The most recent one is Maokai, which is an old favorite not many people play these days. If you want to watch it here's the link, but I'm not really going to talk about it much in particular. Towards the end, SaintVicious lets everyone know "Maokai is viable—in solo queue," which begs the question "Why isn't he viable in competitive play?"
This question has a very simple answer that's somewhat present in the guide SV makes. Maokai is extremely susceptible to counterjungling, and he's blue dependent. This is also why Amumu took a hit. But can we track how this happened? Maokai was a force to be reckoned with near the end of Season 2, but during the summer seasons of EU, NA, and Champions, he was only picked seven times with a 29% win rate (that's two games). While that's not statistically significant by any stretch of the imagination, people just—aren't playing him. At all.
Armor reduction
Sightstones
Nunu's Jungle
The return of Lee Sin
Good in solo queue?
Fixing Maokai
Questions
1. Armor Reduction changes
There are stages to this. The first obviously took place early Spring with the advent of the carry junglers who did ridiculous amounts of damage for no reason while still building tank items—mostly health. To underline this claim, the top contenders were Jarvan IV, Vi, and Xin Zhao. The latter's insane burst combined with his mark 15% armor shred properly ate Maokai alive in the jungle.
But why?
People didn't just suddenly realize these jungle champions are better than Maokai; RiotGames changed the way armor works.
- Armor reduction, flat
- Armor reduction, percentage
- Armor penetration, percentage
- Armor penetration, flat
The above is the order at which armor reduction and penetration are applied since the start of season three. Prior to season three, flat armor penetration was applied before percentage armor penetration, so the list would have looked like this.
- Armor reduction, flat
- Armor reduction, percentage
- Armor penetration, flat
- Armor penetration, percentage
This is significant for a couple reasons. The most obvious is that percentage armor penetration comes almost exclusively from the late game item, Last Whisper, while there are various other sources of flat armor penetration coming runes and masteries which decrease the relative effectiveness of the item. With the order change, flat armor penetration runes are a lot more useful. Early game, you can enter the rift and flat penetration will aid you before percentage penetration is acquired, and in late game, these same runes are not decreasing the relative effectiveness of your Last Whisper.
The second reason is a bit more subtle. To compensate for the changes to armor penetration, Riot also nerfed armor penetration runes and buffed flat armor seals. This is significant because it meant the most reliable way to break through armor early—which junglers need to do to secure buffs—is to reduce armor through flat armor reduction and percentage armor penetration. This made Xin Zhao, with 15% armor reduction on his passive, Vi, with 20% armor reduction on denting blows, and Jarvan IV, with 10% armor reduction on Dragon Strike, hella desirable to clear faster on single targets and break through the buffed armor seals on champions early game. Who is that percentage reduction going to be most effective against early?
Maybe a target with 18 armor at level 1 like Maokai.
Add the fact that he's blue buff dependent and will probably have expended his last sapling cooldown to set up his buff clear, and he's a very juicy target for an invade. His clear is now incredibly slow since he is blue buff-less, and you've managed to cripple a heavy ganking jungle so he'll fall behind in farm—plus, you have an advantage on him in that you can break through the newly buffed armor seals if a countergank opportunity arises. You can see how Xinvan Vi's advantage begins to snowball out of control.
We've all seen the 5 ward, all pots start on supports throughout season three. Previously, support players would at least start a Faerie Charm so they could rush a GP10 and have the income to sustain constant warding. These days, it takes 950 gold for supports to get a two free movable wards every three minutes. These little buggers are more useful than your standard sight wards because you can move vision to where fights occur from places where no one is paying any attention. As a result, there is less pressure on the support player to keep buying individual green wards, and they instead rush sightstone and pink wards.
Since ruby crystal, the first component to a Sightstone, is 475 gold and will leave a support susceptible to early harrass, they instead feel free to begin with only wards and potions in their inventories, and they can travel with their teammates to place these wards all over the enemy jungle.
How much of an invitation does Xinvan Vi really need for a search and destroy mission? Wherever Maokai goes, early wards will allow these hard-hitting junglers to find him and kill him. They just need to wait for him to burn a few cooldowns on camps, and he can do literally nothing but autoattack in vain to stop them while they shred his armor to nonexistence and scoop out his insides. G-motherfucking-G.
Nerfs to Xin Zhao, Vi, and Jarvan IV made the jungle safe for a time, which was when you saw Evil Genius' Snoopeh doing work with his old favorites like Maokai and Amumu. Of course, they were still really strong for all the reasons mentioned, only slightly less viable late game, and Maokai was still a bad pick, but a slightly less disastrous one.
Then came Nunu, and with him a whole round of additional jungle changes.
Nunu is bad for Maokai on his own because he can easily steal Maokai's buffs, and he has a hard enough time clearing without building AP—which he probably shouldn't do. But Nunu isn't nearly as good at ganking as Maokai, so he can be SOL in jungle and still catch up in assist gold and experience.
Riot fucked it up, though, and put all the experience on the buff monsters. This introduced even more fun junglers who like to kill Maokai—but we were talking about Nunu. In the SaintVicious guide, Nunu flashed through the camp wall to consume Maokai's blue buff. In a competitive game, this would easily get him killed, which is part of why you can get away with picks like Nunu and Maokai in solo queue still. But it reminds me of little tricks people used to pull when you could get level two just off of the Ancient Golem without killing the little lizards. They would body block an invading Blitzcrank grab steal through the wall and flash back in to finish their camps. This was clever at the time because level two, I think, is definitely worth the flash. It is less useful now that you can't get level two off of the camp.
But that shows you how powerful invades were at the time of Nunu's dominance in Season Three. A quick level two from a buff steal could snowball into an ace at two minutes into the game.
Then, you guessed it, Maokai is even more screwed. He has no real tools to protect against invade. Jarvan and friends can kill invaders. Maokai can't even throw out saplings to scout because it will jeopardize his ability to clear his camps.
The Nunu era didn't last long. His consume got proper nerfs and the changes to the jungle brought back slower camp clear, heavy roam junglers like Lee Sin and Evelynn. Lee Sin and Evelynn never really liked to farm. It took them a little while, and their ability to jump out of nowhere onto an enemy laner and burst him down made them much better at ganking. In the beginning of Season Three, when Riot put more experience on jungle camps—which also hurt Maokai, but I didn't mention it because duh—junglers who focused more on ganking than clearing like Mao, Lee Sin, Amumu, and Eve would fall behind single target camp clearers who could still gank...
Xinvan Vi true terror.
But when Riot moved a disproportionate amount of experience onto the buff camps, the wraiths, wolves, and mini golems became a near non-factor. Lee Sin and Evelynn could secure the buffs, get level three, and gank a lane at three minutes. And if someone came into their jungle to get one of their tiny camps? Who cares. They got first blood. Mathematically, an assist on a level three champion kill would give the jungler 150 experience. Meanwhile, the experience from the wraith camp is 120. As to the gold difference 150-200 gold (first blood depending) is going to be better than the measly 50 you get from wraith camp. So if Eve or Lee Sin get an assist on a solo lane kill, they're better off.
Do you know what else Lee Sin and Evelynn can do really well? Kill the fuck. Out of Maokai. Eve's spammable Hate Spikes and Lee Sin's Q burst damage and Cripple will keep him down, and all he needs to do is burn a cooldown.
Through all this, I haven't even touched on junglers like Eve who don't even need to shred armor to deal percent health damage or Nasus who can outfarm Maokai and get dragon 100 times better than he can. Riot didn't intentionally make them good junglers the way they seemingly intentionally made Maokai awful.
But what makes him supposedly good in solo queue? For one thing, early invades are harder to coordinate without team trust on calls. If bum fuck bottom lane decides they aren't coming, that might be a first blood for Maokai, who should be the one getting screwed by invade. Then you see the video with Saint where Nunu ended up flashing to consume his Ancient Golem. Let's point out the obvious problems with this. 1) He would definitely die if top lane were present, 2) he didn't get level two. Then if you add in Maokai gets his own red, and Nunu has to take a longer path to his, plus Nunu doesn't gank, and Maokai does and...
Yeah, it's a train wreck. Maokai ended up getting Nunu's blue in the end, too, so since he didn't split the little lizards on that one, he ended up getting more experience from buffs than Nunu did. And Nunu blew his flash.
Wait.
So you can see the shit that will happen in solo queue, but not at professional levels. Considering what I just mentioned above for competitive play relies upon coordination and minimizing mistakes, plus good ward coverage and champion knowledge—sure. Maokai is still the same guy in solo queue as he's always been. A targetable snare makes him really strong when flash is down, and his base armor and magic resist makes him an unkillable monster once he gets rolling (see the video for 3v1 action). But if your enemy jungler isn't blowing his flash to get less experience than you, and you don't take lane farm, you'll fall behind. Eve, on the other hand, rapes in solo queue. Always.
But how can we make him better? You can't very easily. His abilities need the burst to clear, and they need to cost that amount of mana for him to not be the scariest motherfucker to hide in your tribush. This is the perfect example of game changes making a champion irrelevant even though he stays the same (I'm sorry, Mao; it's not you, it's me). I'd say, if anything, reduce cooldown, mana costs, and damage on sapping toss, but buff damage a little vs minions and monsters. This will make the ability more of a utility spell to grant vision and a tool to control objectives, which I think is in tune with the true spirit of the champion. Another option would be to give him almost any other passive that isn't ability reliant.
This is completely false. Looking at early mana costs, Nocturne requires 60+20+15=95 mana for a full rotation, and Maokai requires 55+70+75=195 mana for a full rotation. Not only that, but Nocturne's burst and sustain come from his auto attack passive, while Maokai's sustain also comes from his passive, but that, as well as his burst, is completely ability reliant. This means Nocturne can clear much faster and with much more health remaining than Maokai if his blue buff gets stolen early.
Yeah. A Plat I jungler gave me this question. He should know better.
No comments:
Post a Comment