I don't know, i actually see just as much complaining in normal.

As for ganking, as far as I understand it, ganks should only happen when the opponent is roughly ~75% health or less and overextended or ~50% or less and about mid river... or if you have an agressive top and some form of CC.  These situations seem to rarely seem to come up.  At least the games i've played.

Recently got Udyr, feeling him out, he does seem really good.  Like him a lot better then Lee Sin who isn't tanky enough for me jungle wise.

unless your shyvana you should always be trieng to gank. early on top lane is very vulnerable so lee sin, udyr and mundo have devastating level 2 ganks. even if they are not overextended if you have cc you can tower dive, and their health doesnt matter, as going to a lane and disrumpting the enemy helps your team. the point of ganks is not to get kills but to give an advantage to your laner and that is why constantly camping top lane will snowball extremely hard.

if you have a good ping i suggest you try alistair a bit and then play him in rank, just look up a guide on solomid.net and youl learn fast how to play him. he has the best level 2 ganks and you can make their laners suffer. 

After playing some games with Udyr, he's a tanky assist machine alright.

Went back to just plane old Normal mode for some fun... forgot how non meta things get there.

Before, I learned how to jungle Poppy just because I love Poppy, but I'd have been willing to admit that Philo Stone didn't exactly make her jungle any faster, nor ganks any stronger. I've finally devised a way to accomplish both. At first I loaded up on life steal -- masteries, quintessences, and Vampiric Scepter -- and ironically I was TOO successful. I figured if I had a surplus of life steal, I might be able to get away with less of it in order to jungle faster. Turns out I can:

Attack speed runes (I'd been sticking with hybrid penetration), Life Steal quintessences, 21/9/0 hybrid masteries with points in life steal, and start with a Dagger and a potion.

Obviously 30% more attack speed will speed up the jungle somewhat, and I've found that 9% life steal is, combined with that speed, sufficient to get through the first jungle pass. (You can jungle completely by yourself but you get very vulnerable to counterjungling at red, so at least a basic leash at blue is a necessity, not a luxury, IMO.)

If you don't want to give up penetration marks, Vampiric Scepter will give you a more-than adequate 19% life steal. IMO Jungle Poppy should NOT get Wriggle's Lantern, for all that it's a great item for junglers and practically standard issue: getting it delays Sheen, which is really Poppy's single most necessary item.

Boots, then Zeal and Sheen, or Sheen and Zeal, whatever way you like. Get Vam Scep any time you feel like it. Trinity and Merc Treads, and off you go, standard Poppy build is fine for jungling too. The only difference is that no mana regen means more mana hungry, so you're either blue dependent or have to refrain from spamming too much.

Despite all the disdain for Mobafire, I found it before I found SoloMid guides, and although I'd agree that the BEST guides on SM generally are better than the top guides on MF, there's still plenty of excellent guides on Mobafire too ... including some builds and tips you can't find duplicated even in the top SM guides. My point is, behold my guide! http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/build/runner-poppy-113244 Now updated with my new jungle build.

OMG I can't believe I didn't record this ....

OK, so I won't go into gruesome detail about the seesawing game, but we were in their base pushed through mid and had just gotten the nexus turrets and started on the nexus itself when they all come rushing out the gate. I'm coming up from bot (almost died and healed up by stealing blue buff) and cast my ult on Blitzcrank in order to go after the fed Tristana. (I'm Poppy, of course, so this means that no one but Blitz can hurt me.)

I dash at Tristana and bash her, she jumps away, I begin chasing, then I notice my last two teammates still in the fight just died, making this terribly irrelevant, and I'm standing next to their nexus which has a temptingly low life bar. So i ignore Tristana and just start bashing the Nexus! Blitz is banging away but he is the support and I don't even care except for when he knocks me up, and my ult is going down and I'm SO CLOSE and YES I GOT THE NEXUS BEST ULT EVERRRR!!!!1!11

I've ended up pretty much maining Malaphite lately...

works brilliantly in Twisted Treeline and Dominion... end up winning a lot more then losing lately.  Seismic Slam just really tips the favor your way if you build a Frozen shield early.

Haven't felt up for the extra time it takes to play a classic game lately. Too split up among a bunch of other projects, such as trying to figure out Pathfinder to start a monthly Pathfinder club online with some friends.

I've been playing a lot of ranked lately, since I had a really abysmal ranking and now apparently I'm doing something better since I've been somewhat consistently winning more than losing.

Well I've recently started playing (about a month or so ago), so still learning some stuff, but I've learned to adapt to the champions, I just need to glimpse the guide briefly and after a game I make my own builds/tactics w/e. Currently playing Twisted Fate, and I enjoy playing with TF VERY much, very, very fun character to play with.

Also play with Draven/Vladimir/Blitzcrank/Fiddlesticks and sometimes Teemo (to troll).

It's a neat little game, I was first outraged that there are practically only 3 maps, with one of them being the main one - summoner's rift. But I've grown not to care and pretty much been playing summoner's rift all the time, the gameplay is so dynamic and different with each team champion variations!

Well, I had an interesting game recently. I was top lane Poppy versus Nasus. I figured I was likely to win the lane, because we both have big damage Qs, only he wants to use his on minions (to stack it like Veigar) and I am free to use mine on him.

Anyway, it became clear immediately that whatever innate advantage I had was outweighed by the simple fact that this guy was BAD. We started trading hits, with minions joining in, and he was down to 1/3 health before he noticed that I was still above 2/3 and he popped Ghost and ran away. A health pot or two later, he was back and trying to last hit, with me trying to harass him and gradually succeeding. At one point I harassed him heavily enough to make him panic and pop Flash. After that, he had used up all his health pots, was low health, and was pretty much reduced to just watching me last hit ... only he was standing a little too close to a wall. Wall stun, Q, dead Nasus.

I recalled for Philo Stone and whatnot. I got back to lane after Nasus did, and my jungler Maokai was in the area. Nasus's escape spells were on cooldown, so we gank him, I use Ghost and Exhaust, dead Nasus.

He really didn't die all THAT often, mostly because I would push to the turret because Nasus couldn't last hit while I was there, Nasus is too tanky to dive easily even for Poppy, and then I would go roam until I could push again. I dominated every teamfight, ending 20/5/9. Even considering I had the advantage of being solo top and roflstomping my opponent, I still had to work to earn a record like that.

[edit:  Oh, another thing that made this game interesting was that I amassed a ridiculous amount of gold at one point before going back to base.  You see, we'd taken Baron, and took some towers, and spent a while pressuring their base, and taken Dragon once or twice, and won a teamfight or two (and I got several of the kills); and between my mana regen item and blue buff, I'd been kept supplied with mana, and the spell vamp and life steal from my Hextech Gunblade kept me supplied with health.  So when I finally decided to back off after barely surviving a fight (that we won, of course) for the new Baron, I found myself with about 4500 gold.  Well, I HAD been planning to buy armor, or finish Abyssal Scepter or Force of Nature, but with that kind of cash at my disposal I just bought an Infinity Edge straight up.  I am fairly sure I have never had over 4000 gold in the bank before in this game.]

All right, I've gone all this time thinking "tank Poppy" was a joke of a build. She has no AOE and hardly any CC (a situational single target stun); her most notable attractions are a big damage Q and an ultimate that defends only herself and gives a big offensive boost to only herself. She has natural tankiness due to her passive, but her skills would seem to gravitate toward being a damage dealer rather than a damage soak, and she's certainly incapable of being a CC machine.

And yet, tank Poppy can be surprisingly effective, as I just learned.

I was top versus Darius, and he was competent, which in my experience means a lane where the goal is sheer survival, and it was a challenging goal at that. Partly that's due to a jungler who literally never ganked top.

(Our team: Poppy top, Nocturne jungle, Teemo mid, Ezreal/Taric bot. Their team: Darius top, Shyvana jungle, Kennen mid, Nidalee/dontremember bot.)

(Our jungler, a Nocturne, scared Darius a little at level 2, and showed up to wave hello once or twice later, but nothing I'd call a gank. He even ignored my request for him to cover top so I could recall, despite being at wolves and then blue; instead I died, came back to lane and THEN he shows up and takes some farm. Meanwhile he spent a lot of time going bot and instantly dying.)

So anyway, I'm barely managing to farm, and madly stacking GP5 and health items: Philo, Heart of Gold, Phage, Kindlegem. The only bright spot is that Darius had an awfully hard time finishing me off because I was turret hugging and a skilled Poppy (which I am) is extremely hard to turret dive. I escaped with sub-50 hp on at least two occasions (after Darius's ult and DOT finished ticking). Judicious use of Exhaust and my ult when he had a gank partner (unlike me) also helped.

Due to Nocturne's incompetence and enemy ganks, I eventually lost the outer top turret and around this time I realized that I was going to be building the tankiest Poppy I have ever built. Sure, I was working on Trinity, but I had Shurelya's (HP/regen), I was working on Randuin's (HP/armor/regen), and I was planning on Force of Nature (MR/regen). Combine this with the fact that although we had a Taric, he had been horribly feeding and in fact was much less able to fill the role of tank than I was (due to my solo-top levels of farm and my not being bad), and I realized what I had to do.

Perhaps you have noticed a trend here. Sure, I'm building HP to counter the true damage, and resists which are good against everyone, but what helps Poppy arguably the most is HEALTH REGEN. You see, her passive makes her harder to kill at low health, right? As she gets lower in health, non-true enemy damage is reduced by more and more, approaching 50%. So health regen becomes more and more effective at keeping her alive, approaching (but never reaching) DOUBLE normal effectiveness. This is why Poppy is so hard to finish off, and a tank Poppy with huge amounts of health regen can take this to ridiculous levels (although two or more enemies will still have an easy enough time, if they can corner her). Health potions are very powerful defensive items on Poppy for this reason in laning phase. They can be a useful buy on Poppy even after most champs would sell theirs as junk. (Life steal and spell vamp can also somewhat perform this function on aggressive Poppy builds.)

Anyway, back to the story. I was instrumental in the fight that turned this game around and gave my team real hope that they would emerge victorious. Both teams were playing footsie around Baron Nashor's lair. Enemy Jayce may or may not have been dead as a result of a surprise attack led by myself, but either way the enemy was fed and a strong threat.

I don't remember if I started the fight, but when the fight started, I immediately went for Kennen as his ult would really have been bad for our team. I wall stunned him into the Baron's gate and eventually killed him, and his ult didn't hurt my team. I was pretty low health but I still managed to wall stun Nidalee, allowing my team to kill her. Shyvana decided to try to finish me off, but I ran towards the blue buff golems; when she followed, I doubled back and wall stunned her, possibly killing her but certainly she died and I lived. By the time the fight had wound down, we had only lost one man and they only had one survivor. The other three took Baron while I recalled.

As you probably have gathered, tank Poppy is still a threat that must be reckoned with in her own right as a combatant; no champion can afford to just ignore her damage output unless they are also a tank or offtank at the very least. But unlike my normal Poppy build, tank Poppy doesn't just instantly die when her ult goes down. It takes a concerted effort from at least three enemies to burst her down in a brief period, during which time an intelligent team will be taking them apart. (That happened in another battle while we had Baron buff.) Now, one weakness of tank Poppy is the risk that a sufficiently coordinated and determined team will ignore her in favor of going after other targets while Poppy is ulting. Therefore, tank Poppy must make sure that she is as disruptive as possible to the enemy team's teamwork even if they try to work around her. Fortunately, I don't think this particular enemy team responded to me very well; I got the impression that my initiations either made them want to focus me or otherwise discombobulated them, as is the goal of any initiating tank.

After taking their mid inhibitor, we suffered a setback of almost getting aced and losing our mid inhibitor turret; but we regrouped and took Baron a second time, then downed mid inhibitor again, lured them into a battle over the top inhibitor turret, aced them, and won.

My health regen per 5 seconds (counting Force of Nature's special passive) was, I believe, 161.5, or over 32 health per second.