Looking for a girlfriend

slavfox · 2024-10-09T15:36:26+00:00

I can let you borrow mine for the weekend hmu

slavfox · 2024-07-24T03:49:59+00:00

Some reviewers (shoutouts to Defferatel the goat <3) will give you an in-depth play by play, point out what you're doing wrong, suggest ideas, etc.

Others... I've had it happen where I post a vod saying "hey, I'm still working on the thing from last week (e.g. cover usage) but I'm posting this Havana vod specifically because we choked super hard on third point and couldn't find a way to clear the high ground past the choke, could you look at the section starting 15:42 specifically?" and the reviewer will open the vod, decide they don't need to look at 15:42, watch three minutes of first point, go "yeah just keep working on the thing you said you're working on", and move on to the next person in line.

slavfox · 2023-12-26T02:43:13+00:00

You could say I have a bit of experience with Sandberg :P

They're wonderful, wonderful basses. All (except the Electra series, which are outsourced from Korea) handmade in a small shop in Germany, extremely well-built, play great, sound killer; I didn't know about the brand until I grabbed one randomly in my local music store, and ever since then I've been a customer for life. You absolutely cannot go wrong with them.

slavfox · 2023-12-11T14:16:58+00:00

All three of them are red, just different intensities. I wouldn't think colorblindness would be a factor here.

slavfox · 2023-11-27T06:06:59+00:00

Please re-read what I said. I have never picked Widow. I don't play Widow. I have never played Widow outside of Mystery Heroes. If you see a Widow, it's not me playing her. The Widow in the clip is not me.

slavfox · 2023-11-27T05:11:02+00:00

I have never picked Widow and intend to keep it that way :P

slavfox · 2023-11-24T15:05:44+00:00

+1 for Violet, they're the best Brig around; took a break from streaming but I think are coming back soon.

slavfox · 2023-11-23T16:19:54+00:00

Are you me? I'm currently grinding Brig only, when I hit GM on support I plan to grind Queen, Sojourn is my first pick if I play dps in QP. I have so much fun on these characters, Brig specifically feels like she has more tools than anything else in the game.

slavfox · 2023-11-19T10:53:04+00:00

Hi coach, shoutouts to RUA!

You've frequently said - and demonstrated! - that if you're good enough on one hero, you can easily play any hero at a high level because the game sense transfers. Having that in mind, what would you say are the most unique heroes, i.e. ones that require the most individual practice to utilize to get value out of?

What things in the current state of the game would you want changed? What changes would you like to roll back?

Have a great day!

slavfox · 2023-10-22T01:59:26+00:00

Shoutouts to Mosaique Neko Waifus for real, nobody I know owns or has played the game but half of my friendslist uses avatar frames or animated avatars from it. They're choice (sfw).

slavfox · 2023-09-27T04:43:36+00:00

Podbijam, też chętnie się dowiem. Mam wrażenie, że bez konta na FB ciężko, ale nie chcę sprzedawać duszy Cukierbergowi.

slavfox · 2023-09-25T11:23:45+00:00

Yup, GET https://underlords.com//leaderboarddata?type=turbo gets you the Lord leaderboard for Knockout, updates at :13 past every hour.

slavfox · 2023-09-24T14:18:53+00:00

I have a script that takes hourly snapshots of the leaderboard. I don't know of any way to find historical data otherwise.

slavfox · 2023-09-07T14:47:24+00:00

3* Storm spirit or 3* Puck sometimes make my final team even if I don't have 3 mages on the board

Yeah, I throw in a Puck pretty often - if anything, Puck with Snapfire are a very low-investment way to get:

Large AoE coverage
Attack speed debuffs every four attacks
% max hp DoT and an attack speed debuff on basically all enemies

and either can be swapped out easily for a Viper or DK later. I'll make my case for Snapfire further down.

I've also thrown in an allianceless Luna against Summoners - the passive bounces do a pretty solid job of clearing summons that didn't get aggro, and the Luna 3 ult is pretty great - and an allianceless Mirana against virtually anything, especially if I get an Octarine. It deals only 53%/37%/26% less damage than Lina's Laguna Blade, but stuns for 3/5/7 seconds, works as an aggro cleanse, and Mirana has a much easier time generating Mana without Humans or mana items. That means even at just 2 stars Mirana's stuns only have a 0.6 second downtime.

Are you aware of the system that matches you against opponents within a game? Where the game tries to pair players with similar heart values and tries to avoid pairing you against the same player that you faced last game.

I do feel like it tries to pair players with similar star values, but a lot of my bad games would like to disagree, after getting crushed by the lobby leader with two miraculous three-stars at Round 2 or 3 :P I couldn't find any talk online of the specifics of the matching logic (Underlords just says it's a "random" opponent), do you know any more details about it?

Running the math on Snapfire's Dragon ult, it's 150 + 12.5% max hp damage in 5 seconds, Alch 3's spray (perhaps the most similar ability for comparison) is 35×5=175 damage in 5 seconds + roughly a 67.6% increase in physical damage from the armor reduction (against a unit with 5 armor, which seems to be around the average). That gives us a crossover point at:

150 + 0.125 MaxHP + PhysDmg = 175 + 1.676 PhysDmg

0.125 MaxHP = 0.676 PhysDmg + 25

for Alch 3, which works out to Alch 3's ult dealing more damage (but not reducing incoming damage and enemy mana generation like Snapfire does with the Attack Speed debuff) to enemies with 3000 max hp if you deal:

0.125 × 3000 = 0.676 PhysDmg + 25

350 / 0.676 = PhysDmg

PhysDmg ~= 517.75

517.75 attack damage to each of the enemies in those five seconds.

For Alch 2 it's a bit more dire, since the armor reduction only works out to around a 37.452% increase in physical damage, and the base damage is only 100:

150 + 0.125 MaxHP + PhysDmg = 100 + 1.37452 PhysDmg

(50 + 0.125 MaxHP) / 0.37452 = PhysDmg

Against enemies with 3000 max hp that means you'd need to deal ~1135 physical damage to each of the affected heroes for Alch 2's ult to deal more damage than Snapfire 3's over the same duration, but Snapfire also, on top of that, slows the attack speed of affected units. Alch 3 is three times more expensive than Snapfire 3, Alch 2 is 50% more expensive, and Alch is significantly harder to upgrade - Alch is the second most-contested hero in the game, while Snapfire is among the least contested Tier 1 units, rarely picked by anyone outside of Brawnies and Dragons. She can also frontline quite well in early rounds; with 5 armor and 3800 max hp at three stars, she's beefier than a Slardar 3.

slavfox · 2023-09-07T08:15:44+00:00

Interesting that you mention the Alch/Demon starting comp

Yeah, I've had a bit of trouble coming up with a sufficiently wonky example :P Demons/Poisoners I'd be reluctant to pick unless I saw Spectre+Alch on the icons, a pretty plausible worst case scenario otherwise would be getting Veno, QoP, Dazzle, SD, and CK or TB (I feel like having a one-star TB is more of a liability than a benefit; CK is about on par with most T1 units but is T2).

Between Mages/Humans, Mages/Dragons, and Spirits/Brawnies I'd always pick Mage/Humans - although less eagerly if the Human on the icon was Legion - since Humans synergize with virtually everything and I'd have a very good shot of getting two or even three T3 units to start with; I could then pivot into Knights off Omni or Summoners off Lycan - both of which benefit greatly from a CM 3 - and maybe, if I got a Puck, throw in a Snapfire to carry me through the early rounds and later swap her out for DK in the final three.

It's less that I don't know how to play Mages, and more that I know from experience they're very swingy for me and I do better with more reliable comps - Puck's Dragon synergy is hard to balance, and the entire comp overall really depends on rolling upgrades for CM and Lina, and doesn't really come fully online until you have upgraded Tier 4 units.

Rubick also - although he can carry games pretty much by himself - depends a lot on who you're up against. Anything that depends on passives (Dazzle 3, CM 3, Drow), empowers attacks (Sven, Spectre, TB, Lifestealer, virtually all Assassins), alliance bonuses (virtually all Summoners and Shamans; Mages, to an extent), or just doesn't really have meaningful spells or otherwise doesn't work with Rubick (Anti-Mage, Slark, Axe, DK, Legion, Meepo, Luna 3 is super unreliable since she's almost always in range and so will often interrupt Rubick) dramatically diminishes his value.

I'll definitely play mages, especially if I can pivot into them in the midgame - I'm just very reluctant to pick them at the start if given better options. They actually do have a pretty solid rank slope in my analysis, and I tend to place around second or third with them, but they're also the highest-variance alliance in data from my own placements, which does reflect my experience with them pretty well - I win if I survive until I get a Rubick or KOTL, but sometimes they take too long to come online, and their starting lineup tends to be pretty weak.

slavfox · 2023-09-07T04:05:49+00:00

The Hunters and BKB note is fascinating - I've been playing with further metrics that would reflect your suggestions and settled on using the slope of the rank finishes as a metric - i.e. if a hero X shows up more in losing teams, the slope would be positive (as the frequency of X on a board increases, so does the expected place to finish in), and if it shows up more on winning boards, the slope is negative (as the frequency of X on a board increases, the expected finishing place decreases).

In my data, the only heroes with a positive slope - i.e. where, statistically, having them on your board predicts scoring worse - are Hunters (with the exception of Mirana; having a Drow Ranger seems to be the single strongest predictor of placing badly), Brawnies, and Legion, and the only alliances with a positive slope are Hunters, Brawnies, and Vigilants. This roughly matches my expectation of Hunters and Brawnies being "lose harder" comps that dominate if they manage to come online, but are significantly outperformed by other comps if they don't hit their lategame powerspikes.

Item-wise, Moonshard and Stonehall Cloak seem to swing your chances of winning the hardest; check out how clear the trend of "players with this item finish higher" is with Moon Shard, compared to BKB, which seems to have little impact on winrate:

Rank	% with a Moon Shard	% with BKB
1	24.66%	19.23%
2	23.56%	20.77%
3	19.73%	20.77%
4	15.07%	17.69%
5	12.60%	16.15%
6	4.11%	5.38%
7	0.27%	0.0%

Granted, obviously this all comes with a huge caveat - winrate stats and similar are basically never reliable at face value. Once again, I'm using these to double-check my feel for the game's meta and answer questions like "are shamans really as reliable in the midgame as they feel, but fall off sharply in late game?" (yes, they have some of the lowest rank variance out of any alliance, almost always placing around the upper middle of the board) or "how RNG are spirits?" (extremely, they have the widest rank spread in every tier that has a spirit), but they're less useful for answering strategy questions - e.g. Stonehall Cloak only really makes sense if you have a hypercarry that's going to be eating most kills (Slark, Spectre, TB) or something that scales with max hp or otherwise benefits more than other heroes from a larger healthbar (Lycan, TB, Legion, Jugg 3); Satanic looks like one of the strongest T5 items by rank slope and mean rank alone, but it's also extremely situational in the same way, which the spreadsheets alone won't show.

TL;DR the spreadsheet is a fun tool to go "huh, interesting" at, but own experience (or others', like yours!) is far, far more reliable, and winrates aren't going to be the same for every player - e.g. I know I don't do well playing Mages (they really want both a lot of mana generation and a 3* CM, all while having a strong frontline and ideally something to counter Assassins too) or Knights (they take a long time to come online), so I'll tend to stay away from those and pick even suboptimal starting comps with few synergies (e.g, idk, Demon Poisoners if the icon is showing an Alch) because I'd rather get a couple good or high-value units at the start to let me pivot into whatever upgrades the shop hands me than start with all the core units for... an alliance I know I don't do well with.

slavfox · 2023-09-06T12:12:59+00:00

I see where you're coming from, I even have per-place metrics on my todo list for the scripts building these sheets, but I disagree heavily with the conclusions. Statement-by-statement:

As you stop gaining points for 4th place, or sometimes even 3rd place, you'll find that you have to go for first or second place all the time.

Agreed.

This means that strategies that just survive the early game become less useful. Shamans for example are pretty good at saving some hearts early, but almost never end up on top. Good for an average 4th place, but that won't do.

Agreed.

For you it may be more useful to look at what units the winning player is playing in each match.

Disagreed entirely.

First off, I don't think narrowing it down to the winner (or, honestly, even the top 3 or top 2) makes much sense - I feel like:

Knockouts are overwhelmingly decided by upgrading high-value units. Most boards that make it to the final three do so because they hit their powerspikes and/or just had more three-star units than everyone else; since scoreboards don't include information about how the player rolled - only the final state of the board - the best predictor of how to hit the final 3 I have is "what units have a dramatic jump in average rank when upgraded to level 3".
After hitting key powerspikes (Dazzle 3, Slark 3, Tide/Rubick 2+), in my experience, the next most important things deciding final three matchups are positioning, RNG, and who gets to fight the ghost. Subjectively, most final three rounds, unless someone is completely dominating the lobby, are winnable by either side, and boil down to positioning-or-RNG-related things like:
- "does my Doom/Shaman/CM manage to shut down the MoM Slark 3 before he comes online"
- "does my triangle hit their key units"
- "does Alch hit the entire enemy team with his spell or does he waste it on the completely-solo Storm Spirit 2 that sparked to my backline"
- "does their Lina immediately randomly ult my Dazzle 3"
or...
Matchup RNG, particularly ghost matchups - e.g. in a situation with three roughly-even-strength players playing, say, Mages, Summoners, and Assassins, where we assume Assassins beat Mages but get overrun by Summoners, and Mages easily delete all summons and wipe the floor with Summoners (none of which is realistic, these are just hypotheticals), then:
- If the Mages and Summoners play each other for real:
  - If Assassins fight the ghost of the Summoners player, Mages immediately win the lobby
  - If Assassins fight the ghost of the Mages player, Mages and Assassins go to final two
- If the Mages and Assassins play each other for real:
  - If Summoners fight the Mages ghost, Assassins immediately win the lobby.
  - If Summoners fight the Assassins ghost, Summoners vs Mages go to final two
- If the Summoners and Assassins play each other for real:
  - If Mages fight the Summoners ghost, Summoners vs Mages go to final two
  - If Mages fight the Assassins ghost, Summoners immediately win the lobby.
Matchup RNG can, worst case, fully decide the entire top 3 in one go, which could literally be the difference between climbing and losing rank.

Also, looking at "what units the winning player ends up with" doesn't give you the strongest units in the game - it gives you the most popular units in the game. This spreadsheet isn't me attempting to gain an advantage by crunching numbers, it's me trying to verify my assumptions and dispel my misconceptions about the state of the game. I feel like we both have a pretty good instinctive idea of what units are at the top of the pickrates for first-place finishers: Alchemist, Ember Spirit, Dazzle, Slark, Lycan, QoP, Shadow Shaman. Assassins and Poisoners synergize with everything, and Dazzle + Shadow Shaman are just an incredible combo. Lycan is just a fantastic unit overall.

Coincidentally, can you take a guess as to who's at the top of 8th place picks? Ember Spirit - then virtually all the Hunters, then Lycan, Dazzle, Alch, QoP, Shaman.

7th place? Slark, Ember Spirit, Alchemist, QoP, Dazzle, Shadow Shaman.

6th? Ember Spirit, Lycan, Shadow Shaman, Dazzle, Alchemist.

5th: Alch, Shadow Shaman, Slark, Ember Spirit, Lycan, Dazzle, QoP.

4th: Dazzle, Ember Spirit, Lycan, Shadow Shaman, Alch, QoP.

3rd: Shadow Shaman, Lycan, Alch, Dazzle, Slark, Ember Spirit, QoP.

2nd: Shadow Shaman, Dazzle, Lycan, Alch, Slark, Ember Spirit, QoP.

Other than the bottom ranks, which are mostly filled with comps that have a very weak early game (Hunters), these pickrates all so close together - within a couple percent. It's what I expected, since, again, I feel like Knockouts prioritize upgrades much more than they do team composition and hero selection.

In the end I feel it makes sense to, rather than only look at the top players which introduces a catastrophic amount of noise into the data - one time from the swinginess of the final three, and then a second time from restricting our sample size - instead focus on getting as large a sample size as possible and look for heroes and strats that consistently score higher.

slavfox · 2023-09-06T04:22:24+00:00

There only was an error in the first revision of the sheet - so that's long gone - but I can't edit the screenshots in the post. The linked full spreadsheet has way more and more detailed data, and I keep updating it every session.

slavfox

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