It’s been a long time since Riot has released a blantantly broken champ. You know the kinda one that can claim 3 quarters of your team’s kills effortlessly, tank, chase, execute, duel, debuff, and whack stuff without any compunctions.
So of course they had to release Darius.
There’s been a lot of forum QQing about him, but those of you who read this send feverant prayers to whatever flying spaghetti monster you believe in that most people have no idea how to play him or build him. The amount of retarded darius build’s i’ve seen over the past two weeks, if it be the maximum damage no tank builds or the no damage tank builds (which operate like full tank garen. sit there and KS with ulti). Fortunately very few people seem to have caught onto Jungle Darius as well- rather playing him as solo top- Darius as solo top allows him to dominate one lane. Darius as jungler allows him to dominate the entire enemy team and negates his major weakness of lack of escape mechanisms.
Phreak is partially to blame here. Phreak usually plays characters as junglers and the infamous trinity force combination. Adding on Atmas to form atamogs is standard and effective, and then finishing with maw to add more damage gives you the now fearfully unoriginal metagolem build. Now in typical Riot fashion, they build possibly the biggest metagolem in a while, then they proceed to build and play him completely differently in the spotlight. why? i dunno.
Since they aren’t going to be nerfing him next patch, (unless you count the removal of the ulti grace period and a passive nerf) he’s probably going to stay this way. Why? because riot knows what happens to Darius when he doesn’t shine, or even when he does.
Darius is possibly the most selfish champion ever released. Most champions require an element of team work, and a lot of other tanky DPS/off tanks have the feel of helping your team somehow. But with Darius there’s none of that. You can’t make any bold opening moves, game changing AOE CCs like Jarvan and ammumu, in fact you offer no hard CC at all. You’re only ability as Darius is to kill people, and if you’re team isn’t doing great and the enemy CC is on the ball and that’s proving impossible, then he’s just out of it. Full stop. I’ve played games as Jarvan where you can heorically turn around games with nice moves if you’re smart, but by comparison it’s almost impossible to do that as Darius- and if you do get any kills you feel like it’s the enemy being tarded rather than you being brilliant.
That first game, i could literally feel the game balance changing. I had the vast majority of my team’s kills, and suddenly it became a 1 man team with 4 supports. A fed Darius like the proverbial black hole unbalances all the games which he plays in. A underfed Darius is almost useless. Take the second game i played in.
I went 4-1 in the first 10 minutes due to jungle ganks, finishing in a dive that gave me the fourth kill. From there…. i died 6 times in a row. Why> because the entire enemy team decided that i was public enemy number one, and several of them (fiora in particular) made a point of only ulting me when i came close. Twice they all burned all their summoners and ultis in order to kill me, lost two in the cleanup and then said worth it in the chat. Darius is a tank late game, but trinity and wriggles form the first half of my build, so true tankyness comes later.
I finished up 7-8.
SO what does this tell me. If there was any champion in the game which i could chose to remove it would be Darius. The fact that he is the ultimate pubstomper makes him a constant blight on low and the occasional ones on Middle ELO games. He will also probably be the smerf of choice. He will also never be seen in high ELO ranked matches (don’t hold me to that) unless the team all intentionally supports him and feeds him. Nerfing his numbers would only make him less viable in high and middle, while not necessarily fixing the problems in low- and the only thing that can fix this is a remake. So Unless they failed to mention major nerfs to his scaling and base damage on his abilities, then the darius as we know it is here to stay.
However, as soon as i start my ranked career, i think i’m going to start with Jungle Darius. Because from everyone else who has played the opening few dozen games of ranked, it’s all about how hard you can carry your own team- and if there’s anyone who can carry, tank and generally rape in low ELO, it’s Darius.
Yes there a lot of match records in this. deal with it.