I am just terrible, godawful.
On the one hand. I am surviving. Doing things. For the first time in a very long time, I did some writing! I wrote a bit of a story. Mind you, it wasn't particularly well-written, I felt like I was stealing some material from a prior story of mine, and due to the medium I wrote it in (on a minecraft server), I can't show it off, butstill. It was writing! Serious writing! Not the best, but passable as being. Well. Writing by me.
Speaking of the minecraft server, I've been thriving on it, more or less.
I've also been vastly furthering my grinding/farming (equal parts both, for items, experience, AP, and gold) in Epic Battle Fantasy 5, and beaten all of the monsters in the challenge area for the 10-40 medals (I'm one medal short of 49), and I've caught almost all of the monsters too, so I'm ready to move on to a new area next time I start to play.
I've been playing TFT a lot since the new release, too. I'm quite the fan of Zed as a carry unit. (Ideally, lifesteal in the form of a bloodthirster, attack speed in the form of a rageblade or rfc, and then a third utility item, either giant's slayer or sword breaker to make Zed CC targets.) He works well in a ton of comps. Rebels, obviously, but also Infiltrators, but also: did you know Chrono 4 Celestial 4 Zed is a monster? Even with zero items? Because Chrono 4 gives him the attack speed and Celestial 4 gives him the healing.
That said, I don't force him every game.
I also love the star guardian comps, but in spite of the ease in forcing them, I've only been playing them when the comp has naturally come to me.
Similarly, I've been running a fair amount of blaster/brawler 4 due to their synergies. (Two blaster/brawlers share synergies for a free Chrono 2 and Battlewhateverthatsynergyis 2.) In theory, there's 2/3rds of a third synergy (Lucian/Vi), but going cybernetic is often not necessary especially since both of the units can be replaced. (Vi + Gnar is better than T2 Malphite, but if I get a T3 Malphite especially with a Warmogs--one of the only units the reworked Warmogs is good on due to his passive--then you replace Vi with Gnar. Lucian + Jinx is better than T2 Graves, but if I get a T3 Graves then you replace Lucian with Jinx.)
I've also played a little bit of Cybernetic, but it's a mixed bag of success.
There was a time where I'd have said tanks were dead, due to how much CC, how much raw damage, how many anti-tank abilities (not to mention the item) there are, but I've run a fair amount of Vanguard 6 which convinced me that, in spite of the nerf to warmogs, in spite of the max health, stealing ad, stealing mr/armor, units, that they can work...but they're an even GREATER mixed bag in terms of success.
Especially since there's no clear comp for me to always build into.
Usually it seems ideal to build a sniper. Teemo, if you go Astro 3 via Nautilus, Vayne otherwise for Cybernetic 3. Maybe both. But it's a comp that I can only get to work like...20% of the time. (I'd love to go Vanguard 6 Mystic 4 but that requires level 9 plus a spatula.)
When it works, it works amazingly well! So well that I was instantly convinced to take back my sentiment of "tanks are completely and utterly dead".
But it only works 20% of the time which gives the comp an 80% failure rate so I'm not that fond of it anymore.
Hmm, are there other comps?
I don't really know how to run an ideal Astro comp, I've run some but I want to theorycraft some more optimal ones.
I really really REALLY want to run a Sniper 4 comp, but I've yet to figure out how. I've seen a Sniper 4 comp, and it even won, but I didn't see how it was built start to finish to pull it off.
I've also run a bit of Dark Star as a comp, and it can work reasonably well. It pairs really well with Zed, rather notably. (Shaco, for the obvious, but also Karma, and more.)
In League news...I ran a game of tank Ashe and did remarkably well on it! Really really remarkably well on it. I only died twice--once to a very early gank level 2 before I had any capability to survive a gank and with no way of anticipating a gank, and a second time when the entire enemy team dogpiled me and slowed and CC'd me for ages upon ages and in spite of it taking a full minute for them to kill me I almost lived anyway.
It took me a long time to get that unkillable, and was touch-and-go the entire time. But I cs'd at a record rate (over 5/minute!), and managed to just...perform well. I did run out of mana quite often, annoyingly enough, which is why in my opinion Ashe needs a buff. (And, frankly, I feel justified for this. If you look at professional play in 2020 across all regions, Ashe has a near-zero pick rate and for damn good reason because her winrate is dismal, standing in the 33-40% range. She's never picked unless people banned other adcs limiting the adc pool and performs rather suboptimally the entire time. PROFESSIONAL PLAYERS can't win on Ashe. That says everything about the state she's in; she NEEDS a buff. Granted, I'm of the opinion those professional players are using the wrong build, going lethal tempo attack speed BoRK->Runaan's, butstill.)
But I digress. I continue to mostly play her in bot as both an adc and support.
I also had recently what was probably the best Vladimir game of my life, where I was doing massively to help my team and was actually being an actual carry.
Granted, my winrate is still in the realm of like 40-60%, for good reason; for every game I am performing incredibly well in, there's a counterpart game where I am playing incredibly poorly. There's four types of games, in exactly equal distribution, 25% of each, regardless of role or champion. Games I am legit carrying in and we win; games I am a star player on but we still lose; games I am being carried which result in a win; games where we don't have any winning lane and just...lose. Exactly dead even on all.
The real news: I've started setting myself to auto-fill in queues, which means...jungle games! Now, I can't play Ashe in the jungle. Well, I could try, but we'd definitely lose and my teammates would flame me for the loss. So I decided to try and pick up playing one of the only two marksmen junglers I know about: Kindred. The mechanics of Kindred are fairly easy for me to get, actually.
The problem is I have no real clue how to jungle optimally. (How the heck do I manage to kill camps like Wolves at level 2 with just one buff? I don't know how to pull it off.) My first Kindred game was a game where fortunately, the loss wasn't my fault. Top lane lost; bot lane lost; mid lane was the closest I came to contributing to a loss because it was a lane that was going even and I ganked under the impression we were in an easy 2v1 where we could kill the enemy laner, but both times I tried, both times, it was actually at least a 2v2 if not a 2v3 with the enemy midlaner having their jungler and maybe more there to turn things around.
Needless to say, that game was a stomp, but my teammates didn't flame me for it, didn't blame me, so that was nice.
My second Kindred game...I actually won! And I felt like I was more or less in the right place at the right time, giving my team the help they needed to live, to get kills, etc. I think I got like five marks before the enemy team surrendered, in a game that was like 15 minutes long. This, in a game I was convinced my support was intent on inting (and sure enough, botlane was the lane that I feel like had I not intervened in, would've lost), my toplaner was prone to flaming, and the enemy jungler killed me early-on.
Granted, the enemy team did have their toplaner dc (hard to tell if it was a ragequit or just legit dc), so in that sense I did luck out, but I still felt like I was doing incredibly well.
So in this sense.
I've been having lots of successes.
It's just.
I've been failing on all the important stuff.