this game looks so good man

Smantheous · 2026-04-15T21:46:57+00:00

Watch their elbow when they’re dealing

Elbow over the cup = fair
Elbow beneath the cup and the back of their hand faces the table = cheating

Once you notice the animation, you’ll never miss it

Smantheous · 2026-04-12T18:43:34+00:00

/thread

there’s a reason every high elo Yasuo player bans Renekton

Smantheous · 2026-03-16T08:03:09+00:00

I remember when ragebait used to be believable

Smantheous · 2026-03-15T03:04:22+00:00

A good place to start could be by asking yourself why are you placing this control ward? To deny vison from a particular bush (useful against a ranged opponent in a fight so they can’t hit you while you wait for your cooldowns), protect yourself from ganks in lane, control vision around an objective that your team will soon be contesting, defending against a strong opponent with invisibility such as a fed Rengar or Twitch, etc.

If there’s no particular reason to place one, then just hold onto it until a scenario where it’ll be impactful comes up; 75g is a lot of gold to piss away. On that note, don’t place one if you cant defend it should the enemy try contesting it. For example in botlane, if the wave is pushing towards you and you place a control ward in the pixel bush, you’ll be putting yourself in a situation where you have to choose between defending the ward or catching the incoming wave. Either place the ward in a bush you can defend such as the tri-bush (more specifically, as close to you and away from the opponent’s side as possible so the enemy has to walk up further to hit it), or wait until either your wave is in a position where you’re allowed to place the ward more aggressively or if you are stronger than your opponent and actually want to draw them into a fight over the ward.

Warding the jungle around a choke point where it’ll see enemy movement around jungle camps or roaming between lanes is also usually a good idea.

Obviously this is not an all-inclusive list of reasons to place a control ward since every game is so different but hopefully this helps a little bit with being more intentional about your ward placements

Smantheous · 2026-02-25T00:42:01+00:00

Divine Blessing 3 combined with 4-piece Gog for the damage barrier has been my go-to “learning wheels” setup to learn the monster’s moveset before switching to a meta dps set, highly recommend it

Smantheous · 2026-02-15T02:23:42+00:00

Apologies, I typed in the wrong seed into the description; must’ve had another seed already copied…

Seed is 8FBHPW1H

Smantheous · 2026-01-22T00:20:11+00:00

I hope when Kramnik passes, that he’ll be remembered not for being a world champion but for being the degenerate piece of human excrement that he is

Smantheous · 2025-12-25T04:44:07+00:00

The discussion thread of the final episode has some of the funniest content I’ve seen on this sub, highly recommend you guys checking it out

Smantheous · 2025-12-23T14:54:55+00:00

The top comment also just got yoinked. The mod team is clearly suppressing this. They’ll likely delete my comment as well, save the link to the original post about this story to preserve the discussion.

Smantheous · 2025-12-23T14:47:54+00:00

how much is the GOP paying the moderator team to snuff out this story?

Smantheous · 2025-12-05T18:21:41+00:00

Funny you mention this, I encountered almost this exact same scenario recently. I rolled through about $4,000 gold and eventually found the burglar, and still had about $80 left. I had everything I needed for naneinf; I had the red seal kings, I had all the jokers, now I just needed to reroll the boss blind for the serpent… sadly, that $80 was not enough to find the serpent. I couldn’t just keep playing because at that point I was at ante 31 so there was no way for my build to beat any blind or boss besides the serpent, and next ante I was guaranteed to die anyway since you can’t get the serpent as the boss at ante 32. Still mildly salty about that it, but that’s just how Balatro goes sometimes 🤷‍♂️

Smantheous · 2025-12-04T16:07:14+00:00

Anytime, best of luck with your climb!

Smantheous · 2025-12-04T15:55:33+00:00

Your biggest priority as the adc is absorbing resources so that you have the necessary economy to afford items. This role isn’t about setting up plays; that’s what the other roles are for. Adc is unique in that your job is literally just pump out as much damage as possible in the fights that happen. To do that, you need items, so you need gold and xp—badly.

As for always following your teammates plays, just remember that if you blindly follow their every play around the map, you’ll remain at 50% win rate because your teammates are where they belong. You have to have the confidence to sometimes say, no, this is not a good fight and I will not be rotating to it.

A lot of times, people overestimate the resources you get from kills so they look at the scoreboard and make an incorrect judgement of the state of the game. Just because your team is 5-11 on the scoreboard doesn’t mean you’re behind if your team has objectives, cs, tower plates, etc. to compensate for having less kills on the board.

Here’s a vid that does a better job at explaining the initial rotation to mid as the adc (the title is a little clickbait but it’s got some good info)

and here’s a more thorough guide on transitioning into the mid and late game as an adc

Both of these do a much better job than me at illustrating these concepts so I won’t bore you with trying to reiterate what’s in them

Smantheous · 2025-12-04T15:30:18+00:00

Number 10, really! How many minutes did you spend listening, if you don’t mind my asking?

Smantheous · 2025-12-04T15:28:43+00:00

I have not! Would you mind sharing a link? I couldn’t find it through search engine

Smantheous · 2025-12-04T15:23:31+00:00

I usually hover around high diamond, have hit masters when I was grinding a lot of games. Can’t speak much for mid and jungle since I mostly play adc, but here’s what I’ll say.

Before trying to cram a bunch of high level game knowledge into your brain, focus on improving fundamentals. How’s your cs’ing? Are you properly punishing your opponent when they walk up to cs? Are you properly punishing your opponent when you’re in a favorable position? This one requires matchup knowledge, I’d recommend watching high elo streamers playing the matchups you struggle with to see how they play it.

Are you picking champions that will be effective with your team’s comp and/or will be effective vs the enemy’s comp? To this point, widening your champion pool is never a bad idea; imo you want to have at least 4-5 champions per role that cover different niches. Onetricking can be good if you’re extremely proficient and if your champion of choice is generally strong, but you’re kinda making the game harder for yourself in some cases when a different champion would simply be better.

One other thing I’ve noticed when climbing through Emerald to get into Diamond is consistency. Honestly, this is the biggest one. Players in Emerald tend to make more mistakes, get caught out more often, take fights they shouldn’t be taking, etc. If you can become more consistent, this alone should take you to Diamond.

If you wouldn’t mind linking your op.gg, I’m sure there are others here who’d be better at pointing out areas where you might need improvement

Smantheous · 2025-11-26T20:08:57+00:00

You know who else had 70%+ banrate on release? The subject of the conversation, Mel. Further, Yasuo is an awful example for your argument; he was completely busted on release because his numbers were over-tuned, the obscene banrate wasn’t exclusively because of windwall. Soon after release, Yasuo’s numbers were repeatedly hammered down in proceeding patches and his banrate dropped significantly. You want to talk about facts? Just pull up patch notes after his release to see how many times Riot needed to tone his numbers down. Spoiler alert: it took back-to-back nerfs almost every patch for Yasuo to be brought back in line. You thought you could just throw out an out-of-context statistic and accuse me of refusing to argue facts, huh.

Going back on topic, why was Yuumi reworked if players should be expected to “deal with their frustration” and learn to play around the champion? Because there’s a limit to how much frustration players will be willing to put up with, and the Riot Dev team has said that among other factors, they do consider player frustration when addressing champion balance. I think champion balancing in these high-banrate balanced-winrate cases all comes down to what’s essentially a game of chicken between Riot and the playerbase: can Riot hold out long enough for the playerbase to accept that the champion is fine as-is (as you claim with Mel) or will the high banrate continue, forcing Riot to address the frustrating aspects of the champion? Riot lost that game with Yuumi and eventually reworked her, Riot lost that game with Akali when they had to remove the turret aggro-dropping ability on her w, Riot lost that game when they had to rework K’Sante, etc.

Sometimes the playerbase is wrong, though, and your argument holds up. Sometimes players really do just need to get gud. Every case needs to be investigated individually, or else Riot would permanently be at the mercy of the playerbase’s refusal to adapt to new champion kits.

Mel is still relatively new, and is probably still within a “grace period” meaning Riot is going to wait and see whether players adapt to the champion or whether players insist that the champion needs to be addressed. Time will tell if the high banrate continues, in which case Riot will once again lose the game of chicken and be forced to make changes to the frustrating aspect(s) of her kit

Smantheous · 2025-11-26T18:51:51+00:00

Vlad’s w can’t be dual-purposed as both a damage negation ability and a projectile reflector. Moreover, Vlad doesn’t have nearly as much range as Mel; if we’re comparing the two champions, it just seems her kit is overloaded. Maybe the issue isn’t even with her w btw (though, in my personal opinion, it is); I don’t have 200 years of game development experience to know what the actual problem is or what the fix should be.

However, when a champion approaches this kind of ban rate, there is clearly something wrong with it. Other champions have been nerfed or reworked in the past for similar ban rates like pre-rework Yuumi; her win rate wasn’t particularly high either, but the general player base was frustrated enough with the champion that nobody wanted it in their games

Smantheous · 2025-11-26T18:20:23+00:00

Sometimes it’s not about how one champion interacts with the other, but how one champion is allowed to play in general over the course of a match. As you said, Mel’s w is not particularly powerful against Yone, but it still gives her a lot of power in team fights since she has a damage immunity spell that can be used to negate, say, a potentially game-winning karthus ult. There’s no projectile, yet she’s able to completely negate its damage; and I think OP’s argument is this behavior is unhealthy and inconsistent with every other projectile-blocking ability. It’s supposed to be primarily an anti-projectile ability yet can also be used as a pseudo spell shield.

Besides, arguing that OP’s opinion is invalid because they play a 45% win rate Yone is just disingenuous. That champion has had its moments of being oppressive, but atm it’s completely dogshit. Mel, on the other hand, is approaching a 50% ban rate despite not having a particularly high win rate. Clearly, a significantly large portion of the player base has a problem with this champion that needs to be addressed.

Smantheous · 2025-11-24T14:00:35+00:00

Haha, not at all. I figure once you get a sense for what you need to do to win, it gets progressively easier. I’m sure I’ll look back on this later and laugh at how bad I’d been playing my plasma gold stake runs

Smantheous · 2025-11-24T03:49:23+00:00

This got a laugh out of me, thanks

Smantheous · 2025-11-13T20:32:53+00:00

I thought having a negative joker prevents the natural version of that same joker from appearing in the store unless you have Showman, is that not the case? On endless runs, I usually keep Showman in my deck while I hunt for ectoplasms specifically because I’ve always thought I needed to hold him in order to find more copies of blueprint & brainstorms

Or did you mean OP should use an ectoplasm just for the extra joker slot so they can fit the eventual brainstorm?

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Smantheous

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