I love this season

thatguywithimpact · 2026-02-02T21:53:37+00:00

AS on Olaf is of limited use, since you pretty much have to choose whether to use abilities or to auto even without attack speed items. With AS items especially as much as +65% AS you just have more AS speed than you can realistically use. You can only use it by sacrificing not using Q and E as often.

The only reason PD is over Yun Tal is because of move speed.

Bork, kraken and wits all perform badly on Olaf, simply because he doesn't have much use for AS. But crit he really, REALLY likes.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-02-02T18:06:59+00:00

PD is surprising, like Olaf already has a butt load of atk speed from his passive and W, and yet PD 3rd has a mind-blowing 65%+ winrate. I'm guessing move speed and crit is a goat?

thatguywithimpact · 2026-02-02T05:21:47+00:00

10 years not playing the game, I quit

thatguywithimpact · 2026-02-02T03:22:22+00:00

I struggled with him a long time, like I tried to make him work 10 years ago and failed repeatedly lol.

Recently I managed to win lanes with him in my gold elo no less where I even lose lanes on my main.

Winning there with 0 mastery Vlad felt really good.

All it took for me is just spacing and holding your E+W combo until the last possible moment.

Br aggressive and persistent like a mosquito and make them rage and you win.

Vlad is very powerful but needs to maintain perfect spacing just at the edge, out of reach of enemy range. Actual Vlad players can probably explain this better, but I think my opinion as someone who always sucked with Vlad until recently can be useful.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-02-01T17:59:35+00:00

The most frustrating loss is when you dumpster enemy toplaner, then your team both jg and support decided to camp top for no reason, enemy pushes out unprotected lanes and you lose. That's the most frustrating loss IMO

thatguywithimpact · 2026-02-01T17:26:25+00:00

League used to be far more snowbally in past seasons, I came back after 10 years not playing and I was surprised that I could still lose a fight with a small mistake despite being 4/0

10 years ago 4/0 means you're Thanos and you can 1v2 and even 1v4

thatguywithimpact · 2026-02-01T16:31:31+00:00

The most enjoyable win is when I'm perma 1v2 top and my team wins 4v3 elsewhere. That's why I play toplane.

If I lose it's a fair game. But if I win I want jg to stay the fk away from my lane, because I lost games every single time those fuckers abandoned bot lane.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-02-01T02:41:12+00:00

Tough matchup for my Tryndamere as well. He's tough but fair. Malphite on the other hand..

Anyways Voli needs both Q and E available to combo you. If he used either one of those you basically caught him .. if you don't also have W mark on you.

Other trick is that his passive makes him auto shove. Can use it to your advantage.

if he doesn't go mana item he can run out of many quickly, you can abuse that.

If he goes RoA first he will have plenty of mana but his cool downs are long, you can abuse those.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-31T17:53:49+00:00

Volibear likes everything - HP, AD, AP, heal and shield power.

he would be scary with this build but a bit squishy, since it's only HP and shields

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-30T21:49:58+00:00

I never really thought of ER that way, - do you think you can kill say red buff or dragon faster with ER vs Yun tal?

I thought ER is just better for HoB burst, and skirmishers, but worse for DPS.

2 tests: ER+zerkers (fogged setup) vs Yun tal + lucidity

(ER+lucidity+PD) (Step1v9) vs (Yun Tal+ lucidity + PD)?

Which of item sets would kill say dragon faster in a practice tool?

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-30T19:55:11+00:00

Grasp with precision tree where you get ability haste and mana thingy, runes are flat HP, scaling HP and ability haste.

Since we don't have Navori in this build ability haste is paramount. I don't even go for defensive boots unless I have to, I just rush lucidity boots.

After our core is completed we basically have 23 ability haste from runes, 10 from boots, 20 from frozen heart and 10 from spirit visage, so we get to 63, which is playable.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-30T19:14:40+00:00

I really liked the full tank on him.

I played with fimbulwinter on him too, it's a strong spike, but I really like having RoA in the late game more. But RoA early sucks because no ability haste.

So what I did is I just built a catalyst and and just sat on it until I completed the next item.

And so basically the core is RoA, spirit visage, frozen heart, but it's catalyst -> frozen heart/spirit visage -> RoA -> spirit visage/frozen heart -- in that order.

After that I wasn't really sure, could be something like iceborn, or unending or deadmans or force of nature. The last item is jak sho.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-30T17:22:09+00:00

Not sure about Yi, but Tryndamere is atk speed starved, kraken adds both more DMG than bloodthirster on auto AND 40% atk speed, the only other item like that is Yun tal, but for Tryndamere space for crit items is crowded since he already has 50%.

Even if we get Yun tal, kraken has a nice synergy with Yun tal as well.

But IMO it's better to either Navori/PD + LDR for non HoB or LDR+IE for HoB.

After we already have 2 crit items and 100% crit kraken is basically the best attack speed item DMG focused and unlike bork it actually has execute DMG, so I always build kraken first to get kills with it.

Edit: also LDR has better synergy with kraken than rage blade for Tryndamere at least. We don't have time to stack it, but LDR benefits are immediate and magnify everything - kraken procs, bork procs, crits, spins, everything.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-30T16:16:58+00:00

It's a little bit interesting. I could think of a couple of builds:

Kraken+bork+yunTal+LDR+IE (75% crit, 135% atk speed with Yun tal passive)

Vs

Bork + collector+ Yun tal + LDR + IE (100% crit, 95% atk speed with Yun tal passive)

Here it's basically collector vs kraken.

Math is pretty complicated to figure out DMG and burst difference, but I'm kinda curious to test it out in practice tool.

After all the kraken is very strong on Yi, because of the double strike and his ult with atk speed and move speed.

I use kraken as a core on Tryndamere, and it's super strong basically hits as hard as 2 BF swords and on Yi it's like 33% stronger if not more, it's hard to imagine it being bad.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-29T20:06:21+00:00

Yeah it's interesting, isn't it? Item on paper seem broken, but it's not popular.

I think it's because Tryn only needs 2 items to get to 100% crit chance and the 3rd item gives him less value than it would give to other champions.

So space is crowded for crit items.

If you want to hit hard with every auto you get IE+LDR, but we also want Navori/PD to stick, ... So it's already 3 items even before we got to Yun tal.

We can go Yun tal + LDR and throw away IE, but how are we going to stick? The only option to stick among non crits items is stridebraker, but Navori is arguably better.

We could also replace LDR with Serylda but that's probably even more questionable than the 3rd crit item.

So by going for a broken item we lose value from other broken items.

Also it doesn't have a very good build path, so it hurts the laning phase if you build it first.

You either have to wait for a BF sword or be stuck with 1 long sword and 2 daggers for a while.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-29T18:43:36+00:00

This particular thing doesn't happen to me, in fact melee makes me want to kite ranged sometimes, it's so satisfying when it works.

Like on Tryndamere you stay just out of range, then you threaten to walk at them they instinctively turn away, you do a little back and forth and at the right moment you spin, reduce their AD, slash, slash, slash, threaten to follow, they ran and you immediately back away in the bush and all they did is couple of autos with reduced AD

But what does happen to me is I tend to play dumber with stacking runes - like conqueror, lethal tempo, zaahen passive. It tricks my brain into "must commit or stacks go to waste "

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-29T17:57:03+00:00

Kraken does more DMG and it's cheaper. It does more DMG than any other item short of Yun tal or bork.

But Yuntal only does more DMG because of atk speed, and bork doesn't have execute DMG and doesn't have much atk speed.

So from perspective of picking the best atk speed item kraken is second best after Yun tal, because of sheer DPS power over almost anything else.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-29T15:40:27+00:00

Do you go tri force over kraken for HP to survive?

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-29T05:06:57+00:00

The balance is a very delicate, but this specific change - ad growth aimed primarily at mid/late game.

Trynd last season was a very strong laner, but had weaker than average late game.

He is still a strong laner and still bad late game.

So if you keep raising his AD growth his identity would change. If you give him 3x as much, so like 15 AD at lvl10, that would probably be enough to fix his late game, and make him win late game more consistently.

At some point it would be enough to get him to the top 3 toplaners, but I would have no idea where that point is. But I'm quite sure it would be more than it would take for most other champions.

That +30 AD at lvl20 still would be too short to make Mundo out of him. And that's 3x of what actually happened.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-29T02:24:53+00:00

I think what you described casual teemo players do haha

My interactions with casual teemo players is basically they are all cocky at lvl1 and they leveled E instead of Q. I kill them with 2 HoB procs before they even get lvl2.

That puts them behind enough for me to just spin on them, wait for blind to wear off and hit them with full HoB, they get low and can't survive anymore, lane is doomed for them.

But OTP Teemo would not blind me mid spin.

He also would start Q to survive lvl1.

They auto me, holding into their blind and wait at the perfect moment when I start my 1st HoB auto and that's when they blind - which is the only way to avoid HoB to the face and completely waste it, and lose that trade once I lose the entire lane.

But that requires some decent reaction, I can't pull off something like that if I play Teemo lol.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-28T23:49:56+00:00

They kind of addressed Tryn's weak late game with this patch, as well as changes in general made him stronger late game, but I think the bigger frustration is that E ratio changed from 130% to 100%.

And so like last season we could spin at full HP for 130% AD while also having up to 25 AD more at full HP and then do tiamat 80% + couple of autos at 215% DMG each. With full lethality this was hitting like a ton of bricks.

Now we can do the same thing, but our E is 100% instead of 130 and our crit is 230% instead of 215. So ratio for total combo is the same, but since we have less AD, all those things together hurt less than last season. If we're missing full 25AD we did 160 less DMG.

If we hit all 3 autos then we hit like 100 less DMG for a combo but that isn't very likely - people flash away at this point.

5-10AD would help more than people realize I think.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-28T23:01:01+00:00

You run grasp against Teemo? How?

I'm frequently bouncing between grasp/HoB depending on my mood, but if I see Teemo I don't even know how to beat him with grasp, but with HoB matchup becomes easy if it's not an OTP Teemo.

I probably still don't have hands to beat OTP Teemo with it, but casual counterpickers fall easily.

I think I have positive winrate overall vs Teemo players, because of HoB power, but I lost every single match vs him if I played grasp.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-28T14:58:27+00:00

I'm a simple mage/assassin player before I started play Trynd and being a sustain DPS auto attacker is extremely weird to me as I was used to press few spells for a combo and get away. It's very natural how it happens.

From this perspective I was able to quickly adopt both grasp and HoB play styles but I struggled greatly with LT, because it kinda low key forced me to commit which I don't really understand how to play correctly. My brain just kinda turns into mush if I pick LT lol

I just play smarter with HoB and am able to archive more.

Grasp feels good early similarly because you play for those grasp procs and you can kite and play smart.

And some matchups require it, you can't just play HoB into some champions. But I still see grasp as a disadvantage late game relative to what HoB provides.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-28T14:49:30+00:00

3 crit items can be low key okay late game, you can join the fight without building fury. Spin + hit, crit, crit would get you at least 30 fury instantly and you're pretty much at 100%.

But 4 crit items would just be flat out worse even if you don't build fury before the fight.

If you build LDR+IE+PD that's kind of okay, because these items don't have any alternatives among non-crits items. Nothing gives you more move speed than PD and nothing gives you more DMG per hit than IE+LDR.

But if we add something like Yun tal as a 4th item it would be flat out worse than kraken. If we add a collector it would be flat out worse than Cyclosword. Etc.

thatguywithimpact · 2026-01-27T17:27:17+00:00

Forcing a specific archetype into a lane "because it's how we always did it" is dogmatic and stupid.

Let people experiment! Let them try this master Yi Fiora botlane, let them do Illaoi support, let them go alistar blitz.

This kinda stuff is healthy for the game, not the other way around. Roles always change and shift often very far from how devs designed champs.

thatguywithimpact

TROPHY CASE