S3 Jungle Changes?

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     As everybody is well aware, Season 3 of League of Legends is approaching. Riot employees have officially announced many changes they are making to the jungle. They stated that with the way the game was at the time, they did not like how the jungling role was restricted to tank/support characters. Another aspect they felt was to toxic was how aggressive and how much influence the jungler had early game. Because of how easily junglers could clear the camps, they could wait by a lane for an opportunity, give their teammates a kill, and then snowball that lane which almost always resulted in victory. Approaching this, Riot has decided to do multiple things about the jungle. First of all they are changing the way leashes work, and by that, they are removing them entirely. Jungle monsters no longer attack the first person to aggro them, they will attack the nearest person to them. On top of increasing the stats of the jungle monsters, this is going to make the jungle a much scarier place. We won't see boots and potions on every jungler anymore, almost every jungler is going to have to start with a different item set in order to survive in the jungle. This is going to slow down the early game and force it more towards the laners ability. The biggest thing that struck me, was the fact that the gold and experience rewards are going up for the camps. Does this mean we will see champions like Tryndamere, Gangplank, and Master Yi show their faces in the scene again? Allowing characters to integrate back into the game would be a fantastic change for Season 3, as of right now, I'm sure everybody is getting tired of the same old meta. A lot of complaining has been going around the forums about people claiming that the suspected changes will make the game far to passive. Have faith everyone, Riot will definitely set things through, as long as they keep Morello away from the buffs and nerfs. 

The Shadow Isles

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     Recently Riot Games has released a remake of their old Twisted Treeline map with a new and improved design. This map has taken the Twisted Treeline name, yet changed the theme and design entirely. The new map is based off of the lore of the Shadow Isles, which according to Riot Games is a place full of nightmares and mysteries. A handful of characters have their story based off of the shadow isles, but none more so than the Leagues newest character Elise. In the picture above you can see a top down view of the playing field, it has be revamped to remove the toxidity that came with the old map. Matches in the old map often lasted much longer than they were intended to, most games ran roughly 50 or more minutes. What was intended in the old map were games that were around 30-40 minutes long. Due to the design of the old map, the games often became completely boring and were highly unpopular with the community. This new map has a lot more to offer and is a nice change of pace compared to the slower pace of Summoners Rift. Multiple things really stood out to me on this map, despite not playing it before the rework.
     The abundance of bruisers in this map was astounding. Everybody played a strong bruiser, and if you got one particular character *Darius* you were pretty well guaranteed to win the game. People such as Jax, Olaf, Lee Sin, Singed, and Rumble are the types of people you will see in 90% of the matches you play. After doing a couple of round alone to get the feel of the map, I decided to get a team together and tackle the ranked field of this map. We did pretty well considering it was two in the morning and we were all incredibly tired. We lost one more than we won, but the players I was with were not the standard members on my team, but were the substitutes. Although we did not have the synergy our normal team would have had, we held our own and won a fair share of games. Barely under the 50% win rate, we are going to climb our way up and make a mark on the ladder, it won't be a big mark, but our team will be on there, somewhere.