So As I Play Ascension For The First Time...
Are there any tips or thoughts you guys have for me? I've never done AScension as it happened during my two year hiatus from the game :o
4 Comments
It may be a fast paced slug fest of a map where you can only go back to buy by dying, but if you don't capture the three points on the map as they respawn you will fall behind and lose.
Yes it's fun being the giant, really strong ascended person, but unless you heavily snowball to the point where most of your team can 1v4 successfully you need to capture those points.
Everyone will play super assassins in preparation for their Ascension. The Ascendant basically has super buffs to their damage and super nerfs to anything related to defense. Anyone with a good stun will run roughshod over them. I played Lulu and focused on levelling up Whimsy first, and then focused on attack speed, AP and CDR. Super assassins have no answer to her two and a half second Polymorph, and those that can stealth have no answer for her Pix.
In short, everyone will build for when they become the Ascendant. Build to STOP the Ascendant.
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Don't play any farm-reliant/stacking champions. No Nasus, no Veigar, no Cass. Carefully consider if you can justify choosing Sion and Cho'Gath.
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Be weary of champions that rely on 5v5 fights. They're not necessarily bad but not usually ideal.
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Don't choose supports with a poor fight or general reliance on a slow, poke/sustain lane pattern. Lulu and Morg are ok, not so much Sona and Soraka.
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Don't make the standard featured gamemode mistake of assuming that Nidalee and Katarina are for no particular reason OP. Kat is great against/with certain teams but isn't very hard to shut down either. Nidalee is not worth taking unless you have a very good plan.
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Pay at least some attention to team comp. If everyone on your team is going for pure damage champs it'll be wise to take CC, even a small amount of it.
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Be weary of ADCs, they'll scale pretty decently but they're free kills early a lot of the time.
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Don't try to 5v1 Illaoi. She will win.
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Think of champions that are great in 2v2s/3v3s and focus on them. Duelists are cool too.
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Think about how good your champion is at getting around the map so that you can get to relics efficiently.
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Look at champions in your pool who can make picks with CC because when you're with other high damage allies those champions can create free kills.
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Play Teemo if you're good at him.
That's about all I can think of!
Tanks. Win.
Rammus, Hecarim, Skarner. Heavy Fighters that are already meant to fight 1 or 2 v 3 get redonkulous with the Ascended buff. 2nd game I played last time this was around was a full 5-man randoms perfect game because I spent some 13 minutes as Ascended Hecarim.
Keep your Ascended safe. You don't need to rove around the land as a rolling murderball, but you need to have their back if it looks like a small skirmish will break out with them.
Move Speed Buffs are high priority. Someone else said Sona was low power here, but an on-call Shurelia boost is amazing when the map is this open. And again, Skar, Rammus, and Hec all have large MS boosts of their own. This time around, I really thing Deadman's Plate is going to be an important item for half of the champions in the game. The faster you get somewhere, the faster you can contest the control points, Ascended, or prepare for an ambush. And on that note...
PAY ATTENTION TO THE MINI-MAP. A lot of it is revealed to you, and that is key. I only lost hard on a few games last time, but one was against a Talon that just skipped fighting me (Skarner) and focused on ganking my allies. Ping for your allies if you have to.
Murderball is good, but control points are good or better. Keep abreast of who has what, and if it looks like you can take (or even contest one safely), go for it. Sometimes your enemies will be dumb, and that means 3 of them will run off to stop you right before Ascended resets. If your team is following the countdown, that should be a free buff for your team. Your death would be worth it.
ASCENDED IS EVERYTHING. The only times you shouldn't be at the raid fight contesting it is when you're either dead or the enemy team is so ahead they'll break you and the buff with ease. And even then, hero plays can be worth it. If you get the buff and then die, yes they get the bounty points for killing an Ascended, but they won't have it themselves.