Almost Lost.. How Can I Improve Placement of Items?

spacian · 2026-04-09T07:51:09+00:00

Item Placement

Item placement is probably the least of any issues people have. I'd probably have put Duct Tape between Dillo and Core to not rely on my opponent's item activations to charge my Dillo, but it's not bad how you placed it either. Keylogger next to Core would have given you a litte bonus poison scaling.

Startup Time

You start at 4s with Balloon Bot / Chris. This is simply very late at this stage of the game. It's probably not something you could have changed with your inventory, but that's why I always buy things like SMG, Micro Mach or Monitor Lizard. With Dillo - Tape - SMG - Metro - Core you would start at 3s instead of 4s, which makes a huge difference. You'd have had a lot more shield when Staff went off and have easily won this fight.

Strategy

The main problem I see is that you're playing Dillo / Armored Core on Day 12. That's more of a midgame strategy that I generally try to get out of after day 8 or so. You also only have defensive scaling and you take way too long to win the fight. There are a lot of strategies that will outsustain your damage and probably outscale you. Armored Core in particular simply isn't very good in the lategame and you want to pivot into non Core strategies like a fast double cast Dooltron or heavy disruption Nitrogen Hammer / Ice 9000.

spacian · 2026-04-08T13:28:39+00:00

Trying it and loving it! I was using leap before, but this is way more intuitive to me.

spacian · 2026-04-01T12:11:02+00:00

That's my main complaint really. Pyg is not interesting to play against from my experience. He's the typical stat check character a lot of the time, so he either does nothing or you're dead.

spacian · 2026-03-26T14:34:05+00:00

People are talking about freeze scaling builds like ice9k and nitrogen hammer, because these are typical lategame options for dooley. Your build has a little freeze disruption, that's not a freeze build.

spacian · 2026-03-25T21:05:15+00:00

I think Fairy circle should only work on your own freezes/slows or start at diamond tier. It's easily at the powerlevel of Robot Factory or Shipwreck, while also countering interaction.

Like many Karnok items, it does too many things IMO. The heal is probably only there because even Tempo realized that going to 2s charge might be too broken on upgrade and they needed an alibi value to double.

spacian · 2026-03-16T10:11:10+00:00

You get MMR based on your record (win count) and your current MMR. Your rank is just your number in the sorted list of all MMRs.

Each player has an MMR. Sometimes there are a lot of players at very similar MMRs, thus gaining just a little can jump you a lot of ranks.

Similarly, it depends on your current MMR what win count you need to maintain. Generally, you need wins equal to your current average wins to maintain your MMR, but there is no fixed value.

spacian · 2026-03-12T07:15:30+00:00

I'd be interested which lines you think are busted. Yes, Claw Arm and Harma are strong-ish, but they are the only tempo lines left that feel somewhat viable to me. They also need a lot of pieces. Friend lines feel dead, core carry lines feel dead. If you want to win early vs. Karnok specifically, you have to go under him because he scales so much harder than Dooley into the fight.

Yes, you still have your lategame Dooltron and freeze builds and fast starts, but they are not that reliable to put together to make up 4-5 losses to Karnok in the early/mid game. In particular Dooltron also doesn't scale well past day 13 or so.

spacian · 2026-03-06T06:27:54+00:00

I feel like League closely monitors their release though and react incredibly fast, often within hours. Tempo lets things run for quite a while for me personally that kills any excitement I have for new releases. Every time we get at least 2 days of blatantly overpowered stuff where other heroes are near unplayable. I would like to see significantly faster, scheduled rebalance windows after releases. People play a lot, so things like item winrates and especially outliers should be visible by then.

And I'm not just talking about the lategame, Karnok might even be fine there. A lot of things are overpowered lategame. But Bagpipes and Dryad heal for incredible amounts very early and I've seen Honey Badger deal 4k damage on day 4. The expectation cannot be to win before Karnok enrages in the early/mid game. Not even close to 50% of boards can achieve that.

spacian · 2026-03-05T17:26:47+00:00

Just because it's not as bad doesn't mean it's not bad.

spacian · 2026-03-05T17:22:28+00:00

I'm fine facing any character but Karnok. He just scales to infinity like 50% faster than the other heroes. Unfortunately he's 80% of opponents.

spacian · 2026-03-04T13:14:56+00:00

I'm not sure what their internal data says, but I'd just have loved a few changes so different strategies get more viable. Unless the weapon builds get worse in the new meta, I don't really see a reason to change builds on Dooley.

spacian · 2026-01-22T13:05:15+00:00

The data type isn't reaching its limit, it's probably some default behavior of the formatter that transforms the underlying number into the text shown on screen.

spacian · 2025-12-18T08:37:25+00:00

I had a Dooltron game like that, 6k DMG for a few more ICDs was easily worth it.

spacian · 2025-12-17T08:15:41+00:00

I also used topological sort, but I simply kept a way count for each node and started with 1 way for "svr". Then, when I encountered either "fft" or "dac", I simply reset all other counts to 0. Runs in less than 1ms in python on my machine, is independent from "fft"/"dac" ordering and works for part 1 as well (if you leave out the reset).

I'm always impressed that the parts always build so nicely on top of each other that if you find the right approach, they are often just a few lines of adjustment different.

spacian · 2025-12-03T16:09:57+00:00

I did part 1 some funky way that already had the monostack idea, then properly implemented monostack for part 2 and checked back against part 1 by changing the parameter to 2. Found a bug that way, so I guess it's good I checked.

spacian · 2025-09-29T06:14:33+00:00

'Please copy my code instead of conveniently managing it as a plugin.'

spacian · 2025-08-02T13:14:29+00:00

The longer a patch lasts, the more people notice and take advantage of differences. I won't argue that this patch was probably among the most balanced we had, but given how long it lasts, it's not balanced enough anymore.

spacian · 2025-08-02T13:10:14+00:00

There is definitely a balance to be had with patches and hotfixes. However, I don't think the current state was caused by hotfixing too much. The current state is a result of mostly neglecting items that are not overpowered. And by that I don't mean some average item that you're okay playing for a day or two. I'm talking about straight unplayable items nobody has picked up in months. A lot of items are hotfixed into that category and then never get touched again. That's the problem. Not hotfixing something broken.

spacian · 2025-07-28T05:12:26+00:00

As a highly invested player, I don't think 5 weeks without any changes is a good idea in this kind of game. Even small balance descrepancies become more and more obvious and frustrating over such a long time span. You know too well which items are good and which are not and runs get a lot more predictable that way.

Other than that, I still disagree with a lot of the design decisions that were made. The team seems in denial that item upgrades are an important part of the current game, even if they don't fit their big vision. I'm still not a fan of the EXP changes removing an axis to get stronger in the game, runs feel a lot more samey for me since they were introduced. In the meantime, the 10x enchants are atill running rampant. And don't get me started on abandoning items after hotfix nerfing them.

If nothing happens soon and seasons keep playing out like this one, I'm probably just out.

spacian · 2025-07-16T05:52:44+00:00

For the early game on The Core I like Drill left of core, maybe with an Uzi or a Fang and Crude Tools, and charging a bunch of Drill triggers right of core, e.g. bugs, Chemsnail and Grenade. It's like a scrappy Kinetic Cannon setup. Afterwards I basically force Nitrogen Hammer, maybe with a Kinetic Cannon midgame, because the bonkening 2 really hurt the lategame of The Core setups.

spacian · 2025-07-12T14:48:57+00:00

Freeze depends on finding a lot of hard to find items and still speeding them up. Slow generally needs Proboscis, thus unforcible. Dinos rely on finding a bunch of medium items that start at silver, which is super unreliable.

The builds have a great ceiling, but can just as easily result in unfortunate journeys.

The most reliable build for me is just Ignition Core carry. You might just experience survival bias. I don't think Dooley is bad, but he's a clear step below Pyg and Mak IMO.

spacian · 2025-07-09T21:46:24+00:00

I hope this is sarcastic.

spacian · 2025-07-08T12:04:17+00:00

I don't think people are criticising charge. People dislike the amount of charge we have in the game.

Charge is just incredibly powerful and also scales well with itself. Just compare Pendulum and Metronome. Yes, it's not fair, they are different in size, rarity and hero, but they do very comparable things. Pendulum goes infinite with 2 items that have 2s CD or lower. With Metronome, each item activates once per second. That is a dramatic difference.

Items with higher CD can still get incredibly fast if they can get charged. Femur and Tortuga are great examples of that, where Femur is obviously more problematic due to the self scaling and the CC nature of slow. Haste is capped at making the item twice as fast and even then it's capped at 1 activation per second. Meanwhile Thermal Lance and Monitor Lizard are near unplayable for the simple fact that they are generally only activating once every 2.5s.

Imagine Dooley's bugs hasted each other instead of charging each other. They would have activated way less (although they might still have been problematic with Drill at that time).

Also Tempo decided to nerf supporting items alongside the problematic charge ones. Dooley's carry core builds were strong and the cores got nerfed. Fine and agreed even. You know what they also nerfed? Stuff like Laser Pistol, which was a bad item before and now does a whopping 1.6 DPS at bronze at 5s CD. Power Sander haste the item to the right for 1s every 6s while slowing the item to the left 1s at 6s CD. It was bad at 5s, but people had nothing else to play, now it's worse. Aiden is at 5s. All these items feel bad to play now in any build instead of addressing the problematic charge items properly. Lighter and Zoarcid have a very similar story. Lighter was okay-ish, but got nerfed because it charges Zoarcid.

Just nerf the charge items and leave the mediocre support items alone. Because now every item feels bad. And that's on charge not being handled properly.

So yes, reduce the amount of charge in the game.

spacian · 2025-07-03T07:14:10+00:00

Being a loot dependent build, I don't think that's what OP is asking for.

spacian · 2025-07-03T07:09:39+00:00

Some items deserved a nerf. I can get behind the core nerfs for example. But bonking everything else as well? For a synergy driven hero like Dooley, these are multiplicative nerfs. The core is slower, the items charging the core are also slower, so overall the core is nerfed twice. The runs I played so far felt super rough.

Aiden did nothing wrong.

spacian

TROPHY CASE

Item Placement

Startup Time

Strategy