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Looks like the healers in LoL are about to take a serious pounding. Can we say welcome back poke meta?

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=1102898

Sweet. Although I am totally biased on the matter, I am fucking glad to see the backside of those obnoxious champions.

Yeah I wonder, unless someone can come up with something else that works with 0 farm. Return of roamer + jungle maybe?

Never was a pot meta. Tank DPS meta (we never actually left it...) or Range Carry spam shit under there tower till they leave meta? flip a coin.

NVM, read the patch notes. Range Carry meta dead. Tanky DPS meta wins again.

That nerf seems entirely unnecessary.

The only thing more boring than laning against Soraka + anyone else was if your lane also had a Soraka. Sona was only slightly more interesting. High-sustain characters are both boring and frustrating to play against. The only people that seemed to like playing them were either A) players that liked winning more than they liked having a close/exciting game or B) players who are bad at the game, and used easy support characters to allow better players on their team to succeed. I wouldn't miss A, and B should just learn to play better.

I'm fully in favor of more active 'support' characters like Lux and Orianna. Soraka could be removed from the game and the game would be better for it.

Changes like these convince me that Riot knows what they are doing and how to keep the game fun.

Is it just me... or am I reading this as Sona just got a huge ass buff.




Sona's heal was never all that grand imo early game, and it's just great that she is able to spam the fuck out of it and slowly heal herself and her lanemate up, therefore keeping you online longer.
Lategame the ability lockout time is your hindrance, as you can't quickly go from your q to your e to land a slow.

Without support like soraka, the game boils down to having MORE HEALTH, MORE ARMOR. Lux and Orianna are nukers not active support and don't really hold up if the team they are fighting isn't equally as squishy as they are. soraka does.

Lux and Orianna are both support. Both have large portions of their kit that can be used to defend your team-mates or set up kills. Both can zone enemies to protect team-mates or get enemies into more vulnerable positions.  Both even have shields. They don't 'hold up' their team as well as Soraka does, but that's kind of the point. Being able to keep your team-mate topped off even if they continue to make mistakes is stupid. At least with the shields, you can't sit back and repair all the damage from a play-mistake, but you can still help your team-mate get out of a jam.

Soraka is being turned into a similar-style support champion. Less emphasis on passive gameplay like sustained heals, more emphasis on utility/active gameplay like a MR debuff or a silence.

Lolz, the new soraka only works if the other sides agrees to not stack champs like malphite, rammus, blitz, reneken, xin zhao, jax, trynademere, ect. Neither lux or ori  had counters to tanky dps oriented champions, which is why no one ran them until teams went back to running 2-3 ad/ap carries. That is because lux and ori are nukers with minor support as utility, instead of support whose damage "softens" up targets for the local ad/ap carry.

IIRC these nerfs are aimed at tourney play, with Riot being frustrated that a support champ is mandatory to be competative, and the pool of them is so small.

I must say...good riddance. I was laning against soraka and someone else as cho'gath, landing a ton of rupture shots and had no chance of sending one home. I eventually just stopped.

How is that any different than, say...Tarik? He has a heal too, doesn't he?

A much smaller heal. A much smaller mana pool. And the heal was/is on a longer cooldown.
Comparing Soraka and Taric is like apples and oranges.

I'm confused why they are nerfing late game healing as well?  Isn't the problem that the support is overpowered in the laning phase?

Yes, pretty much. Which is why I read Sona's changenotes as a buff more than a nerf.

Fucking hell.

I guess the Taric changes are not too terrible but they still piss me off a bit. And I just gave riot money to get the new skin too.

Time to build AD Taric I guess. Do it.


Do it.

Anyone else been watching the masters matches this weekend?   You can easily see what they are getting at with this sustain nerf at least.   Not sure what they are going to do with support after that though.

Ya, but then if fair is fair they would nerf tanky sustain-o tanks like my beloved Cho'gath. Those top lane slug fests maybe need to be toned down a notch.

But then they keep saying Dominion is going to be the 'fun' map, with no passive play at all, so maybe they will compartmentalize it that way.

I have a bad feeling after this weekend's tournament that HotshotGG (one of the top players in the game), is going to get Cho'gath and Galio, my two mains, nerfed on me.

I seriously doubt it.   Everyone seemed clear that HotShotGG is just amazing with them.   The question is what they are going to do about Nidalee and Oriana.   Those two were consistently banned in nearly every game of the tournament.   Every time they didn't get banned it usually ended up in everyone face palming.

Well, Nidalee's already got her heal nerf (and spear buff) coming in. So who knows where she'll end up?

Ori may survive a bit longer, since it seems almost universal agreement that she's devastating, but only on really high skill levels. I'm sure when LoL looks at win/loss ratios for anywhere but the top, Ori's probably pretty okay.

And you know, I play mostly supports, so this sustain nerf is meh for the characters I play, but it's pretty well needed. It took like double stupidity on a player's part to die during the lane phase when I was healbotting Soraka.


PS: AP Janna Solo Mid all the way!

I don't understand why Taric was included in the healing support changes but Alistar was not.

The top 2 supports played in IEM matches as far as I could see were Soraka and Alistar with Sona third and Janna fourth. I did not hear of or see a single Taric played yet he got adjusted to be a mediocre melee DPS with a long cooldown stun, relatively low HP, and a small heal. Alistar is a much more tanky support who has a better heal and has an AoE knockup.

Oh well, I will adjust to playing Taric another way I suppose. Will probably end up building Nashor's Tooth earlier and going with Armor Pen and Cooldown runes instead of Magic Pen and AP runes as I have been recently.

It was the only way they would give him a new skin.  :why_so_serious:

Alistar is on the chopping block as well I'm sure.    They are simply still choosing the cut.   :why_so_serious:

Not denying Alistar's strong, and probably he's just next on the changeblock, but I always feel like I never have anywhere near enough mana to both heal a lot and headbutt/pulverize, and the latter feels a lot more useful.

With the healing support nerf I wonder if the meta is just going to change to a strong CC support meta, with champions like Maokai, Shen, Leona (lol) becoming more popular? Not sure if it'll be those heroes, just throwing out suggestions. The viability of shielding heroes as supports should be better of as well: Lux, Morgana, etc.

Tanky DPS meta is coming back, well it didn't really leave but who cares  :drill:

What exactly is the setup of this meta?  I keep seeing it referenced but in the tournament you'd only see one tanky char usually.  Also they kept referring to Trinity Force chars as "tanky" which completely confused me.

Off tank. Slight HP boost, with abit of everything else.

The offtank meta, the reason you don't see it in tournaments is 2 different folds,

1. It was rather recently (end/non end of season 1) that the top level figured out that soraka is still useful and can basically feed your typical ad/ap range carry with health they otherwise wouldn't have. It was considered an "American" style to favor big beefy champs like xin zhao and singe over patch work of hard carries and soft carry/support (champs like lux, orican, morgana).

2. Playing a team of offtanks your advantage is hyper aggressive play, initiating whenever you can. Like how hotshotgg did with jax vs that annivia, the annivia wasn't in a bad place, anyone but hotshotgg playing jax at the time would have happy ignored her for a coming creep wave. Top players are passive by nature, because passive is safe, its really hard for anyone at that level to engage in a fight they haven't already guessed will result in a 5-0 sweep.

But the advantages are still there, in general hard carries lose to tanky dps when laning top solo (that's why the commentator once said that 'lane'wick is very powerful) and mid. Tanky DPS can get fed from the jungle, don't need to deprive your carry of gold. Most tank dps come with the equivalent of flash or ghost. You can tower dive with impunity after a certain level.

No I mostly meant what is the actual team setup?  I knew about off tank dps but why would the entire meta game be named after that if you only have one beefy dps?   I usually saw 3 squishies 1 support and a beefy dps or 2 squishies, support, tank and beefy dps.

3 beefies
1 support
1 carry

or

3 beefies
2 carries

or

4 beefies
1 carry

or

4 beefies
1 support

They are some dual tank builds, which some euros run to counter the 3-4 beef strategy we americans like to use. There is also the extreme 5 beef builds.

Ugh, frikkin' huge patch...seems I won't be playing tonight

Ya it's a beast, especially when it keeps getting stuck on 33%  :argh:

Worked fine for me. I must be a fancy lad.  :oh_i_see: