Updates and Story Time
September 20th, 2011 § 5 Comments
I haven’t been checking twitter or posting as often as I used to since I’ve been a little too focused on playing and watching LoL. If you haven’t heard already, I’ve been practicing with EPIK in scrims to tryout for the 5th spot on their team since PGB has stopped playing as their main support player. As far as I know, Curtoky and myself are playing against each other (alternating places in scrims) to see who the better player is for upcoming tournaments. How are the scrims going? While being able to scrim with EPIK, we won twice against the Korean team with rjsdndgod, won once or twice against REZ (without Tree), and won once and lost once against RS. The one loss against RS was ours for the taking… but Jatt managed to out smite Dan for baron and we lost the game from there. After playing those two games and watching two games Curtoky got to play against RS, I’m starting to understand their style a lot better. I’m hoping we will get more scrims in but we haven’t been doing much for 4 days now…
My computer is supposed to be delivered today and I’m not sure when it is coming but someone on twitter messaged me a question that I thought would take up some time while I waited. @Padrepablo asked me “@NHATN been reading your blog. I’d really like to know the advice Dan Dinh gave you about Rammus way back when” which is a question that comes from one of my older posts where I mention that Dan is one of the people who helped me understand LoL at a competitive level. A long time ago before Season 1 had started (only normal games – about a year and a half ago…), I was a pretty avid 3s player and only played Twisted Treeline. Eventually it got to the point where I was waiting 20 to 40 minutes for a game since my wins over losses got to be over about +100 and I started to run into the same high skilled players while queuing for 3s. This is where I met Aznwiseguy, an infamous rager, and started to group queue with him since he was decently skilled. He was difficult to play with since he would rage at how bad our 3rd teammate was or how bad the other team was but I put up with it because we would win 90% of the time (and I didn’t want to lose after wating for 20 to 40 minutes for a game).
One of the better groups of 3s players who were playing normals at this time were Sickmotion, Chaseonfire, and xxjagedxx. They were probably my biggest competition on 3s back then since they would run a team comp of Janna, Singed, and Ezreal. Janna’s shield was stronger back then, Ezreal’s ratios were higher back then, and Singed has been unchanged but he is still broken as FK. Aznwiseguy and I happened to queue against them one night and we got crushed with a random 3rd player that matchmaking gave us. Aznwiseguy, being the rager he was, decided he wanted to really beat these guys (and that they got lucky we got a bad 3rd player) so he invited Dan Dinh to play with us. This is where I met Dan for the first time (u jelly?). I’m pretty sure I remember our team comp to be Rammus (me), Ezreal (aznwiseguy), and Heimerdinger (Dan – he might have changed champions once or twice to adjust to them) but we got stomped 3 games straight. Even if we were doing well or breaking even during the early game, Singed kiting with Janna and Ezreal behind him was just impossible to beat. During the last game, Dan asked me what skills I was leveling up and I told him that I was focusing on Q and E (which are powerball and taunt respectively) and he was like “wtf” and told me to level up W (defensive ball curl) more.
Since I was curious about why he wanted me to level W I added him after the games and asked him. He told me that I was dying too fast by not leveling W and that I needed to survive longer. Back then this blew my mind since all I knew how to do was powerball into someone to blow them up. I never took the time to think about the most effective way a tank or Rammus was supposed to be played but focused on just killing the enemy team rather than my survivability. Before this advice, I thought that leveling Q was an easy way to crush people since the damage was pretty good. Back then, people didn’t really use many tanky dps champions but would use ranged ad carries like Ashe. My Rammus would always smash ranged ad carries with Q and I never deviated from that. So I took Dan’s advice and tried out leveling W and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. I wasn’t sure if it was my fault or if Dan was wrong but I kept trying to adjust to make it work. Maybe I put too many points into W and not enough points into E. If I didn’t have enough points into E, my taunt duration was too short and the enemy champions got away and if I didn’t have enough points into W, I would die too easily. Eventually, I got to a point where I understood situations enough to cheat and get lots of points into W or E as situations played out and became a successful Rammus player when Season 1 had begun for the 3s ladder.
Just like in my old post, I still think that Dan probably didn’t think much about giving me that advice but it was a great catalyst to how I think about playing LoL today. It gave me the idea that champions can be played differently, where there may be multiple correct answers instead of just one. The best examples I can come up with are the classic EU ad/support bottom, Warwick/Udyr solo top, and more recently RS assassin/bruiser team comps with non-sustaining supports or solo AP Janna mid. I also never really messaged Dan after that day of advice but I would send him a GG once in awhile when he would get a good tournament win or ask when his next tournament match would be. So there is your story @Padrepablo :P GL HF GG~
Nice story! Thanks for the quick reply. You thoroughly answered my question!
np
[...] my replies here. If you liked reading about my IPL 3 experience you might also like reading about how I first met Dan Dinh or what I did at PAX [...]
haha awesome wonder if dan remembers
[...] For LoL I didn’t have a mentor since I played alone for a long time (not many of my friends played and if they did play they didn’t play as much as me). The way I started to learn how to play at a higher level was to watch the higher level players that streamed (like the guys from CLG and TSM) and try to mimic or understand what they were doing while also hoping they would drop small gems of useful information through commentary. I also did not have an idol for the game since there aren’t many support players for me to look up to (although you can read about how Dan influenced my thinking unintentionally here). [...]