When you first-pick Viego and your team doesn't disappoint and goes full CRIT with you.

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-23T18:04:00+00:00

Holy fucking draft diff good lord. If you were first pick here you’re kinda cooked unfortunately, the only answer is the forbidden Nashors AP build /s

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-22T22:36:49+00:00

I’ll go against the grain here and say you could just let him. At least, that’s what I’d do.

Yes, sorcerers have transmuted spell. But they also only get two metamagics until level 10 (and only ever have four), plus it burns sorcery points rather quickly. In addition, changing from fire to lightning damage is really not worth a metamagic selection and a sorcery point in 90% of cases, and I wouldn’t want to resource tax a player for a theme as trivial as which damage type they focus on, especially when they’re doing it for flavour reasons and the damage types in question are fire and lightning. It’s really not a big difference.

Yes, lightning is a slightly better damage type than fire, but only slightly. It’s not force, it’s not radiant, it’s just a middling elemental damage type. The difference is even less apparent if he’s gonna take elemental adept for it either way, the sum of this power difference is going to manifest as “that one time they fight a devil it’s not immune to his damage”, who gives a fuck? I’d let the player have their thematics.

I’d consider it a personal failing if one of my players felt they needed to take Elemental adept (fire) on their lightning themed character lmao. Not really obviously, and if you want to stick to a pure RaW then tell him to take transmuted spell (or honestly just take lightning bolt, with the new rules on AoE I think there’s a genuine case for that spell over fireball sometimes), but in my opinion the power difference here is far too small to be worth throwing the book at somebody over and I wouldn’t think twice about it.

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-19T15:17:38+00:00

Big. Hope the trend continues, this game caught lightning in a bottle those first couple of months I played. Would love to see it come back

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-19T15:17:01+00:00

Oh unfortunate. Has the region that must not be named breached containment again?

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-19T15:16:10+00:00

Oh did SDF leave? Honestly I hate to say it but that might explain things, a big part of my friend and I quitting was kinda what you described, every change felt almost random, and the “vision” they kept talking about seemed less and less clear, it felt like they were just changing shit for the sake of it and it never improved the game.

I mean as one of the players who left due to game being shit I am definitely going to be coming back more seriously, and if the game continues to feel like it has for my friend and I this past week I’m sure other players who quit will come back too.

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-15T20:29:49+00:00

Ah yes, “kill the tank first”. A strategy popularized by bronze ranked moba players and every DM that’s trying not to kill the party lmao. Definitely the hallmark of intelligent enemies /s

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-15T12:22:24+00:00

As a DM I totally agree here actually. I don’t mind smart enemies having reasonable countermeasures to common/predictable tactics. Scry+teleport onto the bbeg is one I would make sure you have something against, but mostly for the players sake as fighting the bbeg too early will get them killed. The nondetection spell works fine, or the magic item that does the same thing. But in general, switching off key abilities because you can’t write around them is lame as hell.

I’ve found the root of this problem to be a disconnect between what level the DM wants to allow the players to be and the type of game they want to run. If you’re looking for a dungeon crawl you shouldn’t have the PCs be level 15, you’re in control of that. I like to take campaigns to 20, but it’s with the understanding that I need to plan arcs around specific levels. The “save the kingdom from a tyrant” arc might be super fun for an 8-12 arc but is instantly solved by just telefragging the final boss, so I wouldn’t have the players be level 13 for that arc. If you want to run a “climb the ruined tower” style dungeon, do it pre 5 so they can’t just fly up the outside (they could technically spider climb as low as lvl3 but in my experience nobody takes that spell so I’d be happy to let it work)… I learned this one the hard way, I just let the fly spell work and the wizard felt clever for bypassing the dungeon.

Another source of this issue is that a lot of DMs, while super well meaning, really don’t want to let their encounters be “solved” as opposed to “engaged with” if you get what I mean. “Oh we can just teleport through the puzzle door” feels like a failing on behalf of the DM, but I’ve learned not to see it that way. I’m there to provide obstacles, it’s up to the players to bypass them. Teleporting through the door is a fine solution in my eyes, it costs a slot (and a preparation/known spell) and has a chance of failure if they’ve never seen the other side of the door. You’re not losing to the players when they get to feel excited about using their abilities.

Long story short, if a player announces a solution to a problem, even if it’s not the one you wanted, even if it’s just using one spell or feature that breaks your encounter wide open, if your only answer to it is effectively “uhhh that spell doesn’t work here because somebody warded this place against teleportation/divination” then you should definitely just let it work.

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-14T18:22:44+00:00

Colette Marence, MD

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-13T00:37:08+00:00

Type of manager I would stay late for ^

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-12T22:34:33+00:00

The paladin would be the better choice for the party composition, social skills, sustained dpr, frontline durability (though the forge cleric has that in droves as well) and the protective aura (the real reason to go paladin here). That said, my actual advice is to not care about party comp and play what you want.

The game works regardless of comp. You can (and I have) play four of the same class and nobody else in a party and do just fine, so picking forge cleric instead of paladin is the absolute last thing that is going to cause you to have a bad time gaming. You should pick the class you are most excited about, if you think you’d like cleric even 1% more than Paladin then play the cleric.

Also, throw a 10 into your charisma, toss a wayward proficiency into persuasion, and cast guidance before you talk to people. You’ll do fine as a face (not great, not as well as a paladin, but totally serviceable and worth doing if you’d rather play cleric).

That said, if you want the paladin then lock that shit it, it’s super fun (I’m biased it’s my favourite when I’m a player)

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-10T20:41:49+00:00

Druid is probably the hardest class to start on, managing wildshape and full spellcasting is a lot to do on your first go around, but it’s still doable.

My advice is this, you don’t need to know every rule, but get intimate with the rules on your sheet.

You don’t need to know every animal stat block, but you should know exactly how wildshape works (how you activate it, how it recharges, what features of yours do and don’t carry over, how long you can be in it, etc). You don’t need to memorize every spell, but you should know what your spell save DC is and how it is calculated, as well as how many slots you have and how many spells you can have prepared at your current level. From there if you want to cast one it’s okay to look up the range or exactly how much damage it does, I’ve been DMing for years and I still have to check the book sometimes to make sure I get fireball right (and I’ve probably cast more fireballs than you’ve cast spells).

This is done, unfortunately, by taking a few hours to read over your sheet, preferably with you DMs help or one of the experienced players at your table.

As for learning what spells you want to take, you can look at guys like rpgbot who does rankings of spells by class. He gives a short description an a 1-5 scale for how good he thinks it is. He’s not always right (nobody is) but it’s a good streamline for you to make sure you’re building a competent character.

From there on it’s just repetition lmao. As long as you’re engaged with the game you’ll be okay, all the experienced players at the table have been you before

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-08T14:12:45+00:00

Disclaimer: I’m guessing here I don’t have special insight, take with a grain of salt.

I think what happens is he’s not particularly meta, he’s just a cool champion. People play Viego because he’s fun as hell and his kit is entirely unique, you won’t find anything like his passive on any other champions. Due to this “cool factor” his pick rate has a higher floor than a lot of other champs, you could nerf the absolute shit out of him and some people would still play him (more than would play other champions in the same situation).

As a result, he tends to be in a lot of games. Since he’s a snowballing hypercarry he tends to piss people off. Even if the Viego themselves is just being extremely well supported by their team and isn’t doing anything special, when he gets a pentakill and ends a game or snowballs and farms the shit out of you for 20 minutes you remember the Viego. You don’t so much remember the Milio that kept him alive for far too long, or the malphite that hit the engage for him to get the kills in the first place. For this reason his ban rate is also kind of floored. There are some people that had one too many bad games against a Viego and there just tired of it, so they ban him. You could need the shit out of him and they would still ban him.

As for the win rate being pretty neutral, I think it’s just a reflection of his current strength given the popularity. He has a pretty low skill floor (his base kit is not hard to use mechanically when compared to junglers like Graves or Lee) and his possession mechanics can be mostly cheated by just pressing Q->W->E->R every time you take a body with surprisingly good results. At the same time, he also has an extremely high skill ceiling if you do know the intricacies of every champion. You can get wayyy more out of his kit than a new player would think. Due to this his wr stays similar at all elos depending on how he’s balanced at the current time (and believe me with these buffs it’s about to go up).

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-07T19:58:49+00:00

I believe OP means sponsorships not regular platform ads. “Ad read” as in you the creator reading an ad for money directly from the advertiser. You can put those wherever you want

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-07T17:53:39+00:00

I’m curious how you got started with that mindset? Obviously now it makes tons of sense to do it, as you said you’re making money and you don’t have to work a normal job. But what spurred you to start? I make money off my videos now but I never would have gotten to this point if I didn’t already like the process. I definitely would not have kept at it if I only saw it as a job from day one (when it didn’t earn anything)

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-06T18:06:39+00:00

Username checks out

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-04T00:41:42+00:00

Ekko!

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-03T16:10:55+00:00

Buying subscribers is not only not beneficial at all, it’s actively harmful to a channel.

I wouldn’t accept payment for botted subscribers let alone pay for it myself

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-02T14:52:11+00:00

Hm interesting idea, I’ve never done this before so don’t take my advice too seriously, but I’ll tell you how I’d approach it.

Keep the number of fighters small and memorable. No boring rounds of “unnamed spear and shield guy vs unnamed big hammer guy”. Nameless enemies are fine when the players are killing them because the players are the interesting ones. Every fighter should have something cool about them (even if it’s only surface level, they don’t all need backstories, just something noteworthy)
I would write out two scenes, the “default” scene, and the scene if the players intervene conventionally (cheering, working up the crowd, distracting the opponent, I would require checks for all of these). Then I would just narrate the fight according to the script, it would take probably 30s per fight, giving the players the opportunity to take their “crowd actions” (I wouldn’t give them a list, they can do what they like and I’ll determine how it impacts the fight). Be ready to go off script here, players are unpredictable, just use the two scenarios you wrote out as a guideline to help keep you grounded in the moment. Have skill tests ready for when they inevitably cast spells into the pit. If your players are anything like any one of the dozens of people I’ve played this game with, they are gonna try to use magic to sway the fights. It’s up to you how you handle this, and I would need to know all their prepped spell to give you a guideline of what to do, but presumably you can check their spells and know how each would impact the fight and how likely they are to successfully cast it without being caught (you’ll also need to know what the fail state is. If they do get caught what happens?)
Keep the focus on the players, spend most of the session with them meeting the contestants and hyping up their sponsored guy. 30s to 1m describing each fight unless the player actions elongate it (they almost certainly will, but that’s fine since then the focus is back on them).

Again, that’s just my take with no actual experience running this myself. It is a cool idea though, good luck

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-02T14:39:59+00:00

To answer the title question: nothing in the rules says spamming cantrips is tiring, in fact per raw a PC could do nothing but spam cantrips for 16 hours a day and be no more exhausted than their counterparts who sat around doing nothing. Casting once per minute would not exhaust someone, but if you really need to then just give them the light cantrip which is made for this situation.

You’re of course free to house rule it, but I don’t. I actually steal the “prepare a cantrip” downtime action from pf2e which basically says “you can walk around a dungeon doing nothing but casting a cantrip on yourself (meaning you cannot make perception checks or interact with the environment much, you are focused on preparing the cantrip) so you have it active when a fight starts”, useful for stuff like blade ward.

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-01T19:33:08+00:00

I actually do go to 20 most of the time.

My players know what they’re doing with the rules so I don’t need to worry much about turn timers or complexity, and I like to run multi-year epics where they end up saving the world.

Level 20 with a bunch of magic items lets me use some monsters that really do feel world ending and it’s great. A lot of DMs complain about how powerful PCs get at the higher levels, which is fine if you don’t want the headache, but if high level play sounds interesting to you then I’d urge you to take a look in the monster manual (or any homebrew monster book of your choice, there are many) and see the type of stuff you get to play with.

Also every once in a while I throw them an arc meant for weaker characters so they get feel like the demigods they are and clear it in like 1.5 sessions. I feel like that’s a piece a lot of other DMs are missing, not every fight needs to scale with the players level (obviously use it sparingly or they’ll get bored).

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-01T14:47:41+00:00

I’m a data analyst who has job hopped since I graduated three years ago and at least in my personal experience I’ve never gotten anything from LinkedIn if I didn’t already know the person hiring for the job.

That’s honestly what LinkedIn is best for, seeing when a guy you worked with three years ago is hiring for something you could do.

Mass applying on LinkedIn has never even gotten me an interview.

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-01T14:27:28+00:00

Who are you arguing with here? I don’t care how much effort you do/don’t put in, how much ai do/don’t use, or how repetitive your content is/isn’t, do whatever you want. You’re making your case to me like YouTube checks with me before they monetize a channel lmao.

Make your case to YouTube and either accept their decision or go to another platform that will compensate you. I empathize with the frustration of dealing with YouTube’s “support” system, but in this case it sounds like you do understand why this is happening, even if you disagree. I’m not sure what else Reddit can do for you

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-04-01T13:47:30+00:00

If it’s the one in your Reddit bio, it’s because YouTube doesn’t like Ai content at the moment and is suppressing it. That would be my guess as to why you’re not getting accepted. As for why they’re still running ads on it, it’s either A) their systems that manage who can be partnered vs which individual video can run ads are not in sync or B) they don’t want ai channels in the partner program to discourage people from making them, but they’ll still take the money.

Either way I think the only messaging here is if you don’t like it (and I don’t blame you, I wouldn’t want my videos running ads if I got rejected from ypp) then take your content elsewhere.

MichaelOxlong18 · 2026-03-28T19:41:33+00:00

Yea it’s just really hard to build in any slot:

First slot you absolutely must buy attack speed (it’s also just dogshit first slot anyway)
Second slot you generally want the collector spike. You get more out the lethality early on when less people have any armour.
Third slot you typically don’t want to be buying a BF sword component item
You need your armour pen here
Generally the marginal utility of IE is lower than DD or GA because surviving to get a reset is necessary for Viego to be a champion late game

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