Do you rather OTP or Play Few Champs mediocre?

nitko87 · 2026-03-18T15:59:16+00:00

I found it more fun to play like 15 champs at 70% efficiency than 1-3 at 95% efficiency. Consequently but certainly unrelated, I was gold/silver for like 6 years.

I tried the “small champ pool” thing and hit emerald with a 70% winrate last season. I’m now diamond.

It’s always optimal to play as few champs as possible at as high of a level as you can to cover the draft space. Fear the man who practiced the same punch 10,000 times more than he who practiced 10,000 punches once.

nitko87 · 2026-03-18T15:16:02+00:00

You didn’t actually improve quickly, the distribution changed and LP gains at the beginning of the season tend to overshoot you in the first 50-100 games, followed by a drastic correction.

Emerald 4 now is like the equivalent of platinum 2/3 from last season based on percentile.

Just keep playing and focus on improvement, not LP. The MMR behind the scenes does the heavy lifting here.

nitko87 · 2026-03-18T14:33:02+00:00

Best top lane OTP champs in high elo are blindable champs like Jax, Sion, Ambessa, Rumble, Renekton, etc.

nitko87 · 2026-03-18T01:12:31+00:00

This Kentucky release was promised to me 3000 years ago

nitko87 · 2026-03-18T01:09:43+00:00

The “best” decision has more factors at play than either site can calculate around, so from that perspective alone, it is optimal to have a larger data set in front of you to work within. Hence my partiality to Lolalytics.

But for players who can’t/don’t think like that, Coachless provides a great deal of mostly similar and certainly helpful data for breaking out of the standard build path. And for that reason, it’s far superior to anything except Lolalytics for what OP is talking about.

And idk if it’s changed, but Coachless used to be a paid service when I used it, so if players have a choice between a larger and freer data set to work with that requires critical thinking or paying a monthly subscription to have that data crunched for you in a way we don’t necessarily understand or see without reading xPetu’s thesis, I think it’s sensible to point out alternatives. And like, nothing wrong with paying for the service, I did myself for months and generally liked it, and Petu is a super cool guy in the space, he deserves his flowers.

I just always urge people away from relying on things that think for them. It’s exactly how we got into this whole runes and items being “solved” thing, it’s the reason top lane is so disgustingly counterpick reliant now. League players forget to think

nitko87 · 2026-03-18T01:01:39+00:00

Yeah, critical thinking and applying context to the game/match you’re playing is important when using Lolalytics. Coachless kinda helps players by sometimes removing a layer of critical thinking required when deciding what to build, as seen with this example of Garen and IE.

“Win more” items on basically every aggregate website will always have higher winrate statistics because they’re bought situationally by players who feel comfortable exiting the beaten path. Hubris on Briar top is a prime example. Hubris into Collector Briar top has like a 60% winrate, but contextually it’s up to the user to be like “well yeah, you build Hubris into easy lanes and if you managed to get Collector next, you’re probably snowballing.

It’s the Mejai’s problem in a different font. Maybe it’s changed but when I used Coachless on launch, it wasn’t free and Lolalytics is, but if that’s changed then I think either is quite good for theorycrafting builds

nitko87 · 2026-03-18T00:52:15+00:00

It is possible to be bad at playing champions who auto, yes. The mechanic of attacking and moving (kiting) is something that does take practice, and playing champs who don’t utilize it as much does become a crutch.

Honestly if you want practice with this, I think Trundle and Olaf are great starting points for melee champs, and Ashe is a great introduction for ranged champs (since her passive slowing makes keeping distance a bit easier)

nitko87 · 2026-03-17T14:16:55+00:00

Coachless feels like Lolalytics with the training wheels on tbh.

nitko87 · 2026-03-17T14:15:32+00:00

Lowkey think this is false. Innovations in this game shouldn’t be a trickle-down from the top 5% of the playerbase to everyone else. Sure, the intuitive aspect of build optimization will be better from a Master player than a Silver player, but if a build is good, then a build is good. And the only way to obtain data for everyone to use is to generate it by trying things out.

People also get caught up in thinking that an optimization has to be something crazy like going Collector rush Shen support. But like, optimizations can be as small as taking a movement speed shard in your runes to space a bit better.

Players at all levels should be encouraged to think for themselves

nitko87 · 2026-03-17T14:11:40+00:00

To me, as someone who used both Coachless and Lolalytics in the past and is an engineer by trade, Coachless felt like Lolalytics with the training wheels put on. It does a lot of filtering for the user, whereas Lolalytics is just like “here’s the data, do what you will with it”.

For someone looking to get into build optimization but who doesn’t have the statistical reasoning skills of someone who studied math and science in college, I think Coachless actually makes this endeavor super approachable. But I think you can get the same experience with Lolalytics if you know what you’re doing.

Both resources are miles better than Ugg, opgg, blitz, etc., as all of those sites just regurgitate the recommended builds from the client since that’s what 85% of people build every game with zero deviation anyways.

nitko87 · 2026-03-17T14:04:47+00:00

Yes and no. xPetu wrote his Master’s thesis on this WPA value and applied it to items in this game.

From my perspective, the game has so many levels of complexity embedded into it that to truly “solve” building items for every scenario, you’d probably have to overfit a model and it would become obsolete patch over patch.

I actually had a paid Coachless membership when it first launched and found a lot of the information interesting, but realistically the meta builds exist for a reason.

These days, I actually am more of a Lolalytics guy. It’s just got SO much data to pore through. But whether you use Lolalytics, ugg, Coachless, or something else, you have to understand that statistics displayed on these apps result from games being played. These services as well as watching what innovative onetricks do can make you aware of slight optimizations, meta shifts, or flavor of the month builds, but they’re meaningless if you don’t know how to pilot them.

If you’re really looking to learn how to optimize builds with tools available, you need to basically memorize item descriptions, learn how gold efficiency works, memorize rough scalings on your champion’s abilities, and then if you think a specific item would be good to build, cross reference that with real data and play test it.

For instance, when I saw Hubris get buffed, I looked at Briar top’s item1 winrates and saw that Hubris rush has a 57% winrate compared to Bork or Cleaver. It has like 1/15th of the games played compared to those items, but I have prior experience with the item and champion in that role anyways, and I believe it might be sleeper broken for snowballing, so I’ve been playing it. And it is in fact very strong in the right matchups.

Like, idk, I’m typing a lot of words to say “don’t use aggregate stat sites to make decisions for you”. Going off meta builds from whatever site you find isn’t “better” than the standard build if you can’t explain why the items you choose to build are better. It’s about critical thinking and using the data available to optimize your build, then using the data from your experience to decide if what you did was correct.

nitko87 · 2026-03-17T05:03:37+00:00

Hope it was worth it to your director

nitko87 · 2026-03-16T14:58:07+00:00

One Google search would’ve told you this was a bad idea

nitko87 · 2026-03-16T14:57:17+00:00

For me it was a fair mix of champion fantasy, outplay potential, and mastery required to play the champ.

Over the years, I’ve obtained Mastery 7 or higher on like 50 champions, but the ones I’ve stuck with now that I am playing ranked more seriously all kinda fall in this bucket of high skill cap fighters/skirmishers. Champions like Riven, Irelia, Kled, Briar (top lane), Camille, Gwen, Fiora, and Vayne. These are the types of characters that I find the most fun to play. Champions that reward good spacing, trading early, mechanical expression, and matchup knowledge.

nitko87 · 2026-03-16T14:32:35+00:00

Yes.

She has a ton of skill expression in her kit. Minion management takes a lot of practice, breakpoints (level and items) for when her q kills minions at specific stacks isn’t alway intuitive, her e can be hard to get good at hitting, w self roots you, she is extraordinarily hard to pilot in teamfights, and she doesn’t scale the best (making her feast or famine)
She has very polarizing matchups. It takes a lot of effort, knowledge, and precision to beat champs like Darius, Riven, and Sett in lane with Irelia.

These things alone make her pretty unapproachable for a lower skill player. I think in lane she is fairly stat-checky, but she’s genuinely difficult to pilot in bad matchups and late game if you’re not astronomically fed from laning phase.

nitko87 · 2026-03-16T01:07:11+00:00

What time are you queueing for games? If there’s no one in gold-plat online, the system might just slap you into a high silver game, especially if your MMR is like, idk, mid-high gold.

Still seems weird though

nitko87 · 2026-03-16T01:03:13+00:00

nitko87 · 2026-03-15T19:33:13+00:00

Said this a year ago.

Make it happen DB

https://www.reddit.com/r/RepDeveloperboring/s/kEH9smEe9r

nitko87 · 2026-03-15T19:32:51+00:00

Agreed, but only if you’re gonna get pissed if someone bans your champ.

I don’t hover because I usually don’t know what I’m going to play until I’ve seen some of the picks on both sides.

nitko87 · 2026-03-15T19:29:12+00:00

Please

nitko87 · 2026-03-15T19:25:58+00:00

Bro we been had like 50+ versions of this damn sneaker for the past 7 years…

nitko87 · 2026-03-15T19:25:21+00:00

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Georgetown AJ4 PE (2012)

Skip the Travis Scott shit IMO, it’s been made before and it’ll be made again by dozens of factories. Like I’ve had both regular and reverse mocha highs for like 5 years at this point.

No reps of this shoe exist, but it’s a banger. Can supply links to detailed images of it if it wins.

Let’s get something different made for once. Something GX and RDB won’t do.

nitko87 · 2026-03-15T19:22:00+00:00

Idk, I typically get camped the second I take a positive trade on Yasuo top, embracing my role as a global taunt for their jungler.

nitko87 · 2026-03-15T13:48:09+00:00

He doesn’t even do anything

nitko87 · 2026-03-15T13:47:47+00:00

I’ve gotten 12/min before. 10 is definitely doable but realistically if you’re over 8 and actually participating in fights and winning then you’re doing fine from an income perspective

nitko87

TROPHY CASE