pacov

So, continued discussion re: my thoughts on earning your rank/elo - with a focus on duo queuing. 

my entire ranked history in a paragraph

Duo'd up to gold in season 2 - I played about 10 games with brad wong.  We hit gold in 10 games.  I played 3-5 more games all season.  That's about it.  Season 3 - I tank my placement matches carelessly and end up bronze 1.  Season 3 - I duo here and there, but primarily play solo queue and hit plat IV.  Season 4 - I go 5/5 in my placements, get kicked down to silver 1 from plat IV.  Disgusted, I take a break and now and am back fairly actively climbing in rank (gold 5 promos to gold IV or gold III atm).

Season 2

So, that duo queue in season 2 I mentioned - that was absolute crap in my mind.  It did little more than get me and my bud some some season rewards.  I worked well enough to hit gold in 10 games with my duo queue and I vaguely recollect like 1-2 difficult games in all of my ranked games that season.  I personally think less of myself and also of others that duo queue their way up in rank.  I'm not even remotely proud of my gold standing in season 2 because I really don't feel like I worked for it or earned it. Getting a reward after so little work was a joke in my mind.

I have 2 thoughts here:  1 - I don't think much of folks being proud of their duo queue rank in general (I'm sure there are some exceptions, ofc) and 2 - I am in no way impressed by people playing a few games and getting a high rating.  I believe its how you do consistently that shows the caliber of you as a player - not that you could play some games, place in gold, then over time be revealed to be smeh.  I respect players that work to get their elo and put their time in. 

Season 3

That said, season 3 - I feel like I earned plat IV. I'm confident I could have gone higher than that, but I lost a bit of steam when I hit my goal of plat and only started to get back into things near the end of the season.  To be fair, I'm not really sure how far I could have gotten, but more than plat IV I'd say. 

Anyway, season 3 felt like a huge accomplishment because I didn't get as far as I did by duo queuing (eg I earned what I got).  Sure, I played a duo queue game here and there, but they were few and far between my solo games.  And I wanted it that way - not because the people I could queue with would hold me back, ofc, but because it meant more to do it myself because, again, I feel like its more of an accomplishment. 

Season 4

Man - f ranked placements matches.  I end season 3 at plat IV.  I play my placements matches - 3 of those games are losses due to afk dc'd people.  1 loss due to an outright troll intentionally feeding.  So, I go 5/5 (with 4 games that can't be won really) and place in silver 1.  Kind of disgusting imo.  And that disgust kept me from playing much ranked for a bit.  That said, eventually I snapped out of it and got back to work.  I feel like I'm good enough to hit plat again without issue.  I continued to find the hardest elo to be at as silver for whatever reason.  In season 3, it was a pain to go from silver to gold and relatively easy to go from gold to plat for me.  We'll see if that trend continues.  Currently, I don't really care with regards to myself if I duo or solo because I kind of think this elo is a bit of a joke and I don't really encounter that many highly skilled people.  I will probably stop duoing after a bit and will likely try to climb solo when I hit plat again.  Kind of a personal challenge for me. 

other jibba jabba

Regarding why I found silver to be the most difficult - I think karl actually had some pretty good insight regarding this and it plays out.  You can't do some things in silver that you can at other elos.  For instance, back prior to the feral flare nerf, udyr was a nightmare if he was able to farm up a feral flare to the 11 min marker (he's still ok after the nerf, but nowhere near as good).  Now, if you do this sort of thing, you are really counting on your teammates to hold off and keep their lanes in ok shape with no jungle support for about 7 extra minutes (compared to when you'd normally start getting ganks). It's actually really unreasonable to assume your team can do that going into a game as there are really, really good odds the other team will have the jungler ganking lanes during that time.  Anyway, at lower elo's, you are better off going with the meta in my experience.  Even a split pushing, heavy ganking shaco can be a problem because the team generally needs a strong initiator so they clearly know when a fight is on.  At higher elos, you see to need less of that and individual players can shine more. 

Worth looking at to get the idea - item changes on pbe:  http://imgur.com/Vl9c0QJ

Anyone else in our little crew actively putting time into solo/duo queue ranked?  Curious pacov

Personally, I think you are over simplifying things way too much.  That said, I'll put this question out before anything else - someone mentioned that TP is being targeted for a nerf soon.  If so, what is the nerf?  I don't remember reading about this.

Anyway, I'm fine with simplifying the discussion by saying that its generally better in a team setting (premade) to run TP for all the reasons you and I can likely think of.  In solo queue, I can think of plenty of reasons to take ignite on various champs in top lane over tp.  BUT - in an optimal setting (best players/best team), TP is obviously a more efficient and useful spell. 

In the example of the top in my premade, I don't think he uses tp optimally and has trouble adjusting to not having ignite in his kit. 

Just checking in!  Still without internet for most of the month!  Hope all is well for everybody!

#TP:

Your top laner was also playing Renekton. Renekton is one of those champs who actually does makes sense to take ignite because that's the only way he is going to be able to do his job. Even then, there are games where higher Elo players will take TP.

(also Bryff takes like pure scaling runes and so it makes zero sense for him to take ignite zzz).

And even in high kill-potential lanes, people are taking TP. TP is partially the reason stuff like Kass top works.

But yeah, Ignite "can" help you win a lane and snowball it. TP "always" allows you to draw a lane and farm it out.

summary of the night.

1 ranked game - was gold V.  promoted to gold III.  So, I'm pretty happy about that. Any skipping means less work and less time i have to put into getting back to plat.  So - good news for me there.

Played some norms with karl.  Had fun with that at any rate.

Played 1 more ranked game - this time solo queue.  Annoyed with my support, but I did my job and we won the game without too much effort (would have been a ton easier with a normal support imo (the twitch adc on the other team was crap).  Got 27 lp for the win.  I'm not super expecting to get bumped from gold III to gold I, but we'll see.  If I go on a streak, its probable I'd think.  I'm on a 70-80% win rate setup my last 10 ranked games at any rate.

Anyway, hopefully we'll get into more ranked 5's soon.  Was nice when everything magically aligned yesterday and we had 5 of us on at the same time. 

VOD of the exhibition match from today on the updated SR

Oppression is extremely crazy powerful. It's one of the most underrated mastery points in the game.

For a single point, you basically gain 3 un-pentratable Armor and MR + another 3 Arm/MR for every 100 Arm/MR you have. In addition, it's a massive mitigation when it comes to jungling (because of Red buff and the fact many junglers have spammable AoE slows in their kit).

Technically, it's slightly better than the 3% flat HP gained, espiecially once you factor in the plentiful sources of % hp damage. But, 3% hp is always "on" and also blocks true damage. So, it's a better 9th point. But Oppression is the best 10th point in the mastery tree until you get to the 2nd to last tier.

Got into 2 solo queue ranked games last night.  Game 1 I had to fill and went jungle... which would have been a bit more fine if every lane wasn't getting wrecked.  I got a bit flustered when the team started pinging for help in all lanes at the same time early... anyway, definitely not my best game and certainly not much fun.  Loss there.  Played a second game as lucian and won pretty easily.  My mechanics were way off for last hitting, sadly, but not so much that it cost us laning.  My team was a little bit hurr durr, but I managed to get the team to close out the game when we should.  

I really enjoyed that game. We had this crazy miracle moment at one point as well.  My team (including me a bit) makes a mistake and decides to steal the enemy blue buff instead of taking an uncontested dragon (either blue or dragon were going to be free, not both).  Anyway, we have to break off dragon and the enemy team gets it after a wee bit (most of us were low from the previous push/team battle).  Anyway, on the previous push, we got the enemy team's inhib tower down mid.  Only wukong and I are alive or in the area (folks were either dumb or dead).  I immediately decide to push down mid while I know the enemy team is at baron.  I assume baron will be a lost cause and I'm 100% confident I have enough time to get their inhib.  Well, wukong goes for baron and dances a bit with the enemy team right about the time that the enemy team sees me wailing on their base... which splits their attention.  Wu gets a beast smite off and steals baron.  I get the inhib.  Could not have gone better. 

I think I made the right call there, though it might be a smidge questionable.  My thought was - I can get an inhib for sure.  Baron = slim chances that 2 of us can stop a baron and that one or both of us might get picked off if we try to defend/steal.... which will very likely result in the enemy team hard pushing a lane and getting towers, etc.  If I take an inhib and leave safely (I knew I'd have plenty of time to get out after clearing the inhib based on their estimated dmg output on baron), they will have to send at least 1 to base to deal with me even if they get baron... which ends any immediate push on their side and buys us time/saves other objectives most likely.  Anyway, I'm fairly pleased with my decision making in game for the most part and how I did in team fights.... at least in that one game.  I'm about 64 LP in gold III atm.

I have some issues with disconnect problems due to a quirk in IP Helper that Riot doesn't seem to be able to figure out(I suspect it's my ISP that causes the actual problem), you should see if turning it off solves your issue.  It's listed as IP Helper in Services, and sports a wide variety of connection issues for only some people and some only some of the time.

Got to play two games of twisted treeline with pacov. One ranked and one unranked. We lost both games but I was pretty happy with our play. Unranked is blind pick and pacov's tryn was hard countered with a lulu/malphite/vi team comp. The ranked game was against an all bruiser team of lee sin, riven and pantheon. I had picked brand early in champ select and against that team comp hes a bad choice. We had a shot to win it mostly because Pacov played well on WK but there team full of snowballers was to much. A few team fights we lost by a few seconds because of ult cooldowns on our team that cost us the game. If I could of got going I outscale there entire team hard but I never did. 

New heimerdonger skin on pbe - looks pretty good imo.  Also, for those that care - apparently there are lots of new files for "nightmare" bots.

http://www.surrenderat20.net/2014/06/617-pbe-update.html