Level at the beginning of day 5: 9

What I learned since last time:

• The outer turret of each lane is the one closest to your home base; the inner turret of each lane is the one closest to the enemy base. I still don’t know how to tell which lane someone is referring to when they say outer or inner turret though.
• Only 1 inhibitor has to be down in order to destroy the nexus
• Turrets must be destroyed in order (I’ve wondered before if you could potentially just use a shielding ability, flash, etc. to run real fast to the next one without destroying the first)
• Shift+[ability] with your mouse over your champion will allow you to self-cast without pressing alt (I have a mac and I don’t have an alt key. I googled if it’s different for macs but I didn’t have any luck. I tried to use it for Lissandra’s ultimate on day 3 and was dismayed when I realized I just straight up didn’t have the key)
• Shift+[ability] with your mouse over ANOTHER champion will smartcast to that champion (not sure how this is better than just casting normally though)
• You have 1.7 seconds to teleport using Lissandra’s E ability after you cast it, which allows you to cast another spell before moving. This would be a great strategy IF I COULD FUCKING FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO THIS.
• Kindred can do a thing where they mark a champion for death and if they kill them, Q is permanently enabled (for the rest of the game?! or just for a certain amount of time?). Cool, but um…HOW? It’s supposed to be a passive ability?
• Kindred is supposed to be good for jungling so maybe when I try that, I’ll use her
• The cooldown of Kindred’s Q is reduced if used following her W ability/within the area of effect
• Kindred’s E is a slowing ability, not a damaging one (totally didn’t realize that despite using it a bunch). If you attack the target twice while E is in effect, the next (third) attack will send the wolf, dealing more damage

Day 4 was the day right before day 5, so I didn’t have a lot of time to do additional research. However, what I did learn was valuable in terms of determining what my priorities in the game are.

I actually ended up not playing Lissandra or Kindred at all yesterday, despite the fact that they were the only champions I did research on.

Instead I continued my quest to become more diverse by playing more new ones.

First, I played 3 games with Shen. Let me tell you, at first I had some pretty strong feelings about him, and they were not positive. It drove me crazy that half of my abilities were tied to wherever my spirit blade was. This made fights hard because if I wanted to run away quickly and my Q was still on cooldown, I couldn’t then use the W ability to protect myself, because it would activate where my sword was. I never used his ultimate either (not sure I understand what it does).

By the 3rd game though I had developed more of a strategy. I do like how you can run to the opposite side of a target and deal damage to them just by using Q and drawing your blade to you. That was pretty fun.

Playing Shen also answered a question I’ve had since day 1 – what the fuck that glowing

blue sword is. It’s Shen’s spirit blade.

Following that I played 2 games with Rumble. He was super fun to play and seems to deal a lot of damage, even though I had a bit of trouble controlling the direction of the Q ability. I actually liked him a lot, which I was surprised about so I will probably play more games with him.

My first game with Rumble gave me my first negative experience interacting with a team. In the chat before the game began, everyone was calling roles and I called bottom lane. But when the game began, I got yelled at by a team member telling me to go top. I thought that they just wanted to be bottom real bad so I said, “ok, but I did call bottom earlier”. I proceeded to make my way to top lane via the river, but because I was flustered, when I got to mid-lane I thought I was already in top and started killing things there, until the person actually in mid said, “this isn’t top”. Embarrassed, I continued on my way as if that was the plan all along.

I was kind of upset and wondering if I’d done something wrong until my new partner in top spoke up. They said, “rumble did call bot though, that’s why I went top”. The original accuser said, “I thought they called top???”

At this point it was clear it was just a misunderstanding, so trying to be charitable, I said, “maybe someone misread bot as top? they are kind of similar”, referring to the fact that bot backwards is tob which is only 1 letter away from top. Sometimes people read letters in a word out of order when they’re skimming things really fast. My lane partner then said, “not really.” *applause emoji*

And then they said, “whatever, I’m just doing this for the IP anyway, I’m so close to what I want”. That was when I noticed that they were actually a ranked player, AKA a head and shoulders above the rest of us (especially me). This A) made the fact that I was now supporting them in top even more hilarious because they clearly did not need my help, and B) made me feel better that a ranked player had stuck up for me and verified that I had done everything right on my end.

So at least I got a bunch of experience using chat (although it was the beginning of the game).

In other news, I will be thinking about that mid-lane moment until I die.

Level at the end of day 5: 10

Hours: 2.5

Games played: 5

Champions played: Shen, Rumble