LoL: New Weekly champions

The new weekly champions are up as of yesterday. I played around with them a bit last night (and two quick games this morning). The ones that interested me are the "Jungler" ones and the "Ranged DPS" ones because both of those fit my playstyle well at the moment. So with that in mind, I played Vlad, Fiddlesticks and Twitch.

As an aside, it's absolutely INCREDIBLE, the flavor diversity they've got with over 100 characters in game. Both their abilities and their general look and feel are fairly unique on almost every character. That's pretty incredible.

Here's my thoughts on the three I tried so far:

Twitch: Wow is he a damage boat. His passive is a true damage DoT with a stacking component. He will single handedly make you want to initiate lvl 1 team fights on Twisted Treeline. The reason is that at level 1, you're going to get an extra trailing 12-60 damage above and beyond what they're expecting. So they need to disengage quicker then they think. Twice last night, I watched as someone popped ghost to run away and then I got the message about their death after they were out of sight. It's pretty wicked. He's an AD Carry so make sure you spec accordingly. As a result of the itemization, he pretty much becomes a glass cannon. I'd like to fix that a bit but it's hard to find items that work really well (it may be time for me to familiarize myself with the item shop). You really want to get the poison dot on there so attack speed buffs are great. You also want to be skirting on the edge of fights so run speed buffs are nice. His Q ability (Ambush) is a nice little escape and attack tool but use it carefully. I'm unimpressed by his Ultimate though.

Vlad: He's the first "non-mana" guy I've tried. He's unique (I think) in that he uses his HPs as a resource. So he has an single target drain (Q) and then his E ability is an AoE attack that damages him but gives a buff to his regen. I find that at 4 stacks (its max for the buff side), I'm regenerating health as fast as it takes it. So there may be some logic in keeping it at 4 permanently (i.e. using it even when not in combat). I'm sure someone's done some theory crafting on that. While visually it launches an attack at a number of opponents, I think functionally it's an AoE hitting everyone around you (without a max?). One other note about his W ability. It's weird. It makes you sink to the ground and you become a movable PBAoE damage and slow "pool" of blood. It's not REALLY an escape and it has a long cooldown. Kind of an odd power, frankly. I ended up using it as an escape mostly but it's only "okay" in that roll. So I'm torn.

Fiddlesticks: This guy was a revelation. He's a goofy scarecrow guy but he's a whole lot of fun. His Q ability is a somewhat short duration fear. It doesn't have a terribly good range and I probably didn't use it right but it's fun. But the real power is in his WER abilities. W is a channeling drain life. And it drains a TON of life. It also doesn't channel like WoW spells as it's not breakable by simply damage (you can stun/silence/fear people out of it though). Your character stands still and just starts sucking the life down on people. This single spell makes him a Jungler par excellence. On Twisted treeline you can easily clear the first two spawns without any help at level 1. You probably don't even need smite but I'd use it just in case until you can confirm it's safe to not use it. Remember when you use this on minions, you want to hit things that have a fair clip of health. So always hit the big guy in a jungle mob or one of those little tanky minions with a lot of hps to steal. His E ability is a chain lightning-esque silence and damage spell. Not sure if it really is chaining or if it's an targeted AoE with a weird visual. But the nice thing here is that it does a fair clip of damage and silences. A perfectly legitimate fight technique is to terror, drain life, silence, chase down. That will probably not kill a lot of champions but it will essentially force them back to base. Finally, the piece de resistance. Murder of Crow's the ultimate. This is a stupidly, ridiculously, awesomely powerful spell. It works this way. Click R. Point to a spot. Channel for 1.5 seconds. Teleport to that spot and nuke it for 300+ DPS. It will kill anything in the area almost without exception. The teleport component makes it a nice surprise if the other team isn't expecting. We were in a game last night where we were all killing their nexus and the other team's Fiddlesticks respawned, teleported into the middle of us and proceeded to kill EVERYTHING before we knew what was happening. Awesome little spell.

Anyways, so those are the champions I played with last night. Generally, I think they're suggested itemizations are pretty good (except maybe for Twitch who might need to take some defensive items along the way). None of them were QUITE as tough as Yorick, but Fiddlesticks and Vlad were close.