The Four Wards Podcast - Episode 535: Mayhem Redux

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to the Four Wards podcast. [00:00:07] Speaker B: 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 535 of the Four Wards podcast. I'm your host, as usual. I'm Jack Soman and I've just got one other ward with me this week to help you move forward in league. It's Mike. Of course. Hi Mike. [00:00:49] Speaker A: You'd never guess it was me, would you? [00:00:52] Speaker B: You know, the next time you get sick or something and miss an episode and I bring on Pillow alone, the listeners are gonna be really confused. Or if I'm gone for a week and it's you and Pillow, I should [00:01:04] Speaker A: just record something for if I ever miss pretend to be here anyways. [00:01:08] Speaker B: No, what I should do is I should record me doing an intro without the episode number so I can just drop me doing the intro for one episode that I'm gone. That would be funny. Anyway, we're getting off the rails already, guys. This is what happens when it's a two man show. We are the four Words podcast. We have a Discord. Come join the Discord. Come hang out. Come play games with us. We just played an Aram Mayhem with a listener before we recorded the show. We really do play with you guys. So come join the Discord so we can hang out and play games. [00:01:38] Speaker A: We've had a couple 5 mans recently. It's been really fun. [00:01:41] Speaker B: Exactly. So link is in the episode description. We look forward to seeing you in the Discord. We also do stream on Twitch. I can be found at Twitch TV JackSolman where it's a mix of links, league and variety streaming. Mike can be found at Twitch TV mikeofmanynames whenever we bully him into streaming and when he has time to. Pillow Pet can be found at Twitch tv. Pillow Pet and I want to give it a shout out to our awesome patrons who keep this show going on the Internet. Shout out to Codex, Ninja, Pillow Pet, Skippy, Squire, Labana, Uncle Chrisco and Yeet. The dab for supporting the podcast at the shout out tier. Thank you guys so much. If you want to support the podcast listeners, head on over to patreon.com theforwards podcast $1 a month just tells us that you love us. $5 a month gets you an exclusive feed of some behind the scenes audio of our prep work before each show. Sometimes it's also story time or whatever else we feel like doing. And $10 a month will get you that same exclusive feed and we will shout your name out during the intro of every episode for as long as you maintain your subscription. And all of those perks also apply to our general gaming podcast. Check out From 8 Bit to 4K on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts where we talk about everything that isn't League of Legends in the gaming space because we play a lot of non league games, guys. Last but not least, listeners, we didn't get any emails this week. We got one question in the Discord. I'm gonna need you guys to step it up. I wanna have a question queue so write in to theforwardspodcastmail.com or if you really do prefer Discord, go into the Discord and drop your question in the question submissions channel. But theforwards podcastmail.com is the preferred avenue. We need more questions please. Alright, so thankfully it is a patch week this week, so we're gonna talk about the patch. And you know what? I'm Jax Oman. People usually think I named myself after the league champion even though I've had this name on the Internet for almost a decade longer than League of Legends has existed. But I'm gonna talk about Jax first and foremost. Jax got two changes on this patch. One is very minor, his E the counter strike. The dodge zone got a slight increase to its max health percent damage. It's nice when he's fighting tanks, but it doesn't mean much. The big change for Jax and this doesn't sound like a big change until you actually play Jax. They've reduced the mana cost on his Q by 15. The main thing that makes Jax really dangerous to play in top lane is that his Q costs a crapload of mana and it is your ability to engage if you have a favorable fight position or your ability to walk up, farm and then use a combination of Q and counter strike to disengage if you're in a rougher lane. If you run oom, you can't farm in those rough lanes and you can't push people off to be able to kill them or take control of the wave in the lanes that are stronger for you. Having this cost less mana is huge. Jax does not build mana items and kind of spams abilities. [00:04:51] Speaker A: It's like a quarter reduction a little longer. [00:04:54] Speaker B: It went from 65 down to 50. Like add that up over all the times you're pressing Q and you are saving hundreds of mana before 10 minutes. It's big. This should Be a huge boon to Jax in the top lane while not making Jax Jungle suddenly become op. Jax Jungle is solidly like B A tier and this should keep him there. They don't want Jax Jungle to actually be strong because just like other junglers who have an insanely strong late game, if they get to bypass their weak early game by not being in a lane, they're problematic. [00:05:27] Speaker A: Yeah, Jax really solves this by having not the fastest of clears. [00:05:31] Speaker B: All right, Mike, you want to talk about the top laner on your list? [00:05:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Let's go straight to the other top laner who can jungle. We're going to go to Gwen. And this is. She's been in a little bit of a painful position since they continued to nerf both her and Dusk and Dawn. And so Gwen has had essentially an unplayable early game versus most other top laners that aren't her like counter pick matchup. The thing that she plays unbelievably well into. Gwen has had an impossible matchup into all of them. And so they have decided to both increase her potential early to mid game and increase her early game in different ways without combining the two to make it oppressive. This is a smart way to change what Gwen gets and to buff her without potentially making her overloaded. So Gwen's Q snip, snip. They're making it so that its later levels are gaining more damage. Not a lot. It's going up by at maximum two, but it's two per hit and she can hit up to four times. So it's eight base damage. But Q's still a very strong ability for her. That's her like core damage, but the real thing like that, that's her mid game slight buff helping her like even out her scaling up into the stratosphere. But her low was too low and this was really where it was is her skip and slash. Her E. They're buffing the base attack speed while keeping its max at cap level the same. So instead of 20, it's 30. Huge for her early game because you don't max this first. You can't step. Step is too strong of you for you to not max it. [00:07:22] Speaker B: This used to be her first max and they were like, oh, that's not allowed. So it is now forcibly the second max because of how she's designed. [00:07:29] Speaker A: Yeah, you need to max snip, snip in order to do proper damage. 90% of the time there's like 10% in which you can do this, but in those cases you're now Significantly weaker on your Q strap. So this is where it's smart. On her buffs, they're making it so that she has a smoother curve. If you decide to move towards one, you're going to want to do snip snap because it's better, but you're not getting a significant buff on that. Your base on your E is a lot better, but if you decide to go with that first, you're not getting that scaling early power. You're actually losing strength as you go on. So this was. This was a smart way to buff Gwen to keep her viable without becoming overbearing. [00:08:14] Speaker B: Yep. I'm happy about it. It's definitely a bigger than it sounds kind of change. [00:08:20] Speaker A: And with the other things that led gone on with, specifically with Sterak's and the people who use Sterak's, she has had a rough time. So this is. This is giving her a little bit more of that back. [00:08:33] Speaker B: All right. You know who hasn't had a rough time, though? Xin Freaking Zhao Riot has finally realized that static shiv on Xin Zhao in the mid lane is just oppressive in a way that most mid laners are not equipped to deal with. He heals way too much too early for most mid laners to be able to affect him in the lane. So they've made a couple of changes to try to basically push him out of AP mid entirely. The first is they have nerfed the healing early hard on his passive. Instead of 3% max HP, it heals for 2% when you have no AD or AP or anything like that. Yet he's losing a third of his healing in the early game. And the second and probably more important change is they have made his mana costs on his W not go down with rank and increased the mana cost [00:09:27] Speaker A: on his E. And that AP ratio on his healing got knocked off. [00:09:33] Speaker B: Yes, the. The AP ratio on his healing did also go down. I was getting there, Mike, because what I wanted to talk about is the key here is all of those changes don't matter for jungle versions of AP Zen. No losing the healing early. He does not give a shit. By the time that it scales up to try to catch up to where it was before you have ap. So the health ratio doesn't matter as much. And mana costs don't matter in the jungle because you're full mana while you're jungling generally or close to it. However, then they also just straight up nerfed the AP ratio. To be clear, it's still really high at level 11 or whenever the last tier of the ratio kicks in. You have 70% AP every three autos is your heal. It's still a lot, but hopefully that's enough to mitigate some of the worst sins of AP Xin Zhao. And mostly just push him the hell out of mid lane. [00:10:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Realistically, if you weren't playing one of the burst assassins, you couldn't kill Zayn. [00:10:32] Speaker B: Yep. [00:10:32] Speaker A: It required you to play that. [00:10:34] Speaker B: Not necessarily burst assassins, but you had to play a burst champ that could hundred to zero him during cc. So like, champions like Syndra were fine. Champions like it'd be fine. [00:10:45] Speaker A: Right. [00:10:46] Speaker B: But champions like, I don't know, Cassiopeia had no way to deal with him. It's brutal. And by the time that Cassiopeia scales up, he's also healing hundreds and hundreds of life per second. [00:10:59] Speaker A: Yeah, this is still going to be like a 400 health heal every three auto attacks, but it's not going to be a 600 health heal every three auto attacks. [00:11:10] Speaker B: Yep. Hopefully this just relegates AP Xin Zhao to being a jungle nightmare instead of a mid lane nightmare as well. [00:11:16] Speaker A: Honestly, I think if I ever see a Xin Zhao and I can find out if it's mid, I'm playing Nasus into it. [00:11:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:11:25] Speaker A: The most powerful thing about AP Xin Zhao is the scaling on his attack speed plus the healing. What is he going to do to Nasus? [00:11:32] Speaker B: Nasus quickly reaches a point where he does not care. Oh, you got statik shiv and you're pushing into me. That's cute. I'm stacking. [00:11:41] Speaker A: That's. [00:11:42] Speaker B: That's the Nasus matchup. I agree. And then if Xin Zhao tries to all in him, you wither and walk away until you're strong enough to wither and turn and kill him instead. [00:11:50] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:11:50] Speaker B: All right. Speaking of a terror in the mid lane, Mike, talk to us about hwei. [00:11:58] Speaker A: I don't know if I'd call him a terror considering he's just. [00:12:00] Speaker B: I think he is after this chair. [00:12:02] Speaker A: He's not around a lot. And his, to be fair, his changes are. He's got a sweep of changes through his Q and a mild buff to his E. His e got 1 second off its cooldown in all ranks. Very simple. [00:12:17] Speaker B: I'm just saying, Mike, he gained 3% win rate from these changes and is over 50%. He is a champion. [00:12:24] Speaker A: I say that. I also personally fully believe that was because people forgot Hwei existed and they went, oh, right, Hwei. Hwei is strong. But yeah, the other thing that Quay was Moderately poorly impacted by how he had to scale slows. So they, they switched his slow around with his QE a little bit and how it does its slow, it's a little bit more powerful now. But also he got a suite of buffs throughout the damage on his Q. Almost all of them are AP boost ratio buffs. In fact, I don't see a single base damage buff. So they're 10% here, 5% there, 20% there. Jesus Christ. [00:13:12] Speaker B: To be fair, the 20% is severing bolt his QW and it is only if the target isolated. [00:13:21] Speaker A: Isolated? Yeah, it's isolated or low health, something like that. [00:13:25] Speaker B: It's not isolated, it's missing health. It does a lot of damage if they are near death. It hits like a freight train. [00:13:34] Speaker A: Yeah, his QW is very, very powerful. But Hu Hue getting some buffs, you should give him a little bit of love if you're good at ki quay. He has weak matchups. In those weak matchups he's very weak. But if it's not one of his weak matchups, he's a good neutralizer or just stronger. [00:13:55] Speaker B: And again, he's currently over a 50% win rate on one of the hardest champions in the game to play. He's overpowered. He should never. [00:14:03] Speaker A: I don't. I don't think he's that hard to play. I think he's just learning. His thing is really easy to make. [00:14:08] Speaker B: Should never. He should never be above 50%. [00:14:11] Speaker A: I agree. I think it should. Should stick around like 49% but I don't think he doesn't. He doesn't need the right treatment. [00:14:20] Speaker B: I don't think he's as. I don't think he's any harder to play than a fel who I don't think is as hard to play as people make him out to be. So like, I agree with you, but I would definitely put him in the Aphelios tier of not quite riven level. Hard, but definitely on the harder side of champions. [00:14:35] Speaker A: The thing with both Aphelios and Hwei is it's an entire knowledge gap. Once you break the knowledge gap of understanding it done easy as can be, this champion is now simple for you to play. Other people may not know what's going on against you. They may not have a proper understanding of where things are going, but you, once you've broken that, now have one of the easier champions in that place to pilot. I should say his piloting is lower than especially someone like Azir whose piloting skill is top tier. Yeah, but the knowledge gap is the real kicker with Hwei and Aphelios is that knowing them and their power is a huge buff to playing both them and against them. Mm. [00:15:22] Speaker B: All right. Any other thoughts about Hui? [00:15:26] Speaker A: He finally got a good skin. [00:15:27] Speaker B: He does. I don't remember what it's called. I'm going to the collection tab and looking. [00:15:32] Speaker A: Yeah, it's the. It's the newest skin. Looks really good. [00:15:35] Speaker B: Sinful Shores Hui. What a. What a name. [00:15:39] Speaker A: It looks really good. And it's. It's this, like, suite of things that's coming out. There's a new champion coming soon. Not like next week, but, like, we've got the champion preview. Expect to get information on it in like a month or so. [00:15:52] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll know soon. All right, I'm gonna talk about a different mid laner who got some changes on this patch. Sylas got some buffs. These are not small. First of all, they have increased the damage on his Q. It got a 5% AP buff and it got base damage scaling per rank beyond the first. This might be worth second maxing now, which is crazy because usually for Silas, his Q is the third max. But I think with these buffs, I'm probably second maxing that in some matchups because it does give more damage than the. The abscond abduct per rank. And if you're going for just one shot builds, I think you max it second because you don't care about the lower cooldown on your dash or you [00:16:42] Speaker A: need to farm from far away. [00:16:44] Speaker B: Yes. But here's the bigger change. Kingslayer. Sylas's W, the thing where he dashes at you like point and click. And heals got a significant buff. The AP ratio on it went from 20% AP to 30% AP. It still increases based on his missing health at the exact same rate as before. This means that Sylas heals a crap ton more. If you think about like typical three item build, he's going to have three to 400 AP. That means if he's almost full health, he's healing for 30 to 40 more health on every W and it's like a three second cooldown. And if he's low health, maybe up to double that. I think it's like kind of crazy. [00:17:29] Speaker A: Below a quarter health, it's double something around there. [00:17:34] Speaker B: To be clear, many patches ago back in patch 14.15. So 24, 2024, his W had a 35% AP ratio and it did not have the health ratio it has today. It's now almost as much of an AP ratio As before and it still has the health ratio. Sylas is good, y'. [00:17:54] Speaker A: All. [00:17:55] Speaker B: I'm probably gonna be playing more Sylas mid. I think he's underrated right now. Both a bruiser version and a assassin version depending on the matchup. [00:18:04] Speaker A: Mm. [00:18:06] Speaker B: Alright, Mike, you got two marksmen left on your list. Pick one. [00:18:10] Speaker A: Go with the one alphabetically. Tristana. She's getting a good couple changes. Both of these are very impactful. One, she's an ad carry and she's getting AD growth already. Great. Half a full AD growth is massive. But the more important change, especially if you are one of those people who still can like wants to play Tristana in the mid lane. This is a big change that pretty much allows it. They are drastically pulling out the mana cost of her Q. It was 30 to 50. It's not going to be 15 to 35. Q is not your first max. In most cases. It's usually your E for the burst. That's huge. That's huge. [00:18:57] Speaker B: To be clear, I think they are allowed to do this because of the nerfs to explosive charge. That happened at the start of the year when they made crits. 200%. Tristana has massively less all in before she gets crit than she did before. [00:19:12] Speaker A: Yep. [00:19:13] Speaker B: But God, am I happy about it because the mana cost change felt so bad if you were an good in mid. But she should feel a lot better. [00:19:23] Speaker A: There are going to be matchups in which you can just play just on a mid and be good. Yeah, it's. It's going to be a powerhouse now in certain situations because she is an ad carry that can abuse the fact she's an ad carry and is a high burst ad carry who eventually becomes [00:19:37] Speaker B: a DPS monster into like Kassadin for example, who has no way to deal [00:19:42] Speaker A: with her early and she isn't burdened by the whole. A lot of those mid ad carries really want to get multiple sets of items. She's good on one and she doesn't need static shift. She can clear a wave easily enough and then build straight into critical. [00:19:57] Speaker B: Yep. And she loves untal because it fits her play pattern so well. [00:20:01] Speaker A: Yes, she does. [00:20:03] Speaker B: All right. I want to talk about a change to teleport. This is a change only for top laners who actually take teleport. So very few people are actually affected by this. However, when they gave us the top lane quest, they made it so teleport. If you took it, the upgraded version you get gives you a gigantic shield that lasts for a long time. The initial version it lasted for 30 seconds. So what would frequently be the correct way to use it was to teleport to a play 15 seconds before it would happen. So you have a giant shield, and you can just walk in and be like, I'm the Juggernaut, bitch. I'm a sett with a 1500 health shield on top of everything. SETT does that kind of stuff. They have changed this significantly. They've actually buffed the shield a little bit, but they reduced the duration to only 10 seconds. You now need to use teleport to arrive as a fight is about to begin or to a fight in progress. You can't just teleport and then go looking for a fight anymore. It doesn't last long enough. [00:21:08] Speaker A: I know that was what the, like, intended idea was for that, but I think the abuse case was someone who was a bruiser like that would teleport to a lane and go, you can't hurt me for 30 seconds. Fuck you. I'm taking this tower and half the next one that. [00:21:21] Speaker B: But it was also specifically, we saw this in pro play a lot. Engage tanks like Ornn, who had to be with their team for objectives, would just teleport right before the objective spawns. So they have a giant shield even though they were right there. [00:21:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:33] Speaker B: They could be a shield summoner spell, like an empowered version of barrier instead of an actual map control spell. [00:21:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Dropping it down to 10 seconds. That might be too much. It might not. They may buff it to 15. I think 15 might be the sweet spot. We'll. We'll see how 10 seconds feels as we play out some more. 10 seconds is either an eternity or nothing. [00:21:56] Speaker B: Yeah. The key here for now is, as a top laner, be aware you only get your shield for 10 seconds. If you actually took teleport in the top lane, it is a little bit stronger to compensate, though. So if you are teleporting timely, you are a bit better. Yeah. All right. You went alphabetical. So talk about the last marksman on your list, because. Holy shit. Fuck. This champion. [00:22:16] Speaker A: Yeah. This champion has been abusive in what it can do for a very long time. We were shown a bit from. Actually, we were showing it from a program where someone took him top lane and then everyone realized, oh, you can just play him top lane. Oh, shit. You can just play a mid lane. Oh, shit. This champion is just good everywhere. Why is Varus everywhere? [00:22:39] Speaker B: Yep. [00:22:40] Speaker A: And so they have with previous Nerfs especially. Especially the experimental hexbite Nerf. He is seen in most of his current build paths. Not one of them but most of them. A significant reduction in power in the non AD carry lanes because as an AD carry lane he usually didn't do experimental ax plate. That was the niche one there. So he's getting some compensation knob twists. Some of these are a little buffy, some of these are a little nerfy. His passive which gives him attack speed based on kills is going up in the non champ kill and the rate base champ kill. But then there's another non camp chill attack speed that is also going down [00:23:29] Speaker B: the the key here is these are attack speed ratios. So these disproportionately bullets benefit on hit varys over his lethality or traditional AP builds. Because traditional AP nashers is your only on hit item. [00:23:44] Speaker A: Maybe he he would gain AD&AP and this bonus was a percent of his attack speed. [00:23:53] Speaker B: Yes, those are getting clear on the patch notes guys. [00:23:56] Speaker A: Those are getting mildly buffed. But the actual attack speed buff that he gets from non champion kills is going down. His champion kill attack speed is still non changed which yeah, if he gets a kill fine. His Q is seeing some AD ratio nerfs. They're good. It's good. It's good nerf to do. [00:24:19] Speaker B: Yep. [00:24:20] Speaker A: And his base damage on blighted quiver is seeing some nerfs very mild. It's four across the board. It hurts a lot more early than it does late. But they have tweaked the couple of abusive cases, especially with how living vengeance plus blighted quiver worked together. And his Q was a little bit too powerful in those on hit scenarios when you weren't building tons of ad. So they're nerfing the ratios a little bit to make it so like hey, stop doing so much damage. [00:24:53] Speaker B: And if you're a fan of actually playing Varus as a marksman bot lane carry, you should be mad about all the solo laners abusing your champion because he is in the dumpster in bot lane his win rate has plummeted. In gold plus in NA he is the 38th best top or bot laner. I don't know that there's supposed to be 38 champions in the bot lane. That's how bad of a ranking that is. However, yeah, he's still hovering at 49% win rate in the top lane which is what these nerfs are intended to target is the lethality build and the top lane build in the last couple patches. So he's still more abusive in the things that are problematic than he is in bot lane where he's actually supposed to be and is supposed to have windows of being strong. [00:25:43] Speaker A: So the thing that annoys me is lethality is less AD but more penetration than crit. They should have pulled some of his base damage. [00:25:53] Speaker B: More AD and more penetration but less attack speed. But yes. [00:25:57] Speaker A: Oh yeah. Yeah. It's all into one without having any of the highest burst of the other. I still think they should have pulled the base and kept the AD ratio up on his Q. I don't know. [00:26:07] Speaker B: What they need to do is give him the same treatment they give other marksman to force them into crit and reduce his damage and give him a crit ratio. [00:26:14] Speaker A: Yes. I think. [00:26:16] Speaker B: I think the version that is not abusive, it's just shit right now. [00:26:21] Speaker A: But there is an on hit build which is okay. And there is the AP build which is not. Not good. Not. Not. Not allowed. Not. That's stupid. It's. It's too strong. [00:26:32] Speaker B: Oppressive is the word you're looking for with just a couple APMs. He doesn't. This is not like a full 800 AP build but with like dusk and dawn gnashers. AP Varus can literally do like 60% max health damage while you are rooted. It's dumb. That's just the max health damage, not all of the base damage of all of the autos and the ults that he's also hitting you with it one shots. Most players, period. It's dumb. It shouldn't exist. I really wish they would just get rid of AP Varus entirely so that they could then make Varus good for the people who actually want to play him like a marksman. [00:27:13] Speaker A: And because as a marksman, his on hit build is actually fun. [00:27:16] Speaker B: Yeah. As a marksman he is supposed to be a Ash like but with different utility in some cases because like he has the. The blighted quiver ground that like puts out a heel cut and with more damage. That's supposed to be what his identity is. But right now Ashe does way too much damage even after the Nerf she got a couple patches ago. And Varus is this weird mage build instead. I hate it. You know what I don't hate though, guys. We got a whole other set of changes we want to talk about. We hyped up Aram Mayhem when it came out and it's getting a big revamp. This patch we've been having a blast on a REM Mayhem. It is just genuinely fun. [00:28:02] Speaker A: This was something we thought was going to be a temporary mode. [00:28:06] Speaker B: Yep. [00:28:07] Speaker A: It's been here for like six months. [00:28:09] Speaker B: I don't think it's been quite that [00:28:10] Speaker A: long, but they said it's the beginning of the year. [00:28:13] Speaker B: I think it was like February or March. [00:28:14] Speaker A: But yeah, whatever it was, Mayhem was supposed to be one of the temporary modes. It has become so popular so fast. They have not only kept it, they have done a new season on it and now a second season on it. [00:28:28] Speaker B: Okay, I was wrong. Mayhem was added in October of last year. Holy crap. I didn't realize it's been around that long. I thought it was early this year. [00:28:37] Speaker A: So eight months. [00:28:38] Speaker B: Yep. So let's go over what they changed and what our thoughts are on it. Having only played it a little bit, we have barely scratched the surface of what these things have done. They've added a new type of two new types of augments. They've added ability augments and quest augments, [00:28:57] Speaker A: which can be the same thing. [00:28:58] Speaker B: Yes. Sometimes they're both ability augments directly change your abilities. These can do different things on different champions, but they give an example in the patch notes of Quick Step. This applies to champions who have a self targeted AOE ability like Garen or Alistar and it makes it so that that ability dashes you forward. My wife got that on Alistar in the game we played before this podcast. It's really funny getting an extra dash on Alistar. [00:29:30] Speaker A: Yeah. I got a combo version on Kha' Zix which was you enhance Q as you cast more Qs. Let's cooldown reductions. Yes. [00:29:40] Speaker B: So quest augments. And again, these can be combined with ability augments. [00:29:44] Speaker A: Cool. [00:29:44] Speaker B: Quest augments have tiers. As you complete stages of the quest, it upgrades the augments to do more. So Mike, in your case, you had one on Kha' Zix Q. What did it do? [00:29:56] Speaker A: The baseline of it was just cast a Bunch of Kha' Zix Qs on champions as your first tier, half the cooldown. At your next tier, get 160 ability Haste on it. I was casting Q every second. Q auto attack Q W Q E. [00:30:15] Speaker B: Now imagine if you somehow got. [00:30:19] Speaker A: Oh, it got worse. [00:30:20] Speaker B: Mystic Punch and the on hit abilities one and it refunded your own cooldown on it. [00:30:25] Speaker A: That would be funny. But I also had shrink engine which gave me more ability haste. [00:30:30] Speaker B: Yep. [00:30:31] Speaker A: So like these. These stack into things really well now. So yep. [00:30:36] Speaker B: With this, I was gonna say there's also one other augment type that we've seen is champions with projectiles can get a split shot where splits it into multiple projectiles. [00:30:48] Speaker A: I got that on Ash ultimate things like BlitzCrank Q BlitzCrank Q Ash Ultimate. [00:30:54] Speaker B: It's so funny. [00:30:56] Speaker A: Now it splits from the point of shot. So long range Ash Ultimates are only ever one arrow. But if you're like in the middle of a fight, you can get three Ash Ults out and smack people. Five Ash Ults. [00:31:08] Speaker B: It's so funny. All right, so that's the new type of Augment. They've also gotten rid of the trait system. So in the previous version of AM Mayhem, sometimes you would get an Augment and then you'd get another one that was similar in style of what it did. Maybe two different stacking Augments or two different Enchanter Healer type Augments. And you got this extra trait that was really powerful and incentivized you to pick the thing that synergizes because of the trait. Regardless of what the actual Augment you are picking actually did. That's gone. It's just straight up removed. However, some of the popular trait effects have been rolled into standalone augments of their own. Various tiers depending on the Augment. For example, Wee Woo Wee Woo is still around. It's now just a gold Augment. Stackasaurus Rex is now a Silver Augment. Archmage is a gold Augment. There's a few others. So some of them are still around. They're just actual regular Augments now. [00:32:13] Speaker A: And they're. Fuck. Most of those are legitimately just straight up worth it. Archmage is great. Stackasaurus Rex is very strong. If you have stacking, we Woo Wee Woo is hilarious. [00:32:23] Speaker B: Yep. Mostly they are worth considering taking regardless of your champion, which was what the intention was when they were supposed to be traits, but now like they're just things you just get sometimes. [00:32:38] Speaker A: And these are. Yeah, these are usually better than the like basic tier of their equivalent. There are some that are just like gain magic pen and armor pen. Well, that's just worse than gaining Archmage or gaining Gold with Make It Rain. [00:32:55] Speaker B: So speaking of worse, they've also removed a whole bunch of Augments from the game. Some of these were removed because they just didn't add anything. Like, as funny as the Question Ping Augment was, it doesn't make for a good gameplay experience to incentivize people to spam question pings all game long. [00:33:15] Speaker A: I got it once. It was fun, but I would never have gotten it again. [00:33:20] Speaker B: Yeah, so that's gone. A bunch of other like, this was technically really good, but it wasn't fun gameplay like Grandma's chili oil is gone because it just incentivized you to stand in one place to heal Hat on, using it for damage. Hat on a hat is gone because it sucked. And some of the ones removed are just. They were freaking bad, so they're gone now. [00:33:45] Speaker A: There's one that they took away that I really miss because if you got it as your first Augment, it was awesome. If you got it any other time, it was terrible. Cheating. [00:33:55] Speaker B: Cheating is gone. [00:33:57] Speaker A: Cheating allowed you to back an Aram. You can't do it anymore. And it's quite literally, if you got it as your first or second augment, great, fantastic. Anything after that, worthless. You just lost your power. [00:34:11] Speaker B: Yeah. So most of the Augments that were removed were either like cheating where they could situationally be really good, but they also just didn't feel great to get a lot of the time. Or they were just bad or things that incentivize or they were. [00:34:25] Speaker A: Or they were bullshit strong. There are a couple that were too strong. [00:34:28] Speaker B: Yes, there are a couple that were just too strong. And a lot of them just incentivized. Not fun gameplay like laser heal where you just sat back and cast laser heal every 20 seconds and healed your team to full. [00:34:40] Speaker A: Void Rift was monstrously powerful. [00:34:43] Speaker B: Yep. So in their place, because of course you don't want just less augments, not only do you have those ability and quest augments that we mentioned before, but they've added a bunch of new augments. I don't know what a lot of these do, but I have a list on the patch notes and we know the ones that are in the new Mayhem pass because now if you play a lot of Mayhem, you got. You get a new progression track to go through and unlock a whole bunch of augments again. And some of these on the list that we can read what they do because that's all we know right now. Sound really great. There's one that makes it so when you cast your ultimate, you create a zone that grants ability, haste and move speed and attacks and abilities, shoot missiles at things. That sounds great for like a plant and fight type ultimate already there is Mordekaiser. Yeah. There's one that makes it so when you die, Tibbers drops in, gets the benefit of your Augments and chases your killer. [00:35:46] Speaker A: There's one where you die. You become the. The shark from Fizz Ult. You just chase people down and eat them from up below. [00:35:54] Speaker B: Yep. And then we don't know what this does, but the last reward in the pass. And this is a free pass, by the way. To be clear, this is not a paid pass. The pass is going to be open until October 6th. So you have plenty of time to work through it. Just play some mayhem. When you get a chance, join the Discord and come play mayhem with us and with other listeners. It's a fun time. The final reward this time around is something called Dimensions Shift, which says gain when the darkness comes. Summoner spell that sends everyone in a targeted zone to another dimension. What I think this means is an AOE Death Realm effect like Mordekaiser Ult, but I don't actually know. We'll find out in a day or two when someone posts a YouTube video after they've ground out the whole pass, if they haven't already. Maybe they have by the time that this goes out. [00:36:47] Speaker A: If you've been playing nothing but Erem Mayhem, I'm betting some people are pretty far up on this pass. I've been playing sporadically and I'm already almost at seven out of 32. [00:36:57] Speaker B: I think I'm at six. Let me look. Where am I at? [00:37:01] Speaker A: And these don't cost like the, the. The cost doesn't continuously increase over and over and over. These are just quick quests to roll through. [00:37:10] Speaker B: Yep. [00:37:11] Speaker A: And if you actually do the like, there is a quest, like per weekly quest thing, gives you some bonus xp, pushes you on the track for play some games. Have some fun. [00:37:20] Speaker B: Mayhem is a lot of fun. Play mayhem with us. Join the Discord. Alright, speaking of the Discord, one of our Discord members and a Patreon supporter gave us a trinket tip and he's our question writer this week. So his trinket tip is pretty simple, but it is a good one. You can often get enemies to use spells or try to engage on you by channeling your back animation. Now, I want to be clear. If you are literally in the middle of farming in the wave and you start channeling back, they know you're baiting. They're not going to get baited themselves by that. What this refers to is situations where like you have your jungler waiting on a pink ward, waiting for them to step up. You wipe the wave and walk away. And they're like, oh, he's going to reset. Let me go throw a spell at him to interrupt his recall. And then your jungler comes in and kills him. That's the kind of stuff you can do with this. And when you're doing that, you don't want to go wait behind your tower, walk up like to your tower to where they feel like they can walk up and poke you. It can be very effective. I've done this Myself before. It's hilarious. It's especially funny when you're playing a champion like Malphite and they walk up to poke you out of your recall and you just ult them. It's great. Alright, so we also got our question this week from Yeet and Yeet. The dab writes what are some ping conventions that are prevalent in your games which might not be intuitive to a newbie. So Mike, I'm gonna let you answer this first because you and I are in different elos when we play ranked and we might have different answers. [00:38:53] Speaker A: So there's a couple things here with ping conventions is a little weird because there are a few things about pinging that are just either misconstrued or just the angry pings everywhere that everyone gets. [00:39:08] Speaker B: Yep. [00:39:09] Speaker A: One of the ping conventions that is not properly utilized is missing pings. And the higher up you go, the more missing pings are used either correctly or as frustration point. You are either going to get one or the other and it's going to increase in frequency the higher up you go. So realistically that's the second you don't see a champion. You're going to start missing pings on the lane. One of the things that I know for a fact if I see a champion on the minimap, I ping them. Just. Just a point of the ping there. Boom. Everyone knows there's a champion and they saw where the ping went if they paid attention to the ping. Not everyone pays attention to the pings. Danger pings mean something to people the higher up you go. Sometimes people ignore them anyways. But usually, usually in games that Jax isn't in, people will pay attention to a danger ping and either back down or play more cautiously. It's something that pings become better utilized just as a whole the higher up you go. But then there are some things that are just like not stat there. There is not something that is a standard use of pings apart from missing pings on a champion because you're mad at them. That's pretty standard across the board. [00:40:27] Speaker B: Definitely one that is consistent at all times everywhere. Unfortunately it is not useful. Don't do it. But it is extremely common. [00:40:38] Speaker A: The other one that is very common in especially my games with Jax because both of us do this. So this is something that becomes common with this sort of gold into emerald rating. Is pinging a pathway? [00:40:52] Speaker B: Yes. [00:40:54] Speaker A: You know, someone has left in a certain direction ping whether you expect them to be going. [00:41:00] Speaker B: Yep. It still doesn't work a lot of the time because some people just aren't paying attention. But if your mid laner is roaming to bot and you ping the path he is taking and then ping retreat or danger on the bot lane a couple times afterwards, they are more likely to react than if you're just ping danger on them or just ping missing on mid lane. What I was going to say is the the most useful pings to me but by far our enemy vision telling people there's a ward here. That one's pretty universally understood and on my way. And I want to be clear about that because on my way does not mean what it should mean. It doesn't mean I'm coming for some reason at least at like gold plat emerald, that bracket of play on my way means fight. Now all in there is an all in ping. No one uses it. They use on my way to mean that. I don't know why but it's very frustrating and definitely caused me to miscommunicate to my teammates a few times before I figured out that's what they think I'm saying. When I say on my way I literally meant I'm coming. Hang on. And they saw on my way and would just immediately blow their ult and fight the dude and then wonder why I didn't arrive. Because I was coming. I was five seconds out. If you've ever watched my stream, you'll notice when I'm using on my way to someone who is in call I am literally counting down. I'm there in 10 seconds. I'm there in five seconds. Four, three. Okay, fight. Because if I don't do that then the on my way ping is gonna bait people in just the same way as it does in solo queue. That's the big one to me. No one uses push. No one uses all in. No one uses need vision and the only people using assist me are people who are complaining about their jungler. That's been my experience with it. [00:42:47] Speaker A: The other one that I've noticed frequently done is especially when ganks are coming is people paying the danger one to try and get you to move away to don't come here. That's the other pretty prevalent one. Yeah, I wanted to circle back because I didn't get a chance to mention this on the trinket tip with that back point. Don't just sit there and back to bait an enemy spell if you gain no benefit from it. [00:43:16] Speaker B: Yeah. You want to use that to bait them to walk forward to put themselves [00:43:20] Speaker A: at risk the the enemy mid laner last game we played did this to me consistently and all it did was hurt her because I got to sit there and throw spells at her. And then when she finally I just. I wondered if she was going to complete the recall and I went, okay, fuck it, I'll let you do it. Then I got to shove a wave through and deny her an extra two waves. [00:43:43] Speaker B: Yep. [00:43:43] Speaker A: So you need to do this for a reason, not just because you want to bait a spell. Baiting a spell, unless it is like a perfect all in engage is not usually useful. Especially not if you can't do anything about it afterwards. [00:43:59] Speaker B: Absolutely. And you tangented back to the trinket tip. I had one other thought about pings. If someone's not listening to your pings, or if they start typing at you because you're pinging, keep doing like the communication pings like retreat or on my way or enemy vision. But I wouldn't keep pinging like back off, back off, back off or assist me or on my way to them because they're not listening. They're just gonna get upset at you because you're trying to communicate to them. It's not worth the hassle. Worry about communicating with the rest of your team. Not the. Not the one guy who's being a jerk. Matter of fact, if he's being a jerk, mute him. His pings aren't going to be worth anything anyway at that point because he's throwing a fit. [00:44:45] Speaker A: Yeah, sometimes it's just better off to mute them so that you don't have to deal with them. Especially if they're doing consistent spam pinging. Because they're not using the pings as a conversation. They're not using the pings to help. They're using it as a harassment tool. [00:44:58] Speaker B: Yep. [00:44:59] Speaker A: However, if you don't want to deal with pings at all, you can just play Lucian in the top lane. You don't have to bother pinging people in anything. Except maybe. I win. I win. [00:45:08] Speaker B: On my way to the Nexus. [00:45:10] Speaker A: On my way. Here I come. [00:45:12] Speaker B: Yep. Alright guys, this has been episode 535 of the Four Wards podcast. I've been Jack Zoman for Mike and many names. Have a great night. [00:45:22] Speaker A: Good night, everybody. [00:45:24] Speaker B: Thanks for listening to the Four Wards podcast. If you want to support the show directly, consider checking out our [email protected] theforwardspodcast and of course, send your questions to theforwardspodcast@gmail com so we can answer them [00:45:42] Speaker A: live on the show. [00:45:43] Speaker B: That's the [email protected].