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Just logged in to the patcher downloading what I assume is a fix for all the bugs they found in Dominion and a "Dominion available now!" message at the top of the news feed.

EDIT: They changed the login screen graphic, hope that wasn't the whole patch O.o.

Just played a dominion game where my team was down 150-1 on nexus health and won.

Literally our nexus had 1 health. For like 5 minutes.

I think when your nexus < 100, they disable champion losses.

I am not sure how dominion will impact lol long term , but for now I kinda enjoy its since its a lot faster paced than regular matches. One thing  for sure - I  will do daily double IP in dominion now

It's a nice change of pace. SR will be my goto for serious business, but if I only have 30 minutes I have no prob with some dominion fun.

I'm not sure I like this, why make deaths matter only to make them not longer matter when the points start to really matter.   :uhrr:

They want the epic comeback feel. But with the game rules changing, I think it's more frustrating to lose. I'm with you, they should change it.

There's also the stupid (IMO) rule that you gain NO points (or to be more accurate, the enemy loses no points) for having only two points. It's cap 3, or gtfo.

I think people are quickly settling in to defend 3 as the easiest way to win th egame.

People would just run around capping points with heroes like Nidalee if they made it like that.   You have to have it such that having a stronger team means you win.

I've heard a few people make a comparison between Dominion and Arathi Basin in WoW and I think it's pretty accurate.  People are still learning how to actaully "win" instead of just 5v5 deathmatch.  I like Dominion more then when I first tried it since I have been playing with groups and trying to actually co-ordinate and win.

I think maybe they do need to buff the "quest" a bit.  They said that in testing the meta was about defending 3 bases and quests are supposed to stop that.

Pushing for 4 capture points is risky and usually counter productive unless you have one excellent roamer, i.e. Rammus. People really don't get the concept of defending.

The quest doesn't make you push for 4 it just makes you control 2 specific ones.   Thus you can't just sit on 3 cap points with heroes like Heimer.

I have found that having a strong defend champ like Heimer hold your "bottom" point, then having 4 go to top early seems to be the current "people who are smart" dominion strat to victory.

Also, Rammus is the tits in Dominion.

I meant in general Amaron, not in response to your point, sorry for the ambiguity.

Loading up on the bottom lane can be a pretty quick way to lose a match.

I have no idea what this means.

Normally when you kill a champion they lose nexus points. When they are under 100 that gets turned off for their team.

Poppy is a steamroller in this. Backdoor capping points like a boss, and giving no fucks. What's that? The entire team is coming to stop you? Fuck em. Pop your ulti on some slow champ and run.

Rammus is astounding. It's almost not fair.

And Jax and Akali. God some champs are completely off the charts in there

Last night we were finding Heimer to be worse than Jax or Akali, and possibly Teemo too.   :uhrr:

Heimer is a bit funny. Almost immovable from his capture point. But he does practically nothing with the other 4.

when one guy can hold a point so easily, it makes for 4 out beating ass.

Teemo is great because he is mobile and he can negate the speed traps for the other team by shrooming them.

Any champ that needs minion farm to really be good in SR is terrible in Dominion (Mordekaiser I am looking at you).

I'm playing a gimmick heimer build right now; start with a giant's belt, build a warmog, boots 1, warmog, treads, guardian angel, warmog. Take that fortify skill and ghost. Stay at/near bottom point. You can easily solo 2v1 and hold off 3v1 long enough for teammates to get there. It's ridiculous. You can push the mobs forward enough to tie up 1-2 of the opponent and scurry back if they try and focus on you. You're basically an enormous annoyance.

When things get patched a bit, I'll go back to ryze. Who is really good as well.

I tried playing one game of summoner's rift. No thanks. Booooring!

Sounds fun, what's your skill build on heimer?

Tried playing Zilean - eh. I can get some good shots in with time bomb and help my teammates a bit, but boy was that a low scoring game.

That Heimer build/strat would become at least 50% better if you started with a catalyst and built a RoA before your first Warmog's. You can buy a catalyst right out of the gate if you forego boots, which is fine if you are just going to camp the bottom lane, and since you are basically leveling nonstop for the first 5-10 minutes it's more than all the regen you need.

Catalyst -> RoA -> Warmog's is, incidentally, my Cho'Gath build for the same task.

I've seen complaints that dominion encourages tanky-dps again, but I actually think more fragile characters really shine here. With less 5v5 team fights, you don't need to worry about being steam-rolled by the entire enemy team. "Duel-ist" champions are really strong here.

Some of the people I see rolling are Singed, Udyr, and GP.  :oh_i_see:

Of the new summoner spells, I find re-inforce to be incredibly useful in dominion. Promote not so much but the increased tower speed has won a lot of team fights for me thus far.

For most scrubs merely buying a defensive item is something you only do on a tanky-dps.   I'm still curious how pure carries like Cait are going to work but I'm already seeing a lot more characters being played viably.

Any time you have a skirmish orianted fight between low numbers of fighting champions 9/10 tank dps will win. Applies double for this mode because
1. The heal reductions benfiets people with sustain built in rather than champs that must by their sustain,
2. Fighting over the tower is a lot harder to do when you have low health, squishy champions can't just bulldoze into a tower to kill AP heimer, why do you think bhodi tank heimer works so well? The tower isn't a SR tower but it does enough damage (and scales on hit too...) and unless you do 2k damage in 3 seconds and can't be stuned good look uprooting someone with sustain and health on there side without a well coordinated gank led by someone with a really long stun.
3. Kills give far less gold in this mode and lack of a farming laning phase means no zoning, no cs advantage, no level advantage. Pure carries rely on level advantage and gold advantage to 2-3 shot bot and top lane. It takes twice as much deaths to feed someone and hovering at 0 kills to have no ability to buy stuff at all. Which means no matter what everyone will most likely get there end game items and again ability to kill someone faster than they can kill you caps at a certain point.

Carries are designed for winning team fights, not small skirmishes.

Early warmogs lets you get a serious health domination. Starting with a giant's belt almost doubles your HP. You don't need a catalyst because you aren't taking damage, and you don't need mana because you aren't really spending it. ROA is great on most heroes but I think the 400 extra health, coupled with completing warmogs very early really makes it worthwhile to rush.

Hmmm, well, I will have to try it next time. I would expect to have mana issues without any sort of mana regen, but then again you can always just do some sort of suicide push or super-recall and return to defend with ease.

The virtue of being the rock at bottom is that if you've just repelled an attack, and either somebody is vaguely nearby, and/or you have two turrets, your recall is pretty safe.

So basically, here's how I play heim:

You should have ghost and fortification.

2 points in turret one in missile, first turret goes in between the bot two points, missile them if they play the harassment game. wave 1 arrives and dies, get a level in grenade, place another turret a bit up, go back and get the +health for more mana. One more in turret as the 3rd wave comes in, so place a 2nd turret farther forward. Back off if needed, they won't be able to chase heim through 2 turrets.

By now, minions are generally near their bottom point and this generally draws out 1-2 people to defend their bot from being neut'd. I generally dump my mana via missiles, put a new 2nd turret near the minion alley, and recall back, buy boots 1. From there, you just defend their counter push and then focus on keeping turrets alive as close to their point (not on it) as possible. Your goal is to keep minions on bottom as pushed to their bottom point as possible, forcing people to peel away to defend. If you have 2 others, you can cap the point, otherwise don't bother doing anything but harass unless you have a full wave to help you cap.

If they start putting pressure on you, run back (you have ghost!), pop your ult and run circles around your point with turrets slowing them, you can solo 1v2 easily and on 1v3 just run away and pop fortification when they all start channeling, then start running laps and harass until your team gets there.

If you do take their point, keep 2 turrets on it and defend as long as you can, generally this ties up 2 of them for a long time unless they're smart and do the runaround. If they do, recall back (buy!) and guard your bottom turret. Remember the distance from spawn is almost the distance between two points, so hit a bush and recall back instead of running back whenever possible.

Ohhhhh god, after 3 straight games of douchebags leaving or afking in classic, I'm starting to see the allure of Dominion.

Buddy, wait til you see what happens when someone afks or dcs in dominion.

The game finishes in 5 minutes if someone afk/dc's.   You have excessive aversion to losing if this bothers you MORE than an afker in SR.

who cares? it's 5min.

When someone disconnects of leaves I just sigh and go on trying to be a beast until it ends.

So lately I've been playing Shaco here and absolutely loving him.

CDR runes/masteries, movement speed glyphs
Take revive and ghost as summoner skills.

Boot's of mobility to start with and a single regen bead. Rush to the prospector thingy with the 2 second movement speed active and + capture rate.
Take one of each skill to start.

Go bot lane with someone else. There is a small area in the ring between the inner fog of war and the ramp to spawn that is also hidden by fog of war. Deceive across this. Hit ghost and haul ass to the enemies bottom cap point. Place a box right before getting there. Throw a shiv at one while deceiving to the other. Retreat towards your box. Congrats you've just fucked up their game start and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it.

Rest of the game just be a huge fucking annoyance. Place boxes on escape paths. Deceive out as soon as people show up. Goto anouther unattended point, repeat. Place boxes at the speed boosts whenever you pass by them.

Soon as you can get Shurelya's Reverie, make sure to hit both your item actives as much as you can, typiclly when dodging people trying to stop you capping or while moving to a point to cap. You end up tying up their team having to constantly deal with you at their points. If you manage to cap a point before they can stop you, you can hold off a 2-4v1 for awhile between your boxes, deceiving around the point, popping your decoy ultimate, and shiving anyone who is trying to recap the point.

edit: should note, in the 10 or so games I've played like this, I've only lost one, where pretty much the entire enemy team started following me everywhere, and my team instead of taking advantage of this and capping points, chased after them trying to get kills.

The vast majority of my experience with people playing stealth champs in Dominion has been - no clue/no help, way too much to say.

In order of hate: Twitch, Akali, Evelyn (only seen once, was worthless), Shaco

Did get a good Shaco player once.  Once.

People have this strange concept of there dps being the deciding factor. Those idiots can burn in hell.

I am getting real tired of busting into WM, tanking all their people until I die (getting martyr) for our team to cap and then we lose it right away because some fuckknuckle on my team decides to go fight people 1v2 in the lane or jungle instead of the point and make us lose the point.

Played this mode for the first time this morning - pretty fun and I do have to admit that I like the shorter round time, which fits my home life a bit more easily.  I've been trying to play Tank since most people seem to ignore that role at this crap level at which I pay, and I seem at least reasonably effective. 

Question:   If I spend some time playing this game mode do you think I'm going to gimp learning how to the "real" game?

Yes. It's completely different. Probably the only skill that translates (besides the basic 'how to click on shit') between the two modes is figuring out when to engage/whether you can win a fight or not, but even there in Dominion the respawn timer is way shorter, so death has less of an impact.

Then again, 'gimp' seems a little harsh. You'll still get more familiar with different heros, etc. But there's no laning/ganking/pushing in Dominion, and that's most of the game.

Agree with ICE, playing Dominion will not teach you anything you need to know for SR/TT.  That said, if you like Dominion better than SR, why should that matter (unless you plan to try to play competitively)?

I disagree. You can learn your champ combos. It's helped me with my Anivia because I don't care how I perform in Dom. How to effectively and quickly kill your enemy is never a bad thing. That's about it, though.

Can also give you a taste of builds, but won't really give you too much of an idea of how they will fare in SR.

You will learn combos, you will learn what all the chars can do, you will learn who you need to run from and who you can fight, how close you can be, how to use bushes. You won't learn last hitting, zoning, exposure, pushing, ward/shroom/box placements, jungling, buff/dragon timing, and fighting as a 5 man team.

I also think, for beginning players as well, Dominion serves to desensitize to you to "holy shit, team battle, what do I do, what do I do?"

Is anyone else running into a situation where predominantly they are getting grouped with Dom newbs?  I probably have something like 75 dom games now but it's constantly grouping me with people who have 10~15 wins.  I'm half tempted to just stop playing till more people know wtf they are doing.

I've gotten a lot of 0-played people, and I've got 30 games or so?

I think this is why Dominion is unsatisfying for me when it's dysfunctional: you get somebody who doesn't know or is willfully just going to do their shit of running around mid or repeatedly trying to suicide on  the opps' bottom, and it's just throw your hands up and wait it out.

While at least in a dysfunctional SR game, I can feel like: "That was a fun/educational laning phase. I totally won that team fight/got my warding patterns down."

Are you playing draft mode? Maybe that will get you more 'serious' players. I think a lot of people (myself included) see Dominion games as a relatively laid-back, low-intensity way to take a break from 'real' LoL.

Actually I think draft mode is getting all the casual types too and that's another part of the problem.   There's some real imbalanced heroes so people go to draft for bans.

I'm starting to think that summoners rift is for pussies after a billion dominion games.

I been playing dominion non-stop over weekend ( I bought a 3 day IP boost and was trying to farm IP). I must say it is  have it own qualities. For one I learned more in those 2 days about  1 vs 1 matchups then I did playing SR for whole year . Like who you can taked down and who you cant and what it takes to do it . Due to insane pace and fight non stop imho dominion is a place to go if you want learn the champ abilities and how to fight. Of course there are the special quirks  (such as no problem with mana regen) and relative lack of teamfights but you get like 10x fights per unit of time compared to SR.

And yeah of course it farms IP well. ~100 IP with boost on a win for 10 mins. that beats 40 min 200is IP from SR. That said its still awfully slow  and only managed farm like 8k IP for playing a lot for 2 days

Yup in dominion if you have an afker at least the game will end very very rapidly and you don't waste 20 minutes to get to the loss. I hate surrendering in games or having games end by surrender. At least in dominion win or lose people play the damn games out to the finish.