League of Legends

[Saph]

Hello fellow gamers and wonderful review readers!

Today I'd like to talk alittle about my latest obsession! LoL, or League of Legends.



LoL is a birds eye view, strategy game with a twist!

You know how most strategy games revolve around you building a camp/city/empire/whatever, and you then create troops and you attempt to conquer one another and so forth? Well in a way, LoL is just that, but in a very different way!

In LoL, YOU(The person behind the screen)are a summoner. A powerful and influencial being(almost god like)who can in times of need summon a powerful champion to aid you in your coming fight. You could almost consider LoL as revolving around a sort of religion where you are the gods, and they are the mortals, and you can summon champions to aid you, and they have no choice but to accept. That's one way you could look at it.

After the summoner has chosen his/her champion, that champion is the only unit you control! There'll still be minion spawning, which pretty much are to champions what champions are to summoners, slaves of the summoners slaves. You cannot control minions, they simply run head long into fights, attacking anything that is hostile and within range. They die easily, and a new wave of minions spawn ~Every 20-30 seconds or something like that.

The goal of the game now is to destroy the enemy's Nexus, a large glowing structure which spawns minions. When it is destroyed, the team that destroyed the enemy's Nexus will win the fight.

But it's not at all easy to get to a Nexus!


The map for 5v5 fights


The map for 3v3 fights

Either side have 2 other structures, Inhibitors and Turrets.

Inhibitors are a sort of 'barrier' placed from the beginning of the game, and each sides inhibitors block the ability for the opposing teams Nexus to spawn super minions. When a team destroys an enemy Inhibitor, said team will gain super minions. There're 3 inhibitors for each side, but destroying only 1 will give your side super minions. HOWEVER, inhibitors will respawn(rebuild themselves)after a short period of time, meaning that if you destroy just 1 inhibitor, it wont be long before it is rebuilt and you no longer spawn super minions! If you destroy all 3, however, it will take a REALLY long time for them all to be rebuilt!

Turrets are the main defense of your camp! They are powerful frozen in place structures which fires a powerful magic bolt at any enemy in range, although they will always attack minions before champions, unless your champion is the first unit to get within range!
Turrets can be tricky to destroy and move on due to the following:

Turret facts:

-Turrets have alot of health, and a powerful spell which can easily kill minions in 1-2 hits! If you get caught in a turrets range, you're dead, unless you have ALOT of magic resistance, ALOT of armor, and ALOT of health!

- Turrets are key defensive positions for teams that're being pushed back! Let us say you're attack an enemy turret, and you have 8 minions with you. There's an enemy champion near the turret with low health. You decide to attack said champion, and you have half health left, so you expect to win. You attack, the enemy champion runs further back, and you follow. The Turret is programmed to attack any champion who attacks another champion friendly to it.

So

If Turret attacks Minion.
And you attack Enemy Champion
Turret will switch from attacking the minion, to attacking you.
and
If your turret attacks enemy minion
And enemy champion attacks you
Your turret will switch from attacking the enemy minion, to attacking the enemy champion

On Champions


There's huge selection of champions in LoL, each with their own unique abilities, strengths, and weaknesses!

Each champion also has a 'role' to fit their abilities.

Most of this is copied and pasted from Dili, I hope he doesn't mind, but he said it so perfectly I thought I might as well add it!
Carry - the carry is a character that achieves unrivaled damage output in their late game. The carry can be ranged or melee, and there are a variety of AP (Ability Power or magic damage) or AD (Attack Damage) carries. In most team compositions, the carry is a Ranged AD carry. They are called a "carry" because they carry the team in the late game; providing the majority of the damage in teamfights and otherwise being responsible for melting the faces of the enemy team.
Tank - The tank's role is to soak damage from the enemy team and mitigate that damage to themself. With a healthy amount of CC (Crowd Control - i.e. stuns, taunts, slows, etc) the tank doesn't have to do damage (though some might anyway) to hold the attention or slow down the enemy team. The tank is usually the initiator of teamfights, though not always. The tank's primary focus is usually to protect the carry who is the main source of damage and is usually rather fragile/squishy.
Caster - The caster deals a heavy amount of AP damage, may or may not have a healthy amount of CC, can be ranged or melee, and usually (but not always) has powerful burst damage (damage that is dealt very quickly instead of sustained over time).
Support - The support has buffs that makes their allies significantly stronger, usually has some form of CC, and sometimes has some healing ability. Supports usually have less damage output than other champions.
Jungler - The jungler is a character whose kit allows them to take on the neutral monsters on the map at level 1. The jungler is a strong ganker and will usually assists the lanes by ganking them after getting the buffs from monsters in the jungle and allows the lanes to get more experience by creating another solo lane.
Stealth - Stealth is a very small group of champions, I think only 2 or 3 can actually go invisible! The main strategy of stealth champions can be slightly more difficult than head to head lets have a brawl champions such as Garen or Alistar. They have to pick their fights carefully, and position themselves for an easy escape should it be required! Stealth champions also commonly possess stuns which gives them an oppertunity to dish out their burst damage. A stealth champion also makes a very good ganker, and most stealth players will run up and down the river(in 5v5)and ambush a champion on another lane. This makes stealth characters a very unnerving opponent, as the entire team wonders what lane they'll be in next, making them play overly cautious, which makes great room for pushers and carries to move further up or down the map, depending on what side you're on. Stealths are quite squishy, and make poor pushers, as they'll most likely be the first to die, as said before, they pick their fights carefully.



Early on you have to begin by finding out what your preffered role is, and develop yourself accordingly(say if you like magic more than tank, you shouldnt get tank related runes etc.)


Each week a new selection of champions are available to play, but only for that week, at which point the champions will reset, and a new group will be available for that week. However, if you decide to spend your IP(Influence Points), you can permanently unlock a champion, making them unaffected by the weekly reset. And this is where the reason why LoL is free comes in! If you don't want to wait by farming IP and getting enough to buy your champions with it, you can spend real money to buy Riot Points(RP). Riot points allow you to buy champions much cheaper per point(for example, a 6300 IP champion will cost ~950 RP). It costs $50 for 7200 RP. To buy alternative looks(aka skins) for your character, you have to pay with RP, IP does not buy new skins.


Masteries


Masteries are special bonuses that you can choose yourself with mastery points that you earn as you increase in level! 1 mastery point per level(need verified)

Masteries will greatly benefit your champion, and are slightly pick and choose-ish. For example, the far left mastery tree focuses alot on damage, attack speed, critical strike chance etc., while the center tree focuses alot on survivability, health, armor etc., and the far right right is utility, which focuses alot on lowering time spent waiting, such as time dead, mana regeneration, health regeneration, summoner spell cooldown reducers(and increase in duration for for example Ignite or Clairvoyance), and gold per second increase.

Choose these carefully, and make sure you know what you wanna be doing in your matches. Do you want to be a tank? A dps? Or an endurance fighter?(Long lasting, aka utility). It is possible to return your mastery points before each fight to make them more fitting for whatever champion you might've chosen.

For example, if you chose Teemo, Utility is probably better than defense.

If you chose Dr. Mundo or Garen, Defense is probably better than utility

If you chose Ashe, Sivir, Caitlyn, Miss Fortune etc., Offense is probably better than defense, but some utility wouldnt hurt.

Depending on your champion, you should set your masteries accordingly, or you'll end up with boosted attributes that you wont even be using!

Runes
(Note that it is recommended to not worry about runes untill level 20 atleast!)


Runes are powerful special buffs that you can buy with IP only(RP wont work with runes)

Runes come in 4 categories:

Mark: offensive runes
Seal: defensive runes
Glyph: magical runes
Quintessence: strong all-purpose runes

And they come in 3 tiers
On tiers: Tiers determine the power stages of runes, for example, tier 1 is weakest, tier 2 is average, tier 3 is strongest, and if a tier 4 should be added, that would be the new strongest.

Tier 1: Weak runes. Have dark faded backgrounds, faces, and borders, except for quintessences, which have pink faces and purple backgrounds.

Tier 2: Average runes. Don't have prefixes, but they have bright borders; Quintessences are different with gold faces and purple backgrounds. These are available at level 10.

Tier 3: Strong runes. Have fully lit backgrounds, faces, and borders; Quintessences are completely covered in gold.These are available at lvl 20.

Several combined runes will also create stronger runes, for example, 5 weak runes will create a strong version of the 5 weak ones.

Important note: Don't waste your hard earned IP on Tier 1 or 2 runes! They will only be useful for so long, and will become pointless after level 20! Their bonuses are also not very great, and will nearly be completely unfelt during a match! Save your IP up for champions(Unless you use RP, in which case you can use as much IP as you want for runes!), and when you have found a good large selection of champions by level 20, then you can start saving up for runes, and buying ones that fit your favorite champions!

Rune Pages

Rune pages are there to help make choosing runes for a coming match faster(since you have limited time before you are forced to go with whatever you have it set to when the timer hits 0). A player(summoner)has a Runebook, with 12 runepages in it. In between matches, a summoner(you), can pick and choose runes that you have bought, and place them in their appropriate slots! Then, when you're getting ready for a match, you can pick which runepage you wanna use for this match. It might be Annies best runepage is runepage 7, so you use it, while you might play Warwick next, so you pick Runepage 3 cause that's better than runepage 7 for him.


Bushes


Bushes are not really bushes, but tall grass that can be found all over a map! When a champion enters it, they become invisible to all enemy units(except turrets, but bushes are never close enough to a turret to worry about it!). A good ganker sits close to a lane in a bush, waiting for a lone enemy champion to come down that lane to farm some unguarded minions. As he does, the champions can jump the other from the bush, catching him completely off guard, and kill him before he even knows what happened. Bushes are also great for escapes! If you're low on health, and need to get away, running down a jungle path with bushes on it will give you an invisible escape!

Warning: Bushes are not a perfect cover from enemies! If you are hiding in a bush, and an enemy champion enters that same bush, you can both see eachother! So make sure that if you should be surprised by a champion entering the same bush as you, to have a quick and easy retreat to another bush, or your friendly turret!


What NOT to do!


There's the right thing to do, and there's the wrong thing to do, and sometimes, people keep doing the wrong thing in LoL(No excuses, even the best player makes noob mistakes!). Some of those things that you just dont do are:

Here's a movie from youtube that really covers the things you SHOULDNT do in LoL much better than I ever could by writing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMF6sTQ7dLM

Don't leave, or else!!!

Leaving a fight in LoL is looked down upon quite harshly! Leaving a game gives you a leaver point(LP)which are very bad to have any of! Having as few as 2-3 can get you suspended for 24 hours, and leaving several times over the course of a few days(several times being 2-3 again), will result in an extended ban. What this means is, that Riot Games pretty much expects you to remain in a fight for its entire duration, which can easily exceed 45 minutes without a problem!

Are there any exceptions? Nope!!! Doesn't matter what reason you have for leaving. If you're having a heart attack, or your wife is giving birth, or your connection was lost, or you're exhausted and wanna go to bed, or if you're starving/thirsting to death, or if you're running late for work/school, or if you're just simply a rage quitter and deserve to get banned anyway. They do not care, if you leave, you get a leaver point, and risk getting banned for it. No questions asked, no mercy, no change of decission on their part. Ruthless, merciless banning for wanting to visit real life is their policy.

Scores

Gameplay: 7/10. Poor gameplay on some fields, but not too bad on others! The screen is mostly too small to see very much, and the screen scrolls very fast when you push the arrow keys, or move your cursor to the corner you wanna travel towards! It can also be very difficult, especially for newer players, to tell whats going on if a ton of people are fighting at once, since there're so many red and green bars of health everywhere, and AoE spells are going off left and right. It is not uncommon to be killed due to confusion in LoL, but it is something that you eventually learn to recognize, but it takes awhile(after 1 week and a half, I'm still having issues with it)

However, moving your character around, buying new equipment, and just having fun ganking an enemy, or laughing at your own noobness as you run headlong into a turret can actually be quite entertaining despite the way it sounds The game has its flaws, but what game doesn't? I enjoy the gameplay tremendously, eventhough it has some major flaws that I think needs work!

Graphics: 7/10. Not the best in the world, but not so bad that its unplayable. The strongest part of the graphics are the beautiful vibrant colors! Due to the graphics being not the best, it is also easy to play the game without framerate lag(the most lag you'll get will probably be ping or latency related, unless your computer is 5 years old or more!)

Community: 5/10. Not the most pleasant community in an MMO! There're of course some wonderful people to meet, but very often do you get a person in your match that is a real douchebag to anyone and anything, enemy or friend alike.

Interest: 8/10. The game will give you tons of hours of fun, no matter how irritating that troll can be, or the fact that you died 31 times without a single kill or assist over the course of 55 minutes of constant play!

Rules: 2/10. Poorest system I've seen in a game in a while. The leaver system is quite unfair, and bans more people who are simply decent people, than the leavers who troll during a match none stop until they rage quit. I give this a score cause it's so bad that I can't get my head around it, and I feel it's bad enough to affect my score for it.

Overall score: 6/10

The game is a fantastic strategy game! Take my score with a grain of salt, and give it a try. Heck might as well, the game is 100% free unless you wanna buy skins, or buy your champions with Riot Points, otherwise, the game is free to play 100%, so I'd say deffinately give it a try! But due to all of the big flaws I feel this game has, from a beginners perspective(which I think is the group of people that this review will appeal to the most!), I feel that it does not deserve a higher score than 6! Give it a try, but remember that the game is free, so don't expect a World of Warcraft like game with tons to do between matches! You just won't get it.


Credits:

Diligence109
For his expert contribution to helping me understand the game more fully, and enable me to successfully write this review in a correct and factual manner Thanks for the help Dili!

Muffincat
For being the verifier for when Dilis straight forwardness and blunt callout of my errors got me upset Her calm behavior helped me get past the irritation of failing hard, and made it possible for me to learn from my errors, rather than just give up and rage quit. Thanks Muffin for the help

youtube.com

League of Legends Wiki

[EpsilonX]

err....reviews go in the review section.

[LiNuX]

Great review. Covered a lot about the game. I'm still learning about it, only been playing 3 weeks and I think it's a great game.

err....reviews go in the review section.

it is in the review section...unless I missed something?

[Diligence109]

-Turrets have alot of health, and a powerful spell which can easily kill minions in 1-2 hits! If you get caught in a turrets range, you're dead, unless you have ALOT of magic resistance, and ALOT of health!

fyi, Turret damage is reduced by both Armor and Magic Resistance.

Each champion also has a 'role' to fit their abilities.

Melee Damage: Powerful head to head combat, relies on stuns, high health, and powerful melee attacks
Ranged Damage: Powerful ranged combat, relies on slow effects, AoE(Area of Effect), and attack speed
Magic Damage: Powerful magic combat, relies on snares, AoE, powerful burst damage
Healer: Powerful main assist, relies on powerful heals to keep themselves and others alive.
Tank: Powerful defensive combat, relies on ALOT of health, ALOT of armor, and less emphasis on damage
Support: Powerful subtitute, relies on anything that their specialty might happen to be.
Stealth: Powerful sneak combat, relies on invisibility, stuns, and attack speed

Oh, young padawan, the things you have yet to learn about this game XD None of these tags are true except to maybe some of the specific champions you've seen played (For example, I can see you're thinking Ashe is Ranged Damage, which is true, but she'd be more formally called a "carry" and not all Ranged carries rely on slows or AS (Attack Speed) to do their job.)

In incredible brevity that does little to no justice in helping you understand how to play these roles, these are the roles one expects to find on a 5v5 team (team composition is a completely different game for the 3v3 map):

• Carry - the carry is a character that achieves unrivaled damage output in their late game. The carry can be ranged or melee, and there are a variety of AP (Ability Power or magic damage) or AD (Attack Damage) carries. In most team compositions, the carry is a Ranged AD carry. They are called a "carry" because they carry the team in the late game; providing the majority of the damage in teamfights and otherwise being responsible for melting the faces of the enemy team.
• Tank - The tank's role is to soak damage from the enemy team and mitigate that damage to themself. With a healthy amount of CC (Crowd Control - i.e. stuns, taunts, slows, etc) the tank doesn't have to do damage (though some might anyway) to hold the attention or slow down the enemy team. The tank is usually the initiator of teamfights, though not always. The tank's primary focus is usually to protect the carry who is the main source of damage and is usually rather fragile/squishy.
• Caster - The caster deals a heavy amount of AP damage, may or may not have a healthy amount of CC, can be ranged or melee, and usually (but not always) has powerful burst damage (damage that is dealt very quickly instead of sustained over time).
• Support - The support has buffs that makes their allies significantly stronger, usually has some form of CC, and sometimes has some healing ability. Supports usually have less damage output than other champions.
• Jungler - The jungler is a character whose kit allows them to take on the neutral monsters on the map at level 1. The jungler is a strong ganker and will usually assists the lanes by ganking them after getting the buffs from monsters in the jungle and allows the lanes to get more experience by creating another solo lane.

Sometimes a team will have a roamer, often times they wont have a jungler, often times they wont have a support because nobody likes to play support, many champions are a blend of the roles listed above, and no champion can be fully understood by one simple tag because they are all completely unique in their function and abilities.


I could easily write several more pages on this, but this sort of stuff is what you learn as you play the game/only interesting if you play the game!


EDIT: do your homework :P

http://www.leagueoflegends.com/learn/gameplay/tactics/beginner

[Muffincat]

I also wouldn't say the tank relies "on a lot of armor and health," because that totally is not what the tank does... The tank (in high levels of play; you won't see it in low elos) is always watching what the other team is building, knows the other champions well, knows the kind of damage output that is coming from the enemy team, and builds against it. They also pay attention to if the enemy team is building against their build (for example, if a tank is building a lot of health, then a carry on the enemy team might build Madred's Bloodrazors [an item that does more damage based on how much health the person you attack has] and then the tank would usually build more magic resistance, because the extra damage on Bloodrazors is magic damage.)

This is just an example... you can't really make the kind of generalizations that you are making about these roles you supplied, because they are too specific to certain champions. Dili's post should help you out with this...

I'd suggest reading about and playing a lot more of LoL ^^;

[Saph]

Eh I'll put this one on hold then until I learn some more

Thanks for the input though! It is true, I kinda got ahead of myself with this review, and since I've played alot of games with similar gameplay(as in with tank, DPS etc.) I thought that it'd probably be more of the same, apparently not!!!

Thank you for the corrections! Although there's one thing I'd preffer in the future Dili.

Be alittle less blunt Not sure how else to put it, but as useful as your info is, you make it sound very frank and 'well duh!'-ish, which makes me feel like "how could I have missed this? OMFG I'm so stupid for not seeing it!"

So just for the future, be more gentle when correcting me so I don't feel like I need to tatoo "NOOB!" on my right ass cheek, lols

EDIT: I'ma find a different game to review on in the meantime!

[EpsilonX]

Eh I'll put this one on hold then until I learn some more
Be alittle less blunt Not sure how else to put it, but as useful as your info is, you make it sound very frank and 'well duh!'-ish, which makes me feel like "how could I have missed this? OMFG I'm so stupid for not seeing it!"

So just for the future, be more gentle when correcting me so I don't feel like I need to tatoo "NOOB!" on my right ass cheek, lols

well, to be honest, you probably should know everything about the game you're reviewing before you review it. Or at least, a game like this you should.

[Saph]

I have finished the review Hope you enjoy it!

well, to be honest, you probably should know everything about the game you're reviewing before you review it. Or at least, a game like this you should.

I agree by the way, that's why I put it on hold until I believed that I knew enough about the game to write a review on it
Remember that the review is not made to help or otherwise aid highly advanced players. All that is said in this review they already know(I expect Dili to find SOMETHING in there that might be slightly incorrect, and I will edit accordingly, should he do so)

So I feel that I've learned enough for now after many hours of reading on the LoL wiki, watching youtube videos, listening to Dilis and Muffins advice etc. I guess you could say that I'm a fletchling of Dili and Muffin Since they pretty much taught me every single bit I know about this game.

[paecmaker]

Looking forward to your second review saph.

[Saph]

Its already there Fable II!