I Made 1 Joke About Shaco...

I'd love it if Shaco got buffs and items got nerfed. Shaco's base stats are horrendous, but scale really well with the lethality and burst that items have provided over the past year+.

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If what you're saying is true, his win rate would dip when you got to Plat+ and Diamond+, but it doesn't, it gets higher.

That's a linear way of thinking about it. It's not necessarily that Shaco players plat+ get worse. They are better ever so slightly. But there's waaaay more bad players than there are good Shaco players. And even less players that understand how to take advantage of the champions' weaknesses. That's why you see pro players banning Shaco. Because in soloQ he's an anomaly that, despite being easy to play against, he isn't someone they can reliably get practice from because 1. he's not gonna be played in competitive anytime soon so just off that it is a waste of time. And 2. it'd require playing in such a way that forces unconventional play from themselves and his teammates.

Overall, the problem isn't that the Shaco players are winning. The problem is that other people are losing.

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This is incredibly wrong in every way.

1. They cited more then winrate. They cited winrate, playrate, and curves/changes through elos. You can accurately determine the strength of a champion based on those observations.

Curves and changes are just that. Curves in changes. Nothing significant about it other than shit happens. You can't accurately determine the strength of a champion based on the actions of monkeys.

2. "A population that doesn't know what they're doing in the first place" ...like what? Diamond players don't know what they're doing? And even though Ru didn't mention it, there are several diamond-challenger shaco mains out there...did they just get up there because no one knows what they're doing? Your argument here was delusional at best.

Yes. They got up because other people did not know what they were doing. Hell! I got up there because everybody else didn't know what they were doing years ago! Even though i'm miles better than I was I am still trash at this game because i'm not willing to put in the effort to actually be good at it. I got to diamond V not knowing ANYTHING about pathing, jungle-tracking (which is basically the same thing but not a lot of people understand that), wave manipulation, back timers, gank timers etc. and knowing all this now I am still consistently hitting diamond and I can tell you RIGHT now more than 70%+ of the players in Diamond 4/3 do NOT know about any of what I just mentioned. It doesn't even register to them. These are things some NA challenger players don't fully understand. I'd ask you to watch challenger games so you could see the proof yourself but I can't really do that since it is very unlikely you understand any of these aspects yourself. No offense.

3. The idea that if a champion is strong in solo queue then they're automatically going to be played competitively has been proven wrong over and over and over throughout the years. The reverse is true too. I thought it was pretty basic knowledge that competitive league of legends is vastly different then solo queue, it's why Galio (when he had a ~47% wr and awful pick rate at all elos) was pick/ban for a time for professional players. It's why Azir and Kalista had to be dumpstered.

No, it hasn't. If anything the opposite has been proven. Any chance that something is remotely good for actual reasons and not cheese picks has always been played in competitive. I mean Shaco has been considered "good" so many times yet he never gets played in competitive except maybe 1 time in EU by a huge memer who went on to play Udyr, Gnar jungle. Tryndamere was considered good a handful of times. AP or AD. But that's only because certain stats were inflated at the time not because his kit was useful whatsoever. Wukong... I mean the guy only does damage after he's been fed 4 kills and level 11 even then he's easy to avoid because there's a limited amount of ways he can flank. This is true for a lot of stealth champions... And Fiddlesticks. I mean generally there's a limited amount of flanking opportunities for every champion but champions like Wukong, Shaco, Talon, Eve etc. rely on flanks. But only Talon and Eve in the specific list I mentioned are the ones who become genuinely viable for competitive. Why? Because their kits open up opportunities to create new flanking positions or subside current ones. Is it impossible for Shaco to become meta competitively? No it's not. But his kit is so fundamentally bad that it would take every other jungler to be utterly useless and Shaco to have high base stats. And you know what? As long as Pantheon still has high base stats he'll still be more competitively viable. You know why I say Shaco is trash? Because I don't want him to EVER be viable in competitive as he is. I don't him to be the champion that is viable just because he's nothing more than a beatstick! As is something like fucking Syndra whenever she's viable. Or like Lucian is right now! Yea yeah! Talk to a fuckin' Lucian main and ask him how he feels that every other adc is absolutely garbage and the only reason his champion is pick/ban right now is because he deals more damage than the other adcs and the support meta happens to favor him a little bit. And then watch him get nerfed even though the other adcs are already getting buffed. Engage supports are slowly falling out of meta as utility supports come back up. Yeah i'm sure Lucian players are gonna have so much fun when that inevitably happens! Look at Sejuani! Went from being a CC tank to a beatstick tank. Galio went from being a utility mage to a beatstick. Ornn went from being a lane-dominant tank to a beatstick who creates other beatsticks. I'm not saying Shaco is trash because for a beatstick he has shit damage. I'm complaining about the fact that he's a beatstick and he's only ever gonna be viable AS a beatstick. And then other people will complain that he has "too much damage." Again, you probably are incapable of seeing it. My rant is proof that any actually good champion is good in competitive. The problem is you don't have the knowledge or capacity to understand why a champion is good in competitive. You don't understand that the only reason Lucian, Karthus bot is good is because every other champion is bad. The only reason Syndra mid is good(not right now) is because other champions are bad. The only reason Pantheon is good(not now) is because other champions are bad etc. You can't understand what i'm saying because it would take all day to explain. Frankly, I don't care. But if you looked historically the only reason these champions were good was because they had/have super inflated stats.

There is no statistical, mathmatical, or any other respectable reason someone can claim shaco is bad. Anecdotal evidence maybe, but that's it.

Statistics, as I've explained, is numbers reliant on something. If you're talking about relying on numbers that depend on the NA region or, really, any region unless it's maybe Master+ KR than it is a region not worth talking about. Unless there's some god forsaken number that is clearly disgusting across the board like a Kassadin 73% wr. At that point, we can talk.

Oh but Shaco... Above 50% wr! Call the presses! Shaco does one thing. Actually no he technically does 2 things. But the first one is obvious. He goes in. He kills someone. Okay, what happens if... They don't let you do that? Suddenly Shaco is not a champion! Isn't it strange how that works? Isn't it weird that if I can't kill someone than I immediately become the most useless champion in the game? That I have to place a box somewhere in desperation of being useful! Even though they don't have to run into my box either! It's fine! I can still send in my clone. Maybe they'll ignore it and it'll deal 120 damage to anyone still near it! My E slows so maybe I can, at the very least, peel for my adc every 8 seconds! Oh... He's probably dead by then... Probably wouldn't have mattered after all wtf is a 30% slow gonna do? Why am I just not Kha'zix who has a 90% slow. 60% if targets aren't isolated. And it's AoE! But it's okay... Shaco can still.................. Shaco is above 50% w/r so he has to be good!

Oh! You wanna know the other thing Shaco can do? He's sort of, not really good in poke comps. Because he can put a box behind the team and if the enemy tries to chase us down they run into boxes. Funny thing about that: Nobody plays poke comps in SoloQ! Because nobody has that much coordination to pull it off as it requires at least 4 members to STAY mid. And Throw shit. Which isn't typically the hard part... No... The hard part is tethering as a group against the enemy in such a way that the enemy are never in range to engage. There's a reason why sieging goes wrong more often than not. What's even FUNNIER is that boxes still aren't even that good at peeling. You can literally pick any other jungler to do the same job. You can pick Kha, Ornn, Sej, Kindred, Graves, Rammus, Ivern, Kayn, Cho'Gath, Camille, Aatrox, Zac (preferable because he counters poke comps), Hecarim, Eve, Elise, Rengar, Taliyah, Skarner, Gragas, Lee Sin, Nunu, Poppy, Pyke, Jarvan, Tahm Kench, Maokai, Brand, Sion and if you want me to list every jungler better than Shaco not just in poke comps but in general.. Well, it would take me way too long to list every champion in the game... Except Vladimir and MF. You just can't jungle Vladimir, MF. On the other hand, yes... It's true not all competitively viable champions are good in soloQ. Only because players don't know how to utilize the utility that comes with that champion typically. Whether it is due to its need of communication or lack of individual skill.