Gaming

That’s Why We Don’t Do That: Crittlesticks

November 15, 2012

This week we’ll be looking at an oldie but a goodie: Crittlesticks.

In all my time playing LoL I’ve found that Crittles is something that is mentioned but never witnessed. Perhaps he is only present in the trolliest of troll games, or perhaps he’s in every other queue wreaking havoc and leading his team to victory.

The basic idea is that you take everyone’s favorite scarecrow jungler, whose kit involves a long lasting fear and a stackable silence, and you build him as a straight AD Carry. I mean, how will the enemy AD even attack you if they’re too scared to do anything? Right?

Before we get to matches let’s compare Fiddle’s basic stats to what is arguably the current holy trinity of AD Carries: Ezreal, Corki and Graves. Thanks again to Leaguecraft for unbeknowingly supplying the base stats for every champion in League of Legends.

So with a quick glance at our statistics you can plainly see that Fiddlesticks is outclassed. Let’s consider the important features of an AD carry, namely attack damage, attack speed, and range. Fiddles begins with 49 base damage and gains +3/level totaling 93 at level 18. In comparison, Ez and company all begin with above 50 AD and cap at above 100 by level 18. Now, Fiddlesticks isn’t very far behind in this regard and since most of an AD’s viability is based off of their item quality it could be argued that with proper farming you could quickly gain an advantage or at least keep up with your opponents.

As for attack speed, Fiddles has a base attack speed of .625 and he gains 2.1% every level to reach a maximum base stat of .849. Graves has a similar base stat, although he gains 3% per level to reach a base stat of an entire tenth ahead of Fiddles. Corki and Ezreal both start around the .65 range and by level 18 they both sit well into the .9 range. Now these stats are not necessarily discouraging. Fiddles is slower to strike then these rivals but not by as much as I expected. Also, it should be mentioned again that what really turns an AD into a speedy beast is a Phantom Dancer, and those cost the same no matter what champ you chose.

Now comes the kicker. The one thing that you cannot upgrade on a champion is their range of attack and sadly, Fiddles is left in the dust in this aspect. While our top three all proudly boast an attack range in the mid 500s, Fiddlesticks is left behind with an unremarkable 480. When you couple this with the consideration that most quality AD Carries have some form of dash initiation and ‘sticks does not, you can start to see the big picture.

We’re going to have our work cut out for us.

Game One:

Laning:

First match has my Crittles and a very friendly Sona going up against an Ezreal/Volibear bot lane. We seem to have an advantage during the first few levels. I’m up in both kills and CS and feeling fairly confident. It was convenient to be able to fear the Voli out of his charge and to silence the Ez before any sort of initiating. In hindsight I think that our early success caused us to be a bit overzealous which resulted in some key mistakes that really cost us the lane.

As my friendly Sona pointed out, I developed a bad habit of using drain in order to finish off opponents. While with a traditional Fiddles build this would probably end up securing the kill, with 0 ap his drain isn’t quite as impressive. If I had only auto attacked (y’know, like an ADC is supposed to) during these times I probably would have picked up two or three more kills. Another item of note is that fiddles has very high cool downs. His fear and silence both run around 11 seconds at max level, so unlike our pals graves or Ez you really have one burst of spells before you’re stuck simply auto attacking.

After a couple successful ganks under our tower from the enemy Lee Sin, our lane is lost around the 15 minute mark.

Laning Phase:

Well, there wasn’t a laning phase. We had an Amumu top that AFK’d at around 5 minutes into the match, and when coupled with our lack of success in all three lanes my teammates decided to call it quits and surrender right at the 20 minute mark. I can’t really blame them.

As the defeat sign rears its ugly head I find myself at 1/3/0 and not entirely happy with the results of our first match. Although, as I mentioned earlier I think that if Fiddles holds any promise as an AD it is during late game when his Q and R are maxed out.

Game Two:

Myself and a support Pantheon (hey, who am I to judge?) are going up against a Teemo/Blitz lane. My confidence is somewhat high since in a top lane scenario Panth would crush the Teemo and as long as we avoided the grabs blitz would be somewhat nullified. Of course, Blitz landed a bunch of grabs and our Pantheon would get so blood thirsty for that poor little teemo that we would end up going all in scenarios that were unfavorable.

Reflecting on the Blitz game, it really makes you appreciate the dash ability of other AD champions. Once I used flash on Fiddles I was screwed. With Corki, Ez, Graves, Cait, Trist or Vayne you have a decent escape maneuver built into your kit that can really keep you from sticky situations. I also found myself really feeling fiddle’s lack of range. Any time we would find an advantage and I would want to participate in Pantheon’s bloodlust I would find the familiar scene of Fiddlesticks frolicking behind the fight as if to yell “Wait for me! Wait for me!”

Late Game/Teamfights:

Well, teamfights didn’t go well either. I continued to have a case of the waitformes. We didn’t really have teamfights, per say. We moreso had designated moments in time where would all find one place to be while the enemy team murdered us.

Game Three:

A hard thing about this article is that when you chose a “troll pick” such as AD fiddles, the rest of your team will decide that the game is over before it has begun and before long you find yourself trying to play a legit game with an Elise who thinks the purpose of today’s match is to see how close to base she can get without dying.

So that was game three.

That and I still try to seal the deal with life drain when I should just keep auto attacking.

Game Four:

Lane:

First thing to happen is our Lulu face checks the bush and dies almost instantly. In the meantime I whittled away at the enemy Ashe and got her down to around 25% health. On my minimap I see our Nunu fresh from blue strolling towards their bot’s tri-brush. Thinking he was going for a level 2 gank, I bum rush the low Ashe and pour out whatever damage I can. I run to avoid death, but I leave Ashe at <100 HP, expecting Nunu to clean up. I check the minimap to find our jungler in the middle of their red camp. He is not ganking my lane.

Ashe lives, but so do I. Why bother mentioning this? Partly because I wanted to vent and partly because I really think it set the tone for the match. I’m not saying Nunu was in any way at fault for my disability to seal the deal. It wasn’t. I think it just put me in the mindset of “this is an uphill battle.”

The rest of lane goes fairly atrocious. The combination of Ashe/Leona seems vastly superior to Fiddles/Lulu (go fig). Any advantage we obtain results in several stuns directly to my face and near-immediate death. I kept up in CS, though. So I had that going for me.

Teamfights:

Our fights were uncoordinated and sloppy. I constantly felt either useless or a direct hindrance to our team. Again, I could never properly find a position where I was out of harms way while still being in range to use my auto attacks. I found myself playing more the role of support fiddle. I would fear and/or silence and then I would be near-useless. On reflection of this concept I can say that it held true for almost all of these games.

Conclusion

Are you ready for this groundbreaking conclusion? Fiddles is not a good AD Carry. While the concept of his skillset meshing well with physical attacks sounds good on paper, in order for that to actually occur you would really need multiple complete attack speed items along with some major damage items to boot. In other words, you would need Fiddles to reach full AD build in order to be able to present any form of punishment, and even then I’m skeptical if it would work.

The main reasons Fiddles does not do well as an ADC? First and foremost is his range. As mentioned earlier, his attack range barely fits in the upper 400s while any reasonable ADC is well into the mid 500 range. Beyond that, he has no gap closer or attack steroid. Another thing to mention is that his cooldowns at their best would fall into the 7/8 second category, but since you wouldn’t be building CDR in a standard AD build you would be lucky if you even reached that time frame.