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.