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 I have been playing dota 2 for twelve years.  I am closing in on my 4000th hour of dota 2.  I'm closing in on 3000 games and I am ranked as Archon 3 (2600-2700 mmr) I have never been Legend rank or had 3000 MMR points. This LP will document my journey to change that. Why are you LPing a moba or dota 2 for that matter? For starters, I lost a toxx on maki itoh winning a match (par for the course. Dota 2 has had a big impact on my life. To keep a long story short, I am an incredibly competitive person and when I was younger I had football as an outlet for that. These days I can't walk around the block without my hamstring feeling like it's going to explode off my leg. Dota 2 is the ultimate game of high's and lows and I want to show that off, I also want to show off the way that (much like a sport) dota can show growth in a really incredible way and I want to show that off to people who may have never experienced it. What's the format for this LP? It's going to be hybrid, I plan on updating weekly/biweekly with screenshots of progress in terms of meta, such as my rating in terms of MMR as well as things I'm practicing and improving on. I will also be doing replays of games that were paticularly notable or posting clips I consider impressive. As an example, here's a clip of me doing something insane a few years ago. https://streamable.com/ei6e07 this is from probably my most successful game ever, as a dota player.  I have a really distinct memory of a genuine feeling of nirvana and pure joy that we actually won this game. I sat for a couple of minutes and just soaked it up. I'm pretty sure I lost the game right after too. The other side of my dota career is well..  Sometimes you have to go into the discord and declare that nobody beats you 10 times on the bounce. It's like I said, ups and downs. Alright, let's get into things, shall we? TABLE OF CONTENTS: Update 1 Update 2 Update 3 Update 4 Update 5 Update 6 (The beginning of the end?) Current role: All roles ItohRespectArmy fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Apr 29, 2024 |
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Apr 2, 2024 07:54
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Dope idea, do it The Cutest In The World.
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Apr 2, 2024 07:59
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Update the first Just a little late for this to be an elaborate april fools prank but here I am.  Last month was entirely forgettable, roughly 50% winrate and not enough games to give me my badge back. Currently my grasp on the game is tenous. I haven't found heroes I like, I haven't found a role I like, I don't know what all the items in the game do, I am lost in terms of ingame objectives and item builds. Thankfully the cognitive function of the average dota player means that I'm currently just average. In terms of roles, my preference is as follows. Position 1 (The Carry). I spent alot of time being coached to play Position 1. My immortal friend played carry and taught me to be the very best pale imitation of himself. It was exciting and it was very effective. Let's look a little deeper on this for a moment.  These are my top 10 heroes, of all time. 7 of them are undeniable positon one heroes, real proper hard carries and I have had good success with them. Luna is favorite hero in the entire game, she's tons of fun and usually unviable unless you're playing in a team. Her playstyle is simply too advanced for the level of MMR I'm at. Wraith King, who is rocking an almost 60% winrate by comparison is also a favorite, he's a big bruiser who gets two lives and has a stun, he just works. Juggernaut and Phantom Assassin can both be very, very good in the right games and the right meta but I don't enjoy playing them much. Ursa is a bear who mauls people, he's awesome. Position 5 (Hard Support) I also spent alot of time being coached to be the hard support because I would duo with my immortal friend to learn things. Position 5 is a symbiotic position, you adjust to your carry and do your best to enable them. They are generally a sacrifical role and suffer for everyone else. my three most played supports.  Crystal Maiden is the archetypal position 5, super squishy, gives people mana just for being alive, has the most cosmetics in the game that add bad visual effects. Omniknight is a classic paladin guy who heals people, I only played him when he was completely busted though. Ogre Magi is the gooniest hero, he's a big guy with a club who uses rng to annoy people, awesome hero. Position 3 (The Offlane) Tanks, initiators and just weird heroes. I love position 3 but I am very bad at it. I don't judge fights well and I do not press buttons well enough to play the more complex offlaners. My three most played position 3 heroes are Axe, who I used to have a genuine 35% winrate as until I hit a very very hot streak on him during a good patch. Bristleback who I usually just play as position 1 from position 3. and Sand King, who is just a cool rear end hero but much the same as bristle. In general my weakness in offlane (position 3) highlights one of my main weaknesses: I am greedy and I will try to farm my way out of any bad situation. I don't do well with early pressure and I cannot apply pressure early. We'll get more into weaknesses later though. I have plenty. Position 4 (Soft Support) Here's a weird one, in terms of winrates I am probably an insane positon 4 player  Low sample sizes for all these but my hypothesis is that it's just that I've played so much carry I know just how to be annoying enough to make someone lose their mind. My most played is actually Nyx Assassin with a 53% winrate in 15 games but dotabuff considers me to be "roaming" on account of his playstyle. Position 2 (Mid) I do not understand Mid, I have never been a good mid player. Mid is a sort of black box that when I enter I find out a millon things I am pleased to soon forget.  It's pretty ugly overall. It makes sense though, Mid is it's own ecosystem with very specific matchups and very little room for error. You might wonder why I did that breakdown, well it's fairly simple. This LP has participation! Every month I'm going to offer it up to you gamers which role I should main for a month with the ability to suggest a specific hero for that role.  Dota 2's solo ranked system allows you to basically play the same role, as long as you're willing to farm role queue tokens and I have 54 to spend on whatever the people want me to play. The voting options are Position 1-5 Any hero Closing date for the vote will be 8am bst on the 8th of April. Until then I will probably just be playing to my whims. In future I may make the voitng conditons more specific but for the opening I literally need to relearn the game, so anything will work.
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Apr 2, 2024 08:26
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Sanguinia posted:Dope idea, do it The Cutest In The World. thank you! I appreciate it.
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Apr 2, 2024 08:26
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Hell yeah. Become THE CARRY, Pos 1.
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Apr 2, 2024 09:12
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I'm voting for Offlane Bristleback, I play it a lot at Ancient and it's genuinely hilarious how few people know how to deal with it. You have the ability to be truly unstoppable and it's my favourite "actually I'm the carry" offlaner. vanguard/mana boots early to sustain yourself whether you're laning or jungling then rush aghs then bloodstone then shard. by the point you get shard the combination of that + your aghs ability mean basically anyone on the enemy team dies if they get out of position and if the other team focuses you then you pop bloodstone and face away and laugh while collecting your free rampage. further itemisation is just a heart, and then things to deal with whatever they buy to mess you up, usually this is silver edge so you just buy a windwaker and Taz away if this happens- the only way to deal with you then is also buying a nullifier and at that point theyve itemised way too hard just for the offlaner (do not pick into viper or PA though)
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Apr 2, 2024 09:49
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Nice to see a fellow Ogre Magi enjoyer. As someone who's stuck in Crusader after 3k+ hours and years of playing DotA Allstars, I'll definitely be watching how this develops. Anyhow, I'm gonna vote 4 because it's in my opinion the most fun position to watch. No farming, just non-stop hero on hero action. Should be noted that roaming is a perfectly valid way to play the position, especially when you're Nyx (or Mirana). anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 12:00 on Apr 2, 2024 |
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Apr 2, 2024 10:17
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Seconding offlane Bristleback; haven't played in years, but one of my favorite memories was matching with a stack that wanted to trilane and asked me if I can solo offlane, and my response was basically "CAN I".
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Apr 2, 2024 14:28
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it's a nice pos1 luna patch so that's my vote. also a comfy hero for getting back into the game as her gameplan has a nice rhythm to it
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Apr 2, 2024 15:05
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as someone with close to 10,000 hours in DOTA 2 and who plays in the 6000 MMR bracket, I wish you good luck. Play Broodmother, shes been OP for 12 years now
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Apr 2, 2024 15:33
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NtotheTC posted:I'm voting for Offlane Bristleback, I play it a lot at Ancient and it's genuinely hilarious how few people know how to deal with it. You have the ability to be truly unstoppable and it's my favourite "actually I'm the carry" offlaner. I spam Hookwink at low MMR just because every game has a BB. I can get a good break on and lock him down long enough for my team to hopefully deal with him. For a while I'd go with Void/Silver Edge and just kite him, but I had so many games where everyone focuses him when he's not broken and turn him into a machine gun that kills all off us.
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Apr 2, 2024 15:44
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My vote is for Pos 1 Lifestealer. It's a good patch for him and he's got a very straightforward game plan to play which means you have to rely less on your teammates to be effective. If not Lifestealer then Luna is a good choice too.
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Apr 2, 2024 16:19
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Pos 1 you can become the God of archon as carry Hero : slark, destroy your enemies morale
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Apr 2, 2024 17:25
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4 try what works!
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Apr 2, 2024 21:45
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEItzmAqqTw
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Apr 3, 2024 01:32
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good luck, I crawled up from guardian back to legend and now I'm back to archon I vote vengeful spirit pos 4,because it worked for me
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Apr 3, 2024 03:30
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You should play a bunch of omniknight offlane. There's a build going around that's phase boots into blink dagger into khanda and you throw hammers and zoom around invincible and poo poo pure damage all game and it looks fun.
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Apr 3, 2024 09:10
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Serious question, do you want smart, sensible picks, or dumb meme ones because I really want to suggest POS 4 Wraith king, an objectively bad idea, but one that is also very fun all 1/10 times it's actually not outright throwing
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Apr 3, 2024 09:50
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TheFlyingLlama posted:Serious question, do you want smart, sensible picks, or dumb meme ones I am down to play Weird poo poo but stuff that most people would consider pure griefing I'll probably discard. so down for either but there's a reason the hero picks are merely advisory.
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Apr 3, 2024 10:48
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Techies 
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Apr 3, 2024 13:34
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ItohRespectArmy posted:I am down to play Weird poo poo but stuff that most people would consider pure griefing I'll probably discard. play Broodmother mid
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Apr 3, 2024 15:39
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I like to write five or six heroes down and then pick them out depending on role
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Apr 3, 2024 19:35
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I've played a bit of dota in the past couple of days, so let's do a quick update before voting closes. So, a very good record here a 66% winning percentage over these games, I decided to try out some new stuff. Venomancer is very in meta and apparently strong, so I tried him.  it didn't go well, I didn't play amazing but I do want to highlight another gamer.  my friend ursa here, we had a hell of a lane, got a few kills and it was all good but he had the bloodlust and I'm not talking ogre magi. every now and again in the archon bracket you encounter a gamer who can only fight, his heart does not know peace. He died doing what he loved, going in no matter what. That's what freedom means.  I went back to old reliable with Luna in my only attempt at carry during the period. This game was messy but we won it in the end due to just having a better lineup basically. I died four times in lane, which is why my gpm was so low but when I accelerated and got into the game I was able to contribute plenty. Not bad for someone who is very rusty.  Some games you get a free loss because your team is grief and sometimes you get this game. By all accounts, we should've lost this one. In the first minute my silencer died, pinged me 15 times and went to jungle for the next 20 minutes. Leaving me solo againist...  this guy and his good friend shadow shaman. Now it's entirely possible a better player than me wouldn't end up like...  so if we lost, it'd be on silencer for leaving me 2v1 and me for dying 5 times instead of swallowing my pride and jungling. but we did win, so actually I'm a genius.  this is probably what caught the eye at the start. I'm gona cover these games in the aggregate and then get to the reason I had to do this update with things fresh in the mind. A good friend of mine with a perchant for smoking trees told me I should play dawnbreaker and I said, sure. So here we are, 5 games. In the first one I did okay but I was too bad at my abilities to get that next level, in all the future games I actually hit all 3 hits of my combo q ability and crushed people. Dawnbreaker is an interesting one at this MMR. On one hand, I can split push and farm while my team fucks around in the jungle idly for 20 minutes and then appear with my big ulti to win the inevitable bad fight. On the other hand, if my team are arguing with eachother over complex eastern europeon racial politics, I can't force anything, the hero is reactive in nature. A sort of second person hero. She is really loving fun though, holy moly. Alright, let's get into the main event though. Do you guys consider yourselves mentally strong? I like to think I have that dog in me, atleast.  Mental strength is what allows you to witness things like this. Now what happened here? Dota 2 tracks win probability, and you might question what on earth could cause such a drop in win probability. Well... Let's look deeper. We're gona start at the 10 minute mark.   Radiant have a 3k gold lead, very good for this time in the game. They're winning some lanes for sure.  looking at the individual net worth we can see all the radiant cores leading the dire ones, with the dire mid (storm spirit) below the radiant position 4, crushing stuff. You may also notice me being top networth for dire, no biggie. But games aren't decided at ten minutes. Let's go forward.  14 minutes in and Radiant grows it's lead while also hitting some big big timings.   Necro has a radiance, and TA has a deso  20 minutes in and the trend continues, things are getting very very bad for dire  Necro is balling out of control and Radiant basically only have two cores at this point. Slardar has his blink and echo, so radiant should have no problem starting fights. If gold were everything, it'd be a extreme lead but one thing worth noting is the state of the map at this point.  Radiant have every single tower up. Dire is barely clinging on to it's two tier 2's All that's left is for Dire to choke out the map, push their advantage and win the game.  16k gold lead.  96% win probability for Radiant, that's pretty good.  Void has done a good job of split pushing and grabbing farm where he can but the three cores of radiant are so so far ahead.   Radiant are going to turn the screws, take some rax while the idiot dawnbreaker and skywrath mage are dead. All they have to do not to lose is to stay safe, play smart and not get baited.  Pudge hooks Necro, which gets two members of dire killed but thankfully due to a combo of chronosphere, skywrath ulti and random diving this happens.  Comeback gold is no joke and before this point, I was a little checked out. The game seemed too hard, they had too much but something like this makes you begin to believe that the enemy is just as stupid as you are.  there's something beautiful about this, the Necro walking into the 4 enemy heroes, the storm who got crushed in lane catching him.  skywrath stealing the kill again, very based. Oh well, it's not like the radiant are a one man team, they have a very very farmed TA.  She's got items and she's feeling herself, all she has to do is stay in the backline and crit us to death.  Radiant are gathering up in the south of the map, getting ready to do rosh probably.  Except one Radiant gamer.  Storm has had a very rough game, so he's not a hugely valuable kill but hey, I'm sure TA can get him.  well, I would hate if that happened to me.  I'm a bit of an empath, so I thought to myself, what would I do if I were him, my team is throwing a basically won game and I just died a very embarassing death. I have 80 seconds to figure out a solution.  Bkb would be good here, it would stop skywrath blowing me up atleast. I'd love to know what everyone in the thread would do in this situation but let's see what TA does. Our new protagonist is TA but it's worth noting Radiant do get rosh during this death timer.  Necro and the gang go bottom and start pushing a t3, let's see what TA does.  bkb queued up, here we go!  At this late in the game, we're officially in carry territory. TA being a player of honour seeks out void for a one on one showdown.  Sadly, the fields of dota are not a place of honor, nothing of value is buried here.  I would hate if this happened to me.  another 80 seconds to ponder what went wrong.. maybe this time-  oh, well I wouldn't do that.  The theme of today's episode, mental strength. Currently, the win probability is at 85% towards radiant.  36 minutes before the madness took hold of templar assassin.  it only took a moment but the entire gold lead flips to dire, the same dire team who hadn't taken a t2 tower the same dire whose mid is still behind witch doctor in net worth.  seconds after TA destoys her items, radiant (who still have aeigis!!!!!!!) kill void without buyback. A few minutes later, Radiant lose. I might do video stuff for future deep dives like this, but I hope this was enjoyable at the very least. Current voting (ends on the 8th) carry 3 offlane 3 mid 1 soft support 5 hard support 1 ItohRespectArmy fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Apr 5, 2024 |
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Apr 5, 2024 04:24
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 Also if my joke Techies vote didn't count, soft support.
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Apr 5, 2024 04:48
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYzMYcUty6s
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Apr 5, 2024 05:58
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Magical. I would love to see team chat between the last two deaths for TA, I'm guessing there was all kinds of melting down going on. And not having played dota in forever but being an eternal 3k player when I did I vote you play pos 5 venge. Point and click stun into armor shred is really good when people are bad, and swap saves bad positioning for your carry and punishes it for the enemy!
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Apr 5, 2024 19:09
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I'm enjoying this immensely. I just started playing dota, (I've watched it for years, I'm 600 MMR atm ~ 150 Wins/300 games total. Maybe I can post my own thread and recap my decent into madness.
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Apr 5, 2024 20:15
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ItohRespectArmy posted:it didn't go well, I didn't play amazing but I do want to highlight another gamer.
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Apr 5, 2024 20:36
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anilEhilated posted:This might be less bloodlust and more the lack of a BKB. I obviously don't know what kind of team you played against but it seems a pretty glaring omission. the bkb would have helped for sure but I can't overstate that he would respawn and go fight the nearest hero, no matter what.
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Apr 5, 2024 20:40
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drat gamers congratulations you just gotta find the weak link in the chain, and sometimes chin checking the solo carry while they're on the gank is just the formula.
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Apr 6, 2024 06:10
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All I know about Dota 2 is that there are announcers and three little goblins in a minecart. I think you should make your announcer the old man from Bastion and you should play as the goblins.
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Apr 6, 2024 11:14
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i bookmarked this thread for the meme but your recaps are pretty fun and detailed.
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Apr 6, 2024 17:47
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Your Uncle Dracula posted:All I know about Dota 2 is that there are announcers and three little goblins in a minecart. I think you should make your announcer the old man from Bastion and you should play as the goblins. I have been using the bastion announcer in dota for the last 6,000 games I've played over 10+ years and im still not tired of that voice.
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Apr 6, 2024 20:06
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420 Gank Mid posted:I have been using the bastion announcer in dota for the last 6,000 games I've played over 10+ years and im still not tired of that voice.
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Apr 6, 2024 21:14
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Storm Spirit announcer or bust.
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Apr 6, 2024 21:19
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I like the dark willow announcer and this thread!!
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Apr 6, 2024 22:13
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Oof, dota 2. Haven't played it in a couple years now, but got 3200ish hours between 2015-2020. Only bothered playing ranked a little bit one season out of curiosity, got to Legend 1 before going back to casual. Nowadays I mostly just read patch notes and watch The International. I played almost exclusively pos5, with my mains being Lion and Disruptor. A lot of lower-ranked games seem to have people like that TA in them - they get mad and essentially ragequit because of some perceived failing on their team's part. Bastion announcer is best announcer.
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Apr 7, 2024 01:22
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Quote != edit
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Apr 7, 2024 01:23
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Only a few hours left to get your votes in! edit: voting is now CLOSED. I will be playing soft support until may ItohRespectArmy fucked around with this message at 09:06 on Apr 8, 2024 |
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Apr 8, 2024 04:59
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they still have the Rick and Morty announcer
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Apr 8, 2024 21:13
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