I've seen you play Thresh a couple of times, but with Coin.  That doesn't really do anything to help with understanding how Thresh with a Relic Shield works. Please substitute "Learning to play Relic Shield Thresh" with "Learning to play Thresh" in my previous posts.  Thresh is a complicated champion with a wall of text to describe his E.  I assumed you knew how it worked but wasn't completely sure since you talked in an earlier post about how little damage Supports do when auto attacking to justify your disdain of Thresh going Relic Shield.

I don't think you read what I said correctly.  I was explaining why I wanted to play Thresh, my best champion, as opposed to a Support you might find more palatable so that I wouldn't be as much of a deficit to the team if I played.  

i mean, i feel like people in general do not give you a lot of crap. The only thing i can think of specifically that happens with any sort of frequency is when you split-push as a support - which isn't "crap" as much as "we need you please group". People very rarely needless/incorrectly whine about things such as:

 - losing dragons due to being unwarded (though you are generally pretty good at this!)

 - lack of vision in the midgame (we all make this mistake)

 - getting hit by by skill shots (same)

i feel like this was mentioned a few times already in this thread:

 - Thunder logs on. i sit out a game. You rotate up to top, Thunder supports Hunny.

 - Thunder supporting you as Thresh

The only thing that i think that does need considering... How we, as a team, are going to address inevitable loss streaks.

At the beginning of this topic, you mentioned that you feel that if people are not playing well in a particular lane (that you WOULD do well in) that they basically need to be substituted and put on some sort of "probationary" status. i agreed that if we are systematically trying something and if it has very poor win rates (<40% over 25+ games), we should probably stop doing that.

Consider then, the possibility that, for whatever reason, we tend to have a very poor win-rate using a particular strategy. We'll say something like 2-8.

What would be your proposed solution?

 - Do we automatically bench the perceived under-performer?

 - Does the support get automatic "probation immunity" and gets "dibs" substituting into whatever he feels like (if the other person can't play support? tough shit, you do now)?

 - Do we just start playing in Normals? (or, perhaps, practice the above solution in Normals)

 - Does the perceived under-performer get a brief "probation" where they go learn some new champs, then come back 2-3 weeks later?

 - Do we just keep trying the same thing, because sometimes you just get unlucky and lose despite your best efforts

Of course... Cow has the final, executive decision since it IS his team.

Yeah i've been trying. \: i am almost positive it is a driver issue.

i tried reformatting my computer entirely, but that doesn't do much.

My current options are:

 1. My shitty $8 mic that has some feedback

 2. My nice headset that only works for about 1 out of every 20 words.

There's also the problem where my bird often gets very excited around dinner time (all the pots and pans, timers buzzing, etc) and will be screaming for the next 30 minutes afterwards. Guess when i tend to play

Is your birds name Anivia? I hope it is. 

As far as people not doing well for an extended period of time goes I don't think ill be kicking any one out off the team since we have a limited number of friends and I can't exactly call up voyboy or the oddone to fill in since our team isn't well known. I do think we have a few players that are flexible and can do well in 2 or more roles (hedige:top, mid, adc; Dan: top, mid, adc; Pacov: adc, support, top; me just about anywhere). Swapping people around if they are not doing well in a particular place could be an option but I have a pretty good idea on where I think people are best at currently and would try those roles first. 

Internet is set up.  I'm at work right now so I don't know for sure but...

Nice, Thunder!  That hopefully simplifies things a bit then.  We've been going through having to put my cat down, to not having to do so, to... bleh for a bit.  That translates into me being a bit agitated.  Sorry for that.  Comments I took as catty, etc, just got me fired up all the more. 

I think there's some over analysis involved in the whole cow's team, picking roles, etc (admittedly prompted by me).  My request is simply to play other roles from time to time IN RANKED.  If that means we lose 1 game on 1 night, well then.. holy shit.  Price you are paying for having a support that is consistently available then.  I think that sounds completely reasonable, right?  So if we happened to have a game somewhere down the road where hedgie played support and I played top, well then... I think its possible to endure that.  Not looking for someone's "spot" or w/e. I will, ofc, get really fucking annoyed if the 1 game I get to play a non support role is the game everyone decides to fuck around (worth mentioning, I guess). 

My chops can certainly be busted for split push support, being all fuck relic shield thresh, support itemization - just not a fan of some of the catty shit that leans towards insult. 

Post-Game Wrap up (mostly from my perspective but going to include comments w.r.t to other people as well when applicable).

(spoiler: played pretty poorly overall, and felt like i was an overall-detriment. Though at least 2nd game was just madness so that's whatever)

Match #1: http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/1735490030/40443430?tab=overview

All of us were extremely aggressive and ended up losing out by like 50 hp. Karl missed a level 2 kill on Khazix by like 10 hp. Yasuo went really hard on Brand midlane and got him really low. Likewise... i had a poor level 2 and fell way behind from there.

In the midgame (16:00 mark) we all went and played ARAM for about 5 minutes and ended up getting a few kills + assists, despite being 6k down! That said, we all fell behind in levels, and the gold difference didn't really change despite the kills we snagged. At the 18:00 mark i was pretty much 100 CS down - pretty damn awful.

Unfortunately, we ended up just getting out-golded and slightly getting grinded out of objectives. i feel like it's hard to say exactly what could have done different because if all 3 of our level 1/2 plays WON instead of LOST, we would have probably easily won the game. (that said, i do know that Brand ended up killing Yasuo a few minutes later - but he still lost the level 1).

The one thing i do want to ask Karl specifically: please help push into the tower when i'm behind! You came once and ganked top around 8:00 but didn't quite stay long enough to push in the tower. i ended up getting teleported on while shoving and dying. Maybe i over-stayed for a few CS and if i based i would have been fine but... then i may have gotten zoned out of the creeps.

Match #2: http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/1735521370/40443430?tab=overview

This game was pretty much a slaughterhouse. i was still a little jittery and felt pretty bad about the previous game, and then i got caught by a blind laneswap and binded by Morgana into a level 1 death (can't run from the Kalista and they were BEHIND me in the bush).

Anyway, there's not much to mention from my perspective... i got slaughtered by a team that was much more well prepared to do 2v1 rotations and did the whole "double jungle and be 1v0 botlane" thing. What we COULD have learned from them is how effective it can be (with Morg, Kalista in particular...), and maybe give us some motivation for the future.

One thing that i feel was important to point out was, not only did their strategy wreck us top/bot, once they were able to get ahead, they just shoved into Ryze mid. Ryze doesn't have the waveclear/scaling that early in the game to do much against 3 people and lost towers because of it. So we should try to keep this strategy in mind when we see the opponent picking a hero with poor early game wave-clear (eg, Fizz, Akali, Ryze, so on).

Match #3: http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/1735537201/40443430?tab=overview

Didn't really want to pick Gnar into Kennen but i did it anyway... Top lane was pretty farmy. i ended up getting ahead in kills, at the cost of a little bit of CS (which makes sense: Kennen can pretty Gnar pretty hard first few levels). Started roaming with the team a lot for dragons, and such. Just like game #1, i think i spent too much time with the team and my laner got a lot of CS ahead of me. This time, at least, we were getting objectives.

Despite us doing well overall in the early game, i feel like we really crumbled in the mid-game. Not 100% sure of the reason why - i feel like all of us had good initiations and there were several times i got great 2/3 man stuns into walls.

My personal guess is a lot of the time we were doing deep "flash ult-intiates" that put us really far ahead of our backline. Even though we may have trapped in 2-3 people in a Gnar/Jarven ult, if we didn't have the DPS close enough to contribute... sad days. i know that happened one time in front of the dragon pit where people sort of ran in TWO at a time into a chokepoint of 5 (the 3rd dragon i think - Karl probably remembers).

We really had a good wombo-combo team (Annie, Jarven, Morgana, Gnar, with an Ez ult on top). i do know a few times Kennen would just go over us and wreck out backline though.

Anyway, my bad for playing mediocre/poorly and hopefully we'll have better luck in the future... Mentally i only considered us to have gone 0-2 instead of 0-3. That 2nd game hardly counts. i also probably should have sit-out the 3rd game, even if i didn't do so bad in it. The two back-to-back games of feeling pretty bad i think took away some of my confidence and i was either forcing stuff too hard to make up for it, or not going in when i should.

I think game three I should of picked a different champion. I think I could of been aggressive on lux if I was brand. I had some bad calls especially around dragon pit in the first and last game. Ill try to play better and stick to brand more often when its a match up that I can play him in. Other than that I was pretty happy with our play. Some bonehead getting caught out mistakes were made by all but it happens. 

I think that there is always some learning curve in these things.  I agree that in hindsight Morgana didn't really work, but whatever.

I'll also probably be changing out of my default jungle pattern when we end up on bot side (I think 5 out of our 6 games so far have been on bot side with only the stomp being top).  I normally like to be more red side oriented on bot side since red is always a bit more efficient in a lot of ways, and I like to favor bot ganks over top anyway.  But hunny/pacov lanes tend to push so hard early that there just isn't much for me.  Nothing wrong with bot pushing their lane, but it means there isn't much for me to do.

Game 1 was largely just unfortunate.  A lot of close plays that didn't go our way.  Me screwing up the invade was bad and meant I couldn't do the early pace that I wanted.

I generally agree that I should stay and push lanes, but there was a specific reason I left in that case.  I knew that red buff was coming up very soon since I knew the timing on it, and I knew that there Kha was covering buffs very well so I was expecting him to be around.  So I wanted to go into their jungle to either head him off to prevent him from showing up and killing you, or to steal his red.  My timing was about 5 seconds off so I couldn't do it, and I didn't account for a teleport to the side, but I don't think that it was the worst idea ever given what I knew.

Anyway, we have a lot of problems with midgame calls, especially around the dragon.  One of the games we did the classic 5v5 at dragon, then randomly attack dragon to put us at a big disadvantage.  We just need to stop doing that.

But the last game was lost in a big way at the 3rd dragon.  There was a call to go to the 3rd dragon, but we were REALLY slow in going to it because people wanted to grab farm.  Their team went right away.  Because of this we trickled in and got aced, they got dragon, then baron on same play.  That was basically game.  I really wanted a fast rotation to that dragon since that was looking like a potential win by 5 dragons game, and we have to be able to make quick rotations in ranked 5s.  But we can never seem to coordinate it because we do solo queue style rotations where people always have stuff to grab first.  So I think that needs to be cleaned up.

In hindsight, I was probably misplaying against the Kennen in the last game though.  I was basically going for the default approach of trying to get their whole team in my ult.  I was actually doing a pretty good job at that, but they were kind of overwhelming us with their damage.  I probably should have just tried to isolate Kennen to trap him alone during his ult even if he was the only person I got, then E+Q out to get on other people.

I sort of didn't stick with my mentality of dragon fights either. Dragons 2-3 need to be either taking when we wont be contested or as a collapse onto the other team as a group (not by me running in all rambo cause I have zhonyas). Ill try to make better calls on dragon fights. I am also trying to speak more but I tend to be more quiet on summoners rift than I am on twisted treeline.

replay - looks like there are replays for all the games on my op.gg pacov

https://na.op.gg/match/observer/id=1735521370

Also this= cool "We're aiming to buff a number of tanks in the jungle in patch 5.5 and/or patch 5.6"

fairly weak showing by me in our games.  Game 1 - not sure what I could have done differently honestly, game 2 - oh my gawd... my rotation to top was amazing... game 3 - smeh - some missed ops by me 1 or 2 times I had a good initiate but we weren't on the same page - overall meh play from me though. 

I'd like to somewhat immediately start playing around with the new strats, though.  Strat 1 - lane swap, jungle/top stay together for a wee bit then go to lane. strat 2 - adc/top lane swap, jung/support stay together

Practice rotations - eg - when do we flip lanes, etc.

last - warding strats early game (group together to acquire vision appropriately. 

oh and lets let karl call dragons if we can.  Nothing wrong with us saying "should we dragon" - but we need to let him decide and be VOCAL quickly w/ that decision.  This sort of thing is something hunny needs help with.  He needs very quick do or don't calls on certain things or he'll just do shit. 

I have some opinions on what you guys should keep in mind when it comes to the strat that was used against you Game 2 as far as how to counter it next time or use it yourselves.

Seemed like one of the reasons they might have tried it was that you guys had Leona Support since it limited your options to counter.  Sending a hard engage no sustain Support champ to a lost lane wasn't an option but you guys did it anyway.  I think Pacov's right, it should have been him and Hunny who both went top or they should have just stayed bot together and let Hedgie farm under his tower.

I guess scouting out their jungle to see if they were up to any shenanigans against a Morg wasn't really an option.  Don't think it's that important though.  Next game Hedgie will be ready and won't have that "Where is Rumb- Ahhhhhh!  Ahhhhhhh!  Fuuuu-" moment when he got too close to the Bush Of Doom.

Yeah, at the same time, Leona WOULD be a powerful zoning tool in a 2v1 lane as well.

Lane swaps really come down to experience.  If we do normals where we have control over top and bot lanes we might want to lane swap just to practice it even if it isn't a great idea in terms of matchups.

Well, we'd probably need to also have control of the jungle

Either that or the top laner would need to be Maokai/Sion (someone who can kill raptors level 1).

Decided to grind out some levels in Hots tonight.  back in lol world fri. 

back to the interesting mmr calculation on op.gg - take a look over here.

1st -baseline- cows ranked games are around 2k with him at diamond 5.  I'm plat 5 and my games are 1700-1800. 

http://na.op.gg/summoner/userName=krazikarl

Our ranked games last night were between 1800-1850 - so op gg has them slated as a plat IV-plat III level.  Not saying op.gg's stats are spot on btw - just interesting to me anyway.