Who hates jungling? I do.

A group of my friends and I signed up for League of Legends after beta. Throughout the majority of the games we queued for, picking smite and going in the jungle was practically considered a privilege. Sometimes we'd even argue over who got to jungle over the next few games. Even in solo queue and blind pick, there was always a player eager to take the role.

Clear speed is somewhat important.

However, for the last few months encountering someone who wants to jungle just seems unbelievably rare. By rare I mean none-existent. It's not too bad to get into a match with two champions in the side lanes- but when the enemy team only has a single champion at top you have to absolutely crush them and/or sabotage the jungle. Otherwise, your entire team will probably fall behind the longer you leave it.

Ideally in champion selection I like to wait to be one of the last picks, so I can choose a champion that will best bring together our setup. It's frequent for people to lock in what they want to play regardless of how it affects your chances of winning. So I pick a champion that will compliment the team. Unless it's support. I only support if I am positive I have a reliable carry to assist.

Covering lanes is optimal to keep the enemy at bay whilst your team buy items.

For the last couple of months I have slowly smothered the jungle to death with almost every character that can attempt it. I hate jungling. While you have to pay more attention and try to watch all of the lanes, it bores me to sit farming and being commanded to gank every lane at the same time. Not all champions can clear the minions that quickly, so wasting your time on a couple of doomed ganks will set your experience and gold back as much as dying.

When the entire enemy team bum rushes the opposing red or blue, they can absolutely shut you down from the beginning. Jungling can be way more stressful and risky than laning. There are always moments when your team need to react fast to support you; for example when you're attempting dragon or encounter an enemy player whilst scouting around.

Ganking is the most prominent feature of the Jungler.

Ultimately playing with a jungler is a necessary sacrifice unless your team composition is built specifically to work without one. But there is a possibility of it backfiring if you can't keep your clearing speed up, or don't have a proactive enough approach to it.

The one thing I've learnt from playing jungle, is you always have to make things happen. If you see a lane to gank you have to do it well, if not you should be attempting to steal the enemy jungle or something else damaging to the enemy team. If you sit and farm your own jungle for the first 20 minutes, you might come out with a fair amount of farm but you could have accomplished so much more.

My pentakill and a couple of games with Slowlyawesome.

A couple of days ago I was playing some matches with my American friend Slowlyawesome. He captured two games on stream, which can be found here.

You may not see me much in the video above, but you'll notice me killing a lot of scrubs in the background.

We won both games, and in one I got a Fiddlesticks pentakill. To be fair, I was incredibly fed. The other team was pretty mad about it, too.

Here's the penta video:

Caw Caw Caw

Check out Slowlyawesome and his stream sometime, he's not an avid League of Legends player but he is very entertaining and a great streamer. He's new to the game, and improving very quickly so expect some highly skilled videos in the future.

League drawings, comics and images.

I found an excellent set of funny League pictures today, so I gladly post them here for your viewing pleasure. Leave a comment and tell me which one you found the most entertaining. I preferred the Maokai one myself.

If anyone recognizes this comic, you're a cool guy.

The last face is just wat.

Garen and Lux are actually a pretty good laning combo.

Seen it a hundred times, and now it makes me laugh when I see it.

Maokai and his stupid saplings are so gay.

Well.... okay then. I'm afraid of playing Taric again.

Pantheon should be my wife.

This comic is true, awesome, and hilarious.

This has happened to everyone at least once, and the facial expressions really sell the moment. God damn BR.

Soraka isn't allowed any kills. Obviously. I've genuinely laughed at this moment in a match.

Kinda reminds me of Orochimaru. Just more outrageous.

I get killed for this same reason every single time I play Teemo.

I don't even know why this one is funny. Ezreal is such a bitch.

Spectator mode is for spying on your friends.

I spy you my feeder friend.

I love abusing spectator mode to drop in on a friend playing a League of Legends match. It's even more entertaining when they aren't doing particularly well. If you haven't used the spectator system to spy on your friends when you have nothing better to do, you should try it right now. You can even turn on a chat box in the bottom left corner of the UI- making it possible to insult your friends whilst watching them feed.

Note the extra UI addition.

You may observe anyone who is playing and on your friends list. Riot also have a spotlight for dropping into ranked or normal games so you can always find someone to watch even if your friends list is foreveralone. It is possible to fast forward and skip through the boring bits, but you may not progress more than 3 minutes behind the live match. Why? To stop people cheating, of course.

Very useful for spotting new tactics to use.

As many veteran players will probably know, the spectating feature has been 'in production' for a long time by the Riot developers. An immense amount of QQ and demands have been made over the past year by the public on the forums. Since spectator mode is such a basic mechanic to implement, a lot of upset has arisen over the long wait. However, I would say Riot did a good job. It's incredibly easy to monitor both teams, and even easier to follow the flow of the match with the aesthetic scoreboard.

So I just bought Brand.

When I play a new champion, I usually get a fairly modest score. Sometimes, I even end up feeding. Brand however, is a different story altogether.

My first few games on Brand.

So the games went rather well. I always thought Brand was stupid overpowered. Now I know.  I am quite proud of my recent kill ratio, which is why I present them to you.

What I enjoy about our fire throwing friend is how easy it is to land his spells. Whilst laning in mid your opponent really has to work to avoid your circle, allowing for you to last hit without any issues.

He's pretty viable in terms of ranked as well, bringing a lot of ability power to the table- with some area damage and a stun. But I feel Brand has his best moments early game. He can dominate his lane against a lot of champions and his ganking utility is unbelievable. Spam a couple of spells on the sidelane and toss in an ultimate and you've probably got a double kill on your hands.

I would suggest Brand as a new champion for anyone to buy, if you have the 6300 IP it requires. He's fairly noob friendly and a good player will absolutely devastate the enemy team. Boy, melting faces never gets old.

Ezreal underpowered? What?

So recently I've seen a string of threads and people complaining Ezreal is weak on the forums. I'm a little shocked. Sure, baddies can't play him successfully- but doesn't that ring true for all the champions except Darius?

Rush the bush!

The only legitimate point I've seen made against Ezreal is he does end up being less forgiving than other carries. With a small margin for error and a ticking clock to get fed before mid game, the cons can sometimes outweigh the pros. 

He's a great champion. Although the newer AD range like Graves or Varus do seem to perform better than him generally, that doesn't negate the fact a good Ezreal is an asset to the team. If I play him in middle, the majority of mid characters that play against me die before level 6 or get denied a lot of exp. He's certainly viable in bottom lane with a support too- so I don't understand where this consensus has come from.

His recent buff is a little lackluster, but he didn't even need it anyway:

• Essence Flux Mana cost reduced to 50/60/70/80/90 from 60/70/80/90/100
• Trueshot Barrage Mana cost reduced to 100 from 150

Reduced mana costs are better than nothing eh? It's not possible to increase his damage early game, he hits hard enough as it is.

I prefer Ez mid.

AD Ezreal excels at performing high damage on a single target if you land a couple of skillshots. As AP he can spread that damage out a little more across multiple targets. My favorite part of him is he is often underestimated, and you can often take out squishier champions like Ashe before they can react.

His built in flash is his only escape, so positioning is absolutely vital. When used correctly however, he's a slippery little bastard to catch. It can also be doubled over as a damage tool early game, because it does a fair bit of damage.

You can assassinate targets in a teamfight.

Trueshot Barrage is brilliant for sniping kills, and very accurate and efficient once you've practiced it a little. Sometimes you aim for one person and end up killing two or three, the new champions can't do that can they?

All in all, Ezreal requires you to think a little more than just sitting on your fed AD champion farming last hits and auto attacking in teamfights. His damage more than makes up for the lack of CC or survivability- provided you have the right team to utilize him to his full efficiency.

What happens when you bring ARAM to a normal game.

A lot of players never even venture into the custom matches feature on League of Legends. Which is a shame, because there are a few games in there with very entertaining rules.

All Random All Middle (ARAM) is one of these crazy methods of mixing up a League match and having some fun. For those of you who aren't familiar with the obvious nature of the title, ARAM forces you all to choose random, and then all five players on both teams fight the match out entirely in middle. Most of the time another general rule placed on the game dictates nobody may return to base unless they die. As you can imagine, fighting in mid with your entire team at low level is very hectic- and largely dictated on which champions you and your team get. It's unbelievably fun to play when you're sick of ranked or normal- and if you play with friends someone on your team is bound to rage down the microphone.

Recently, a few of my friends and I decided to force an ARAM in a normal blind pick match. Kudos to those of you who recognize any of them from youtube.

HEAL/TELEPORT LIKE TRUE MEN.

We never expected to win, and for those of you who love the underdog victories- you will be disappointed. As we brought our very tanky setup to the fields, someone had the brilliant idea to convert it into a surprise ARAM battle (brilliant idea because it was mine, yes).

Lying in wait for stupid Brand and his stupid face.

We all chose tanky builds, threw Darius into middle as bait, despite the fact anyone who'd chase Darius is stupid since he'll eat your face. As the creep wave landed, a wild Brand appeared. After a few tenuous moments of furtively testing the lane, Brand overextended.

SURPRISE ARAM MOTHERFUCKER!

After rushing the first blood and all spamming ARAM in the chat, the enemy team actually joined in. Within a minute everyone was in middle lane, and we were having a battle of the ages. Which is strange because this is League of Legends. They are usually all complete wankbags on the enemy team, amrite?

Hurr durr zerg the tower.

Ultimately, we got beaten down- maybe because the enemy team had ranged champions. League of Legends is a casual game, and anyone genuinely attempting to take it seriously should probably go play DotA2, which has a higher skill cap. However, we regret nothing and hopefully this will inspire some new people to give ARAM a go. Just go to custom games, and you shall probably encounter one in seconds.

Remember it can be unbelievably imbalanced due to the random factor, but oftentimes you can turn that around later on in the match. Good luck.