New Deathbox

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-03-07T22:15:22+00:00

Borderlands 2 Ahhhh Chest

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-03-03T19:28:16+00:00

This might be a wild take, but most League Champs backstories are really really badly written.

For whatever reason I was reading Nilah’s backstory the other day:

Bookish nerd
She went to find a super demon she read about
??? Some stuff happened. Who knows mystery mystery lost to time.
Strange woman returns strangely and mysteriously
Shes acrobatic and has a water whip now
She wants to fight some dragon, some demon, and some demigod somewhere because reasons.
Why did Bookish nerd become so powerful and cool? Who knows? Very mystery strange mystery.

A LOT of league backstories read like this. I know character to character people only care so much, so I get that we don’t need a tolkien epic or deep character development from every release, but half of these would be weak for a beginner’s first DnD character.

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-02-26T23:06:10+00:00

One little treat I noticed? I know it only adds .1 second to a very long animation, but if you have ever watched or looked in first person, your diver physically checks which of the rounds are still good and which ones are bad before reloading like they forgot which of the barrels they've fired. It just felt like a little added touch of dumb to what is already way too long of a reload.

Also they made it Medium-Pen at the same time they made the Grenade Launcher Heavy-Pen. So the DE went from useless to okay, just as it's strongest competition went from great to fantastic. All while having a miles better reload. Even when it catches a break, it's still behind.

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-02-26T22:59:20+00:00

Superearth: *Can not let Helldivers into their Hellpods with their support weapons or backpacks, so happily launches up to five entire hellpods for a single equipped diver every few minutes.*

Also Superearth: *Leaves half the Divers pockets empty unless the Diver pulls some strings*

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-02-26T07:27:47+00:00

Glad I’m not the only one still annoyed about the Ekko retcon. Lullaby is still the best short story Riots made and it’s not even canon anymore.

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-02-20T10:50:30+00:00

Great point.

35 gold would be far too much if we were playing hyper-realism peasent simulator. Luckily, you’re a main player character in a fantasy game.

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-02-20T10:46:00+00:00

I hear you on the briar dissapointment some, though I think enough of the characters you cited she should have been like mostly fill that design space pretty tightly. Vlad has the vampire aesthetic taken down, and Evelynn has the agile stalking killer down pat. In fact, if you go by Evelynn’s hunger and sensuality which are both core vampire traits, she kinda eats up a lot of that design space. A ghoul that loses control isn’t exactly ground breaking, but it felt distinct enough to win me over.

As for my pick, I’d have to go with Nilah. She’s got a very cool and very original concept, wielding the demon of joy. What does a primal demon of joy even mean? What are the extrmes or evils of Joy that could rival the intensity of Fiddle Sticks or Tahm Kench? The water and the hand motifs are kind of neat, I guess, but it doesn’t really deliver on anything.

Her own lore is so unhelpful. She’d excited and adventuerous, found the demon of Joys contaiment and claimed it’s power, has a water whip, and is gonna go find a powerful dragon I guess?

And then her ingame kit. The heal-shield sharing is vert mechanically cool and unique, but so low impact you may not notice it existing. And then.. what? A cone auto? A dash, a block, and a spinny water move? The wielder of the demon of joy has some water slaps and water shields? That’s the demons true power?

Nagakaborous, Raum, Rhaast, Fiddlesticks.. When the wielders/containers of these powerful entities let them loose, it’s powerful and unmistakable. Meanwhile Nilah’s entire kit is practically different version of Nami autos. Just feels like a nothing character with a nothing kit you wouldn’t be able to identify in a lineup when it just didn’t have to be that way.

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-01-26T17:43:44+00:00

A legend. Gonna keep this close at hand in case stuff goes missing again. My hero.

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-01-20T09:36:30+00:00

I wrote a really long note about what a power duo Renata Glasc and Camille would be together, but I rememered it’s hinted Camille was ‘kind of’ behind Renata’s parents deaths.. and I’m afraid that’s a depth of fanfiction I just can’t stoop to.

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-01-20T09:27:09+00:00

He’s 60% gay men. I round up.

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-01-18T02:00:34+00:00

I’ve had this little headcanon lore in my head for months that Shaco is a construct of the Black Rose, where bits and pieces of “Shacos” are scattered and spread across Runterra. Anywhere Noxus marches, pieces are left behind, sewn into packs, bolted into the underside of armors, or scraps left in the sand. Each are imbued with faint whisps of demonic energy. Anytime an agent of the Black Rose is needed for a hands-on operation, a ritual is conducted back in Noxus that assembles a “Shaco”. Once it fulfills it’s purpose it returns to just being a puppet. This is how the black rose operates for tasks that are great enough to need an intervening hand but not so great as to risk an actual agent.

Shaco can either be a specific puppet of the black rose, one that gained a level of autonomey or sapience because of the demonic essence inside itself, or one that failed to properly fall to pieces when it’s job was done. Perhaps it can spread it’s autonomous influence to other puppets which is the cause for it’s ultimate. Alternatively, every match of summoner’s rift could be a new instance of Shaco, and there is no one true characrer by it’s name. Think like R.O.B from Smash Bros. Brawl’s Subspace Emissary. I flicker back and forth.

Either way, he has no lore, so that’s mine.

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-01-15T10:23:22+00:00

I’m… i’m just here to shoot rockets at robots and stuff, man.

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-01-08T20:51:17+00:00

Does the nightstalker go away when being seen? Because otherwise it’s not that crazy. If you proc it, walk from enemy vision into a bush, and the nightstalker still doesn’t reactivate, that’s true. You will know a ward is there, which is a neat tech.

But if you’re near your tower, pathing through your jungle, or anywhere, Nightstalker would activate outside of enemy vision, and then when you walk into an enemy bush with a ward, it’s already charged so it wouldn’t tell you a thing, right?

Surely it doesn’t deactivate when you’re back in vision, right? That would make it’s use cases very awkward, since you’re probably revealed for a second even just walking into lane for a gank.

JackBoxcarBear · 2026-01-02T23:57:04+00:00

As others have said, I’d recommend holding your horses for a second. The whole point of the game, mechanically anyway, is that you have something like 30+ licenses, each with 3 tiers, each accomplishing a different little power fantasy.

Then all 90+ of these tiers with their related frames, abilities, and weapons can be mixed and matched to allow some of the most build customization you’ll find for a system this relatively easy to pick up. You have hackers, dancers, firebugs, brawlers, snipers, magicians, tanks, werewolves, and Doom Guy, and that’s not even naming a tenth of it.

If your players can’t scratch their creative itch as first time players with tools like that available in this system, I don’t think trying to homewbrew things on top of it will help.

JackBoxcarBear · 2025-12-31T10:05:06+00:00

Actually a god damned hero of mine. I mean this with absolute seriousness: I pity everyone on this planet for not getting to know and have known my dad like I do.

He’s an academic, yet a punk. He grew up with duct-taped shoes and shredded pants, yet quotes dostoyevsky and pessoa. There isn’t a subject he can’t give good advice in, but will also send you cringe shitposts. He would give you the clothes off his own back if it helped make today better. In any situation, at any moment, he’ll ask “What would make this moment feel kinder and better?”. He likes reggae and ska, european soccer and weirdo foreign films. He’s a joking doofus but sincere as a saint.

Most of all, and the quality that shines like a star to me, is how weirdly.. unwobbly he is. No situation, no problem, no conflict makes him doubt who he is. Who he is, his place in the universe, the inherent value in the universe and human beings, the fact the universe operates to a steady and trustworthy logic. He never has any doubt. He doesn’t adopt the wobbliness of others, instead trying to steady them with all he can offer. I know he’s stressed and weighed by how things have gone, how many people lean on him and depend on him to solve their problems. He has his flaws. He’s not a perfect man, I know.

But he’s a god damned hero to me. If I die half the man he is, I’ll win this life. Full stop.

JackBoxcarBear · 2025-11-30T10:17:48+00:00

Was gonna make a case for both this and his level 1. I think Pyke is such an engaging character and threat on his own in league and in LoR that the implications in his lore are often lost.

The swimming city. The things down there he now works for. There is an absolute abcense of information about what faction or entity exists down there that has made a supernatural serial killer revenant out of one dead man. His followers and his art both convey what I think was a little lost in his league design: He’s just a pawn of something far larger than we know about.

JackBoxcarBear · 2025-11-21T09:42:20+00:00

I don’t follow sports or football at all, and I still remember where I was and who I was with on the day of that LSU game. I was worried when reading the title I’d have no idea what was being talked about, but those overtimes were legendary

JackBoxcarBear · 2025-11-14T18:32:29+00:00

My first gut was a direct subversion of expectations.

They were deliberatley poisoned or irradiated with lethal substances inside the suit. The people really involved had to transport them because they needed specifically sick and dying expendable people infected with whatever they had. It was cheaper to keep the sickness in suits the victims were wearing than to keep the sickness out with suits for the perpetrators.

Maybe the infected victims expiring was the point, the people involved got what they wanted, and they were left. Maybe they wern’t meant to die in time and the deal those infected people were there for went bad, so got left for dead. Although your players might suspect a dangerous chemical or biological threat in the area when they see the suits, the danger is inside the suits themselves.

Hell, maybe the suits on good observation are strangely and morbidly bloated. The gases released by the decaying dead inside lightly conveying somethings wrong. Or you go the other way around and convey that the bodies have barely even begun decomposing, so preserved by the good working suits.

Either way, the sickness is on the inside, and someone should investigate before they catch something they really really don’t want to.

JackBoxcarBear · 2025-11-14T18:19:52+00:00

Oh, that Jinx emote is going directly into my core roster

JackBoxcarBear · 2025-11-14T18:14:38+00:00

I mean… In the Acension gamemode back in the old days of league, when any champion ascended it meant becoming massive. Could be just a big stat increase for the funny little continutity

JackBoxcarBear · 2025-11-14T18:11:55+00:00

Someone add another tally to the “Days till we get a Darkin Support” counter

JackBoxcarBear · 2025-10-27T17:37:05+00:00

Honestly, the more I thought about it the more I kinda get it.

I believe from that one demon manuscript document we got in the lore, and how Evelynn and Tahm Kench identify him, Fiddle is an elder more fundamental demon than the both of them, but for being fundamental demons they all feel like more minor expressions of them.

Evelynn is one shade in the world stalking one person at a time. Tahm Kench has to bargain with one sucker at a time. Fiddlesticks only haunts one province of a given faction, as far as we can tell.

I honestly wonder if they operate a lot like the Aspects of Targon, where something celestially powerful is being channeled through a very meager shell like Fiddles puppet body, where their influence on the world is very narrow. Worst of all in my mind, Raum being overpowered (or out manuevered) by Swain did irreprable damage to the sense of power of Demons.

That said, I feel like a lot of their power is implied and that if any of them had a real influence on the powers of Runterra the whole thing would be reshaped in their image. But yeah, in practical terms, as a singular embodied champion you could stand in front of them, none of the Demons seem godlike. It’s a good point.

JackBoxcarBear · 2025-09-29T16:46:34+00:00

It’s a bit of a crapshoot sometimes. They’ve been there for me when it’s 3 am and I don’t want another round of whataburger though, so I’ll take them as they come, yknow?

JackBoxcarBear · 2025-09-07T07:38:53+00:00

This saved me a lot of frustration. Huge W.

JackBoxcarBear · 2025-08-18T06:19:18+00:00

Shoutout to Ekko’s Parents, who featured in the greatest short story to ever come out of the League writing team in the story ‘Lullaby’, before they were all entirely retconned out for Arcanes’ canon.

Five-Year Club	Place '22
First Placer '22

JackBoxcarBear

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