AWKWARD ZOMBIE

My thoughts on every champ with more than four abilities:
"Wow, this champ is really fun! I bet they'd be even more fun if I had any idea how to play them!"

At lot of it is knowing your cooldowns without looking at them.

fun fact

tryndamere v darius does not tend to work out for the tryndamere

Anything vs Darius is not a good idea, you always get insta gibbed by this fucking piece of unbalanced garbage

I don't think Darius is that bad, as long as you stay out of his pull range, or make him waste it on a tank or something.

You counter Darius with range and kiting as well as good jungle ganks. He has no escapes and is somewhat squishy during laning.

Countering with range is not a good possibility when you're a melee, yourself.
And even when he's squishy during laning, once he gets his ult it's over - an instant refresh with true damage is just like he's shitting in your face.

So you don't play a melee. If you see Darius on the other team, pick Jayce or Yorick or another champ that doesn't have to get into melee range to trade. If someone picks Darius into your melee fighter, tough shit. Know how to play safe and make sure your jungler ganks and get yourself snowballing. If you're melee, build HP to counter that true damage (unless you playing an AD bruiser then you really need to play safe and wait until a later phase of the game where you're more effective. You can also try to find advantages elsewhere). Sunfire cape gives you armor and health, two things you need against Darius. There. There's your first item.

Darius isn't OP. He's just a good laner. He doesn't scale well into late game. Also, if you're playing blind pick normals, welcome to blind pick.

I always play blind normals, and it's not even that I always play melee.
You can't really hurt Darius anyways, wether you go tanky or not, as he always goes tanky himself. His basic attacks and other abilities don't really matter, he only needs to get a bit of stacks on you and then set off his ult. And when you are at a point where you have a lot of HP to MAYBE survive his ult, it's late into the game too, where he built some damage aswell to skyrocket his ult, and it's way past beyond the laning phase, so you are not dealing with Darius 1v1, but also with a whole team.
And unless you're a tank, or a very tanky bruiser, you just building tanky is going to make you useless.

AD carries can stay in ranged at that point, because they have the extra movement speed from Phantom Dancers etc.

But what if you're a support?
Or AP mid?
You're naturally slow, and Darius has like... 390 or even 395 movement speed with full boots. Pair that with a Frozen Mallet Darius always builds - well you get the idea.

Sure, you're staying in ranged mode anyways, but if you want to cast your abilities on Darius/the enemy team, you need to get closer, as not really that many chars have abilities with super huge range. Possibilities are that you're a squishy ranged, and Darius always goes full commando initiating into the enemy team, with the squishies as priority of course. So what are you going to do? Allow him to chase you away from the teamfight? Try to stop him and likely get killed? Kite him trough the teamfight where you're just going to die without being of much use?

And you can only build so much HP. Even though HP stacking is really popular in Season 3 right now, you can only build oh so much without any armor or MR for it to be effective. Cool, you can survive Darius ult - but nothing else, nor can you really deal any damage, unless you're Vladimir, Mundo, Volibear or Sejuani or any of that HP scaling stuff.

bodaciously everything your saying short of his ult is how most popular bruisers function right now, darius being one of the worst of them.
darius has very little actual laning presence before level 6, that's when you want to fight him and hopefully shut him down, especially if he misses one of his abilities.
if he pulls you and you just try to run you lose. If you fight him back you'll probably deal more damage to him than he can to you.

I played Singed against Darius couple days ago.
Can confirm Darius op.

Wrecked him in lane phase, but when he finally bought a giants belt, gg. I get anywhere near him, and he kills me.

darius counters singed
not super strongly, but he is a good pick against singed.
they have essentially the same stategy, get your dot on them and hope they run instead of fight. or chase you in singed's case. Except darius has auto attacks that actually matter and has more than 1 ability that does damage.

The whole point of Darius is "Kill anything that gets close to you". So its simple, don't get close to him. If that means you don't get to harass him or get any damage on him, so be it. A top laner's job, IMO, is not to get tons of kills, but to hold the tower and wait till mid game where they can start being really strong.

Also patch 3.8 notes are out
Tibbers buffs yes, Tibbers is best champ in League
Ashe passive change yes
Hecarim nerfs, after playing him this week, not surprised
Kha'zix "buffs" - oh boy League of Kha'Zix incoming
Nautilus nerfs, makes me sad but it probably won't be too bad since they buffed his early-game shield a while back.
Sona "nerfs", no idea, I'll have to wait and see

Items changes, pretty cool, especially the jungle stuff. I'll miss Malady but at least the passive's on Wits End now.

SaintCrazy wrote:Also patch 3.8 notes are out
Tibbers buffs yes, Tibbers is best champ in League
Ashe passive change yes
Hecarim nerfs, after playing him this week, not surprised
Kha'zix "buffs" - oh boy League of Kha'Zix incoming
Nautilus nerfs, makes me sad but it probably won't be too bad since they buffed his early-game shield a while back.
Sona "nerfs", no idea, I'll have to wait and see

Items changes, pretty cool, especially the jungle stuff. I'll miss Malady but at least the passive's on Wits End now.

Kha'Zix was more rebalanced than nerfed. All they really did was move some damage from evolved W to evolved Q and they buffed his ult. Though, they did get rid of the ability to cast W mid-jump. I don't mind that.

As for the Sona nerfs, it's because her W power chord was buggy as fuck and barely worked so the rest of the spell made up for it. Kinda how Rumble's Q was bugged for the longest time and when they finally fixed it, it was OP. Sona's also getting some HP and armor back so that's cool.

Verom wrote:darius counters singed
not super strongly, but he is a good pick against singed.
they have essentially the same stategy, get your dot on them and hope they run instead of fight. or chase you in singed's case. Except darius has auto attacks that actually matter and has more than 1 ability that does damage.

It's just annoying that there is no counterplay. Without his ult, you could kill Darius easily. But with it, if you are half health, you might as well recall.

Recalling at half health because you have nothing better to do sounds like a broken mechanic to me.