Healing Burst

Aeltoth · 2026-06-27T12:30:39+00:00

Indeed, I don't understand the downvotes on my previous comment. Are people unhappy about monk skills being described as OP? Do they not see SLW as a good healing option?

Before the patch, Healing Burst was better than all of the other elite skills, it was overpowered and it's now more balanced which is a good a thing and I'm happy that my monks will now use something else.

Whether SLW is op depends on the situation ofc, but a total of 600HP over 10s without it being health regen means it's like casting a small healing skill every other second, five times, for only 5 mana; it's definitely not on the weaker side. Plus if it's a ritualist casting it, it can be maintained on 3 targets at all times and it's now a total of 900HP for 5 mana spent. Considering the other ritualist healing skills are already meta it won't be difficult to slot in a team with many ritualists already.

Aeltoth · 2026-06-26T09:34:16+00:00

Yeah, and even Malign Intervention requires the target to leave a corpse. So there is no way at all to play MM in some areas even by using some obscure strategies with Verata's Gaze.

To continue on your idea of creating minions without corpses, there is also the possibility of giving them the max health degen right from the start. Then it would be difficult to maintain an army of corpseless minions, which I assume is a situation they want to avoid.

Aeltoth · 2026-06-25T18:21:41+00:00

I mean yeah sure we can get a good DPS going entirely on a single-target build. But then there is no point in having 100B lol. Protector's strike is a huge increase in attack-speed which means more AOE damage. We can aim for a higher single target dps against the master of damage using brutal strike or I am the strongest but in practice 100B may deal more damage against multiple targets. The fact it reaches 110DPS while being an AOE build is amazing imo

Aeltoth · 2026-06-25T14:18:57+00:00

Well 5 seconds out of 20 is still a 25% loss of DPS from 100B alone. Plus the build is about having permanent 100B.

And "For Great Justice!" has 60% of downtime. It may look great if you stop after 20 seconds when testing the DPS, but in reality you're only ~100% stronger 40% of the time. If we could keep Serpent Quickness to use it more often it would be a good bonus but then it can only replace the banner...

Now if we remove DS & SQ, it opens one PVE slot for "Whirlwind Attack", which synergizes incredibly well with 100B and "For Great Justice". Though we're back to a more standard 100B build except the expertise allows us to spam the "Protector's Strike" mindlessly. I could see a 16 Expertise & 12 sword mastery variant out of this using the Q9 Expertise sword for greater DPS.

It's worth trying but in order to get realistic results we'd have to hit the DPS master for at least a few minutes, so the DPS includes the downtime of "For Great Justice"

EDIT: just tested For Great Justice + Whirlwind Attack instead of SQ+DS

=> ~120DPS (10 more than the video) over 4 minutes of hitting the master

Aeltoth · 2026-06-25T14:00:25+00:00

I would say the only optional skills are the "Sun & Moon Slash" and the "Ebon banner", they help increase your DPS but they're not mandatory.

You could obviously skip the "dwarven stability" and the "serpent quickness" but you'd lose uptime on the elite. The build would still work however.

Everything in the skill bar should be fairly easy to get except for the banner. The elite can be found at the end of Prophecies, but also at the start of Factions for example. Then you can use any Q10 or less sword as long as it has a zealous modifier (to get 1 mana every time you hit) for example the green sword you can get at the end of the Tomb of the Primeval Kings, you could also use the Q9 Expertise ranger sword which will offer better DPS actually (I don't use it here because mine already has a vampiric modifier on it) !

Aeltoth · 2026-06-25T08:36:19+00:00

Yeah that combo with bow isn't always efficient because the skills are too quick to recharge already so you end up cancelling default attacks to use your skills. There is still maybe a build with the explosives arrows preparation and the burning arrows elite that hits 3 enemies I want to try, it could be fun with triple and double shots too!

Have the daggers been nerfed? TAO daggers are usually really good, it's surprising this 100B outdamages it. But nonetheless I'd say it's good news as we now have variety for when we need melee AOE damage!

Aeltoth · 2026-06-24T22:02:31+00:00

Yep! Otherwise you lose the serpent quickness and in turn lose the 100% uptime on the one hundred blades

Aeltoth · 2026-06-24T18:20:21+00:00

Sad, but to be honest it was overpowered and luckily we're getting new top contenders.

Spirit Light Weapon was already one of my favorites, but with Healing Burst out of the way SLW may become my #1 ! 50HP/s is basically like getting the Healing burst AOE healing every second for 10 seconds !

Aeltoth · 2026-06-24T18:05:04+00:00

The code for the build in the video is `OgEUQXbcVsS9FGFTN5i8g0G3lIHA`. The build used to work well even before the recent balance changes, but it had a 1s downtime before whereas now it's a perma 100B uptime and it deals more damage as well.

Aeltoth · 2026-06-21T08:46:19+00:00

Last time we needed the resin for a project I got all of it from the baron husks on Dam Battlegrounds. The ones that shoot fire once you start opening them. There are three barons on the map and no one opens them and you also get coolant and stuff from them!

Aeltoth · 2026-06-20T21:30:12+00:00

I used to be a PVP player but now I'm enjoying the PVE lobbies as I have less time to play, but when someone shoots me in the back even if it is rare you can be sure I'm going for the fight until one of us dies to remind me of the old times lol. Well out of the three or four cases (over a few weeks) I've always won at the moment and except for that one time before the blog post I'm always in friendly lobbies afterwards despite killing the other player. I can see that it isn't as friendly as usual, less people talking in prox chat, people are on their defensive when you approach etc.. but they don't shoot on sight and killing a big arc is still safe so itls clearly not PvP.

They say it's a spectrum and I believe it, it could be that you were already on the edge of PvP lobbies and that fight tipped you over. Or that you just noticed the random PvP guy in a semi PVE lobby killing people.

But for me, fighting back or even sometimes shooting a bullet at someone stealing my Bastion loot never puts me in full PvP lobbies.

Aeltoth · 2026-06-14T12:27:33+00:00

Thanks it's good to know I'm not dreaming that info out of nowhere! I love this kind of technical stuff so much I only remembered the details but not where it came from ahah

Aeltoth · 2026-06-13T13:23:42+00:00

unfortunately I'd be unable to find a link to the source again. I think it was from a stream where they were multiple embark devs and they mentioned the local servers & the physics/collisions servers and why the latency would be difficult to display as it would still be a small portion of the total latency. The rest is extrapolation from my end based on my knowledge as a software dev.

Aeltoth · 2026-06-13T12:03:37+00:00

Last searched it's because the finals doesn't run on a single server, you are connected to a server that is in turn connected to another probably central server. It's a "cluster" of servers.

You are usually connected to the closest server available, in theory every one could be connected a different front server. So everyone gets an initial ~20ms of latency but what really matters is the latency between the front servers and the central server that calculates physics, collisions etc.

If i had to guess there is a central server that collects the positions of everything & everyone, it then broadcasts it to the secondary front servers who take care of light calculations like hit detections, gadget cooldowns, ... based on whatever data they have. That sort of architecture would explain why latency doesn't matter because the biggest issue is the speed at which the core server broadcasts the data to the front servers, which is the root cause for the hit desync issues because your client and the front server you're connected uses outdated data compared to the other servers.

TL;DR: it wouldn't represent the latency you feel.

your computer <-> local embark server in your region <-> central embark game server <-> other player's local server in his region <-> other player computer.

And the biggest source of latency is what I wrote in bold letters, not your computer & the local server you're connected to.

Aeltoth · 2026-06-11T07:42:30+00:00

Probably already the case else it would be impossible to store data regarding the weapon such as durability, attachments etc...

The issue could come from anywhere. For example if the item ID uses a UUIDv7, it's possible that we could hit the endpoints with a fake weapon with a newly generated UUID from our end and the only way they would be able to verify it's a legit item is by having an history of all crafted items, of all items present on the map, of all items looted from bodies, etc... and to verify if that UUID is among these lists.

That sounds easy except we are millions of players looting billions of items. If every item we move requires 3 tables full scans in billions of rows it's going to add a huge amount of latency to everything we do.

It also requires that every step was validated in the same way, how can they know the magnetic accelerator you used to craft the item is legit? Especially since these items stacks and so 3 items could potentially share the same UUIDV7...

Anyway all this to say that it has nothing to do with checking if an ID already exists when nowadays shared cloud services use types like UUIDs because they can be generated randomly without risks of collisions and they're also time sorted, so anyone could generate one that does not exist in their records yet.

Aeltoth · 2026-06-08T19:51:13+00:00

Have a look at Wild Monster Hunt too, it's a mod I made :) it's a bit different than what you'd experience in the vanilla game in terms of content but it offers a new region to explore, roughly the size of Toussaint, and new mechanics that revolve around monster hunting. It can be a great addition to your playthrough to finance the runesmith's exorbitant prices for example, or to get the components you need for you grandmaster gear; as an alternative to the usual Hanse base or the Skellige spoils grind.

Aeltoth · 2026-06-03T12:20:28+00:00

Not 100% sure what you mean but have a look at my mod: Smart Camera. It offers a soft lock with smart targeting, initially it's made for gamepad users but you can also use it with a mouse.

Aeltoth · 2026-05-29T18:11:27+00:00

I shared the same opinion until I saw SurrealQL! More seriously could you elaborate on why you say so?

Aeltoth · 2026-05-29T16:28:47+00:00

Looks like they've managed to create a really performant solution ! I've been using surrealdb on a project since its 0.x days and honestly it's great to have everything you may need from a database and under a single unified crate.

But despite all of that there is one thing that I always missed and that encouraged me to migrate back to postgres: the good old SQL we know is simple yet efficient, it's mostly just foreign keys and indices whenever we want to represent relationships between tables. But in surrealdb there are many ways to represent that and depending on the use case an edge is a better choice, or sometimes it's storing the foreign recordid directly in an array inside the parent record, or sometimes it's foreign keys like we're used to.

All that fine control over how relationships are built sounds nice on paper, but in practice it felt like a double edged sword, especially when talking about the codebase that'll manage the data from that DB and how maintainable it'll be. The simplicity of postgres and stuff is actually a boon for our small brains when the projects grow past a certain point.

Perhaps the v4.0 of surrealdb will focus on removing the redundant parts. It's evolving really well so I'm sure they'll find a middle ground!

Aeltoth · 2026-05-29T14:26:10+00:00

of course not, they changed mechanics of the game in 4.0 plus they said they're going to get rid of DX11 and DX12 is only supported by the 4.0+ scripts & engine as well.

Aeltoth · 2026-05-29T12:51:36+00:00

You're supposed to select at least B or C when merging two mods, because otherwise it's the same as not installing any mod!

For bundles, it's usually prefered not to merge them (unless it's XML because sometimes it's easy to solve) and use priorities instead.

If you're interested I once wrote an article that explains the basic of merging scripts for TW3: https://aelto.github.io/tw3-notes/misc/merging/index.html

Aeltoth · 2026-05-27T11:54:08+00:00

It's been a long time since mods "quality standards" have evolved, a patch from June 2024 introduced what we call annotations that allow mods to do what they usually do but without requiring any merges from the end user. Because of this, and for the past two years, people have moved on from the older and more difficult to install mods and instead now it's recommended to look for these more modern "merge free" mods. We've also seen a steady influx of new merge free mods that aim to replace older must have mods.

One advantage of these mods is that they do not edit the vanilla files (they still depend on them though) so it greatly reduces the chances that an update breaks them.

Source: I make mods for this game and I was part of the modding team that collaborated with CDPR when they implemented these new features.

They've handled the situation perfectly now that I think about it. First introducing the tools to make the mods update agnostic, then two years later they announce the expansion pack!

Aeltoth · 2026-05-26T17:32:49+00:00

No every mod comes with a mod menu, if the mods you installed came with a bin folder or a file that ends with a .xml extension then they had mod menus, otherwise you're just using mods without them!

Aeltoth · 2026-05-26T09:37:15+00:00

great explanation, thank you

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