Guide to League of Legends, part 1; Outside the game.

Intro

One on the games I have played a lot lately is League of Legends, a free to play game developed by Riot Games. It is a MOBA game played from an isometric view. In the game you control a character called a Champion. At the time of writing, the game contains 121 released Champions with one new currently on the Public Beta Environment or the PBE. It is a free to play game with a fairly fair monetary model. You have a few things to acquire for you. In addition to Champions, you have runes. Runes are minor stat boosts that all players have access to. At the start of each game during Champion Select when all players selects which Champion they are going to play, they also selects a Mastery page and a Rune page. The game has several game mode, ranging from the standard 5v5 game mode with a slower pace to a slightly faster but similar 3v3 mode all the way to a 5v5 mode where you play a random Champion that you have access to. I will going down the different parts of the game, one by one. And a note on the capitalization, I will capitalize several words throughout the article. These terms refer to specific components of the game which everyone might not have familiarity with, and are terms which I will explain in the article.

Account and Summoners

When you create your account, you get to pick you in game name, also know as you Summoner name. Your account represent your Summoner which levels up as you play games. These levels are seperate for Champion level which are earned ingame each game. Each time your account levels up, you gain 1 Mastery point and 1 Rune slot. The max level is 30 at which point you can start to play Ranked games.

Champions, Runes and Masteries

Lets continue with Champions, Runes and Masteries. This is what you set up before the game. The current roster consists of 121 Champions divided up in 6 roles, with several of the Champions having secondary role tags. The role tags are Assassin, Fighter, Mage, Marksman, Support and Tank. Each tag gives a rough idea on how the Champion work and I will explain how they generally work.

Champions

As a new player, you won't own any Champions, you have to buy them as you proceed. Don't worry though, each week 10 Champions are free to play for everyone. You can buy Champions for either Influence points, the currency you earn by playing the game, or for Riot points, which are purchased for real money. The Champions have different prices depending on a few factors, but mainly based on when the Champion was released.
Each Champion has at least 5 Abilities. One passive Ability, three basic Abilities and 1 Ultimate. The passives are varied, although some are quite alike. But even those who share common traits behave differently. There are a few "extra life" passives, each with its own mechanic. We have Anivia who turns into an egg if she gets killed and her passive isn't on cooldown. And we have our gooey hero Zac which splits into 4 blobs when he died is his passive isn't on cooldown, which then move together and reform him unless the enemy destroies the blobs before that. In addition to those, you have passives the gives the Champion a shield, extra move speed, a bleed and a whole lot more.

From left to right, passive, followed by 3 basic abilities, an Ultimate and finished with 2 summoner spells and the recall spell.

All Champions have 3 basic Abilities, and some have 4 but no Ultimate. These Abilities come in all shapes and sizes. Some are simple click on target and do damage, some are player aimed Skillshots, some are activate and get a buff and some are far more complicated. However, many of the simpler Abilities have interesting side effects.
Most Champions have an Ultimate, that being an Ability that is stronger than the basic Abilities. The Ultimates in the game are very varied. In some ways, some Ultimates might seem broken. For instance, we have the Champion Karthus whose Ultimate deals a large amount of magical damage to all enemy Champions after a short channel. This is however balanced by the fact that the channel can be interrupted, unless he is in his passive form which activates when he dies, and that the it has a long cooldown.
In addition to your Champions Abilities, you get to select 2 Summoner spells. These are chosen from a group which everyone has access to. Currently there are 13 Summoner spells in the game. There are 3 mobility related, 4 self enhancement related, 3 that targets enemies and 3 that do other things.

Lastly, you have the Recall spell. This spell is something everyone has access to, and it teleports you back to your base. It takes a couple of seconds to channel, and it gets interrupted if you take damage during the channel. This puts you on the fountain which will health you up to full health and mana.

The Recall spell

Assassins generally are good at doing just that, assassinate. This means that they tend to someway to get on to their target and kill them quickly. However, as a drawback to doing terrible terrible damage(I tip my hat at those who know the reference), they can't really take a hit. If they are caught out, they will go down very quickly.

Fighter are the group most difficult to define, and this is something Riot is having trouble with as well. Fighters are somewhere between Assassins and Tanks. They have more damage than Tanks but less than Assassins. While being able to take more damage than Assassins but less than Tanks. Fighters doesn't follow any distinct pattern. Some have a large amount of damage, some not so much. Some are range(or partly range at least), some are not. Some are very mobile, some not as much. Some do magic damage, some do physical damage. As you can see, there is a great variety to Fighters. But this also makes them difficult to nail down.

Mages are Champions that mainly deal damage through their Abilities. While some can be built to do physical damage, they mainly do magic damage. Other than that, Mages are a quite diverse group, which is shown by the diversity of secondary tags. There is at least one mage with every possible secondary tag, a trait only shared so far by, surprise surprise, the Fighters.

Marksmen are brought together by one thing, most of their damage comes from their Auto attack, generally. While a few can build to primarily do damage through their Abilities, Marksmen can all do large amounts of damage through Auto attacks. Tagging along with that damage, is an inability to take large amounts of damage. Marksmen are known for being one of the least tanky roles.

Supports aid their allies through buffs, heals and Crowd control. During season 4, Riot introduced Utility scalings, something commonly found on Supports. That being scalings that increase the utility of something. For instance, several Movespeed slows got Utility scalings which affected the rate the slow decayed or decreased in effectiveness.

Tanks are a group that is easy enough to understand, they can take a lot of damage. Tanks tend to do relatively small amounts of damage, when looked at in aggregate. This does not mean that they can do damage though as some of the Tanks are know for doing massive amounts of damage if built a certain way. But something that is universal among the Tanks is that they have some sort of Crowd control.

Runes

Runes are something that each player can acquire for Influence points, the in game currency earned through playing games. Each Rune gives a small stat bonus, which can be put into a Rune page. The Runes comes in four versions and 3 tiers. Each tier is a bit stronger than the last with tier 3 Runes being the strongest. The 4 versions are, Glyhps, Sigils, Marks and Quintesenses. Runes either gives a flat bonus or give a bonus that scales with your champions level ingame. The general consensus is that you should not spend any Influence point on Runes until your Summoner level is at least 20, as it is a that point you gain access to tier 3 runes. This also means that at that point you will have a grasp of what each stat does, and which is useful on which Champion.

Masteries

On each Summoner level, you gain one Mastery point, to spend on masteries. Mastery points are never permanently spent to be clear. You can have up to 20 different Mastery pages, in which you can have different configuration of masteries for different Champions. This is so you don't have to fix a full page each time you are starting a new game.
The Masteries are split into 3 catagories, Offence, Defence and Utility. The Offence tree contains things that boost you offensive capabilities or are triggered by offensive actions. The last one you can get in the Offence tree is Havoc, which gives you 3% increased damage. This counts for abilities and auto-attacks. The Defence tree helps you to survive, either through giving you more health, more resistances, more health regeneration or through strait up damage reduction. The final Mastery in the Defence tree is Tenacious, which reduces Crowd control on you by 15%. The final tree is Utility. This one gives you a bit of everything not included in the other trees. It have masteries that increases your Mana regeneration, gold generation or as the final mastery in the tree, Wanderer does, movement speed. Wanderer gives you 5% increased movement speed outside of combat.

I will continue with the guide soon, at that point going more into the ingame aspects. And as always, comments at welcome and have a good day.

Update - Lets resurrect this thing.

Right, this thing died hard. My last attempt to revive this thing failed horribly. I think I failed last time because I couldn't find anything to write about. This time I won't be as picky and I will not care too much about the length of the articles.

I'm planning on getting into a schedule where at least one or two articles are posted every month. The more responce I get, the more effort I will put into this. As I'm starting to make my own games, I might have beta or alpha test for readers. And if someone wants me to cover something, contact me.

I will post on twitter when I post a new article. You can follow me @RaiganAvalon

A personal word on combat and difficulty, part 2

Bullet sponges, what can I say about them other than that they are the worst thing ever invented.

The big problem with bullet sponges is that they arn't any more difficult then enemies with less health. If you can defeat the enemy when it has less health without taking damage, you can take the same enemy regardless of how much health it has. This make scaling difficulty by increasing health pointless as as you get better, the enemies just gets annoying, not difficult.

This is not how you do good difficulty. You should make the enemies more intelligent. Sadly, I have yet to see a game that did this. Though I have some ideas about how it could be done. If you compare how the enemies in Assassin's Creed and the enemies in God Hand act, you can see that in Assassin's Creed, the enemies wait a lot more for their allies to finish their attacks before attacking themselfs. While in God Hand, they just attack you if they see an opening. In games where you fight a lot of enemies, you could scale the enemies aggresivness instead of their attack pattern. While each individual enemy wouldn't be any more difficult to defeat, groups would be a lot harder.

This became a shorter part, didn't have much to say this time and I wanted to get another post out. Sorry for that.

A personal word on combat and difficulty, part 1

So I recently stopped playing the reboot of Tomb Raider. It wasn't because of the story was bad, I actually liked it a lot. However, for as much as I liked the story, I couldn't continue playing as the combat system is in my opinion broke. To make it clear, I played the game on the PC with a keyboard on the hardest difficulty.

Now, what do I mean when I say that I feel that the games combat system is broken? This is because of a number of factors. One of these is how the cover system works. I like the idea of not pressing a button and gluing yourself to a piece of cover. This is however a mechanic that needs to be implemented with care as if you are not careful you can end up with a cover system that doesn't work to the extent that is needed if the combat system is centered around the use of the cover system. Now the cover system in Tomb Raider isn't that bad, but it could have been better. I have had several time when I have wanted to get behind cover, but as I rush over to it, Lara jumps over the chest high wall and out into the line of fire of every single enemy in the area. This, I feel is becuase the controlls are poorly optimized. However, this alone would not make me feel that the games combat system is bad enough to stop playing the game.

What made me stop playing was when I had to fight two different enemies that require two completely different playstyles. A number of enemies fighting with automatic rifles that shredds your health in a couple of seconds if you are out of cover and a melee enemy that requires you to dodge his attacks to be able to damage him, this is because he has bullet proof shield that you can bypass for a few seconds after he attacks. Might be worth mentioning that the enemy that is melee, kills you in two to three attacks and causes flinch when he hits you. So you end up in a situation where you have to stay in cover not to be killed while you have to dodge out of cover and run around in order to not get killed. This is what made me turn of the game and uninstall it.

This cuased me to think about combat systems in games and how I see difficulty in a game. As a result I will be posting a series on how I view combat and difficulty in video games. Join the discusion down in the comment section, I'd love to hear you you ever have had any experiences like the one I had that cause you to just stop playing a game.

Introduction

Welcome to House Avalon.

Here I and any contributors that joins me down the line will be primarily review video games, talk about up coming games and host game play videos. What is the difference between me and everyone else who does video game review, you ask. Well, to be honest, not that much. I will be striving to be as objective as possible with a focus on making sure that when it is my opinion, that I state it clearly.

I will be posting game play videos of games I play that I like. These will be coming out when I have something to talk about, so they might be a bit inconsistent. However, I will still be trying to post something 2-3 times a week.

Apart from the video game related content, I will be posting other stuff. This could be about anything I feel like taking about, be it politics, religion or what ever else that crosses my mind, for instance, food.

While I will not be censoring the comment section, I will not be tolerate threats and the like. I hope the comments will be a place for discussion of the content.

With that said, I welcome you to House Avalon.