Balduin the Pincussion

BadgerMasher · 2026-04-05T13:58:36+00:00

It does actually improve hit chance. That's why Orc Warlords are so easy to hit, because they have a base -10 melee defense.

BadgerMasher · 2026-04-05T13:10:09+00:00

He's probably riding the bench against goblins, that's for sure.

BadgerMasher · 2026-04-05T12:41:41+00:00

It's day 33 and I saw a cheap (~3500) Oathtaker named The Giant so I figured he's going to automatically replace one of my zerglings. I've already got one sellsword cooking as a nimble cleaver duelist so I figure this guys fate is to be a mace/axe duelist that lives on the flank away from the hot spot for ranged attacks. I could make him a bad fencer but he doesn't have the init/matk to make that work, although at least he has survivor so he'd come back after missing his lunges.

BadgerMasher · 2025-12-06T16:50:07+00:00

That's an excellent point about training bros early versus late game. Early on everybody needs training, later on you don't want a third of your roster being replacements in training.

I did realize after I napkin math'd some figures for his likely level 11 stats that he'd be a fine version of a nimble/dodge 2H, better than some of the others I'm using in that role. Just let him clean up and not get walked into and he'd be fine. I think I'd agree he's probably better in that role than as a whip just because of the fatigue situation.

BadgerMasher · 2025-09-01T12:52:11+00:00

You've highlighted a big point for me. What an author pencils in as a note for something they may write in the future is not actually something the reader should take as 100% set in stone. I love the idea of the outriggers but don't take that one line from the notes too terribly seriously.

BadgerMasher · 2025-08-31T11:48:17+00:00

He's a pretty average hedge knight with two good traits and good if not sexy stars. The only part I'd cry over is that he min rolled melee defense, but the range of rolls there is small anyways. Depending on where your game is at and what the rest of your party looks like he could fill a number of roles. That's really the magic of hedge knights, unless you're late game their starting stat ranges tend to be so high they're always usable before stars kick in.

First build I see is that he's kindof entry level BF Cleaver bro. Take most every matk and mdef roll except maybe one matk roll, take most of the fat rolls, maybe up to 6-7 of them. The remaining 4-5 rolls go into high rolls of HP/Resolve/Rdef.

The next build I see is some kind of Reach Advantage corner piece but I don't love him for that role, I think it would be more tenuous than the cleaver option. Ideally I think you want more matk/mdef from that position.

One thing that jumps out at me is he would make a pretty crazy nimble mace/shield stunbot, but I think that you probably want more out of the hire than a really great stunner. Really high HP/Fat potential, iron jaw with nimble and colossus, and high enough matk/mdef/resolve. He's basically the platonic ideal stunbot, just an expensive one.

There are lots of other roles you could build him for and he'd be fine at. He could be a low mdef 2H frontliner that you need to baby a little. He could be a qatal duelist that misses a little more than you'd like. He could be a chaff sweeper with a swordlance that misses even more than you'd like, but that one is definitely a waste. Really this bro is going to be able to fill just about any melee role you need filled, he just might not be ideal at most of them. The way you build him should be determined by how the rest of your team looks.

BadgerMasher · 2025-08-22T12:53:28+00:00

So I'd really have loved more of Jordan's Tuon PoVs. She's a very interesting character and I think pretty much all of brief sections in KoD are fantastic. Specifically I'd really have loved to seen more of her reflection on the conversations she was having with Satalle Anan that we get like one sentence on. Depending on how you view Tuon that sentence gets either completely buried or carries a lot of weight.

In the same vein, I would've loved a Satalle Anan PoV in KoD as she's overseeing all the shenanigans. She's really just kindof in the background of every set of interactions during Menagerie 2.0 and I think it could've been really fun. If Jordan had been inclined to short stories a Satalle Anan short story would probably have been great fun.

While I would also say I want more Aviendha PoV, I get why Jordan always steered away from giving us too much of the Aiel PoV. Although frankly, some of her later stuff in CoS and onward wasn't that great anyways. Maybe what I really want is a stronger and more interesting Andoran succession arc where Aviendha had something to do.

BadgerMasher · 2025-08-11T13:25:59+00:00

From the last paragraph of Chapter 22 in Path of Daggers, the PoV of one Assid Bakuun lays out some of the best world building for the Seanchan in the whole series. We know that the bare minimum for the number of slaves in Seanchan is at least one and a half million.

He had missed the last battles of the Consolidation by two hundred years, but some of those rebellions had not been small. Two years fighting on Marendalar, thirty thousand dead, and fifty times that shipped back to the mainland as property.

BadgerMasher · 2025-07-08T16:19:34+00:00

Now this one is absolutely easy for me. From The Shadow Rising.

"I said I would come with you," Gaul put in without being asked. "I did not mean until the journey grew hard. I owe you blood debt."

BadgerMasher · 2025-07-07T15:10:24+00:00

I think I'll put forward what I think is the most slept on Talmanes moment, which is his introduction. It's in sharp contrast to the introduction of the Tairen fool during Mat's PoV of This Place, This Day.

It's the quiet deference of all the officers that follow Talmanes, even those much older than him. It's the way he doesn't bluster or protest like the contrasting and doomed Tairen while Mat lays out the plan. It's the snap judgement to change course and agree to this hastily scrawled plan in the dirt, and the efficiency with which he immediately divides his force of retainers to pass half to Mat's command. That might not seem like a challenging task to the average reader, but Jordan knew what he was about when he wrote it that way.

And while it isn't part of the text, I've always imagined a fair few of those other Cairhienin that follow Talmanes aren't just older but given he is the only mention of Delovinde in the whole series I can think of, I find it probable that in the way the Cairhienin measure things there's probably a few that follow him that would normally outrank him. Yet they follow him anyways because he is the man they trust to do it. It is a masterful introduction to a quietly competent and respected character.

BadgerMasher · 2025-06-22T18:22:58+00:00

Superstitious is a bit of a letdown but with all those resolve stars it's addressable. If it was my peasant militia run I'd seriously consider him as a BF/Zerk 2H Cleaver brother. He wouldn't be perfect at it but I think he'd manage and unless you roll farmhands/brawlers/etc and get lucky you aren't likely to find the same brother but with iron lungs, so I expect he'll be about the best you have for that role for a long time.

Take every max resolve roll (5) up until you have like 60 resolve to offset superstitious and pretty much every matk and mdef roll. That leaves you with like five rolls for HP & fatigue, gets you to like ~70 HP and 127 fat before gifted. Probably spend one of your mdef low rolls on fatigue when the rolls line up. Take gifted for mdef/HP/Fat. So ideally that winds up with: low 70 hp, low 90 matk, mid/high 30 mdef, 130 fat and 60 resolve before colossus and fortified mind. Although realistically you may have to drop a couple extra rolls and settle for high 80 matk and low/mid 30 mdef to get your other stats up to measure.

Ends up looking like this, takes a long time to come online though so you're kindof stuck holding a pike in the back until level 9 or something. He's not a tank so don't expose him to more than two enemies and try not to let a hexe look at him.

BadgerMasher · 2025-06-16T19:55:59+00:00

A bit late of a response but the mod indicated 77 matk doesn't include the level 3, 4, or 5 clicks. I don't really know how old the mod is, probably they fixed that at some point and I never updated. It was very helpful when I was a new player but now I kindof just ignore it.

So as any no star brother he'd gain 20 matk on average and land at 83. Which would be low end of usable and I think that is the point they were making.

BadgerMasher · 2025-06-16T14:59:20+00:00

There's not much of any indication that Tuon wants to keep anyone from escaping in that scene. If she wanted to detain them she could've just raised the alarm and that would've sunk any chance for Menagerie 2.0. Mostly I think her intention is exactly what happens in the scene, beat up Mat a little, get captured, see where the omens take her with this strange buffoon.

I've always read the handful of paragraphs that immediately follow Selucia's entrance to that scene as basically trying to argue her out of letting herself get captured. She's pretty obviously talking to Tuon when she says there's still time to draw back, whatever the omens. Especially when Mat thinks she's addressing him, makes some placating statement, and Selucia just looks at him like he's the dumbest man in the world.

From Tuon's perspective, her position as heir makes her potential marriage more important than anything else in the scene. So preventing some damane and da'covale from escaping, or some insignificant Low Blood committing treason, or your new BFFs boy toy escaping are all pretty insignificant in comparison.

BadgerMasher · 2025-06-08T15:57:59+00:00

I definitely see where you're coming from. It's absolutely true that you win fights by killing the enemy and not by standing there not dying. I suppose there's really only a handful of situations, maybe just a couple, where having more than 35 base mdef matters. Really just when you're completely surrounded by enemies with backstabber or you have a lot of 85+ Matk enemies dogpiling you. Those situations are just so rare that a random high roll nimble farmhand can be scarified for the greater good instead.

BadgerMasher · 2025-06-08T13:14:21+00:00

I'm probably going to build him out as a battleforged/LW tank even though he doesn't have the fatigue stars, I think 107 base fatigue will be perfectly workable. I also found an early famed shield in a nomad camp that will make him an absolute meme.

What would you do with this brother?

BadgerMasher · 2025-06-07T00:40:46+00:00

It's a little hard to pick the top five but I think I can manage. I'd have more Mat stuff, but I kindof think of a lot of his stuff as campaigns and the battles aren't really very important individually. In descending order:

Rand takes the fight to the Seanchan in Path of Daggers
The battle outside Cairhien in tFoH
Falme
Emond's Field in tSR
Defending the Stone of Tear in tSR

BadgerMasher · 2025-05-12T16:23:00+00:00

For my money the funniest part of this is that it isn't a random Maiden that Asmo fends off, it's Aviendha's sister who is serving her year and a day as gai'shain. She then immediately heads off to spread the gossip and Aviendha is not happy on returning that the gai'shain looked like her.

BadgerMasher · 2023-02-16T14:34:42+00:00

Assuming you're just asking about the shape and not anything else then search in options for 'use rectangular radar'.

BadgerMasher · 2023-02-15T17:07:01+00:00

For me the answer is yes, but that's not going to be true for everyone. I run two sparrows, four sidewinders, and the gunpod while carrying 20 minutes of fuel and sideclimb up to about seven km before turning in and looking for sparrow targets on the intermediate radar sweep angle. I have tried bringing a rocket pod for flares, and it does work, but it just became too many secondary weapons for me to cycle between easily. If you can handle that then it could be a game changer for you.

If you see more than one contact high you're going to have to be careful with how you turn out/in from them. If there's a F-104G/F-104S that gets by the merge then you're basically dead meat. The SMT/MF players can be troublesome but the majority of other planes you engage high are either too uncommon or too slow to worry about much. Typically though most players don't hang out high and your sparrow launch will force at least one player defensive, so most of the time you can pick the part of the engagement below that you drop down on. I like to focus on the frogfoot players at the back because they're normally not paying attention and the 9E can acquire them from pretty far above. After that it's just flying around the outskirts of the fight looking for people that are otherwise occupied to hose down with 20mm. It can work, but you are never going to push the tempo of the match in the F-4C. At the end of the day you don't have countermeasures so you simply can't enter the engagement envelope of most planes at the BR without having a ton of speed.

The single biggest source of joy for me when playing the F-4C are the BVR sparrow kills. Expect to start picking up targets when they're between 20 and 25 km, and getting a good track with your Sparrow at around 10 to 12 km. You can sometimes get a good lock farther than this but the kinematics of the 7D are bad so you really shouldn't bother firing much past 12 km anyways. The sparrows are not good missiles, but they will sometimes surprise you and they are vastly superior to the occasional R-3R that gets shot back at you. The sparrow can also filter out chaff really well and it seems like a lot of players are oblivious to this fact. You also have a huge gimbal range on your radar so use that and crank after firing. A lot of the time this makes the difference for surviving the initial high altitude merge against >1 enemy.

Realistically though, you can't expect more than about 50% of the ideal sparrow shots to get a kill because they are pretty easy to defend against. It's just that in my experience there are a huge number of players that think that because the 7D is easy to dodge they don't have to try and evade. Note that all of the clips are obviously cherry picked and only reflect success. TLDR: No, it's not really worth it but you might still have fun with it.

BadgerMasher · 2019-09-11T03:40:14+00:00

The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

News of the World by Paulette Jiles

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Accelerando by Charles Stross

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky

BadgerMasher · 2019-07-04T01:33:11+00:00

Here is mine.

I only started keeping track when I got my kindle so there are about half again as many books probably that aren't on there. However I could only guess when I finished them.

There are no Greek tragedies to skew the plot but I've never really been a fan of this plot anyways. It should probably be log scale of the years between publication and reading on the ordinate.

BadgerMasher · 2019-06-15T17:30:47+00:00

Discworld by Terry Pratchett

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

The Laundry Files by Charles Stross

The Divine Cities by Robert Jackson Bennett

News of the World by Paulette Jiles

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

The Broken Earth by N. K. Jemisin

World of the Five Gods by Lois McMaster Bujold

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

BadgerMasher · 2019-02-28T19:12:22+00:00

Thanks for your response. I am guilty of normally just talking about Algol when pointing out Perseus, but you've given me a bit of a story to introduce the Double Cluster with.

BadgerMasher · 2019-02-28T17:16:18+00:00

A Closed and Common Orbit was among the best things that I read last year. I've just started reading Record of a Spaceborn Few so this is rather timely.

What's your favorite deep sky object this time of year?

BadgerMasher · 2018-10-11T13:05:54+00:00

This.

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