u/Many-Translator-8512

15 games into learning Yone. Am I completely misunderstanding how this champion is supposed to lane mid?

I've got around 15 games on Yone now, and I've been trying to actively improve instead of autopiloting. One game I'll try to pressure lane more, and the next I'll play much more patiently just to compare what works.

The conclusion I've arrived at so far is... it feels like Yone just doesn't have winning matchups in mid.

Against most mages, they either sit too far back to realistically threaten, or they have enough CC that every engage window feels fake unless they make a huge mistake.

Against assassins it doesn't feel much better either. My last game was into Fizz. If I engage with Q3, he just presses E and avoids everything. If I let Q3 expire, he immediately walks up, procs Electrocute, and backs off while I have to spend several seconds stacking Q again. It felt like I never actually dictated the lane.

After 15 games, it honestly feels like the first 10 minutes are just about collecting as much CS as possible, bouncing waves when you can, and trying not to die until one or two items. It feels less like I'm looking for opportunities and more like I'm just waiting for the lane to finally become playable.

Is that actually how experienced Yone players approach mid lane?

If not, what am I missing? Are there specific trading patterns, wave states, or matchups where Yone is supposed to have agency before his first item? Or is surviving lane and scaling simply the intended game plan for most matchups?

I'd rather know if my understanding of the champion is fundamentally wrong than keep reinforcing bad habits.

Reminder #2: If you're a practicing Muslim and serious about marriage, it should not take longer than 3 to 6 months from meeting someone to being married.

Most people probably won’t like this, especially those raised in Western environments where the norm is longer, undefined talking stages, but this is the truth that needs to be said.

This applies to both brothers and sisters.

Assuming both people are practicing Muslims and are following the Islamic process, there is no reason for a "talking stage" to drag on for months.

Within 2 to 4 weeks, you can usually find out all the major things that actually matter: deen, character, compatibility, goals, family expectations, finances, deal breakers, and whether you're both genuinely interested. If families are involved early and both people are intentional, that is more than enough time to decide whether to move forward or walk away.

Anything you think you’ll only discover after month five or six is usually not important enough to justify a prolonged talking stage. If you’re intentional and methodical from the start, the key things that actually matter for marriage; deen, character, compatibility, life goals, family expectations, finances, and non negotiable dealbreakers can be understood within a few weeks of focused, honest conversation. The goal is not to know everything about a person before marriage, because that is not possible and you will never reach full certainty about another human being. The aim is to reach a clear, accurate enough understanding of what matters for making a decision, and that level of clarity is realistically achievable early when both people are serious and involve families from the beginning. Beyond that point, continuing usually becomes extended talking without real direction, where very little new information is actually being gained that would change the decision to marry or not.

If it takes longer than 3 to 6 months from meeting to marriage, one of two things is usually true:

1. You're not actually serious about marriage.
2. You're not following the process Islam laid out.

This is a general reminder aimed at practicing Muslims. I'll probably post this every month or so because I think it's something our community needs to hear.

I've been trying to improve at Yone and there's one type of matchup I still don't understand.

How are you actually supposed to play against mages that have long range CC that completely shuts down your engage if they just hold onto one spell?

I'm talking about champions like Syndra, Ahri, Hwei, Anivia, and Lissandra.

It feels like they only need to save one ability. If I go in with Q3 or E, they immediately CC me, knock me away, or root me before I can actually follow up. Even if I land Q3, I often can't convert it into a real trade because I'm instantly interrupted.

Against players who understand the matchup, it feels like they don't even have to use those abilities aggressively. They can just hold them, and that alone prevents me from ever taking a meaningful trade.

Am I misunderstanding how these matchups are supposed to be played?

Should I just accept that I don't have kill pressure until they waste their CC, and focus on wave control, farm, and roaming? Or is there some Yone-specific trading pattern or baiting strategy that I'm missing?

I'd appreciate advice from higher elo Yone players, because these are the matchups I struggle with the most.

Edge of Night is one of the most slept on items for assassins.

After your first item, it consistently outperforms most lethality options in terms of real game impact. The spell shield alone can decide fights by blocking a key CC ability, and the 250 HP gives you enough durability to actually stay in fights instead of getting instantly deleted after going in.

People overvalue raw damage and delay it too long. If you are ahead, you do not need more damage, you need consistency. Edge of Night lets you keep your lead by preventing throws and letting you execute fights cleanly.

Outside of core items like Voltaic, Umbral, and Ghostblade, it is hard to justify most lethality items over it. Profane Hydra, Hubris, Axiom Arc, and especially Serpent’s Fang rarely provide the same level of consistent value.

If you are snowballing, stop greed building. Just put the Edge of Night in the bag.

I have always struggled to understand this.

Why do some Somali parents start asking their children for money so early in life, even when the child is still in their late teens or early 20s and only just getting started? Rent, food, bills, money for this and that. In many cases, the parent could cover it themselves, but the child ends up being treated like a constant source of income.

What makes it harder to understand is that this usually does not seem to help anyone in the long run. It does not really build much responsibility in an 18, 19, or 20 year old who is still trying to get established. It mostly just slows them down and puts them behind financially.

For a lot of Somali families in the West, this has also gone beyond small help and become a pattern. Children are expected to keep giving money over and over again, and a lot of that money goes into land or property back home. The issue is that many Somali children raised in the West do not see themselves going back to live there. So in practice, that money often feels wasted from their perspective.

I am not saying children should not help their parents. They should. But there should be a limit, and there should be timing. Let the child get some stability first. Let them build a career, earn properly, and stand on their own feet before they are expected to carry everyone else.

Because at some point it stops looking like support and starts looking like children being treated as financial investments.

I want to start by saying I'm not in the "have kids immediately after marriage" camp.

Personally, I think waiting around 6 months is reasonable, and if circumstances require it, even up to a year. I can understand some couples needing longer, but I've never really understood the people who say they want to wait 2–3 years, or even 4–5 years, before having children.

My reasoning is pretty simple:

• The first few months of marriage are usually when you figure out whether you're actually compatible.
• Many marriages that fail tend to run into serious problems fairly early on.
• A lot of people save themselves for marriage and naturally want time to enjoy being married and spend quality time with their spouse.
• Building a bond and getting to know each other is important.

I agree with all of those points.

What I don't understand is why any of them require 2–3+ years.

To me, most of that can be accomplished within 6–12 months. Even if life gets in the way, I can understand stretching that to 2 years max.

The thing I've noticed is that a lot of people who say they want to wait several years often end up having children much sooner once they're actually married.

It's almost like the idea sounds appealing before marriage, but the reality changes when you're living with your spouse every day and having children suddenly becomes a real possibility rather than a hypothetical future plan.

The reasons I usually hear are:

1. "We want to spend time together first."

Fair enough, but why does that require multiple years? You can build a strong marriage and enjoy your spouse without waiting that long.

2. "We want to travel."

You can still travel after having children. Obviously it's different, but it's not like your life ends once you become a parent. And if you wait a year before having children, that's still plenty of time to take trips together.

3. "Finances."

This is the one I understand the least. If you're already in a position to get married, it usually means you're capable of providing at least a basic stable life for one or two children. So finances are the least convincing reason to delay children for multiple years. It also doesn't really align with religious values the way people use it, since marriage itself already implies responsibility and provision rather than long-term postponement of family.

So my genuine question is:

For those who want to wait 2–3 years or more before having children after marriage, what is the reasoning?

Is there something I'm missing, or is it one of those things that sounds good in theory but often changes once people are actually married?

Hear me out. In my opinion, anybody who says a talking stage should last longer than 2 or 3 days (Max 2 weeks for people who want to process things slowly) is delusional.

I am not saying you should marry the person after 2 or 3 days. That is not what I mean. I mean that after a couple of days, you should already know whether this person is someone you want to start taking seriously or not. At that point, you move into the serious stage.

The reason I say this is because unserious people get weeded out very quickly once things become real. A lot of people can act normal when everything is still vague and casual. But the moment you start moving with intention, things change fast. The person who was just flirting and wasting time usually backs out when they realise this is not mindless chat anymore.

That is why I do not see the point in stretching a talking stage for months. If you speak to someone for 2 or 3 days properly, you already get a sense of whether they are worth pursuing. At most, I can understand giving yourself up to 2 weeks to think things through and process what you have learned.

Anything beyond that starts to look like pointless chatting that goes nowhere. You are not learning anything meaningful anymore. You are just entertaining each other without moving with intention.

So for me, 2 or 3 days is enough to decide whether this is someone worth taking seriously. If you need months to figure that out, I honestly think you are overcomplicating something that should be obvious very early on.

I genuinely don’t understand why people choose 3-door versions of cars over 5-door versions in most cases.

Outside of cars that were clearly designed around being a 3-door from the start, or cars that are more for fun/styling than practicality, why would you willingly choose a 3-door? Especially when the 5-door version usually looks almost identical while being way more practical.

You lose rear passenger accessibility, convenience, ease of getting things in and out, and overall usability for what usually feels like a very small styling difference.

The only situation where I can fully understand it is if you barely ever carry passengers, don’t really have family around, or rarely drive with friends. In that case, fair enough, the practicality loss probably doesn’t matter much to you. But for the average person, I genuinely don’t see the benefit.

So for the people who actively prefer 3-doors, what’s the actual appeal? Is it purely aesthetics? Does it feel sportier to you? Or is there something I’m missing?

I just had a weird stretch of games and it made me question how much luck actually affects climbing.

I went on a 15 game win streak, then in the next 15 games I lost 12 of them. My own play did not feel drastically different between the two runs, but the results were completely different. That made me wonder how much of League is actually skill, and how much is just being on the right or wrong side of matchmaking for a short period of time.

I know the usual response is that if you are good enough, you will climb no matter what. But in small sample sizes, luck can absolutely decide whether a streak turns into a climb or gets erased by a bad run of teammates, lobbies, or game quality.

That is what I want to ask jungle players: how much do you think luck really matters in matchmaking? And do you think win streaks can sometimes push you into harder games that then cause the swing back down?

And before people answer with "AP Shaco scales" or "AP Shaco is more setup/control focused than AD," I already understand that. I know the champion isn't supposed to have the same early game impact as AD Shaco. I know AP Shaco is way more thematic than AD Shaco and plays far more around tempo control, traps, objectives, pathing manipulation, vision control, and teamfight disruption instead of just raw early game pressure.

What I'm trying to understand is what actually separates good AP Shaco players from bad ones.

Because whenever I play AP Shaco, it feels like the early game impact is insanely low unless enemies massively misplay and walk into boxes. Ganking feels much less reliable than AD Shaco unless the lane state is perfect, and until I hit 2 items, usually Blackfire + Liandry, the champion doesn't really feel like it comes online for me.

And yeah, once I do get those items, the champ starts feeling genuinely strong around objectives and teamfights. But before that point, it sometimes feels like I'm just farming and hoping the game stays stable long enough for me to become useful.

So what exactly are good AP Shaco players doing differently that makes the champion work consistently?

Especially from people who play a lot of AP Shaco, what are the biggest differences you notice between good AP Shaco players and lower elo AP Shaco players?

Because I feel like I understand what the champion is supposed to be conceptually, but I don't think I fully understand how the champion is actually meant to function game-to-game.

Coming back to League after a few years away and I am trying to understand something that feels very different now.

I used to play about five years ago, quit, and I have just come back to the game and started jungling again. For now I am mainly playing Talon and trying to get back to master. One thing I have noticed is that gold and XP leads do not seem to matter anywhere near as much as they used to.

There are games where I am up two or even three levels, and sometimes a full item or more, and still certain champions can fight me way closer than they should, or even beat me outright in a 1v1. I am not talking about obvious hard counters like an assassin into a tank. I mean situations where, in the past, that kind of lead should have meant the fight was heavily in my favor.

What changed over the last few years? Is it just modern champion design, base stats, item spikes, damage creep, defensive stats, or something else entirely?

I am genuinely trying to understand whether this is just how the game works now, or if I am missing something important.

I used to play long sessions and just queue game after game. Lately I have started taking bigger gaps between games, and it has made a noticeable difference.

What I have noticed from tracking my own games over the last six months is this: after a really bad loss, especially one that felt messy or unfair, my next two games are far more likely to go badly if I instantly queue again. Even when I do not feel tilted in the moment, the loss still seems to affect me more than I realise.

That is the main point I want to make. A bad loss does not have to show up as obvious tilt for it to affect your play. Sometimes you are not angry, not flaming, not visibly frustrated, but the loss still sticks in the background and quietly damages your next games.

Because of that, I think taking a 10 to 15 minute break after a bad loss is a very good habit. Do something that has nothing to do with League. Get away from the screen for a bit, reset, and come back with a clearer head.

Even if you think the loss did not bother you, it is still probably worth stepping away. You do not always notice how much a bad game affected you until you already queue into the next one and it is too late.

Historically, every role and class in League had something they were good at, and also something they had to give up. That tradeoff mattered. Riot never seemed interested in every class becoming a “do everything” champion.

Over the last several years, and especially since the durability update, I think class identity has blurred badly. My biggest issue right now is bruisers/fighters.

The problem is simple: bruisers get to stack damage, health, and resistances all at once, while also getting easier access to target reach than they used to. Historically, one of their biggest weaknesses was getting onto a target in the first place. That weakness has been softened a lot over time by reworks, item changes, and kits that now come packed with dashes, sticks, gap closers, or enough mobility to make access much less of a real weakness.

So now they are no longer paying the old price for their strengths.

At the same time, their damage has crept up so much that in a lot of cases they are getting uncomfortably close to the output of actual damage classes. That is part of the problem. It is not just that they can survive. It is that they can survive while also threatening damage that overlaps too much with ADCs, mages, and assassins in the early and mid game.

And that makes picking a pure damage class feel bad. Why should I pick an ADC or mage when, in many games, the bruiser is going to match or beat my damage while also being harder to kill and harder to punish? That does not feel like healthy class distinction. It feels like identity collapse.

This is not me saying bruisers should be useless. It is me saying their damage should be trimmed so that their power actually has a cost again. If a class gets durability, sustain, mobility, and reliable access, then its damage should not also be near the top of the chart. That is exactly how you end up with champions that feel frustrating, overloaded, and too efficient at everything.

Riot has already acknowledged that damage has crept back up over time, and they have also talked before about fighter item overlap and subclasses blending together instead of staying distinct. That is why this discussion matters. It is not some random complaint. It is a real class-identity problem.

This line of thinking was also sparked by a recent Riot Endstep Q&A, which is why I am bringing it up now.

If you are going to reply, read the post carefully and address the actual point. Do not nitpick one sentence, miss the overall argument, and act like that is a counterargument. If you reply without understanding the post, I will call that out bluntly.

~(Master 238lp AP Shaco Main)

I am mostly talking about AD assassins here, not AP assassins, because I do not play AP assassins and I am not trying to speak for that side of the class.

Before the usual replies come in, I am not arguing that assassins should kill tanks, frontline, or any random target they touch. That is not the point. Riot has always framed assassins as a high-risk, high-reward class, and fighters are meant to be more target-agnostic, which is one of the things that separates them from assassins. My point is much narrower: assassins are supposed to be the class that kills vulnerable targets efficiently, and that job has been blurred so hard that a lot of bruisers now match or come close to assassin burst while also bringing more durability and more forgiveness.

That is why I stopped playing assassins two years ago, after mythic items were removed. I gave up on AD assassins because there has been a long-running bias against them, and it feels like Riot keeps treating their damage profile as something that must be tightly controlled, while other classes are allowed to creep into the same burst space.

The game I want to use as an example was Talon into Lee Sin. He hit one item while I was around one and a half, which is already expected because my items are cheaper. The issue is what happened next. He landed Q, then E, then autos, then ultimate, and the damage was enough to take my entire health bar. Then he still had enough to follow with Flash and finish the kill with a second Q. I am not saying an assassin should always one-rotation someone. I am saying a bruiser should not be able to come that close to assassin burst while also having the rest of a bruiser kit.

That is the overlap I am talking about. If a bruiser can threaten the same kind of burst window as an assassin, then the assassin loses the thing that is supposed to make the class distinct. Lee Sin is not the only example. This pattern shows up across a lot of bruisers. They are able to do too much damage too fast, and that makes the assassin identity much less exclusive than it used to be.

At that point, the only thing that still feels unique to assassins is movement. Even that is not enough anymore. Talon is one of the few assassins with truly game-warping mobility. Most assassins do not have that. And mobility is not exclusive to assassins anyway, because Riot keeps giving new champions and reworks more and more movement tools. So once burst is shared and mobility is shared, what is actually left that makes assassins distinct?

That is the part that feels wrong to me. The class is still playable. I am not saying assassins are unplayable, and I am not saying good assassin players cannot climb. They absolutely can. The problem is that if you want to play an assassin, you often have to put in far more effort than a bruiser just to get a fraction of the same result.

That is not a healthy identity for the class.

I used to think mid was better for Aurelion Sol because you did not have to depend on your support’s synergy.

After more games this season, I have changed my mind. Bot has felt better for me in almost every bracket. The lane is easier to play freely, the enemy ADC usually has less utility than the support, and once you factor in Aurelion Sol’s range with Q and E, it becomes much harder for bot lane to meaningfully punish you. Even though mid can look cleaner in theory, Aurelion Sol is a scaling champion, and bot seems to let that scaling convert into wins more consistently.

I also think bot lane is less reliant on your jungler bailing you out. Mid matchups tend to punish you harder and earlier, while bot lane often gives you more room to farm, poke, and stack safely. For me, that has made bot lane feel better across all elos, not just lower ranks.

For builds, I am mostly seeing the standard Comet setup or new ~ (DFT) with Rylai’s into Liandry’s (Lowkey I prefer Liandry first idk why) , then damage or defensive follow ups depending on the game.

I want to hear what other people think. Why do you think Aurelion Sol is better mid or better bot, and what runes and item order are you running this season?

Edit:
Small thing I have also noticed. Early stacking is not as important as it looks. There are plenty of games where I sit on around 70 to 90 stacks at 15 minutes, which looks bad on paper. But by 25 minutes I am suddenly at 280 or more.

Once mid game fights start, stacking accelerates hard. A few decent fights where people stay inside your E and you get full Q uptime will rapidly catch you up and often push you past the usual stacks per minute benchmarks. Because of that, I do not think early stack numbers should be overvalued as long as you are reaching fights and playing for scaling.