League of Legends

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been playing a lot of League of Legends and I'm very much enjoying it. The terminology is very dense and somewhat arcane so I wanted to give a brief little primer for anyone looking to play. This will be equal parts "guide" and "dictionary" for people.

League of Legends "Classic" game mode is a tower "push" game based on an old Warcraft mod (Defense of the Ancients or DotA). I never played DotA but it was obviously very popular and people say it's a good reference point so I include it here for that purpose only. You have a base that you ultimately need to defend. These bases generate "creeps" which are little computer controlled robots that run towards the opponent's base. They followed predetermined paths or "lanes" through the map (2 on the 3v3 map and 3 on the 5v5 map). These creeps inevitably meet their counterparts and, eventually, towers. That's where the players come in. Each player controls a "Champion". At present, there are 105 champions and they're constantly releasing more. These champions each have four abilities. In general, these abilities are referred to by their default key binding (Q,W,E,R). A few abilities are passives that are always on but most are active abilities for which the keystroke label is a convenient reference point. In general, Q/W/E abilities are the "primary" abilities and the "R" ability is often referred to as their "Ultimate" (or "ult" for short). Your goal as a champion is to push your creeps to the opponent's towers and take them down with the eventual goal of eliminating all of the towers in a lane and pushing to their base ("Nexus") and destroying it.

One other critical layout aspect of the boards before we move on. In between the lanes are "Jungle" areas. These areas don't have the base created creeps. But they do have static spawned monsters that can be killed. This type of game play is called "Jungling" and is a critical, somewhat esoteric, aspect to the game play.

Each creep (or jungle monster) killed gives experience and gold. Experience allows you to level up which gives you hit points, mana and a skill point for one of your four skills. Gold allows you to buy equipment. The equipment is critical in this game as is leveling, obviously. This is the reason that "Jungling" is so critical. It's extra income for your team (because otherwise, income just comes from time and creeps killed). One other note about killing creeps. You only get the big gold boost if you get the last hit on them. So if your tower kills them or one of your creeps kills them, your income is greatly diminished. This "last hitting" skill is really important.

The stats for each character are fairly straightforward but can be modified in intriguing ways.

Each character has the following:
Movement speed
Mana Pool
Health Pool
Armor
Magic Resistance
Mana Regen
Health Regen
Attack Damage (AD)
Ability Power (AP)

Attack abilities generally come in two flavors. Physical damage attacks and Magic attacks. Physical attacks are mitigated by Armor and generally (but not always) are boosted by AD. Likewise, Magic attacks are mitigated by Magic Resistance and generally (but, again, not always) boosted by AP. All of these stats can be boosted by various equipment in some way. The equipment builds on itself in a modular fashion too so you can customize your states quite nicely as a game progresses.

There are a number of roles that get played a lot and you'll hear reference too.

Tank: Someone who can take a lot of damage. Generally they also have some sort of crowd control as well so they can protect their teammates.
Bruiser: A somewhat tanky person with good DPS
Jungler: Someone who specializes in fighting in the Jungle. These characters generally have some kind of AoE attack and the ability to Sustain their hit points without help (generally referred to as "sustain"). They also generally have heightened mobility in some ways because they're expected to pop out and double team ("gank") the adjacent lanes at appropriate times.
AD/AP Carry: The term carry comes from their late game ability to "carry" the team on their shoulders. Generally these are characters with some sort of game breaking ability (generally in the form of crazy high DPS).
Support: Certain characters lack a lot of damage abilities and instead get various buffs/debuffs/heals, etc that they can use. I wouldn't recommend using these characters as a beginner because they really struggle without knowing a fair amount about their teammates and various champions.

There are, as far as I've seen and read, four main strategies in the 3v3 map (Twisted Treeline).

Bruiser/Bruiser/Jungler: Generally this setup wants to have one guy in the top lane, one guy in the bottom lane and a jungler in the middle to add income and pop out for ganks.

AD Carry/Bruiser/Bruiser: Two on top and one on bottom with the top bruiser occasionally dropping into the jungle for the altars and for extra income. The Bruiser on top has to make sure the AD Carry gets the lion's share of the experience from the creeps in the top. This setup also wants to 2v1 the big boss at the top of the map once they're high enough (11ish?) because it gives a big global buff for the whole team.

3 man gank squad (tank, bruiser, AP Carry): This team eschews lane control to try to kill the opponent champions as much and as often as possible. It's a high risk, high reward play style.

Bruiser/X Carry/Support or Tank: This goes one top (Bruiser) and two bottom. The bottom lane is a bit shorter so tends to be a little more action packed. As a result, having two people down there can effectively push the opponent into making mistakes more easily. To do this, the team has to be comfortable that the guy on top can basically be on an island. His goal is to fight just inside turret range and still manage to farm creeps (rather than losing them to the turret). This requires a very high level of last hitting skill.