So, last I heard cow has actually appeared in Hawaii and met up w/ thunder.  That said, his appearance mysteriously and nearly instantly, destroyed thunders computer.  I believe lava was involved.

That said, I'm awful and putzing around with Azir currently.  Actually spent a good hour or 2 researching and watching for playstyle, strategies, combos, etc. 

I'm wondering if any of you have any tips or thoughts on him based on experience.  A couple of things I learned - his best opening appears to be to try to get into solider cast range and drop your solider and immediately aa, wait about .5 seconds, then q and aa again.  This does a pretty good job of getting some lane control and pressure going early. 

The hardest bit of his play style for me to get into my head is the idea of playing back line and also trying to make quick decisions to pull off positional advantages.  Staying back is kind of a big deal unless you are at least even in lane eh...

I'm starting to get a decent feel for how to cs with him (takes me a little bit to get used to cs at low levels on mids). 

I learned some of the distances you can cross now with his w,e,q combo and am starting to get better with using that to setup some sneaky positional plays. 

Looks like it will take a ton of practice... doubt my attention span will last a super long time, but I'm enjoying him atm. 

well, I actually had 1 halfway decent game as azir last night, but I was up against somewhat soft competition going solo in team builder. 

So far, I'm doing really well in all match up for about the 1st 5 minutes of the game.  I get good poke down and zone very effectively.  The downside is that with my current skill cap, I tend to fall off in a pretty major way after that 5 min marker.  I'll make some sort of bad trade/trades, and the enemy will be in position to wipe me.  I might try to compensate some with runes - currently doing an hp/lvl setup and perhaps the flat hp might be a better approach for survivability. 

Also, I think I need to adjust my itemization timing a bit.  Currently rushing morellonomicon when I'm probably better off going dbl dorans to keep in it during that power flux at 5 min. 

I'm also farming ok, but not well enough.  Choosing to go back pretty early to be safe which costs me.  Much to learn anyway.

pete kind of went super nova tilt last night for a bit - kind of a pacov doesn't shut up/stop complaining sort of rage.  Eventually had to move him out of the voice chat channel.  I feel really bad when folks tilt and I've got a MC candidate w/ me.  Anyway, hopefully all that is cool.  Going to try to go out of my way to not nudge pete to tilt town tonight if he's around at least - please do the same if he seems like he's tilting. 

worth a look re: bot lane opening. Kind of foolish not to start this way... provided you can get your jungler to start on the other side so you can get a big level 2 adv. 

back to my azir stuff - well, I'm starting to adapt a bit with runes/masteries and itemization.  I'm getting better and more flexible.  Cs is getting better but still pretty weak.  I need to work on my all in strats for him during laning.  Also, the 2 times I got to play as him last night I ended up majorly handicapped by other lanes and I don't think I'm a good enough mid to get all the work done myself (eg if I'm the team's damage at this point, you are going to have a problem).  So much crap to learn...

I thought that it was pretty common knowledge that both sides lanes are "supposed" to take jungle camps.  My understanding is that bot is supposed to take 1 side camp and top is supposed to take some camps (depending on who is being played) then shop and TP (I don't know enough about top to know who is supposed to take what).  This can really put junglers behind, but everybody screws the jungler.  And the jungler kind of catches up a bit since most of them aren't handing off second blue buff any more due to really bad XP in jungle right now.

A lot of this will probably be fixed in the future.

Yeah, at IEM the whole botlane meta was really strongly linked to the level 1 camp thing... one of the reasons Soraka was so popular/strong (go triple buiscuit, tank the creeps, heal your ADC to full 24/7... hence the HP5 nerfs).

A lot less toplaners do a camp + teleport. The biggest one is Maokai, who can clear the wraith camp with level 1 saplings. Sion can also do it (by getting himself to ~20% hp by running under an enemy tower, then dying to the camp and finishing it with his passive).

This was one of the reasons why Riot was experimenting with putting the "buffs" for Gromp/Turtles onto the actual big guy? Like if you shoot gromp and you haven't smited his buff away, YOU take the poison damage. Or if you are tanking Turtles and you didn't smite the buff away YOU get stunned every 5th hit.

Re: Taking Camps As Bot

Yeah, was reading a Reddit post a month ago talking about how the side who can take Rock Snails has a huge advantage.  It was funny cause Krepo chimed in as "someone who knows a little about supporting" to talk about how the opponents should be taking Gromp to get a bigger lead.  He mentioned specifics on how to tank/kite Gromp but I didn't pay much attention since it will be fixed before the season starts like Karl said.

Re: Pete

I like Pete.  Think he has a good heart and it just doesn't register that if a bunch of people tell him something that he doesn't know, he might be mistaken.  I fell into the trap the other day where I tried to educate him but I just don't have the knack that some others do.

I'm just going to relax and let him do his thing while hoping you guys don't tilt him.  If you think you can get him to play differently that's one thing but when you guys just yell at Pete for being Pete and tilt the fuck out of him, what's the point?  That is when playing with him becomes distracting and less enjoyable for me.

Re: Cow

No texts from Cow about missing his flight back so I guess he's headed home.  Was a great house guest and it was fun showing him around, but I'm glad he's gone cause having him around broke my PC and screwed up my WiFi.  Moment I dropped him off at the airport, the spirits that live in the pooka pooka mahalo trees were pleased and restored bandwidth to the island.  However, my computer still tells me that my recovery disk is in fact not my recovery disk even though it is plainly labeled as such.

So I'll be playing on my laptop tonight and tomorrow.  Oh well.

That makes sense... I think the current best way would be to ALWAYS let the adc/support take dbl golums if they are on that side while the top laner helps the jungler at gromp.  that way the jungler doesn't really get screwed AND you give your bot lane a pretty decent advantage.  It's probably worth it to have the jungler start wherever side his adc/support are not currently at (debatable ofc).  I don't think its cool to screw the jung take both top side and bot side camps - though plenty of junglers would be fine if that was the case.  There had better be a nice payoff for the top laner blowing tp to get back to lane though. 

Hope so - I think perhaps reducing the xp gained if you don't have machete or further tweaking the dmg taken (but bake in some bonus to machete as well so the jungler isn't penalized. 

I don't really watch high level streams, but my understanding is that one side is "supposed" to take doubles and the other side is supposed to take gromp.  The jungler is supposed to start on the opposite side.  Top is supposed to do something which is very dependant on which champion is picked, but can be as simple as just leashing for the jungler.

Uh huh.  You definitely killed him in some lava tube.

I made it back! had a great time! Its good to see that you have returned to good graces with the pooka pooka mahalo trees.

^

Totally not me posting on Cow's account to cover up the fact that I accidentally got him killed in a lava tube.

Edit:  Ah, and Cow left his FB account open so that should make it easier to keep up the charade that he's still alive.

JK Cow, signing out right now so I can cyberstalk my ex GF's.

Working is lame so happy 1001 comment.

Bonus rp is live now

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/store/sales/extra-bonus-rp-here-limited-time

To waste 100 dollars or not to waste 100 dollars... hmmmm

Waste - pfft.  You are investing in your future... or something.  Besides - unless you are expecting to become bored of LoL, you'll... you know... use it and benefit from the bonuses.

Random rant - I've been a bit more prone to negativity lately.  I try to keep it in check, but we just had to put our dog to sleep this past Saturday and things were moving in that direction for a bit now... so... I've been a lot more tilt prone.  My apologies for being quite rotten here and there.  Not cool of me.  But hopefully I'm about done now.

Other stuff - I really like Boaz but I'm kind of getting sick of his setup.  He seems to be consistently having some sort of issue every game that always sets us back.  Hoping that stuff ends soon for him or I'll just stop playing with him for a bit.  Sucks, but I don't think he's tech savy enough to solve his problems and I guess shipping of computer parts to Alaska is somewhat expensive. 

Cow - did you actually think that kat from last night was scripting?  I didn't really get to pay much attention to tracking any of that.  Riot's been banning alot of accounts lately for scripting  - would be pretty easy to get that person banned if that's true.  Pretty sure I have a replay as well, but don't really know what you experienced or if you were just salty. 

Anyway, I'll be on tonight probably a little earlier than normal (7PM or so).  Happy to get in games with folks that are around.  My mid is still kind of rubbish but I'm improving alot now and moved over to a more consistent mid - syndra.

like 75% sure that Kat was a scripting. the kill at baron was redicilous, the insta kill she pulled off in less than a second at the inhibitor. The fact that shes was plat V and never plays kat is another dead give away. There is a small chance she was playing absurdly well but I highly doubt it. Plat V players are really bad (no offense to any of you guys that are there right now).