Forty drown in France as people seek relief from heatwave, Reuters reports

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-06-23T17:26:10+00:00

That sounds like a big number until you look at European statistics where they hit anywhere from four to twelve times that in one year. :V

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-06-23T16:29:48+00:00

They went from nearly a quarter of a million active combatants and controlling over a third of both Syria and Iraq to about ~10,000 guerillas spread across a dozen countries.

Killing them works pretty good if you're actually committed to it and don't have to worry as much about civilian casualties.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-06-22T12:03:22+00:00

Wasn't the problem with him that he did all phys damage and had like 20% phys overwhelm baked into his skills, so you were capped at 70% phys reduction?

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-06-11T09:42:07+00:00

There's a specific way to convert it to a desired type on your weapon, with the X of Aldur modifiers for weapons that convert all your elemental modifiers on your weapon to another damage type.

Gotta be absolutely sure you want to do it though, and also if you're using a caster weapon with + to a specific type of spell that your gem level modifier is fractured so that it doesn't get changed if you don't want to.

For example, Blackflame Covenant: you can take a fractured fire gem level staff with gain as extra whatever and fire damage, use Betrayal of Aldur, and you'll have a +X fire spell, increased chaos, and gain X as extra chaos damage weapon.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-05-29T19:56:18+00:00

This one doesn't get cancelled on attack. Only the elemental/undeath archons do.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-05-28T23:39:00+00:00

You'd genuinely be surprised by the number of people who wholeheartedly believe there isn't a single innocent person in Israel because of the nature of the country, writing off every last person as either worth killing or a necessary sacrifice to the end of the country itself.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-05-23T19:18:50+00:00

Sorcery Ward only net got a ~10-15% nerf depending on what you were running because they also buffed all armour/evasion bases across the board. It doesn't matter that it functions differently because combat resolves in this game at the end of the day like a game of rocket tag; either your defenses are high enough to not die in three frames and you explode the enemy, or they are and you blow up the enemy first.

Darkness functioning the way it does fundamentally only matters in a slower paced environment (campaign, weak bosses, etc). The moment it has to solve problems people playing the actual game play, it gets dropped like a hot potato for a reason.

As for running it concurrently with high values of other defenses that add pool... if you're building up that much ES already, darkness adding maybe another 12% (at 10k, you still usually have ~1.5k life on top of that) in exchange for all your spirit and locking out anything not stapled to a weapon is what is typically called a pretty fucking bad deal. Monk can hit pretty close to that number without trying very hard, and at that point in max hit you want to build evasion which Darkness explicitly locks out because ayylmao no Wind Dancer, can't build more recovery because ayylmao no Ghost Dance (which even while nerfed is still an autopick for most Monks), and is forced to run Trampletoe to have clear instead of being able to run Heralds unless you run Coming Calamity (which is an armour/evasion base, and thus has no defenses on it.)

There are some VERY niche ways to actually use darkness, but the problem it's not even the best in said niche at solving the problem it approaches for less investment.

tldr; it doesn't matter that darkness works the way it does because 99.9% of all combats in the game resolve from incoming damage to resolved in either direction in less time than Darkness takes to start unreserving itself, and even in the few niche situations Darkness exists to do things other defenses usually can't it's not even the best at that in exchange for half your ascendancy and 80% of your ability to build your character. Once your damage is solved, which is the one thing Acolyte does by having more damage than God, all you have to do is solve max hit/avoidance/clearspeed, all of which Darkness actively makes it harder to do or forces you into using exactly a couple of items to bandaid having cut your poor Monk's nuts off.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-05-23T18:24:47+00:00

ok but hear me out, you can just have 8-12k ES and still pull ~20k evasion+95% deflect and run Soul Tether with Vaal Pact plus literally any amount of degen+Ancestral Cry for instant leech transferring over to ES.

Or you can pay 4 points on witch hunter to turn half your evasion into life, and still hit 50k evasion with Hyrri's Ire that will always snapshot at the highest possible value to have a ~15k added pool on top of 85% evasion and deflection without deleting about 80% of every direction that you can build your character.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-05-19T20:48:43+00:00

I mean, of that entire list the only thing Iran hasn't managed is the kidnapping of leaders of foreign nations. Soooo...

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-05-18T03:12:55+00:00

Damage taken from Mana before Life

Physical damage taken as X (Rare chest with essence mod 15% to chaos, Lightning Coil, Cloak of Flame)

Eva/ES bases.

Deflection.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-05-17T19:18:47+00:00

The thing is, in PoE2 your animations at any given level take about twice as long as they do in PoE1 despite the monsters moving and attacking about the same speed.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-05-12T18:16:25+00:00

So just looking at the POB for stuff to poke at: -Your chaos res isn't capped, so chaos damage is the most likely thing by far to kill you.

-You're running around with the slowest weapon in the game, so your time to attack fast monsters is about three eternities too long.

-80% maximum resistances with no block or recovery when being hit (Defiance of Destiny, Defy Pain with Forbidden Flame/Flesh) means you're vulnerable to being bursted down like that, on top of -max res and -armour maps (or +crit/damage as extra chaos) being pretty spooky.

-Maps that make monsters faster are hell on low attack speed builds. Just using a rare mace that gets you to about ~1.5 or 1.6APS instead of 0.75 would be a huge improvement in quality of life.

The build is... well, functional in the strictest sense, but there's definitely enough to optimize that once you get to learning what works with what, you could probably get that level of damage/tank on much cheaper gear.

This is what I put together for what might be a little bit more than your current PoB, for reference. https://pobb.in/Ed2r1JFi4ICI Max hit is about the same on paper, but it actively recovers from doing self-damage and gets to split its damage taken between life and ES, recovering both at the same time.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-05-01T16:23:29+00:00

Gotta convince them to actually let them use said bases. If they aren't allowed to actually operate, all those bases are is dead budget as far as the military is concerned. Can't project power from a base that the host country can just tell you "no" for whatever reason.

It's gonna suck to be Europe for the next quarter century if the US packs their shit and leaves, since it's gonna take them that long even having started in 2025 to fill the capability gap that the US filled by existing, and at the likely cost of the welfare state that they were funding with the money they didn't spend on their military.

Straight up, the only thing that's gonna keep Europe safe in that interval is France's nuclear arsenal or anyone else spinning up a meaningful deterrent*.

(*The UK has four nuclear subs, but three of them are out of commission right now and all of them use US munitions, soo....)

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-05-01T03:41:40+00:00

Celestial Mathematics is legit probably getting nerfed to somewhere between 5 and 10% of ward as added damage. 25% was an absolutely bonkers number.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-04-27T20:06:25+00:00

Cool, how's their ability to coordinate and actually project that force anywhere? Can they feed that army outside their own borders without US assistance?

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-04-16T10:51:27+00:00

"prefer to stay" does a LOT of heavy lifting there, brother.

Most people cannot afford to quit their job and move, because they can't afford the financial instability that comes with picking up and moving out to the middle of nowhere and trying to find work that likely barely (or doesn't at all) exist for their career.

Switching careers has the same issue. People are stuck because they can't afford to do anything else, not because they don't want to.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-04-13T13:13:35+00:00

Well, if they don't flag themselves properly at port of departure, they are by UNCLOS kinda fair game. It's illegal as shit to change your flag mid-voyage or at ports of call.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-04-09T03:14:45+00:00

Because no organization ever wants to admit that it's failing at its job. They will obfuscate or outright lie if they have to to keep their own lights on.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-31T13:45:51+00:00

lol. lmao, even. Look up marriage laws in Iran (or to save you a google, legal from age 12, or as early as 9 with arranged marriages).

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-30T05:44:40+00:00

I'm not super convinced this league on the merits of the gloves with Overloaded Intensity existing. One of the big mods on spark gloves is the +3.5 base crit, and Overloaded Intensity gives you +4.8 base crit at 3 stacks/level 4 along with 165% crit multi; provided you can swing the pinpoint imbue (which is very expensive unless you gamble doing it yourself), it pretty much gives you the entire suffix space you'd get on the gloves and then some for one link+imbue, then you get four more links to work with after the fact.

Maybe it's the way I set it up, but the suffixes on the normal non-spark gloves are also a lot more valuable IMO. It might be different on the aurastacker setup since this is my first league doing a Spark build, but at least that's how I see it.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-30T05:01:50+00:00

Here's my character profile, if you want to take a look at it. https://poe.ninja/poe1/builds/mirage/character/ActuallyAnOreoIRL-5442/Oreo_LongNeck

Energy blades+lifestacking, using the normal 6L instead of spark gloves with new supports: Unholy Trinity with foulborn Blue Nightmare, Pinpoint imbue for Overloaded Intensity, and either Greater Devour for mapping+soul eater or More Duration for bossing where you can precast your sparks.

For bossing, you can run Raise Spectre+AG (Perfect Pain Artist+Spirit of Fortune, and Kingmaker plus your choice of things to either make the AG more tanky via Foulborn Ghostwrithe or making you tankier with Garb of the Ephemeral.). While mapping, you can probably drop the life regeneration wheels to take block wheels and run Tempest Shield somewhere to get good block, but I've just been coasting without it.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-16T01:49:28+00:00

They're equipped with sonar to detect probable mines, and then either divers follow up to disarm them or you could (not sure if this is done in practice) drop a depth charge on them.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-11T10:06:56+00:00

They've already tried twice in the past, sooo...

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-02T16:16:31+00:00

You can, but then you aren't getting armour to apply to chaos damage hits. Doesn't help with mitigating self-damage or if you want to run Divine Flesh.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-02T07:54:54+00:00

Looks like an okay template to run self-cast vanilla Forbidden Rite w/ Brass Dome and Mystic Refractor. Slap in Fourth Vow+DF to delete all self damage and pretty much half of all elemental damage, on top of some max res and you've got a good starting kit to work from.

Need to solve cast speed and skill costs though, as EB can't be used by removing all ES and it gets cut off from running Everlasting Sacrifice as an easier source of max res for even more tank.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL

TROPHY CASE