So for those of you who have read my pieces before, I’m Silver 5 and play pretty much every role. I have level 5 mastery on around 7 or 8 champions, and I get S ratings in about 30% of my games (depending on how hard I’m tilted). So I guess the point of this introduction is that my expectation was that without consistently playing a role, and with the limited number of S ratings I get, I didn’t expect to get a Mastery Level 6 champion for quite some time.
(courtesy of ddragon.leagueoflegends.com)
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a pretty good Nasus. I’ve been known to put up 700-900 stacks in a standard 40-50 minute game, and I’ve broken 1000 stacks more than a couple times. I can win lane against a Garen/Riven/Teemo etc. But even still I typically only see A- or A’s. (I have a tendency to get caught out while split pushing). But imagine my surprise when it took me 2 games to get the necessary S’s for Level 6. How did I do it? URF.
Last weekend URF was upon us (in all its glory), and I figured I’d play Nasus. Nasus can easily stack with a less than 2 second cooldown on his Q. He can almost always escape with Wither on a less than 7 second cooldown, his E allows him to have constant AOE damage in lane and its debuff helps his Q hit harder, and his ult (which is up every 20 seconds or so) makes him virtually impossible to kill late game. So all one has to do is walk to lane, focus on Q-Smacking minions while zoning opponents away with W and E, and you have a recipe for an easy 300 stacks at 15 minutes. In my experience that’s pretty much all it takes to have complete dominance over the majority of champions. Nasus can easily spam Q/E to quickly take Rift Herald or Dragon to increase his power further, and he can 5 hit towers once he gets over 500 stacks.
In URF, Nasus is almost a free S (if you have a basic understanding of how to play him anyway). So I quickly played 2 games of Ultra Rapid Fire Nasus, paid the blue essence toll, and now have a nice purple Level 6 Mastery.
This doesn’t seem like what Riot intended. Nasus is by no means the most powerful URF champion: nerfplz.com (my standard for tier lists) places him in tier 3, and suggests that he is well balanced within the game mode. For people playing Alistar, or Evelynn achieving an S is as easy as mashing Q and being in the right place at the right time. Which means Level 6 and 7 mastery is easy.
Not every Rotating Game Mode will give Free S’s, but I anticipate seeing URF at least once a month for the rest of the year, and seeing as it only really takes 5 S games to get a champion from level 5 to 7, I think I could easily have 10-15 Level 7 champions by the end of the year. To me that makes these new mastery levels almost entirely meaningless. I’m a “fill” main, if the mastery levels were legitimate and actually based on skill on a champion over time (similar to the ranked system), I would probably be a Level 4 or 5 on almost every champion in the game, but I don’t think I’d have a 7 on any of them. I think the system would be more worthwhile if rather then a 1-7 scale, our champion mastery was our average letter grade on that champion in standard 5v5 matches with a reset at the beginning of each season.
Maybe its just me, but I want my mastery to mean something.