My favorite gaming experience huh? All time? I went through my screen cap folder for this, because everyone who plays League of Legends has a screen cap folder. Out of my countless favorite memories, one stands out from the rest. This is the story of me winning a ranked game playing Sona Midlane.
Back in season 5, October 2015, I remember how excited I was to finally hit gold. That was the goal I wanted to reach, but after getting there and having a few weeks left to play, I figured why not just play until the last day? The whole day of games leading up to this match was filled with ragers, flamers, and toxic people galore. For most people, this was the last chance a person could play to try to reach gold. Any little thing that could go wrong in champion select (where we choose who we are playing before the game) would set off, trigger, or otherwise completely tilt any person on your own team before even having a chance to play the game. Needless to say, every lobby was heated.
My playstyle also didn't help other people's causes. I like to play who is regarded to be the squishiest, easiest to kill champion in the whole game. She is a support character, and her name is Sona. She is the embodiment of what a music lover is like, and in different skins she can be seen playing harps, guitars, and DJ decks, she even has a skin where her weapon is an arcade control panel. She is why I play this game. But as you may already tell, being the easiest to kill character of all doesn't fair well in a room of players who want to win more than anything else in the world.
My in-game name is also Shello, because this is not only my nickname, but my gamer tag. How toxic is League you may be asking? Well, this is the screen cap reaction by my top laner, when he realized that I wanted to not only play Sona, but to play her as an Ability Powered mage in the mid lane, instead of playing as a support. I was actually supposed to support this game, but our Blitzcrank wanted to play that role instead.
Usually people get real salty if they can't get "their role", and either a fight breaks out in lobby and someone doges the game resetting the cue, or one of the angry players decides to troll pick a crappy champion and intentionally lose the game for everyone else. Fortunately, I was neither one of these, and willingly gave up my support role to the other guy c:
Instead of choosing a "meta midlaner" as an acceptable pick for my team, everyone thought that my Sona pick was to troll, feed, and gate keep other players out of gold. While everyone else simply threatened to report me for who I was playing, the Yasuo main (obviously) didn't hold back when divulging in his pure hatred for everything that I was.
Did I leave the game? F#@% no.
I locked in and got ready for a challenging match. You see, I'm what other players call a "one trick pony". I play only one character and never get bored, because I always find something that I can improve on. I know this champion inside and out, better than the back of my hands, and have more Sona games than other players have games total. If you want to master something, then you gotta practice it everyday.
The game starts up, and before heading into lane, everyone has to buy their first item. Anyone who says spelltheive's is the best starting item for Sona, has no idea what they are talking about- Even if it's the official "recommended item." The point of the spell thief blade is to give a tiny AP buff to start, and each time you attack an enemy champion with a spell, you get a small gold reward (one of the items that replaced GP10's, or gold per 10 second items). The problem with this item is that it's only useful in the laning phase, which is in the beginning of the game. When first towers go down, and everyone is roaming, you aren't going to be throwing spells on anyone, unless getting picked off in the enemy jungle is your thing.
Supports have it hard, we have to use all of our gold for buying utility items that don't really help us, but our team. We build specific items and pray for our other laners to do a good job. Since I was playing a solo lane as a mage instead, it would have made sense to start with a Doran's ring for the bonus AP and mana regen that goes with it. That's standard to build in this role. I didn't do that either. Everyone was hella mad seeing me stroll into lane with an "Ancient Coin". So this thing doesn't give me any damage, and is a support starting item as well.
The thing that makes this item broken for me is that Sona has one of the weakest starting AD (attack damage) in the game. In order to get gold for items, I need to last hit minions to increase my creep score. Any Sona main can tell you that last hitting anything with her, is really difficult. At the time, I also had bad timing at cs'ing in general, so this kinda got thrown out the window. Ancient coin gives me gold for standing next to minions that die, even if I don't hit them. Nowhere close to the full reward, but would work out in my favor to help me better focus my lane opponent, who was Zed.
Zed is what's called an Assassin, his attacks are burst AD (attack damage). This champion is very good at sniping off a single player in a team fight, or 1 v 1. I'm certain he wasn't expecting to see a Sona, since her midlane capabilities got hard nerfed the previous season and no one was playing her. When we hit level 2, I already have a self heal and shield, what are you supposed to do with a self sustaining opponent? Many traditional midlaners don't have shields, and much rarer to see one with a heal. I didn't have to go back to the base for a while, and I was stacking gold just playing carefully.
At level 5 I finally did back, and I bought some AP items, along with a cloth armor, and walked back into lane. You should have seen this Zed's face when his level 6 ultimate didn't kill the squishiest champion ever, only for him to die right after from a q + chord shot. He realized that his must have made a mistake and miscalculated, but his real mistake was challenging me. He ended up getting frustrated and continuously charging into me, wondering why he was dying.
When people see a Sona, they imagine that she has a sight stone, boots, maybe an aegis, or armor of some kind, not a s#&$^ ton of AP items. He eventually fed me 5 kills and had to leave the lane altogether, to try to be useful somewhere else. At one point my Amumu came out of the jungle to gank for me, saying that he was sorry and thought I was trolling, but realized that I am actually playing and he wanted to help me out.
The rest of the game was a blur of roflstomping and laughter until we hit the end game screen.
I died the least number of times out of everyone in that game.
The person saying to honor me, then saying he did, is actually the same guy who threatened me in the beginning of the game. After a ranked game, all the players have an option to honor another player (at the time you could choose someone on your team or the enemy team) to acknowledge that they were you favorite player in the game. That Yasuo player honored me as an apology for being wrong.
Even the Zyra player who fed 11 kills to our team couldn't comprehend what could have possibly happened to make Zed lose such a match up.
And the Zed player. He wasn't even mad, in fact he complimented my skills and how I outplayed him. What was most toxic lobby I had ever seen, had the most sportsman-like players come out at the end. Things like this is what my favorite game memories are made of...
The impossible.