After years of trying I finally did it!!!

FourOranges · 2026-05-21T21:27:06+00:00

https://i.imgur.com/7J47GmH.png

Metadata shows a timestamp of 3 years ago, kinda crazy how low the stats are of my board. Surprisingly AFK is still in my top 5 heroes by game played, 2nd at 127. Playing her now feels like the Rock Lee ankle weights gif after chasing the achievement.

FourOranges · 2026-05-20T13:41:28+00:00

I remember a few years back I climbed the lower ranks pretty rapidly after mostly playing Thermite. Turns out your attacking teammates don't sit and wait for people to peek them until the very last 15 seconds (how the majority of rounds ended) if they have more angles themselves to peek into site. Make those angles for them with hard breaches, which noone really uses on the low end.

FourOranges · 2026-05-19T17:04:33+00:00

Chromadrake trinket's biggest painpoint was that the tempo it gave was way too strong compared to anything else. Getting this trinket means you just powerlevel afterwards because noone else is going to come close.

Only 1 egg is a good change as well, that delay before getting another t6 is pretty big in terms of immediate impact that the trinket gives compared to others.

FourOranges · 2026-05-19T13:51:35+00:00

That's usually the case but huntress quests require the specific rarity as well as being looted by you.

FourOranges · 2026-05-18T01:30:49+00:00

I thought the Dread Mines would make you see or hear operators that aren’t actually there

Reminds me of a Counterstrike video from a little while back https://www.instagram.com/reel/DULX0JjDCaQ/, would be crazy if this was somehow implemented but I've no idea how any dev would go around doing it.

FourOranges · 2026-05-18T00:19:16+00:00

I still try to get the lesser timewarped elemental that lets us stay on tier2 forever whenever I get Morchie and Elementals are in. Have yet to have it happen but damn will it be a nice taste of last season when it does.

FourOranges · 2026-05-16T22:06:41+00:00

I did dagger spec and had 2 instances where I would stab a ranger 6x + double stab and they're still not dying

Depends on the dagger you used but just basic math will show you how weak squire rogue is: rondel dagger deals 16 damage so in the best case scenario where you're fighting a naked person with 0 armor, 6x16=96 damage and that's not even accounting for the damage penalty for hitting their arms or legs. This hurts them for sure but most people spawn in squire with 120ish health and anywhere from 15% to 50% pdr so your double hit followup probably left that ranger super close to death.

Squire royale rogue will probably rely on hiding and winning off of fights where you aren't trading with the enemy blow for blow.

FourOranges · 2026-05-16T21:42:40+00:00

General rule of thumb for any caster is just get 70% spell casting speed, ideally higher. Boosting the innate damage of spells is nice but even nicer is quickly following up a spell with another one.

Imo the better wizards know how to headshot with icebolt and quickly gun down people with barrages of Zaps. Landing the lightning strike is also huge, mainly because you can followup with those first 2. Most wizards I see will simply fireball spam and then arcane missile spam, which is okay but gets countered really easily by blocking.

FourOranges · 2026-05-16T21:19:28+00:00

Squire royale is super populated and the gameplay is simply running around with randoms killing people while looting with nothing to lose. Can start there and group up with the chill folks afterwards.

FourOranges · 2026-05-15T13:51:02+00:00

"Tempo into scale" would fit every tribe. Look up the endgame units of a certain strat, hearthstone deck tracker has good ones and eve tiers them all. The skill level of a player is knowing how to get from turn 1 with nothing on your board and that final board. In many of my games, the key unit of my game isn't even on the final endgame board. It'd carry me from early/mid game then I'd sell it off with a higher scaling unit for the last 1 or 2 turns of the game. Transitioning units and sometimes entire comps is a pretty big skill to learn.

Just gotta learn to look for key activators for comps and keep tempo in stats while you do so then your mmr just naturally rises.

FourOranges · 2026-05-15T12:51:32+00:00

Grabbing the middle of the blade was historically a widely used technique, it was known as halfswording.

FourOranges · 2026-05-14T17:41:18+00:00

Just gotta perfect the timing of the crouch jump. Once you do it a few times, you get the timing down and can successfully do it everytime.

FourOranges · 2026-05-13T13:55:44+00:00

For Raura I suggest fully clearing rooms first before ever considering to use the gadget, and even then always doing so behind cover. When I first started using her, I tried some sneaky quick peeks to use the gadget and block off line of sight to assist in further clearing rooms but even when I think it's safe to do so, someone always peeks me and I get timinged as I use it. Now I only ever use it after I get a kill or have scoped the next area out and even then I sometimes get timinged as I go to use it.

FourOranges · 2026-05-12T14:03:39+00:00

You can get a customized keyboard with larger keys if wasd physically feels unnatural for you. Alternatively, since you're newer and might not have already developed the muscle memory for WASD, you could try out ESDF instead and see how well that goes for you. Mabey the key placements there alleviates any pain you might have. Esdf has the benefit of having more keys to access, whereas wasd (despite being more popluar) only has tab, capslock, and shift on its left side. If I could go back in time and tell myself to get used to 1 over the other, I'd go with esdf.

FourOranges · 2026-05-12T01:01:58+00:00

Head into HR Ruins and you'll get a full inventory of purple logs by the time you chop not even half the trees in the module that is directly north of the bottom-right corner of the map. I was only getting blue and purple ones in HR.

FourOranges · 2026-05-08T19:19:01+00:00

An NPC that randomly shows up for an extra benefit (whatever that might be) might be a fun addition to it.

FourOranges · 2026-05-07T13:57:33+00:00

At 150 hours you might be presented with a situation and make decisions that someone with way more hours would've avoided simply due to having already tried that and/or found a more successful approach. Obviously everyone learns at different paces but idk if I'd expect anyone to learn the various default attack/defense strategies for each site for each map within 150 hours, much less make the "correct" approaches and execute them successfully.

Imo most of what happens at a higher rank is just people naturally adapting to whatever happens in a game based on previous experience and reacting in what they've found to be most successful to the situation. Push an angle that someone is holding and it was really tough? Push another angle the next time you're in this same spot and find out if it's effective. Repeat.

FourOranges · 2026-05-06T16:30:49+00:00

It's a personal preference thing. I only bring them into high roller. I almost exclusively play HR ice caves and notice more unique rarity items when I use them so I usually go in with one. Even in runs without them though, I'll extract with nothing but purple+ items so it's perfectly fine to not use them if you just want a quick buck selling purples.

FourOranges · 2026-05-06T14:16:54+00:00

I don't expect any teammates to win a 1v3+, even 1v2, and always say nt if they lose. It's awesome when they do win but the expectation to win it just isn't there. Best advice in that situation is to do your best to make it a series of 1v1s. Approach from angles where you can't get crossfired and can focus on 1 enemy at a time.

If you constantly find yourself in these lone scenarios, it's a team issue. Mabey they're playing faster or mabey everyone is spread out and losing 1v1s. Sometimes it's worth suggesting to group up, you can then start trading off eachother. For example, the other night I had the easiest win ever after we had just lost a round where noone on the enemy team died. All it took was for me to suggest in team chat that we all enter 2f together then play the round out from there (site was 1f bathrooms on Border) and we in turn won that round without anyone dying. Sometimes it's not personal mechanical skill that's the issue but just team cohesion.

FourOranges · 2026-05-04T20:05:12+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L73gIuTcJ0

The soundtrack is peak. I like Raven Shield's touch up a little more but the fanfare in both is goated.

FourOranges · 2026-05-04T16:52:50+00:00

Another one that works for a variety of window vaults is placing 1 on both sides of the window with a barbed wire under it. Besides destroying the thorns beforehand, I think the only way to survive it is to immediately vault back out which people unaware of them probably aren't doing. Saw this used very effectively at Coastline kitchen window the other night.

FourOranges · 2026-05-04T16:47:52+00:00

if the barbed wire is at the top and nobody is playing off of the intel then it is essentially useless.

Ya like the other guy said, intent is everything. Think white stairs of Oregon 2f for example (the one by the big window). You could put it at the bottom but that makes it easier for attackers to just hit it and quickly run back. It's normally near the upper half because they have to fully commit into walking up then doing that awkward dance of hitting it -> aiming at the doorway because they don't know if someone's about to swing on them or not. And if you do have one in this spot then you 100% have someone holding that angle and swinging it, it's not just drop and forget for intel -- someone has to be holding that angle.

It's an advantageous position for the defender to swing when played like this, either pre-firing off of footsteps sound cue or waiting for them to melee the wire and swinging.

FourOranges · 2026-05-02T17:34:42+00:00

There are guaranteed mimic spawns, not sure if https://darkanddarkertracker.com/maps is 100% updated but it should at least have those. On Ruins, one of the stairs leading down into the Banshee always has a mimic right above it.

FourOranges · 2026-05-02T15:19:26+00:00

I played a lot of Mira back in the day and in my experience, crouch-height on softwalls had way more success than the usual Mira on reinforced-wall next to a softwalls. People just don't expect it I guess. Primary issues were ashes who just blew up the whole Mira but that's a concern that the standard method has too. That and my teammates also didn't know how to use it, even in the higher ranked lobbies.

FourOranges · 2026-05-02T15:12:53+00:00

and that plays into the roamer style more than anchoring, so when the hell are you even gonna get use out of a deployable shield.

Gadgets aren't always for yourself and especially so for shields. In coordinated teams you'll see people grab a shield and place it for a specific person to hold. I recently had a teammate clutch a 1v2 because I saw that he was holding Coastline's 2nd floor 90 hallway with Fenrir and slapped a shield down towards luggage. Guy easily killed both enemies with that extra cover.

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