I like Zyra.  I can pick into most of those pesky assassin counters and still perform decently in lane, then the epic damage comes when you're doing triples in team fights after the assassin already killed you in the middle of your ult farm.  She's a lot better at harassing them than most of the farmers are, and as long as you can land it well, her escape potential is pretty good between the snare and the plant slow.

playing a bit of ori now - having some very awful ults here and there, but also some freaking great ones.  Good stuff.  Going to work on her more i think

Thunder will probably finish his placement series tonight.  I think he's in game 10 now... he's 4/5.  Hedgie I think is on game 3 now.  Gl fellas!

Well Fantasy didn't go well for me this week. Hopefully the addition of a few fanatic players into my line up will help out next week unless fanatic's success was a one time thing with there almost entirely new team.

thunder placed into gold V.  Hedgie is 1/1 in his series. 

And peter has been bumped all the way down to silver 5 from gold in season 4. 

boaz is currently 1/3 in his placements. 

I THOUGHT bryff got busted all the way down to bronze 2 for a sec - turns out that's just his stats with his ranked team. 

Had a last pick Vi who told us she was "taking a piss" during the entire champ select phase but didn't let that stopping from complaining and insulting us the whole game about forcing her into a role that she couldn't carry from.  I won't quote her cause some of the things she said probably violate Stardock's rules involving hate speech and such.

Had a player who offered to fill in and somehow ended up mid lane as Fizz.  I was bummed cause fill players tend to make better supports than playing high skill cap assassins.  Well, I was bummed till he went 20/3.

Rest of the team: "Thank you for carrying us!"

Fizz: "No.  Thank yourselves for following up on my roaming and initiating good team fights for me."

Had everything else in between.  Kinda bummed cause I can't say for sure any games I 'won' for my team but I can think of one I lost.  There were some I didn't play well and some I played great, but felt like the only one where that mattered was my Jinx game.  My Thresh was a beast and kept landing these hooks where I came soooo close to killing him.  We were winning our lane completely but I went ham because I felt like I was missing kills earlier and gave Ez a double.  He ended up carrying that game so it was pretty much on me.

I like the new system.  Kinda felt before that people should have to earn their way back to where they belong every season but now that I find I don't have to go through Gold promos again.... yeah screw the old system, I'm all for this.

5.2 is a comin - night all!

Good news everyone - Server maintenance for our next patch, Patch 5.2, has been scheduled!

On January 28th  at 3:00 AM PST for NA, 5:00 GMT for EUW and 02:00 GMT for EUNE, servers will go down for maintenance and the  5.2  patch will be applied.

Here's  NA version of the  Network Operations maintenance announcement:

"On 01/28/2015, starting at 01:30 PST, ranked queues will be disabled in preparation for patch 5.2. At 03:00 PST, the servers will be shut down and all games currently in progress will end in a draw and stats will not be recorded. We estimate the battlegrounds will be unavailable for 6 hours."

Be sure to check your particular servers status page for your region's specific 5.2 maintenance times:

I'll keep you updated as more information on what the patch contains and patch notes become available. While the 5.2 PBE content is usually a good indicator of what's to come, please remember that it is tentative and not everything may make it to live.

They are pushing it already?

If the jungle item change goes through a lot of junglers simple aren't solo queue viable any more.  This includes Hecarim.  I think that you simply can't play him in jungle any more if you want to win but can't count on a big leash.

I had assumed that they would revert the change on PBE early this week since it was completely insane, especially given Riot's reasoning.  If it goes through, the jungle pool probably gets cut in half for solo queue (competitive not as big a deal because you can count on a leash).

Started a new sort of a joke team for 3v3's with tenzing and bosshound. So far we are 2-1 but only beat two silver teams and got slaughtered by a gold team. I would like to get our slightly more competitive team back together again so we can earn the new ward.

Had some pretty dumb games in solo queue today. One where my Janna was afk for the first 5 or so minute putting my lucian behind on farm and levels (don't think he gave up a kill at all). So the game was pretty much auto loss even though I started 3-1 on annie shutting down the katarina (didn't matter though as soon as janna came back she roamed and got a double or triple, such a fun champ to play against...). The other game I am almost 80% sure had a scripting Katarina on the other team. She has like a 22-3 record as Katarina over the last 25 games player in Solo Queue ranked. She had inhuman perfect combo times (blade throw -> jump right as blade hits -> spin instantly upon landing) she literally killed me in like .25s at one point from 100% health when she was like 5-1 or something. I reported her after the game. 

what jungle change are you on about karls?

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/2tt423/spoiler_lcs_week_1_picks_bans/

Pick/ban rates.  rek sai 100% ban rate EU, 70% ban rate NA - 1 out of 3 wins - 33% win rate. 

Other stats in the link

Random pacov jibba jabba.

By and large, I've really been enjoying my time in LoL lately.  With pals or solo.  Often solo.  Currently working on mid laners and a little bit on the jungle.  Seems like I'm going through pretty quick rotations now on what I roles I'm feeling proficient in.  Usually when I decide to work on a role its because I fee like I'm crap at the role.  Now I'm kind of getting to a point where I'm feeling more and more confident, so I'm picking roles based on what I can carry out of or what sounds fun to me.  Still learning, but I'm developing an ok skill cap on ori now. 

I managed to avoid tilting last night.  I was playing a few games with hunnybadger/karl when a madcast affiliated fella wandered into my chat room looking for a game.  I chatted him up and invited him to play as I'll often do when I notice someone in my chat channel.  Anyway, he joins us and plays support.  That goes fine for game 1.  Game 2, he decides to go teemo top and gets crushed.  I note that I'm getting really, really pissed off.  Not just due to a new guy taking a good role, running teemo, and getting stomped, but I'm having issues in lane as I'm working on a mid I'm not really good at (xer).  I've done similar things to your peeps, so save your breath fellow nerds.  Anyway, I handle myself ok I think.  I, noting that I'm getting to the point where I'm going to start complaining and then bitching and so on, mute ts (in/out).  I do my best in a losing game, pop back onto ts and say gg catch you fellas later and take a few min break. 

After that, I fire up LoL again and play a game with karl... in which we have ranged adcs and no tank.  We end up losing, but I was able to recover from a near tilt, which is pretty good for me. I go on to play 1 more game solo as j4 jungle and I do a pretty good job overall.  Tilt recovery is a pretty great thing for me.  My pattern is typically to tilt, get other folks worked up because I'm tilting, then they fuel the fire, and on it goes.  Managed to step outside of that.

Oh - and I super want to play ranked now... BUT - I'm having a little anxiety.  I'm like 0/3 after placing in plat V.  I really, really, really don't want to get demoted. Which, AFAIK, could easily happen with just another loss.  I really don't know how that works, so I'm a bit nervous.  Getting demoted (never happened to me in any tier as of yet...) sounds quite awful - EXCEPTIONALLY awful if its from Plat to gold and you have to redo your best of 5.  So, I'm really hoping I can get a couple wins soon... which should end my anxiety. I'm going to get more and more on edge if I lose another.  I probably just need to get over it though and press on.  I'm actually starting to feel like I would prefer to play ranked more than norms now... barring that SOB for the love of god win the next game. 

also - pete is in his promos from silver V to silver IV

I haven't heard of them changing the system for demoting out of a division.  If it's the same as last year, then it's almost impossible to do and really only meant as a deterrent to keep the Elo Boosted from playing on their accounts after being raised up.

Think it works like this:  If you lose enough games as a Plat V to get you to a Gold V MMR, you'll get a warning.  If you lose a couple more games after the warning then you get demoted.

I went through a really bad time in Ranked last season where I was in my promos for Gold III and mega-tilted my way down to Gold V with zero LP thanks to lag, playing at 3am to futilely avoid lag, and an Ezreal who was so bad that it made me give up playing Support for a month.  Then I kept losing.  Then I lost some more. I never got the warning so I don't think you should worry even if they made the demotion threshold a little less forgiving without announcing it.

Yep, the change is in.  Don't play weak early junglers in ranked any more.  Udyr and Pantheon should be monsters now though.

Man thats a terrible change.  But I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be able to absolutely murder people with a counterjungling Udyr now.

SOB - WHAT IS THE CHANGE YOU PISSER?

@thunder - i hope you aren't lying re: demotion from plat to gold.    OK - I'll get back to ranked. 

Still quite interested in ranked stories.  Curious to hear from folks that are going through placements and folks that are actively playing ranked.  I enjoy checking on folks stats and seeing how people are doing.