Clairoyance

Clairvoyance – 1800 Range, 55 seconds cooldown (42 seconds with masteries), 6 seconds duration.

Clairvoyance is a mandatory summoner spell for any support champion. It is seen in most competitive games because it provides a lot of utility for the team.

The goal of Clairvoyance is to instantly provide information from any location on the map. As such, it is important to use Clairvoyance frequently, but still at critical areas on the map. Spamming Clairvoyance at every cooldown can be as useless as never using it and depending on the stage of the [...]

A few months ago, no one would have ever expected league of legends to get this big competitively! A while back , I expected LoL to only have a few LAN events each year, with a very small competitive scene. Recently, ESL picked up League of Legends as one of their main titles - which means that LoL has joined the ranks of Counter strike and Starcraft! Realistically, the competitive scene of League of legends is no where comparable to StarCraft, StarCraft 2, or even Counter Strike. However with the big player base that League of legends has, I feel that possibly one day - League of [...]

Each team needs a well balanced team. Although the meta does change i will explain the main job of each group of champions. Im 99% sure of my self when i talk about this but if you see anything wrong please tell me. Of course each champion has a different job in each team but this is generally what they should be doing.

Almost every role should almost focus on farm, abusing, killing when their jungler ganks, ganking, protecting your carries (support), and warding your lane early game. When it comes to mid/late game your primary roles are:

Tank - Most likely the [...]

Leona

First question that comes to my mind would be: What is her role? Tanky dps I guess. To me she looks a lot like Jarvan, except instead of utility she offers a skill shot gap closer that doesn't look very easy to land and a potential of 2 stuns + a slow. I could see her needing tons of farm, so I would probably put her in a solo lane. The problem is that she looks really vulnerable to harassment in early stages.

How would I play Leona? I would grab solo lane and cloth + 5 health potions, and turn the cloth armor into a wriggles. Or, I would start with [...]

The Rain Man's Solo Queue Tier List PART 2: THIS IS WHAT 1900-2500 PLAYERS ARE USING IN SOLO QUEUE AS OF 7/3/2011

This list is completely subject to change, and I would like to hear your comments on what you think about certain heroes being at certain tiers and why. These are my observations from the past few days to a week in solo queue. This list does include junglers!

Tier 1: OP Flavor of the month heroes who are firstpicked/firstbanned. Twisted Fate, Gangplank (Jungle and Lane), Orianna, Yorick, Fiddle (Jungle), Udyr (Lane and Jungle).

Tier 2: [...]

The Rain Man's List of LoL terms and translations

My teammates have been sucking lately.

Translation: I have been sucking lately. More often than not, a player's stupid decisions and bad play will affect their teammates as well. Though it may look like teammates are doing poorly, the player who is complaining about a trend of bad teammates is probably part of the cause of the general bad performance of their team.

Matchmaking sucks!

Translation: Matchmaking is working as intended. Though the system may seem flawed and really [...]

After fighting hard the entire season trying to raise your ELO, the off-season is finally approaching. If the speculations are true and the entire ELO ladder will be reset when season 2 comes, you would have to once again begin the perilous journey to high ELO. But before that, Riot rewards you with a vacation away from the tryhards that is everyone in ranked games.

Now what?

The off-season is the perfect time for you to increase your depth as a player. What do I mean by "depth"? Depth implies the amount of knowledge, expertise, and experience you have in [...]

There's a couple learning curves in this game, some easier to learn (like gameplay
mechanics, last hitting, bush juking etc) and some harder.

The hardest thing to learn though however, is situational plays.

What is a situational play?
Well it's simply doing something that may seem out of the norm
but in the long run is going to help your team.

For example, if it's 30 minutes into the game,
and your team is grouped up around Baron.

Running into the enemies blue to distract the other team,
may cost you a death, [...]

As most of you know league of legends is a team oriented game and is much more enjoyable played that way. Having a core team for ranked, tornies, ect. is awesome but a lot of players dont know how to
1. get a team
2. have a good team
3. Establish yourself as a leader.
First ill cover number one. How to get a team. I still to this day have been trying to get together a team. Of course i could just pick 4 people from my friends list who would be interested and enter tourney but this wouldnt work out. Why? Because when it comes to making a team for a game that requires [...]

Being an avid solo queuer for awhile now, when I enter champion select I have expectations.

One. There will be trolls. There are trolls at every elo. Some of these players don't even realize they are trolling (playing poor heroes, building poorly, etc), and some do. Regardless, try to make the best of every situation. If somebody is going to troll and play a hero top that shouldn't be top like Karma, just let them. The worst thing you can do in a troll situation is lane with them against their will, and doing this will lessen your chances of winning dramatically. [...]