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Doubts on TFT Gameplay.

Spettro97·1/5/2020, 1:51:32 AM·1 votes·1,150 views

Hi, I don't know how this works, or if the devs even actually read this kind of posts, but here we go! I'm one of the "old-school": i've started playing LoL in Season 2 and i've never let it go. It is one of the best, funny and exciting game out there, and i've made countless new friends and strengthned the bond with my closest ones, match after match. I've never really tried ranking up, as I play for fun, not for the rewards of glory and pride, so take my words with a grain of salt.

When the news said a new gamemode was coming, I wasn't really interested: One for All, Siege and whatever were pretty fun to play at first, but they were just "game modes" - aka a different, yet similar way to play LoL. Then TFT came up, and it really surprised me: it took my friends a while to convince me to try it, but i was HOOKED. Thresh I played in Season 1, and it was -very- cool: it was a new, fun and fresh idea for LoL, but had some serious flaws regarding balance and item randomness. Most of the times, the player with more items won. It's not a big deal, afterall luck is part of the game, but in a match where -There can be only ONE!- it got pretty lame.

But you know, this is Riot we are talking about: they get things done, and good God if they make them shine. At the 42nd attempt.

In Season 2, as i see it - from my humble and low-skilled place - they didn't take the right way: they remade some of the team passives, introduced new elemental combos, and they tried balancing things up. I didn't stay up all night playing tft matches, and I for sure didn't even think about going for rankeds, but the times i've played it felt... wrong: you have to choose a team, what passives to look for, and when you finally think you got the right one, it blows back into your face.

I've tried going full mages -> lots of Ap, massive dmg numbers, even thrown a bit of crit chance on those spells (quite the OP item if i may say) and a team of Glacials simply blew right through me.

I've tried going for full Wardens ->Tons of armor, that means no enemy ranger (except that lovely, ever present Vayne) or berserkers or assassins should have been a problem, and there goes a full team of ad glacials completely destroying me.

Summoners -> a single Syndra oneshotted half my team and the army of minions i had created.

Inferno team! -> a single renekton built against Ap damage completely annihilated my frontline before they had the chance to stack some dmg.

It got frustrating, as the more i tried to do some "smart" - the logical way to do it, not sherlock holmes smart - teams, the more i got beaten up. You see a team full of tanky melees, you build mages. You see a team full of assassins, you build tanks and move the champs around to counter them. You see mages, you build MR. That sort of logic didn't work at all: tanks overwhelming mages, assassins nuking the hell outta 600% armored up tanks, mages that did so much dmg to a spell-(almost)-immune line of tanks.

I started to see a pattern there: you either max out the team passive by building a single-type-team and hope you chose the type well, or you simply hope that the RNGod bestows you with TONS of items. (Victim and Culprit here, as it happened to me and to my adversaries as well).

Is this the gamemode Riot worked so hard for? A glorified slot machine that throws a dice and rewards you, and sometimes bugs the hell outta that Tibbers ~~humping ~~ hugging the corner of the map?

I'm not mad, just a little disappointed. LoL isn't known for its gameplay variety, and this has pros and cons: TFT was the way to show LoL is a living, breathing world of creativity and elegantly balanced moving parts ( i'm looking at you, LoL Universe, the most detailed, static universe i've ever seen) and can still be so. They just need to stay away from that pit trap of "Randomness is part of the gameplay" because, right now, that is ALL the gameplay you'll get if you play TFT.

Throw the dice, get the rewards if you're lucky.

I'm summoner 4 outta here.

5 Comments

Psylosopher1/5/2020, 4:57:15 AM2 votes

If you are not given items, it seems to give you gold instead. The problem is, you can waste gold with rerolls (it is not on the same power level either, I would trade 3g for a chainmail in the early turns in a heartbeat).

It seems to also try and compensate you later on with a lot of items if you got very few early. Getting them in later rounds is likely too little too late though, if your opponents capitalized well. You will be around 33 health, and just getting your 'equalizing' items.

Smyrage1/5/2020, 9:56:03 PM2 votes

Set 1 used to have bigger variety when Riot nerfed the Ninja/Assassin comps. Even when the (in)famous Noble & Knight build was dominating a lot of builds were viable and you could beat that build with others. In the current one there are some oppressive builds and depending on how the game feels like one will be the most viable. These are:

  • Ocean Mages
  • Warden Rangers
  • Inferno 6
  • Light 6
  • Predator & Poison
  • Blademaster Nocturne
  • Glacial Berserker

I would say Inferno 6 and Light 6 win the least amount of times from the list. The rest are extremely situation dependent or close to useless. Mystic buff is a joke, because mystics don't deal much damage and usually die before they could ult. Desert is a joke, one of the desert champions don't even benefit from the desert buff (lol). Cloud is the dulled down version of the Yordle buff. Woodland is oppressive early game, but becomes really irrelevant later on, so much that everybody will sell those champions and even in lategame, when T1 champs have the smallest droprate, the pool is oversaturated with them. And overall Set 2 has way too many RNG built in. Taliyah hitting randomly, LeBlanc stunning randomly, Glacial's chance based stun, Syndra casting randomly etc..

Set 2 is definitely a step back compared to Set 1, which wasn't the pinnacle of balance either with Katarina, Draven and Kayle appearing in almost every single game. I remember when people were crying about the Hextech buff, which was an anti-item stacking buff (the buff hit an enemy champion with items on him/her and disabled all items in one hex radius around him/her for some seconds). These newer mechanics are just so much worse. Not to mention the smaller pool size, which forced people to Lv3 their champions or just lose. Whole Set 2 is horrid.

jabberwockyslay1/5/2020, 9:32:00 AM1 votes

I still can't fully figure out the tft games. I've tried building one type of team, more than one trait, or just the most annoying champs together. Nothing works... I don't understand the strategy of this mode. It seems completely random. I can use the same team as well over and over again and can get first one round and 6th the next and back to 4th. IT's aids bro... items don't seem to help either the way they should. I've tried building the recommended items on the tft helper app (never gives the items you need anyways) and I've tried to building my own. What is this mode exactly. And how the hell do people keep playing it weird and winning..