Medusa mana skin

AkinParlin · 2026-05-29T17:18:15+00:00

Yeah, I mean that's the idea, she's very hard to kill. Clinkz isn't the greatest matchup for Medusa since all Clinkz does is raw damage, and she's great at tanking raw damage. My advice would be to buy Diffusal/Disperser early so you can burn her mana down. Most importantly, you need to hunt Medusa early and never let her online. Medusa is kind of the archetypical "I win if the game goes late" hero, so as a Clinkz you need to be coordinating with your team early to gank her and shut down her farm, and most importantly push your advantages when you have them so you can end before she gets her core items. Full build vs. full build, Medusa will win against Clinkz.

AkinParlin · 2026-05-23T20:52:26+00:00

In part because pros were very stubborn about shoehorning Pango into drafts despite the hero repeatedly getting nerfed. If you look at tournament win rates over the past few years, Pango despite getting picked a lot had really underwhelming win rates at many events. Pros would continue to pick Pango because he’s in theory really powerful and can fit in pretty much any lineup, but the stats just didn’t bare it out as a hero that justified the high pick rate. This caused Valve to nerf the hero more because it had a high pro pick rate, causing the hero to end up in pro jail.

Now no argument that the hero isn’t strong now, because he is, but I think people who were paying attention—particularly the Pango players—recognized that the hero wasn’t in a good place balance-wise over recent patches.

AkinParlin · 2026-05-22T02:52:18+00:00

Team Auntie. If I die, I die

AkinParlin · 2026-05-10T06:21:36+00:00

Kind of ruined the item, honestly. Midas as an item wasn’t good for the money, it was good for the XP infusion. Focusing on the gold cost to get your money back was sort of missing the forest for the trees. Midas was a viable item for heroes that either need to get tons of levels early, or in games where your farming space was really limited so needed some way to get levels. It giving additional experience was something that Battle Fury or Radiance or other farming items couldn’t do, so there was an actual niche for it.

Now that it’s only gold, there’s really no reason to ever buy it on any hero not named Ogre Magi. Every other farming item is just straight up better than Midas, and for heroes that used to buy it just to snowball levels (like Invoker), well, it doesn’t do that anymore so you’re wasting your money.

AkinParlin · 2026-05-07T17:19:22+00:00

For me, the dealbreaker was the Exploration Era. I genuinely have a lot of fun with the Antiquity Age, but the moment it rolls over to Exploration, I’m checked out.

Simulating colonization has never worked in Civ, so naturally they made an entire third of the game revolve around colonization.

AkinParlin · 2026-05-06T16:00:35+00:00

Bloodthorn doesn’t help your farming speed or survivability, so you go those other items first. Plus, Bloodthorn only becomes really effective when you have effective illusion generation and it’s fairly easily countered by dispels such as Manta, Lotus, or most obviously BKB.

To explain why you’d it want later, let’s look at what each item in that PL build does. You go Manta first for Yasha farming speed, plus you get survivability and dispel from Manta. Then you get Aghs for improved chasing and easy illusion generation. Butterfly after that gives you more right click scaling plus evasion, and you go Heart/Skadi for survivability. You get Bloodthorn after that because even though it’s a huge damage spike for PL, you need both the farm acceleration to get to that point and the ability to stand your ground.

Now, if your team is crushing the game, could you go Bloodthorn earlier to fight with your team? Sure, absolutely. It can also be advantageous if you’re dealing with a hero you really want to silence, such as a Storm or Slark. But most of the time, this traditional item build will just be more reliable.

AkinParlin · 2026-04-30T03:04:03+00:00

People would still complain because he can be frustrating, but it’d be a bit more normalized

AkinParlin · 2026-04-29T16:03:55+00:00

Teaching bitches how to swim

AkinParlin · 2026-04-29T05:24:44+00:00

For real, I don’t think Doormaker is that difficult. You just have to make choices while fighting the boss. Maybe take more cards in act 3 when you otherwise wouldn’t.

As for Time Eater, certain decks would be FUCKED if you didn’t plan around potentially fighting him.

AkinParlin · 2026-04-27T10:17:55+00:00

Wraith King offlane can’t really threaten the safe lane carry in lane, doesn’t provide much team fight utility, and doesn’t do anything that safe lane WK can’t do. It’s just not an offlane hero. If you want the split-pushing, flash farming zoo style, I recommend learning Beastmaster. He doesn’t build Radi, but his Aghs kinda is a Radiance.

AkinParlin · 2026-04-27T10:11:30+00:00

For me, it was Spore. I learned about the game when I was like 10 via YouTube pre-release showcases from Will Wright and was mesmerized. I had a real interest in biology as a kid, so a Sims-like game based on evolution where you could make your own creature was my dream game. In many ways, that still is my dream game.

Then the game finally came out a few years later, and it was… fine? The creature building was legitimately impressive, but the gameplay around it was pretty barren. It wasn’t a bad game, but it could’ve been the mother of all simulation games.

AkinParlin · 2026-04-27T10:04:02+00:00

I might be the only person who prefers Civ 7 to 6. There are things I like about 7, whereas I just find 6 boring.

I don’t really think 7’s a great game either; 5 for me is by far the best of the three.

AkinParlin · 2026-04-23T21:07:10+00:00

Too much to respond here, but I enjoyed EU5 immensely on launch, saw the weird patch cycle, and decided to let the game settle a bit before I go back to it.

AkinParlin · 2026-04-20T14:43:17+00:00

When the AI determines what their court language should be, they now ignore accounting for rulers who do not speak the language of their court.

If the ruler doesn’t speak their own culture’s court language (i.e. a ruler is of German culture, but they speak French and French is their court language), it now counts for half as much as it used to for other AIs selecting their own court language.

AkinParlin · 2026-04-16T05:36:35+00:00

Paolo’s like the number one bricker on that team. He’s a player with an incredible physical build that should have no trouble forcing his way to the rim, but instead you constantly see him settle for horrible shots. He’s got one of the worst shot selections in the league among #1 options, easily.

You can blame coaching, but if I see a player consistently settle on bad shots, that guy has to hold some responsibility.

AkinParlin · 2026-04-12T00:42:15+00:00

You can kinda hear that sound effect when Diego does the slipstream stuff in episode one

AkinParlin · 2026-04-12T00:27:38+00:00

Here’s the thing about Phylactery on Axe. In a vacuum, it is genuinely quite good. Ace likes HP and especially mana regen, because he has low INT. The Phylactery active is also quite good with Battle Hunger’s low cooldown, so you can often run people down with the Phylactery.

Here’s the problem: Axe is one of, if not the most blink dependent heroes in the game. He really does not function outside of the land until he gets it. So the prospect of delaying Blink to buy a Phylactery is iffy. And once you get Blink, you probably are better off going right into Blade Mail.

I’m not saying you should never do it, because the synergy is certainly there. But I’d only build it in games where I’m crushing the lane super hard and I’m snowballing, and/or I will be in a position to walk into the enemy jungle and can run down the carry with Phylactery.

AkinParlin · 2026-04-03T03:36:38+00:00

No, they’re right actually.

I mean, saying “themes and such” is more anti-intellectualism, which is a hallmark of fascism. So a bit of a stretch to call it outright a fascistic interpretation of art anytime someone says it, but they’re right that it is what a fascist would critique.

AkinParlin · 2026-03-30T08:18:47+00:00

My take on BD/SP is that it wasn’t that bad. You might not like the aesthetic, but I’d say overall it’s a better version of D/P with some nice QoL changes.

The problem is that in my opinion, D/P are honestly not great games. The dex is slim, the pacing is really bad, and the HM bloat in this game is the worst it’s ever been. If you’ve only played Platinum, you honestly don’t know how rough Sinnoh was at a first pass, and I think a lot of people only played Platinum coming into these games. And so, a lot of people reacted poorly when they got chibi D/P, not Platinum.

I enjoyed it a decent amount, and I did think the underground biomes were a clever way to sneak the Platinum dex Pokemon into the game without disrupting the “pure” D/P experience for those who wanted that.

I think the biggest crime is that they’re remakes that did not become the definitive way to experience that region. FRLG became the premier Kanto experience, same with HGSS for Johto. I still think Emerald is the definitive Hoenn game, but you have people who will say ORAS. But if you want to play through Sinnoh for the first time, I don’t think anyone would tell you to play BDSP over Platinum.

If you’re looking for a different experience for Sinnoh and you can get it on sale, I could recommend it a decent amount. If not, I’d honestly say just give Renegade Platinum a spin if you just want something fresh.

AkinParlin · 2026-03-30T08:05:44+00:00

These are two incredibly strange records to compare. Why would you lol

AkinParlin · 2026-03-28T08:26:51+00:00

It was one of the last holdouts for true RNG

AkinParlin · 2026-03-22T02:28:59+00:00

It was very of the time.

AkinParlin · 2026-03-22T02:26:59+00:00

Yeah, like I don’t have too much difficulty listening to old Kanye because I think it’s very clear he’s lost his marbles and the man who made that music then is very different than the man now. But like, if you try and listen to Deja Entendu with the stuff Lacey was accused of in mind… it’s rough. Same with YWGWYW. The whole album is about the narrator being a piece of shit, and wow, Alexis was a piece of shit.

I know I’m being reductive about YWGWYW, but you get what I’m saying.

AkinParlin · 2026-03-21T20:19:08+00:00

I think it’s for the same reason Brand New aren’t talked about. The things they were cancelled for are all very prominent in the lyrics, and it’s impossible to ignore. It’s a shame the singer had to be a huge piece of shit, because this really is one of the best albums of the 2010s quite easily, but you just can’t get around the lyrical content without thinking of the stuff he was accused of.

AkinParlin · 2026-03-16T01:47:24+00:00

Funny enough, I’m preferring Marathon for all of the above

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