Saturday, November 19, 2011

League of Legends: Getting Better?

I was watching some of the games on MLG today and chatting with Robb about them. Nasus (the hero I've been playing a lot recently) was featured in one of the games on the winning team and Robb asked me how long it takes me to farm my Q ability up to +300 damage. (Each time you kill something with the ability it gains a permanent 3 damage for the rest of the game.) I said I didn't know and Robb said it would be a good way to compare with the pros and measure improvement.

Now, it turns out I'd recently downloaded a program called LoLReplay. League of Legends by default doesn't save your games to allow you to replay them but this program runs in the background while you play recording things and then lets you replay them. I hadn't actually replayed any games but I'd been saving them just in case I wanted to look at them later. And now I do!

20 minutes in - 94 creep kills, +189 on Q
game end - 35:32 minutes, 136 creep kills, +273 on Q

Now the game we were watched at MLG had 3 players on each team around 150 creep kills at the 20 minute mark. So I was running at about 60% of a good player in terms of creep kills. I don't know about Q levels since there was no Nasus in that game and there's no way to check unless the observers in the game make a point of checking. They did once during the one game with a Nasus but it isn't up on VOD yet so I can't replay it to check. I think he was at +432 about 40 minutes in?

At any rate, I now have something specific to work on. I'm going to play games as Nasus, record them, and then check on my CS and Q values to try to get better. In the short term focusing on that one thing may well make me worse but it should be a long term gain, I hope!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I believe that nasus was at around +300 at the 20 minute mark, but I may have the time on that wrong.

But ya, I think we need to work on our cs.

Robb

Sky said...

That sounds exactly like how Day9 encouraged people to work on their SC2 play. Pick one thing, get awesome at it, then pick another thing. I think he is right and this is a good strategy for long term improvement (though likely not short term improvement).

Ziggyny said...

I just rewatched the middle of that game to see when they showed his Q stats. Turns out at the 24:20 mark he was at +366. And 215 creep kills total. Also he was 3/0/1...