Ranked Game #29

I'm back at home for a few days to relax before moving into an apartment for the summer, so I'll be playing quite a bit of LoL. I got around to playing my next ranked game last night, where my recent run of bad luck continued. I personally did better than I have the past couple games, but its a little difficult to carry as a support champion. This was a solo queue game.

I had second pick on my team, which had second ban:

Rammus, Karthus, Amumu, Nocturne


Draft:

Shen
Annie, Ezreal
Taric, Teemo
Mordekaiser, Nidalee
Warwick, Vladimir
Garen


I gotta tell you, I was pretty excited to have Shen on our team, being saved from out of nowhere can turn the tide of any battle instantly. Teemo is always a solid champion to have, as is Vladimir if he has a good start. I'm not confident in any junglers at this point, so I won't talk about Warwick. Being able to lock down any champion for 3 or 4 seconds with our combined crowd control was encouraging, especially when compared to theirs. They had almost no crowd control, with Annie having the only hard CC, and a sporadic one at that. To sum it up, I felt our significant advantage in that department would get us a solid victory, as long as we coordinated our attacks well without getting into bad situations.


Lane Matchups
Top: Vladimir vs Ezreal, Nidalee
Middle: Teemo vs Mordekaiser
Bottom: Taric, Shen vs Annie, Garen
Jungle: Warwick vs none


Early Game
Nidalee did a little probing in our jungle before minions even spawned, establishing a bit of a presence there to start out. Once the buff golem spawned, she came in to disrupt Warwick, which apparently threw off his groove entirely. It seemed like he was playing the entire game angry, as he claimed Vladimir had a chance to stop her, but didn't (he hit her, but didn't chase). As a result, he played very poorly, and couldn't get any successful ganks going. The first tower kill actually happened before First Blood did, which was something I had never seen before, and probably won't again for a while. As you may have guessed, our top tower was the first to go down after about 6 minutes of relentless pushing from Ezreal and Nidalee, even with a little help on the defensive side from Warwick. The matchup in the middle was pretty even kill-wise, as neither side could get anything going. My lane was one-sided in regards to pushing, as we were consistently sitting at our tower picking off creeps before they got into range. No kills happened while laning down there. First blood happened a minute or so after our top tower fell, when Vladimir caught Ezreal running away from his tower.

Mid Game
By this time everyone had started kind of roaming around where potential threats presented themselves, though not much came of it for our side. There were a few times where a couple of us would get caught with our pants down, and get annihilated. When full teamfights started happening, they were in the middle of the map. Warwick would go ahead and use his ult whenever he felt like, providing a pretty poor initiation for our team. It would be that, or Vlad running in with a faceroll, only to be blasted with their full team right away. It wasn't entirely their fault though, as we never discussed any real strategy for who to target first, which ended up in each person going after someone different and so we got destroyed. Nothing real exciting or at all notable happened for the rest of the game, we just got beat bad by a better coordinated team. They exploited our poor teamwork and took out towers when they could, eventually triggering our surrender at 33 minutes.




Post game scoreboard:

Replay link: Ranked Game #29 - Taric


What I learned:
- I can't trust anyone but myself at this level of play...I need to start playing champions I can take over a game with, and queuing with friends as well
- Vladimir doesn't seem like a good option to go 1v2, though I don't know who would have been better
- No crowd control does not make a bad team, as long as you can coordinate your attacks incredibly well
- Mordekaiser seems to be difficult for a Teemo to bring down, as he doesn't have that much burst
- I need to learn how to use Clairvoyance better, I find it hard to pick my times and areas to use it on

My Score: 2/3/5
My Build: Doran's Ring, Mercury's Treads, Aegis of the Legion, Negatron Cloak, Sapphire Crystal, Ruby Crystal
Summoner's spells: Clarity, Clairvoyance

Current ranked record: 14-15
ELO Rating: 1227

The games continue to get more and more frustrating, but I shall press on in hopes of getting my rating back up to 1300. I'm going to start trying to carry as often as I can, I'm tired of tanking and supporting mediocre players. I mean obviously I will tank if no one else does, but I'm not going to go for a first pick tank anymore until I move up in rating. As always, comments and suggestions are appreciated, thanks for reading.

-Chickenmoo