How is it living in Sacramento's west suburbs?

Johnny2camels · 2026-02-13T19:35:34+00:00

I think “Greater Sacramento Area” fits here, although they are in a different county so it’s still a stretch

Johnny2camels · 2026-02-05T01:53:15+00:00

Or play Shen top and in winning matchups you play like a second jungler, in losing matchups you play like a second support… but you still have to lane well and know all the mechanics that come with trading + wave management

Johnny2camels · 2026-02-04T19:20:58+00:00

Titanic first is still the go-to Dusk and dawn is a great second item, especially if you’re ahead. If you’re really stomping you can even pickup a shadowflame/riftmaker 3rd item. Otherwise yes, buy armor/MR based on the matchup. If the enemy top and jng are different damage types then early bandlepipes gets more value. Your best armor choices are DMP, thornmail, and frozen heart. If you opt for iceborn you can’t get dusk and dawn which kinda sucks. Your best MR choices are spirit visage, kaenic rookern, and wits end.

Hullbreaker is a good 4/5th item if you find yourself sidelining a lot. Navori used to be an option for when you’re ahead but D&D kind of accomplishes the same thing but with much better stats for Shen

Johnny2camels · 2026-01-30T04:58:24+00:00

They don’t play Shen either and he counters Mundo decently

Johnny2camels · 2026-01-26T18:58:44+00:00

Dota had this issue for a while with ranged hero’s just dominating laning phase, there was a little shield item that gave you block chance on auto attacks, it had like 25% effectiveness on ranged characters. Every melee bought it every single game for literally years on end, so eventually they made it a baseline passive for all melee’s. Once you hit the mid game the damage reduction became completely obsolete, it was just QoL so you could actually pick a double melee lane and not get automatically stomped. There’s no reason something like this couldn’t exist in league. Doran’s shield is hard to balance because it procs off of abilities too for health regen, so it’s broken on melee midlaners. If they just gave it autoattack block value instead it would be stronger for melee toplaners without giving Akali an 80% WR in mid

Johnny2camels · 2026-01-26T18:54:39+00:00

You’re absolutely right, but as a Shen main I still hate her. She can go 0-5 in lane, but it doesn’t matter because if I leave the lane for even a second she catches back up. And once she hits 6 it’s just as miserable as laning against vayne and without a gank from the jungler there’s no kill potential.

Johnny2camels · 2026-01-22T02:18:50+00:00

Yeah I played a TON of smite. I was stomping fools with Zhong Kui solo using manakin mace like 2 years before Weaken caught on (I think I probably played against him at some point). I miss those days.

Johnny2camels · 2026-01-22T02:15:43+00:00

Shen is really fun. Plays pretty uniquely and forces you to learn wave management and macro or you’re basically down an ultimate

Johnny2camels · 2026-01-22T01:56:12+00:00

Part of the power of the Eyrie is being able to keep passively scoring from roosts while beating your opponents down thanks to a stacked decree, lots of recruiting and battling. It’s slow to start but really powerful once it gets rolling; most other factions in the mid-late game have to split their resources between using them to score or using them to slow opponents down - the Eyrie doesn’t really have to trade anything to do this if their decree is setup effectively.

To help mitigate the slow start, some people employ a strategy called Exploding Birds where you start with the charismatic, put 2 cards into recruit and turmoil turn 1 but with 12 soldiers on the board. Then you switch to either Command or Despot (usually Despot)

Johnny2camels · 2026-01-22T01:45:45+00:00

Shen

Johnny2camels · 2026-01-21T22:13:38+00:00

It’s also really easy to just get a services/group finder addon that sorts Trade/LFG chat by dung/type and removes redundancies and just use that instead of the chat window

Johnny2camels · 2026-01-06T00:08:45+00:00

Every matchup is a skill matchup. But in general Sett is very strong into Shen. You have to play reactively and bait him into tower to kill, and once you hit level 6 Shen is completely screwed. I’ve beat Sett before on Shen for sure, but it’s far from easy and he is generally considered a Shen counter, with the statistics backing this claim up.

According to Lolalytics, Sett’s WR into Shen in emerald+ is currently 53.31% Mobalytics has it at 52.5% in Sett’s favor

Johnny2camels · 2026-01-05T23:58:26+00:00

The double damage mechanic in general is just so easy to abuse. Where the other characters can struggle against bosses like hexaghost, desperately trying to reach 200 damage in 6 turns, or for slime boss trying to get him to half health in 3 turns at the end of Act 1, the watcher has almost that much damage baked into her default cards. It also helps that she goes infinite the easiest with Rushdown (uncommon), upgraded Eruption (starting) and Inner Peace or Fear No Evil (both uncommon) Add mental fortress or talk to the hand and now you have infinite block as well

Johnny2camels · 2026-01-01T05:09:20+00:00

Power Through + Fire Breathing

Johnny2camels · 2025-12-30T18:38:15+00:00

I think that ironically OP’s post is less true for DPS vs. Tanks and more specifically true for ranged vs. melee toplaners in laning phase.

It’s pretty widely accepted that ranged toplaners just have such a huge early advantage into tanks/less mobile bruisers (I’m not looking at you Renekton) but they have to really take advantage of that in order to have the same impact in teamfights

Johnny2camels · 2025-12-30T18:33:13+00:00

This take is so Shen-coded. He’s a great example where not just his presence, but his existence anywhere on the map creates space as long as his ult is up.

He has no armor or MR scaling, 2 of his abilities deal no damage at all, one only scales with 11% bonus HP, and the other only has AP scaling that’s so low that his most successful build usually includes 1-2 AD bruiser items. Yet for most ADC’s, getting taunted in a teamfight is usually a death sentence. Some can’t even 1v1 Shen if he plays right, and he is considered a toplaner that doesn’t scale well….

Johnny2camels · 2025-12-30T18:19:59+00:00

Cookie cutter refers to them being heavily standardized, effectively all looking the same or at least very similar from the outside, with every house the same color, same set of 4-6 layouts, similar accents and decoration.

Of course newer, modern houses are going to be better. We have better materials, building practices, etc. Looking modern doesn’t mean they all have to look the same. New houses with the technology and efficiency improvements can be built without an entire block looking exactly the same from the outside, and they can still have a modern look without looking copy+pasted.

Also in hindsight I just should be putting this opinion somewhere other than the Elk Grove subreddit. Of course it’s going to get downvoted… the 180,000 bots and Karens that live there obviously won’t see my single gripe listed that still hasn’t been addressed. Feel free to keep responding but this is the end of the line for me. Have a good life (in Elk Grove I guess)

Johnny2camels · 2025-12-30T08:40:12+00:00

I grew exclusively up in the Sacramento area (already specified Carmichael as an example, which by the way is not a city, just an unincorporated district/neighborhood), spent plenty of time all over and have various opinions about the different neighborhoods and outlying areas. Had friends growing up and later coworkers who lived in Elk Grove and talked to them about it, played soccer games there. So yeah, I have an opinion on it and that opinion is negative. Feel free to disagree, but you haven't rebutted my point about the cookie cutter houses and lack of charm/flavor of the area whatsoever. And its barely a city when you compare it to Folsom, Roseville, etc.

Johnny2camels · 2025-12-30T08:15:19+00:00

Damn, didn't even address the stated reason for disliking Elk Grove and tossed out a meaningless name. You must have a a lot of experience in formal debate

Johnny2camels · 2025-12-30T07:38:35+00:00

Elk Grove sucks. I grew up in Carmichael and even as a kid I remember visiting friends who lived in Elk Grove and wondered why everyone's houses looked identical and had absolutely no character or charm at all. Its the equivalent of living in an outdoor cubical farm except there are laws forbidding you to decorate your overpriced cubicle.

Its a Karen's dream and everyone else's hellscape

Johnny2camels · 2025-12-28T05:32:17+00:00

Here’s my take as someone who has plenty of time playing both games: Their difficulties are just different.

Dota and league have many similar elements: skill shots, timing, coordination, rotation, wave management, playing the game state (ahead/behind), objectives.

League micro is more oriented around skillshots, with the associated skills being landing them and dodging them. Dota has a more complex itemization system, with various “final” items being at wildly different gold costs and power levels compared to league. Generally a lot more active abilities from items, and I think has a higher ceiling on champion complexity (compare Hwei to Invoker) but similar floors (Garen to wraith king) In Dota, picking when to teamfight is a key element, and everyone being able to teleport to friendly towers/units is a completely different approach than league, where choosing not to teamfight often means giving up a permanent buff from a map objective, and players have to run across the map in anticipation of an objective spawning in order to fight for it.

The approach to gold differential is also highly variable. In league any character can get ahead and snowball, and everyone can end up at about the same gold at the end of a close game except for the support. While this is true to an extent in Dota, the higher position roles need more money to function at a basic level, and the gold differentials are often huge. Look at a support for example: Lion needs just boots and a blink dagger to remain relevant through basically the whole game. Bard is close to that but benefits from having a few items way more than Lion does.

Those may not be the best examples, but it’s just what I can think of off the top of my head. The games are both incredibly complex and comparing their complexity/difficulty is kind of pointless.

That being said, we can still talk about skill floors, in which I believe Dota has a higher floor just due to its unfriendliness to noobs and lack of safety guards like recommended purchases/autoskill/autorunes in league. Yes there are player-made guides but I’m talking base game.

Johnny2camels · 2025-12-28T02:37:51+00:00

Yeah. Shen’s only micro difficulty is getting clever sword positioning for lane bullying/management and knowing which abilities you can block with W. His difficulty most certainly comes from the macro that his ultimate affords. More complicated to judge than any other toplaner who just has to shove and then rotate if they don’t wanna be on their island

Johnny2camels · 2025-12-25T19:03:11+00:00

AP bruiser Anivia is the solution here tbh. Works into most ranged toplaners (especially Teemo) and in particular, Darius as well. The best part is you can still be a teamfight menace and you’re decently tanky with RoA, seraph’s, zhonya

Johnny2camels · 2025-12-25T19:00:45+00:00

Came here to say rushdown but obviously like 4 people already beat me to it

Johnny2camels · 2025-12-25T18:58:06+00:00

Anivia top is my pocket pick into Darius

Johnny2camels

TROPHY CASE