After so many great plays with lee sin last night, I've decided to main him.  heh... I was actually pretty surprised when I actually did have a few good plays on top of my many awful ones.  I don't think I was able to kill thunder by kicking someone into him - maybe next time.

Anyway folks, merry Christmas and happy holidays!  I'll likely be back around Christmas night. 

Hope everyone's been enjoying a good holiday.  I've had inlaws with me the past couple days and will likely be taking off tonight.  Hope to get in the some game time. 

Or... The Peter Whisperer?

I was going to say The Peter Pleaser cause you'd always say "Peter please!" but it sounds kinda... yeah, I think The Peter Whisperer should be your new handle.

Edit: If you can get Pete to start with a support item when he plays support AND buy a Sightstone within 20 minutes, we might upgrade you to The Dumptruck Messiah, but you're not there yet.

more importantly, Peter has to do it while NOT in a game with you. None of this - oh ill buy you a mystery gift if you buy a sightstone and a support item, Peter - bullshit

I don't know about reasonable.  I mean, it took us like 2 games to convince him that maybe the optimal Syndra strategy actually involves attempting to CS a little instead of just going for stuns on the enemy champion ("I stunned him but I do no damage!").  Peter is still convinced that CS doesn't really matter in Gold V ("The only thing that matters is killing the enemy a lot"), but it seems that he naturally does it on Malzahar, so it kind of works out.

Also, while Peter does buy support items now, he makes weird choices.  I mean, he pretty much just plays mage support, but he always buys Coin.  But yes, that is better than blue crystal.

Could you get that far with normal pete, though? Also, I'm going to practice lee by playing the next game with you fellas, refusing to jungle, and just running into lanes trying to work on my q's.  Get ready to get carried brah. 

Seriously, though, you've got to admit it's not as bad as it used to be, though.  I couldn't really reason with old pete much at all. 

cow - don't go into any lava flows or w/e crazy crap he dreams up. 

But we didn't convince him of anything.  He stubbornly refused to listen to us about it, then only changed his mind after he outright fed two games in a row.

Anyway, the Ali thing was because Peter didn't know how Ali ult worked.  He thought it gave some moderate armor/mr and wasn't listened when we told him it gave damage reduction to physical/magical damage.  Peter doesn't really understand a lot of game mechanics outside of some mids.

So, last I heard cow has actually appeared in Hawaii and met up w/ thunder.  That said, his appearance mysteriously and nearly instantly, destroyed thunders computer.  I believe lava was involved.

That said, I'm awful and putzing around with Azir currently.  Actually spent a good hour or 2 researching and watching for playstyle, strategies, combos, etc. 

I'm wondering if any of you have any tips or thoughts on him based on experience.  A couple of things I learned - his best opening appears to be to try to get into solider cast range and drop your solider and immediately aa, wait about .5 seconds, then q and aa again.  This does a pretty good job of getting some lane control and pressure going early. 

The hardest bit of his play style for me to get into my head is the idea of playing back line and also trying to make quick decisions to pull off positional advantages.  Staying back is kind of a big deal unless you are at least even in lane eh...

I'm starting to get a decent feel for how to cs with him (takes me a little bit to get used to cs at low levels on mids). 

I learned some of the distances you can cross now with his w,e,q combo and am starting to get better with using that to setup some sneaky positional plays. 

Looks like it will take a ton of practice... doubt my attention span will last a super long time, but I'm enjoying him atm. 

pete kind of went super nova tilt last night for a bit - kind of a pacov doesn't shut up/stop complaining sort of rage.  Eventually had to move him out of the voice chat channel.  I feel really bad when folks tilt and I've got a MC candidate w/ me.  Anyway, hopefully all that is cool.  Going to try to go out of my way to not nudge pete to tilt town tonight if he's around at least - please do the same if he seems like he's tilting. 

worth a look re: bot lane opening. Kind of foolish not to start this way... provided you can get your jungler to start on the other side so you can get a big level 2 adv. 

back to my azir stuff - well, I'm starting to adapt a bit with runes/masteries and itemization.  I'm getting better and more flexible.  Cs is getting better but still pretty weak.  I need to work on my all in strats for him during laning.  Also, the 2 times I got to play as him last night I ended up majorly handicapped by other lanes and I don't think I'm a good enough mid to get all the work done myself (eg if I'm the team's damage at this point, you are going to have a problem).  So much crap to learn...

Yeah, at IEM the whole botlane meta was really strongly linked to the level 1 camp thing... one of the reasons Soraka was so popular/strong (go triple buiscuit, tank the creeps, heal your ADC to full 24/7... hence the HP5 nerfs).

A lot less toplaners do a camp + teleport. The biggest one is Maokai, who can clear the wraith camp with level 1 saplings. Sion can also do it (by getting himself to ~20% hp by running under an enemy tower, then dying to the camp and finishing it with his passive).

This was one of the reasons why Riot was experimenting with putting the "buffs" for Gromp/Turtles onto the actual big guy? Like if you shoot gromp and you haven't smited his buff away, YOU take the poison damage. Or if you are tanking Turtles and you didn't smite the buff away YOU get stunned every 5th hit.

That makes sense... I think the current best way would be to ALWAYS let the adc/support take dbl golums if they are on that side while the top laner helps the jungler at gromp.  that way the jungler doesn't really get screwed AND you give your bot lane a pretty decent advantage.  It's probably worth it to have the jungler start wherever side his adc/support are not currently at (debatable ofc).  I don't think its cool to screw the jung take both top side and bot side camps - though plenty of junglers would be fine if that was the case.  There had better be a nice payoff for the top laner blowing tp to get back to lane though. 

Hope so - I think perhaps reducing the xp gained if you don't have machete or further tweaking the dmg taken (but bake in some bonus to machete as well so the jungler isn't penalized. 

I made it back! had a great time! Its good to see that you have returned to good graces with the pooka pooka mahalo trees.