While that's true in teamfights, that's not really true in-lane.

The only assassin that Anivia does really well against is Leblanc and that's only when your egg is up. If you fall behind and don't start stacking your RoA by 14 minutes, she can pretty much combo you to egg and then kill you for realsies 45 seconds later. Similarily, AD Assassins have no difficulty auto-attacking an egg to death. Fizz is a difficult matchup unless the Fizz is really bad (then it's mega easy). Cass, Azir and Syndra are extremely difficult matchups because you aren't allowed autoattack because you get "stunned" long enough that it's trivial for them to Q you.

She does have a very strong matchups against Swain, Vlad, Yasuo and Lissandra though.

She excels against hard-engage comps with tanky junglers... stuff like Udyr, Amumu, Maokai, since you get to just wall them off. Those champs just aren't played as much anymore since junglers are more often damagey and top laners go TP + splitpush.

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The thing is that you like to play long-medium range mages that are "lane bullies" that farm well ALSO scale well into the late game thru large amounts of AoE damage (Ziggs, Gragas, Brand are your big three that fit that classification. GP is another example of a medium-range lane bully you like to play).

In Season 2, champs like Karthus, Orianna, and Anivia "did it all" and were just as "OP" as you claim assassins are - they did exactly what the meta dictated. They were able to actually pick "Kills, CS Lead, Map Presence" because Map Presence didn't really matter until 20 minutes. Remember that people used to intentionally NOT take towers until 15-20 minutes into the game just because laning was so drawn-out.

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And i sort of disagree with your current "snowball" view of the current metagame. i feel like that is only true botlane.

While i disagree with Riot's current balancing approach to botlane (it's been extremely aggressive ever since Lucian was released, except that brief stint where Kog + Twitch + Tristana dominated everyone for about 6 weeks, and i feel like ADCs should be more mid-late game focused rather than early-game), the current meta is pretty decisively balanced around the mid-game.

Look at the past for snowballing:

Season 2 was the "farm for 40 minutes" meta. Champs like Karthus, Anivia, Orianna were king.

Season 3 was the real "snowball" meta. Assassins were actually good for the first time (as a class - not a single overtuned assassin like release Ahri or release Fizz). Do y'all remember how silly Oracle-Monkies were? Junglers literally only got boots + oracles the entire game. Ziggs was a 55-58% winrate champion for roughly 6 months.

Season 4 started off with their extremely silly 4-1-0 lane matchups in competitive play. That was quickly patched out. The game still had a huge snowball off of inhibitors/baron, but... generally you need to win a teamfight to get either of those objects. Teleport became common-place and teleport is intrinsically "anti-snowball" when you compare it to Ignite. There was the brief "hypercarry" patch which was 100% teamfight focused. Toplane Ryze was popular off-and-on thru the season, which is very much a teamfight champ. When they reworked Exhaust, Assassins were temporarily almost completely removed from the game.

The big reason that Season 5 started off Assassin heavy was exactly what i mathed out back with the first preseason patch:

1. everyone is ~30% tankier levels 1-2. Which is when asassins struggled.

2. everyone is ~7-9% squishier level 6-9. Which is when assassins spike.

3. Athenes nerfs + Morello buffs means most midlaners are going to have -20 MR compared to before by level 9

4. Botlane got super-aggro again so supports are taking Ignite more often => no exhaust for fed assassins or your botlane loses lane

(Fizz in particular got the strange MP5 buff that was out-of-place and was actually what pushed him over the edge).

And it's hard to say that preason-5 was really truly only "snowball" when scaling-teamfight focused champs such as Rumble, Lissandra, Gnar and Irelia were top-picks toplane. 

And while assassins have more relative spike damage, junglers can no longer perma-camp midlane due to the increased difficulty of the jungle and the reduced amount of sustain. Which reduces the ability for a midlane assassin to snowball off of 2 easy 2v1 kills. And a bunch of assassins just got nerfed (with even more such as Katarina next patch), so assassins might not even be good in Season 5 - just 5-preseason.

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i feel like in-general you just go into frenzy the moment a particular champion icon appears. This goes BOTH directions btw: you get super excited the moment you see that TF lock-in and you get to go GP. It's not just Ahri/Fizz.

i feel like you put a huge amount of emphasis in matchups and counterpicks. (Espiecially when you don't have a lot of expierence with the matchup. Eg, Fizz is one of the classic counters to Ahri in competitive play, but you feel like Ahri beats Fizz because she DOES if you are not as expierenced on him - just like how Fizz can lose a lot of lanes if you aren't experienced on him).

We aren't at a Master-Tier level where it becomes harder and harder to just "out-skill" your opponent thru a skill differential and matchups become actually "really important". Sometimes you go against a mid-Riven as mid-Renekton and get completely demolished. Or you play GP-mid against a TF-mid, get camped and then the TF just ults everywhere and kills everyone else.

It's also kind of rude in other situations such as wheni only did well against Leblanc that one game because "Anivia trashes Leblanc". i was apparently just on autopilot and my champion just plays itself (and it had nothing to do with, for example, the Leblanc being lower skill and the Shaco completely neglecting my lane while Karl camped me)

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The 100% valid complaint you can make about ALL assassins is that: They tend to warp the entire game around their skill versus their opposition's skill.

This is just going to be a feature of high-mobility, high-damage, high-scaling champions, however. If you want to be able "carry a game", then you have to accept that certain roles/champions are going to be able to carry harder if things go their way.

i personally do not think hedgie is passionate about this topic at all. 

Re: Cow Coaching Top Lane

I'd love some tips from you buddy!  I'm mainly playing top cause it's my third choice in Ranked, and since Supp and ADC are number one and two and are taken if there is a bot lane duo, I've been playing it a little more.

I used to love Rene but the double whammy of the TP meta and his personal nerfs kinda took him out for a while, but I love this rework.  Hedgie wasn't sold on it last time we talked but I think Rene has a higher skill cap than he and a lot of people give credit for now that he's been reworked.

You can't just zone people out and while aa'ing creep waves to intimidate people with your double stack of rage.  I don't think a lot of people are taking into account that you can E into people and Q them to get an empowered W and are still trying to build up their rage before going in.

Re: Assassins 

I don't think Cow is imagining things.  Riot likes big LCS plays that go on YouTube and having Zeds triple shadow dodge outplay opponents are a lot more appealing than watching a fed AOE mage get their pentakills.

Was watching a Cyanide VoD guide the other day and he was talking about how "and since you're in solo queue just go pick off retards that are wandering around alone."  So if assassins are going to be good-okay in pro play, they're going to be a step above that in solo queue where people would rather yell "WHY DIDN'T YOU FOLLOW?!" than play safe for a little while after you ping the MIA.

Re: Pacov Problems

I was having a similar issue and updating my time clock to internet time fixed my issue.  If you're getting the same screen as I do after the failed login, there is a link that takes you to the most common problems and having your time on your comp not synced with Riot's is the third most likely issue but there's a bunch more if that doesn't work for you.

You probably won't read this or believe me when you do, so I guess you'll probably just suffer until you find the answer yourself and post it.  "Look I fixed my issue... Reddit says it was my computer's clock the whole time!  Who would have thought?!"

You are a pisser. I have tried every single thing listed.  Really.  Riot suggestions and reddit.  I kind of get ocd and when things are off, I do ALOT of research to try to sort.

Anyways, I did a complete uninstall/reinstall today.  I'm not installing LSI for the time being (so its really just a LOL install).  So far, 2 logins without issue... I honestly don't think I'm sorted, but right this second.. 100% success rate and zero crashes.

Guessing tomorrow I'm back to 8 login attempts, but for now its good.  If that continues, I'm going to hold off installing anything else (zero mods, no lsi, etc).  If its stable for a bit, then I'll start adding back in. 

Any time you want to chat let me know Thunder.

Garen Game. Garen is pretty damn good vs Sion. Interrupts his knock up and gets to freely spin2win afterwards. You can shrug off the slow with W and if you kill sion its easy to run away from him with Q. I really like this match up but late game Sion has a stronger team fight. I denied sion a lot of farm but could of probably did a better job of it. Teleport might of been a better option but my goal was to kill sion. I think if I got the tower earlier I could of roamed and made a difference in mid game that would of won the game but I couldn't seem to get him out of lane fast enough to take the stupid tower.

Fizz games. First game vs the good orianna was really hard. She was very aggressive early, not allowing me to farm and keeping my health down. Flask helped a little bit but I got destroyed in lane and died 2-3 times without getting a kill. As the game went on I picked up kills and snowballed. A champion that has that bad of a lane phase and can come back to being as strong as I was is pretty silly IMO.

The 2nd game I dominated lane phase/mid game but fell off later when Lissandra's only goal in life was to ult and blow me up. She was pretty successful at this and made me a non factor in several fights. I was still able to make a difference in fights but did not feel as impactful as the Ori game.

I think both of these game I had difficult match ups but I am not that experienced with Fizz so it might just be that I am bad. Anyways valuable reps on him anyway.

Played some 3's with Bosshound and Snipersbane late last night. Ended our series 2-5 and placed into Bronze III. Ended up playing vs a Masters tier talon in one game. We got stomped but there was a few nice moments, we managed to ace them after being behind at one point but still got rolled pretty hard. Its fun playing with my buddies that genuinely want to learn about the game more. Bosshound has a long ways to go but Snipersbane is quite good for having so few games. Gnar is REALLY good on TT.

Orianna is one of the classical lane-counters in competitive play against Fizz. She's not as good as Lissandra in teamfights though Liss is a really hard matchup as well.

Note sure why it's "wrong" for a champion to come back from the lane phase? Didn't you say in your last post that snowballing was bad? If the first 10-15 minutes are all that should dictate a champion's future performance, that means that you 100% agree that snowballing should happen (or it needs to be a hyperscaling champ like Karthus/Kog/Trist).

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#Ahri:

Well apparently the movement speed buffs were way OP on her, despite losing a lot of damage (20% amp on charmp + 15% max hp + 20% amp on DFG)

54% in all games. 57% in ranked. 58% in Plat+.

That's only in one day, but she's getting between 18-20% play in games, which means the # of games is very, very high, so it's still statistically significant.

i suspect we'll be seeing either nerfs to her Q movement speed buffs, very small damage reductions on W, or an ult CD increase next patch. Her damage certainly didn't go up (level 18: +0.15 AP ratio, +20 damage on E, +50 damage on W).

Cow should probably be learning her. Has a more magey style than Fizz + it looks like Riot wants to shift her into more of a "kiting" style of play. Even if it was too good... like ye' old Lucian rework.

#Fizz:

Got hit pretty hard. Dropped down to 43.66% in all ranked games. Ranked Diamond has him at 45%.

i suspect that number will climb up slightly after people figure out new builds or figure out if Bruiser Fizz Jungle/Top is worth playing (maybe its OP - maybe it's not).

#Tristana:

Nothing really conclusive by win rate. Huge increase in popularilarity + slight winrate increase in Normals. But win rates are down in ranked. However, it's not a significant shift, so you couldn't tell that she was changed just looking at the graphs.

yeah - but the value add of a garen is fairly limited.  They get a late game beast tank with cc.  We get a garen.  I don't think its worth it to be able to put sion a little behind for the late game trade off. Maybe if you had been able to roam out lane early... but he can get back to lane so quick w/ his ult/tp, so smeh on that.  He's def a nice counter to sion in laning.  Short sited pic imo though. 

re: ahri - currently pretty high on my ban list.  Getting lots of play and even some weaker players are able to make a go of it.... I could probably make a decent go of it... I think she's worth learning and agree with hedgie... BUT - I think she'll start becoming banned more and more as folks start believing she's stronger.  Also, froggen played her yesterday in split and did some really sick things...granted, dfg was present, but stuff like that gets people playing her more often.

Looking over the leagueofgraph trends, I'd say that Tristana's winrate in Gold+ is slightly down, and her Plat+ winrate is fairly significantly down.  It looks like she got hit fairly hard against competent players as predicted, although I suppose its always possible somebody will figure out better ways to play her.

Ahri was overbuffed and needs to be banned.

top vs ire?  I think I'm onto something there.    The only thing that really stands out to me is her tower dmg with e.  She's an absolute beast with a little dmg.  I don't think her power levels have gone up over all though... I'd still prefer other adcs to her.  Her wave clear is sick... but that's not necessarily a good thing... generally isn't...

i thought she lost her Grevious Wounds? i think that'd make her a lot weaker to sustain champs top after the first few-levels.

One thing about Trist is that her traditionally-awful midgame DID get a lot better.

Corki with a Trinity Force will still be better, of course. It just might not be so weak that professional players often forgo a BFS item for the first 20 minutes and go Pickaxe + Shiv for better farming. Additionally, if Graves/Sivir get nerfed, she might have an easier time farming up for that midgame.

heh - oh no that was just a joke based on me fping trist, deciding to go top, and being up against an irelia.  Not my best plan ever. 

I do feel like her mid game is a bit stronger as well.

Yes, pacov declared that he knew some secret about top lane Tristana as we were asking him not to play Trist top.

Long story short - there was a fed Irelia running all over the map.

Pacov never gets upset when someone picks an off meta champ so hopefully you went easy on him that game.

just like he'd never duo queue botlane for a third of his promo matches since it's SOLOQUEUE and bot duos literally have a 25% win rate

Its more the rate at which certain champions snowball. I started 0-3 and had probably half as much farm as Orianna for ~10-15 minutes of the game. I should not be able to recover from playing that badly in the early game. If I did that on ANY farm champion the game would be over. Since I was an assassin however I got like 2 kills my farm discrepancy and feeding literally did not matter at all. I had lich blade and could kill any squishy champion 1 on 1 in seconds.