League of Legends Mini Review

After the fairly brutish and disorganised treatment I gave League of Legends on the podcast, I thought I’d try to do it justice with a slightly more organised crack.  Pour a nice hot bath, grab a martini and settle in.

League of Legends (or LoL) is a free to play multiplayer online third-person RTS tower defence MMO-lite.  Does that clear it up?  The developers actually call it a MOBA – Multiplayer Online Battle Arena – which is simultaneously a better description and more wanky.  It’s probably closest to an RTS though there is no base building, only base defence; it’s you, your teammates, your AI controlled shooty towers and your AI minions against the same on the opposing team.  Ready… FIGHT!

Basic gameplay is this: you form a team, each choose a Champion (the warrior that you control in the battle) and the battle is on.  You battle enemy minions, enemy champions and enemy towers to fight your way to their nexus and destroy it, thus winning the game.  Of course, the other team is trying to do the same.  As you fight your champion gains experience and gold; the xp levelling your champ towards the 18 cap (over the course of a single 30-60 min game) and allowing you to level his/her/its core abilities which differ from champ to champ.  The gold can be spent on items and consumables for your champ to improve their abilities in some way during that game.

Champions

Simple enough right?  Well the basic mechanics are easy to learn, but the strategy is surprisingly deep.  There are at the time of writing 74 different champions to choose from, and even though they generally fall into a few generalisations (physical vs magic, tank/heal/DPS etc) they are all very different.  Each champ has one fixed passive ability and four fixed champ-specific ones, plus can choose two “summoner spells” before each game, out of a choice of 13.  They also have varying health, mana, speed, armour, magic resistance and so on.  These make every champ different, and even two opposing people using the same champ may play them differently with different summoner spells and gear.

Here’s an example of a champion that I’m enjoying at the moment – Fiddlesticks.

Fiddlesticks - the scarecrow of doom

Fiddle is a ranged mage. His passive (Dread) reduces enemy Magic Resistance around him.  His active abilities are Terrify (a single target fear), Drain (single target lifesteal), Dark Wind (multi-target bouncing damage) and Crowstorm (AoE damage).  I will normally take the summoner spells Flash (a short range instant teleport, useful for ganks or escapes), and Teleport (a slow but full-map teleport to move around quickly).  He also has a ranged autoattack, useful for hitting minions.

I’ll typically buy items that improve Fiddle’s Magic Penetration (overcoming enemy Magic Resistance), and Ability Power making his active abilities that much more win.  Depending on what champs we’re up against, I might also take some defensive items like a Guardian Angel (which allows you to resurrect once in a while).

Fiddle is very squishy, so not a great 1v1 champ, but is a team fighting master.  Imagine you’re in a bunch, fighting the opposing team.  Suddenly, there’s a massive AoE circle damaging your whole team; a bomb bouncing up to 10 times from one player to the next, damaging each time, you’ve been incapacitated for 3 seconds due to fear so you can’t run out of the AoE, and on top of that you’re having your health stolen by a freakish looking scarecrow.  That’s the experience of Fiddle unloading on you.  It’s awesome when it works.  Of course, being so squishy, the other option is you’ll be getting close to the fight ready to unload, and someone like Vlad will nuke you dead in a second and a half.  Five times in a row.  Screw you, Vlad.

Shaco - for people who aren't terrified of clowns. Yet.

Maps and Matching

There are only two maps – a 3v3 and a 5v5 – though there are rumours of more coming.  TBH, it’s not a big deal as the gameplay is king.  Some more variety wouldn’t totally hurt though.  There are also several game modes including standard 3v3 or 5v5 PvP, Co-Op vs AI (and the AI is really good, including organised ganks) and custom games if you want to practice with friends or do something unusual.  There are also a couple of different modes for selecting champs – standard blind pick, where each team chooses their champs without visibility of the other team, draft mode where you can ban certain opposing champs and take in turns to choose, visible to the other team (allowing for strategic choice), and random.

You can join the game matching queue in a group of anything from just you to you plus four friends.  The matching is pretty good; it will normally match you with other summoners around the same level, though the longer it takes to find a match, the more flexible it is on that.  It works well and only rarely do you get totally outclassed.  The best fun to be had is with a full group of 5 on voice, as it gives you a big coordination advantage.

Free to Play

Vladimir - for cheating pansies who cheat. Effing Vlad. What a douche.

The free to play aspect obviously implies some sort of market for paid items to support the dev team and servers.  The primary payment incentive is to unlock champions.  Though there are 74+ champions to choose from, you can’t choose them for a game unless you own them, or they’re on free rotation.  Each week a new group of 10 champs is put on rotation so that anyone can use them in games and get to know them.  If you find one you like, and would like access to use it any time, regardless of the rotation, you can purchase it either with Riot Points (bought with money) or Influence Points (earned by playing).  $10 USD will buy you 1380 Riot Points, which is enough to buy any champ you want, as they generally sell for 975 RP, but often you can pick up specials for as low as 260 RP.  If you want to buy with Influence Points, they cost up to 6300 IP per champ, though more often less.  It’s pretty easy to build a small stable of regular champs using IP, but you can get some great bundles of 20 champs for under 4,000 RP.

They also regularly release new champions, which are getting increasingly exotic and complex to use.  The recently released Lee Sin, for example, has two stages on each ability – so if you hit for example Tempest, causing damage to surrounding enemies, and then hit it again within 3 seconds, you invoke the Cripple ability which reduces their movement and attack speed.  In the month or so I’ve been playing, they’ve released three new champs, which keeps the content fresh.

Git yer new champs 'ere. Loverly.

Apart from champs, you can buy different skins for your favourite champs, which change how they look ingame.  For example, stock Teemo shoots poison darts and places exploding mushrooms, while the Astronaut Teemo (1820 RP) skin puts him in a space suit, and he shoots lasers and places exploding satellite dishes, as well as changing some of his sound and visual effects.  A really epic skin also has a psychological advantage – the opposing team know you’ve invested in that champ and probably know him well, so they’re more cautious.  People playing current rotation toons with default skins don’t get that.

The other big use for IP is to buy Runes.  Though your champion levels from 1-18 over the course of each game, your “account” (called your Summoner) actually has a persistent level.  After a month or so my Summoner is up to level 19.  Each level unlocks another Mastery point (similar to Talents in WoW) which you can use to tailor bonuses that apply to whatever champion you use.  These can be reallocated at any time if you want to change them for a different champ. You also have two Rune pages, which again unlock at one Rune per summoner level, and again offer you the ability to give slight buffs to any champion you’re using.  Runes however have to be bought, though you can switch them around at will after buying.

Sona - a champ for the ladies. And by ladies, I mean 14 year old boys.

You might think that a level 1 could never compete with a level 30 (the cap) Summoner, but the differences due to runes and masteries aren’t that huge.  Player skill is a far far more important component.  Important also is a never say die spirit.  I’ve lost count of the number of games I’ve won after halfway through it looked like we’d be rolled, and narrowly defeated a surrender vote.  Because of the champ level cap, even if you’re getting out-leveled early on, you can erase the gap late game if you can hold in there.  In very long games (~1 hour) even equipment ceases to be an issue as everyone will have more gold than they know what to do with.

Nuts and Bolts

You can read a more in-depth overview on Wikipedia, and download LoL & sign up for a free account here.  There’s also a good new player guide and information about all the champions and items in the Learning Center.

There are no specific system requirements; generally if you have a PC that’s no more than a few years old you should be OK.  It runs fine on my Core 2 Quad + win7/64 + 4GB + 9800GTX at full HD resolution, and also on my Core i5 + Win7/64 +4GB + integrated Intel graphics laptop at 1280×800 fullscreen.

You can play on either US or EU servers (I’m “Suddenly Derp” on the US servers) and it’s perfectly playable with pings around 200ms.   Look for me around 0930 UTC / 1930 AEST and say hi!  I normally hit one or two games a night, 4-5 nights a week.

Verdict

LoL is a HUGE amount of fun.  5 player co-op on Skype is enormously entertaining, and you can walk away from it after an hour, win or lose, without getting sucked in to epic sessions.  It’s stable as hell, constantly evolving, challenging and always frantic.  Two thumbs up from me!

Doooo eeeet.