League of Legends Hexakill Tutorial

Hexakill is a new game mode available for a limited time as part of The Harrowing event in League of Legends. It uses the 3v3 map, Twisted Treeline, and doubles the amount of players to a 6v6. Chaos ensues.

Champions with an Advantage

There are many champions that are good in the original 3v3 form of Twisted Treeline, but this section focuses on the champions that get a little more oomph out of having more targets available.

List of Champions with Abilities that Benefit from Multiple Champions

These champions have abilities with multipliers based on the number of champion targets available. Not listed here are champions who have abilities that are capped at certain amounts (more on that later). Edit for Clarity: The increase in most cases is usually a very small amount, but relevant enough to mention. For example, Wukong gains a max of 8 more armor than usual from his passive. Poppy, however, gets complete immunity from 5 targets instead of 4 for a medium duration, which is rather exceptional.

• Galio
• Irelia
• Jarvan IV
• Maokai
• Poppy
• Wukong

List of Champions with Resets

These champions have abilities that reset when enemies are killed. They benefit heavily from additional Champion targets, if they get the kill or assist. Edit for New Information: After many matches, the following champions have proven to be deciding factors in getting closest to achieving a Hexakill. (A runner up, without resets, would be a Twisted Fate that my team chased in a straight line through the jungle and he kited them to death. Good times!)

• Akali
• Darius
• Katarina
• Karma
• Kha'Zix
• Master Yi
• Tristana

Champions with a Disadvantage

These champions have abilities that are balanced around the 5v5 Summoner's Rift map. Their ultimates are capped and are much less effective with more Champions to hit. Edit for Clarity: The following champions are at a theoretical technical disadvantage. In practice, having more targets grouped more closely together in the claustrophobic passageways of the Twisted Treeline can actually cause their ults to benefit more (except Fiora sans Tiamat).

• Evelynn
• Brand
• Fiora
• Swain
• Kennen

A notable exception to this is Irelia, who has a target cap on her passive, but 40% tenacity is still godly.

Items

There are many different items on the Twisted Treeline. None of them were changed for Hexakill. It is a good idea to familiarize yourself with some of the major changes.

• Rabadon's Deathcap and Zhonya's Hourglass are replaced by Wooglet's Witchcap
• Infinity Edge is replaced by Lord Van Damm's Pillager
• Bloodthirster is replaced by Sanguine Blade

Additionally there are many more items with a vision ability available. The Active on the items reveals a large nearby area that you target, including invisible enemies and enemies hiding in brush. They also upgrade to reveal enemy traps, like Teemo Shrooms.

There are no wards.

The Map

The size of the map is much smaller than Summoner's Rift, and even Dominion's Crystal Scar. The size allows travel between lanes with greater speed, but all paths are through the jungle. Since wards are not available, control of the jungle can be a major turning point.
Walls are also much thicker in many areas of the map, meaning they can't be jumped or flashed over as easily. Usually, the tips of a thick wall can be flashed over if aiming at an angle, but it is risky business. The back of each minion pit can also be flashed over.
Edit for Additional Information: There is a larger amount of space between the turrets than in Summoner's Rift. This can make ambushes especially deadly and escapes more difficult. If trying to use flash to escape, remember the above information about the walls and how close you will need to be for the flash to be successful. Also, keep that in mind for ganking ;)

Vilemaw

Vilemaw can be taken down much more quickly by 6 people than by 3 in order to take advantage of her buff and gold. There is nothing different about her for Hexakill, but here is a quick rundown.
Instead of Baron Nashor, there is Vilemaw. Vilemaw has a lot of HP and 4 different abilities: a normal attack, an AOE close range smash, a long range fissure attack, and a web attack that pulls all Champions in the pit to the center. Additionally, she has a passive that strips armor and magic resist with every attack.
Vilemaw does have a pattern. Like the Baron, she will focus the closest target. If the closest target is far away, she will Fissure or Web. Sometimes, she will also fissure if Champions stand in a line. Whoever is tanking Vilemaw needs to stand close, and whoever doesn't want to get hit needs to stand anywhere but behind the Tank.
When Vilemaw is slain, she will give your entire team a buff called Crest of Crushing Wrath which grants cooldown reduction, attack speed, and some health and mana regeneration.

GLHF

MLGrama - Curse and Dignitas Disqualified - Destiny Leaves MLG Day 1

The final culmination of the Major League Gaming (MLG) Raleigh League of Legends tournament ended with Dignitas and Curse in a surprising face off. Surprising to most, anyway. Although they had met and agreed on one of their matches being an ARAM match, a non traditional game mode where players pick random champions and face off in a single lane instead of three, that was merely the tip of the iceberg. MLG was actually okay with the ARAM match, which was an interesting and unexpected twist to the Finals. What they were not okay with was both teams publicly talking about splitting the prize pool, which SirScoots overheard and tweeted about. In response, both teams have been disqualified. They will not receive any of the tournament points that Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, keeps track of for their Season 2 tourney, nor will a first or second place be awarded for MLG Raleigh. [EDIT: Curse has released an apology video]

ROOTDestiny, a Zerg StarCraft 2 player and member of Team ROOT, left the Starcraft 2 MLG Raleigh tournament shortly into it over a personal emergency. Allegedly, one of his friends by the name of Bluetea sent nude pictures of herself to Destiny at some point in the past. He later showed them, in a private conversation, to a few friends over Skype. Someone in the conversation sent the chat logs via an anonymous e-mail address to Bluetea. Outraged, she attempted to contact Destiny, but could not get in touch with him before MLG. Taking advantage of a password that she had for Destiny's e-mail from when she helped schedule his training sessions, Bluetea logged into his public Twitter and posted pictures of his penis that she had in a folder on her computer. Finding out what she did, Destiny left the tournament to take care of personal matters that came up as a result of these events.

Sources:
[An Important Message Regarding MLG Summer Championship League of Legends]
[To spare Erin, here's what's going on]

Technical Support : Maintaining League of Legends

If you have been playing League of Legends for a while, you may have run into a few instances where the game fails to launch or loads slowly. The solutions to most of those problems can be found here, but today we're going to be discussing how to properly maintain your League of Legends installation to prevent these sorts of bugs from happening.

Proper Maintenance
League of Legends frequently updates, which can cause a lot of fragmentation and a fairly high chance for corrupted files. This is not bad programming or anything like that, it's just basically how Windows works. In fact, LoL uses some pre-existing Windows programs to help it run. The most important of which is Adobe AIR.

AIR is the platform for the LoL Launcher. Think of it as a sort of browser. Keeping it up to date with the latest version can help prevent many launcher related issues. There is a method to determine which version of Adobe AIR that is currently installed in your system ( found here ), but it's just as simple to go to the web site below and install the latest version.

Download Adobe AIR Installer

Other Software
Fragmentation. This has been the bane of Windows for a millennium (or almost 30 years). The way to combat this is through defragmentation utility programs. There is one that ships with Windows, but there are a lot better alternatives. Two of my favorites are:

Advanced System Care, or ASC for short, is made by IOBit, and is a suite of repair and maintenance programs for your entire computer. It can help fix more than just League of Legends, and is extremely easy to use. You can use the free version to scan your system once a week, or buy the pro version to allow it to run in the background and perform automated services for you as well as giving you access to a few more programs in its Toolbox to configure your internet for maximum speed.

Defraggler comes from Piriform, the developers of CCleaner. Defraggler is sleek and a bit faster than ASC. It also allows you to target a single folder for defrag by right clicking the folder and selecting the option in the drop down menu. On top of that, the free version won't hound you to upgrade it like ASC free sometimes will. The pro version comes with a year of tech support and automated updates, but if you're going to go that route, spring for the package deal with CCleaner Professional to get the most out of your purchase.

Game Booster is a subset of ASC. This is deceptively more advanced than the last two programs. It has five main functions:

• Boosting - What the program is most known for. Using this before starting a game can be a huge help to many people. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Everytime you boost, it shuts down background services and defragments your ram. When you end your boost, it restarts the services. This has a tendency to restart programs that you don't want to reopen, like iTunes. Extended use also appears to have a negative impact on the system, so don't use this feature unless you know how to customize your services.
• Defragging - When it first installs, it creates a catalogue of all of the games on your computer. This allows you to boost and launch a program with a click, but also to defrag specific installations, like Defraggler can.
• Tweaking - The functionality of this feature is similar to what the main ASC program offers as part of the scan. It checks system settings to make sure they're optimized, and checks virtual memory settings. Run this once, and again whenever Game Booster updates.
• Checking Drivers - Game Booster can check to make sure that all of your drivers are up to date, which is important, but this is another feature that needs to be handled with care. If you bought your computer from Dell, HP, etc. use their support site to download the latest drivers for your system instead. A lot of the time, those companies use proprietary drivers in their machines which may not be detected properly by Game Booster.
• Diagnose - This is extremely useful if you run into any major errors. This won't fix the problem, but it will create a detailed log of your system that you can copy and paste to tech forums. This will provide almost all of the information that tech support will need, regarding your system configuration. For League of Legends, there are separate log files that will also need to be uploaded when using the forums. Details about where to find those are here.

You can find Game Booster in the Toolbox tab of ASC, or download it separate for free.

Download Advanced System Care

Download Defraggler

Download Game Booster

Optional
At the top of the League of Legends Launcher is a button that looks like two gears. Click that and it should open a tiny window within your window with an option for Repair. Repair checks all of your League of Legend files against the most current files on the server. It will locate corrupt files that can cause a lot of the major issues. It's mainly used for taking care of issues without having to reinstall the entire program, but it doesn't hurt to run this once a month when you're heading to bed or work. Most often, it's not going to find any issues, but even that can help maintain your own piece of mind.

Syndra Preview Analysis

Syndra, the Dark Sovereign, is the next League of Legends champion to be released in the next patch, barring any additional testing that might be required before the due date. From the early build, it looks like Riot has her tech fully implemented, but is busy balancing the numbers to prevent another Zyra incident. For the current numbers (which will probably change by release) check here.

Her abilities are fairly interesting:

Q creates a sphere at a target location. The sphere appears at the location, dealing damage in an AoE, and remains in that position for a few seconds. Currently, it's possible to have 3 spheres out at a time from her Q.

W is a dual activation ability changing after the first time you press it. It allows Syndra to pick up a sphere or minion. The sphere or minion will be dragged slightly behind Syndra. Upon activating the ability a second time, she can throw the minion or sphere to a target location to deal damage and Slow in an AoE.

E deals damage in a cone and pushes enemies hit away a certain distance based upon how close they are to Syndra. It also launches any spheres, which will deal additional magic damage and stun enemies hit.

R generates three spheres and picks up any additional spheres in the area, then launches them at a target opponent for massive single target damage. Currently, the maximum damage of this ability is at Veigar levels of damage, but it does require a setting up 3 spheres and using R before the spheres disappear.

Her passive increases the power of all her other abilities when they reach their rank 5. Her Q has an increase in damage on champions, her W becomes an AoE Knock Up and Slow, her E conal area increases in size. Her R does not currently benefit from her passive.

Syndra has a play style similar to Orianna. Her ability to zone is her strong point in lane, and the amount of set up for her ultimate ensures that her most effective usage will be in poke comps. Poke comps revolve around laying siege to an opponent and whittling down their HP from out of range of the opponent's ability to retaliate. The amount of range she can achieve with her Q, and her Q and E combination, and the amount of set up required for her R to reach full potential, make her ideal for this strategy.

Check out the Yogscast interview with Paul Bellezza for more information about Syndra, Dominion, and, of course, Poppy.

Sources:
[Gamescom - Riot Games Interview - Syndra Preview]

[Syndra, the Dark Sovereign, Revealed at Gamescom]