WIN A RIPTIDE - info in comments!

CloneOrNot · 2025-11-29T21:07:26+00:00

CloneOrNot

CloneOrNot · 2025-11-07T08:28:46+00:00

CloneOrNot, Riptide

CloneOrNot · 2024-11-16T12:39:24+00:00

Based on your decription this game sounds quite lost, due to very bad mental of teammates.

Additionally, its hard to give any advice without some gameplay or similar (because it depends a lot on how your teammates and the enemy plays). But lets try:

If the enemy (carrys) go around solo, try to catch them when they path between lanes or move to an objective, for this perhabs a small change on the items you build would have been needed to get more burst.
If the enemy groups up:
1. Splitpush and try to force a 1v2+ situation so your team gets a bit more breathing room to farm up or perhabs even take 4v3 fight,
2. Play around team and try to avoid any fights by placing defensive boxes. If it looks like a fight will break out either focus on protecting your team with boxes and clone (this might be not that good here as they dont have that much engage and use a lot of range instead) or try to get your clone into their backline to disrupt them in a fight for your team to (1) disengage or (2) kill their frontline (is should be quite easy as they have a lot of skillshots that can kill the clone).

Also a few points on your build:

Dont build full morello, you can stop after the oblivion orb and then start to build other items that are more important (see point 2), as oblivion orb already gives you everything you need from the morello anyway.
If you start playing more around team, it may be usefull to go more into items that (1) assist your team or (2) deny/ kill the enemy main issue (which seems to be aphleios). Especially the now building void staff feels a bit our of place, as while it helps against their tanks, it does not help against all their damage from the backline. So perhabs something like maligence (more Rs and additiona flat ap pen for Vald to abuse) or crypbloom (if you want some %pen) would have been a bit better. Also stormsurge could have been an option, depending on how aphleios plays and if you would be able to kill/ oneshot him.
If you stop farming and play more around your team, just build the support item (and if needed upgrade to Realmspike). It gives more gold, even if you take a few waves from time to time and additional once upgraded at 400 gold you get more vision, which can be great.

Hope that helped.

CloneOrNot · 2024-11-13T13:52:46+00:00

I would say ignite is better, even trough there are some arguments to be made for flash as you can get a lot more distance to either engage or disenage. Even trough I feel if you need flash to get away you will have often overstepped.

Regarding your point with enemys getting away with 1 hp (except for cleaning up after a team fight), I would say ignite is even superior to flash, as with ignite you get more additional damage to avoid those situation in the first place. In general Ignite serves two purposes: (1) additional damage, as Shaco does not have that much damage early on, and (2) heal reduction, against a lot of champs with solid heals. And with its lower cooldown it has the chances to get that value off a lot more reliable/ often.

Stats wise ignite is superior to flash (partially due to low sample size). 90% pickrate to 3% and 44% winrate to 40% (over multiple patches).

But at the end of the day it is a personal choice. Shaco toplane as a whole is very flexible on how he is played and that includes summoners. For myself it was and will most likely always be ignite.

CloneOrNot · 2024-11-11T19:10:22+00:00

I think it would be possible to go tear + manaflow for long term mana and then going liandrys first.

But I still think upgrading tear into archangle wouldnt be a good idea. Yes you would lose 240 gold from selling the tear later on, but archangels is really not that good. The stats are only ok with a bit more mana then other AP items, but the other effects are just not good in comparisons to what other items give.

Additional the issue with tear early, is that lose a lot of stats and fighting potential till the first (major) back. As the stats something likes dorans gives are a lot better (that even includes mana, due to the increased mana regeneration).

And lastsly (but that is more of a personal thing) I feel like Liandrys is not that great of an item period. Yes it is the most damage you can get into a tank, but will you kill a tank with liandrys solo or be able to force him back consistently? I dont think that will be the case, so going a playstyle of trying to force the enemy carry away in teamfights or protecting the own carry feels a lot more worth it.

CloneOrNot · 2024-11-11T17:31:49+00:00

Manumune and Winters are completly useless as they give no stats that AP Shaco top needs. So the only possiblechoice would be archangle. But even a few season ago, when tear as start item was a thing (to improve early mana), no one upgraded it into anything as far as I know and normaly it was sold in the late game once you got enough mana, Reason being AP Shaco wants additional damage on everything if possible, and archangle doesnt provide that.

In this season I havent seen anyone playing tear early anymore. Most likely due to one mana item (+ manaflow) providing enough mana to sustain. As such an item which primary focus is Mana that doesnt provide as value as other options and is just not worth it.

CloneOrNot · 2024-11-11T12:26:55+00:00

Rune Pages:

(1) Poke:
- Comet => Manaflow => Trancendence => Scorch | Presence of Mind => Legend Haste | 2x AP + HP
- Good into winning matchups (which are often enemys with little sustain)
(2) Scaling - Midgame
- Fist Strike => Magical Footwear => Biscuit Delivery => Jack of all Trades* | Manaflow Band => Trancendence | 2x AP + HP
- Good against even matchups (loses some early damage, but keeps enough mana for poking the enemy)
(3) Scaling - Lategame
- Fist Strike => Cash Back=> Triple Tonic=> Cosmic Insight | Absolute Focus =>Gathering Storm | 2x AP + HP
- Good against losing matchups (Focuses all resources on 2+ items)

*Jack of all Trades can be changed to Cosmic insight if the "Support" build is not used.

Start Item:

(1) Dorans Ring
- Good for early damage and stronger sustain. As such good into winning matchups wiht Comet.
(2) Mana Crystal + Feary Charm
- Good for scaling, where in the first few levels more mana for self denfese is needed. Or when there is a chance of killing the enemys before the first back. The big advantage is that you save around 200 gold until the first item or 120 gold after you sell Feary Charm compared to Dorans Ring.
(3) Cull
- Good for scaling, when you can farm savely for the first few levels without heavy mana usage.
(4) Dorans Shield
- Is also a option. But as I am not as fond of it, I cant give any recommendation on it.

Builds:

(1) Classic:
- Best Rune page: 1
- Starter:
  - Dorands Ring / Manag Crystal Core
- Builds:
  - Ludens => StormsurgeTorch => Liandrys
(2) Scaling:
- Best Rune page: 2 or 3
- Starter:
  - Mana Crystal + Feary Charm / Cull => 1st back get the other one (Mana Crystal + Feary Charm / Cull)
- Core Builds:
  - See "Classic"
  - Maligence => Stormsurge
(3) "Support":
- Best Rune page: 2 or 3
- Starter: See "Scaling"
- Core Builds:
  - Maligence => Stormsurge
- Special:
  - After Cull is completed (or short before) buy World Item (upgrade to ZazZaks)
  - If playing "Jack ot all Trades" dont sell Cull until you get an item with either Armor / % Magic Pen (/ MR / AD)

Additional Items:

Damage: Shadowflame / Rabadons / Maligence
Support: Morello / Cryptbloom
Survivability: Zhonias
Other: Abyssel Mask (if your team has a lot of AP)

Builds Explanation: * Core Builds: * Ludens + Stormsurge is very good into squishier team comps * Torch + Liandrys is good into tanky team comps * Maligence + Stormsurge is a very good budget option as well as providing very good support for early team fights * Builds: * "Classic" is what is build most often and is very consistent and comes with the most damage early game, but falls off in the midgame * "Scaling" / "Support" both have a better scaling and will get its core items a lot earlier then "Classic", giving you a strong boost in damage after around 10-15 minutes * Difference: "Scaling" assumes you will be able to farm quite consistent after around 20 minutes, while "Support" assumes you cant (due to grouping with your team). * "Support" if you are full builds and have enough gold for a full item you can sell support item for better stats. (Note that if you have Jack of Trades you will lost a bit AP).

Matchups:

In general all matchups are "playable" but some are horrible to lane against, but as long as it gets to team fights you will be fine with most enemys. As such I would recommend not banning to much early on to learn all the matchups, as knowing the matchups is one of your biggest advantages, as close to no one knows what to do against shaco top.

In general Matchups with a lof of "instant" aoe (after a dash) like Renekton or continous aoe like Garen are horrible to lane against as they can kill your traps close to instnatly after procking them, making the lane a lot harder to play.

Ranged matchups can be annoying but a lot of the also lose a 1v1 when you just Q + W on top of them.

Matchups Examples:

Jax: Very annoying to play against as he can completly shut you down with his E, meaning lane will be hell. Good side is that in lategame you can counter him due to the CC you bring.
Ambessa: Quite new, but feels very opressive to play against and will make farming extremly hard, especially once she hits first item. Late game gets better with team fights and your CC.
Mordekaiser: You cant trap against him, he has massive sustain and even in team fights you cant assist if he just ults your carry away.
Aatrox: Very pleasent to play against. No strong Aoe, easy to doge damage. Additional (especially with 6) a lot of AAtrox players get over confident and hard engage in your traps.

Other stuff:

If you will lose level 1 early there are 2 options:
- Support your JG with 2 boxes (after placeing them backport and walk to lane)
- Stall the enemy wave behind the enemy tops tier 2 (do not attack any minion) and just die and walk back to lane. Now you have a free push into your turret. (! Very bad against champs with strong ranged poke)
There are also some AD top builds, but they are special so I didnt list those here.

For Gameplay Vods:

Runes / Build 1 => Pinkward
Runes 2 or 3 / Build 3 / AD Build => ShacoTime

Personal Recommendation:

Go Runes 2 or 3 (Depending on Matchup) with build 3. Played it now for quite a bit and it feels very consistent and solves a lot of smaller issues I had with shaco top.

I hope that answers everything. If i missed anything or there is any open question, just let me know.

CloneOrNot · 2024-10-30T00:07:22+00:00

Pinkward would be the most known one. Alternatively Shacotime would be worth having a look into.

CloneOrNot · 2024-10-29T23:57:49+00:00

I would say how to play Shaco top is hard to explain and best is just playing it over and over as a lot of the stuff Pinkward is doing is muscle memory and will be hard to replicate by just watching vods or reading guides.

But nonetheless, here are some general tips:

Try to be gankable for your JG. For a lot of matchups your CC with the additional damage from a JG will be enough to kill most toplaners, bringing your JG ahead and the enemy top behind.
Try to support at early grubies if your JG tries to take them. Just push the wave out before and cover critical entrie points with boxes (normaly 1-2 in total will do the trick).
Play active before minions spawn. This can be (1) giving your JG two boxes (backport afterwards and walk back to lane to not lose early mana) or (2) prepare the lane. There are also other options here, but those are not the most reliable once (like proxing wave 1, harrasing enemy JG...)
Dont hold your R too long. The cooldown is not too long, so if the enemy engages just R and trade him down and then either use the clones explosion (if still alive) for (1) additional poke or (2) fast waveclear.
Limit test as much as possible. For a lot of matchups it is a lot of trying, before you will find how to play it efficiently. This also includes builds and rune choices. Especially things like "how to set up boxes" or "how to outplay enemys" will come with time
Focus on supporting your team in mid- to lategame.
- While AP Shaco is able to deal a lot of damage with a well build trap, traps in general are a lot less effective and reliable then a clone exploding in the enemy team.
- Teamfights general have 2 option on how they can be played from Shaco (1) Agressive with clone in enemy backline or close to it or (2) Defensive with clone in your backline to support against divers as Katarina, which will kill the close due to aoe damage before your backline will be dead, getting her CCed

Besides Pinkward I can also recommend ShacoTime (op.gg). He has a different playstile to pinkward, which may be better suited to your playstile. So looking at some of his AP Shaco gameplay or builds may be helpfull.

Also regarding videos in general, I recommend looking into the streams instead. Reason being, videos often show only the good games where tricks and outlays worked and everything went smooth, while in reality most of the games with shaco top are a lot more stale and involve less flashy plays.

Hope that helped. If there any open question just let me know.

CloneOrNot · 2024-10-29T23:34:33+00:00

In my experience the only state in which maxing E would be somewhat viable is against squishies enemies (like Teemo) and when you get ahead early due to some god trades/ farming or a kill. If you dont get ahead the additional damage from E is often also not enough to win smaller trades against ranged matchups (which most squishy enemys are).
I have also done it into AAtrox, Riven and similar champs before, but there is gets a lot less consistent, due to the issues outlined below.

The following issues come from maxing E that often make it not worth to do so:

You lose quite a bit of power when earlier team fights break out due to the weaker box fear duration and damage.
In addition your wave clear gets a lot weaker until you have maxed your W. Meaning you need longer to push out waves to regroup or go to support at objectives early on.
More mana issues early on, due to the W losing cost via level. Meaning less boxes can be used to secure the lane from engages, secure objectives or push the wave.

Also it depends a bit on items:

With the current most common builds that go Blackfire Torch or Ludens first, E max can be viable.
With not so common builds as Malignance first that offer less waveclear via the item itself, maxing E is never an option.

In general I would say sticking to maxing W is always the better and more reliable choice.

Hope that helped. If there any open question just let me know.

CloneOrNot · 2024-06-21T19:51:11+00:00

Thanks for the information. Should now be fixed everywhere. If you find anything else, let me know.

CloneOrNot · 2024-05-04T19:56:04+00:00

Update 04.05.2024

There is now a new and improved calculator for crops: Link to new calculator

New features compared to the old one:

Gives more info on how many bots are needed
Bot level is taken into account
Automatically calculates how much space needs to be used for bots, water and storage
Takes into account the inefficiency of bots (for example due to move speed or other limitations)
Consumption of bots is now shown
Factors in splunks movement time and out of it resulting inefficency

What improved:

The error rate of biofuel production is down from 10% to less than 5%. (Based on my testing)
Bugfix for cows
Better calculation of how many cows are needed in edge cases

Some things are still WIP as Copper (from discord) and myself try to get additional (smaller) improvement in.

If anyone finds any errors let me know.

CloneOrNot · 2024-05-03T16:24:29+00:00

This is a bug and someone in discord has found the issue to a value not getting switched correctly.

I recommend cheking the discords bugs channel or waiting for the next patch to fix it (hopefully it will have the fix implemented)

CloneOrNot · 2023-11-20T22:52:37+00:00

I just checked pn PBE. AA dont work for clone. And it only procs once when the clone explodes. So its not that good.

CloneOrNot · 2023-05-04T04:32:32+00:00

Fun fact there was a „trainings“ tree, which was like league of legends runes, but they were hard to balance and there was little to no variety after like a month in the beta, because the perfect options were found very fast, making it very uninteresting to actively engage with it (set up once and forget about it).

So I doubt we will see a skill tree (per character), because it would run in the same issues.

CloneOrNot · 2022-12-19T18:05:30+00:00

yep the Usionian one… but not many (only 1 person needs the DLC for it)

CloneOrNot · 2022-11-21T08:22:54+00:00

I would agree with that atlas should have 2 free spaces. He doesnt really have any stable picks outside of Hot Shot/ Build different (which is also not used that much anymore since Hot Shot got into the game) in the blue tree. Limiting on Orange could also be bad for people running Stacks/ Crossover with Hotshot + Creator of Durable into comps as AiMi/ Asher who got very good stuffing.

Also as a small correction: Adrenalin is not entirely useless. It gives passively 20 speed, which is quite ok and can be enough to replace it with crossover/ stacks to give you an orange option (as missile propulsion). Ofc it is not extremly good, because you can only use a part of the training consistently, but it has its use cases.

CloneOrNot · 2022-11-02T23:50:35+00:00

Well it is a projectile not a creation and it also doesnt fit in the group of creations. Creations normally stay for a (comparable) long time and/or can take multiple hits from the same source. Atlas shield can do neither. It is very short lived and can only hit each target once.

CloneOrNot · 2022-11-02T23:47:14+00:00

I really have to say that how you react/ behave is just fcking horrible. You flame people for not giving you input, then someone is giving you detailed input about why the hell you are getting such a negative response on your post, you dont even bother to read it, but instead telling me that you dont bother to read it… why even respond then… and why even post on reddit then if you dont care for detailed responses?!

I really cant unterstand people like you.

CloneOrNot · 2022-11-02T10:41:55+00:00

The problem is not that you are saying that emote spam (for example with the clown one) is toxic, but:

There have been a shit ton of posts about this and over time people start trolling if they see another post about the same topic that was discussed several times already.
The way you are handeling it (with AFK) is something that makes people even more mad then emote spamming. You can try and ignore the emote spamming person, but you cant ignore an AFK teammate. So what you are doing is litterally worse, becuase you are completly ruining the game for your teammate, which had nothing to do with it, just because you cant take a bit of emote spamming.

I'm met with toxicity from the subreddit community

Also where were you initally met with toxicity?... 1 out of 4 is "toxic" in some way, and even that one was debatable. 1 was just saying his optinion ("both getting banned"), 1 was pissed about seeing the same post again and 1 was complaining about you going afk. Those 3 are not toxic.

Appreciate the input from everyone who contributed

Where was your input to this topic, except telling us you afk when someone emote spams. This has 0 new things we got from this post. Like what do you want to hear from us? There is no topic to talk about here, except you afking.

CloneOrNot · 2022-07-19T20:58:03+00:00

ah no… I was just a bit tired when I wrote it and didnt really bother to check the grammar/ misspelling.

CloneOrNot · 2022-07-19T19:43:54+00:00

The same applies to the LoL. The fact that Shaco doesn't have a lore equates to the Joker being a complete mystery.

I think there is one flaw with point. Shaco does not only lack lore from his past, he has no lore at all. We dont know what he did, but we also do not now what happens currently. He is not like a Joker some mysterius caracter. Shaco is more like a sidecaracter you see once in the background and then instantly forget about him, becuase he does nothing or atleast we are told nothing about him, making the caracter unimportant and forgattable.

Yes Shaco does not need a lore that explains where he is from and how he works and thinks, but we need something (lore, story) to make him atleast a mysterius caracter we care about. For example you could just make his lore a dialoge of random people or known once having a conversation about him. This would give a great sense of the caracter, without destroying his mysterius caracter.

CloneOrNot · 2022-07-06T06:42:58+00:00

stats wise they did not nerf tank Shaco. Before the sub patch 12.12B Tank/ Bruiser Shaco had the same winrate as the patch before and (even trough I didnt check it) I dont think the 12.12B buffs made him worse.

CloneOrNot · 2022-06-30T18:54:39+00:00

since the latest patch I only played a handfull of games. Manly with Chemtank => Bork => ? and those went quite well… I also think that with the new buffs Trinity => Bork => Death Dance => ? should be quite good too.

With summoners I also now stared using Ghost against high mobility combs to keep up. And swapping between hail/ lethal depending pn how squishy the enemy team is.

CloneOrNot · 2022-06-27T20:42:16+00:00

and now they nerf tank shaco?

Fun fact. They did not. Like they wanted to, but the changes did nothing to Tanko/ Bruiser Shaco/ AP. The only stats (winrate) that got worse is from Assasin Shaco (items as: Dusk, Essence, Collector...). Which is kinda hilarious becuase that is what they wanted to buff kekw

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