The Four Wards Podcast - Episode 453: A Grumbly Patch

[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 and Velkoz. And you're listening to the Four Wards Podcast here to help you move forward and lead. [00:00:34] Speaker B: Hello and welcome to episode 453 of the Four Wards podcast. I'm your host as usual. I'm Jack Soman and I've got with me two other wards to help you move forward. In League of Legends. We've got Mike of many names. [00:00:50] Speaker C: How's everybody doing? [00:00:53] Speaker B: And we've got Pillow Pet. Hello, guys. We are the Four Wards Podcast. We do have a Discord. Come join the Discord link is in the episode description. We'd love to have you come hang out, talk about games you've had, share clips, talk about whatever the hell else you feel like. Other games, esports. We got it all. Come join the Discord. It's a good time now. I do stream on twitch@twitch TV Jacksomen. Pillow Pet can be found at Twitch TV Pillow Pet. And we're still trying to bully Mike into streaming. [00:01:30] Speaker C: Three more people. Come on, you can do it. [00:01:33] Speaker B: All right, now we gotta give a shout out to Codex, Ninja, Pillow Pet and Robigon for supporting us at the shout out tier. Thank you guys. We could not do this without you. We do have a Patreon. If you want to get shouted out, go to patreon.com the forwards podcast. $10 a month, we'll get you shouted out. Just like Pillow Pet, Codex Ninja and Robigon. $5 a month, we'll get you an exclusive feed of some behind the scenes audio of our prep work before each show. Sometimes it's actual podcast prep, sometimes it's just us shooting the shit. What you get varies from week to week and $1 a month just tells us that you love us. All of those tiers do also qualify you for a special role in the Discord. Last but not least, listeners, Rain saved your asses this week, writing in back to back weeks. We need questions. Send your questions to the forwardspodcastmail.com so we can answer them on the show. Again, that is the forwardspodcastmail.com again. That link is also in the episode description. It is all spelled out. All right, now that we've got the busy work out of the way, it's patch 1421. This was actually a decently big patch and we got a lot of things that we want to cover. I want to kick it off with a couple of quick things from me and Pillow and then we'll get into the meat and potatoes changes. There's a couple of changes in here that just don't do a whole lot. But I like the intent. So that's what I want to cover. The first of which is Corki. They buffed his passive. They buffed his ultimate ad ratio mostly. Also a little bit on the base damage. And most importantly to Riot. They buffed the damage on his W. I do not understand why Riot continues to think that Corki W is a damaging ability. It makes no sense to me. But at max rank, Corki's Valkyrie now does 500 damage plus 200% bonus AD over the duration. [00:03:52] Speaker C: Such a high base duration and base damage. [00:03:54] Speaker B: It's. It's such a psycho amount of damage for an ability that is almost impossible to use offensively. I don't get it. They also made a change that. I like the intent, but I think again, they don't understand the problem here. They nerfed Galio's mana by 90. That sounds like a lot. They nerfed him from 500 mana to 410. But it doesn't do anything. Cause Galio doesn't really spend his mana to farm ever. He casts a Q about once a wave and he auto attacks and that clears the entire wave in a few seconds. It's dumb. He's still not building mana items and still doesn't need to build mana items. But I like the idea they should just add a mana cost to his passive. That would literally fix Gallio instantly. [00:04:50] Speaker A: Hmm. That would. That would be interesting to see. [00:04:55] Speaker C: I don't know if I like cost. [00:04:56] Speaker B: Like 25 mana to use the procurement. It's basically a spell. [00:05:04] Speaker C: I don't know if I like that. [00:05:08] Speaker A: I feel like you'd have to give him away clear for free. I feel like you could have to create a way for him to like decide to use his passive and then not use his passive or completely rework his passive. Because I. I don't. I wouldn't. I wouldn't know how to. [00:05:25] Speaker C: Spending mana needs to be an option that you choose. Not something that just passively goes off from you. The only people who do that natively were the manamune things they used to cost mana with Muramana used to don't anymore. [00:05:40] Speaker B: And Jinx can cost mana on every auto with a toggle. [00:05:44] Speaker C: She's choosing. I don't know. [00:05:45] Speaker B: They need. They need to do something to make it so Galio actually has to spend mana in lane. Nerfing his mana doesn't change that problem. So again, Both of those are. I like that. Riot has identified the problem of Gallio has too much mana, and Kirky needs more damage. I don't understand why they chose to change the things they changed. In both cases, it's just not the actual problem. All right, Pillow, you got a couple quick hit changes. [00:06:17] Speaker A: Yeah. First one's Gwyn. They just did a slight nerf to her passive. The true damage and the AP, it's 0.72% down to 0.6%. It's not a lot, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. But it doesn't, like, change what her problem is at a core. And it's just. She can be super far behind, and it doesn't really matter. She's just one of those champions that can play from extremely far behind and still affect a teamfight tremendously. Because her passive is. What's the best way to put it? Insane. [00:06:58] Speaker C: Yeah. They've identified the right thing. The passive is the problem. How often she gets to activate the passive is a huge problem. [00:07:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And to be clear, so for those who don't play Gwen, she activates her passive on every auto attack on a champion and every centered Q hit and every hit of R on a champion. Her Q times and her R hits 1, 3, and 5 times on subsequent casts. [00:07:26] Speaker A: If I remember, just in a. Heals like. Heals her like for quite. [00:07:30] Speaker B: It does have a healing component as well. I don't know if the healing changed here. [00:07:34] Speaker A: No, I don't see it. Unless it's. It's based off damage. So it probably went down a little bit. But yes, did not. It's step in the right direction, but it's. It's not enough to take her anywhere else. [00:07:48] Speaker B: She has the same problem that Fiora has of. If you just build enough of your offensive stat, you just do 100% of someone's maximum health with your combo. [00:07:58] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I was playing against Gwyn the other night and dominated her league lead. I'm sorry. In lane. And then when she got six, I was just. Didn't matter. I was in lane anymore. I was 4, though, and she was 04. It just didn't matter. She just deleted me. Moving on to another champion. I'm pretty happy with this change. Even though I don't play the champion. It's healthy for them. Kale. It's mana cost on her W, which is her heel, is going down quite a bit. Just real quick. It was 90, 100, 110, 120, and 130. And now it's 70. 75. 80. 85. 90. So her last rank is going to cost just as much as her first rank, which is a. It's a one point wonder anyway. So this is gonna give you a lot more survivability in lane. And it won't dump your mana. [00:08:53] Speaker B: That's the big key is it won't dump your mana. She doesn't really spend mana for her dps because it's just auto attacks. Her E is free. It's the only time she spends mana is Q to slow people, which you don't spam, and W for movement speed and a little bit of healing, which again, you don't spam. But dropping it by 20 mana at rank one and 40 mana at max rank is nutty. [00:09:18] Speaker A: I think her Q shreds armor too, doesn't it? And Mr. [00:09:21] Speaker C: Yes, it does. [00:09:22] Speaker A: Okay. [00:09:23] Speaker C: All right. [00:09:23] Speaker B: But again, it's not a spam because the fight should be over by the time it's back off cooldown. Whether one or both sides disengaged or someone died. [00:09:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it will definitely be a good. It's a good change for her. And it's a quite a. It's a pretty massive one too. 20 mana right off the rip. That's a lot of casts. [00:09:41] Speaker B: Yeah. It might free her up to not have to take mana runes anymore. [00:09:47] Speaker A: So, Kale players, rejoice. Let us know if you like the change. I got one more really quick one is Teemo. His movement speed on his W, the passive went up 2% and then the active went up 4% on his movement speed. And that's going to be pretty fun for you, Teemo. Players that like to move fast and dodge every skill shot. [00:10:18] Speaker B: I love that for this patch note, they literally said Teemo seems like he needs a buff, but he does enough damage, so we made him more annoying, basically. [00:10:28] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. He's just going to run in more Auto. You run away laugh Spam. Because they brought back his old laugh. [00:10:36] Speaker B: Yeah, they realized that the old laugh was iconic. [00:10:40] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. So he's. He's in a good spot right now. So if you. If you like Teemo, I would recommend playing him because he's really strong. [00:10:48] Speaker B: All right, Mike, you volunteered to take the big changes in this patch. Which one do you want to cover first? [00:10:54] Speaker C: Start with the one that everyone cares about. The one. We're going to talk about bounties for a minute because they've really fundamentally changed how champion bounties are accrued, and they've done some slight tweaking to objective bounties. As well. The. The long story short is kills and assists are no longer the primary way to gain bounties. Bounties are pretty much based entirely on gold difference. Now, there are a couple of exceptions to this, and they are the champions that inherently get their own gold. Draven Twisted Fate Gangplank. If you generate gold, your special generated gold doesn't count. But apart from that, you. You just start building bounties based on how much money you've been gaining. There are a couple of really important things about this. One is that you can now gain way over a technically 700 gold bounty by dying more than once. So you never stop gaining bounty gold. Now if you gain more than a 700 bounty, it's just rolled over into your next life. So if you are someone who's on a hyper carry that you've gone 15 0, you've got the 700 shutdown bounty. If you die twice in a row, you've just given over an insane gold cost because you're gonna have basically two full 700 gold bounties. [00:12:32] Speaker B: Yep. And to be fair, that part was true for kill bounties before, but not for other sources of bounties. [00:12:40] Speaker C: And then they've gone into what. What we'll call negative bounties this case, which is always the penalty for doing crappy. And it's not just based on death streaks anymore. It's. It's. You're down a lot of gold, you're gonna start losing money. And this is actually, I think, the most important part. Just getting an assist or a kill doesn't reset that bounty anymore. You're no longer suddenly worth something when you finally accidentally steal a kill. [00:13:08] Speaker B: Yep. I'm so happy about that. [00:13:12] Speaker C: There's a lot more little minutia to it that we could talk about, but that's not really important. The next thing is the objective bounties. Grubs has a bounty now. Experience doesn't count for as much. [00:13:29] Speaker B: We got to explain that one. Because people are going to get the wrong idea. Grubs despawn when bounties are objective bounties are allowed to come into play. So they don't have objective bounties. [00:13:40] Speaker C: You're right. [00:13:40] Speaker B: They now contribute towards whether or not. Exactly. They contribute towards whether or not objective bounties happen and how much they're worth. [00:13:48] Speaker C: Essentially, they are fundamentally changing what it takes for objective bounties to activate. Grubs now contributes to that. Turrets and drake differences are more potent than they were before. Gold differences contribute a lot more Experience contributes a lot less. [00:14:07] Speaker B: Yep. [00:14:08] Speaker C: And then. And the kind of big one for me is there's that timer where an objective bounties are ending soon. That's been halved from a minute to 30 seconds. Which means if you are not actively doing something right now to get that bounty, it's gone. [00:14:26] Speaker B: It's hopefully that and also bounties deactivating more quickly when the losing team makes a comeback is the other thing. They said they didn't give us numbers on that. I'm hoping that reduces the occurrence of. Oh, the losing team wins a big teamfight takes two turrets and a dragon. So they get all of those kill bounties, all the actual regular kill gold and then three objective bounties because the first one doesn't do anything. The second one triggers the deactivation and the third one turns it off and gives the last bounty. [00:14:57] Speaker A: I'm not sure if you mentioned it yet, but they also are combating that to where you can just consecutively take those bounties by giving a reduction, I think up to almost 80% in some situation situations. I read 20 to 40. [00:15:10] Speaker B: They say in the patch notes 20 to 40%. If you're already coming back, the bounties will be reduced. But. [00:15:19] Speaker C: With everything else it could mean a lot more money. Like this is a a healthy change to change how bounties function across the board. I mean there's also a reduction in the cost of Baron's bounty by 200. But that's just Baron being the best objective for a while. I think this is going to help when you are really far behind. You have much better ways of swinging yourself back in by getting kills on the enemy because those bounties are now worth a lot more. And just passively being objective better isn't going to suddenly skyrocket your team through the roof because you have your split pushing Tryndamere suddenly get three turrets and a dragon on his own. [00:16:11] Speaker B: Yep. This assuming they've tuned it right. And we'll see. This should help start comebacks more often but not make comebacks outright happen as often. Which I think is a good thing. Like objective bounties should be the you're behind. Here's the carrot on the stick. Try to make a comeback instead of just forfeiting. Congratulations. You did it. You did a good play. Now keep doing good plays. [00:16:43] Speaker C: The other half of this is the changing it from kill based to gold based means that in those games where you're just turreting up and you're sitting there farming, farming, farming, farming. You're still going to be able to get those bounties when they're just pushing you down because they're still going to be gaining gold advantages. You're still going to be turreting to try and save your life and then when you do eventually get those kills, they will be worth a lot more. [00:17:13] Speaker A: I think the boss is sad too because he can no longer give the top laner a bounty for inting just because they mention it here. Sion's hundred gold death won't put an extra hundred gold bounty on Fiora who's just trying to protect her tower. [00:17:30] Speaker B: Good. [00:17:31] Speaker A: So you can't build up your enemies bounty and then kill them later by emptying them continuously. I mean you can a little bit, but it won't be as drastic as it was. [00:17:46] Speaker B: Good. Again, they do say they've tested these internally a lot. They'll be reacting to player feedback if parts of the system are mistuned. So I expect to see that. We haven't seen any hot fix changes, but I expect to see some tweaks to this next patch. Most likely. [00:18:04] Speaker A: Highly recommend to go through and try to read this because there's a lot more in it than what we can cover and probably one podcast. [00:18:12] Speaker B: Yeah, we could literally spend the entire podcast talking about implications of this change. All right, let's move on to something a little bit easier to wrap our heads around. Kai'sa got a nerf this patch. For those who weren't aware, Kai'sa was basically the biggest winner of the recent itemization changes for ad carries because unlike all the crit marksman, she still has good build paths. So they've nerfed her passive on hit damage a little bit. Mostly they've nerfed the scaling on the additional stack. So for those who don't know Kai's passive applies on hit damage, the first stack of the Passive applies less on hit damage than the fourth one does and then obviously the fifth one pops the stack. The pop is unchanged, but that scaling from 1 to 4 has shrunk significantly and that's the big part of this change is just her fourth auto before she pops the passive is not going to hit nearly as hard relatively, which I'm fine with. Again, she was the big winner of the changes and I think she's still fine. [00:19:34] Speaker A: Yeah, she's. She's really strong, especially that AP build. [00:19:40] Speaker B: Hello. You want to talk about my one of my least favorite champions? [00:19:45] Speaker A: Yeah, this one. This one's kind of notable to me because Aurelia, like you see her a lot when she's. When she is in a good spot, you'll see her a lot. And when she's in a bad spot and you do see her, you can definitely tell when she's weak. So Aurelia got a buff that I will say, like, is needed for her because she did feel really weak. So her Q cooldown went down by a second and her mana on the Q went down by 5 to 15 damage. This is probably the big one. Her Q damage has a 10% increased AD ratio now from 60% to 70. That's where you're really going to feel it because she's very bursty with that Q when she hits her. When she puts a mark on you. Yeah. [00:20:32] Speaker B: If she does her combo correctly with like a stun Into Q into ult into QQ, that's three Qs. That's a 210 AD ratio now. [00:20:41] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's. If you're proficient, proficient and hit those. Those abilities, she's gonna be really strong. I feel like. I think this Nerf's gonna hurt her just a tad when it comes in. They did Nerf the damage to Minions not by a lot, but by enough that you probably aren't going to be able to one shot as quick You're. When you're full stacks and you're queuing onto, like, back line. Hard to tell. I don't. [00:21:11] Speaker B: I think she's still going to be able to just delete the back line. [00:21:14] Speaker A: At like one item probably once you. If you get an early blade, you'll probably still be able to one shot. But I. I won't know. I don't play her a whole lot. And the only change to our R is her Q cooldown reduction. She does no longer. She no longer gets that when she casts R. So they just put that pretty much in her Q kit, just reducing the cooldown. [00:21:40] Speaker B: There is one other change to her, which is just in items. Blade of the Ruined King lost some on hit damage. And that's, I think, the reason why they felt the need to add these buffs the way they did. I just really wish they'd buff something other than her cued raw damage. I'd rather they buff her like attack speed from her passive or something. Something that's DPS oriented instead of making her burstier. [00:22:01] Speaker A: I mean, her healing on her Q is already insane. [00:22:03] Speaker B: It's fucking stupid. [00:22:06] Speaker A: Oh, I guess we'll see. [00:22:07] Speaker B: If you've ever tuned into my stream and heard me rage about Irelia, it's the fact that she can Cue an entire wave and heal to full. And there's no interaction. [00:22:17] Speaker A: And she's just. She's is a very strong champion when she's. When she's ahead. Yeah. Very strong. [00:22:27] Speaker B: All right. You know who else is strong when they're ahead and got a Nerf that only makes him weak earlier. Volibear. I hate this. What the actual changes is they change the cooldown on his e. The thunder strike from 12 to 14 seconds. But the reason for this is that Volibear is op specifically with Rod of Ages plus Navori Flicker Blades. And here's the thing. Navori Flicker Blades refunds missing like remaining cooldown. By making the cooldown longer, you get bigger refunds on each auto attack from Navori. It barely actually increases the cooldown once you have the Flicker Blades. This is only an early game nerf for Volibear. Once he hits the Flicker Blades, he's just as strong. He's broken with Rod of Ages plus Navori because of how it interacts with his kit and the fact that they're both cheap fucking items like that is a 5250 gold build. And he's. He just builds Tank after that because he doesn't need anything else. I really wish they would fix the Navori interaction with him or just straight up remove Navori and then balance him accordingly. [00:23:46] Speaker A: I mean, it's the same reason they removed the original Spear Shochin way back. [00:23:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:23:50] Speaker A: Because you get literally the same problem. You get champions like Renekton or Jax who could just abuse. [00:23:56] Speaker B: Yep. He's the current iteration of it. It's so frustrating because I don't want to build that build, but I have to because they're balancing around that. [00:24:10] Speaker C: Whoever was the person who invented that build has sort of cursed Volibear. [00:24:14] Speaker B: Yep. So, yeah, that's. That's the change to Volibear. He is genuinely weaker early. And then it does nothing once he hits the two items. All right, Mike, it's your turn for the big one. [00:24:30] Speaker C: Yeah. They. They've called this one the Swain patch for a reason. Because they are retuning everything about him. The goal of the tuning is to make him less potent as a support and to give him more personal agency. They're changing some base stats. Nerfing regen. Nerfing mana boosting mana regen. They're changing his passive to be a linear scaling as opposed to leveling only with his ultimate. The broad changes to his Q are that they're both buffing his damage, both base and ratio in a single hit cast. So when you're doing the long range strikes, they're slightly nerfing the extra bolt damage when you're really close. But they're giving it a better ratio. They are slightly like 5 mana across the board, reducing the mana cost overall. Great buffs for him. [00:25:31] Speaker B: Yep. [00:25:32] Speaker C: His W slightly nerfs to base damage. Slight buffs to the ap Lower slow duration, bigger slow. And they're just changing the reveal to not be scaling. It's just six seconds. [00:25:49] Speaker B: The intention being that this doesn't have to be your second max anymore. [00:25:53] Speaker C: Yes. And now this is the complicated one that we're not going to work on all of it. But Never Move Nevermore has been given a very long list of changes. It's got a scaling cooldown from 14 down to back where it's 10. It's just mana nerfing. It was 50. Now it scales up. It has a weird thing with its missile speed and travel time. The. The basic goal of it is it's their changing it to make it more consistent instead of having it be slow to fast. They're. They're just. They're just making it take X time. It's got a slightly bigger width, more nerfs to base damage, buffs to AP ratio. And the. The sort of big change to it is it no longer does the pass through damage. All of the damage has now dealt when it does its root, its grab the detonation. [00:26:56] Speaker B: Yep. On the. On the pull back. Like not. Not when you pull them back but like when it comes back and explodes and roots. It's. I like this one, honestly. It gives it more flavor instead of it just being a damage spell half the time. [00:27:14] Speaker C: It's a little bit faster and it's a little bit better overall. And they really want you not to have one hit wonder on this one. That's why they massively nerfed the cooldown but made it go back to where it was. And then they're doing more changes to his. His alt Demonic Ascension. It still has its repeated casts every eight seconds that's been unaffected. The cooldown now is just 120 and it begins immediately when the transformation is. As opposed to you could stay in demon bird form for 30 seconds and have the cooldown start after that was done. So in almost every case it's a nerf to this cooldown though. [00:28:05] Speaker B: The exception being very long fights where you stay transformed for a long ass time. [00:28:11] Speaker C: Yes, he does more upfront demon flare damage as opposed to having more ratio. But it's a good upfront. It's about 50. When you scale up, it's got a better slow. The damage per second has been reduced pretty much across the board, both base and ratios. But his healing is a little bit better. It's changed a little bit. The base is higher, the AP ratio is lower. But now he also has bonus HP ratios in it and he gets a lot of health. [00:28:47] Speaker B: Yep. That's why I was kind of grimacing is from items itself. The heal is just worse. However, he gets a lot of bonus HP in his kit from his passive and that's the part that I don't know whether it's actually a net buff or nerf to the healing. [00:29:03] Speaker C: Well, he also usually builds health in his items. At least he's always getting a realize he's always getting. [00:29:09] Speaker B: But for example, on Rylai's I did the math. The healing it gives is like 8 less healing per tick on Rylai's than it did before. [00:29:22] Speaker A: Heartsteel swain incoming. [00:29:25] Speaker C: Honestly, maybe it's possible he's already tanky enough. [00:29:29] Speaker A: It opens him up to be able to build in a tankier path like I've seen it done in the past where he just builds like tank items, spirit visage, all that. [00:29:39] Speaker C: That's where his Aram build is and it's gonna. [00:29:42] Speaker A: It's gonna be. I'm interested to see how this changes is built. [00:29:47] Speaker C: Oh, we did miss it. Also no longer reduces the cooldown on the Z that's just gone. Yep. If you are a swain player, go through and look at the details. There's a lot more. [00:30:00] Speaker B: Did you mention. Did you mention that demon flare can be cast repeatedly? [00:30:05] Speaker C: Yes. It has always been the case you can cast it more than once. It's every eight seconds. Oh no. Yeah. You used to be able to. [00:30:12] Speaker A: No, you can only cast it once. [00:30:13] Speaker B: One per ult before. Now it is one after eight seconds from the last one. So if you can stay in ult for 10 seconds because the first cast is locked out for the first two seconds of your ult you can cast a second demon flare. And if you can stay in there for 18 seconds, you can cast a third demon flare. This does not scale with ability haste. [00:30:34] Speaker C: I swear you could cast more than one. [00:30:36] Speaker B: Nope. It was once per ultimate before. [00:30:39] Speaker A: And if you can stay in it for like 13 minutes, you can cast it up to 100 times. [00:30:45] Speaker B: Yep. I want to see now someone do like volibear with full tank build so he can just sustain through it against a swain with full tank build and they Just sit there, not actually dealing damage and someone actually like make 100 demon flares go off just because it would be funny. [00:31:06] Speaker A: Be funny if they added like a special sound effect or something for his last one or a voice line. [00:31:12] Speaker B: They should just make it. So if you actually get 100 off in one ult, the last one is just map wide and does insta kill on everyone. Just you finish ascending and it just kills the entire enemy team. [00:31:25] Speaker A: Hit max power. [00:31:27] Speaker B: It'll never happen in a real game. So it would be a fun Easter egg. [00:31:35] Speaker A: I'd enjoy to see that. That'd be funny, right? But yeah, I mean, I would say these are good changes on Swain. All in all, they've cleaned him up. You're gonna be noticeably. No, I think the E from what videos I've seen the movement speed back on the return is much faster. I believe. Maybe. I don't know, maybe it's just in general, but every time. I've always seen the videos. He's in his R. [00:32:02] Speaker B: Well, yeah, because that's. That's where the highlights happen. [00:32:06] Speaker A: But I. I think it's going to be a good change. Hopefully it'll put him back in the mid lane. [00:32:12] Speaker B: I hope so. I hope it. Mostly I hope it gets him out of support. [00:32:17] Speaker C: This is the big thing. He has been such a potent support for a good chunk of time now that they really want to sort of pull that power away from there and put him back in his top lane. Mid lane. [00:32:33] Speaker B: Also, I want to point this out because it's hilarious. You said never Move and then corrected yourself to Nevermore. Because that's what's written in the patch notes. Except the patch notes also multiple times in the text block up above. Call it Nevermove. I believe Nevermove is actually the name of the ability and they just wrote Nevermore for the name of the ability in the patch notes. [00:32:56] Speaker C: It's changed multiple times. It's been both Nevermove and Nevermore several times. [00:33:01] Speaker B: It's always been Never Move. Even the old Swain, it was Nevermove. [00:33:05] Speaker C: They changed for some reason. [00:33:06] Speaker B: They keep typing and Nevermore instead. It's literally just a typo that keeps happening. It's always been Nevermove. But I find it hilarious that Riot keeps making that mistake. Alright, now that we're done laughing at Riot, not being able to keep track of the name of their own ability, to my knowledge, the only ability that has changed names and changed back ever is Twitch. [00:33:35] Speaker C: Ultimately Rat a Tat Tat and spray and pray. [00:33:39] Speaker B: Yep, yep. It was Spray and Pray. They changed it to Rat a Tat tat and people hated it so they changed it back to Spray and Pray. I still miss Finalis Funken. [00:33:51] Speaker C: Oh Luxalt. [00:33:52] Speaker B: Yes, they just translated it. Final Spark is always what the name was. Just no, it's not in German for no apparent reason because it was a Toho reference all right, that's enough of me rambling. Let's do our trinket tip. This comes from a game me and Mike played this morning. If you want to trade rolls with your team, not like pick order but actual trade rolls. Like maybe you got autofilled or something, discuss it with your team immediately. Give them time to figure out what they want to play instead. If someone is willing to trade you frequently if you say hey I got autofilled, I main this. A lot of times people will give you that role as long as you're polite about it. But if you're going to do that, you need to do it immediately. Be polite. Give them time because they might want. [00:34:50] Speaker A: To adjust their bands. You know. [00:34:53] Speaker B: Exactly. They might want to change their bands, they might want to trade pick orders, they might want to not lock in their champion that they're about to lock in because you didn't give them enough time to react. [00:35:08] Speaker C: This does remind me of a game that I played with a couple of our fans before and I think Pillow was there too. I offered to take Jungle from someone. This is now important. You need to put Smite back on. If you have it first and you do a switch, make sure Smite is there. Because I walked into that game without Smite and that was just lost game because I was worthless. [00:35:36] Speaker B: Yikes. All right now like I said earlier, Reigns carried you guys with questions again. Listeners, we need more questions right into the forwardspodcastmail.com so we can answer your questions on the show. But Rains wrote in and writes Good evening Morning Wards. Thank you for your responses to the last episode. I've been finding ways to enjoy playing again and it involves being very ratty but alas, gotta be having fun as some follow ups and cleanups from last email. I've moved from ad carry to mid top as I find it easier not to get frustrated at randoms. Wukong has been good because I understand his trading patterns well and I can use Clone to dodge CC when needed. I have unironically joined the echelons of Mid Lane Garen and found myself to be extremely adept at the pickup, finding a good balance between a lot of kills and getting map pressure. Even if I don't find early leads in lane. Akali and Lux were the hardest lanes I've found. All right, I'm a pause for a moment reigns. I am disappointed. Fuck Mid Lane Garen. Don't. Don't become the cancer. [00:36:38] Speaker A: It's too. On a counter note, I'm proud of you. [00:36:42] Speaker C: It's too late. It's already there. [00:36:45] Speaker B: No. Take him top lane where he belongs. The mages of Mid lane do not have the tools to deal with Garen. Most of them have the type of CC that's reduced by tenacity. I hate it. I hate Mid lane Garen with an absolute passion because he presses W and negates my entire champion pool. Incidentally, you mentioned Lux being a hard one for you. Literally just press W before the root hits you win the lane. I wish I was kidding. Um, so Raine's actual question for the how do you identify conditions in draft for changing your runes? For example, I'm running Conqueror typically but sometimes feel like I should be running Grasp. And similarly, how do you identify conditions in game to change your build path? Thank you in advance and I apologize if some of this email doesn't make sense. I am writing this at 3:46am whilst on a call with Jax and Mike and I'm tired and exhausted from the rollercoaster of the T1 Gen G match. So conditions in draft for changing your runes. I think the easiest one is something like Conqueror versus Grasp where look at the matchup. Do you want to take long fights? Go all in. You want Conqueror? Do you want to short trade and then disengage and reset? You want Grasp. Grasp is good for short trades. That's generally for those two runes. The difference. There are other runes that have a similar interaction like Press the Attack versus Fleet Footwork. Same idea. [00:38:20] Speaker A: A lot of people sleep on the Rune Phase Rush. It's actually incredibly good on Garen specifically because of his trade pattern because his E counts towards all of his hits. So you Q E run away. That's your. That's. That's it. Q E run away. QE run away and then flash R. Yep. [00:38:43] Speaker B: The guarantee specifically that's what you do in Mid lane to just make the mages fucking hate you is you W their cc. Yeah. QE them and then Phase Rush procs and cool. You can just walk away and let your passive heal you back up and they can't do the same. [00:38:59] Speaker A: I would recommend looking at some of the Garen Phase Rush like games because you'll see like real quick how beneficial it is. In a lot of it's. It's a slip on rune like entirely. I've seen people use it on like Nasus for example. Like it's just a very good trading rune. [00:39:18] Speaker B: Phase Rush is probably the most underrated rune in the game. [00:39:22] Speaker A: I love it. Movement speed is one of the strongest stats. Like that's why I was so excited about the Teemo change. It's just the strong one of these, I would say the strongest station. [00:39:31] Speaker C: It's definitely the most underrated stat. [00:39:37] Speaker B: Specifically because of the way phase risk triggers. There's a lot of champions that you wouldn't think of where it just makes it. So they have trades that you can't trade back against. Orianna, for example. QWe cool. She's now running super fast. How do you fight back? She just hits you for a bunch of damage and zooms the fuck away. [00:40:00] Speaker A: And I think it gives it like it's strong. I think specifically too like Garen likes it because I do believe it still reduces like your slow. It gives you slow resist, doesn't it? [00:40:10] Speaker B: For melee champions? It does, yeah. [00:40:11] Speaker A: Yeah. So like you can just easily just run away and like they're still silenced as you're running away, so they cannot retaliate. [00:40:19] Speaker C: Yeah. Garen is a very, very good anti mage to sit in this. This build. The reason why you have such problems with Akali is because her trade pattern is dumb, just like yours is. [00:40:33] Speaker B: Yeah. In largely the same way she. [00:40:38] Speaker C: She has unstoppable burst that can get very easily put into play and a great way of dodging away from abilities. [00:40:46] Speaker B: I have to correct myself a little bit. The slow resist is no longer melee specific. Everyone gets it. [00:40:53] Speaker A: Oh, even better. I will say I'll give you a little advice when trading into Akali as Garen. If it's in the early levels, you just beat her. Like just stay on top of her head. If you got Conqueror on, you're just gonna win. Because Akali's trade pattern is 1, 2, 3, out. Q auto. Q auto. A shroud in there. So you can't trade back. But if you're able to stay on top of her and find out like especially with your E, you just win. Keep that fight going because she has no sustain like they took away her sustain a long time ago. [00:41:36] Speaker C: There are two things about trading into Akali that you want to know. One, you probably still want to get a sweeper because that way, even in her shroud, you have a vague idea of where she's going. [00:41:45] Speaker B: You know where to spin and you're. [00:41:47] Speaker C: Spinning on her so she's taking damage. And two, don't initiate your Q as you're walking up. Use it immediately after she jumps away with her E because that just kills the slow and allows you to run at her at the same speed. [00:42:07] Speaker B: Yep. Also specifically, the thing that does the most damage of her is the shuriken flip. When she reactivates it to dash in on you, that's what you want to hit W to block. [00:42:20] Speaker C: It feels disgusting giving gearing advice for mid lane, but it's versus a collie so it's worth it. [00:42:27] Speaker B: That's why I'm okay with that. You want to play Garen into a collie in mid lane. I am never going to throw a fit about that. You are fighting cancer with cancer. [00:42:35] Speaker A: Just go stride breaker and then what's the rookern? Go stridebreaker and rookern and then it's a disgusting combo. [00:42:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I know a lot of Garens like going a phantom dancer second, but literally just go the rookern and you win all trades. You're blocking the upfront damage and then your passive heals up any residual damage afterwards. [00:43:00] Speaker A: She gets ad scaling, but all that ad is converted into magic damage. So it just any Mr. Is just what you want to build against her. So Rakurn just completely takes away her entire burst window and she's no longer scary. [00:43:16] Speaker C: The best thing about Garen is your ability to wipe away then immediately run away. Because once you've wiped the wave and run away, you now have your passive is going to heal you up for almost anything. You now have the freedom to go bot go mid. It's. It's a disgusting lane option. [00:43:39] Speaker B: So I did look. It looks like statistically Garen does get lose lane to Akali globally in higher elos, but Garen wins most of those games. So here's the other thing. I'm going to lead off with late game, sit next to whoever's important and cue Akali when she goes to kill them so that she's silenced and can't kill them. [00:44:04] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:44:07] Speaker B: And then just while she's silenced, you guys kill her instantly with your old and your teammates damage. [00:44:13] Speaker A: Boom. [00:44:13] Speaker C: We've ignored your other one, Wukong. Oh, I feel bad about ignoring the Wukong. It's a much healthier champion. I love Wukong. [00:44:22] Speaker B: Absolutely. But also, it looks like Reigns understands Wukong a lot better. So I don't know how much help Reigns needs with Wukong. Reigns can write in and ask if you want specific Wukong help. Again, listeners, that email is the forwardspodcastmail.com right in. So we can answer your questions on the show. [00:44:46] Speaker A: Yeah, we kind of went on a little rant there a little bit to go back to the core question. I'll give my little input. So to identify which rune you're looking for is going to based off, like, what opponent you're going against. So are you going to be able to use grasp, like, all the time? Are you going to be able to have that option? Like, if you're going against Lux, I would not recommend going grasp. [00:45:10] Speaker B: Yep. [00:45:11] Speaker A: You're not going to. You're not going to be able to proc it. If you're running Conqueror, like, that's going to be a lot better for you late game. So I would always go with the Conqueror in that matchup. If you're specifically trying to just survive the matchup. I would also, like I said earlier, look into the phase Rush builds as far as identifying to change your build path. Garen specifically has a lot of paths that he can take. He can go tank, he can go damage, and both are great on him. And he still does a lot of damage because a lot of his power comes from his R is execute. So I would just look, are you ahead or are you behind? If you're behind, go for surviving. And you can probably still throw in what Phantom Dancer in there, just because it's passive is really good on Phantom Dancer, I think that was the key. [00:45:58] Speaker C: That you said there was. Whether or not you're ahead or not really determines his build path more than anything else. If you are in ahead, Garen, you're going to be focusing more on damage because you can blow up anybody that isn't a hyper tank. And even still, you could do a lot of damage to hyper tanks. So you're generally going to go stridebreaker into Dragon Slayer, Phantom Dancer, you can go eye edge. You're gonna go maybe more into crit because you scale with crit, maybe more into attack speed because you can get more procs on your e going. He has a lot of potential builds. And then if you're even, maybe you want to go bruiser. That way you've got a way to fight. If you're behind, you can go full tank. Maybe one damage item. He's. He's got a lot of options. [00:46:47] Speaker A: I would say, like, the most annoying thing for me on Garrett and one of his strong points is you can CC him and it doesn't stop his spin to win. Yeah, like. Like specifically, and I'm sure back when Jax played Jax, like, you jump on a Garen and stun him, you're still stuck in a spin. Like you're still taking damage. [00:47:06] Speaker B: It's. It's extra aggravating on Jax because his counter strike, specifically bl, is to block auto attacks and his spin scales like an auto attack, but it isn't. So you can't even counter strike to block the damage in the first place. [00:47:20] Speaker A: Garen is just a very strong champion. Like whether you're a pro at AIM or just beginning, he's just a great champion and unfortunately multiple roles. Yeah, like, I mean his E in the jungle is just insane. But we won't even go there. [00:47:39] Speaker B: Yep. So Reigns does wrap up the email with GGS to all future gamings and hopefully we can avoid ranged top leaders, specifically Lucian Top. So thank you for giving us the Lucian Top this week, Reigns. We do appreciate it with that. This has been episode 453 of the Forwards Podcast. I've been Jack Soman for Mike of Many Names and for Pillow Pet. Have a great night. [00:48:08] Speaker A: See ya. [00:48:09] Speaker C: Good night everybody. [00:48:11] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the Four Wards Podcast. If you want to support the show directly, consider checking out our [email protected] the Four Wards Podcast. And of course, send your questions to. [00:48:25] Speaker B: The Four Wards podcastmail.com so we can. [00:48:29] Speaker A: Answer them live on the show. [00:48:30] Speaker B: That's the Four Wards podcastmail.com.