I'm going to get right into this without any kind of intro.
SUPPORT TO OWN NUMBER ONE: Sona
What is the role of a support like Sona? Well, all it takes is a look at her skills to figure out that she's a teamfighting beast, as long as she can stay alive. Her ultimate is one of the most powerful abilities in the game. A well-landed Sona ultimate in a teamfight can disable three to five champions, or hit one critical bruiser or assassin as they dive your back line. Either use of the ultimate can be backbreaking to an opposing team's goals. Her other abilities also function as excellent teamfight tools, giving the ability to spread damage boosts, shields, and movement speed to all of her teammates. These powerful actives, combined with the ability to use her passive Power Chords to do things like destroy one champion's damage output or movement speed, make Sona a very powerful teamfighter.
Sona is also a strong champion outside of teamfights. Her E Power Chord can set up picks on over-extended farmers, particularly those who don't have some kind of gap creator. A Q+Power Chord can take a significant chunk of health or finish off a fleeing squishy target. W+Power Chord is excellent at turning soul-crushing tower dives into soul-crushing double kills on the enemy team. Sona's laning phase can potentially be one of the strongest in the game, with the ability to poke and sustain extremely well pre-6 while having one of the best level 6 all-ins among supports. Most supports are only really strong at one of the 3 main axes of supporting (Poke, Sustain, All-In) but Sona can be incredible at all 3 with proper use of cooldowns, conservation of mana, and a willingness to protect the flank from jungler ganks.
Sona's biggest weakness is her squishiness and relatively low amount of peel in both early laning and lategame fights. While W power chord is a strong damage reducer and ult can be enough CC to finish off a diver before they can kill your carry, both are very reactive in these capacities and if your ultimate is on cooldown and you don't have a power chord ready (or, god forbid, accidentally don't let the song animation switch before you shoot off the autoattack and end up using Q or E chord) you are basically useless except for providing a relatively small heal and shield. Your peel tools are not as frequently available or as powerful as the tools of a champion like Leona, Thresh, Nami, Alistar, or Janna, all popular supports with powerful CC on non-ultimate cooldowns.
Playing Sona in lane is all about tempered aggression. Your pre-6 poke is amongst the strongest in the game, and no support except Karma can match your level of sustained raw damage. Q has 850 range on its damaging active, which means that you can reliably hit both enemy champions for 60-70 damage on cooldown at level 3. Sona's autoattack range is 550, which puts her on the same tier as a majority of ADCs, so it's pretty easy to walk up and trade an auto-attack for the extra on-hit damage after you cast each Q. Every third spell cast you can top that damage off with even more damage in the form of a Q power chord, which adds 30-something damage to each autoattack from level 3 onwards. This multitude of damage sources, plus the bonus damage added by Spellthief's Edge, means that Sona is a defining lane bully. And unlike other lane bully supports like Karma, Annie, and Zilean, Sona offers a ridiculous amount of sustain with her W. The base heal value to mana cost ratio on W isn't amazing, but the additional small shield it grants is nice for shrugging off things like reciprocal minion damage attracted from all the autoattacking you'll be doing. A Sona lane can outpressure and outlast basically any other support lane in the game, as long as you avoid major fights that bring you dangerously low.
And that's where the "tempered" part comes in, because with her relatively simple and extremely powerful kit Sona is actually a pretty vulnerable champion. She has the fifth lowest starting HP in the game, similar to other squishy supports like Janna, Zyra, and Nami, but lacks the CC tools that those champions have available to them from level 1. Her ability to disengage and peel for a carry is abysmal at extremely low levels, where she might not even have all three skills leveled to get faster power chords. Positioning is of the utmost importance, because a good all-in by the enemy support can result in a very fast double kill. Even more dangerous is a CC-heavy jungle gank, and something like a landed Lee Sin Q pretty much demands an instant flash unless the Sona player feels like dying. Constant awareness of the enemy support's positioning and good warding in early laning are even more important than usual.
Sona is an extremely vulnerable blind pick as a support. Leona is a hard counter to Sona and a good Sona player will have to be extremely aggressive at level 1 to preemptively relieve the constant pressure a Leona can lay down after she has reached level 2. Thresh offers similar threat levels as Leona, and can actually trade autos somewhat equitably because of his Flay's passive, but the fact that his engage skill is easier to dodge than Leona's makes him slightly less difficult for Sona to deal with. Blitzcrank is a potentially disastrous lane opponent if you or your carry get hooked even once in the early levels. Against all of these lanes, your best bet is to play more safely and abuse creeps/range to avoid the enemy's engage tools. Support Fiddlesticks can provide problems with his long-ranged harass and diverse CC tools. I haven't played against too many Fiddlesticks supports recently but my guess would be that you want to space away from your carry more than usual to try and mitigate crow bounces. Ask for ganks on the Fiddlesticks lane and you will probably get kills, especially if you take a point in E at level 4 for a slow chord.
On the other hand, Sona is extremely good as a counterpick support. Alistar is a fairly easy lane to deal with because he can be poked down extremely hard pre-six. While it's easy to think of Alistar as a tanky monster because of his ultimate and high base HP and HP growth, he doesn't have any strong tools to mitigate early damage and his heal costs quite a lot of mana for the low amount of health it returns. If Alistar all-ins with his combo, it can be terrifying, but if Sona and the carry are aggressive in returning damage while Alistar walks back to safety it typically will represent a won trade for the Sona player. Janna and Lulu are also very strong matchups for Sona, since both rely on their ability to defuse hard engages to win lanes. Since the Sona lane doesn't plan on making hard engages and instead looks for constant pressure, Janna and Lulu have a difficult time making their mana bars more helpful than Sona's. Janna in particular can be bullied aggressively, because her auto attack range is 75 lower than Sona's and her ability to poke with skills is non-existent. A well-played Sona should be sending the Janna lane back to base early and often. Lulu is slightly more resilient because if played well her poke can match our outdo Sona's but if the Sona is being efficient with her cooldowns and mana she can outshield and outsustain the Lulu. I think Braum might have difficulty dealing with Sona due to his lack of sustain and minimal hard engage tools, but I haven't played the matchup enough to say this authoritatively.
These are the basics on playing Sona as well as understanding her strong and weak matchups. I'm obviously omitting a lot of things about teamfighting in making this guide, and it's with good reason. Teamfighting changes so dramatically at every Elo and in every game that it's tough to say what would be the overall best approach beyond obvious things like "land big ultimates" or "try and give your strong auras to everyone while also surviving" or "W power chord the assassins, E power chord the fleeing champions, Q power chord the squishies if everything else is dealt with." If I was to give a basic quick and easy version of how to use Ult I'd say this: if your team is winning, or at least if you have a strong frontline tank or two, you can initiate fights with Flash-Ult. If your team doesn't have much in the way of a strong frontline, save ult to peel for your hopefully strong carries. This kinda goes out the window if you're up against champions who are very hard to land ultimate on like Fizz or Zed or even Vladimir. Just don't die with your ultimate on cooldown, whatever you do. Even a one person ultimate can turn a lost fight into a win, so if you get engaged on and are 100% going to die fire the ult off to the best of your abilities and hope it turns the tides.
For runes and masteries, I personally run AP Quints, Hybrid Pen Reds, and Armor Yellows every single game that I play Sona. I have two different options for blues, one page with 5% flat CDR and the rest scaling MR, the other with full flat MR. The flat MR page is for dealing with supports that represent lots of magic damage, the Karmas and Morganas of the world, or if the support is a minor magic damage threat but her carry is a magic damage champion like Corki, Kog'Maw, or Ezreal. The other page gives you 10% CDR from level 1 with a typical 0/9/21 support mastery page.
With a finished support item (always start Dagger for the harass, occasionally swap to Talisman after laning) you get to 15/20% CDR around midgame, and the next 20% CDR will basically always come from Mikael's Crucible and Locket of the Iron Solari. In games where Locket isn't necessarily the best use of gold you might get the last 10% from something like Twin Shadows, Ardent Censer, or if you are getting particularly spicy and have a lot of gold, Iceborn Gauntlet. There's a strong temptation to buy a Sheen and later a Lich Bane on Sona because of the synergy with her kit, but the 1200 gold for Sheen is a pretty tough sell early on when Sightstone, T2 Boots, Frostfang, and Chalice are so much more important for the early- and mid-game. Lich Bane is even worse as a buy, because the nerfs made earlier this year made having a lot of AP a pre-requisite for Lich Bane to represent a considerable amount of damage above Sheen, and your build should never have enough AP to make the extra 1800 gold investment worthwhile. You pretty much always want Mikael's Crucible for the cleanse active. If the enemy team is something like Yi jungle, Zed mid, and Akali top, feel free to skip it and buy your stupid Tear of the Goddess that won't be useful for 25 minutes, or an Athene's for style points and the smug joy in knowing that your Pentakill was funded by the insane bonus mana regen passive and your enemies decision to lose the game on champ select.
So to sum up, I specifically think that Sona right now is a really really strong counterpick in solo queue. You can be an immense lane bully on Janna, arguably the strongest support in the game, and as long as you're not picking into Leona or Thresh you're probably a favorite to win a given lane. Those two are the most popular supports in the game, though, so picking Sona early is extremely risky and unless you have a lot of experience in those matchups I'd bench Sona as a blind pick in solo queue.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
The Relatively Fresh Level 30's Guide to League of Legends: Intro, Runes and Masteries, Buying Items, etc
Getting to level 30 in League of Legends takes a whole lot of games. Bot games, normals, ARAMs, whatever your mode of choice, it's a pretty time-consuming process to go from 1-30 without the benefit of XP Boosts. You might think that when you hit level 30 after all those hours of gaming that you know the game pretty well. After all, you've probably played a wide variety of champs, looked up guides online, watched streams, tried different roles, and gotten into at least one argument on champ select about how your team needs a tank. The problem is that unless you're a really fast learner you will place, at best, around an "average" ranked LoL player in low Silver. And that wouldn't even be something to be ashamed of! There are hundreds of thousands of dedicated LoL players who never make it out of Bronze. Probably millions, honestly.
Why are millions of League players so terrible at the game, despite spending hundreds of hours playing before they even first enter ranked? How can something like SaltyTeemo, the land of the Runaan's Hurricane Sejuani, exist? Part of it is that a lot of people don't actually care about winning. They want to have fun in their own way, and maybe have accepted that they lose more often than they win when they play in that fashion. They like the idea of only buying sword items on Yi, or they think the minigame aspect of Tear of the Goddess is so much fun that they even build Muramana on Caitlyn. Other bad players just have terrible attitudes towards their fellow summoners, and are quick to give up on games, rage at their teammates, and are generally making their games harder simply by having low morale and feeding into their team's demise. But the majority of bad players are bad because they haven't spent time really thinking about the game on any meaningful level. The point of this series is to provide guidance for relatively adolescent players to think about things on their own, with a bit of a nudge in the right direction.
My IGN is Daunte Vicknabb, and I am currently Plat 4, though I think I could probably be nearing Diamond right now if I didn't take multiple 1 month breaks from playing ranked this season. I mainly play support and jungle, though I have a few midlaners that I am pretty good at and can ADC or top in a pinch.
I want to talk really quickly about runes, because they are extremely important but also extremely simple to get "basically right." You really only should need 2 rune pages to mostly get by: a page with AP, and a page with AD. What this entails is usually a set of Armor or HP Yellows and a set of Flat/Scaling MR blues (I like a mix, if I'm not going to have dedicated pages with 9 of each), plus Reds and Quints to flavor. The AD page should probably just have flat AD reds and quints at this point, and the AP page should have flat AP quints and hybrid pen reds (though MPen Reds are good enough and cost substantially less IP, if this is a big concern). When you've gotten to level 20 and are moving on towards 30, it's extremely advisable to start buying the runes as you go along so that the task doesn't seem as monumental when you're about to hit the grand stage.
Masteries are actually a much tougher thing to properly set up, because they can be changed as you learn more about the makeup of the game. While you can again "get by" with somewhat generic pages, different champions within a role will sometimes value different masteries, even in a role as generally homogeneous as ADC. A Sivir or Lucian player will probably value the "weaving" masteries more highly than a Caitlyn or Tristana would. The first thing I'd recommend doing is looking at the mastery trees for a good ten to fifteen minutes, making note of which masteries are in which parts of their respective trees. How many points does it take to pick up the "biscuit" mastery in Utility, and what are some of the things you might invest in to get there? What combinations of masteries are impossible, and which masteries require you to make big sacrifices in other parts of the tree? When you get a hang of where the masteries are, try setting up pages for yourself in under a minute. Create a situation, like "I am playing Warwick jungle" and figure out what you think works best, then try cross-checking it against a website like probuilds or a well-written higher Elo player's guide on Solomid or Lolking.
As you improve at the game and are better able to recognize certain characteristics, these situations will become more complex: "I am playing Nasus top against a team with 3 magic damage threats, including a heavy amount of slows and AoE magic damage." Now you might be more willing to invest points into the +MR masteries, and the slow reduction mastery. Maybe on Mundo you would want to invest in the Perseverance/Second Wind masteries but on Darius you'd find those points a waste and be better served maxing out on Armor and Legendary Guardian. These little differences in your mastery pages don't always make an observable difference, but the difference is definitely there, and a good mastery page can add hidden gold that a carelessly made page would miss out on. In a game where saying "I could only buy one potion on my back" often means you are about to get snowballed on in a big way, every bit of gold matters.
Item builds are similar to masteries, in that you will want to have a good idea of the types of items you should be buying on a character but will also want to be flexible as things develop. Learn the basic items first: daggers and bows, tomes and wands and rods, swords and axes and swords, etc. Once you know those, think about how they combine to make the bigger, better items that will define your power spikes throughout a game. A Dagger and a Brawler's Gloves are a pretty innocuous pairing, but a Zeal represents a fairly considerable spike in power stemming from the stat gains and the tacked on movement speed buff. Having some Long Swords floating in your inventory is pretty much always a solid option on an AD based champion, but combining those into a Brutalizer might tend towards one play style where building a Cutlass might indicate something else. After you generally know what items make what, and what items do what, you can think about why some items might be situationally superior to others even though in the abstract they are worse.
Take the big mana items for AP mid laners: Rod of Ages, Archangel's Staff, Athene's Unholy Grail, and Morellonomicon. RoA offers tankiness and incredible raw stats but needs time to grow. Archangel's offers the most raw damage and an insanely powerful active effect but takes even longer to grow than RoA and offers no defensive benefits until it is fully charged. Athene's offers resistance against your lane opponent's damaging spells, excellent cooldown reduction, and excellent sustenance in lane, but has less AP than the alternatives. Finally there is Morellonomicon, which is not great as a mana item and confers the least defensive value of the bunch, but has a cheap cost, solid AP, and an occasionally dynamite passive ability.
Which of these items you elect to build is entirely conditioned around who you're playing as and what you're going up against and experiencing as the game develops. Sometimes the Morellonomicon passive is more appealing than the slight tankiness afforded by an Athene's. Sometimes you will want to be tanky initiator Annie with a Rod of Ages, and sometimes you will want to be bursty Annie and skip a mana item entirely so that you can rush a DFG. Sometimes you will have a long game and a flow of blue buffs, and Archangels will be a completely legitimate rush on Orianna, while other Orianna games will dictate a need for Athene's to allow aggressive farming both in lane and in the jungle. If you fall into the trap of always buying Tear first on Orianna you will have a number of games where you spend ten to fifteen minutes wondering why your Q-W combo doesn't kill the caster minions. But if you decide that you will never buy Tear on Orianna you might be passing up on an extremely valuable active against a burst heavy composition featuring champions like Riven and Rengar. This also applies to choosing what tanky items to buy, or which Zeal item to buy on an ADC.
I guess the takeaway from this first post should be "think flexibly". When I watch people who are not very good at the game, I notice that they almost always play in a very restricted fashion that doesn't allow for creativity or adaptive play. I'll talk more about the adaptive elements of individual champions in the support role tomorrow (hopefully).
Why are millions of League players so terrible at the game, despite spending hundreds of hours playing before they even first enter ranked? How can something like SaltyTeemo, the land of the Runaan's Hurricane Sejuani, exist? Part of it is that a lot of people don't actually care about winning. They want to have fun in their own way, and maybe have accepted that they lose more often than they win when they play in that fashion. They like the idea of only buying sword items on Yi, or they think the minigame aspect of Tear of the Goddess is so much fun that they even build Muramana on Caitlyn. Other bad players just have terrible attitudes towards their fellow summoners, and are quick to give up on games, rage at their teammates, and are generally making their games harder simply by having low morale and feeding into their team's demise. But the majority of bad players are bad because they haven't spent time really thinking about the game on any meaningful level. The point of this series is to provide guidance for relatively adolescent players to think about things on their own, with a bit of a nudge in the right direction.
My IGN is Daunte Vicknabb, and I am currently Plat 4, though I think I could probably be nearing Diamond right now if I didn't take multiple 1 month breaks from playing ranked this season. I mainly play support and jungle, though I have a few midlaners that I am pretty good at and can ADC or top in a pinch.
I want to talk really quickly about runes, because they are extremely important but also extremely simple to get "basically right." You really only should need 2 rune pages to mostly get by: a page with AP, and a page with AD. What this entails is usually a set of Armor or HP Yellows and a set of Flat/Scaling MR blues (I like a mix, if I'm not going to have dedicated pages with 9 of each), plus Reds and Quints to flavor. The AD page should probably just have flat AD reds and quints at this point, and the AP page should have flat AP quints and hybrid pen reds (though MPen Reds are good enough and cost substantially less IP, if this is a big concern). When you've gotten to level 20 and are moving on towards 30, it's extremely advisable to start buying the runes as you go along so that the task doesn't seem as monumental when you're about to hit the grand stage.
Masteries are actually a much tougher thing to properly set up, because they can be changed as you learn more about the makeup of the game. While you can again "get by" with somewhat generic pages, different champions within a role will sometimes value different masteries, even in a role as generally homogeneous as ADC. A Sivir or Lucian player will probably value the "weaving" masteries more highly than a Caitlyn or Tristana would. The first thing I'd recommend doing is looking at the mastery trees for a good ten to fifteen minutes, making note of which masteries are in which parts of their respective trees. How many points does it take to pick up the "biscuit" mastery in Utility, and what are some of the things you might invest in to get there? What combinations of masteries are impossible, and which masteries require you to make big sacrifices in other parts of the tree? When you get a hang of where the masteries are, try setting up pages for yourself in under a minute. Create a situation, like "I am playing Warwick jungle" and figure out what you think works best, then try cross-checking it against a website like probuilds or a well-written higher Elo player's guide on Solomid or Lolking.
As you improve at the game and are better able to recognize certain characteristics, these situations will become more complex: "I am playing Nasus top against a team with 3 magic damage threats, including a heavy amount of slows and AoE magic damage." Now you might be more willing to invest points into the +MR masteries, and the slow reduction mastery. Maybe on Mundo you would want to invest in the Perseverance/Second Wind masteries but on Darius you'd find those points a waste and be better served maxing out on Armor and Legendary Guardian. These little differences in your mastery pages don't always make an observable difference, but the difference is definitely there, and a good mastery page can add hidden gold that a carelessly made page would miss out on. In a game where saying "I could only buy one potion on my back" often means you are about to get snowballed on in a big way, every bit of gold matters.
Item builds are similar to masteries, in that you will want to have a good idea of the types of items you should be buying on a character but will also want to be flexible as things develop. Learn the basic items first: daggers and bows, tomes and wands and rods, swords and axes and swords, etc. Once you know those, think about how they combine to make the bigger, better items that will define your power spikes throughout a game. A Dagger and a Brawler's Gloves are a pretty innocuous pairing, but a Zeal represents a fairly considerable spike in power stemming from the stat gains and the tacked on movement speed buff. Having some Long Swords floating in your inventory is pretty much always a solid option on an AD based champion, but combining those into a Brutalizer might tend towards one play style where building a Cutlass might indicate something else. After you generally know what items make what, and what items do what, you can think about why some items might be situationally superior to others even though in the abstract they are worse.
Take the big mana items for AP mid laners: Rod of Ages, Archangel's Staff, Athene's Unholy Grail, and Morellonomicon. RoA offers tankiness and incredible raw stats but needs time to grow. Archangel's offers the most raw damage and an insanely powerful active effect but takes even longer to grow than RoA and offers no defensive benefits until it is fully charged. Athene's offers resistance against your lane opponent's damaging spells, excellent cooldown reduction, and excellent sustenance in lane, but has less AP than the alternatives. Finally there is Morellonomicon, which is not great as a mana item and confers the least defensive value of the bunch, but has a cheap cost, solid AP, and an occasionally dynamite passive ability.
Which of these items you elect to build is entirely conditioned around who you're playing as and what you're going up against and experiencing as the game develops. Sometimes the Morellonomicon passive is more appealing than the slight tankiness afforded by an Athene's. Sometimes you will want to be tanky initiator Annie with a Rod of Ages, and sometimes you will want to be bursty Annie and skip a mana item entirely so that you can rush a DFG. Sometimes you will have a long game and a flow of blue buffs, and Archangels will be a completely legitimate rush on Orianna, while other Orianna games will dictate a need for Athene's to allow aggressive farming both in lane and in the jungle. If you fall into the trap of always buying Tear first on Orianna you will have a number of games where you spend ten to fifteen minutes wondering why your Q-W combo doesn't kill the caster minions. But if you decide that you will never buy Tear on Orianna you might be passing up on an extremely valuable active against a burst heavy composition featuring champions like Riven and Rengar. This also applies to choosing what tanky items to buy, or which Zeal item to buy on an ADC.
I guess the takeaway from this first post should be "think flexibly". When I watch people who are not very good at the game, I notice that they almost always play in a very restricted fashion that doesn't allow for creativity or adaptive play. I'll talk more about the adaptive elements of individual champions in the support role tomorrow (hopefully).
Friday, June 20, 2014
Mission Statement
The goal of this blog is for it to be something I actually want to write, first and foremost. I felt encumbered trying to write on my old blog because I didn't think I could write now like I wrote then, when I was younger and perhaps more easily stirred to be loud and vulgar and describe beers as having the odor of dead rats. Which is not to say that I am not still loud, vulgar, and eager to describe beers as having the odor of rotting lettuce from someone's vegetable crisper last opened during the Bush administration. It's just that I don't necessarily want to write like that as much anymore, except when I really feel that it's critical to the topic at hand.
The title of this blog, "Useful Stuff About Useless Stuff" came from an idea I had to write a guide on playing Ruzzle. I'll probably do that shortly, with picture examples to illustrate the ways you can easily improve at the game. And that's like, the definition of useless. It's a cell phone word puzzle game. Yet at the same time, anyone who plays Ruzzle, or any game like Ruzzle, still likes winning and getting lots of points and getting big words, so it's kinda helpful to know more about it. I think that it's something I'd have fun talking about and thinking about on my own, so there's no point to not actually writing it down and making it public.
Beer is kinda the same thing. It doesn't really matter if I think a beer is the greatest thing on earth or the worst thing since Foster's, but I feel compelled to discuss it so I might as well do it through writing. I will probably talk about more general beer stuff and less about specific beers, but I'll leave that for when I actually write stuff. Movies, games, music, these things are all not ACTUALLY useless (when you think about it, pretty much nothing is useless since all of our experiences shape our future experiences in some form or fashion) but they're "useless" so there you have it.
What I'm saying is, enjoy the "useless" because without it living would be useless.
The title of this blog, "Useful Stuff About Useless Stuff" came from an idea I had to write a guide on playing Ruzzle. I'll probably do that shortly, with picture examples to illustrate the ways you can easily improve at the game. And that's like, the definition of useless. It's a cell phone word puzzle game. Yet at the same time, anyone who plays Ruzzle, or any game like Ruzzle, still likes winning and getting lots of points and getting big words, so it's kinda helpful to know more about it. I think that it's something I'd have fun talking about and thinking about on my own, so there's no point to not actually writing it down and making it public.
Beer is kinda the same thing. It doesn't really matter if I think a beer is the greatest thing on earth or the worst thing since Foster's, but I feel compelled to discuss it so I might as well do it through writing. I will probably talk about more general beer stuff and less about specific beers, but I'll leave that for when I actually write stuff. Movies, games, music, these things are all not ACTUALLY useless (when you think about it, pretty much nothing is useless since all of our experiences shape our future experiences in some form or fashion) but they're "useless" so there you have it.
What I'm saying is, enjoy the "useless" because without it living would be useless.
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