Another free week analysis

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Now, onto the free week champs:


Fiora: Let me start about by saying, "I HATE Fiora". She's a champion that I will FORCE myself to play this week just so I can learn how to fight against her. She doesn't always crush me but when I beat her, I don't know how I did it and when I lose, it seems to be out of nowhere. So I think there's something she does / builds / activates that changes her entire game play. I suspect it's something like Spirit Visage in combination with her Duelist ability and attack speed steroid that leads to stupid high levels of regen. May be time to explore those "grievous wounds" items (Morellonomicon and Executioner's Calling).

Gangplank: Gangplank is a lot of fun. If you play Dominion, his ult will essentially stop any team tower capping effort for 7 seconds. Use it to pick up kills and assists on a global level (particularly effective for when the jungler ganks bottom and allows you to share in a couple assists and help secure the kills. Also, he has a nice reactionary cleanse in "Remove Scurvy" that will help you hone your reaction skills.

Kassadin: The mage killer. He's naturally tanky versus magic damage and has a reasonably long silence, semi-spammable gap closer and decent scaling. He will absolutely bully any non-assassin AP caster (think Annie, Anivia, Brand) in lane. Late game he's ridiculously mobile and you'll want to head into fights with 4-5 stacks of Riftwalk (this takes some practice but you can do it) so that you can get 1-2 in the fight and absolutely shatter people. A good Kassadin will be at 300+ AP by the time the game gets to this point and will be able to Riftwalk in with an AoE burst of 640 for the first pop and 3 seconds later 720. That should be sufficient (along with a 500 damage, 2.6 second silence and a 490 damage, 50% aoe slow) to kill any squishy target. I would suggest leveling your silence first against casters and assassins but if they're melee (Malphite, for example), you may want to level your Nether Blade to give you significantly better sustain.

Master Yi: Noob stomper extraordinaire. The trick here is to A) have reliable stuns and interrupts on your team and B) have someone with said interrupts who can prevent his split pushing. Shen is great for this with an energy based taunts and superior mobility, team fight ability and tankiness to Master Yi.

Nunu: I really like Nunu support. He can also jungle in a pinch (he's a super safe jungler but has pretty horrid ganks... I'd suggest counter jungling heavily and especially focus on taking the big wraith and occasionally big golem or wolf and leaving the others. That will greatly frustrate the enemy jungler). They "nerfed" his blood boil but it's not really a big deal. Early game, you can't have it up permanently on your ADC anymore. But that's not a big deal really. You still have it up 12 out of every 15 seconds. Late game, you're going to build a Frozen heart which gives you sufficient CDR to keep blood boil up permanently anyways. The real loss is that you used to be able to go for 40% CDR and keep it on 1.5 people at all times. That's not possible anymore, unfortunately.

Singed: Don't chase singed. I think Singed is fairly weak against anyone with range and a knowledge of his abilities. Just don't push hard. He'll slow you (with a ridiculous 85% slow) and then toss you over his shoulder where the turret will hit you. This is a common trick for lvl 2 singed to try. If you see him slowing attacks or avoiding attacking altogether, last hit until you can stack a wave and then clear the enemy wave quickly. This will send a double wave at his tower and you can go back and buy while he tries to farm under tower (which he, unfortunately, does ok).

Teemo: Gahh... another Teemo free week. I'm playing ranked now which, fortunately, doesn't allow you to use free week champions in ranked draft. But I suspect the normal queues (and Dominion especially) will be rife with Teemo's for this week.

Thresh: Hurray. First Thresh free week. The thing about Thresh is that he tends to be predictable. Anyone with an aoe ability can target souls when he gets close and be reasonably sure of a hit. On the plus side, he has ridiculous levels of CC and tends to build tanky while still bringing a fair bit of damage and utility to team fights. Some people are trying to build ADC Thresh. This depends on spiking his AD so high that your alpha strike is just devastating to people. Don't buy attack speed.

Twitch: The only real ADC this week. Twitch has a weak escape that serves a dual purpose as a pseudo-initiate. The trick with him is stack his poison and use expunge which deals a whole lot of damage to everyone with stacks of poison. Remember to hit this when people run as it has a longer range then his auto-attack. His ult also pushes his AA range outside of turret range so you can take out turrets without retaliation making him probably the best split pusher for undestroyed outer and inner turrets (he really lacks the escape to try to do this inside the enemy base). If you position yourself right, I believe you can be outside or just on the edge of sight range making it possible your opponents won't even notice what you're doing.

Zyra: Probably the most aggressive "support" in the game. She has absolutely no "support" ability as far as I can tell. People run her this way because of the snare and the ability to zone out enemy champs. She's a very good mid laner as well and her ult is a HUGE aoe knockup (delayed) that works well as both a disengage and an initiate.