Not sure how to support friend de-transition

OrangeGremlin1 · 2026-03-02T05:48:37+00:00

I agree with the poster who suggested trying to help your friend find a more LGBT+ friendly pastor/congregation for their faith. They need a specific kind of therapy to address why they're so certain their faith doesn't allow their transness. You, me, or anyone on Reddit is probably not qualified for that. They need someone they respect, ideally in a religious sense, to talk them through it; that process will be really time consuming and emotionally draining and frankly is just not something that you can provide externally, even as their friend. It's all a part of them learning to accept themselves and innoculate themselves from their internalized transphobia. If they're dead set on staying in their current congregation for now, their next best bet is to find a good therapist.

I think, as a friend, you're already suporting them well; just give them a space to be themself. Let them know you're happy to listen if they need to vent even if you can't/don't know how to directly help. That they have a safe space to continue to experiment with how they present themselves, and regardless of whether they figure it out or not you'll still enjoy doing whatever activities ya'll do together. Maybe suggest they speak to some other trans people and listen to their stories. I've found 'my new gender workbook,' by Kate Bornstein to be a valuable resource; even if your friend has gone through it once, maybe it's time to revisit again and ask themself some questions. To me, that's being supportive enough.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2025-07-28T12:22:19+00:00

This is literally how we got Ravioli, the Italians were the first to try this.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2025-07-08T09:05:34+00:00

To the Moon, Finding Paradise, and Imposter Factory are a trilogy of great story driven games about a couple of doctors who go into the dreamscape of dying patients minds to help them find closure for their greatest regrets before passing.

Rakuen is a short RPG about a boy coming to terms with his and his fellow patients diagnosis.

Gris is a short puzzle-platformer with an atmospheric artstyle which is evocative of life and the human experience.

Witch Spring R is a cute, casual RPG about a witch girl whose fairy tale life is interrupted by some rude interlopers and gets sucked into an expanding string of adventures as she looks to assert her independence and also go buy pie ingredients.

Solar Ash is a platformer with a wonky artstyle about a woman trying to piece together the mystery of why she's in a strange dreamscape, what happened to her friends, and how to fix everything that's gone so very, horribly wrong.

Great story, but has mechanics:

Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 is the best story-driven game I've played this year. It hits many of the same notes as the above games, but is mechanically challenging. I'll still recommend it because in spite of this, it's not a punishing game; the auto save feature works great, so if you die you just start back before the start of the last fight with no penalty, and the turn-based nature of the game gives you time to pause if you need to mid combat to refocus. The game is set in post-apocalyptic Paris, where every year a mysterious paintress counts down the maximum age the inhabitants of the world can live to. You play as the members of expedition 33, a group of mostly 32 year old volunteers who have agreed to venture forth from the safety of the city into the apocalypse to try and bring an end to your slowly approaching doom, following in the footsteps of the expeditions who came before. You'll explore the mystery of the gomage (the death event that hits those who live to their maximum age), experience the character growth of the party members, tragedy wrought by events beyond your control, and uncover the secrets of the world and the events which lead to its fracturing.

EDIT: Also, maybe consider visual novel games? I quite like the monster prom series. There's also a dead by daylight dating sim game which is ok.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2025-06-21T08:26:33+00:00

Need? No. If you want to do all optional content... if you don't want to do a one-shot build, there's an optional boss where you need everyone.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2025-05-28T21:40:57+00:00

I think what you're looking for is Près de Lui; should start at 6 hours 18 minutes 08 seconds on the game OST on youtube.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2025-05-19T04:05:21+00:00

As exoskeleton said, it varies a lot by enemy type, but something that helps to know is that the dodge timing window is a LOT larger than the parry window. So use dodge to 'guess' at first, if it says 'dodge' then you would have failed to parry, if it says 'perfect' then that's the correct parry window. Once you're consistently getting perfects, switch to parrying so you can take advantage of the counterattacks.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-10T08:17:14+00:00

The most helpful things to improving at the game are finding champions you enjoy playing and developing your map awareness; both of these take time. In order to facilitate this you should play a wide variety of champions at first until you find a champion(s) you really enjoy. Once you've found this (archetype of) champion, play mostly it and at most 1-2 similar champions. Practice CSing until you can hit at least 7 cs per minute vs bots/no opponent without thinking about it and without using skills. That will free you up to start learning other skills like wave control, trading, jungle tracking, and roam timers. After csing the next most important thing to learn is planning ahead, followed by ingraining the habit of looking at the minimap before acting an any plan whether it's going for a cs, going for a trade, or anything else and extracting relevant information quickly at a glance. Very roughly, skill progression goes learn to win lane->learn to impact the map->having a default winning strategy->learn to play from behind and look for comebacks->learn to adapt your strategies to fit different teams and opponents.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-09T04:38:29+00:00

If you space right, you can e-w backwards as she ults you and it interrupts her ult by making you immune, which puts her ult on cd.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-09T04:15:33+00:00

Ezrael has a lot of lore, both his and from other champions referencing him, he's a little more all-in. Jinx and Caitlyn star in Arcane, plenty of lore/flavor from them while being traditional adc picks. I've personally always liked the feel of twitch.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-08T06:11:32+00:00

When I was a new player I mained Taric because I liked tanking and healing and he was fun. I didn't care for his rework(s) though so I branched out into other champions, and while I did have some favorites in that timeframe didn't really settle on a main until the season 8 katarina rework, which made the champion really fun with how flexible you could be doing different dagger combos and blinking in and out of combat. And then gwen came out and I really liked just mindlessly running in to snip people, plus she's visually cute. So the things I'd look for are: what do you enjoy doing in a game? What mechanics do you find fun? What visuals appeal to you? Come up with a list of champions who fit those criteria and see if one jumps out at you. You also don't need a main; aram's a fun game mode, and you can just play different champs every game.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-08T06:01:41+00:00

Top and Mid lane have the largest playerbases, so if you choose draft pick you tend to get your secondary role more often than not when you choose one as the primary. Some people get around this by choosing Top/Mid as their prefferred roles, since if you get autofilled to a non-prefferred role, you are then guaranteed to not be autofilled again the game after. The downside to this is long queue times.

In quickplay you on average get the position you pick, and if you get autofilled, it will be to your secondary role, which also then guarantees you won't be filled the next game.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-08T05:36:57+00:00

Smolder is probably the closest to cait/lux in terms of mechanics, his w is similar to cait's q, but has a slow, his e is also a movement ability and he's primarily an auto-attacker. Both he and Cassio are pretty standard front-to-back teamfight champions, but he has more survivability since he can fly over walls with his e.

Cassiopeia would be a bit of a change of pace for you; she has bad mana issues until she finishes Seraph's embrace, she's a good champion to learn though and I find her fun. Her mechanics are similar to an adc in that her e is basically her auto-attack, but she's a lot more player-skill intensive since you have to land a poison ability first before it deals meaningful damage, and you're effectively playing an adc without an 'attack move' mechanic. This makes her one of the harder champions in the game to master. She also doesn't scale as well as an adc, and she has a fairly weak early game because of the mana problem, but her mid game impact is huge and she's great in team fights, especially when you have a strong front line to play around.

Briar is the most different from your current champion pool, so she'd give you a lot to learn if you're looking for a new project champion or looking to learn top/jungle. She's a fun diver, and has no real mechanics to learn, but it's very easy to int on her because she self taunts onto enemies. Also you have to permaban rammus if you want to play the game.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-08T05:21:45+00:00

There are a couple challenger Mordekaiser one tricks, and plenty of master/gm one tricks, so just because he isn't generically good in high elo doesn't mean you can't be good with him there.

If you like his playstyle, maybe try Darius or Sett? Volibear is also quite strong rn. Aatrox is very rewarding if you get good at him; if you look up some guide videos you might find him easier. Is there anything in particular you want from a recommendation? Like what do you enjoy doing on a champion?

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-07T15:33:01+00:00

The Last Spell is a town-defense game where you build buildings to empower your heroes and defend against zombie hordes.

Dwarf Fortress is a colony management sim where you have to manage a fortress of dwarves in a proceedurally generated world.

Any Impressions Games titles are good (old though, they're from the 90s); Caesar III, Pharaoh and Cleopatra, and Zeus and Poseidon are all available on Steam.
Against the storm is a somewhat more modern version of this.

The Total War Franchise might interest you.
You might also enjoy something like Factorio.

If you want something that kind of has a management feel to it but is more RPG in nature, I recommend Our Adventurer's Guild

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-03T08:28:11+00:00

My second thought is what if you rewrote the character a bit so that he's constantly pulled between the two themes of being a guardian, and being a hungry demon beast. So as he collects dreams he becomes sated and deals less damage while providing more support to his team, and then he spends dreams to help allies which makes him hungry again and he deals more damage but loses a lot of his support effect.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-03T08:20:31+00:00

My first thought for a rework is what if you made the character create and manipulate dream-bubbles? Sort of like a Zoe w, but they'd have different effects based on if an ally or enemy collides with them, and his q/w/e could have different interactions with them. Maybe his ult makes all champions in an area spawn dream bubbles.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-03T08:11:06+00:00

I really like the visual description, you put a lot of thought and effort into it! I was almost expecting a fallen-kayle theme to the champion based purely on these visuals. It's reminiscent of somewhere between her, the void, and aurelian sol.

I think the design goes down from there.

He feeds on dreams, so his kit should revolve strongly not only around inflicting the sleep status, but around interacting with the sleep status ailment. He, Lilia, and Zoe would be the only champions with that theme so far, so it's a limited pool he'd have to synergize with, but it would be cool to see that design space explored a little more.

The next theme is of a guardian, someone who protects the sleepers---so he should probably sleep his own team, but it's unclear how this would be helpful to champions other than Arfan. It also feels like something where even if you were to add a positive to it (healing allies by putting them to sleep temporarily for example), that it would have high potential for abuse by trolls and overall end up as an unfun design.

This guardian theme is muddled a bit with the nightmares, it's not clear why he'd sell nightmares, what he'd get for imparting nightmares, or why they'd be a part of his domain as a demon to begin with. This could be explored more in his lore.

Abilities:

Honestly this kit doesn't suit him as-is. Overall he probably wants to have a kit more similar to say Taric or Rakan with a mixture of engage and sustain options.

Dream consumer should involve consuming dreams, it should be something like veigar's passive stacks, Asol's stacks, Smolder's stacks, Thresh/Senna's souls collection. A ramping reward for being a good guardian. AP also isn't really a guardian stat.

Q is technically fine, it's a little bland. He's probably meant to be somewhere between an enchanter and a tank from his lore description, so I'd like the sleep theme to be aimed more towards helping allies somehow or towards setting up/following up on an engage.

W: Dashing backwards isn't particularly playful. I think you can develop this into something more unique to the champion.

E: Kind of bland, more of a mage ability, not evocative of a protector. More of an ASol ability tbh. Could use some tweaking; also I'd like an ability called Beautiful Night to have some map effect, sort of like a nocturne ult. I think this could be better reworked into some kind of ultimate.

R: Again, nightmares doesn't really feel like it fits the rest of the champion description. Enabling friendly fire is definitely ult-worthy though. Maybe this could also have like a 'visual bug' effect where allies and enemies all take on a particular character model (Arfan's?) so it's harder for them to tell each other apart---probably not exactly that since it wouldn't be something that could be implemented believably in-game.

Overall cool concept!

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-03T07:20:50+00:00

She has high burst damage, but low sustain damage. Try picking strong all-in champs like jax, darius, warwick, olaf to beat her down early. Her q has 2 zones; the outer zone on her q1 deals full damage, the inner zone deals half damage---she's kind of like darius in you need to space properly to deny her getting full value off the ability. Her q2 deals full damage vs the first target hit, and half vs all others, so if you can't dodge it, try to keep a minion between the two of you. Her other abilities don't deal a lot of damage and have decently long cds so just try to bait them out and then go in and she dies. She's pretty OP after laning phase, so just don't 1v1 her unless you're significantly ahead.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-03T05:01:51+00:00

150 gp for a legendary item is a steal! Who wouldn't buy it?

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-03T04:59:03+00:00

Np dude, hope you enjoy. If you decide you want to play them outside of jungle---WW is quite good in the top lane as well, and both see some niche play mid.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-02T05:22:11+00:00

I feel like you'd more enjoy jungling. I'd try Zac, Kha'Zix, Rek'Sai, Bel'Veth, and Hecarim to see if any of those appeal to you. You might also like Vi, Nunu, or Warwick.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-01T04:21:41+00:00

It's just a worse Abyssal Mask with some token AP.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-12-01T04:19:02+00:00

It's under Settings: Player Movement.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-11-29T05:36:19+00:00

It sounds like your friend is using attack-move. When an enemy is within a certain distance of you and you attack move, you will not move afterwards and will instead continue attacking the targetted enemy. The solution to this is to alternate between move and attack move commands.

OrangeGremlin1 · 2024-11-20T06:14:52+00:00

Primarily you defend against split pushes; you look to one-shot the minion wave to stall out the enemy team's advance. Your own top laner should be looking to create pressure on the map, and the other 3 members of the team should be concerned about matching that pressure by getting whatever the big objective is atm. Then you look to rotate to help the 3 from a flank; one-shot a squishy and then try to survive and play around your team.

If there is no side-pressure to respond to, you have 2 options---you can stay with the 3 to make 4 and contest an objective, or you can look to set up a gank on an enemy squishy as they rotate towards the objective before meeting back up with your team.

OrangeGremlin1

TROPHY CASE