Champion Rotation: Preseason Week 11

Another week, another champion rotation and this week could potentially be the last week of the “Pre-Season”. The European teams have now qualified joining their North American brothers, the Riot Game League of Legends Season 3 Champion Series (What a mouthful) is set to be fierce even from the commencement early in February.

This weeks roster of champions is a pretty strong one, support Lulu excels as a teamfighter with huge damage output in lane with her poke ability. Lulu would work well combined with Sivir another of the champions in free, her Q ability is amongst the highest damaging poke of any of the AD Carries. Corki is another of the ADCs on free this week, which is a nice break from the recent tradition of only having one but Corki also synergises well with Lulu, especially after Lulu has hit level 6 due to his ability to Valkyrie in while being Explosive Growth’ed by Lulu knocking everyone up in the air and providing the carry with more health to help survive the burst.

Even if you are a jungler you have some great picks this week, Dr. Mundo is going to start being much more regularly picked this season due to how much he scales from building health and the current state of Warmog’s Armour and health in general. In season 3 health was made much more cost efficient and resists/armour was nerfed slightly. Maokai is a support jungler who is a hyper-ganker who is extremely fun to play as a champion, but can be one of the trickiest junglers to pick up.

Katarina, Ziggs and Malzahar representing the AP mids on this rotation, Katarina is the definition of snowball in mid lane, and once you get used to using her shunpo effectively she is also a very safe character in lane, only having to go really deep and commit during teamfights/dives. One of Katarina’s big strengths comes from her passive in that any kills or assists she gets, it reduces all of her cool downs so she is able to keep spamming her abilities and even better her ultimate which tears teams apart. She is much like Master Yi in that she is very happy in a teamfight even if just one person is low on health as if she makes sure to focus that person down, her ultimate will recharge very quickly and by then everyone else will be low.

Malzahar has some very good lane matchups and is very undervalued in this current meta, and if you’re playing low level games and want to win lane, Malzahar should theoretically beat Katarina. If she dives you, you can suppress her ultimate and blow her up with all your spells, great champion for free wins this week if you are new, and the likelihood of your opponents having other champions is low.

The excitement is brewing and it is palpable, once the Season 3 Championship Series get under-way in early February there will be many happy summoners throughout the Fields of Justice studying what the professionals are doing.