low from the previous push/team battle).  Anyway, on the previous push, we got the enemy team's inhib tower down mid.  Only wukong and I are alive or in the area (folks were either dumb or dead).  I immediately decide to push down mid while I know the enemy team is at baron.  I assume baron will be a lost cause and I'm 100% confident I have enough time to get their inhib.  Well, wukong goes for baron and dances a bit with the enemy team right about the time that the enemy team sees me wailing on their base... which splits their attention.  Wu gets a beast smite off and steals baron.  I get the inhib.  Could not have gone better. 

I think I made the right call there, though it might be a smidge questionable.  My thought was - I can get an inhib for sure.  Baron = slim chances that 2 of us can stop a baron and that one or both of us might get picked off if we try to defend/steal.... which will very likely result in the enemy team hard pushing a lane and getting towers, etc.  If I take an inhib and leave safely (I knew I'd have plenty of time to get out after clearing the inhib based on their estimated dmg output on baron), they will have to send at least 1 to base to deal with me even if they get baron... which ends any immediate push on their side and buys us time/saves other objectives most likely.  Anyway, I'm fairly pleased with my decision making in game for the most part and how I did in team fights.... at least in that one game.  I'm about 64 LP in gold III atm.

Well, I had the very exciting chat problem all of yesterday where I couldn't get the chat system to work.  It was working for most people, but was broken for a substantial number of people, including me.  Very fun.