But first, I should also mention the civ 3 modified scenario I was working with. This is something which is applicable to all my scenarios for Civ 3 though--Across the Ages (even if the project is somewhat...well, not the best), my original 'Zeo Rise of Rome' (named so mostly for the sake of locating it because Z would place it at the bottom always making it easy to find), all other scenarios I've made (well, modified from existing ones), and every scenario that I've planned to make.

I recall planning a 4-way 'Battleship' scenario where Battleships would be your King unit (I imagine due to how it works programming-wise, this would probably not work for the AI, OH WELL, but hey I did put extensive thought into how to make it theoretically work), and I also recall planning a 4-way game based around a single pseudo-King unit that isn't actually a King but which you can't win the game without using.

(Basically, that scenario involves you being unable to create units--your pseudo-King unit can enslave defeated enemies to create new units, and those units can enslave defeated enemies themselves to create your infrastructure, and each pseudo-King civ would have a different specialty. One with worker actions on military units, one with treating all terrain as roads, one with increased movements, one with better stats, if I recall the division correctly; they were meant to have the aesthetic of the four civs in the Age of Discovery scenario, with the Iroquois-based one being movement, the Inca-based one being terrain as roads, and then between the remaining either the Aztec one as more stats and Mayan one as worker actions, or vice versa.)

What I went to ask yesterday is something applicable to all of them, including my current project.

Basically.

When I play a game, I am always looking to try and top my top score for that game. It can be a vanilla game of Civilization, or it can be a scenario. (Btw I imagine the easiest way to get an unbeatable high score in vanilla conquests scenarios is to save scum as Persia in Rise of Rome on the highest difficulty--avoid war with Rome at all costs, conquer Macedon, conquer Egypt, and you can achieve victory. If Rome captured cities rather than razing them to the ground, Rome would with its Legionary IIIs being produced every turn basically overrun the whole world, but because they do raze cities to the ground they don't have the same landmass that you do. I did most of this once until I got bored with the endeavor because higher difficulties to me aren't harder, they're just more annoying. Since I play for fun, being annoyed = less fun = not worth it which is why if you look at my history of playing on the easiest difficulty you'd think I was a basic bitch baby who can't beat the higher difficulties. It's not that I can't, it's that they're just not fun to try to.)

So every time I play a game, I want to know what my score is--if it's higher or lower than my high score. Which in a normal game, or in any of the basic conquest scenarios that came with the game (unmodified Mesopotamia, unmodified Rise of Rome, unmodified Fall of Rome, unmodified Middle Ages, unmodified Age of Discovery, unmodified Mesoamerica, unmodified Sengoku, unmodified Napoleon, unmodified WWII, I think that's all of them?), you can see in the postgame Hall of Fame.

If you set a new record, it will replace your old record, more or less.

And I love striving for that. It's a little disappointing to know that in a run you felt you did really well in, that you didn't set a high score, and you don't know by how much you missed doing so, but that's not what I wanted to find a workaround for. You might be able to guess what I was wanting.

In custom scenarios, or in the existing scenarios if they are modified in any way, shape, or form...once you reach postgame, that's it. No recording. Outside of the save file. It's as if the game didn't exist at all. It isn't captured in the hall of fame. It isn't something you set a score for. And I searched for any way to find a workaround for this problem, yet I couldn't find any.

So I bit the bullet and created an account on the Civ fanatic forum to actually ask (since that is one of the best sources of information for modding Civ 3 on the internet), as well as asking on Steam. It's only been 24 hours since I asked, but initial results: looks like the reason why I couldn't in my searching find anyone with a way to do it, is because it is impossible for most people to do it.

Not impossible altogether, but nigh-impossible overall, requiring rather than just a small every-day tweak of things, a fundamental alteration to the game's code, more or less. To put this into perspective--you can add sound to the game easily; you can add unique art to the game easily; you can add unique animations to the game easily; you can add units to the game easily; you can adjust a bunch of settings in the game easily, things that vary from scenario to scenario, things that you see change, can be changed.

But some things never change about the game because in order to change them, you would need to fundamentally edit the very core nature of the game. (I'm pretty sure, for instance, that the game having four eras is hard-coded into it. You can make a scenario that makes use of less than four, but there's still going to be four ages. I am pretty sure that you can't make a scenario with more than four ages, without this fundamental change to the game code. The editor only supports four ages.)

And apparently, recording your score in custom/modified scenarios to the Hall of Fame is a change of this nature--thus, why I couldn't find information for it. It's a change that nobody has made because nobody, without incredible difficulty, can change it.
(I got the impression more or less that the order of change was, to put this in perspective, similar to the Majesty mod that involved basically turning Majesty into a separate game--nobody else in the Majesty modding community has been able to figure out how that mod was able to do things nobody else has figured out how to do. The answer I got so far said more or less, 'you can contact this one person who apparently made their mod work with altering the original game coding' basically, which sounds a lot like a similar parallel in concept. That it can be done because someone did do it, but nobody outside of that person knows how it can be done.)

You never know, though, so hopefully, with time, some answers can come in and help me there. I did ask on two sites, so I maintain my hope that with more than 24 hours, that with a week or two, that I'll get better answers that will result it me maybe pulling off something that I have wanted to do for ages upon ages: have custom scenarios be recorded.

On that note, I did notice that for the first time in like two years or so, there's an active modder or two for Majesty, designing scenarios and mods that may be interesting to check out. I'm not quite convinced of them, but it may be worth trying out at some point.

Majesty never stopped being fun for me, it's just that the things I like to do in that game take an absurd amount of time to successfully pull off (for instance, making mages out of Warriors of Discord or similarly ambitious undertakings: get someone to have all their weapons and armor to the maximum level coded into the game, poison their weapon, have every Bazaar item, every marketplace item, and every spell learned that they can learn).

And because they take absurd amounts of time, and I am prone to not coming back to things I start in there, and it's not something I really find fun to spend "an hour on this scenario each day", I've just got better things to spend my time on overall.

But bringing it back to what I promised I would be talking about from the beginning--Riot Games stuff. I'll start with the intro: I finally finished the accursed quests requiring me to play three Ranked games. RANKED games. I said this before and I'll say it again; Riot was out of their bloody minds by making it a 100% requirement with NO other way to fulfill it, by requiring players to play RANKED games to fulfill a quest.

I, justifiably, got flamed in all three games. I am not a Ranked player. My placements list me as Iron III but that's probably because my team hard-carried me to a win in the first game because I have every reason to believe that I am an Iron IV skill level player--and I know that I am that skill level.

Most of the players who are going to try and fulfill the quests are probably filthy casuals like me. Most of the players who care about quests are people who play the game for fun and see the quests as fun things to try for, achievements for rewards. They are not tryhards who play the game to be competitive.

Basically, when it comes to games, there is a fundamental divide between "I play for fun" and "I play to win". These are not mutually exclusive, because someone playing for fun isn't trying to win--they will still try to win, but they aren't really upset if they don't win because their goal was to have fun, not to win. Winning is usually more fun than losing, but it is not a requirement to win to have fun.

And vice-versa is applicable as well. Someone playing to win is trying to have fun. They wouldn't be playing the game if it wasn't fun. But to them, the fun is in the striving to win. For them, the goal of being competitive, of playing seriously, is the goal. Is what they are after. Their fun comes from doing well in the game, not from doing fun in the game. They can get upset if a game doesn't feel fun, but if they are still going to win, not a loss in their book, more or less.

I probably am not adequately enough explaining the "play to win" mindset when it comes to League because when it comes to League I am firmly in the "play for fun" camp. Yes, that's partially because I'm not good enough to play to win, but it also revolves around other factors, like how I got into the game (from a good friend), wanting to hang out, finding it enjoyable, but not something I wanted to take too seriously.

But, my point being: most of the people who I imagine play to try and complete the quests given to them, such as myself, I imagine are in the "play for fun" camp.
Ranked games are, inherent in their nature, the "play to win" camp.
You can't play ranked games for fun without risking eating a ban for your troubles, because ranked games have actual consequences to them. Four other players will be negatively impacted, taking losses they shouldn't have, and even the five players on the enemy team are probably not going to exactly be happy about it. (Eh, depends, but "I want to play the game and win, not be handed a win" isn't that uncommon.)

You can't exactly play Normal games for fun with total impunity, but there is a much greater slack involved. Trolling that is obviously trolling still isn't really appropriate, but playing bad because you are bad, with a build that isn't optimal because you're not an optimal player, isn't something that will get you in trouble the same way it would in ranked games.

I hated that quest with a passion and while I didn't know where to voice this opinion to Riot with it actually being listened to, you can bet I tried. Because it is a terrible idea to force casual players, who deliberately avoid playing Ranked and who don't want to be playing Ranked, to play Ranked.

Yet casual players are, presumably, the majority of the players who try to play the quests to completion, so the quest requiring Ranked games is incredibly alienating. Either they bite the bullet and play Ranked games they really didn't want to, or they bite the bullet and deliberately fail to complete not one, but TWO quests as a consequence. (Because one quest required completing the Ranked Game quest.)

It's just not fun at all. If those players wanted to be playing Ranked, they would already be playing Ranked. Does Riot think that forcing players who normally don't play Ranked, to play Ranked, will get more people to play Ranked? No, it'll just encourage people to quit trying the quests, maybe even quit the game. It's not like people don't know about the existence of Ranked. A quest requiring playing Ranked doesn't raise awareness of Ranked games and it doesn't encourage people to keep playing Ranked games because the people who play Ranked games as a result of the quest, are going to be miserable because of it.

And sure enough that was exactly what I was. I did give my team fair warning each game. The first game we won in spite of me, not because of me. The second game, I'm pretty sure wasn't exclusively my fault, but my jungler flamed me and certainly blamed me for it. (To be fair, was playing Ashe support, and while I have some practice on playing her as support, I haven't mastered her. I figured playing the champion I am comfortable > playing a different champion though.)

Granted, said jungler was tied for me with the highest deaths in the game and had stats not in any way really much better than mine, but the flame wasn't entirely unjustified. Of course, not much I could do in some cases. When I was level 5 I had no ult and when they engage on someone while I am traveling to lane, I can't get to the fight in time so that wasn't on me; when I am out of the enemy team's vision and am flanking from behind, throw my ult at a Yasuo who has no way of seeing the arrow coming and no reason to windwall behind him since my entire team other than me was in front, and yet he somehow windwalled behind him to block the ult, not much I can do about it; I had every reason to believe that ult would connect and via the stun, let my team kill him, and I don't know how he knew to put the windwall there.

Butstill, the fact that I was underperforming for my team that game is undebatable; I was a hindrance to our team's chances of winning.

The third and final game, the one flaming me was my support though similarly to my previous game with the jungler, they had an identical K/D to me (which is to say, incredibly negative) albeit having a couple extra assists. Each game started the same, too. They started friendly, we do well early, can even get first blood, then when we start to lose...flame begins.

And while the fault for the loss cannot be exclusively on me.
It can be mostly on me. So when the flame is justified...not a good experience.

And I hated every moment of it.

​This is NOT what Riot should do to people.

But it's done now.
At last.
So let me talk about something else Riot-related now!
What I originally came to talk about today.
And yesterday, for that matter.
​My TFT girl Vayne.

Vayne was my favorite set one unit, and she was basically unchanged in set two. She was always my carry unit aside from rare instances where it'd be Braum or Ashe or Sejuani or Kayle or Pantheon (because every unit in the Glacial/Noble/Guardian comp could be a carry unit). 

But in the second set.
In spite of her herself being mostly unchanged.
Still having the same ability, still having the Ranger synergy, having a new synergy working similarly to Nobles.

I just...stopped using her.
She is hard to be a lategame carry and for the life of me, I can't make a Ranger comp work, or a Light comp work. They just...I know they can work, I just can't figure out how to make them work.

So I stopped using her.

But on Saturday, almost using her in URF.
Inspired me to run some games with her yesterday.
Vayne has seven-eight items on her which are good--one of them I prefer not to and a second I didn't know worked on her until I looked it up yesterday and with that item specifically working, another item also becomes good on her that in isolation isn't.

The obvious item is the rageblade. Stacks attack speed so that she can proc her passive, and gives AP which boosts it.
Since her synergy doesn't innately give her reliable healing (my main issue with figuring out how to get the light synergy working), gunblade is an obviously good item on her. It heals her and boosts her passive.

A third item which is excellent on her is Rabbadon's Deathcap for the raw boost to her passive's max health shred. (It dealing true damage means nothing reduces it.)

Runaan's Hurricane is also fairly excellent on her, allowing her to hit two targets with her bolts instead of one, giving her some MR, and attack speed, too--I'd shy away from this unless I have no other choice, but it's not a bad item on her, I just think that if you can get the others, they'd be better.

Quicksilver Sash is godly good on her if she has a rageblade. It prevents cc effects on her, meaning nothing except dodging (which frankly I think they should add back into rfc as 'attacks cannot be dodged' since with the removal of the Wild synergy...nothing counters dodge chance) can stop her from stacking bolts, while also giving some MR and also dodge chance. It keeps her alive and in a gain ridiculously heavy in CC (there's no comp in the world that's lategame which doesn't have some form of chain-CC), it is a godsend to have.

The sixth item on her, the last of the original ones I recognized as being decent, was red buff--some armor, some health (which helps for her Light synergy), and prevents her targets from healing. One of the only units in the game who has use for a red buff over a Morello (since I looked it up and apparently Morello doesn't proc on her passive). Now I personally prefer not to use it. Vayne's max health shred should outdo the healing from any heals, and the damage over time shouldn't be relevant because Vayne's meant to shred through health bars on the third attack. Still, I recognize why it is built on her.

The seventh item on her which is good is an item that I didn't think worked on her--but looking it up and testing it out myself, I think it actually does work. That item is the Jeweled Gauntlet. Vayne's max health shred on her third bolt, with it, can crit. Jeweled Gauntlet giving 30% crit was apparently a bug and it was meant to give +20 like other offenssive sparring glove items, so that was fixed, butstill:
25% base chance + 20% = 45% base crit chance.
You might be able to see where this is going.

I don't know how crits work, especially in regards to spells. Say a spell does 100 damage. Base crit damage is listed as 125%. Is that +125% damage, e.g. a spell doing 100 damage deals 225 damage, or does it mean +25%, e.g. a spell doing 100 damage deals +25%? I think that it's the latter, but regardless, you can see where this is going.

With a jeweled gauntlet, building an infinity edge on Vayne turns her damage from strong to absurdly strong. 45 + 25 = 65% base crit (with an easy way to get more), and with Infinity Edge buffing crits...her spells should deal extra damage.

Say her third bolt proc has the base damage of 10% max HP. Critting that would be 22.5% max HP, I think, if my understanding is correct. (Like I said: math on how it works is hard to find and even if it wasn't, I don't have very good understanding of how it works.)

But say your AP items and another AP source (again, you can probably see where this is leading) boosts that to be 20% of max HP.

That would be 50% of max HP on a crit.

Meta-build-wise, Vayne is Light/Ranger as a unit.

...But I had the thought.
"What if Karma boosted Vayne's attack speed and shielded her, and then we used the Lunar synergy on her?"
Vayne, Karma, Thresh, Ivern, Leona as core units, building into one of three synergies.
The first, Light. Aim for Light 6, Vayne + Lucian (without Senna) + ?Yorick? + ?Aatrox? + Soraka (Soraka for sure) + Nasus or Jax, which if you do the math is more than nine units, so replace the Ivern when you can obtain Light 6.

The second, Ranger. Aim for Ranger 6, Vayne + Twitch + Ashe + Kindred + Ezreal + Varus, which has identical math; more than nine units, so replace the Ivern when you can obtain Ranger 6.

The third, originally the build I thought would be least effective of the three, is upon reflection, I think my favorite:
From the core units, build into Mystic 4. Any Mystic 4 combo works, but some are better than others.
Nami has the across-board CC to enemies and ally buffs, not to mention, gives you Ocean. So that is an obvious good one.
Soraka shares Vayne's Light synergy giving you a potential in to Light 3 and her suppression is an excellent way to prevent the entire enemy team from casting spells.
Janna gives a bunch of heals and pushes units away from Vayne--of the three mystics added to Karma, this is probably the least-valuable overall especially if Vayne has a Gunblade, but if Vayne has no internal source of healing, having Janna give it can help save her life.

Master Yi would be an excellent unit to have as a secondary carry, due to his untargetable, self-healing, nature as a frontliner dealing damage, but obviously, he's not someone who buffs Vayne even if he's a smarter unit to have overall. He's probably better than not having Mystic 4 (so if you have him but not one of Janna/Nami/Soraka yet have 2/3 of them, fielding him > fielding Thresh or Ivern, particularly Ivern), but otherwise not the best for this specific comp (I fully recognize  Master Yi is a 5g unit for good reason; I admittedly don't know the units to make him a carry but I know he is a carry for good reason).

The 120 MR is very very clutch for keeping your team alive.

You can see how this comp works, particularly with the crit Vayne.
The Lunar synergy is basically a better version of the Sorcerer 3 synergy--giving +40% AP to the team, including Vayn'e passive. (Which at least at one point was precisely the amount Sorcerer 3 gave. Riot changed the Sorc 3 value a lot, but at one point it was +40%.) What makes it better is that whereas Sorcerer 3 aside from a squishy-shield-reliant Kassadin had no frontline and were squishy and highly spell-reliant...Lunar has no such problem.

With Leona as an exceptionally-tanky frontliner and with no spell-reliance from the synergy, it is much much better. It does have the drawback of taking time to activate, but again: with a bit of a tanky frontline and with the Thresh/Ivern shields, that extra time isn't hard to achieve.

Lunar also boosts crit chance and crit damage--which works with Jeweled Gauntlet. +15% crit chance, times four: +60% crit chance at maximum. You may note that Jeweled Gauntlet, in of itself, provides 45% so this gets you to above 100% for guaranteed crits.
It gives +15% crit damage, times four: +60%. Not as strong as Infinity Edge's 125%, about half as strong in fact, but still strong and by the way...can stack with Infinity Edge.

So say Vayne has Rageblade Jeweled Gauntlet Infinity Edge.
+80% spell power means her bolts do a lot. 13% (T2 Vayne because T3 Vayne's too hard) * 1.8 = 23.4% max HP, base.
Crits dealing + 25 + 125 + 60% extra = +210% of that. That's ~50% of max HP by my estimation, if it works the way that I think it does.

Is that a three-shot in of itself, no, but it is really really strong.

Of course the max AP would be 75 + 75 + 75 + 40% from triple-deathcap + Lunar = 13% * 265% = 34.45% AP if my understanding is correct. (I could be mistaken, but the wiki itself lists a Deathcap as giving 75 AP, so I'm pretty sure I'm not being too liberal with my estimates though it is possible I'm being too conservative and the amount is higher, whereas in the above it was possible I was too liberal and not conservative enough.)

So that's more or less what I aimed for.

It's not easy to pull off partially.
Getting one of the item combos isn't too hard overall.
But I never quite got it to work the way I wanted it to--I did get really really close, tho, multiple times, and was satisfied with that. 

Still!
Is immensely fun, not hard to do, and preforms pretty well overall.
So my girl Vayne is back!
It just took forgoing her synergies in favor of supporting her through other whole-team synergies and boosting her and shielding her.

​Incredibly off-meta, but hey, it allows my girl Vayne in TFT to destroy and I am happy with that.

Yesterday, I played AR URF--and of all the champions I could have gotten, I got Ashe!
Mind you, I couldn't run my normal Ashe build--manaflow band and presence of mind are disabled on the map, presumably due to you not using mana. This would present a problem since I use them for their maximum mana boost capabilities, if not for the fact that the Manamune is also disabled in that gamemode.

There's three possible explanations for that.
1: Per above, Riot thinks of it as a mana item, and thus, useless. (Disappointing if true.)
2: Because mana isn't used, they decided it was worthless. (This shouldn't be true, because even manaless champions can charge a manamune. No, really. You'd think, surely, they couldn't--they don't have mana, so they never expend mana! Except as part of a stupid-ass quest, I was required to play a Garen game...where I ended up doing precisely that, stacking the manamune, in spite of him being a manaless champion.)
3: Most likely, they deemed it just far far far too OP because it would be precisely that.

Notably, Ionian Boots were also disabled which is disappointing because I still had Transcendence and any items would give me bonus damage if they had CDR. Presumably disabled for whichever of the two above is the reason for the Manamune disabled. Either Riot thought it worthless (it's not), or they realized it wasn't and thought it the opposite, too strong to include.

Still built most of the items from the build anyway due to them being tanky items which I needed that had cdr as well for damage, though ultimately, it ended up not mattering much--we had a player decided to jungle in URF. I had the misfortune of, thanks to this, being in a 1v2 for pretty much the entire game.

Now, granted. It ended up working out. Because we had a jungler, mid was 2v1; bot was 3v2.
This gave our team a huge lead to snowball the game.
But it also meant that there was no way for me to make use of the fact that I got on my half-trick champion because even on URF it doesn't matter if I'm playing on Ashe, I'm not going to win a 1v2 until much much later, IF I get fed, and thanks to the 1v2 I never got fed.

Disappointing, but when you have a 1v2, not much you can do. I also fared fairly well given that it was a 1v2. I still had a negative K/DA because if I had no summs and no ult, I had no way of surviving the MF-Blitz combo if it connected, but every time I had any summoner spells and/or my ult up, I could survive--sometimes, even thrive!

Still gave them first brick and over half a dozen kills and was way behind in levels items and such.

But in spite of clearly losing, I lost softly enough for my team to still win.
The rate the enemy team was winning top, was lower than the rate at which my team was winning bot/mid. Because the enemy team couldn't capitalize on their lead on top because while they had a lead it wasn't an insurmountable one, whereas my team could capitalize on their lead bot because their lead there was insurmountable, I can't really complain.

I was, in a word, a sacrificial lamb. I did poorly so that the rest of my team would not; I attracted sufficient enough attention that the enemy team didn't realize what was happening elsewhere until it was too late.

The game before that (where someone dodged, alas), I got Vayne--which made me think about her in TFT.
I actually played a few games using her today, but not the meta builds!
​I'll talk about them tomorrow, though, because I waited too long to make this blog and I am tired enough that I should be going to bed now.

...In fact I was planning on it already but I realized I didn't make the blog entry yet.
Yesterday in my mega-blog post one thing which I neglected to mention--Phyrra and Cyrus continues to be something I work on. A while back, don't think I mentioned it, but I added something to Bard's character that made perfect sense and made a particular storyline feel more nuanced and natural (albeit having one necessary adjustment earlier in the story to accommodate for it).

Very, very recently, I did similar for Clara, adding a significant section to her previously-rather-underdeveloped (considering her status as a childhood friend of Phyrra and Cyrus) backstory which helps increase her role in the story ever so slightly, fleshing out an already-planned moment.

So Phyrra and Cyrus is not a project I have forgotten about.

I also did today lay the groundwork of the simplified expanded Rise of Rome scenario, too, but that blog can wait.

"...Wait, didn't you say that yesterday?"
Yeah funny how that works out.
Turns out shortly after my blog entry, we lost it again! For almost a full 24 hours. Fun times.
Now I did try to sleep sleep sleep the troubles away and now that my power is back, hopefully for good, I have a ton of catchup work to do, but there were plenty of eventful things I think are worth talking about.

Yesterday, my family made the decision to drive to Denny's for dinner--we had no food prepared and no way of preparing food with the power out, no generator, nothing. On the drive there, my mother and my sister were both rather alarmed by my father's haphazard driving; his carelessness made them rather...on edge.

And while I have utterly desensitized myself to thoughts of various different catastrophes by playing the scenarios out in my head (I have talked about this before on my blog, about a month ago, a little bit more if I recall correctly, so you can find me talking about it there--normally, I would be all too happy to talk about it again but this blog is going to cover a ton of things which leave me with a need to rush the rest of the subjects).

I found myself sharing similar sentiments.
Which is rather surprising.

Because you know that headspace I've been in? The rather negative one where I haven't had a reason to live? I'm still in it and even now to some extent am still feeling it.

And yet.
My mind was filled with thoughts of.

"I don't want to die."
I had an overwhelmingly strong urge to live. My will to live is still there. I don't know what's driving this strong power, I don't know what the basis of it is, I don't know where it comes from. But it was most definitively, positively, overwhelmingly there.

I was sharing my sister and mother's concern, because I didn't want to die.
I don't know why I didn't want to die.
I still haven't figured it out.
But I don't want to die.
And in fact, to the quite opposite: I am afraid to die. It's terrifying me.
I haven't a clue why.
I still don't know why I am alive.
I still don't have a reason to live for.

You'd think that in order for me to have this strong, overwhelming urge to live, I would have some sort of motivating reason, underlying justification for not wanting to die.

But if it's there, I haven't found it yet.
In spite of me not having a reason to live.
In spite of me being in that negative headspace.
Of thinking.
"The world might just be better off if I were not in it", more or less.
That terrible headspace I blogged about less than a week ago, that I never left and am still in it even in this very second.

​That doesn't change that the feeling was there, that fear of death and very strong desire to never let it pass, as long as I have any ability whatsoever to fight against it. (Mind you, realistically speaking, this is a bit morbid and grim, but I don't expect to live to an old age. The two most likely causes of death would be either in a car accident or more likely, due to something like cancer from not taking good care of myself, not checking in with doctors regularly, and the doctors probably not searching for the signs of the diseases that would kill me until it's too late. If I did get, sayyy, skin cancer, and the doctors didn't notice it until it was stage four and had metastasized to multiple organs in my body...I'd be pretty much a goner in no time flat. If that happens, not much I can do about it, but you bet that I'd still try to do something.)

And knowing that deep down.
I very much am fighting to stay alive.
Even if I don't know why I am fighting to stay alive.
The fact that the fight is there is, in of itself, empowering.

It's a little disappointing, not knowing why I want to live.
But I do know that I want to live.
I haven't discovered the reason why I want to stay alive, so I need to keep searching for a reason to keep living, but knowing that I want to live is, in of itself, just that tidbit, enough to keep me afloat for as long as I remember it. (Which is one reason I'm writing this blog, mind you! It'll make it easier for me to remember the feeling that was there, even if I don't know what the feeling is for or about, so that I don't forget.)

That was one thing which happened during the outage.
There were a couple of extra things as well, though.
One thing was working on a webcomic project which has many, many, of the same themes as The Descended does, with a similar core cast size (four protagonists), following a 'villain' in his rise to power, that has a notable beginning and end, in a Fantasy setting (albeit an Urban Fantasy setting of sorts; religious notes about it but not a lot of actual nonhumans otherwise), which I wanted to blog about ages ago yet never got around to it.

In fact.

If you check my December blog entries, at or after December 13th of last year (that is to say, December 13th, 2019 or so), you'll keep seeing me refer to "I really need to blog about this!", and then I never did because I am a moron about that sort of thing.

Well, blog entry made! Or, started, anyway. Still need to finish it.

Basically, I don't know if any blog readers will remember it, but around December 13th, I had mentioned that there was an idea for a webcomic that I really really liked and which was really really fun, but which I didn't have the skills to pull off. The webcomic, Freakshow High, remains something that I cannot make for a vast majority of reasons; I would need a co-writer who would take my basic ideas for the setting to come up with characters and plots which I would collaborate with them on.

Traditionally, I have never been involved in a collaboration which went well. Admittedly, though, that was me working on other peoples' brainchilds, rather than someone who shares my ambition and can see what I am going for, fleshing out my concepts to make something of their own that I just so happen to also have credit for. Butstill, I imagine that's a bit of a tough ask.

How do you get someone to be a co-writer for a webcomic by telling them, "take this basic idea and then make it so that I can make it"? I mean, I think that some collaborative efforts actually have worked out from similar, but the question is could I do that? I'm...not so convinced. Even if I could, the point remains, by myself, I wouldn't be able to make it in any world no matter what; I'd need help, help of a specific kind.

However.

Freakshow High did revive the artist within me.
And more than that--the worldbuilding narrative-writer within me. (Which I think is reflected in my dreams. The last two nights, my dreams have been amazing, cinematic, masterpieces, beautiful, fluent, works of art with fleshed out characters and deep, intricate plotlines and amazing worlds with simply stunning visuals, that I was really bummed out to wake up from because I knew that my awake mind couldn't continue their plots and that I wouldn't get the stories back if I went to sleep so they were killed mid-project, essentially.)

I did a 5-minute drawing of the protagonist from that series, Hey You.
It was done in actually closer to three. In ink. With no reference images. And it was better than most drawings I've made in pencil, with no time limit, using reference images. Was it perfect, no, there were obvious flaws born of me improvising on the spot. But for what it was, it was the best drawing I've ever done...

...Until I drew the Dean of Freakshow High, Dean Master Satan Hercure, in a similar timeframe. I called it a 5-minute doodle concept sketch, but it was done in three, and it would be passable as being in an actual webcomic page.

I did better than that, too.

For the first time in years.

I designed a webcomic logo to apply to the webcomic. Not the most inventive of logos (Freakshow High, underlined by bull horns that surround the text, with flames on top of it), but still an actual well and true proper logo for a webcomic, even knowing that it's for a webcomic that I'll never actually be able to make on my own.

And it goes further.
That worldbuilding I said I hadn't done and was feeling uninspired to do?
That didn't last!
I created a list, incomplete, of attendees to Freakshow High, with details about them.

Demons are among the 'infernal' attendees, who more or less feed off of energies radiating from their source of specialty, particularly emotions. Each demon has a unique specialty (though these are usually genetic, with a clan of demons sharing their specialty), but can still sustain themselves off of other methods. Think a lot like Cubii as portrayed in Dan and Mab--they are usually attached to an emotion (mostly negative ones), and feed from the energy radiating from it.

They may occasionally gain abilities pertaining to their primary source of sustenance, which can include things such as minor shapeshifting or invisibility among others.

Devils who the Dean is among, are among the 'infernal' attendees, and are not to be confused with Demons. They more or less get their energy from contracts, sustaining themselves from bargains, both written and spoken. This is neither inherently nefarious nor inherently benign. They are obligated to fulfill the terms of these deals for their duration, but have the power to terminate any deal they want to at any time. They also have very loose definitions, open to interpretation, on what a deal is. (They can call things deals which weren't intended as deals, with some creativity, and with specific interpretation of wording, get away with breaking the spirit of a deal in favor of rules lawyering the wording.)

They have reasonably decent shapeshifting abilities.

Succubii who should not be confused with Incubii and should not be confused with Devils or Demons, are among the 'infernal' attendees. They are, technically speaking, all hermaphrodites, who in spite of being hermaphrodites do true to what you'd expect, usually appear female. They do indeed feed off of the type of energy you'd expect, love energy, most potently from sex, but they can recharge themselves simply by hanging around people who have a bond of any form of love--familial, romantic, platonic.

They get the most energy from having sex with someone and more or less 'draining' them, but they can sustain themselves just passively by being around strong bonds. Due to having the same resource pool as Incubii, they are bitter rivals with Incubii by and large, absolutely loathe being compared to them, will probably murder you if you make the mistake or even if not give you a rather lengthy lecture on the differences between them.

To a lesser extent, this also applies to Demons. Most demons can partially sustain themselves off of the Succubii territory resources, and some demons specifically require it as their unique specialty, but Succubii are a different species altogether.

Incubii who should not be confused with Succubii and should not be confused with Devils or Demons, are also among the 'infernal' attendees, and much to the chagrin of Incubii and Succubii everywhere, you could take the paragraphs above about the Succubii and apply them to the Incubii--they are, technically, hermaphrodites, who in spite of being hermaphrodites usually appear male. They feed off of love energy, are bitter rivals with Incubii as a result, loathe being compared to them, would probably murder you for doing so or at least give a rather lengthy lecture on the differences between the two, and these differences to a lesser extent apply to them and Demons.

Imps are among the 'infernal' attendees, who're anywhere from 25-75% the height of an average human. At their tallest, they just look like a shorter human; at their shortest, they are like the size of a dog or big cat. They make up for this by having limited illusions and shapeshifting capabilities, which allow them to, should they so choose to, appear normal size, something aided by their wings naturally supporting flight.

Fairies are basically more insectoid Imps. About the same height, with the same illusionary and shapeshifting powers, who have wings that allow them to fly.

The Fairfolk are much as you'd expect the Fae to be: basically alien in thought process, but incredibly attuned to the world otherwise. They have unparalleled hearing and sight, which non-Fairfolk suspect is the reason they appear to be crazy (because they see and hear things others do not, and can't turn this off), and like the vast majority of attendees to Freakshow High, have no limited lifespan, accumulating knowledge and also quirks as time passes and they get bored, usually choosing to obsess with something. 

Gorgons can paralyze people with eye contact--note that this is an activated power, not something that always applies at all times. Their hair is indeed snakes, but these snakes can take on the appearance of dreadlocks and can be cut to any length the gorgon wants their hair to be. These snakes are prehensile so long as they are in snake (not human) form, allowing gorgons to manipulate objects using their hair.

Lamia are basically the land-equivalent of the merfolk: they are basically anthropomorphic snakes. Think like a centaur but instead of the bottom half being a horse, it's instead a snake. However. At puberty, lamia's tails will split in two, allowing them the option of either slithering, or walking on two 'legs'. (Yes this is blatantly ripped from One Piece, I thought that was incredibly neat, deal with it.)

Lizardfolk are pretty much what you'd expect; anthropomorphic lizards of various kind.

Dragons are, well...exactly what you'd picture a western dragon to be. Gigantic creatures, winged, scaled, four legs, tail, claws, teeth, with a big breath weapon. They are inherently master level shapeshifters, though, and almost always take far, far, more reasonably-sized shapes, usually humanoid. They are some of the strongest creatures in existence and do indeed have a taste for greed, but they are not invincible and do lay eggs unless they maintain their shapeshifted form 100% of the time, so they almost never appear in their natural forms.

Merfolk are also pretty self-explanatory, with the add-on I mentioned ripped from One Piece: they are amphibious, able to breath both air and in water, are the best swimmers bar none in the water, and at puberty their tail splits in two allowing for them to walk on land rather comfortably while still maintaining their ability to swim.

Fishfolk are not Merfolk; they are basically anthropomorphic fishes. Whereas Merfolk can vaguely be thought of as terms of literally half-man, half-fish a la Centaurs being half-man, half-horse, Merfolk are instead just hybridizing human and fish features throughout their whole body. It's a little cheap to do especially given what I already stole, but again, you can more or less just look at One Piece's depiction of Fishmen to see what I am getting at here.

Insectoids are to insects what Fishfolk are to fish, humanoid versions of various different insects.

Werebeasts are pretty self-explanatory: humans who have the ability to transform into a different, usually mammalian, creature, in various different forms: full transformation (fully become the creature), hybrid form, and partial transformation (where they're mostly human but have a few features accentuating them that come from the creature they are a werebeast of).

The most common of these by far is the werewolf, but there are plenty of others like werecats as well. You can indeed be either born as one or gain it as an infection; the infection can only be transmitted on a full moon, and there is a slight difference between those born werebeasts and those who're infected; those born have full control over their transformation from birth and are not obligated to transform during the full moon, whereas those infected need to learn how to control their transformations yet no matter how much control they gain they are always going to be in either their hybrid or full-beast forms on the full moon.

Vampires are pretty self-explanatory as well. No, they don't fry in sunlight, but the sun does weaken them. They're pale in complexion. They drink blood; this doesn't need to kill the target. They can be transformed or exist from birth; transforming requires draining someone then giving them blood when they are on the brink of death. They don't explode when impaled by a stake, but leaving a stake in their heart will paralyze them and put to halt their regenerative capacities; long enough will kill them.

I'm not sure on what abilities they have for sure. Do they have hypnosis, shapeshifting, turning into a mist, etc. powers or not, more or less, haven't decided that yet, but they are more or less your standard fare for vampires who aren't ridiculously weak and yet also aren't ridiculously brokenly strong, either. Average run of the mill vampires pretty much, who don't have stupid quirks (they're not compelled to count, repelled by holy water, do not require invitations, can cross running water, are unaffected by crosses, you get the idea), but don't have dominance either.

Witches are a separate species from humans, technically, but for all intents and purposes, are basically just "humans who can use magic". This magic is genetically passed on from parent to child no matter what (general rule of thumb: almost every single attendee of Freakshow High is fertile and capable of having children with almost any other attendee of Freakshow High, which means that yes, you can have someone who has anywhere from 2-20 species in their lineage although it should be noted that you're not going to have best-of-all from this, you'll basically inherit one or two and then the rest basically don't exist aside from having a small chance your descendants manifest them, think dominant versus recessive in that you'll have a few dominant with most recessive), and on every rare once and a while, can appear in someone who previously lacked it.

They are disproportionately female, but not inherently so. (Usually any witch who randomly gains powers in spite of lacking a lineage of it will indeed be female though.) There's plenty of male witches, but they still call themselves witches in spite of that term usually having a female connotation to it.

Their magic is currently not well-defined, though what I have in mind is more or less, "very very versatile and capable of a lot, but still having set rules to follow which make it not capable of anything, with limitations to what is possible", I just didn't put in the actual work yet to set said limits and such.

Ghouls are creatures that are 'cursed', more or less a generic term that applies to many types of things. A wendigo would be a type of ghoul, for instance, due to the curse of consuming flesh until passing it on. These curses can be of numerous different natures. Common curses that create ghouls originate from Witches, but they can be from plenty of other sources. As long as they retain enough autonomy to function in the supernatural society, however, they are more than free to attend Freakshow High and work towards whatever goals they have. (Some curses can be ended, others are eternal.)

Zombies are not the infectious type--they are, specifically, people who were raised by the voodoo magic of a witch. This applies to all zombies, but normally, most zombies are automatons that have no free will, give no thought, are basically raised creatures that are slaves to the one who created them to do their bidding and nothing but their bidding. However, it is a not-too-uncommon happenstance where zombies gain sentience and with it, a sense of free will. They think, they are no longer mindless, they no longer are slaves, though they may remain servants, they just aren't nothing but a body. They have a mind and thus are entitled to everything which comes with it.

In this sense, zombies are technically speaking a very specific form of construct, but they are classified differently because constructs weren't actual people before gaining sentience whereas zombies were. The personalities zombies gain may or may not reflect who they were before. They may or may not have memories of who they were before.

Constructs are magically-created golems that have somehow gained sentience. Whereas golems are mindless automatons that have, of sorts, 'programming' that they follow, constructs can think, have free will, and are thus entitled to everything that comes with it.

The quintessential example of a construct would be Frankenstein's Monster (though depending on how much of Frankenstein's monster is nuts and bolts and how much is flesh he probably qualifies more as a zombie); that is in a nutshell what a construct would be. Something artificially constructed that has gained a will of its own.

Ectoplasmic creatures, which I am calling 'ethereal', are also numerous in attendance.

Ghosts are the most famous of the 'ethereal' species, due to more or less being the ones who overall have the best abilities. Like all ethereal species, most ghosts are not born, but while they have incredibly reduced fertility, they are not actually sterile, so it is possible for an ethereal creature to be born as an ethereal creature rather than simply randomly existing by happenstance.

They have optional invisibility which they can trigger at will. Like all ethereal creatures, they can fly--and of the ethereal creatures, by shifting their legs into a ghostly tail, they can achieve the fastest flight speed of any ethereal creature, and are basically to flight what merfolk are to water.

Wraiths are ethereal creatures who have the ability to teleport. In this sense, they can rival ghosts in speed in flight, by repeatedly teleporting over and over again, but while they can shift from one location to another instantly, this is not something they can spam indefinitely. (They can do it in rapidfire short-term, and there's no hard-limit to what they can do, but they do get winded the more they use it.)

Banshees are ethereal creatures who more or less have the ability to shout really really loudly and painfully. But it's a little more complicated than that; they basically have mastery of sound of all sorts. They can mute sounds that would normally be made, or crank up sounds that would normally be inaudible. They can't travel at the speed of sound, but they can otherwise fully manipulate sound in ways that make them basically unparalleled masters of sound.

People know them as shouting really loudly and painfully though because while Banshees are capable of really complex, nuanced uses of their power...inherent in being a Banshee is basically an innate sense of drama queen (note that there's a dead even split between male and female banshees), an inherent hamminess, laziness, desire to play things up, and the like, and also an utter lack of awareness to how they are perceived by others, who think that their loud screeches are 'true art' and that the people who cover their ears are haters that don't understand, more or less.

​Phantoms are ethereal creatures who have the ability to phase through matter. This is an optional ability. Other ethereal creatures are still very much physical, which is something you might not expect. And all ethereal creatures thus have the ability to interact with objects (which is why I didn't add poltergeists to the list of ethereal creatures originally, though I have since reconsidered), and be interacted with.

Phantoms can optionally disable this interaction and optionally pass through walls and such.

Specters are unique among ethereal creatures as having the ability to shapeshift. They can choose what form they appear as, which makes them one of the stronger ectoplasmal creatures since they can fly and more or less choose what mass and shape they have, which can have a number of rather useful effects, even allowing them to somewhat mimic the powers of other ethereal creatures. (Take on a form small enough to pass through a wall if the wall has a crack in it, for instance, or accelerate themselves by physics, and so on and so forth.)

Poltergeists were originally not in the list because all ethereal creatures can interact with objects, but I decided to add them in with them being unique among ethereal creatures as being able to do this from a range with them having telekinetic powers whereas other ectoplasmal creatures require touch.

Bigfolk are basically your Yetis, Bigfoots, Sasquatches, and such.

Sirens are similar to Banshees in being masters of musical noise, but with more of a pleasant take on it and also being more seductive, with their sounds inherently containing hypnosis to them.

Among the attendees would also be a word that I imagine exists and I could find but was too lazy to for this blog because this is a massive tangent from my true blog entry, involving a catch-all term for Satyrs, Centaurs, and Minotaurs.

I also included from Greek Mythology Harpies, Chimeras, and Sphinxes (who would also take on the Egyptian mythology there as well as the Greek one), with the intention of adding more similar with research.

I also added in Ratmen, anthropomorphic rats, and Avians, anthropomorphic birds (aka birdfolk).

One classification I also added was something I wanted to be distinctly separate from Witches, Necromancers, who more or less are masters of the dead, having a high attunement to ethereal creatures, can raise the dead, and perform some low-level magics separate from Witch magic that revolve around various aspects of humans specifically.

And that's a list I expected to be incomplete.
It's all I have.
But it's something I made on December 11th with a little added on December 13th (though for this blog I did a little bit of on-the-spot decision making, namely, including Poltergeists).

I did far more than make the attendees though.

I did an estimation of the size of the school, somewhere in the range of 200-500 students.
Given that number, I estimated that there'd be around 15-30 teachers and probably 20-60 total faculty (since not all faculty would be teachers though there would of course be people with multiple jobs).

I named the town the school of Freakshow High is in, and modeled it as being a fairly isolated town-city: not small enough to be a town, but small enough that when most people think of a 'city', they're going to think more populous than what this is. (To put this into perspective, probably about the size of Snohomish or Monroe here in the state of Washington. Not entirely rural, but also not exactly a metropolis. No skyscrapers, but a fair amount of industrialization yet enough undeveloped land that there's plenty of trees and the like around.)

The school is in Edenville, and I even gave Freakshow High its sports teams' names: the Edenville Devilsnakes.
I think that the size of a small city-town is somewhere in the range of 2000-10,000 though I admit I would need to research this a bit. (Not exactly sure where but it's not a big enough deal for me to focus on.)

I have character bios on Hey You and the Dean, a fair idea of Hey You's background and where they came from, the like. A ton of work I put in.

And yet in spite of all that, it is a project I will never make because I would need help to make it.

...So what was all of that build-up for?

...Because on December 13th, sharing a sheet of work scrapbook paper that the first half contained the additions for Freakshow High.

...Was a webcomic project that I could​ do on my own.

This is a long, long blog post, so, uhh...lemme pull it back and remind you of exactly what I was on about since I realize we went on the longest tangent ever. Go way back to the, "One thing was working on a webcomic project which has many, many, of the same themes as The Descended does, with a similar core cast size (four protagonists), following a 'villain' in his rise to power, that has a notable beginning and end, in a Fantasy setting (albeit an Urban Fantasy setting of sorts; religious notes about it but not a lot of actual nonhumans otherwise), which I wanted to blog about ages ago yet never got around to it.", section of this blog entry.

That project is what I actually set out to talk about.
I can't make Freakshow High on my own.
But if I so chose to. (I probably won't, but I have the choice that I could.)
I could make this new project.

​This new project has the first chapter more or less mapped out. It has a set beginning, end, and various middle parts set out. I know what I want to do with it if I were to do it and I know how I would do it, more or less.
I have the main characters modeled out as well as the three other demons in the setting. (The minions of the three other demons, the later lesser followers of the titular demon, the lesser followers of the three other demons, the followers of more holy divine powers, the lesser followers of more divine holy powers, and random people who aren't followers of anyone? Yeah I have absolutely none of them modeled out.)

Which is to say, the most important characters, I know what they look like more or less and know their personalities in a nutshell.

I have done rather extensive worldbuilding and can talk about every aspect of the world; it's a fairly simple world to pull off easily enough. It's neat, it's beautiful, but also fairly simple to grasp once you get into it, just get a few of the basic bases down and you can follow along rather freely. 

And like Freakshow High, I did more work than that.
I made a really really cool logo for it that I can draw repeatedly and easily because while simple, it is easily replicable. (It is probably not a very original logo concept, but it is still something I took time to design which I feel like I put my own spin on that makes it a signature of my webcomic.)

I even made the webcomic's slogan too.

During the outage, I went one step further and drew the cat in the series, too. Mind you--I did so in about three to four minutes, with zero reference images (this was at Denny's so no kitties to use) and zero erasing. I drew a cat in five minutes with zero references and in spite of that, it actually looks passable as being a cat. 

The only reason I didn't draw more was due to lacking time, usually being busy with other things.

But all of the pieces to make the webcomic are there if I were to so choose.

That project is one which I'm not sure I want to mention by name, but ehhhh...sure, I'll risk listing its name; it's Bazu's Fourthsworne.

To keep a long long story short:
There are four rulers of Hell, the Foursworne, and Bazu the Broken (full name, Bazu Fourthsworne, the Fourth Foursworn) is the weakest of them. (He is associated with snakes and the color yellow.) He was UnPersoned by the first foursworn, trapped to rule the smallest section of Hell and with no presence on earth and no followers and no means of manifesting.

The story follows his rise to power after he is, through a sheer stroke of luck, manifested by pure happenstance in a ritual that had every reason to not go right but somehow actually did go right. (It was deliberately written wrong as to sabotage any efforts to make it successful, but by a one in trillion chance occurrence, managed to fulfill the conditions that had been left out.)

The main characters aside from him (this contains first-episode spoilers by the way):
Creed, his summoned Avatar. Creed has four forms: possessing the cat, possessing the cat but transformed into a humanoid form (that of a little boy), using the cat as a way of manifesting an incomplete form (very loosely modeled off of Ryoma Hoshi from Danganronpa V3), and a fully manifested complete form where he is the will of Bazu incarnate.

Adam Caine, the person who did the summoning, becomes his head follower, basically what you'd get if you combined the Pope with a King in that he has almost absolute authority over Bazu's domain (which, as noted, at the beginning of the story...is nothing, but Bazu makes it clear that as he gains power, so too will Adam), second only to Bazu himself.

Lilith Edenson, one of the people present at the summoning, becomes a servant of Bazu by making a contract with him. During the summoning process, Adam killed his sister--Lilith, in love with her, was very much Not Okay with this. Contracts with a demon can be broken down into more or less trivial (the demon does something and in exchange the servant does a single task for the demon and is then free), difficult (the demon does something hard to accomplish and in exchange the servant has lifelong servitude, but is free once they die), or impossible (the demon, via the contract, accomplishes something that shouldn't be possible for the demon, in exchange for the person making the contract becoming an eternal servant, damned to forever be the slave of the demon), to more or less keep the long story short.
Reviving Adam's sister, whose death was integral to the success of the ritual, was an impossible feat, which via the contract, was achieved, but as a consequence, Lilith has become an eternal servant of Bazu.

And the actual protagonist of the story (because Bazu is more of the deutagonist), the one whose perspective the majority of the story is told through:
Evelyn Caine, preferring Eevee (not Eve), is the sister of Adam Caine and more or less FWB with Lilith. (Lilith is a lesbian, Eevee is pan, Lilith's love for Eevee is stronger than Eevee's love for Lilith but they have communicated their feelings. Eevee does love Lilith, just...not as much as Lilith loves Eevee, and Lilith has accepted this and is okay with the status of their relationship since both Eevee and Lilith are happy with it.)

Since Adam, her brother, becomes basically a lord of the damned helping Bazu accomplish his will in exchange for becoming more powerful, and Lilith her sort-of-lover is eternally indebted to Bazu to always serve his will, she more or less tags along with the group of them.

She is heavily a deadpan snarker, will heavily riff on Bazu, has a low opinion of him, will insult him, and so on and so forth. For his part, Bazu considers her expendable and will often trick her into doing things that are far more dangerous than they may seem, to further his own ends, and has no qualms of letting her die again and no intention of reviving her a second time should she die again. He demonstrates, both with his actions and his words, that she is essentially cannon fodder for him, a useful tool, but not an actual asset.

She doesn't really have a reason to help Bazu but more or less nonchalantly tags along and inevitably ends up helping him anyway. Sometimes by choice, sometimes to help Adam (she is his sister so she does care for him), sometimes to help Lilith (she does care about Lilith more than she cares about a friend), but often just because Bazu manipulated things that way.

Because Bazu is, specifically, the Demon of Charisma and is the most charismatic bastard around. Not the smartest, not the strongest, but his charm is why he was basically removed from the mortal realm; he was too much of a threat if allowed to roam free...

...And yet, the story follows precisely what happens after he does exactly that.
​From Eevee's viewpoint, by and large.

I love the project and I like it a lot.
I can make it, too.
Will I?
Ehhh...not sure.
But it's primed and ready for me if I ever decided to.

So what else?
I kinda have a growing urge to mod Civilization III again.
I don't want to work on the Across the Ages project--that was a bit too cumbersome. I do like what I was doing with it, but it just was something that had too many issues that I don't think someone of my skill level could work out.

Instead, I wanted to work on a more toned-down attempt at a modified version of the Rise of Rome scenario.
My first modified Rise of Rome scenario was my first, and grandest, venture into modding Civ 3 stuff.
It had a ton of stuff done but was atrocious overall and I basically made it ridiculously easy mode regardless of who I was playing on, adding everything and the kitchen sink to it.

This toned-down version would have a few modifications that would risk pushing me into that territory, but which with luck I'd be fine with.
The basic idea, 7/8 playable, Egypt still on the decline, but with each civilization having specific traits of theirs emphasized and played up. 
I'd remove pollution as much as is possible (this is just a quality of life improvement), add in Wool in locations as close to the Medieval scenario as is possible and no other locations (which would actually make it difficult to achieve for half the civs, which is a good thing!), turn silver/gold into resources, add in the wonders from Mesopotamia that aren't included, two outposts for Rome to allow for contacting the Celts and Goths (one in England, one in approximately Germany near the rivers there) with one unit on them, an extra Carthago Novo unit for Carthage as compensation, an outpost for Persia to allow first-turn contact with Scythia and similarly an extra Macedon unit as compensation, and then the draw to the scenario:

The units.
Goths would have a focus on raw offense, forgoing defense but having offense rivaling or even exceeding even Roman units.

Celts would have movement speed, traveling extra distance. Their units would have bog-standard attack/defense.

Carthage would have units that take less shields to produce, but require more resources to make, emphasizing their cheap mercenary nature. These units would be loosely equal to normal units, but some stronger and others weaker.

The Scythians would have units that treat all terrain as roads, but no extra movement speed, to differentiate their units from the Celtic units. Their units would have bog-standard attack/defense.

Rome would have their units be able to use all worker actions, have the strongest overall units in offense/defense (including a defensive horseman that'd be able to match their citizens), but pay for it in having those units be more expensive overall in terms of shields.

Egypt would have unique units, but have all of them be weaker than units from other civs, to represent their 'on the decline' nature.

The Greeks would have amphibious warriors/swordsmen (who would have stats equal to other swordsmen otherwise) and be self-balanced against the Persians for their spearmen to be loosely equivalent to the Persian swordsmen with Persian units having higher offense and lower defense and Macedonian units being equal in both.
Their units would be stronger than Carthage, but weaker than Rome.

I wouldn't touch things otherwise for risk of turning things too complex and ruining the simple idea as it is now.
Now, admittedly--there would still be about 75 units in the scenario, but that wouldn't be "75 units plus the ones already in there", it would be "75 units including the ones already in there".
Maybe bump it up to 80 when you add in leaders, armies, gallies, and workers.

But I am pretty sure a total of 80 units in the game or thereabouts, is not more than most scenarios.
I'd have to double-check to be sure, but I feel like if it's not actually much more than is in most scenarios, no real harm in striving for it.

It feels incredibly doable, I'd just need to do it.
Hmm, what else...I think that beyond that, it's just 'catching up' stuff.
I need to play a few TFT games to get the quest there.
I have eight days to play two RANKED (yes, RANKED) games of League, and to also play one of Garen, Jax, Draven, or Leona. (Sadly, I only own Garen of them. The one I'd least one to play.)
ARURF is life and I want to test if my build with a mana champion works on ARUF, where cooldowns are at 80% and every item is thus over the CDR limit. But also mostly to see if a manamune can transform into the muramana in ARURF.

I have obligations that I am days late to attending to, and these once I finally finish this blog entry (I think I've been writing this blog for an upwards of six hours?), those are going to be what I probably focus on.

I have a vod to watch and multiple videos to watch to catch up on. Probably about 12-24 in total. Most of them ~10 minutes but at least four of them are longer.

​Busy, busy times.

Surprisingly.
I suppose I should talk about League--Riot is killing crit-based builds by nerfing Stormrazor (it didn't need the nerf, it was already a situational item) and on top of nerfing it, nerfing every crit cloak item--if Zeal maintains the 25% crit, this will help kill Stormrazor, Infinity Edge, and Essence Reaver as items because it'll mean that you'd need more than four crit items but less than five to get 100% crit. 

Mind you, I don't really care about the killing Stormrazor/Infinity Edge nerfs as I don't use them, but it would be upsetting if Essence Reaver, the staple item of adcs everywhere, got a nerf, during a season where adcs are already a joke. In season 10, adcs are basically "in the teamfight, maybe they clean up and deal damage", basically acting as a second support to mop up the mess.

Zoning work, waveclear work, objective pressure, but in terms of making a difference in the fight...they are pretty much useless.

And that's not just me in my Iron skill level saying that, and it's not just me on Ashe a utility adc saying that.

It's literally every level, even Challenger, where this applies. And even in competitive games from what it seems like. It feels like right now it's "pick Aphelios, or let the adc be useless almost all game long", with Miss Fortune being the closest adc they've got to a damage-dealer and even she is being out-damaged by the midlaner, toplaner, sometimes even the jungler.

And if you look, unless the players go out of their way to get the adc fed (and sometimes even then!), that continues across most game levels. The toplaner/midlaner in tandem with the jungler, deal most of the damage, take most of the objectives, are most important in teamfights, make the difference in a win or loss.

That being said--on the bright side, Aphelios is set to receive much, much needed nerfs, finally. Frozen Heart, an item in my current Ashe build, is set to receive a buff, which I will definitely see use of. 

​In Teamfight Tactics, it seems Riot wanted to buff some of the strongest comps in the game, and then quickly realized, "Wait hold on, these comps are winning a lot" and are trying to tone back on the strong comps. Specifically, I'm referring to Mage 6. (Riot is really crazy there.)

Riot is mostly on the right path with their changes, though. Assassins weren't weak, but as far as lategame comps go, they were underperforming compared to other OP comps. They were heavily item-reliant before; if these changes go live, they'll be super-OP, but that'd just be them joining the ranks of other super-OP comps.

Inferno as a comp could work well, but again was usually item-dependent to make them be OP. With the buffs there, they may end up being super-OP which would put them in line with other comps.

Summoners were too strong in particular due to their easy synergies (e.g. with Inferno, but also Light and Shadow), so that change I feel was healthy. A bit out of line with the rest of their changes, but healthy overall.

Nobody had any use of vieing for an all-woodland comp. Nobody. I would still run Woodland 4 because I needed Neeko for damage, LeBlanc as a living synergy, Maokai for a tank frontline, and Ivern would be my disposable unit if I needed to remove one but I'd still field him for the shields. But I'd never use woodland Lux.

With the addition of copying every woodland unit rather than a random woodland unit, the Woodland trait is now literally in the exact same niche the old Noble trait was in: strong earlygame powerspike that falls off hardcore lategame...unless you manage to get the six-synergy version of the trait.

I am a bit disappointed that it requires Lux in order to actually work, though, because with that requirement, it's not possible before level 7 and it requires you randing the very specific Lux you need in order to pull it off. Still, though, it'll be ridiculously strong, if it goes through.

Karma and Leona are receiving nerfs, but I think Riot missed the mark there--they're nerfing the champions who're part of the Lunar trait, rather than nerfing the problem which is the Lunar trait itself.

Desert 4 getting the armor reduction boost helps them be more relevant given that an item basically singlehandedly replaced the need to use Desert at all. (Really, Riot, when you put an item in which has the exact same effect as a synergy, you should realize that either the item or the synergy will then go unused.)

Shadows are receiving a buff, when they were already OP, so this change will shift them into the super-OP comp territory other comps were already in.

Warden 6 was already fairly strong, but unless you got very specific items and probably the mountain map, wasn't really viable. I'd argue that the inclusion of the Lunar trait in tandem with a Morello/Shojin Malphite (which does take up 8/9 of your units, admittedly) made them viable if you got that very specific combo, but they were not super-OP; their buff to Warden 6 can help make them so.

I have to say, though, that I am disappointed.
There are nine wardens in the game.
You can make more wardens with a wardens vest.
The synergy maxes out at 6.
I would've preferred they kept the synergy at 6, and then added a synergy for 8.
Or, heck, if they felt like that was too strong (they apparently don't think it is tho, but let's play devil's advocate), realtalk, I'd be fine with a change to Wardens being a 3/6/9 synergy rather than a 2/4/6 synergy provided that the 3/6/9 synergies give more armor than their current 2/4/6 versions do. (Sayyy, +250% for 3, +500% for 6, and +999% for 9.)
But ideally just give it an extra level of the 2/4/6/8. +150/300/450/999% armor, seems fairly logical. There is a notable spike from my hypothetical warden 6 to the hypothetical warden 8, but that would be more in line with the idea of fielding more wardens in my opinion.

But OH WELL.
​If Riot gives it to me, I most definitely will take it!

Funny, I seem to recall blogging, heavily, about Snowmageddon about this time last year. Maybe it was two years ago (it seems heavy snow is every other year), but I kinda feel like it was last year? Maybe it was a bit earlier so technically 2018, maybe a bit later, but I do seem to recall early circa last year, there was heavy snow.

And this year.

There is ridiculously heavy snow.
Which is kinda annoying to be honest.
Our uninterruptable power supplies aren't actually working--right now, they're glorified outlets, serving as nothing other than precisely that, something to give multiple things needing power, power...so long as you have power. The second power goes out, even if it's for a split second...BAM. Everything dies. Computer, internet, everything. Not a single thing stays up.

And our generator isn't working (not that we have internet when we have no power anyway), so no generator, no UPS, means that when we have a power hit...everything goes down until we get power back. Meaning anything I am doing, better be automatically saved and not crucial because if it ain't automatically saved or if it is crucial...I be screwed.

Notably.
This does allow me to do stuff like watch people; this does allow me to play TFT. But it doesn't really allow me to play Minecraft; it doesn't really allow me to play League.

I can.

Can.
It's just incredibly risky, to the point where it's not something I really want to do unless I have teammates who know about it in advance and can cover for me if it does happen and I leave my team in a 4v5.

Now, admittedly.
Given that I play on Oceania's server.
Me having a sudden dc due to weather? I'll blend right in! Or so I imagine. Opposite extremes, quite literally, because I'm in a land of ice, Australia is a land of fire right now, but I imagine the effects would be similar when it comes to playing the game; high likelihood of getting sudden dcs.

Admittedly, I don't really know nearly as much about the fires in Australia as I should. My close friend is from Australia, their family lives in Australia, and I have multiple friends and associates who live in Australia. I know it is really, really bad, but...I don't know as much about it as I should, and I don't know what I'd realistically be able to do to help.
(I mean. I imagine there's donations to charity and the like. But I am notoriously stingy with my money; I know it makes no sense, but I usually just...I will give hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to a friend in need. They need not be a close friend. They need not have the expectation of paying me back. Anyone I call a friend, anyone, I would give hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to if they were in need of the money, with no expectation of them ever paying me back. Yet donating to a charity? Donating to a charity which would help the friend, which would have 100% of the money go to a good cause that I would love to support and I know is a good cause and I know the money will do good...for whatever reason, I just...am incredibly hesitant to do so. I guess it's more or less the difference between knowing the face of who I'm helping, versus helping an idea which has no true face, if I had to wager a reason.)

Like...should I better educate myself on it to know about it more? What would I actually do with that knowledge? Spread it to people who could have use of it, spread it to people who with it could help? The people who I know that could have use of the knowledge, are already more knowledgeable on the subject than I am; THEY could teach ME. So that'd leave the 'spread it to people who with the knowledge can help', but even there, I'm not sure what I could do.

I don't really feel comfortable asking people to, what, give money, for a cause especially when I myself am not contributing to it. So what would they be giving? Relief supplies, maybe? Similar story there; I'm not comfortable with asking them to give things I myself am not giving. So I just...don't know what I would do to help. Write to the government asking the government to help? As one of their constituents, contribute a well-thought-out plea for them to help?

Maybe, but I'm not sure how I could pull that off and I'm not sure who I could spread the word to that would want to do it and could, who hasn't already done it. (Basically, the people with the skills to do it and will to do it that I know, have already informed themselves better than I am.)

In that sense, I just don't really have any idea of what I could do to help and I feel really guilty about it but like.
I don't really know what I could do.

But I digress.
I'm also having the obvious heavy depression. There's not much to say about that though. It's fairly self-explanatory. I feel worthless. I feel like I am a piece of trash. A failure, fraud. Someone who makes promise after promise.
And delivers on none of them.
I am just.
Objectively.
Terrible.

And it's very negatively impacting me.
Where, yes.
I have the thoughts of, "it might just be better if I wasn't around", because then people wouldn't have those false hopes about me. Then people wouldn't expect me to be any good, when I am demonstrably not. You could always go. "But Bree. Can't you just...decide to not be in those positions of responsibility?" Resign, step down, be forcefully removed, and so on?

Why yes.
I could.
And then I would lose what little hope I am holding onto.
I would lose one of the only things keeping me alive.
I don't really have a reason to live right now, but having duties, obligations, that I am bound to, helps to at least keep me floating by--losing those duties, losing those obligations, means I lose the things I am floating by on.

I would be way, way worse off if I lost them.
And yet every day I feel like I am losing them, specifically because.
I am failing at them.
And because I am failing at them.
​I am at constant risk of losing them.

And what makes it worse.
Every day.
I have visions of my jobs as they could be.
And I have visions of my jobs as they should be--not as optimal as they could be, but at least realistically humanly achievable. Things that I have no reason to not achieve and then...I don't achieve them. For. no. good. reason.

I think about the job as it is most optimal, every day--but that daydream I have no delusions of becoming real. It's fictional, unrealistic, not something that I could ever achieve. It's worth striving for anyway, but I have no disappointment if I fail because I know that it's not possible in the first place.

But I also think about the job as it is most practical, every day--the job as it could realistically be done easily. There is literally nothing stopping that from becoming real because it's not unrealistic. It's easily doable, and easily achieved. And yet I don't do them. For no good reason. No excuse, no real reason for it.

When I inevitably fail to achieve that, how could I not feel disappointed in myself? It's fully possible, and easily so, for me to do the things. So why on earth do I not get them done, when I can easily get them done? There's no excuses, no justifications. I have no alternative answer.

Other than "I suck".
I just fail.
No reason I shouldn't have done it, yet I didn't do it.
What can that be.
Other than a problem with me?

You might think.
"Maybe your thoughts of 'this is pragmatic' is off and your pragmatic is still 'too perfect'?"
Except no.
It isn't.
I know what is too ambitious for me.
I might still try the too-ambitious anyway, but I'll hold no illusions of when it fails, of it being unrealistic.
I have a very good sense of what is basic minimum, versus what is absolute maximum. 
And I am constantly, consistently, below the basic minimum.

And if you asked others who have or had the same job, they would agree. They would look at what I did versus what I am expected to do, and agree with my self-assessment of it being below the acceptable standards. That I am not performing to the expectation of my jobs.

If they said otherwise to my face.
They would be lying to try and comfort me.
Or maybe they would be delusional in legitimately thinking I'm okay, due to bias from liking me and thinking surely I couldn't fail and maybe them being highly self-critical of themselves. (Basically, there's a higher chance that they'll think I'm fine, if they are self-critical enough to think that they weren't doing what they should.)

But if they were to honestly assess me, in private, not to my face, talking to others in the business.
They would be forced to confess, to admit, to face the truth.
That I am not performing to the levels I should be.

I know that I have low self-assessment most of the time.
Where due to my ego I have high expectations of myself and due to this am largely self-critical when I fail to live up to my own self-hype.

But I know that if someone were to objectively rather than subjectively measure me and assess what I've been doing.
I objectively would not be living up to expectations and nothing they can do or say will change that objective truth.

And if I am not living up to expectations.
The only conclusion to draw from this is that I am failing.
And if I am failing at everything.
I feel like a failure.

How can I not?
I'd argue that if I am failing at everything, I should feel like a failure because if I'm failing at everything...I feel like I should feel like a failure because what do you call someone who's failing at everything? The best word for it would be failure.

The fact that I am constantly calling myself a POS (except I am saying the full term unabbreviated) should tell you as much to say the least.

But I still want to write blogs.
Not gonna lie--not really in the mood to blog today, I was more in the mood yesterday...but then I did the thing which I was going to blog about me wanting to do yet not having done yet and while I constantly, constantly got screwed over either by getting the absolutely worst random luck and by the time I was turning it around, got eliminated by those with better luck just before I could make the comeback...
...Or, I was getting godly good luck early, but in the lategame, the key units that I needed in order to not get massacred just. wouldn't spawn. Quite often, NOBODY had them. Not on their boards, not on their fields. Not a single person had them, and yet in spite of spending upwards of 100 gold in rerolls, I couldn't get them.

It was incredibly frustrating, but eventually, I did get it to work well.

To explain what I am building: I am more or less playing around with Druids, Lunars, Mountain (specifically, Malphite), and Nami. There are multiple comps that I wanted to run and I have at least partially run most of them.

My dream of dreamteam comps:
Malphite with spear of Shojin, Morellonomicon, then any third item but usually a defensive item of some sort, buffed by Karma's shield.
Plus Nami with spear of Shojin, Morellonomicon, then any third item but ideally Warden's Mail.
And Neeko with Seraph's, Morellonomicon, then any third item but ideally a defensive one.
Get Taliyah for Mountain.
Leona for Warden 2/4 and Lunar.
Karma for Mystic 2 and Lunar.

And then that leaves me with three units.
Option one: Ocean 4: Thresh, Nautilus, Vladimir.
Option two: Mystic 4 plus one spare unit (or a redundant Mystic 5): two of {Yi, Janna, Soraka}. Soraka for her ult to stop the enemy's mana; Janna to heal your team; Yi to heal himself and deal damage.
Option three: Druids into woodland, with one spare unit: Ivern and Maokai.
Option four: SHIELDS SHIELDS SHIELDS! Add in Thresh and then two of Ivern/Diana/Scarner.

There are five shielding units in the game:
Thresh and Ivern were staples. (Ivern got nerfed into oblivion but still can help.) Diana also got nerfed, but Scarner got buffed. (That said, Diana's ult deals guaranteed damage, whereas Scarner's ult gives attack speed while he's shielded; the former is usually more helpful than the latter to be honest.) And Karma is now the fifth.

A comp I ran was to try for all five, plus Leona for Lunar, plus the mountains for eight, and then leaving open the ninth unit as ideally either Nautilus (for Ocean 2/Warden 4 and Nautilus's ult giving CC), Taric (for Crystal 2/Warden 4 and his ult giving immortality), or Nami (for Ocean 2/Mystic 2 and Nami's ult giving whole board CC, healing, and such to the whole team).

That comp is a comp that you can probably see the problem of--it has basically no synergies until much later in the game and most of the units for it are high-cost meaning you have trouble obtaining them and the units are usually fairly contested. So I don't want to try running it again unless I get very specific luck that makes it viable--but I did pull it off!

So basically, right now I am running pretty much every single game, Druid/Woodland + Mountain/Warden + Ocean 2 + Mystic 2, trying to get a Morello ideally on Malphite or Nami but settling for Neeko, too, and ideally with them also having a spear of shojin.

The reason for this is pretty obvious.
The comp, as a Druid comp, is amazingly strong earlygame.
A problem with Druid comps is that they are usually tremendously weak lategame, outscaled by other comps.
But by using Nami, Malphite, and the Lunar trait, they don't get outscaled. Well, they can be if you get screwed over, can't get all the units you need, most of your units aren't T2, you have no T3s, don't get the right items, etc.
But if they get the right items and if you get most of your units especially key ones to T2, they aren't outscaled.

They CAN lose, still.
The comp isn't unbeatable, it's just difficult to beat and a bit RNG-based--if your Malphite with a morello chooses to ult an isolated unit rather than the group of six, seven units, that round will not be a good time for you. Depending on who your units aggro and who your enemies aggro, you can win matches against players, barely win matches against players, barely lose matches against players, or get hard-stomped against players.

Which, while frustrating, is still overall fair in my opinion. The comp is OP. Ridiculously OP. But every comp which makes it to the lategame is OP; they wouldn't make it to the lategame otherwise. And when one OP comp faces a different OP comp, one of the OP comps has to lose. And usually it's a lot due to luck.

The core reason the comp works is quite obvious, too. In the current meta, red buff is almost worthless for most units because the unit needs to be heavily autoattacking to make use of it. Most units don't make good use of it, though there are some niche exceptions. (For instance, I commonly see it on Vayne. I don't think that's the optimal item for her but I also think it's a good item on her even if others are better.)

Morellonomicon is better in most situations. A TON of comps make heavy use of healing. Any Olaf comp, any Druid comp, any Braum comp, and more. Morello cuts it down if you place it on the right unit. Units who heavily, heavily use spells due to really low spellcost can get mileage out of it, and units who are really really hard to kill get heavy mileage out of it, and units which are both are the best. (This would be why Vladimir is a common Morello user; he casts his spell constantly and it keeps him alive.)

But better than both of those are units whose spells are aoe and can potentially hit the entire enemy team, basically nullifying their healing and dealing 18% of their max HP over time guaranteed from one single cast--so if you cast it 3 times in a fight...that's almost 60% of the whole enemy team's HP gone.

Nami and Malphite are the best because of this AOE application, with the added bonus of applying CC to the whole board, so that this burn damage cannot be healed, cannot be prevented, cannot be dealt with. By stunning the entire board, and applying anti-healing to the entire board, and applying burn damage to the entire board, they can basically set up the rest of the team to burst down the enemy ridiculously well.

Neeko's ult isn't quite as good, but she's the third-best item for good reason: she's hard to kill, she's got a low mana cost so she can spam her spell, and it's aoe. The reasons she's not as good as Nami/Malphite for it but is still good are more or less:
-Neeko needs to be T2 minimum to be effective, whereas Malphite/Nami while stronger as T2 don't need to be T2 unless you're facing Veigar. (In which case all your units need to be T2.)
-Neeko's aoe applies three times in a wider radius each time, but this delay in the attacks means that her ult takes too long to apply the damage.
-Neeko's ult has atrocious targeting, where frequently the first and second blossoms hit thin air with only the third actually hitting anyone.
-Neeko's ult is blocked by Braum's shield (and plenty of people are running Braum even without Glacial/Warden comps for whatever reason). Malphite and Nami's ults are not.
-Even if Neeko's ult was targeted not at thin air, it synergizes poorly with Taliyah's ability and similar, where enemies which were in range of it are knocked out of range. This isn't a problem on Nami/Malphite.
-Due to the delay, Neeko's ult frequently is aimed at targets that are at low health and are dead before the ult connects, leading to it hitting thin air altogether. This can happen on Malphite but is incredibly rare, whereas on Neeko it is incredibly common. It is almost unheard of on Nami.
-Neeko has less scaling than Malphite/Nami. She's strong earlygame, but she's weaker lategame.

That's probably an incomplete list to be honest.
There's likely more.
Still: Neeko's not a bad choice for Morello if I need an immediate powerspike. To keep a winstreak that I am afraid I will otherwise lose when I haven't had the ability to find Malphite yet, or to put a halt to a losestreak which would leave me with too little HP to make a comeback.

Heck, a dream of dreams on Neeko would be an AP Neeko. Full-damage would be Gunblade, Deathcap, then either Luden's or Morello, full-MP would be Seraph's + Magecap; actual AP build would be Seraph's, Gunblade, and then either Morello (if Neeko's more of a support-carry or if she needs to cut down healing more than she needs damage) or Deathcap (if Neeko is the carry carry or if she needs damage more than she needs to cut down on healing).

It's just that anything Neeko can do, Malphite does overall better.
She's more fun, Malphite's more pragmatic.

What's better, I can run this comp basically every game.
There is one annoying thing though.
During the first carousel, it used to be that everyone saw the champions/items at the same exact time: almost immediately after the game began, before the shield had fallen.

Now, it is very very VERY obviously not the case: I am not seeing the items or champions until the exact second the shield falls, give or take a second (that is to say, the shield can sometimes BE FULLY DOWN AND I CAN'T SEE WHAT TO GRAB), whereas I can see the other little legends gunning for areas of the map at the time that it used to be visible, meaning that THEY are still seeing it at the time it used to be.
But *I* am getting royally screwed over because the first carousel can set the tone for the rest of the game particularly on Mountain maps.
And I can do nothing to fix this.

This has...rather negatively impacted my enjoyment of the game to say the least.
It's not fun to not be able to choose how you start the game and be locked into lousy starts.
I have played the game often enough that I know how to position my little legend to vie for control of a champion/item I want to grab on the first carousel. It's a skill I have practiced. Do I get it every time, no, but I get it most times.

Except now I can't.
Because by the time I actually see what I want to grab, everyone is in position already to grab it.

In a sense, this forces me to go for things that are off-meta, low-priorities, things that are strong that people don't realize are strong.
Since apparently people think other things are strong than what I go for, that helps me a lot.
But it's just.
Frustrating.

It used to be painfully obvious that everyone saw the first carousel at the same time. Literally everyone, every single match, started moving towards the spot they wanted, at the same time.

It is painfully obvious that nobody sees the carousel at the same time anymore. Literally everyone starts moving at a different time, every single match. Whoever sees things first, gets an unfair advantage because by the time the person who sees things second, sees them, the person who sees things first is in the ideal position.
And so on and so forth.
And I suspect it is ping-related.
I play on 200 ping so I am consistently 8th in seeing things (which is where the ping-related seeing things suspicion comes from).

This was NOT a change for the better.
Everyone seeing things at the same time left it open to skill.
Everyone seeing things based on who has the lowest ping means that there is no skill to be had.
Just better internet and better luck.

...And in this regard, I was highly successful overall! I still have three, lengthy, videos to watch (one is two hours; two are each 45 minutes), but I watched about ten videos today to get entirely caught up there. There were a bunch of things I needed to get caught up on, though, and...I was...less successful elsewhere.

In Minecraft I did do some work but had the tilting experience of zombie death losing my experience and risking my items...again. And now I wasted a bunch of time for what amounts to nothing.

In Teamfight Tactics, I needed to play five games for the orb of enlightenment and play enough games to get the four quests done--this also contained extreme tilt of either lousy luck in the earlygame and by the time my fortunes were turning around...being eliminated by those who had the amazing luck earlygame and were just strong enough to beat me before I could make a comeback...

...Or godly good luck earlygame, but which was severely soured by the lousy luck lategame where I would spend 100 gold and not get a single T3, not get the key T2 that I was after, and in many cases, not get the 5g unit I needed to make my comp transition into the lategame, where I knew I had the earlygame crushed but I knew that I needed to go to a very specific comp to not get outscaled...and couldn't because no matter how much gold I spent in spite of being the requisite level and literally nobody else running my comp, the unit just. wouldn't. spawn.

Which lasted until I got a few games I considered passable enough. Still didn't complete the latter two quests but considering one of said quests requires me to play nine games to completion and each game is like 30-60 minutes long, an average of 45 minutes...that...didn't happen.

Then in League I had multiple misfortunes. I had my Ashe stolen from me; that game went predictably badly. I was assigned a game of jungle. I said that I don't play jungle, recommended a swap, nobody took me up on the offer, but fortunately when one of my teammates noticed that my champion locked in was Ashe and asked "can Ashe jungle" and I bluntly said 'no', they dodged. (I generally assume that most of the people who dodge have alternate accounts or aren't willing to play games that they know they'll lose. I do not have alternate accounts and I will play games that I know I will lose, because I figure that they might give me a learning experience.)

Then I got a game where I accidentally took the wrong runes--the runes I took were runes I use on Ashe, but in that specific game, I really really needed Sorcery, and yet I was stuck with Fleet Footwork. Sorcery would've allowed me to get a ton of kills that game that I didn't get, because I took the wrong runes accidentally due to the Vlad game. Even if it was winnable, it became unwinnable when two members of my team dc'd.

And then I got a game where my team did flame me for my build--to be fair. I was 0/8, but in this case, that legitimately was not entirely my fault. My "support" was Tryndamere. Tryndamere can be played in 4/5 positions, like Ashe can--top, jungle, mid, even in the right circumstances adc. (With Ashe's four being top, mid, support, and adc, obv.) He is very much not a support in any way shape or form.

He didn't take a support item--which meant that whenever he last hit, he was stealing my cs. Because he was stealing my cs, I had less gold than I should have had. He also took fights that would be fine for him to take, between his ult and his spin--but he criticized me when I went in and criticized me when I didn't go in because while he has tools to escape from death...I do not. And he was expecting me to have some magical get-out-of-a-2v4-situation.

Because, yes. We were 2v4'd. Repeatedly. Given that it was a 2v4, I did fairly well given the circumstance. I could burn my ult defensively and summoners to escape to safety, and did so repeatedly, which kept me from dieing like four more times than I did, and at least two of my deaths were due to me getting collapsed on by 3-5 people when I didn't have vision on them and thought that they were somewhere else. (Those are at least partially my fault, yes, but when caught out by 3-5 people, I'm dead; there's no escaping that.)

He wanted me to engage in fights that were 2v3, even 2v4. I could not, and when I tried, I died. He wanted me to engage in situations which I knew I wasn't in position to engage in--he has a spin he can use for a gap close; if he spins into a fight when we were previously together...I can't get in range to help in time because Ashe is much much slower than Tryndamere's spin.

Not helping was the fact that my toplaner lost hardcore and my jungler was also in on the flaming (the jungler and "support" were the ones doing the flaming), in spite of my jungler himself having done pretty terrible. And it reflects in their scorelines, too. I had the second-lowest number of deaths in the game, but only by one. (Somehow, the jungler had one less death than me.)

It was all-around incredibly frustrating. Ashe can engage in all-ins, but she is primarily a specialist at dealing poke damage. She is the queen of kiting--of hit-and-run. Hit, retreat. Hit again, retreat. And only after the enemy has been whittled down sufficiently, do you engage...preferably still with enough ability to leave room for a disengage or a finisher.

Being asked to engage engage engage without kiting, to go purely on the offensive especially when we were behind in every lane with only one player on our team doing even close to remotely well, is the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do on Ashe, especially when behind.

Heck, even the enemy team had a member who recognized that I wasn't the problem. And I believe it was my midlaner who shared that opinion, mentioning that Normals are a good place to practice or something to that effect, with at least one person in the game who wasn't the jungle/support saying that I could be pioneering a new meta.

Maybe they were sarcastic, maybe not, it's hard to say for sure, especially from vague memory, but if they were sincere in giving that benefit of the doubt then they were giving me far more than my own team did. (Plus at the beginning of the game I am fairly certain one or two members of my team dropped the N-word but since I was too busy playing the game I couldn't look up who it was. I have two very obvious suspects tho.)

And, heck. At the end of the game, I ended up with stats that were still some of the best on my team and I could tell that in teamfights where I was able to kite away from the enemy I was actually dealing significant damage, contrary to my teammates' claims of my build being worthless for damage. I was less than 400 damage away from dealing the second-highest damage on my team and I had the sixth-highest damage in the game; I did more damage than the enemy adc. I was one of the only two on my team to damage a turret. I earned more gold than our toplaner, which is an impressive feat mind you since, again I must reiterate: my "support" was stealing my cs so my gold income was halved. I was one point off of having the second-highest vision score on my team, and also one point off of matching the enemy adc.

I had the highest minion kill of my team...and had an exact tie with the enemy adc, down to the last number, for being second-highest in the game. The only player who killed more minions was the enemy toplaner. (Who, being Mordekaiser when Mordekaiser even post-nerf is kinda OP...was. Well. Mordekaiser.)

Are those good stats to have? No, not particularly. They are still not great. It still means that overall I was a little bit sucky. But in spite of my team having placed the blame on me and my build...I genuinely don't think that it was my fault? Like...toplane lost hard against a champion who can and did 1v5 us. Hard, HARD lost. Midlane was the best of us but even they in spite of getting the kills they did were barely going even with their counterpart and were losing against the enemy toplaner and losing when outnumbered.

My "support" didn't take a support item, took half of my cs (when I am already not good at csing), entered into areas we had zero vision of and expected me to follow, took fights that I couldn't engage in, took fights that I couldn't disengage from, and sure enough had the highest deaths in the game.

It is not an uncommon belief that in games, supports are the main difference between winning and losing--a good support might not win by 1v5ing the enemy team, so much as they win by setting their team up for success. A bad support directly loses their team the game, by setting them up for failure.

And, hey.
I didn't place blame on them in-game.
I never flamed back.
I never asked them questions about their rather-questionable tactics.
But I feel like I have the right to believing that that game was genuinely just not my fault? Like, sure. I admit. I made many, many, many mistakes. I did get genuinely caught out of position multiple times. I should have been smart enough to recognize, "I can't engage on that." I should have been smart enough to ping my teammates not to engage on that. I should have pinged when I was trying to engage on something.

And I made many misplays. Missed most of my ults. Missed many volleys. A ton of my volleys got minion-blocked where one minion (or if I were lucky, multiple minions) ate all of my arrows, meaning none of them connected. I did legitimately play a bad game, and I feel they had room to call me out on the mistakes I did make.

But they were calling me out on things that I genuinely don't think I was responsible for. Ashe needs lifesteal? I had it. I didn't have the full 12% because I couldn't farm it out, couldn't get champion kills, but I don't think that my inability to do those things lies on me. Ashe needs damage? I was dealing considerable damage when I wasn't instantly deleted. The only thing that they called me out on which I feel has merit is that Ashe needs crit, for a stronger slow. Crits double her slow and deal increased damage to slowed targets; my build didn't have the crit yet.

But honestly--in that game, I cannot think of a single time a crit giving increased slow would've made a difference. I was building defensive items that are designed to help keep someone alive, and which just so happen to on this build give me extra damage and a bottomless supply of mana. Would a stronger slow have allowed my team to kill an enemy who got away? No occasion that I can think of. Would a stronger slow have allowed someone to survive in a situation they didn't? Not when the slow would be applied to one enemy champion when someone is being dogpiled by three enemies. A stronger slow applied to one still leaves two in kill range.

I am fairly certain that there was no way I could have slowed them and made a difference.
But I am also fairly certain that I couldn't have done more damage with a different build.
The problem was that I kept dieing before I could deal the damage. There's no build in the world which can deal damage on Ashe when you're dead before you can so much as proc Ranger's Focus. If you get to only launch one volley and maybe one autoattack and are dead before you can launch a second auto...there's no Ashe build in the world which can get her a kill there. She can't oneshot like that.

And the build I go for is actually one of the best possible builds for trying to prevent being killed. It's a hugely defensive build with a metric ton of armor and a ton of MR in it as well. I was still being killed before I could get a full combo off, because I didn't have my teammates taking the damage for me. They were dead, they were fighting elsewhere, they were unable to stop the enemies from bypassing our frontline to focus on me, our backline. All three at different times.

I don't think there was any build I could have done. None. Which could have prevented that.
And sure enough.
I had a final game I played where I ended up hugely popping off.
I do admit--I had an incredibly competent support, and my midlaner won lane. I think my jungler and toplaner actually lost lane tho? I mean, I remember almost all of my deaths were in the earlygame and yet I wasn't the one who gave first blood; it was my toplaner. And I recall my jungler having died early, too. Might be mistaken tho.

And I will fully confess. Even if we didn't all play well early. There wasn't a single weak link later in the game. (The closest was us having an uncoordinated assault on the enemy base where when some of us were dead, the others were attacking, and when they died, the others who respawned tried attacking, but that was a collective int from everyone including me making miscalculations.)

So it's not like I singlehandedly won my team the game. I had the most deaths on my team and the lowest kills to my name, but almost second-highest kill participation in the game. (Highest was my support, second-highest was my midlaner, by a slim margin--they had one more than me. Though I admit, I only had one more than our jungler or toplaner who both were just one behind me. Suffice to say: we teamfought a lot and worked incredibly well as a unit.)

I had better stats than most of the enemy team and better stats than the enemy adc across the board, and overall I did incredibly well. My team was friendly, supportive, we worked together well, coordinated reasonably well enough, and even when we inted, we usually got something out of it. Securing a drake even if three of us died (not exactly worth), securing a nexus turret even if most of us die (probably still worth), the like.

And this brings the total games I've run this build in on Normals, with the runes and items, up to five. I thought it was more than that, but I could only find five in my match history. Three of them have been victories. Two of them have had teammates who hard-flamed me in the form of some combination of {jungle, midlaner, support}. 

I blooged about the prior defeat before, and this is my blog about the defeat here.

But so far I still maintain my conclusions thusfar.
It feels like the build's success/failure rate has less to do with the build itself, so much as it does, the team I am on. If I have teammates who are making plays that are blatantly mistakes who then flame me when those plays go south...it doesn't work, but I don't think any build would work for those games for a player of my skill level, which is to say, not very good. I will fully admit to being a trash-tier player and a significant portion of my losses are due to mistakes I made so I will own up to having been a significant contributor to the loss.
(Though, as I said last time: I feel like I am in the right to justifiably not take exclusive blame for the loss and that my teammates played equally as large a part in the loss, at a minimum if not more of a part than I did.)

If I have teammates who are chill, work well with me, synergize with me, are willing to own up to "whoops, that was my fault" when they make a mistake, accept me saying the same, and who have a plan to recover rather than running in and doing the same thing we just got killed trying to do...it tends to work. Mind you, I admit: given those circumstances, probably any build would work.

And I do confess, this game I had a little bit of an extra edge; the enemy team was all-AD (a fact I didn't recognize until midway through the game; I probably should have built tabis in hindsight, or rather, since I didn't notice the enemy team was all-AD until midway through the match, sold my Ionian boots for Tabis), when two of my items give some of the highest armor in the game. Frozen Heart gives the highest armor in the game (100 armor), and Iceborn Gauntlet is in the top...I think six? Maybe it's only top eight, but it still gives a ridiculously large amount of armor. (I did let my team know about this fact, which they found useful to know, because apparently I was the first one to realize the enemy team was all-AD and none of them had realized it until I pointed it out, so that was a good contribution of mine. I mean, not sure it made much of a difference; the two members who built armor were two members who are already tanks, and a third who was maybe building into tank is also sometimes albeit not always played as a tank, so it's hard to confirm for sure that their itemization was due to them taking note of the full-ad enemy team after I noted it, but hey, I'd like to hope that I made a difference in helping them.)

Obviously, in terms of games to run the build in...a build where the enemy team has some difficulty bursting me down (though Pyke could still deliver killing blows with his ult, annoyingly enough, because many times where I thought I was high enough HP to survive, I received a nasty surprise that I didn't realize would kill me until it did) is going to be a bit more successful than a game where they can kill me even if I got to full-build easily.

And obviously, in terms of games to run the build in...having two tanky frontlines who have excellent tools at protecting their backline from being accessed, preventing the enemy champions from getting on top of me (with a third who, at least with their itemization, was also a tanky frontliner that had excellent tools at protecting me), is pretty much the dream. Gnar was building tank and he can toss people around; Sejuani has multiple ccs/slows in her kit; Leona has some cc in her kit and a gap-closer (admittedly, one-way--towards her enemy. But if the enemy bypasses her and she has the ability up, she can use it to again place herself between them and me).

I played it not as well as my other two wins, which is reflected in my final gold score and to some extent champion damage and similar stats. In spite of this being probably the best comp of my three victories for the build, it was my worst performance with the build of my victories.

But that wasn't the build's fault, that was me being tired, tilted, and making multiple misplays. I would've been those things with any build. In fact I would again argue: using any other build other than the build I used, would've resulted in me being the LVP, least valuable teammate, of the game, because any other build for this game would've had me still be tired, tilted, and making multiple misplays, but with a build not suited for perfectly working with my team's comp, to perfectly counter the enemy team's comp.

Overall, my faith in the build isn't being shaken by anything.
Briefly, in the game where I was being flamed for it.
I did consider it.
Of, "is it actually not that good in spite of my insistence otherwise?".
I did.
But after that consideration.
And upon reflection of looking at how that game went, the scoreline, how that game felt to me as a player, with how at the end I did feel like I was doing the damage I was supposed to be doing, how most of my problems were due to mistakes I made as a player with my team certainly not helping, and looking at the postgame to have an intuitive feeling for what my instincts had told me about my team. (My instincts told me that my "support" didn't have a support item; my instincts told me that my support and jungler weren't really playing well; my instincts told me that the enemy toplaner had hard-stomped due to how strong he was compared to the others on the enemy team.)

I just have the feeling that it really wasn't the build's fault we lost that game, no matter what my flaming teammates might believe. And feel like I am rather justified in that belief.

I feel like the build is working for me.
Heck, even if it's not a build which works for other players.
I think it is a build which works for me. And if it works for me.
It feels good to run.
My successes feel like a large part due to the build.
My failures don't feel like they're due to the build.

Then I feel like it is the right build for me.

But I digress.
I've been writing this blog for at least an hour; I suspect it is closer to two. It's 3:48 am right now, the game I finished I believe finished at 2 am? I don't think that I went straight from it to here, but I certainly didn't do much after it before coming here to the blog.

I have work tomorrow.
I get up at 8 am for a shift starting at 10.
And, oh yeah.
I still have a bunch of stuff I need to do.
I got some stuff caught up on.

I got most of my stuff, not.
Like, I still need to get caught up on my emails and to send one to my boss about trainings. They said that the ones available were full, and that they were "looking into" options. I need to give them a reminder of, "Hey, I uh...really need this?" Because trainings are a Big Deal to keep up to date on.
And I still have a ton of daily chores to do that I haven't done yet.

I half-considered writing a blog today saying "god I am pathetic" by listing all of the things I need to do, which I promised I would do (I promised to do judging today, after having previously promising to do it on Monday and failing to deliver on that promise), because...well, when you think about it.

I really kinda am pathetic.
I watched videos instead of attending to those matters.
I played games instead of attending to those matters.
I wrote this long-winded blog post that amounts to little more than a ramble ranting about my delusions of having a good build and complaining about teammates calling me trash when I believe that they themselves more than qualify for that term themselves, something which even if it is true leads to a dangerous road of me not acknowledging my own faults. (I try to take responsibility for what was in fact my fault, but if I think that it isn't my fault and is my team's fault, even if that is true, it can lead to me thinking it isn't my fault and was my team's fault...when it isn't true. And I want to avoid that.)

I basically started today thinking, "today will be a day where I get everything I need to, done...or close to, knocking out almost everything on my immediate to-do list!".

I ended up realizing that while I did do some things and while nothing I did ended up in a complete and total waste...
...Due to tilt, I ended up doing just about none of what I set out to do. Some, I did! Most I did not.

So yes.
I do suck and am a piece of utter garbage for failing like this.
No wonder I prefer to focus on writing the gaming entries like on League.
Because at least on those I feel like I am writing about things I'm not​ a failure on.

To be honest, in terms of League, there's nothing really relevant to my interests. I guess you could vaguely say the support item changes affect me when I play support, but otherwise, nothing of importance to me, really. They nerfed Aphelios but the nerfs are so ridiculously small that they aren't really nerfs at all. He's still going to be OP, still going to be banworthy, still going to be too strong to be allowed, because Riot needs to realize that his kit is just fundamentally too strong right now; even an unskilled player who doesn't know how to play him, can crush while using him, because he's just that strong. In games where his team is behind, he can almost 1v9--not reliably good enough to actually 1v9 from behind, but he's still a monster and this change does nothing to stop that.

There was a buff to Varus, which will cause more people to play him, but I actually like playing against Varus. It's a poke versus poke matchup. Mind you, I suck at dodging his abilities (you'd think that his piercing arrow would be an easier-to-dodge version of Caitlyn's ability, with the ridiculously long wind-up time, but no, I get hit by them all the time even when I swear I've been out of the trajectory), but he's a champion whose abilities I understand how to deal with and his style is similar to Ashe's.

​Like, in terms of adcs, he, Caitlyn, Jhin, Lucian (Ashe kinda hard-stomps Lucian), and Ezreal are some of my favorite champions to face as the enemy adc. Because they are champions who have similar abilities to Ashe in terms of poke and all-in potential and I have reasonably good understanding of them. (Jinx would also be there but I'm less fond of facing her because I usually can't beat her whereas I can usually beat Varus, Caitlyn, Jhin, Lucian, and Ezreal. It's been a while since I've faced a Jinx tho, so we'll have to see.) I guess Miss Fortune's also good to go up against, too. Xayah's pretty easy as well. (Draven's not exactly similar in style, but he's not hard either.) Technically Sivir's similar but she falls in the Jinx category of "I basically never face her but traditionally do poorly against her". 

​​Of course, there's a few adcs I'm less fond of facing, the type who are good at gap-closing and dueling/all-inning. Tristana, Kai'sa, Vayne, technically-Quinn (she's more of a toplaner tho), probably Corki, probably Kog-maw, technically-Graves, probably-Heimerdinger, and the like. (I also dislike playing against Twitch though he doesn't qualify as that style.) 

But the only one of those who got a buff was Corki, who is more of a midlaner. I guess Kalista also got a buff, but nobody plays her so she's not a problem.

Usually left to my own devices, I ban support picks because they're the larger threat to me. Lux, Morgana, Veigar, as the unholy trinity. Picks that are also midlaners but are at their most annoying when as the enemy team's support because I cannot play around them for the life of me. Zyra would be up there too but nobody plays her and even the change to her this patch won't make people play her.

And even against the champions I'm not fond of playing against that are adcs.
It's not like any of them are 100% losses for me; I can and do stomp them on occasion, I just don't like playing against them because they are annoying to deal with and easy to kill me on and most of them outscale me. (Corki, Tristana, Kai'sa, Kog-maw, Jinx, and Sivir I am all fairly certain are champions that have some of the best lategame scaling in the game? Vayne might fit into that category but I'm not sure. Heimer is also very good at scaling but I don't know where he falls overall.)

Like, most adcs if they get a lead can snowball into an insurmountable lead that never falls off in the lategame and have reasonably strong lategame scaling and are midgame monsters. If Vayne isn't one of the lategame monsters, she's here; Varus I'm pretty sure is in this category as well; I'd probably guess Xayah's around here in my opinion.

But some are easier to get that lead than others; some are easier to make comebacks against than others. And overall not many are annoying enough to warrant a ban.

But Aphelios does warrant a ban and will continue to warrant a ban until Riot realizes that him having the highest skill cap in the game, doesn't justify him being so strong in the hands of even unskilled players, and that cherry-tap nerfs to him aren't enough to stop that status from still being true.

So until next patch at minimum, probably still keeping my Aphelios ban.

But the really exciting changes are in Teamfight Tactics.
Riot has seemed to have decided, "Oh, comps are OP? Well, we've got the perfect fix to that: make other comps be OP! And if they already were, make them moreso!"

They buffed Druids--their regen and Neeko specifically.
They buffed Light units (when Lucian with Senna is already ridiculously broken).
They did give a minor nerf to Ocean 2, but most users of the comp run Ocean 4 anyway which they left untouched so Ocean/Mage/Warden/Mountain will still be a thing.
They buffed Shadow in spite of Shadow being OP in part due to the Senna-Lucian combo.
I'm incredibly fond of the Vayne buff.
They buffed Predators/Glacials by buffing Warwick and Scarner.
They buffed Jax and Malzahar, again helping Berserkers, Light, Shadow, and Summoners, all of which were already strong.
They buffed Senna.
They buffed Syndra, part of the Ocean/Mage broken combo.
They buffed Aatrox.
They buffed Azir.
They buffed Master Yi.

Pretty much the only buff to a non-OP combo was Varus, counterbalanced by the nerf to Annie and Amumu. I guess also Twitch.
And the only nerfs were to assassin-heavy comps that were already falling out of favor.
Plus a nerf to Sivir which I don't care about since I don't use her anyway.
And a nerf to Nami but I didn't use her anyway.

Overall.
The game is making basically every change I would want to run my favorite comps.
And doing nothing to discourage me from running them.
​Me like!

...I am not doing most of it. I'll instead just make a blog post today about League which I wanted to make.
I am feeling much, much, much better about my mana build on Ashe. It's not that hard to, relatively speaking, pop off on it. I'm not gonna lie; it's got severe drawbacks. It gives much less pressure most of the time until you've got the levels in volley to spam it and the tear to not lose mana.

It can't slow down an enemy slowball; if the enemy gets ahead, it can't stop them from just ending the game.
It's easy to mess up on; if you position yourself wrong, misclick, think summoners/abilities are up when they aren't (this is something that even challenger players and pro players can occasionally be guilty of, but that doesn't mean it's something that's good to let happen), or get too low on health from not dodging the enemy team's poke, then you basically lose the game because the enemy team gets fed and you can't stop them from getting further ahead.

But it usually seems to be the case.

That in my first game of the day where I haven't played for a few days, I lose because of stupid stuff that if I had played more wouldn't happen, where it wasn't the build that was the problem but rather my play...

...But in my second game (or in some cases, my third), I just...excel. I pop off hardcore. I mean, I'm sure that matchups play a part in it. Most of my losses are to an enemy Aphelios (that champion is, currently, ridiculously busted and hands-down the strongest champion in the game pretty much regardless of role; I got stomped by him as a "support" where he was the reason the botlane won and making things worse--he's currently free to play so he's in almost every game and since he's usually the adc and I am usually my team's adc, that means usually he's on the other team).

And when I win I admit that it does involve a fair amount of competency on my team and incompetency on the enemy team's part--when the enemy team's Yuumi thinks that she can be nowhere near one of her teammates, she's a free kill (and in this case, first blood) for me and my teammate hard-winning mid and making a good invade call where we hard-won (in part due to it being a 4v5 after I noticed Yuumi was nowhere near her team and killed her).

So yes, my wins have had a good team on my end and a somewhat-suspicious-in-the-competence-department enemy team.

But honestly.

It kinda feels like.
I'm not being carried in my wins and being the reason we lose in my losses.
So much as it is, that I am working incredibly well with my team in my wins, and messing up in my losses with the rest of my team.
Synergizing well with my teammates in wins, having anti-synergy in my losses.
That I am a significant contributor to the wins, and only a contributor in the losses.
That is to say.
Not solely my fault in the losses, but also not solely responsible for the wins. Somewhat responsible for losses but still partially my team's fault; somewhat responsible for my wins but still partially my team's work.

And overall, I feel like the build snowballs pretty easily if I don't mess up.

I can actually play somewhat aggressively unless I know that I need to play cautiously, and do so. And I can also play more defensively when need be. Scaling up either way, just a matter of order. The usual strategy is to not back until I get the tear, then get boots when I can, and complete the manamune, and then it depends on the build order. Iceborn Gauntlet and Abyssal Mask are the first two, but the order depends on which I think I need more. I build the other next regardless, but Abyssal for countering an AP threat; Iceborn for countering an AD threat. And then because most matches are ~2 AP and 3 AD, more AD than AP, building Frozen Heart for the extra defense against their main threats.

Of course, if the enemy team was largely AP-based and the main threat wasn't AD, I'd probably do Essence Reaver first and then complete Frozen Heart last.

As a reminder.
This build is primary tree Sorcery--Arcane Comet, Manaflow Band, Transcendence, and Gathering Storm, with the secondary tree of Precision, specifically, Presence of Mind (for the 500 bonus mana and the mana from takedowns) and Legend:Bloodline (to give much-needed lifesteal in a build that aside from Abyssal Mask otherwise lacks it).

The build's core tenet revolves around transforming the Manamune into the Muramana. Once that transformation takes place, mana equals damage. The build has a secondary aspect of, through transcendence, cdr = damage. You only get the cdr damage when you've got boots + three items (Muramana, Iceborn, Abyssal), but it is a build where you never, ever, run out of mana past a certain point.

Manaflow Band replenishes mana over time. Abyssal Mask makes damage you take convert into mana. Presence of Mind gives mana for takedowns. Essence Reaver generates mana. And three of the items involved (frozen heart, iceborn gauntlet, abyssal mask) give bonuses to your maximum mana on top of the runes doing the same (manaflow band + presence of mind).

You still run out of mana very very early and you have almost no lifesteal early, but once you get the build rolling, you never run out and you almost never die. Most of my wins have like two deaths on average and like 20-30 kills/assists. The poke damage is ridiculous. I almost always have near the top damage of my team, regardless of win or loss, but especially with a win. I can heavily pressure objectives later-on even though I don't have much ability to do so early.

I will admit. I'm not a master of the build yet. I am often too cautious when in the lategame, too far back, which means I am contributing less to teamfights than is ideal. I deal a ton of poke damage whenever I hit, and when I get ranger's focus stacked, I can deal high damage to champions stupid enough to be in range. But I often deliver a volley and move backwards. Kiting like that would be fine if the enemy team were moving towards me to try and catch me out, but because my team is there, the enemy team is usually either relatively stationary or is on the retreat...
...So by moving backwards, I take myself out of range in the fight more often than not.

I feel like I really found something that is fairly good, actually.

And when you think about it, it's not too surprising.

On Ashe, manaflow band is the meta thing to grab. This necessitates sorcery as either primary or secondary. You could maybe, maybe, maybe get away with inspiration secondary if you have biscuits so that the biscuits increase mana, but those give less maximum mana overall and don't give the mana regeneration. You could maybe, maybe get away with no manaflow band if you do take presence of mind (presumably, running lethal tempo), but Triumph is far, far, far better on her and even Overheal is usually a better choice when paired with bloodline. (Though I suppose presence of mind is probably better than Overheal in isolation.)

Her volley consumes an insane amount of mana, so she needs some mana replenishment methods. Since the two meta primary runes are Precision (Lethal Tempo build) and Sorcery (Arcane Comet build), regardless of which is ran, there is a way without dipping into the secondary tree for her to have that extra mana she desperately needs.

Essence Reaver, an item in my build, is one of the most common first-items on Ashe, and also a common item later on as well. 20% cdr, 70 attack damage, 25% crit chance, and the mana replenishment from autoattacking is godly on Ashe.

It's just that this build diverges from the meta build by running both precision and sorcery rather than one of the two (with the secondary usually being inspiration with the outside chance of domination).

And then diverges from the meta build in items other than essence reaver and the build order of ER.

The meta boots on Ashe are Berserker Greaves.
The only times in the meta build where Ashe doesn't build Berserkers are,
-When, without Berserkers, she can get close to or reach the attack speed cap and she doesn't have lethal tempo (thus making it a waste)
-When the enemy team's basically all-AD and/or the biggest threat on the enemy team is an autoattacker who she REALLY needs to defend against (thus, Tabis)
-When the enemy team's basically all-AP and/or has many forms of CC that present a huge threat and/or the biggest threat on the enemy team that is by themselves something worth itemizing against is AP and/or the only threat on the enemy team to killing Ashe does so with a combo involving CC (thus, Merc treads),
-Or when the enemy team has many many many forms of slows and Ashe desperately needs a counter to this in her boots and/or Ashe desperately needs every single bit of movespeed possible (Swifties, but this...is the least-used of them for good reason).

This build forgoes Berserkers for a boot choice that you should pretty much in all other cases never build on Ashe with the exception of support Ashe (where they are some of the best boots for her to get to 40% cdr early).

There are, I believe, exactly six meta items on Ashe.
Essence Reaver, as previously mentioned, is a god-tiered item on her for the huge attack damage, the large crit chance, the mana regeneration, and the unparalleled 20% cooldown reduction.

Trinity Force is not usually built on her unless Essence Reaver is also built but if ER was built, Trinity Force is an incredibly common item to build to get her to her 40% cdr so she can spam abilities better and is one of the best utility items in the game overall. Extra health, extra mana, incredibly useful passive abilities, extra movespeed, extra attack speed, extra attack damage, it gives everything to her that she needs because it gives basically every stat there is to give.

Blade of the Ruined King is a godly good item for her. It gives her much-needed lifesteal, attack speed, attack damage, and a passive that absolutely shreds through pseudo-tanks that have their tankiness come through their HP. (The go-to example is Cho'gath.) Obviously, doesn't help against actual tanks that have tankiness through actual armor, but its health shred is incredibly strong. And then on top of that, it have an active that makes it one of the strongest dueling items in the game, stealing stats including movespeed from your opponent to make it much easier to kill them.

Runaan's Hurricane is a godly good item for her because of how it interacts with Ranger's Focus. Other champions in the game might use Runaan's Hurricane...but none of them use it better than Ashe does. The item basically changes her volley of arrows from her ranger's focus from killing one champion, to theoretically allowing her to kill three at the same time. It gives her incredible aoe that deals more damage than her usually-rather-pathetic volley damage. (Volley deals rather low poke damage later in the game. My build has volley deal ridiculous amounts of damage, but volley in the meta build is usually to set up for dealing damage through autoattacks more or less; most of Ashe's damage in a teamfight isn't from volley connecting and is from proccing Ranger's Focus.)

Even aside from that--Runaan's Hurricane gives 7% movespeed. I am pretty sure that of all AD items in the game, none give equal or higher amounts than that. (Boots don't deal damage so they are excluded from that list.) Okay maybe there's Youmuu's Ghostblade for out of combat movespeed (it's 40% for out of combat movespeed, if I recall correctly), but even if so, that'd place Runaan's Hurricane as the second highest AD item in the game for movespeed.

And then it gives ridiculously high amounts of attack speed and the 25% crit chance on top of that.

Between all of these factors, the item gives incredible utility to a utility-based adc and that's why it is so godly good on Ashe.

Infinity Edge is, simply put: the highest AD damage dealing item in the game, bar none. It gives the highest attack damage in the game, highest crit chance in the game, and boosts the crit damage of crits. No item gives a bigger pure, raw, sheer boost in raw attack damage. Essence Reaver can come vaguely close and due to ER giving greater utility, ER is usually built before IE, but IE is commonly paired with Essence Reaver for 50% crit chance, big attack damage, and big crit damage. I, personally, don't like building it; that doesn't mean it isn't an amazingly strong item for Ashe since it helps increase her slows and damage on slowed targets.

Phantom Dancer is another incredibly common meta item on Ashe, albeit like infinity edge, not one that I personally like to build. But I do understand why it is built. It has utility up there with the likes of runaan's hurricane: 25% crit chance, 5% movespeed, huge attack speed boost, giving a ghost effect to allow for huge gap-closing or disengagement, and a defensive shield to help keep Ashe alive if she is brought to a low enough HP. It is a godly good item for a utility adc due to it having a ton of utility.

Now, I'm not going to lie; as a six-item combo, there is some appeal to this.
Phantom Dancer and Blade of the Ruined King in tandem are the two ultimate dueling items--they ensure that the opponent can never escape, as the ultimate gap closer.
Phantom Dancer, Trinity Force, and lifesteal from BoRK, give an inherent tankiness to the build which with the right runes can be even stronger (for instance, legend bloodline + BoRK = 24% lifesteal, and overheal gives a shield to make it even harder to kill her).
The build has 100% crit chance, meaning slows are always doubled to 40-60% and deal absurdly high damage to her slowed targets.
Most of the items have movespeed, attack damage, and attack speed to them.
The build has extra mana built into it with a way to replenish mana.
The build has a lot of things which could go for it so obviously there's some appeal to that six-meta-item combo for Ashe...

...But, uh.
I don't think I need to say it but just in case.
Obviously.
In the meta build, you don't actually build all six of them.
For a start, you need boots, so boots eat up one of the six items.

But in an actually meta build.
You're obviously only going to build about half of them--3-4 of them, leaving room for 1-2 situational items.
In very very specific circumstances, you might only build two of them due to a need for three circumstantial items!

So they don't all exist on her at once.

I am not a talented enough player to know the best combos of them to pair with the situational items and I know there is huge debates to the ideal build order for them and so on and so forth so that's as much as I will say on the subject since I am not good enough to be able to speak further about it.

But I believe that everything I've said here is more or less true.
The meta build on her involves ~3 of those six items, usually Berserkers Greaves, and then ~2 situational items to finish out the build.

My build uses only one of the meta items on her, and it builds it near the end of the build.
And my build while it does use meta runes on her, uses a combination of runes which are not.
Since the meta is usually either Lethal Tempo + Triumph + Bloodline-or-Alacricity + Coup de Grace, with Inspiration (some combination of {Magical Footwear, Biscuit Delivery, Timewarp Tonic or Approach Velocity or Cosmic Insight, with the occasional rare perfect timing thrown in if the user intends to build GA} with which two you use being somewhat debatable and probably subjective preference), or Arcane Comet + Manaflow Band + Transcendence-or-Celerity (Transcendence if you're not planning on building 40% cdr, Celerity if you are, presumably) + Scorch-or-Gathering-Storm (Gathering Storm scales with time, but Scorch gives extra laning phase power and never really is useless and is always helpful in securing kills), with Inspiration (see above) as the secondary.

So me running Sorcery-Precision, and taking slightly-less-common sorcery runes (I believe more Ashe users use Celerity than use Transcendence; I know more Ashe users use Scorch than Gathering Storm) and slightly-less-common Precision runes (Triumph is infinitely better in most Ashe builds than Presence of Mind would be + Alacrity is more common than Bloodline on Ashe) and running secondary Precision at all (most Ashes run it as primary or not at all), is off-meta.

I know my build lacks in attack speed and movespeed and has less lifesteal than most Ashe builds and less crit chance than most Ashe builds and so on and so forth.

I know it is not the meta build for her because it is not the most optimal build and the most optimal builds are the meta builds for good reason (they wouldn't be the meta builds on her if they weren't the optimal builds on her, pretty much), but the runes aren't that far off-meta overall and with the items I build with said runes...the build just works for me.

I just find it really really fun, and really really effective. And so far...I haven't actually had a teammate flame me for it? Like. When I've run other off-meta builds. I've had teammates go "wtf". Heck, even when I've run meta builds where the flamer disagreed with that being optimal on Ashe, I've been flamed because they thought it wasn't ideal for her (even though it was).

But nobody has flamed me, nobody has pinged me, when they see me buy the tear, or the ionian boots, or the iceborn gauntlet, or the abyssal mask, or any item in the build. Not in even the games where I got flamed! Like, I've been flamed while using this build. But they never flamed my runes or item choices so much as they did my effect in the game, my scoreline (cs, kda, etc.), positioning, enemy adc/support items, enemy bounties, etc.

Like.

When my teammates have flamed me when I'm running other builds, regardless of whether those builds were optimal or not, they made it quite known they thought what items I was building played a part in justifying the flame on me.

But when I've been running this build...my teammates haven't flamed it in spite of it being such an off-meta build all-around.

And it is fun to play.
And it fits my playstyle really well and I can make use of it well and make a lot of good plays using it and it is not a hard build for me to execute and it is all things considered a fairly cheap build to get rolling and it is a build I can get started with a fairly cheap back (I was baffled to learn that Tear of the Goddess was an amazingly cheap 850 gold, and starts the stacks that carry over to the completed buy of the manamune so you can get like 500 of the 750 stacks for the manamune transforming into the muramana while the item is still incomplete) and overall.
It works.

And my teammates don't seem to take issue with it (at least so far).
It's fun.
I can pop off on it fairly easily. 
I play on it fairly well for multiple reasons.
I don't get grief from my teammates for running it.
It suits my style.

So.
Why wouldn't I run it?

I am actually thinking that I might have discovered something that nobody else has discovered yet.
Presence of Mind in season 9 wasn't the same as the current Presence of Mind. It was among the runes which got reworked in the preseason for season 10. So this will be the first season with the current Presence of Mind. Essence Reaver also was adjusted fairly recently at the end of season nine as well.

So this rune and item combo wouldn't have been possible to exist during season nine.
Season ten is the first season where this combo will have existed.

I legitimately think that my build is actually onto something.
Maybe a refined build wouldn't use all the items I mention. Instead of building both iceborn gauntlet and frozen heart, for instance, only building one of them and then building a situational item instead of it. Maybe building only 3-4 of the items in the build, or maybe slightly tweaking the runes using slightly alternative ones.

But I actually think.
Seriously.
Legitimately.

That the build I came up with isn't actually bad. And more than that? I think that it would work in the hands of a better player at a high elo, too. And not just a little bit--a lot. A higher elo player would be able to cs much better than I can, get kills that I don't manage to nab, avoid getting killed in situations where I die. They would be up against people who are higher elo that know how to punish Ashe, but I legitimately, genuinely, think that my build is fairly good at surviving most of the usual counterplays to Ashe.

She's got amazing tankiness to reduce burst damage; she's got healing and mana replenishment for sustain; she's got an amazing kiting ability to disengage and even if she is slowed, her slows are stronger than most slows from the enemy team; pretty much the only way she can still get caught out is if she has cc land on her but that's a problem with Ashe pretty much regardless of items or runes. (What do you take to actually counter getting chain-CC'd? Mercurial Scimitar plus Merc Treads plus some runes like Legend:Tenacity? Tenacity-Scimitar-Merc Treads as a rune and two-item combo is pretty much the only thing I can think of to help counter chain-cc, but against heavy cc it's not foolproof. Qss cleanses one effect, but if you're hit by three in succession, cleansing one effect still leaves you hit by two and even with all the reduction in duration of those abilities you can get, they still hit and cripple Ashe for just long enough to kill her. Like. Genuinely, how would you escape from chain-CC? Other than 'just be good at positioning and dodging', I don't see how you can ensure your safety.)

I think basically the main reason why this build or something very similar to it wouldn't be run, is more because nobody has run it before and they are more comfortable running the meta runes/items on her because that's what's been done for a long time and has proven that it works fairly effectively.

But I legitimately think.
That if this build were given exposure.
And if people saw the merits of trying it out at a higher elo.
That something almost identical to what I do, could become the meta build on Ashe. (Or Riot nerfs something in the combo to make it no longer viable because I imagine Riot doesn't want this sort of build to be an Ashe build.)

But the build deals an insanely high amount of damage and has incredibly high levels of sustain and good tankiness and overall is just.
I actually, legitimately, think it is a good build on her.
Maybe not the most optimal as-is, but I feel like if an unskilled player who doesn't understand the game in the detail I should can come up with an imperfect version of it that is still hugely effective...that someone who is skilled enough to understand every facet of the game, could take my build and perfect it to be optimal.

To use most of the same runes and at least half of the same items with a similar build order, and to then refine it, hone what I started to make a new optimal meta-build for her.

I'm not going to arrogantly say, I think I discovered a new optimal build for Ashe. I don't doubt that my build isn't in any circumstance, optimal.
But I do think that there is an actual, genuine chance. That with the changes to runes, items, abilities, and such in recent times.
That a build that takes what I do and refines it, could become the newest optimal Ashe build.

Granted.
Whoever does discover this new optimal Ashe build probably would start from one of the current optimal Ashe builds, playing around with Sorcery or Presence of Mind and ER on Ashe and discovering by happenstance how well some of these things synergize with them. They'd build from testing variants on the existing meta builds, rather than starting from scratch, coming up with my build, and then refining it into an actually optimized build.

I made my build from scratch, without help creating it, basically just as a troll idea of maximizing mana and cdr with every expectation that it wouldn't work--but then it actually did work so I was pleasantly surprised that my idea worked.
Whoever does discover the optimal version of my idea won't have done it from my idea, but from a small variant on the meta build that they discover is even more optimal than the current meta build.

But I am dead serious.
I think that my build is actually a good starting point for creating a new meta build for Ashe that would be optimal for her, assuming no changes to runes/items/the champion that ruin how well it works.

I did search for how others can use Muramana on Ashe, and they came up with various different variants on the idea which they self-admitted were probably not the most optimal because Muramana is usually not the best item on Ashe in general.

But I actually think that my build on Muramana is good for her. I realize that in terms of adcs using Muramana, there's pretty much only two (maybe three with Senna?) that come to mind, Ezreal and Kai'sa, and that when paired with the Iceborn Gauntlet that is firmly in the realm of being an Ezreal staple build.

Yet it does for Ashe basically what it does for Ezreal, accomplishing similar things for her that it does for him. (I assume the main reason it's usually not done for Ashe is that Ashe naturally has a slow via her passive which makes Iceborn Gauntlet less useful for her, whereas Ezreal gets mileage out of Iceborn Gauntlet's slow.)

Give Ashe a bottomless supply of mana, with 40% cdr, and she can spam abilities nonstop. Her ult is on a really low cooldown, her volley can be shot almost every second, her ranger's focus still deals huge damage, and with the muramana dealing so much extra damage...her poke deals ridiculously high amounts of damage. Regardless of autoattacking, Ranger's Focus, or volley. She just deals lots and lots of damage.

Using the build I actually feel like I am an actual carry. Usually when I play Ashe I'm a glorified second support at best. Giving minor utility to my team who if I am fortunate can maybe set up my team for success.

Yet I am dead serious, I've never felt like I was carrying my team until I started using this build. Was I solely responsible for my team's wins? No. But I am, for the first time ever, feeling like I could be that bit of difference, that carry, who can carry a fight and make the huge difference. Not as a "my abilities set my teammates up for success" way that I've been before; in a "my teammates set my abilities up for success" way.

It has to have something going for it that makes it work so well for a player as incompetent as I am. It has to have some merit to it, for me to be able to make it work fairly consistently well. It has to have something to it, for it to make me feel like I can and do carry my team through a teamfight, where I feel like I am doing most of my team's damage (the way an adcarry is supposed to, because an ad carry is meant to be the team's main damage source), a fact which is reflected in the endgame stats where I have one of the highest damages dealt in the game.

Like.

ADCs are supposed to basically be, what, 80, 90% of the team's overall damage? Where the removal of the enemy adc is a common victory condition for a teamfight, an objective, even the game? In every game I ran before this build, whenever the enemy team focused on killing me, I'd basically be laughing. "Of all the people they chose to try and kill, they tried to kill me? Joke's on them, I'm not actually my team's source of damage so them wasting abilities to kill me will let my team crush them", more or less.

But by running this build.
I actually, genuinely, feel. (Pardon the language.)
"Oh, shit. If they successfully kill me, my team doesn't have the damage necessary to win."

And it is more or less true!
When I die early, my team loses.
When I die in the middle of the fight, my team might still win even with me dead...but it's much, much harder for the team to win and even if they do win, they have trouble taking objectives because I am their main source of dps.
When I don't die at all, my team wins the fight or if they lose, only barely lose; they manage to take the objective or prevent the enemy team from taking the objective.

Which is the way things are supposed to be. The above is what's supposed to happen in any given game.
But prior to this build.
When I died early, my team wouldn't lose because I died early.
When I died in the middle of the fight, my team would always win even with me dead...because my death made zero difference to their chances of winning because I was contributing nothing.
When I didn't die at all, my team might win the fight or if they lost would lose rather notably; we would not have a guaranteed objective and weren't guaranteed to stop the enemy team from taking the objective because I couldn't help them with it.

Where even with me alive it was basically a 4v5, where I was basically a living ult at best, free gold for the enemy adc getting snowballed at worst.

Yet with this build. I feel like I can win 2v3s, maybe even 2v4s, maybe, maybe, maybe even a 1v3. Not a 1v4, not a 2v5, there's only so much you can do to overcome those situations, and certainly not a 1v9 or even 2v8 where my teammates lose every single lane, hard int, etc. There's limits to how much you can get away with. But I feel like I can win in numbers disadvantages, provided I am not at a severe numbers disadvantage, and that my team isn't essentially helping the enemy team.

If I perhaps one of the most incompetent players in the world, can feel like that when running this on Ashe.
There has to be something going for it.

But maybe I am just crazy, maybe I am just delusional, maybe I've just gotten lucky, maybe because I am so incompetent I'm only playing against those who're incompetent and thus players who were competent could develop a reliable counter to the build that would always work at making sure it wouldn't pop off.

I am obviously arrogant. In spite of knowing just how much I don't understand about the game.
There are a ton of things I don't get.
Rune interactions. Item interactions. Champion ability interactions. Champion abilities. Micro of the game. Macro of the game. Team compositions. Objective control. The list drags on and on and on. Things I have a very obvious demonstrable utter lack of knowledge or understanding of.

And someone like me who on a very fundamental level just doesn't understand so many of the fundamentals of the game, thinks that of all people, I developed an actually good build for my champion of choice?

That's arrogance.
That's sheer obliviousness to the obvious truth that I don't know what I am talking about and self-evidently so.
But I am also serious.
I legitimately.
Genuinely.
Think that I am actually onto something. Something that actually can work.

And if you doubt it.

I'd encourage you to try it out yourself.
Play around with it, try out the basics of it, refine it, tweak it, modify it, experiment with it.
Give it a serious, actual, genuine chance to see what you can make from it.

I don't think that if you give it an actual, serious try with an open mindset. Run it over multiple games, play around with it a bit depending on your team and the enemy team and how the game is unfolding. (Big difference between your lane being ahead and your lane being behind, for example.) Where you don't attribute failures to, "Well, it didn't work, so it must actually be trash", where you approach the idea with seeing if it could maybe be viable.

I think you will, if you think it can work. Will find that it does work for you. Maybe you still ultimately conclude, "Other builds are better". Maybe you still ultimately conclude, "This build is only good for select circumstances". But if you give it a serious try with an open mindset and multiple games, play around with it a bit.

I think that it can actually work and work well.
I'm not good enough at the game to really understand why it works.
But I do think that it does​ work.