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Ascension woes

Swift2568·9/17/2014, 2:47:53 PM·1 votes·616 views

This might not be the most constructive feedback but I wanted to get my experience out there for the riot team. You guys do a great job and I want to make sure you have the feedback you need to keep it up.

I finally got perfect ascension last night. Thank god I no longer have to suffer that miserable format. In my experience it was a confusing free-for-all where no single action felt significant and surprise death was rarely more than a minute away.

I found that for me Fiddlesticks was most effective. His kit has a lot of good defensive CC and denial that allowed me to effectively counter ambushers. I tried tanks and found that traditional defenses are meaningless in the face of ambush tactics. I tried an adc and found that I just could not scale fast enough. Ambush burst champions, which are rarely fun to play against but always fun to play as, seemed to be most dominant on the map. I know I angered many players with Fiddlesticks crows and fears. I will honestly tell you that I did as well as I did because I made a game of taking away other players fun. When I did not do this to people, it was done to me. I feel like an awful player for this, but I felt like there was no other way.

Ascended felt like a completely random determination with the sniping enemy getting it more often than not. The constant game of "steal the ascended" was awful. No one wanted to start it. Doing the bulk of the work felt like you were serving it up for a sniper to take. I saw a few games where a Jax or a Lee Sin would spend all game just trying to steal it. Most times when I got it, it was because a crow bounce into the pile happened to take it.

Getting ascended felt more like a curse than a blessing. I never wanted to be a big target. Having ascended never really made me feel particularly powerful. It was a death sentence that I took dutifully for my team.

Guarding an ascended felt cool, but it was still chaos. I would frequently peel a target and kill it only to realize that the ascended had walked away from me and either died, or left me to die. The map density was just awful for splitting teamfights. Thank god for crow bounces.

On a positive note, I will say that the map density and frequency of roaming 3 man kill teams made Fiddlesticks Ultimates feel awesome. I almost always jumped walls into piles of enemies only to walk away with triple kills. I know I was "that guy" a lot of times, but this map was made for it.

Frequently my role was just a matter of "stay with the team and spam damage". Taking relics was important, but I could not tell you how many we took, or if any particular one mattered. Like points in quidditch, I felt like relics were just keeping us busy in between ascended killing sprees. I would be first or second on my team and yet feel like I was doing poorly because some ambushing enemy kept wrecking me. I was clearly doing something right, but I could not really tell you what it was. I was too focused on trying to avoid getting ambushed*. (*go ahead and insert your favorite word for sudden and unavoidable unpleasantries) It was very frustrating to win a match, in first place, and be angry because I felt like I lost or did nothing awesome.

I'm a fan of these gimmicky formats. I loved the 1v1 showdown. Urf was silly/stupid but it had its fun moments. But Ascension was just frustrating. I have said to my friends a few times that if Riot publicly announced that this one was a failure then I would feel better about my experience with it. I know that will not happen. Maybe I will settle with looking at the statistics for players abandoning the format after getting their perfect icon. I dunno. I am just glad it is over.

That was my experience.

1 Comments

Lumus Avatar9/17/2014, 3:06:03 PM4 votes

I actually really like the game mode Ascension. It takes the focus off of getting kills, as they only amount to one point, and places it on functioning as a team. You strategically move together or split up to cap and deny the relics (which have equivalent value to three kills each) and then carefully wait for the right time to go for Xerath.

I have been trying, completely unsuccessfully, to get perfect ascension, but I have about a 90% win rate in the game mode as I can generally keep my team on task for taking and denying relics.

My worst experience was last night and it was because of one teammate. They did not understand that kills (while not Ascended) had little relevance as compared to relics. They played Nidalee and took/denied relatively few Relics. They had the lowest score on the team and did little to help the rest of us except to offer "constructive criticism." This came in the form of telling other payers to sell back their champs/skins because they "suck so bad." I was a particular target of their trash talk because I had the lowest k/d ratio on the team, but at the same time, I had the highest score because I was capping relics. Their vitriolic blather continued into the post game after we lost with a depressing 98-200. They continue to believe that k/d is all important in that game mode and reported other as Unskilled Players because they had low K/D. I remind you that this player also had the lowest score in the match (ascension points).

So no, I don't have a problem with the game mode (though I do agree that it's easier and far more effective to steal Xerath than to work him down), I have a problem with players.