Before I get into this week’s post – we are looking to make changes to our stream schedule and want your input. Our current schedule was more of a ‘test’ to see what works and what doesn’t and we’ve determined that we probably need to make some changes, both for you guys and for ourselves.

So we created a poll with all of the times that we’re currently considering, so you guys can vote for which times you would be able to watch. And don’t worry about us; like I said we already selected these times based on what will work for us as well.

Changes won’t come into effect until close to the new year so please answer based on what your schedule will look like in January!

And if you haven’t been able to watch us before but would like to, now is your chance!! We welcome your opinion as well.

Click here to vote! We really, really appreciate it.

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Now that season 7 is over, I thought that now would be an appropriate time for me to review my progress. tect reviewed my progress a few weeks ago over on Patreon, but the last time I did this was in June, and I didn’t go into very much detail.

Strengths

My biggest strength by far is my defensive playstyle. I know, I know, it’s also a weakness, but I honestly think that this is what landed me in silver rather than bronze. As a support, you won’t do very well with a high number of deaths because in all likelihood, you won’t have the kills to balance our your score, and it’s hard to get assists if you are dead. So…I may not participate as much as I should or could, but at least I don’t feed.

I’m proud of how quickly I picked up Nami – I started playing her in July and I already have mastery level 5 on her. I honestly feel more comfortable playing her than I do Soraka sometimes.

I personally think that I have good warding instincts, though some may disagree. I feel that my warding has improved greatly since June thanks to tect’s suggestions, in particular his constant reminders to buy control wards. I ward as I go when I’m walking through the jungle and I make sure that key bushes near my own area are warded whenever possible. I usually know when it is and isn’t safe to ward.

I’ve definitely found my niche in the game, which isn’t actually just relegated to support. I believe that I can find success with any ranged champion with reliable crowd control abilities. My success with my ‘OG Five’ (Soraka, Sona, Morgana, Anivia and Lux) was due to mastering their crowd control abilities. Leading to my next point…skillshot accuracy.

My accuracy isn’t the best, but it’s pretty good. Of course this gets a lot worse playing against more experienced players, but I’d still classify it as a strength. I’m good at predicting where players will move next (barring a sudden flash or something) and aiming skill shots where they will be rather than where they are. However, I do sometimes find myself a victim of what tect called the ‘no dodge dodge’, AKA where the player actually doesn’t move at all and I narrowly miss. But I still think that it’s good that I’m thinking about these things.

I feel like I have good instincts as to when and when not to hit minions as a support – usually the answer is ‘don’t’ but there are some times where it’s okay and I’m not scared to take advantage of those times because CS. Sometimes tect will want to do particular things that I don’t fully understand but in general I don’t ruin things, so that’s good.

I keep up with League related news, so while I don’t always remember all the changes that get made, I’m at least aware of what is going on.

I finally learned to use the number keys to use my items! I still don’t use them very often, but when I do, I use the keyboard 100% of the time now. Go me!

And finally, I’m nice. Or at least civil. I don’t really consider this a strength; I consider it just ‘being a decent human being’, so I’m reluctant to put it in this category, but I am indeed tilt-proof. Not in terms of my actual life – tect sure does piss me off sometimes – but it doesn’t impact my gameplay very much. It was pointed out to me that while I consider this ‘normal’ behaviour, other people’s ‘normal’ looks very different, so I suppose whether or not it’s considered a strength depends on your baseline.

Most improved

I decided to make a ‘most improved’ section for accomplishments that I’m proud of and skills I’ve come a long way on, even if they are technically still weaknesses or at least things I’m just okay at (story of my life).

Something that you all have endlessly teased me about is the fact that I constantly held my mouse button down during gameplay, because it just seemed more energy efficient and also my mouse was hella loud. However, after getting a silent mouse, I find that I click way more often now. Perhaps too much in some circumstances. Because I can barely hear or feel it, so it’s like it’s not even happening! I still find myself holding my mouse button down just a little too long sometimes and accidentally hitting a minion, but it’s been ages since I accidentally hit a plant, thank god for that. Sometimes I hold my mouse button down for no reason without realizing it, causing me to stop backing or standing still or what have you. BUT NOT IN COMBAT. And that’s the most important part.

My team fighting has drastically improved thanks to the hundreds of ARAMs I must have played by now (seriously they’re addictive), but I still wouldn’t call it a strength per say. It is still difficult for me to process what is going on, and team fighting in an ARAM is different from team fighting on Summoner’s Rift, especially because there are no physical obstacles like walls.

Melee champions will probably never be a strength of mine, but it used to be that I couldn’t even function on a champion who wasn’t ranged. Now, however, I can usually hold my own. Playing Maokai frequently and being willing to try new champions in ARAMs is probably what helped me with this the most.

Despite Morgana being part of my OG Five and picking up Janna very early on, I never knew how to use their ultimate abilities. I’m not really sure what I found so difficult about them in hindsight, but I would always cast Janna’s ult for like a second and then move because I didn’t know it was a channel, and I straight up just refused to use Morgana’s because I didn’t know you could move and like, do stuff while using it. Seemed like a death sentence to me!

I was so heartbroken that I couldn’t play Ahri to save my life because she was an early favourite, but thanks to tect and ARAMs I’ve improved a lot with her as well. The main reasons for that are that I nearly always only use her ultimate as a gap closer or an escape tool, I know how to optimize the use of her passive’s healing, and I know that when you charm someone, you shouldn’t then walk towards them.

I’ve also improved playing shielding supports because I’ve learned more about what a significant impact they can have. Their impact isn’t as clearly visible as healing abilities, so I always kind of just felt like I was doing nothing, but now I know that some shields grant the player additional effects as well. The champion that first brought about this revelation for me was Karma, when I realized that her shield grants a speed boost.

I’ve now played almost every champion in the game (even though I tend to forget everything about them immediately afterwards), and I also get to watch tect play champions that I don’t usually play. This means that my overall knowledge about champions in the game has improved, and while I’m still not really able to proactively play around other champions’ abilities, I’m way less confused and overwhelmed when stuff is happening now.

I know what ping is now, which I never thought was a weakness because I figured it wasn’t very important, but it actually has helped a lot because now I know that when someone pings their high ping (this phrase still makes me lol), it means that they’re lagging and therefore I should play around that.

And of course, I know what enemy raptors are. Although i still have no idea why you should ward them – I feel like that’s probably outdated advice and now it would make more sense to ward the enemy buffs.

Weaknesses

If we’re painting with broad strokes, I would say that my biggest weakness is the laning phase of normal games. The only thing I’m good at in these scenarios is playing defensively and not ruining anything, but at best this just keeps us even and at worst allows us to be bullied. As a support, I feel like I just stand around doing nothing, and as a mid-laner I struggle to CS.

CSing is another huge weakness of mine, though one that doesn’t come up the majority of the time because I rarely play mid. But this is likely why I found success with my main mid champions (Anivia, Lux, Lissandra, and to some extent now Ahri) – they all have abilities with short cooldowns that basically CS for you. Especially Anivia – although her ultimate isn’t available until level 6, it pretty much guarantees you the CS.

Anivia works well with my playstyle because by design she is weak until level 6 anyway and is supposed to play safe – and then when she gains strength, she gains an ability that gives her a CS advantage in many cases (which in my case partially compensates for my weakness) and a bunch of damage at the same time.

That said, although Anivia is my strongest mid champion for those reasons and others already stated, I can’t use her wall. I’ve managed to do all right without it, but I would obviously be a lot better if I could use it effectively. I think it would help me a lot with more aggressive gameplay. I think a good first step would be to commit to using her wall in 1v1s, even if I feel like it’s just for the sake of it, so that I can focus on just placing it rather than whether or not I’m going to screw someone else over.

Continuing with the theme of mid-lane, for some reason I struggle a lot with Lux. At the end of the original project in June, I was probably equally good (or bad) on both Lux and Anivia. But now, I’m way better at Anivia than I am at Lux. This is probably due to the fact that for some reason I get Anivia in ARAMs a lot and Lux very rarely, but it’s something I’d like to correct. Lux is one of my favourites and I want to even out that skill gap so that if I ever play her in mid, it’s more of an equally good alternative rather than a handicap. It would be nice to feel like I had a range of good choices, because as much as I love Anivia, I don’t want to get sick of her.

Deep warding is also a weakness of mine – as I mentioned earlier, I feel like warding as I go/warding whatever area I’m currently in is a strength of mine, but proactive deep warding is not. Part of this is because I usually play very squishy champions who will probably die if they get caught, but I still think that I can work on finding opportunities where I can wander off, even if they are rare.

 

My biggest mechanical weakness right now is the fact that I can only play with a locked camera. Most of the time this isn’t a problem, but it means that I can’t take full advantage of some champions who I would really like to play, such as Galio, Jinx, Xerath, Ashe, etc. Basically any champion with abilities that have a very long range. I think that the ideal starting point would be for me to continue to play with locked camera but practice unlocking it and moving it around in specific scenarios. Part of my problem is that when I do unlock it and try to move the camera, I have very poor control over it and it takes me a while to find the correct spot.

Communication with the team is also a weakness of mine. Obviously no one wants to be that person who won’t shut up, and most of the time staying quiet is a strength as I already noted, but sometimes being the person who never says anything at all can be just as frustrating for others.

As I mentioned earlier, I have good instincts at times, and I need to learn how to communicate my thoughts with the team and start calling shots, especially in the games I play alone with other lower rank players. Most of the time I still have no idea what to do, but more and more frequently I do have ideas, and when I have those ideas I should share them.

I think I should start with practicing pinging (both using the wheel, regular pings and

pinging random things) until it feels as second nature as the one ping I am comfortable using (the ‘asking for assistance’ one, because of course). I already made this easier for myself by changing my key bindings for pings, but I already forget what my new keys are. Also, I accidentally set the ‘enemy is missing’ ping to B, so for a couple of games I spammed question marks every time I tried to recall, before I figured out what was going on. That was a fun time.

Once I have pings down, then maybe we can move on to using actual words. Maybe. And as I start sharing my thoughts more, I will learn more about what risks are appropriate to take, thus helping me with another weakness.

Conversely, I need to improve my knowledge of the confusing League of Legends language so that I can understand others, even if I’m not saying anything myself. People still say things in chat or ping things that have me scratching my head (not actually though, cause I need both hands to play). I’m still of the opinion that we should all strive for inclusiveness in language even when we’re short on time, which means using current terminology as dictated by the game itself and minimizing shorthand, but I have to work on understanding others as well.

This also goes for interpreting pings – I do think that using pings solves a lot of language problems (including actual language barriers), but because players use them in ways that were not intended by the game (enemy is missing ping, I’m looking at you) and because you can basically ping any random thing now, they can be even more confusing than words.

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Well, those are all the things that I can think of for now, but I’m sure this is far from an exhaustive list! If you have tips for me on any of the skills I listed, let me know! If you watch our videos or stream, let me know what YOU think my strengths and weaknesses are or if you think I miscategorized something.

Death snack of the week: mini Tootsie Rolls (seriously I’ve eaten so many of them help)