[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to the Four Wards podcast.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Hey, what's up?
[00:00:08] Speaker A: It's Eric Brah, voice of Draven, jerks.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: And velcos, and you're listening to the.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Forwards podcast, here to help you move forward and lead.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Hello, and welcome to episode 441 of the four Wards podcast. I'm your host, as usual, despite stumbling over my words. I'm Jack Soman, and I've got with me three other words to help you move forward in League of Legends. Free shooters here, of course.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Hello, episode welcomers.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Yes, we've also got Mike of many names.
[00:00:58] Speaker C: Howdy. Howdy.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: And pillow pet.
[00:01:01] Speaker D: Hello there, guys.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: We are the Forwards podcast. Some of us stream on Twitch. I can be found at Twitch TV Jackson, where it's probably just gonna be path of exile streams for another couple weeks. Free shooter can be found at Twitch TV. Free eshooter. That's right. There are three e's in free, and pillow Pet can be found at Twitch TV. Pillow pet.
All of those links, by the way, are in the episode description, along with the link to our podcast website, to our Patreon, a link to our email, all those things. So check out the episode description, guys, so you don't have to remember the shit I say.
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And, yeah, it is greatly appreciated.
[00:01:56] Speaker A: Yep. Thank you, Patrons.
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Shout it out in every episode for as long as you maintain that subscription.
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All right, the meat and potatoes of our topic tonight is the patch. It's patch week. Patch 1415 is here, and we're going to do our usual breaking down of the changes that we think are most interesting, we're most frustrated by or excited about, whatever it may be.
But first, I want to highlight the most important change in the patch, and I quote, fixed, an issue that caused the scoreboard to not correctly sort itself.
[00:03:17] Speaker A: Yay.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: Thank fuck.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: This was very annoying.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: It was very annoying. And it made champions whose position was naturally ambiguous more annoying because you didn't know necessarily who you were leaning against. Most likely. Obviously, they could still choose to just swap, but most people didn't.
So it's nice at least having a good assumption of who you are gonna be up against. And this. This bug took away that safety of assumption.
Okay, who wants to highlight an actual, like, meaningful change and not just a bug? Fixed.
[00:04:03] Speaker C: I'll go first.
Let's sort of admit that we were a little bit wrong about how powerful Aurora was. Cause we sort of figured she'd be more of a mid flex to top. No, she's pretty much a top laner. And holy crap, was she powerful. She got a micro patch to nerf her armor, her percent health damage, the cooldown on her q, and the damage it does to minions. And that was just a little bit ago. Then she also got a suite of nerfs coming in the patch.
So she's gotten nerfs to her passive. That gives her movement speed.
It's given her 5% down to 2%, plus a little bit of an AP ratio. So it's a little bit of a buff at the insanely high ap ratios, but you're not getting there.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: Most likely, you shouldn't be building that much ap in the first place.
[00:04:57] Speaker C: On her, the only technical buff on the patch is the twofold hex is your q. And it went from the recast being half a second to 0.1 second. And your q two can no longer miss its original target. Less of a buff and really more of a, you're going to get what you intend to have. Other than that, everything else across the board is just nerfs. Her w, which is her invisibility now, what was her initial cooldown is now her final one point wonder. Cooldown.
So you lost 4 seconds total on that?
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:05:37] Speaker C: Your e, the weirding, the dash speed that it gave you is going from a set speed to a number plus multiplicative to your movespeed.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: This is a buff. Once you have boots two, in most cases, it is a nerf for boots one or no boots.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:05:58] Speaker C: And then they took a pretty large chunk of damage off of her r. They took 50 base damage off of it across the board and then 5% off her ap ratio.
So they've been hammering her with Sweden Nerfs because, well, she just absolutely dominated the top lane.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: She basically was just being a ranged bully with no counterplay who would win duels if anyone actually tried to gank her.
[00:06:29] Speaker C: She had real, real safety with the w and her e, so it was really hard to gank her. It was really hard to kill her. And she could just out fight pretty much everyone else on top line that wasn't an ad carry.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, as a newly released champion and in specifically top lane, she had almost a 53% win rate.
She's down to, like 51% now, though. Still nearly Perma banned in pro play for the one region that plays her.
[00:07:01] Speaker C: They don't have the patch on. So she is pre full set of nerfs.
That's why she's getting perma ban, because they do not want her to have their full percent health ratios and her q cooldowns, etcetera.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Fair.
But, yeah, I think she's still probably good.
[00:07:23] Speaker C: It seems she's probably still gonna be a pretty damn good top laner.
Yeah.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: So since you started talking about pro at the end free shooter, you wanna talk about some more pro targeted changes?
[00:07:36] Speaker A: Which one?
[00:07:39] Speaker B: Take your pick.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: Sure. I'll start with the easy one, which is Ezreal. Yeah, you're not wrong. I'll start with the easier one, which is Ezreal, because he's my boy.
So he's been getting a ton of pick in pro play, and, you know, he's always high presence in solo queue, but got even higher.
So they're doing a partial revert to the buffs they gave him, where they're taking 10% ad ratio off of his q, which kind of deserved. He was getting picked in two lanes.
And whenever Ezreal's good outside of bot lane, there's a problem.
[00:08:21] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: So.
But I'm glad they didn't go too far. They just like, okay, let's just tap down a little bit. One of the buffs we gave him, so I think that's fine.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: I just find it funny how much his q ratio has ping ponged up and down over the years.
[00:08:39] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: This is the knob they always tune to make him better or worse.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: I would rather them be tuning this knob than his, like, e cooldown. I remember there's a period where they, like, cranked his e cooldown way the hell up, and it just felt awful, awful to play him because a lot of his power budgets in having the safety of his e.
I just want.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: To point out this is the fourth time the 80 ratio specifically on his q has been changed in 2024.
[00:09:14] Speaker C: Well, they still haven't gotten it right.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: I just. That's how much this is. The knob they changed specifically to make him good or bad is four times this year.
[00:09:27] Speaker A: Yep. It's gone from 135 to 130 to 135 to 140 to 130.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: Yup.
It's fucking hilarious.
And it's not like it hasn't changed, like a couple years ago as well.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: But, yeah, four times this year.
All right, I want to talk about another champion that tends to build tier items. That's the way I'm going to Segway off of Ezreal to talk about Cassiopeia.
So if you do watch pro play, you probably have seen Cassiopeia get pulled out as a counterpick to Tristana. But Cassiopeia has actually just kind of been secretly good, but with a really weak early laning phase keeping her down.
So what they're changing here is trying to make it so that she is less mana gated, but also has a little bit less of a crazy late game.
So they're buffing her base mana. They are nerfing her mana growth.
They are reducing the mana cost on her q. When you rank it up, which is her second max, reducing the mana cost on her w. When you rank it up, which is her last max, reducing the mana cost at all ranks of her e and slightly reducing the ap ratio on her e, they're also nerfing the ap ratio on her q. But the point of that ability is mostly to be able to spam your e with the high power version.
All told, what this should do is she can actually fight back without instantly running, um, in the early laning phase because quite literally you would run, um, on a single trade in laning phase on her before.
So that shouldn't be nearly as punishing. But when she hits, like, full six items, she is going to be a little bit less of a. Oh, my God, this champion is just unfightable levels of damage. She's still going to fucking merc you. But there's a chance maybe your tank will be able to survive a second and a half.
All right, who wants to go next?
[00:11:38] Speaker D: I can talk about a colleague. So a colleague.
What I would, in my eyes, consider a buff.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: Yeah, except they call it a nerf.
[00:11:52] Speaker D: Yeah. So her w cooldown, which is her one point wonder, is actually getting a reduction down to 16 seconds at max. Rank starts at 20 and her r damage is being increased, but the cooldown is being increased as well. And that just means she'll be able to kill you a little less often. In lane, I feel like this is just an all around buff.
So her initial damage on her r went from ad scaling to 360 with a 30% ap ratio and a 50% ad ratio to 110. Scale into 330 on her initial damage with a 30% Ap. The ratios are unchanged. And then her second cast, minimum damage went from 60 scaling to 200 to 70 scaling to 210. So just a ten damage buff on the base damage, and then it went. Her second cast at maximum damage is 180, scaling to 600 from 210 to 630.
So the damage isn't a whole lot.
It's not going to be very noticeable early.
The cooldown reduction is going to hurt her early in lane, I feel like, um. But it's not going to be enough to stop her.
Uh, because she is one of those champions that can build hybrid, I feel like. So if she needs to pick up some CDR elsewhere, she can just pick up any of these ad items and I don't. I can't remember. Does Eclipse or is it centered sky? One of them have CDR, I think.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: Eclipse.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Both of them do.
[00:13:48] Speaker D: Okay. Both of them do. So both of those items are really good on her. Um, she gonna pop eclipse really quick. I think late game. Akali is gonna be a monster now with her w almost up probably twice as often. She could probably get it off twice now in a longer team fight. With all the CDR she's probably gonna be building, I don't think this is gonna ever hurt Akali.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: It's all right. Can I vent for a moment?
[00:14:21] Speaker D: Oh, yeah.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: At level six, Akali has a longer cooldown on her ult, but she also gained 60 base damage between the initial cast and a full execute recast.
[00:14:34] Speaker C: Yep, that's what I was saying. This is. This is a huge buff.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: She gained 40 base damage. At level six, if she gets the minimum, just. You're healthy. But she's hitting second cast of her ulta.
That is a significant base damage buff on a champion that already has base damages that are way the fuck too high. They took 100 base damage off Shuriken flip a couple patches ago, and it still hits like a truck.
Like that is how high her base damages are.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: At max rank, the base damage change is now neutralized. It's 30 less on the initial cast, 30 more if you're getting the proper execute. And it has the same cooldown. So at level 16, she does the same damage as before, but she gets a cooldown reduction on her shroud, the most annoying ability in her kit.
This is just a buff at all stages of the game and I hate it so much. This champion is back in my permaban queue. I had briefly moved to Zed as my permaban because he's super popular and obnoxious as fuck. Nah, I'm back to Perma banning akali. Fuck this champion.
[00:15:39] Speaker C: And it gets a little bit worse because some of the items that have been a little bit buffed are some of the items that Akali likes to buy.
So I'm with Jack a little bit here. I'm hating this.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm really confused on why they called this a nerfenk.
[00:16:05] Speaker C: The nerf is she can use it less often. But how often are you using your ult on cooldown?
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Well, they also justified it as her late game ULT base damage decreases. It's net even. So, like, yep. What base damage decreases?
[00:16:22] Speaker C: It's. It's tactically net negative in only one scenario. If it's minimum damage, you gain negative.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: If you're not getting the proper execute because. So her UlT does bonus damage based on the target's missing health. If they are at 30% health or less, it does full bonus damage. So if she is hitting you when you are at 30% or less, her ULT does the same damage at rank, at rank three as it did before. If you are healthier than 30%, it is a damage decrease at level 16 compared to the previous.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: And at second rank it is exactly the same. The changes or sorry, it is just a buff, I should say. It's just the ten and 30 minimum maximum damage. The initial cast base stayed exactly the same, so someone was doing some kind of drugs I want to try when they wrote these changes because these are insane.
[00:17:18] Speaker D: I don't understand like the reasoning either where they're just like, oh, Akali should be more powerful. Early game like that don't make sense to me.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: This to me feels like a they're testing the waters for how far can they push her without breaking the game so she'll show up at worlds like.
[00:17:36] Speaker D: Akali's most weakest point is levels one through three. After that, it's kind of over because how dramatically her q energy cost reduces. But like, your time to bully Akali is levels one through three and try to get her in a deficit from there. After that, it's. It's kind of over, I feel like.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: And once she hits six, what is it, Mike?
[00:18:04] Speaker C: This is to combat. The ad carries in mid, give her more power early so that when she hits six, she blows them up. You, they want to try and get ad carries out of mid. You bring the assassins back. And this is one way to do it. They've. They've done some changes on multiple assassins in this patch.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: Yeah, it's not a bad theory.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: All right, uh, who wants to go next?
[00:18:32] Speaker A: Oh, well, speaking of ADC, trying to get ad carries out of mid.
Um, so I'll just do all mine because one is really quick, one is just fleet footwork. Got a very minor nerfenk. Um, so it was, um, healing eight to 110, scaling linearly. It now heal plus bonus ad and ap, those ratios haven't changed. It's now, um, five to 120 following stat progression multiplier.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: So you want me to explain what that is, or do you want to explain?
[00:19:09] Speaker A: Please, go ahead.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: So all champions do not gain the same amount of stats going from, like, level one to two as they do from going from level, like, 16 to 17.
There is a, like, curve of, like, a percentage of whatever your growth stat is that you get. What they're saying is fleet footwork will now follow that same curve. They do specifically say in the patch, note this means that fleet footwork does not heal for as much or more than it did before until level 14 plus.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
Which.
That's mostly when you care about the healing late game. You honestly just, at least, I mostly care about it for the move speed proc. It gives.
So, yeah, the. It's just basically a nerf to fleet to take away some of the safety of ad carries. But the other tap ad carries got is nerfing some of their items.
Specifically.
There's two, like, of the kind of unhit ish items and the two armor pen items. So I'll do the armor pin first because it's quicker. The armor pen, Lord doms, and mortal reminder.
Oh, sorry. It's actually different changes. I thought it was both armor pen, but Lord Dom's the armor pen went from 40% to 35%. And then mortal reminder, the ad went from 40 to 35.
So just trying to take some of the armor pen out of the game, trying to make tanks a little bit more viable. Again.
[00:20:49] Speaker C: Interesting to note here. Now the armor pen is even across the board for all armor pen items except for the lethality one. That one can actually now scale higher than the others if you were building nothing but lethality.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: Just what we needed. Tanks getting assassinated.
[00:21:11] Speaker A: Yep. Love it.
So the other items that got changed were static shiv and kraken Slayer, which were both very popular first items for a lot of ADC's.
Neither of these items give crit anymore. They haven't since the midseason change, but both were popular first item rushes because of a lot of the power that they gave was kind of too good to pass up. So both of them got a five, got their move speed tapped down from 7% to 5%.
Kraken Slayer, it.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: So it lost damage for ranged, yes.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: Yeah. It was 140 to scaling to 310 on the three hit passive. It's now 80% effective for ranged champions. So 112 to 248, which is pretty decently significant.
And then static shiv, it's only other change. It got 100 gold more expensive, which makes sense. Part of the reason it was rushed is it gave a lot of stats for the price.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: Okay, so here's my question for you, mister Marksman player.
[00:22:25] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: Do you think the Kraken Slayer change specifically is enough to drive the ad carries that were buying Kraken Slayer into crit builds to just revert back to like, infinite the edge rush type crit builds like they were doing prior to crack and Slayer getting retooled?
[00:22:43] Speaker A: Um, I don't know if it's enough, to be honest.
It's weird. Like, because I feel because Kraken Slayer should be more of like an on hit item, but it's being built by the crit marksman. Um, so no, I don't think it is enough of a change. I think, like, the stats it gives are still, like, too good.
Like giving both the ad and the attack speed and the move speed, plus a good passive on it. Like, with how fast a lot of games are, I think it's a good way to be, like, relevant at one item by getting all the stats you need. And same with Shiv, honestly, so I. Honestly, so no, I don't see it changing just because of this.
[00:23:41] Speaker C: Like, I think I have a counterpoint to that.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: Go ahead.
[00:23:45] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:23:46] Speaker C: We've been seeing on other specific ad carries really frequently bloodthirster rush.
I think this might start pushing specifically misfortune Draven. Obviously. I think this might start pushing people towards that.
[00:24:04] Speaker B: Possibly.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: Possibly. But I think a lot of the champions that we're building is. Were ones that really wanted the attack speed.
[00:24:11] Speaker C: Like attack speeds pretty. Pretty heavy on it. Yeah.
[00:24:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, it still gives, you know, kraken is 40% attack speed and shiv is what, 50 or 45? So like, you know, Zeri would be. Yeah, Zeru would be rushing this jinx rushes it. Ashe rushes it, like, and I.
[00:24:30] Speaker C: And it's impossible to replace the passive on the static shiv if you have a hard waveclear champion jhin example, even, like Zeri, that. That explosion is really useful.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: Yeah, it's nice.
No, I don't. I don't think this is enough. I think that, like, the niches these two items fill, like, when the. All the items got changed, I I was curious where these items would fit in because it kind of seemed like they didn't belong in either the crit or the on hit camp.
But really, it's the other side of no. These are kind of the mandatory first items because it gives you a bit of a one item power spike to actually be relevant as and ad carry. So I think that in order for, like, the true crit builds to come back, these items almost kind of need to go away or get a rework in some way or just not be as good as, like, just the stat stick first item rush make you relevant.
[00:25:35] Speaker C: Well, there's another possibility in that the champions that were bound to these two items as their first item, might be going away and others might be coming to take their place.
Seeing more MF, seeing more draven, seeing more Jyn.
Yeah.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Whenever I get filled to bot lane, I just ban MF now because she's so oppressive.
[00:26:01] Speaker C: Although, speaking of ad carries, I have another change for you. And that's Riverus.
[00:26:07] Speaker B: Okay, go ahead.
[00:26:09] Speaker C: Varus. Got a nice suite of buffs coming in and a slight nerf, but it really. It's less of a nerf because it's based on his attack speed. So he got a base 80 buff, he got 280, just baseline. It's a nice little tap up. And his passive, which is living vengeance. Anytime you killed a minion, you gained a little attack speed bonus. It was 10%. Now it's scaling at one, seven, and 1310, 15 and 20%.
He also. Anytime you got a champion takedown, you had a big 40% attack speed buff. Now that's upping as well. You're getting a 50% attack speed buff, and you're getting attack speed as ad and AP. 25% of that, plus your attack speed cap, is now above the two and a half. It allows you to exceed it up to three. So this really, really, I think, cements him more into the on hit camp. You can get real high attack speed.
And then his one little nerf was blighted quiver, which the base damage went down at all ranks.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: Would you say these passive changes get varys excited?
[00:27:20] Speaker C: Uh, yeah, yeah.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: It's.
[00:27:24] Speaker C: It's a, it's pretty, pretty common to the jinx form. Yep.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: Oh.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: I couldn't resist, listeners. I'm sorry. Not sorry.
All right, I want to talk about an item that literally no one except maybe Vladimir was building, and I don't know if these changes are enough to change that.
[00:27:44] Speaker A: Hey, Ryze builds it, too.
[00:27:48] Speaker B: Maybe I'll explain why I don't think most people were building this. So the item is cosmic drive. And cosmic drive is supposed to be, a, the movement speed item for mages, and b, like, kind of an AP bruisery type item. The problem cosmic drive has is mana based champions get all the ability haste they need off of building one or two lost chapter items, and those items give them the mana to be able to spam their abilities.
So cosmic drive has kind of been left in the dust by basically all mana users. Its only core user, really was Vladimir.
So what theyre changing. They are buffing the health on it just straight up. Its going to 350 health instead of 250. And then theyre making it a better rush item because it now has a floor of giving at least 40 movement speed at level eight or below, whereas before it gave 40 movement speed at level eight, but it would give less if you were below level eight. Now, you're not likely getting a cosmic drive before level seven or eight unless you really pop off, but it makes it a better rush item on those games where you do pop off.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: That's a lot of move speed, too. That's like a second tier, two boots.
[00:29:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Cosmic drive gives a lot of movement speed. And by the way, the condition on that is dealing ability damage to an enemy champion, and you get that movement speed for 2 seconds.
[00:29:17] Speaker A: And that's why Ryze loves it.
[00:29:19] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a really lenient condition.
[00:29:24] Speaker C: But.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: The item just, it suffers from. It's an AP bruiser item with ability haste. And most AP champions are mana users and have too much ability haste from a lost chapter item.
[00:29:34] Speaker C: The one person who really would use this, Lilia, she's sort of gated behind Liandry's and blackfire torch. Those are her two items. So you would almost never see cosmic drive until third item, at which point.
[00:29:46] Speaker B: She'S building more tanky in the first place, or she's building like Rylai's or something.
[00:29:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:52] Speaker B: And honestly, slowing enemies does more than speeding yourself up when you're already as fast as Lilia.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: And honestly, on most champions, I still don't see buying this before third item.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it still remains a Vladimir rush item, a rise, eventual item, and that's probably about it. Maybe Casio with a couple of the.
[00:30:13] Speaker C: Changes they've brought to another champion that coming in, it might end up being something if they're trying to push someone into a different build.
I'm being a little cagey here with him because it's Jax's next talking point.
[00:30:26] Speaker B: I guess I'll talk about that now then.
So there's a whole bunch of changes around Sylas.
They're trying to make him more like a bruiser and less of an assassin. So they are across the board trying to nerf his AP ratios and base damages and such and make him more about repeated hits of spells.
So to that end, they're buffing his base armor a little bit. They are reducing the cooldown on his q and nerfing both base damage and ratio a little bit of. They are changing his w by a lot. They're nerfing the damage on it, just the ratio, not the base damage this time. And they are reducing the AP scaling on his w and giving it bonus health scaling. Now, Mike did the math on this when this change was put on PBE, basically. And unless the enemy has a chogath and you are stealing his ult regularly, you are never going to have enough bonus health on items that Sylas actually builds for this to catch up to the old amount. This is a nerf to his healing pretty much across the board.
[00:31:31] Speaker C: If I did it right, you would need to have something like 3000 bonus health for it to even out if you're building non full AP builds. So you'd have to get almost entirely bruiser items. And then maybe a warmogs.
[00:31:45] Speaker B: Yeah, they're also nerfing the ap ratio on his e, which it was a fucking 100% ap ratio. Now it's 80%.
So all in all, jungle Sylas is happy. Cause Q is his first max and it got a shorter cooldown. But all other sylas are real sad about this.
[00:32:06] Speaker D: So what you're saying is like bring Sylas into the top lane now and build full tank.
[00:32:12] Speaker B: Honestly, heart steal Silas might not be the worst thing in the world with these changes.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Yay.
[00:32:17] Speaker B: I love hate it.
[00:32:19] Speaker D: Heart still warmongs. Let's go.
[00:32:21] Speaker C: Listen, I was in there in a cosmic drive. Hey, we got it.
[00:32:24] Speaker A: I was that dirty player that played tank sylas and tank echo top. Bring it back. I loved it. It was such an awful thing for the game, but God, was it fun to play and not play again.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: I still just love playing Sylas when there is a cho'gath because Sylas, when he gets a whole bunch of cho'gath stacks, looks funny as shit.
[00:32:45] Speaker D: I still have PTSD from when Silas E used to give him a shield.
[00:32:51] Speaker B: Yeah. God, I forgot about why they ever thought that needed to be a thing.
[00:32:58] Speaker D: It was ridiculous.
[00:32:59] Speaker A: I think that's part of why tanks I was top also worked.
[00:33:04] Speaker D: All right. It was such a beefy shield.
[00:33:07] Speaker B: It was pillow pet. Tell us about a different kind of AP champion.
[00:33:12] Speaker D: So I wanted to briefly talk about Aurelian Sol because they recently buffed him and realized that that was a bad idea and brought him back down to earth for saying aruneterra.
They nerfed him his mana costs all across the board except his r. His cost per second on his q was 30. Scale into 50. And now it's went up by five. It is now 35, scale into 55. And that's going to nerf those people that would just tap spam or just spam their queue because that's where he got most of his stacks. Now since they nerfed his stacks, didn't it?
Yeah, it's been a while.
His astral flight is now back to 1500 across all ranks. Range was 15 hundreds. No, no, it was. They moved it. Moved it to be 1500 scale and 1900. And now it's just 1500 across every rank because they buffed that and he became a roaming monster.
His e is just 80 scale into 90 on the mana costs. So damage is all the same. Just his mana usage. He's just gonna burn through it a lot quicker.
Noticed him in this last patch. He was just in every game. I feel like I played in some sort of way. And he was just a monster early game and monster mid game and a monster late game. He could cast his, uh. What is it? His awakened alt or what is it?
His star.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: The sky's descent.
[00:34:56] Speaker D: The sky descent? Yeah, from mid lane and hit you in both bottom and top lane and just whatever he wanted to do, it was just nasty. He didn't have to do far. So I'm glad to see that they're going to make him a little weaker early because if he gets any kind of lead early game, it's just over. You might as well just get out of the game.
[00:35:18] Speaker C: His scaling is still obscene, but the one thing to note with this is his astral flight is still a longer range than it was before. Hits buff. So used to just be 1200 at all ranks and they change it to 15 scaling.
Now it's just 1500.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Yep.
I was I was looking up to see if this was a full revert or not because I couldn't remember.
[00:35:42] Speaker D: It's not meaningful. As far as you know, they didn't change a whole lot. They just realized that they overtuned him and they just want to back him down a little bit with mana costs.
[00:35:51] Speaker B: So they did the same.
[00:35:53] Speaker C: Actually.
[00:35:55] Speaker D: I just saw the mana cost change.
[00:35:57] Speaker C: No, no.
[00:35:58] Speaker D: From 80 to 90.
[00:35:58] Speaker C: It used to be 80 at all ranks, and then it went from 80 to 100. And then it used to be a scalar rank that they changed just to 80 and they went, that's a little too much. And they boosted it just to 90.
So it's still technically, according to a couple patches ago, a little bit of a buff.
[00:36:18] Speaker B: I just hope these changes are enough to make him actually mana gated enough to need to build a mana item again. Because I've really hated the Rylai's rush. Aurelion soul God.
[00:36:28] Speaker A: So obnoxious.
[00:36:30] Speaker D: Never be able to escape anything from him. Kite shit forever.
[00:36:35] Speaker B: Yup.
[00:36:36] Speaker C: The one great thing is that that singularity no longer just. If you're Annie or anyone who has any form of minions, it's no longer just a death sentence for the minions.
[00:36:46] Speaker B: I mean, the pet champion I usually play as Malzahar and I still will dodge if I get an aurelion soul because I don't want to feed him. Free stacks.
[00:36:54] Speaker C: It is free stacks. There's nothing you can do. It's instantly dead because Malzahar's minions are dumb and they don't have any health.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: Don't worry, his highest win rate on this patch is still rushing Rylais. It hasn't changed enough.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: Alright, I'm tilted now. Talk about boots. You two. You guys both have boots on your lists.
[00:37:16] Speaker C: You can start it off.
[00:37:17] Speaker D: Yeah, real quick. Just the noticeable one that piqued my interest was the plated steel caps. Price went up 200 gold, so from 1000 to 1200. But the plating on it, which was your auto attack damage reduction, went from 8% to 10%. This was like.
This is a rush. Usually in top lane when you're 280 matchups or if you're just. And you just wanted to get into like survive lane farm lanes and you weren't really interested in interacting with your opponent, you just wanted to survive the poke, get your wave and back away.
They're doing away with a lot of that. Trying to incentivize the fighting again in top lane, bring back the skirmishes.
And I think they succeeded in that because there's not a lot of top laners that can opt into free boots, so they don't get that option a whole lot. There's a few.
So you're better off if you got the 1200 gold when you're back. Backing is to get like, a pickaxe and a longsword if you got the gold instead of going in straight into your plated steel caps because it's too much of a gold sink.
[00:38:31] Speaker C: So to sew it on, that plate of steel caps are a little bit better, even though they're more expensive. Every other pair of boots pretty much got straight nerfs across the board, except for two pairs, the symbolic soles and the symbiotic. Symbiotic. Thank you. And, oh, the zephyr. Zephyr. Thank you. I can never remember that thing's damn name. But pretty much across the board, either you have stat nerfs or a price hike or both. So merc treads are a little bit more expensive. They're 1200. Their magic resist is now only 20 from 25. Berserker greaves lost 5% attack speed. Ionian boots went up 100 gold, and you lost two. Summoner haste sork shoes lost three magic pens. Swifties are another hundred gold. They just, boots were really efficient and really wanted to be done, and they're just tapping that a little bit.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: Some specifically say, summarizing all these changes, that they want your first legendary item to be the optimal way to play out laning phase. Upgrading your movespeed should be worthwhile. If you need to dodge skillshots or close the gap on a ranged opponent.
Their intention is for you to go first core item, then finish your boots.
[00:39:46] Speaker A: Yep.
And yeah, the ones that were typically rushed, most like murk treads, zerkers, and plated steel caps, were the ones kind of hit the most, at least in, like, either cost or stat changes. Czerka is honestly the lightest of the three with just the 5% less attack speed of, um. I think I'm for the people who rushed it.
[00:40:10] Speaker C: I don't think it's gonna change. The thing is, you're still gonna want to start out, you're gonna want on the. The windshielders, that's still pretty much their first forever.
[00:40:18] Speaker D: Yeah, I would say one boot rush that's still viable is still gonna be your boots of lucidity just because of the ability haste that it does have. And they even talk about that they don't want to kill the ability haste on it. It's still a really good rush item for mages. And anybody who needs the ability haste early it's still a really good viable rush item. It's only a hundred gold difference. It's just half a minion wave.
[00:40:46] Speaker B: Yep. They continue to be the best boots and probably the best rush on the like, ap bruisers that were building them before, such as Sylas or Vladimir.
All right, any other thoughts on the patch before we move on?
[00:41:05] Speaker C: I think that's it for me.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: Still don't take dark harvest. They got buffed. It's not enough.
[00:41:10] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, agreed. Dark harvest got buffed. It's still shit. Don't take it on anyone, ever. All right, Pillowpet, I think you're the one who gave us our trinket tip, so I'm gonna let you read it.
[00:41:22] Speaker D: So if you're running teleport and you have to back to, you want to back, and you have enough gold to buy your item, you can start your tp with about eight gold left, need your item and just spam buy it and you'll have enough time to get the eight gold passively and still get your tp off in time. So 8 seconds is a good amount of time to gain back in lane instead of waiting till your gold spot or until you got enough gold and then tp. 8 seconds. A lot happens in that. That's a minion wave spawns every 30, so a lot can happen in clear.
[00:41:57] Speaker B: What this means is like, start channeling your teleport with eight gold or less left before your gold ticks up to the threshold to buy. And then while your teleport's channeling, reopen the shop and mash buy on the item.
It is something you should practice because it is definitely easy to fuck up and just not buy your item.
But yeah, this is one of those, like, I do this instinctively, automatically. Things where I forget to tell people they could do that because it's so ingrained in me.
So this is why I appreciate having people like Pillowpet around to remind me of things that I take for granted and share them with the listeners.
[00:42:38] Speaker D: It's definitely a.
Definitely something that can save you a lot in lane and give you a little bit of an edge up on your opponent. Cause eight, like I said, 8 seconds is a lot of time.
[00:42:52] Speaker B: Absolutely. This. This can be the difference between getting the cannon when they're crashing the wave in because you had to back and not getting the cannon.
[00:42:59] Speaker C: This also works for the aram portal. While you're channeling into that, you can buy because you're gaining gold.
[00:43:08] Speaker B: Yes, although the timing is much harder on the Aram portal.
[00:43:11] Speaker C: No, but you gain more gold faster. So it's about, yeah, it's like you.
[00:43:14] Speaker A: Need, you should if you're doing it at Aram, it's like you do it with like five gold left and then start spam. Clicking the item.
[00:43:24] Speaker B: Yep. Alright, let's get to some listener questions. Our first listener question comes from Codexninja. Codexninja writes hi wards. For better or worse, I generally am a win one game, lose one game kind of player. I very seldom streak on the rift or IRL and my biggest win streak ever was like five games. I went on a six game win streak, lost a couple, then a seven streak, and it felt like riding a rocket to silver. Most recently, I've taken a small tumble and it's a frustrating mindset to deal with. What strategies do you employ to handle win streaks and loss streaks? Does winning a ton of games in a row mean anything?
[00:44:00] Speaker A: Especially suddenly it means whatever you're doing, keep doing it. I think I talked about this earlier in the year during split one. I had a like eight or nine game win streak to get into Emerald for the first time and I was just playing smolder and ADTF back when that was broken. So like, okay, these two champs are working. Keep playing. These two champs. Turns out they were both very broken and got tremendous nerfs, but I used them while they were broken and to good success.
[00:44:34] Speaker B: Yup.
Alright, I feel like this question was tailor made for me because if you've ever watched me stream league, you know that my streams tend to be the streakiest shit on the fucking planet.
Against my better judgment, what I should be doing when I have a bad lost streak is going, oh, that's two games in a row where I played well and it did not matter. I need to take a break.
Yeah, because that's what inevitably happens is I get into the mindset of, dude, I dominated my lane opponent, I roamed and made things happen, and then my team just chose to lose the game. I can win this. Let's go again. And that is the wrong attitude to have, because after those two losses, I am going to be less trustful of my teammates, I'm going to be less invested in trying to help other people help carry me, and it is harder for me to turn games around when they are not just one sided stomps because I've had those games that felt like they should have been wins that were losses streak in there.
Similarly, when I'm on a win streak, just keep writing it until you get a bad game.
I have literally had days where I just win six in a row because I'm on fucking blessed queue. And we take those, just keep going until the blessed queue ends because you never know when you're gonna get another one of those.
[00:46:01] Speaker A: Also, it's important to recognize, like, if you have one of those games where, like, you did not play well, but you still ended up winning, that's still a sign of, like, okay, I should take a break.
[00:46:18] Speaker B: Like, yes, I highly recommend have some other game that is not a MOBA at all to help reset your. Your mental state, even. It doesn't need to be a long break. Go play. I mean, in my case, like, go play path of exile for 30 minutes, run a couple maps, or go play Final Fantasy 14 and do a dungeon or something or whatever your personal game is. Like, go do a run of a roguelike and then come back for you. Go for it.
[00:46:52] Speaker D: It's. It's also, like, important when you're taking those breaks to even between wins because a lot of times you'll carry over, like, the. If you had a game where you're like, we'll just throw 15 and one out there and you're just walking around the map decimating everybody, you're going to carry that mindset in and you're going to take that, that cockiness and that being fed into a level one fight and that when you're on an even playing field, so it's good to just, like, even go use a bathroom, get a drink of water, just kind of reset just a little bit and then talking a little bit on the losses. What I like to do is, like, I limit, I try to limit my ranked games to, like, a three game block.
So if I'm losing, I will limit it to three games. That's it, and I'm done. Like, I will switch over to norms or arams or anything, just. But I will put rank down. But, like, with jacks, it's hard to quit when you're winning. So, yeah, just ride that wave, and then once you get a loss, be like, all right, I'm done. Like, just set yourself a goal, and if you beat that goal, just be like, all right, I would take a break. You know, I'm good for then.
Or just like, yeah, ride the wave or set yourself a goal and tell yourself when to stop. But if you're on a lost streak, just limit your games because you're. You're going to just carry negativity into your next game and just expect a loss. So it's very important to give yourself a mental break because this game is just very taxing mentally.
[00:48:19] Speaker A: I have a life hack to help yourself remember to take break between games, especially the bad ones.
I keep a big bottle of water on my desk and every time I back, well, I try to every time I back, but definitely every time I die, I take a big swig of water just to like help me to remember to stay hydrated while I'm gaming. And this has two effects. When I'm having bad games, I need to get up to get more water between them more often and also I need to get up to pee between games more often, both of which get me up and away from the screen, have that little bit of mental reset time and I'm drinking more water, which is healthy.
[00:48:58] Speaker B: It's true.
I like that. I might start employing that if people don't start redeeming my force me to drink on my stream more often.
All right, let's, let's get our other listener question, the one we actually got in this past week. Again, listeners, the
[email protected] we need questions. We always need more questions.
[00:49:22] Speaker A: And we will be out after this one.
[00:49:24] Speaker B: Yep. So our last question of the day comes from Tigilla the killa, who writes. So that's how you said I. I think that's how you say that. That's what I'm going with. If I've pronounced it wrong, I'm sorry. Tgilla the killa. Feel free to correct me.
He writes, I have recently picked up nocturne. As a champion for jungle, I tend to have a lot of map awareness. I try to keep track of the enemy jungle and do counter objectives. If he's at dragon, I'll do grubs, vice versa. It just seems that even at such a low elo, people tend to be better than iron ranked. It's kind of weird. I played a lot in the past. I talked about it earlier, but I don't know if there's just that many smurf accounts or people in Iron actually know what they are doing. Has anyone else had trouble climbing out of low Elo?
[00:50:07] Speaker A: The average skill level of people who play this game has gotten so much higher than it has in the past. I remember back when I started watching pro play in like season three, you were considered a pro level ad carry, if you could. They called it orb walking back then, which is essentially walking away from a fight. Still auto attacking kiting now. You like have to be able to do that to be gold.
[00:50:35] Speaker B: This is where I want to show how old I am. Do you know why they called it orb walking back then?
[00:50:40] Speaker A: Cause wasn't it like you have to like, move, like the optimal way to do it was like moving your mouse in a circle or something like that?
[00:50:45] Speaker C: No.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: Nope. It comes from Dota because of course it comes from the Warcraft three engine, which Dota was a Warcraft three map originally turn speeds.
Yes.
Specifically, you could not animation cancel an auto attack unless you animation cancelled it with a modified auto attack. In Warcraft three, these were called orb effects that were items your heroes could get that modified your auto attack. And there were champion abilities, like kind of like how Ash's arrow works, where it's like she hits the button and then her next auto attacks are all modified. There were champion abilities that were like that as well. These were all orbs because that's how they were coded in Warcraft three in the, like, scripting language of the Warcraft three map editor. That's why it's orb walking, is because it's using the orb effects to allow you to animation, cancel the backswing of your auto attack, and walk.
[00:51:41] Speaker A: Today I learned.
[00:51:43] Speaker B: I've been playing this game for a long time, guys.
[00:51:46] Speaker A: But, yeah, so back in the day, that was like, pro players did that, or like challenger players did that. Now it's like, if you play ad carry, you probably do that without even realizing, because granted, a lot of these mechanics are easier to do than they used to be. Like, the thing I always think of, and I heard this, like, talked about somewhere recently, is like the, what's called, like the insect, the whole Lee sin. You like, get behind someone, like, flash kick them. That used to be a lot harder because Lee sins ult didn't root them, like, during the animation it does now, which makes that easier. But still, it's like, you know, I've seen Lee sins in my game, like, pull that off with perfect timing. Like, it's like.
[00:52:35] Speaker D: And you also have, like, better Internet speed and better hardware that can handle the graphics and stuff a lot better.
[00:52:43] Speaker B: I want to put this in context.
The first time I made platinum was in season five.
If you put the me today that's made emerald in current platinum up against actual season five platinum players, I would absolutely wipe the floor with them. The way I get my ass kicked by a masters player. That is how much the overall system wide skill gap has grown.
[00:53:10] Speaker A: Yeah, it's.
[00:53:11] Speaker C: It's probably if you're facing people in iron today, a lot of those people have the capabilities to be in gold previously. That is how much the game has changed. That's how much the skill floor has increased.
[00:53:26] Speaker A: That's also why they keep adding, yes.
[00:53:29] Speaker B: That'S how much you have to learn as a returning player sometimes is just there's literal years of like endemic skill that you need to pick up to catch up. That's why we have new player focused podcasts, because as a new player you're coming in to just a wall of knowledge.
[00:53:50] Speaker A: And it's also like in like climbing out of lower tiers, it's like you'll find the people who are like mechanical gods but have no idea how to play the, how to play around objectives. You'll have people that like, are always in the right place at the right time, but can't hit a skill shot to save their life, like, because being able to meld all those different things is what allows you to climb.
[00:54:19] Speaker B: My favorite are the low Elo people who have better mechanics than I do. Like just straight up. Their hands are better than mine.
[00:54:26] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:54:27] Speaker B: But they just straight up lose to shopkeeper. They're building stupid items that make them weaker at two items than I am at one and a half items because they chose wrong items.
[00:54:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I've gone down like zero four in lane to like, players in silver when I'm up in platinum. And it just didn't end up mattering later in the game either because of that. Like, they just built weird builds that I was like, I can see what you're going for.
Maybe if this was last year, there's.
[00:54:59] Speaker C: A couple of other things like that. So it's a lot of people are really good at the beginning of the game. Sometimes you get laning phase going in and have no idea how to do a team fight. So if you're someone who's really good at late game fights, you can carry if you can slow down a game.
There's a lot of intricacies that really, player by player, change how good you are, but also because of what the game is sort of designed around can really mess up where your placements are. People who used to be really good at late game team fights aren't getting team fight as much because the game is faster, things like that.
[00:55:41] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:55:42] Speaker A: Yeah. And of course, if you're having trouble climbing out of low Elo, just take Lucian and play him in a top lane.
You'll climb instantly in a day.
[00:55:53] Speaker B: Or if you're playing nocturne, just use your ult to just spam Gank for your Lucian in the top lane.
[00:55:57] Speaker A: True. That works too.
[00:55:59] Speaker B: Alright, guys, this has been episode 441 of the Forwards podcast. I've been Jack Soman for free, shooter for mic of many names and for pillow pet. Have a great night.
[00:56:11] Speaker D: Goodbye.
[00:56:12] Speaker A: Send questions yes, thanks for listening to the Forewords podcast. If you want to support the show directly, consider checking out our
[email protected]. the four Wardspodcast and, of course, send your questions to theforwardspodcastmail.com so we can answer them live on the show. That's the four
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