LoL get's me giggling

I haven't played PC games on my computer in a long time. I believe the last one I played was Nexon's Vindictus. While that is a fun game, we farmed the same missions over and over again and that grew stale pretty fast. I didn't think I would get into any other PC game until TERA is released for North America, but I think I have found one!

The initial install.

Friend of the blog Kavy T. and Johanny S. have gotten me into League of Legends, an online game from Riot. If any of you have played the Warcraft 3 mod "DotA"(Defenders of the Ancients? I don't remember what it stands for.) then you would know how LoL works. In League of Legends(LoL), you have 2 opposing teams of champions, each one controlled by a different player. They have 1 camp on the map for each team, in the bottom left and top right of the map. Along the 3 roads to the camp are turrets that must be destroyed in order to advance. To help you along, minions(known as creeps in DotA), are spawned periodically and automatically advance towards the enemy base, fighting whatever is along their path. The objective is to destroy the enemy's base before they destroy your own.

Killing bots is nothing to be proud of.

So LoL is a pvp based game. There are a few maps to choose from, and the objective is the same on every map. The minions and turrets don't really change either. The only real thing that changes in the game is the part that makes it fun in the first place, the champion roster. As I am typing this, I believe the roster is up to 79 playable champions. Each one has their own set of abilities. It can be generalized however as your tank, burst mage, melee DPS, ranged DPS, stealth assassin and support with lots of little variants of each one. There are also tons of items to buy for your character, as you gain gold throughout a fight. Each game you play has you to start from scratch, so you build your character the way you want it each time you play the game. Because of this, many of the characters have different builds you can play them with. Tied to your main account is a "Summoner Level" and IP which is game currency. You can use that IP to buy things like new champions(you don't have access to all the champs at the start of the game), skins for your champions, and best of all runes for your champions. Runes are "account buffs" that give you additional stats to any character you choose, like HP+1%, Armor Piercing +2%, and other neat things. Adding to that is the Summoner Level again, which gives you 1 Mastery point per level. Those points go into even MORE account buffs, making your character's build more and more customizable. Think about it, instead of having a high Attack Speed character that is focused on damage, you can buff his natural HP with your account buffs, increase his natural Armor and Magic Resistance, then toss Life Stealing items on him so that he attacks at a fast rate and steals a large chunk of his already big HP pool with every hit. Or if you like one of his skills, but it is designed to not be spammed with a long recast and high mana cost, you can buff that too to make an "AP"(Ability Power) version of the character.

Perhaps the most fun, tied into how many characters there are, is the amount of skill required to be successful. I started the game with Vayne and Cassiopiea. Vayne is your typical crossbow DPS champ and Cass is a poisoning harasser. Cass is a tough character for me because I couldn't burst down opponents very easily(which Cass can do if you build her correctly). Vayne was awesome though. She gains bonus damage on every 3rd hit, and she can tumble around to close the gap on enemies or run away. Toss on ASPD gear and you have a character that can whittle away life pretty quickly. Once I got enough IP I bought Leblanc. Leblanc is a "Burst caster"(meaning that she does skills in succession to kill her enemies) with a high skill curve. Her abilities are simple - single shot high damage bolt, Teleport to hit enemies then teleport back to your original position, chain enemies which slows them and ultimately roots them to the ground for a couple of seconds, and Mimic your last spell with bonus damage. The part that makes her difficult is figuring out which skill to use most efficiently. If you Teleport to an enemy and Bolt->Mimic, you may not kill them. Worse yet is that now your Teleport is on recast and so is Bolt and Mimic. You could Chain first, then bolt, then mimic instead. If they don't die, You stomp on them with Teleport. If they STILL aren't dead, Bolt should be ready to cast again. If they don't die from that, well, you may not have wanted to initiate fights with super high HP characters.

I have more kills than anyone on either team and 0 deaths. We still lost this match.

My current record for the game is 10 wins and 15 losses. That sucks but the worse part is that it is almost never my fault. The most recent game I played gave me a 9::0 kill::death ratio. That is 9 kills without even anyone stopping me. When I get to that point, Leblanc can kill just about anyone with all the equipment I bought with the bonus gold from mowing down other players. However, when the rest of your team has 1 kill and 5+ deaths each, they will surrender and you lose the game. "Farming" is when a character dies repeatedly to another and "feeds" them gold and experience. Really, any champ that was fed will be a force to reckon with, so playing with bad players can end in disaster. Luckily, Kavy and Johanny aren't bad at the game. In fact, they are too good; walking away with over 15 kills per match shows skill. They even play with multiple champs, whereas I have my two(for now).

There are many champs to choose from, and that makes the game a lot of fun. My next champ will probably be Sona or Orianna. If you like pvp games and the kind of strategy that revolves around knowing all character's strengths and weaknesses, then give League of Legends a try. It's free anyway, so why not?