u/Cerael

Hello Shacos, long post so bear with me

I’m a masters shaco OTP. I recently just hit it after being a hardstuck emerald for a few seasons, so I’m far from the most experienced shaco out there.

I primarily play AP, but in my 1.5 million mastery I’ve played some AD and even some bruiser.

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about shacos weak points. With AD, you’re potentially worthless late game and reliant on positioning misplays to “win” games. With AP, you’re essentially half of a teammate until 2 items (aside from niche lane skirmishes).

With the HoB nerfs, I’ve been cooking up a hybrid build and wanted to share the concept. This is based on the hero who posted the shaco AP build spreadsheet particularly the max CDR set which I’ve been playing with. When I play AP shaco, I find the majority of the value to come from the sheer number of boxes you can place down, not the individual damage they can do. The problem is, the higher elo I get the more often games are “decided” by 20 minutes.

The concept behind a hybrid build is that you can leverage the best parts of shacos kit in each phase of the game. AD for your first two items, and transition to AP all while focusing on stats that will have value.

The build will look like this:

Eclipse > Spear of Shojin > Mandate > Cryptbloom > flex (liandry/rabadon/zhonya) with boots likely after your 2nd item.

For runes, HoB and transcendence are the only two that really matter to me.

I’ve seen some worried about HoB nerfs, but I don’t think it’s as impactful as people feared. I think only a small portion of kills will be lost due to this.

Eclipse is seeing a buff too, and with 15 ability haste will see value later.

Spear of shojin gives you a lot of ability haste, health, a bit of AD, and you’re essentially a bruiser at this point with eclipse too. It also gives you the damage amp on your boxes. Not OP, but definitely has value.

Then you’re basically transitioning into a standard AP cdr build. Personally, I don’t think the burn has much value into squishier teams. These last items might have a bit more flexibility.

I picked cryptbloom because a lot of mages build BFT anyways and it has more ability haste/MR shred. I really like this item in my standard AP builds. If you don’t need it, cosmic drive could be viable too, or of course BFT.

I haven’t played with this, but if it feels at all decent I’ll give an update in a day or two. I’ve messed around in practice tool and the damage feels decent enough.

Your boxes still do respectable damage with the damage amp from spear and mandate, and your AD items still hold value from your E scaling which has a crazy low cooldown.

Curious what people think of hybrid shaco, as I haven’t seen it meta in a long time.

Hurricane is back, and deliver a pretty cool trailer for Siege. Siege Hype!

This is just my opinion - recently came back and have been climbing. Just hit emerald 3, was diamond 2 at my peak early last year when I took a break.

But jungle feels like it’s in a really good spot right now. I feel impactful while not having too much to do (atakhan). Grubs/dragons feel strong, but not so strong that you aren’t incredibly punished for losing one/two. Faster start means I’ve been getting invaded less level 1, but maybe that’s just my luck.

Curious what others think. Maybe I’m biased because I’m a shaco OTP (AP). The only bad thing is that I have gotten autofillled adc twice now, but both times I have LP protection and actually won both so I got double.

I’m also still climbing. As I get closer to my true MMR maybe I’ll feel differently when I hit that wall.