Tuesday, October 13, 2009

How to play against unbalanced teams

A lot of times when you solo queue or play in a premade you would often see a team with 4 magic based damage and 1 physical or 4 physical based 1 magic based damaged champions. What should you do in this case?

In any case you should make a well balanced team of casters, tanks, and dps. Any of the following combination usually works.

3 casters, 1 tank, 1 dps
2 casters, 2 tanks, 1 dps
2 casters, 1 tank, 2 dps

The first important thing is to look at their team composition. Its very intuitive. If you see a team with too much physical damage you get a lot of armor and HP. If you see a team with too much magic resist you get a lot of magic resist and HP.

The next important point is how to build your tank. I generally like to get improved heal as a summoner's spell on all my tanks. In any case you want to get an aegis of legion on your teams tank as an early item. Right after your upgrade boots or even after your level 1 boots.

If you are playing against a team with too many physical dps, I suggest either 1 of the casters or the tank to get a frozen heart. If you have 1 or two in either cases they should both get a sunfire's cape then a guardian's angel or vice versa.

With just the Aegis/FrozenHeart/Sunfire/Guardians, you should be able to piss off any physical damage dependant team.


Next is against a team with too much magic damage. One of the thing that I have and is by far the most underrated tank book among the mid and lower tier levels and more exploited among the high teir level is the +75 magic resist book. I use this book in all cases when I am tanking. Because even physical damage heros have spell damage. Unlike armor, magic resist does not scale like armor as you level.

The first Item I get on my tank is an Aegis of Legion. Again, this Item adds both armor and magic resist to the entire team! The second item should either be a banshees viel or a guardian angel.

Try some of these things out and let me know what you think. Apparently the new hot build is armor and magic resist stacking and HP comes secondary.

7 comments:

  1. Thanks for the post, I often am unsure how I should go based on the other team's comp. I have a question though:

    I thought armor and magic resist gave the same damage reduction based on the formula %DR = X / (X + 100)

    Doesn't that mean they are effectively the same for their damage type? If not, can you explain what you mean that they don't scale the same. Thanks!

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  2. I'm pretty sure he means that on most characters, your base Magic Resist does NOT increase every level, unlike your base armor. This means the mitigation stat that is more useful is MR rather than armor.

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  3. Ya, it is what AngryBovine said.

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  4. nice work - I have included this in www.thelolwiki.com - attributed to you personally.

    Curtis Pyke
    Head of Content at www.thelolwiki.com
    curtis@thegamenet.com

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  5. Magic resist does scale the same way armor does (its just more expensive gold per stat cost), the difference is that Magic damage scaling is much much lower then Physical damage scaling. While it is possible to make yourself (in most practical situations) immune against magic damage late game (team aegis + banshees + another MR item) with physical damage the same cannot be said (especially with Last Whisper and Starks).

    Basically if you are up against a 4 caster (or 3 caster + one semi tank/caster team) you will have a very serious advantage if one person on team gets Aegis, you get Merc Treads + one MR item (such as Banshees)

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