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The Summoner's Guidebook: The perfect LoL gank
We've talked a lot about teamfighting lately, but that's not the only kind of engagement in League of Legends. In truth, a large number of kills in most non-professional games occur long before teams ever group up to take an objective. Even in a teamfight-focused gametype like Dominion, smaller skirmishes are frequent. The most successful skirmishes are those where one team outnumbers the other. In cases where the numbers advantage is only apparent after it's already too late, it's called a gank. Ganking is a critical part of LoL. You can put an enemy team out of commission long before the midgame starts by having many successful ganks. While it's common in Summoner's Rift to have the jungler be the ganking linchpin of a team, ganking is not confined to junglers. Roaming supports and mages are also quite effective, and in a gametype like Dominion, anyone who can approach undetected and deliver burst damage or CC can make an effective ganker. This week in the Summoner's Guidebook, we'll talk about setting up for ganks and some ways to make them pay off more effectively.
The Summoner's Guidebook: Our favorite League of Legends bottom lane teams
Although building a team composition in League of Legends is all about synergy, the bottom lane in Summoner's Rift is the most critical. In Dominion, players may split up as the needs demand, and the other characters in Summoner's Rift spend around 15 minutes of each game on their own against a lone enemy. The bottom lane has two characters that are essentially joined at the hip for most of the game. While the support will eventually roam free and the carry may engage in some solo pushing or farming, those two characters spend much of the game together. It makes sense then that these two characters should mesh well. Here's a list of my favorite teams. If you're stumped on whom to pick for carry or support, you should try some of these out.
League of Legends shows off new champions, spectator mode at E3
Riot Games' League of Legends is one of the biggest free-to-play titles around -- it started off as a spiritual successor to the old Defense of the Ancients mod, but has since grown, strictly by word of mouth and organic growth, up into its own industry. Riot hasn't actually announced player numbers for the title yet, but this is a huge game online, consistently landing in the top spots on Xfire and other services' most-played lists. If you've never played (and why not? It's free!), the basic structure of the game has you controlling a champion on a real-time strategy-style battleground, and Riot has been releasing one of these new champions every few weeks for quite a while now. In the game's booth at E3 last week, we got to hear about three of the upcoming new champions, as well as brand new feature to the game designed to get even more players involved: A spectator mode.
