News front/Lolhammercrafting!

1) I have bought tickets to Claremont! Huzzah!

2) In LoL, I have developed a liking for everyone's favorite unicorn-drow, Soraka!

Look, I don't like it anymore than you do.

This is in large part because she's got kinda a weird power curve for LoL. But before I go into that, I should explain what the deal is with power curves in LoL! The relevant numbers are Teamfight Influence-- that is, how much you can wreck up the business of your opponents--and Gold Earned-- how much you were able to farm up minions and enemy heroes throughout the game.

The reason the graph looks like this is because support characters tend not to have abilities that scale well-- however, these abilities also have effects like stuns, debuffs or knockups that don't increase in power as you acquire better stats. AD and AP carries, however, have abilities that-- implicitly or explicitly-- act as multipliers for their base statistics, which is to say, multipliers for the gold they earn. Tanky DPS is typically somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.

Check it out. The reason Soraka's graph looks so different from the other supports is that her own primary teamfight-support ability (Starcall) shreds the enemy team's magic resistance for a flat amount. The thing is, unlike for the other characters in the "support" category, the power's short range requires Soraka getting all up in the enemy team's fries, as per Utahraptor in this Dinosaur Comic. Thus, in order to do anything in teamfights without getting immediately ripped apart, she needs lots of HP and armor. However, there is very much diminishing returns to this tankiness, because when she stops getting focused she stops having a really good place to put all that gold-- that's why her power curve falls off later on, to the point where her dInfluence/dGold becomes more-or-less even with the other supports.

(Note that without this added health she really is pretty impotent. So it goes.)