The Four Wards Podcast - Episode 498: Boosters Beware

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to the Four Wards podcast. Hey, what's up? It's Eric Bra, voice of Draven Jerks and Velkoz. And you're listening to the Four Wards podcast here to help you move forward in League. Hello and welcome to episode 498 of the Four Wards podcast. I'm your host, Jack Sohlman and I've got with me only one other ward this week, guys. That's right, it is a two man show. Mike of many names is joining me tonight. [00:00:49] Speaker B: I am that unique ward that you put on the enemy's side that has four health. I'm the only one standing perfect. [00:00:55] Speaker A: The ward of longevity and whatever. I. I can't remember the name that words get if they sit on the map for a very long time. [00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah, that thing. [00:01:05] Speaker A: Anyway, we appreciate you. Unfortunately our other hosts are busy with life. So you get a two man show this week. Sorry guys, we do have a Discord. Come join the Discord. Come hang out. Come play Doombots with us. Come chat. Come ask us questions in the question submission. I'll get to that in a moment. Link is in the episode description. We look forward to seeing you there. Some of us do stream on Twitch. I can be found at Twitch TV Jackselman, where it's a mix of Super Metroid, Silksong, Path of Exile and League. Whatever I feel like at the moment. And you stream at Twitch TV mikeofmanynames. Have you been streaming any Silksong? [00:01:42] Speaker B: No, Mostly because it's been getting pretty hot here and I'm a fat man and no one wants to see the fat man without his shirt. [00:01:47] Speaker A: We gotta get you a Vtuber. Yeah, you can get just an anime dude Vtuber. Like I have, like I sometimes use. [00:01:56] Speaker B: I don't know if I care enough. Maybe if I actually like stream for money. I don't know. [00:02:02] Speaker A: It's fine, it's fine. Listeners, join the Discord and tell us what you think Mike's anime Vtuber should look like. So also we have some shout outs. Shout out to Codex, Ninja, Pillow Pet, Robogon, Skippy as Esquire and Labana for supporting the podcast at the Shout out tier on Patreon. We appreciate you guys. We could not keep the show going without you. We have a [email protected] the 4words podcast. $1 a month just tells us that you love us. $5 a month gets you a behind the scenes audio feed of our prep work before each show and $10 a month we'll get you shouted out at the Top of every episode. In addition to the behind the scenes audio and telling us that you love us guys, we also have started a new podcast. We have a general gaming podcast. If you want to hear us talk about video games that are not League of Legends, head on over to from 8bit to 4k on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Or just click the link in the episode description. [00:03:06] Speaker B: It's a little bit longer episode thing. It's. It's not, it's not as condensed as this. We're a little bit more freeform, a little bit more off the cuff and. [00:03:14] Speaker A: Join the Discord and tell us what you want that show to be. If you have ideas or suggestions, because we're just making it up as we go. Last but not least, listeners, we have not gotten any questions this week. Not a one. None in the Discord, none in our email. We need you to write in the fourwards podcastmail.com or join the Discord and drop your questions and questions submission so we can answer your questions on the show. We don't have a lot of backlog left, guys. It's mostly gonna be gone after tonight, so get those questions in. Again, the email address is the four wards podcastmail.com alright, now that we got all the bookkeeping stuff out of the way, patch 25.18 is here. And before we get started on the things we want to highlight, Mike and I both agreed we want to highlight. Riot is taking another step to trying to make League of Legends less frustrating for us. People who are just trying to climb. They are rolling out system punishments, flagging accounts that have been used for boosting and hitchhiking. Hitchhiking being where you're playing on your real account but you're queued with someone who you do not normally queue with, who is on a Smurf account and hard carries games for you. Basically duo queue boosting as opposed to. [00:04:32] Speaker B: Boosting, being boosted as opposed to boosting. Yeah. [00:04:35] Speaker A: Yes, they will be rolling out penalties to accounts that have been doing this. They are flagging those accounts hopefully. They say they are very confident in the accuracy of their detection systems with a bold on very but hopefully they've actually caught enough of them that the rest of us should see a lot less examples of this stuff in our games. It's really frustrating when you get one of these. Like. Like a booster is just. It's a smurf where someone's playing on an account that isn't theirs and just crushing the game. They ruin the game. They win 95% of the time. It's really frustrating. They're way better than everyone in the lobby. But the hitchhiking is even more frustrating because you have one of those and someone who is terrible and doesn't belong there. [00:05:27] Speaker B: You. Yeah. [00:05:27] Speaker A: So and frequently they're a support. So if you're an ad carry player and the Smurf isn't the ad carry, I'm sorry, your support's probably pants on head stupid and you're going to lose the game. [00:05:38] Speaker B: It's a lot of shit like that. For those of us who have like there are plenty of channels that do unranked to whatever Diamond Masters, etc, etc. Those are not as a whole a problem. They get such a high win rate that they're out of your rank very quickly. And yeah, you'll see one or two of those guys go through and pub stomp and they usually pub stomp but it's usually those ones are almost always a single person rolling through. And then you'll check back a week later and they'll already be two ranks up. So if you see something and then you look and you go oh man, we just got stomped. And then go back a couple weeks later and take a look at that person's account. If they're still roughly where you are. That might be more towards a booster as opposed to someone who's doing anything else. [00:06:31] Speaker A: Possibly you. [00:06:32] Speaker B: You don't need to go through and check those things and report them. Their detection system is going to be way better than trying to get reports out for that. [00:06:40] Speaker A: Yep. I, I, I'm just getting rid of this shit will be a step towards making our games be a more Fair representation of 10 people who are roughly at the same skill level. Going head to head into two teams of five. That's what matchmaking is supposed to, that's always been the promise of matchmaking is get matched in on a team with four other people around your skill level against a team of five people around. [00:07:06] Speaker B: Your skill level and it's always going to be a little bit off, it's going to be a little bit up, a little bit down because it's, it's almost impossible to get a perfect rank for everybody. Yep. [00:07:17] Speaker A: But hopefully they're successfully making this a little better for us. Now let's actually talk about the changes that are balance changes in the patch. I'm gonna start with one that I think is important for literally everyone to know whether or not you play this champion. Because Briar got a significant functionality change to her ultimate. So her ultimate plays a global warning sound when it is fired so that everyone on both teams know that Briar has fired her Ultimate. It is being moved from playing that sound when she casts the ultimate to playing the sound after the ultimate has been cast. It has a one second cast time, so that is one second less heads up for everyone to react to Briar's Ultimate. [00:08:07] Speaker B: And it is a fast projectile movement. If you hear this move, end of story. [00:08:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Do not complete your recall. It's probably aimed at you. If you're just sitting there recalling and nothing's happening, you need to be out of that projectile's range before it hits you. They also have some other balance changes because obviously that's a huge power increase. And Briar was not particularly in need of buffs, especially since that's a reliability buff, which are really hard to quantify. So she also has some. Some numeric nerfs. They've nerfed the scaling damage base damage on her Q per rank, so it does 20 less base damage at max rank. However, they have shifted it back to physical damage instead of magic and they've removed the AD ratio entirely from the damage her ultimate does. All in all, I think Briar's just buffed from this despite the reduced damage in a couple of different spots. [00:09:06] Speaker B: Did you mention that her ULT also got longer? [00:09:09] Speaker A: It did. This is one of those. It doesn't meaningfully affect 99% of games, but her ult went from 10,000 range to 12,000 range. [00:09:19] Speaker B: This essentially means if she is in the center of the map, she can hit anywhere on the map. [00:09:24] Speaker A: Yes, that was already true. Now it's more like if she's in the ring of like Raptors and mid lane, anywhere in that ring, she can hit the entire map. [00:09:35] Speaker B: Yeah. From the jungle, she can basically hit you almost at your. Your base. You're in him. [00:09:41] Speaker A: Yeah. So, yeah, Briar, significantly more reliable, slightly less damage. I think it's a straight buff. Mike, your turn. [00:09:50] Speaker B: I was going to do this in a different order, but since do it. [00:09:52] Speaker A: In whatever order you want, since I'm. [00:09:54] Speaker B: Already up here, I'm going to take a quick talk about Aurora. She got a very, very simple change. Aurora, her passive got functionally nerfed. It takes 200 AP for her passive to. Well, no, it actually almost will never get up to it. You need like 5,600ap plus for her passive reaches the same place it was before the base percent. The. The baseline that her passive does is percent max health damage. And they knocked it down to just 1% from 2 and a half. To compensate, they buffed the ratio per 100 AP, but considering it went from 2 to 2.7 or something, you're essentially not recovering until a little over 200 AP. [00:10:41] Speaker A: Yeah, after that, it's better. [00:10:43] Speaker B: So this is a big nerf to her early game versus Tanks. It's. It's a nerf to her everywhere, but especially Tanks, where she is a pretty insane duelist in the top lane and kind of just become a burst mage, whereas she seemed to have been a duelist before. I'm not happy about it, but I'd rather see the Duratios on the passive be messed with than any power being given to any of her other spells. [00:11:10] Speaker A: Aurora makes me sad because Aurora is the latest example of. Here's this cool champion that does all sorts of cool things. Oh, wait, Those cool things are impossible to balance and could be really overpowered. So, yeah, now she's just a generic burst mage. Her Ult was way too strong in the original version, but I hate that now. It's basically just a big nuke in a large AOE that lets Aurora zip around. [00:11:36] Speaker B: Yeah, if you are good at Aurora, your ultimate can do really nasty things and get you out of situations where you would not be able to survive otherwise. But for most people, it's just big bong. And it. It does so much damage and she as a whole does so much damage and her Passive is so quick and easy to activate that, like her combo burst with Electrocute. Electrocute is disgusting. Whereas this. This whole concept originally was she was this mage, top Laner, who was able to fight with Tanks, but was sort of not as good versus the traditional mages in the mid. I wish she'd go back to that kind of a design and tone down her burst damage and give her more scaling into fighting tanks. But she's. She's technically weaker in the laning phase and stronger afterwards. [00:12:25] Speaker A: The. The biggest important thing here is that it discourages the, like, Bruiser slash Tank Briar that we kept seeing in Pro. You should not be building Rod of Ages liandries on Briar with these. Or not Briar on Aurora with these changes. [00:12:40] Speaker B: Yeah, she. She much prefers. Like, if you're. If you're going to go for a tanky thing, you go for seraphs. It gives you the ap. It gives you plenty of mana to stick around, gives you a nice big shield for survivability and then just go raw burst. [00:12:55] Speaker A: Mostly she just needs the ap. I feel like she needs to just be going like malignant or ludens into another high AP item. [00:13:03] Speaker B: Now horizon focus. The best item in game. [00:13:06] Speaker A: Horizon focus is absurd. Yes. Alright. I'm gonna do a couple of quick hits next. There are a couple of junglers who received very straightforward very small nerfs. First of which is Qiyana. Technically this is also a mid lane nerf but they've nerfed her base damage by 2 her armor growth slightly and reduced the ratio on her passive which is where every time she dashes and gets a power she can then auto attack you for bonus damage that has a lower ratio than before. This should make a significant difference in her jungle clear speed so that she's not literally the fastest jungler in the game. [00:13:44] Speaker B: It was kind of dumb. [00:13:45] Speaker A: It was very dumb. She should have never been that fast a clear speed. The other one they've changed is Volibear. Volibear, his passive has an AP ratio. It has two of them actually. One is that it has an AP ratio on the damage it does that has not changed. It's shockingly high. I'm just saying pun intended. But the part they've nerfed is the attack speed you get based on AP. They've nerfed it from 4% per stack per 100 AP to 3% per stack per 100 AP. This should meaningfully affect how much clear speed he gets when he starts buying items. Because Volibear was a rush. Usually cosmic drive first jungler where you're rushing the AP portion of it first. He's getting significantly less clear speed from doing so. I think he's still fine in the jungle. [00:14:44] Speaker B: Oh yeah. [00:14:44] Speaker A: He has some knock on effects for top lane and I'm fine with that. I will still play Volibear on this patch. I do not think this dumpsters him. [00:14:51] Speaker B: Pretty much same for Qiyana. [00:14:54] Speaker A: Honestly, if I played Qiyana I don't think this dumpsters her. I think it just knocks her down from S tier to A tier. [00:14:59] Speaker B: I think. I agree. I know less about Kiana than I do about Volibear and I think Voldemort is just fine. He's. He is still fully capable of building completely tank and having nothing problems. [00:15:09] Speaker A: Yep. [00:15:10] Speaker B: And you're only going to see a minor damage loss if you go some AP into tank or even full AP if you're weird enough to do that pretty much. But it's. It's. I think changes in the correct direction. [00:15:24] Speaker A: All right. Is your turn. What do you want to talk about? [00:15:26] Speaker B: Let's go to Hwei. So Hwei actually has maybe the most changes out of this patch he got partially because it's hwei. So he has quite a lot of spells within his spells, but he actually received multiple buffs across the board. The least meaningful potentially is his wq. The the path before you that gives you movement speed. They just flat out increased the movement speed and the AP ratio for movement speed. Its base rank is now the same as its final rank was before and it got a full percent extra per 100 AP movement speed bonus to it. So it's just frankly a better point. Your W is usually your one point wonder anyways. So this is just good. Your passive the two spell combo explosion that got a 5% AP ratio buff and all three of his E combos got a 5% AP ratio buff. Basically build full APM way you're going to do more damage and you should see especially if you're getting your passive out consistently, you should see a big chunk more damage because you're almost always procing it through qnd. Very occasionally you're proking it through Q and your W passive thing but or with your ult. But you should see like a 10% AP ratio essentially buff. Between the ease damage and the Q's damage is not a small amount of damage increase. [00:16:58] Speaker A: So here's my question. Is this enough to push him to like a Luden's horizon focus type build instead of the blackfire torch that is also popular on him? [00:17:08] Speaker B: I think it depends on what you're facing. If you're doing consistently the the volcano path Q, I think that's qe. No, that's. That's qw. If you're consistently doing qw, it's still better to go with the dot damage because you're just compounding dot on the dot and so it is doing a little bit more. But if you're sniping with QE or sniping QQ and eq, that's gonna do a heavy chunk more burst. And I would go more towards Ludens but as I said, it's also a little bit about what you're facing. If you're facing squishier targets. I think I would go Ludens regardless. [00:17:45] Speaker A: Yeah, that's kind of where I stand on it. You should pretty much only go blackfire if you're up against a team with a lot of beef. Yeah, if they've got like a squishy mid lane and a squishy ad carry. But the rest of them are beefy. Go blackfire. If they're like A Squishy Carry Top Laner, an Assassin Jungler, and a Mage Support Go Ludens. [00:18:07] Speaker B: Yeah, pretty much. [00:18:09] Speaker A: I want to talk about a champion that received two different buffs, one of which is a change to him and one is a change to items. So Amumu got a change to his bandage toss, which is his second max in the jungle typically. And the intent is for this to be a big buff to Support Amumu and a mild buff to Jungle Amumu. [00:18:28] Speaker B: Yes. [00:18:29] Speaker A: Ranks past the first on cue have a shorter cooldown than they did before. Same cooldown at rank 1. And the mana cost is now normalized at 50 at all. Ranks big buff for Support Amumu, who maxes this first. But this is the second max on Jungle Amumu 99% of the time, so it's a meaningful buff to that too. Cause 12 seconds at max rank is low enough that you can often get a third Q in a teamfight. Because remember, it's a charge system. He gets two Qs, but with a little bit of ability haste on your items, such as a Sunfire cape. Get that down to like eight seconds. You Q someone to start that cooldown, then you Ult them, then you Q them. By the time that second Q's run out, you almost have a third one. So I think Amumu is significantly stronger in all rolls because of this. And then I mentioned items as well. Riot finally realized that Bammy Cinder was a much, much, much, much worse buy for Clear speed than Faded Ashes, despite them costing roughly the same gold. So they're buffing the shit out of the damage amplification. That Bomby Cinder deals against monsters to try to close that gap. I do think Faded Ashes is still better, especially on someone like Amumu, but it's a lot closer. And someone like Amumu who builds both is a big beneficiary. [00:19:49] Speaker B: This just becomes a raw buff to him by, like, rank level nine. Because you're already putting. You should have a second rank into your bandage toss by then. Yep, you're probably close to a completed item starting to work towards your second. And the Bombies is the second where. Where your damage just clears. Insane. [00:20:08] Speaker A: And this also means if you fall behind on Amumu, you can just skip Liandry's and still have good clear before on Amumu, if you skips Liandry's, your clear was so slow that you just fell further and further and further behind. So it was kind of a. You have to. Because Faded Ashes is too strong. [00:20:25] Speaker B: It was it was almost to the point where like you basically, if you fell behind as Amumu, leveling Q was actually worse for you. For clear, you had to almost level W and E because otherwise you didn't kill monsters fast enough. [00:20:37] Speaker A: Yeah, specifically like the single target ones. He clears like Raptors incredibly well no matter what you build. [00:20:43] Speaker B: Yeah, there's nothing that can stop him from demolishing Raptors. [00:20:46] Speaker A: Okay, Mike, tell us about the Eye Laser Squid. [00:20:50] Speaker B: The Eye Laser Squid is also just catching buffs. And I think as a whole, like he needs a few more buffs, but they're also technically buffs to support Vel'. Koz. His E, the tectonic disruption, the knockback, it's just getting two seconds off at all ranks. Great buff. And this is where it's more towards mid lane than it is support. The base damage at second and third rank on his ultimate is going up and it's. It's ending up 125 more damage baseline, which very quickly becomes true damage. Yep, these are solid buffs. It's not enough to push him too hard. It's your. Your R is not your base source of damage. Your E is not your base source of damage. Gives you a little more safety, gives you a little more pick power. But you still need to have the strength to play him. [00:21:43] Speaker A: I'm saddened because it does nothing to handle the parts where he's oppressively ahead. It makes those worse and does nothing to help when he's behind, because then he still can't ult because he's behind and you'll just dive on him and kill him. All it does is just make it so Vel' Koz just does more damage and ccs more often. I would have really preferred instead of buffing his ultimate damage if they had buffed his W damage on ranks, because that ability kinda is like a. Even if you're stuck in it, if you sit in the W, it has a 45% AP ratio. His E, the knockup that just got a buff is a 30% AP ratio. All of Vel' Koz's damage is in his passive. His Q and his Ult. [00:22:27] Speaker B: Yeah. So realistically, this buff's good Vel'. Koz. [00:22:32] Speaker A: Yes. And I didn't think good Vel' Koz particularly needed buffs. I feel like average to bad Vel' Koz needs some help. [00:22:38] Speaker B: Yeah. But being able to buff those, being able to buff those makes the other ones even worse. So. [00:22:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh well, it is what it is. That's what they changed all right, reminder guys, we need more questions. Write in to theforwardspodcastmail.com so we can answer your questions on the show. We're gonna get through the rest of our backlog. So here we go. Our first question tonight comes from Reigns because I'm gonna bounce around a bit so we don't have just all Reigns questions for the second half. So Reigns writes in terms of personal win conditions and overall impact on game outcomes. What's the breakpoint for choosing a mechanically simple, consistent champion like Garen versus something that's more complex with a high ceiling carry like Fiora Camille or Kayn Top Specifically? At what point does it become more beneficial to invest in learning a carry top laner whose kit allows you to solo carry games if ahead rather than sticking with a straightforward champion like Garen who is easier to execute but may lack the tools to turn around a losing game or hard carry in high stakes matches. Are you masters or grandmaster? That's the breakpoint to me. [00:23:43] Speaker B: For two of those, yes. For the third one, do you have the time to dedicate to mastering a champion? If you cannot put in 100 plus games on a champion easily per like season point, you don't have enough time to invest into getting one of those into into a lane area. There are other easier laners to. To win on, but they're. They're going to be more towards like Garen. They're going to be straightforward at least in what they want to do and have a little bit easier of a baseline to play there. There are other champions that are very good with top lane. Renactin's obviously still one of them. Darius. These are easier champions that don't have the same sort of deficiency that Garen is, which is you always know exactly what Garen is going to do. You almost always know what Renekton and Darius are going to do, but they have a little bit more agency to them unlike Fiora, Camille, Kanan and I think out of those three, Kayn is the least likely to be seen. [00:24:42] Speaker A: Yeah, do not play Kayn Top unless you know exactly what you're doing. I'm sorry, that is. [00:24:48] Speaker B: That is by far the hardest. Kane. It. It allows you to get more into. You're. You're obviously going to be going Ross when you do this because you're just going to be fighting your top laner and you need to be consistently fighting your top laner and getting to rost. But Kane is really geared towards being a jungler and so pushing him into a top lane really sort of gives his power a little bit. So that's, that's of them the least one I would try and then I would also immediately pull Fiora out of that as well. As much as Fiora's damage is nutty bullshit, her skill floor is the highest of them all. If you're going to attempt to do this out of any of those champions, Camille is the one to attempt and you need to be able to put 100 games in per season, not like per year. So you're going to be getting 300 games of Camille alone in a year to try and master a champion. [00:25:41] Speaker A: For context, so far this year I have played 472 ranked games. I have not played more than 45 games on a specific champion in solo queue. [00:25:52] Speaker B: You're also an anomaly who doesn't have like a small champion pool. So yeah, if you had a reasonable champion pool that might be split into like 100 games per champion, maybe a little bit lower. Go like 80 games per champion with five of them. [00:26:09] Speaker A: Yeah. But the real answer is just if you're grandmaster or challenger, you can pick up a complex high ceiling carry. If you're not, you're better off learning game mechanics, learning your fundamentals on someone like Garen. Because if you learn things like minion manipulation and how to wave manage trading patterns, matchups, all of that, you're going to succeed more overall than if you try to pick up someone complicated and have to spend all of your time, energy and mental resources on trying to learn your champion again. [00:26:43] Speaker B: Yeah, if you find them fun, by all means continue to play them. But you're going to find that it's going to be significantly harder to win games with them than it would be if you just played Garen. Yep. [00:26:54] Speaker A: Also, what, what world are you in where Garen doesn't solo carry games if he's ahead? I see so many Garens in Plat by the way, who just get a lead and then just steamroll every fight because you can't kill him and he murders your carries. Garen's a nightmare. Just play Garen. Alright, our next question comes from Labana who writes bot lane. Question. You take a fight 2v2 and you lose, you're at around a quarter life, they're around half to two thirds. And your support or adc, whoever you're not, backs while the wave is pushing away from you. Is it better to base with them or attempt to stay grab what XP and farm you can as long as you don't die? [00:27:38] Speaker B: This is a very important distinction. Question if you are the support, it entirely matters what support you are. One of these can stay. If you are a tank support, you're not pushing a wave. You're staying as far back as you can to grab xp. Or you're just backing and using that time to go somewhere else. If you're a mage support, you can burst a wave and run. It's less likely to be done because then they can freeze it on you. As the even carry I think is the worst one. [00:28:07] Speaker A: Yeah, it's also one of those. It's bot lane. What happens if they freeze it on? I'm assuming you took the fight, you were at an even game state because otherwise why are you taking a 2v2 fight? So you're forced to back. They're now up a level, let's say because of all the experience you lost that they didn't. While they've got the wave pushing away from you, you and towards them. But you've based and spent your gold. You're coming back with a longsword or a couple daggers or whatever your champion builds first. And they don't have any of that. Which means you coming back in at full life. When they were at half can then just walk up with your support and 2v2 break the freeze. Yes, you will lose some experience in Farm because they had a freeze. But the likelihood of you not dying while you try to grab experience and Farm sitting there at a quarter health is very low. You will probably die doing that. Especially if the enemy jungler shows up. So just basing buying and coming back to lane with more raw power to offset the experience difference that they have is the best position you can really put yourself in because it's pushing away from you. They can't back or they lose the wave to their turret. [00:29:22] Speaker B: There are three AD carries that I can think of that unless they are explicitly pushing forward beyond the wave and keeping you off of it that you can kill the wave and run away. I think Varus. I think Sivir. I think. Oh shit, I just lost Jin. Those three. [00:29:43] Speaker A: I would add Caitlyn and Ezreal to that group. [00:29:45] Speaker B: Caitlyn and Ezreal, Yeah. Ezreal is by far the safest. He can stick around at a quarter life. It's dangerous but he can all the time. [00:29:54] Speaker A: Even though I shouldn't. [00:29:55] Speaker B: The others are. I'm wiping the wave. I'm leaving. Because they have the power to wipe the wave and leave. Ezreal doesn't, but he is the safest. [00:30:04] Speaker A: And he has the ability to last hit the wave from a very long range. But yeah, in general the answer is cut your losses, take the back, come back stronger, break the freeze. Unless their jungler shows up, you can break the freeze when you return. [00:30:19] Speaker B: On a side note to that, if you are the support and your ad carry is now like been playing poorly and is not doing this correctly. This is a good timing window when you're backing here to go to another lane and get them ahead. Surprise gank mid. Surprise gank top Gank mid. [00:30:36] Speaker A: Especially because the time it takes for you to walk up gank mid and then walk to bot lane is barely longer than it takes to walk to bot lane. [00:30:44] Speaker B: Even if you don't take a different path into lane instead of following the lane in, get a little bit more extended vision in. There are many reasons to go back at this point all right, let's get. [00:30:54] Speaker A: To Reigns big novel that he wrote. This is the last set of questions we've got for the night Rains writes. I figured I'd swap the monotony of sending spamming the discord with an actual email for a first time in a while. I've been endeavoring to keep questions very direct and not bloviate, but alas, here we are again. I've been recently picking up steam in my climb and I'm currently sitting in mid Bronze two with this. It means I'm coming against low silver grade Top laners who I'm finding challenging. My flavor is Mundo at the moment. Number one, I remember Jax saying a few pods ago that we need to remember this is a micro centric game or something along those lines. I can't quite remember the quote. Is there ever a world where I use macro decisions to just outthink opponents in games in a more lower decisions, larger impact type of way? Only because I don't have the hands or split decision making skills to hands diff people anymore. [00:31:43] Speaker B: Not really as a Top Laner unfortunately. [00:31:45] Speaker A: Top Lane is a very 1v1 duel and minion management Lane. This has to have been something I said about Top Lane because I can't imagine why I would say that it is a very micro centric game otherwise. But in Top Lane specifically in the the microcosm of Top Lane on Summoner's Rift, it's extremely micro centric. It's wave management, it's going for plates and greeting for plates when you can. It's 1v1 duels. Map awareness mostly comes down to knowing when the enemy jungler might be looking to gank you. [00:32:17] Speaker B: The sort of macro decisions that you can do as a top laner that can highly affect the game. Really are jungle timings, grub timings, other other big objective timings. And occasionally if you're a you're playing Mundo. So it's less likely here. But like Sion is very good at this. Randomly ganking bot lane and then TPing Top. These are the sort of things that are the macro decisions that top lane has if you want a more macro centric game. Realistically, jungle's where that is pretty much. [00:32:52] Speaker A: I will say as top lane. There is one time when macro can come into play. If the enemy has a freeze on you and you can't break it, your job now becomes go do something else on the map. So he has to break the freeze or else you are just winning the game while he sits there with his thumb up his ass. [00:33:09] Speaker B: Yeah, there is a macro thing with split pushing involved, but as a Mundo, you want to teamfight as opposed to split push. [00:33:18] Speaker A: Okay. No, Mundo loves split pushing because he fucking destroys turrets. [00:33:23] Speaker B: He does, but he's not a like. But he's such a dedicated split. Yeah, he's such good at the teamfights too. Just I'm walking past you all and going to your backline. Stop me or they lose. [00:33:35] Speaker A: Yep. Okay. Question two. I really enjoy playing Trundle as a secondary pick to Mundo, but I just can't get wins with him by myself. If I enjoy the champ and am mechanically sound with them, should I just continue to brute force it when the pick is necessary? [00:33:50] Speaker B: You said a very unique thing there and the correct thing when the pick is necessary. Trundle is not a champion into most champions in the top laner. He's better in the jungle because he. He has more tools to be a jungler and they have nerfed him relatively recently. That doesn't matter so much with what we're talking about. Play champions you enjoy more. But he is a champion in a scenario that you need to be versus tanks for Trundle to be optimal. [00:34:20] Speaker A: And specifically you need to be versus a tank who cannot taunt you under the turret. So not Rammus or Shen. And your job Trundle is a like split push forever champion when played in the top lane. He eats turrets for breakfast. He 1v1s amazing. Well, he teamfights like shit. [00:34:41] Speaker B: He 2v1s surprisingly well with a tank. [00:34:44] Speaker A: Yes, because you can ult the tank and kill the squishy carry that came to help the tank. It's if you're picking Trundle in the right circumstances when you're against usually a more teamfight oriented tank and you're just splitting to win. He can work, but that's also why you're not getting wins by yourself. If you're not getting ahead and splitting to win, you will lose. Trundle just doesn't bring much to teamfights. Compared to most other top laners, he. [00:35:11] Speaker B: Is essentially a weaker mundo in teamfights that also has a little bit of cc. [00:35:16] Speaker A: He has some synergy with a few champions like Poppy, but good luck executing that synergy in solo queue regardless of what rank you are. Okay. [00:35:24] Speaker B: My favorite synergy is Akshan. [00:35:27] Speaker A: That one's just funny. I forget, does he keep spinning even after the pillar despawns if left alone? [00:35:33] Speaker B: I think so. [00:35:34] Speaker A: That's so fucking funny. Get your friend, go into the practice tool and just throw down a pillar and let Auction spin around it. You'll understand the joy. Alright, question three if I feel like I have plateaued in terms of winning in a certain way with a champion, is it better to experiment with a different but viable build or just move to a different champion? I ask because my other secondary pick is Garen and I feel like I've done what I can with Bruiser Garen and I'm considering going Fazera's stridebreaker kit to carry through side waves. What the hell build are you going? That isn't Phase Rush stridebreaker crit. That's what I want to know. [00:36:07] Speaker B: There's like a bruiser tanky build. That's not usually why you would play Garen. Garen is a champion that wants to do damage. That's his only goal. So he needs to stride breaker on someone so they can't run away from him. He does a couple hits of damage so that he is unstoppably fast because Phase Rush plus his own passive and crit really is where his damage now comes from. There is a slightly tankier crit ish build where you eventually go black cleaver. But I might have to look at other builds on Garen. It might be that you are you're playing it in a little bit of a suboptimal way. Take a look at like what's doing really great right now. If you like the champion and you have enjoyed playing the champion, take a look at what builds are actually like good with them and you may find that you've been doing something that's just been outdated. [00:37:01] Speaker A: Yeah. The reason I'm so taken aback is that every single Garen I have seen for the last four months is fade Rush, Stridebreaker, Phantom Dancer, ie. After the ie, it varies, but that's the only build I ever see. Or maybe instead of ie, it's a mortal reminder if the enemy is a healing tank like Dr. Mundo. [00:37:22] Speaker B: I've seen some Trinity Forest builds. It's not really common. [00:37:25] Speaker A: Slap chop Garen. Don't play slap chop Garen. It's fucking bad. Just. Just seriously, just go Phase Rush, stridebreaker, crit. It's legit. The best way to build him, you do not need 100% crit. 50% is plenty. You can just build Bruiser afterwards. It's fine. [00:37:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Going like Black Cleaver for extra tankiness. It gives you more movement speed as well. [00:37:46] Speaker A: Or Sterak's to stay alive make you even harder to burst. He's already hard to burst. [00:37:51] Speaker B: He's great with spirit visage. Because then you walk away for 10 seconds and you're at full health. [00:37:55] Speaker A: Yep. [00:37:56] Speaker B: Depending. Depending on what you're facing, Garen optimally goes 1, 2, 3. That that Stridebreaker plus the crit combo into whatever is good versus the lane he's facing. Sometimes he'll go more damage into just crushing because he can go with a team fight and surprise bush. Kill a target very quickly. [00:38:16] Speaker A: Yup. Sit in a pink warded bush Q spin ults before the silence wears off on the Q and the squishy just dies. Because you went the correct build and because Phase Rush, they can't escape you even if they fucking flash or get thresh lanterned, you're still on top of them because you're Garen with Phase Rush. Seriously, just actually play that. It's just better than whatever you've been doing. It is all of his top builds, by the way, if you look at stat sites, all of his top builds are Stride breaker pd. [00:38:45] Speaker B: So I think we'll. We'll sublimate this into a. If you're struggling with a champion, take a look at what their current builds are and see what the wins are on them. Because you may be doing something that is out of date or you like. There are reasons that there are meta builds. They are just statistically better. There are some places towards the end of builds where customization really comes in, but for the most part, your core two, three items are almost always solved and you should be taking a look to try and figure out what to use versus when. And I think this might be just the problem. You're using something that's been outdated and it. It's noticeably weaker. So it's feeling off. [00:39:31] Speaker A: Also, we didn't talk about him, but Garen did get a minor buff to his AD ratio on his spin this patch. It's like 2% AD at all ranks, but still. All the more reason to just don't dump Garen. Just keep playing Garen and steamroll over the idiot Lucian tops that you're getting in your Bronze Solo Queue Games. [00:39:50] Speaker B: I was going to say they don't get a Lucian Top until we get more questions, but you gave them one anyways. [00:39:55] Speaker A: I gave them one anyway, but it's Lucian Top losing because you're gonna steamroll him with Garen. Listeners, we need more questions. Write into theforwardspodcastmail.com so we can answer your questions on the show. Or in the Discord put it in the Question Submission channel. We are out of questions at this point. That was the end of the backlog, so I look forward to seeing those things get filled up. And I've been Jack Zelman, you've been Mike Of Many Names, this has been episode 498 of the Four Words podcast. Good night everybody. [00:40:32] Speaker B: Good night, everybody. [00:40:33] 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 the Four Wards podcastmail.com so we can. [00:40:51] Speaker B: Answer them live on the show. [00:40:53] Speaker A: That's the Four Wards podcastmail.com.