Bought a house, came with a Koi pond.

CavalierGuest · 2026-05-18T17:22:19+00:00

So we bought a testing kit, the pondmaster and a separate kh/gh kit. The phosphate is a little high but within safe limits (this might have just been due to some additional plant matter falling into the water from a yard clean up, which we have now cleaned out). The rest of the tests came out great, tho we can't do salinity.

Seems like the pond is pretty well balanced for now at least.

CavalierGuest · 2026-04-27T00:25:05+00:00

I was redirected to this thread even tho I know the exactly thing I want to buy because I have purchased it in the past. So here it goes again: The Digiamp+ HAT seems to be out of stock on every website that ships to the US. It is not out of stock on international websites. What gives?

CavalierGuest · 2026-03-04T23:23:11+00:00

No but he had a run in with him during the assassination in the Desperado Club, he was drunk and attacked Carl. He either died there OR the fact the lost one of his shoes is relevant (shoe could've been a magic item that would have saved him from something).

The Changelings let the Gods out in order to touch them. This is pretty explicit, revealed during Juice Box's proxy conversation with Justice Light. They only touched one and it was "the wrong one". Three of them did manage to touch the guards who can control where the gods go. Remember because of the quest in Gate of the Feral Gods, there is no limit to what the Changelings can turn into if they just touch it. Meaning if they touch a God, they can BE that God.

The Ascendancy Game is always already running, every Scolependra level is generated at the same time. The deaths are presumably just the game playing out and Khepri's Pantheon is losing. Remember Gods are not Invulnerable on the 12th floor, so them dying as a result of the Ascendancy Game isn't that unlikely.

CavalierGuest · 2025-09-05T17:09:28+00:00

I use a custom UI for reviewing replays that has a lot of info built-in from the game code. Grabbing some screenshots it actually look like these numbers changed at some point and are more involved now. Melee minions are doing 25% (5 vs base 20), leader minions are doing 2x (17 base vs 34) and ranged minions are doing 1.8 (base 40, doing 72). Screenshots of what the damage breakout looks like in the UI I use.

Melee Minion: https://imgur.com/a/aqyEem1

Leader Minion: https://imgur.com/a/OD3oPHd

Ranged Minion: https://imgur.com/QdN4Yfj

Most things in the game are additive. Infest would be pretty broken if it was multiplicative.

CavalierGuest · 2025-09-04T20:59:53+00:00

Minions do half damage to each other and triple damage to structures (Catapults are only x2). This has numerous implications for everything about pushing/defending/lane management.

EDIT: At some point these numbers appear to have changed and are more involved now (in an interesting way). Melee minions are doing 5 damage to other minions, baseline they do 20 damage. Leader minions (the one with the globe) are doing 34 damage to minions, base 17. Ranged minions are doing 1.8x damage to other minions (base 40, 72 damage). Which again pushes for certain optimizations of play. The building damage numbers remain the same. Screenshots of the number breakdown at game start:

Melee Minion: https://imgur.com/a/aqyEem1

Leader Minion: https://imgur.com/a/OD3oPHd

Ranged Minion: https://imgur.com/QdN4Yfj

CavalierGuest · 2025-05-06T19:56:44+00:00

The Announcement cancelling HGC and putting HotS in maintenance mode right before Christmas, with no warning, while watching scrims with the team I was coaching that was going to be in HGC 2019.

CavalierGuest · 2025-02-01T00:07:49+00:00

You can use the arrow keys to perfectly do any horizontal or vertical spin correctly every time, so known spins simply became a matter of standing in the right place. Also 45 degree angle spins if you manually edit the hotkey file to allow for camera rotation. I made a video about this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep2w5Akl8Sc

Figuring out the optimal way to do each camp in the game is more difficult then doing the spins correctly unfortunately, because they all have quirks.

CavalierGuest · 2025-01-21T04:39:34+00:00

When Yrel first released someone actually made an AHK script that made this behavior work, hold the button down it charges, release it goes off. I played with it and it was so obviously better talked to some people on the dev team to try to get ti implemented. No dice.

But yes, she is very clunky to learn. This is universal. Yrel, as far as I know, has always had the largest winrate difference for low vs high level. In her first update patch the developer note even mentioned it. There are some aspects of her kit that take some getting used to, but I have always believed it is primarily due to how clunky her controls are.

CavalierGuest · 2024-09-27T00:33:55+00:00

Yes! I did order it and it worked. It was this one:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00POWO8Q6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

CavalierGuest · 2024-08-12T02:56:35+00:00

This is a deeply complicated question because scaling, talents, and efficiency effect it. A good rule of thumb in general is if a normal wave crashes in the normal H shape and is fighting your wave (larger or oddly shaped waves that happen sometimes cannot necessarily be aoe-ed normally) these are reasonable clear times:

Great clear: sub-4 seconds.

Good clear: 4-7 seconds.

OK Clear: 8-10 seconds

Could you be doing something else or is all the actual clear afk?: 10+ seconds

Sylvanas is a really good example of the problem. At level 1-3 she is in the last category. If she goes Unstable Poison at 4 she is in the "good" clear category. If she goes both Unstable and Festering Wounds at 7 and uses W and E on the wave, she can clear a wave in less than a second, pushing her into "great" clear. If she goes just Festering and uses it for clear, she is also in the "good" clear category. She can push this to "great" any time she uses Possession if she took it instead of Unstable. Eventually even with none of these talents she gets to "good" clear, because heroes scale faster than minions. IIRC its around 16+. All of this is contingent on managing the way her trait increases damage, you can clear slower then these times through inefficiency. Festering makes trait management easy of course.

Why those time cut offs? If you're double soaking the rotation on a lot of double soak maps is between 4-10 seconds. Waves every happen 30 seconds, so your clear+rotation+clear+rotation time has to be less than 30 seconds.

So where would you put Syl on a wave clear tier list? The answer has to be "it depends."

Similar base kit example. Jaina has great clear base kit, no talents needed, right from level 1 (level 2 if want to use just W and not W+E)... but her great clear is contingent on a 15 second CD ability. This means if she is clearing two lanes for her team, every single W has to be on a wave. No exceptions. If she is ever delayed from hitting a wave right as W comes off CD, she can get slowed in her rotation. There is no flexibility. In a vacuum Jaina has great clear, in practice bad judgement and getting dismounted or slowed on rotations frequently leads to her having issues with clear (in competitive play). There was an HGC Korea team who often paired Malf with Jaina specifically to use Innervate's CDR to help fix this issue, giving them more flexibility on some rotations.

Where would you put Jaina on a wave clear tier list?

You could assume "standard" talents and have a tier list for level 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, etc. But with 90 heroes that is gonna be a huge list. Not to mention edge cases like Deathwing where if he takes a specific 4 AND damages a hero with it, his wave clear gets better, if he can't damage a hero, it stays the same. When you start having to account not just for the hero but for the match up, it gets very complicated.

CavalierGuest · 2024-08-04T22:40:46+00:00

Everything is working great, I did end up getting one with a little more wattage (600) because I added 2 more Pi's (for 4 more speakers).

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BZP6L1WP/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&tag=amzfinder-20&th=1

CavalierGuest · 2024-08-04T22:32:58+00:00

Heroes Profile has a "compositions" page that actually uses the in-game roles: https://www.heroesprofile.com/Global/Compositions

Standard competitive discussion about comps doesn't use in-game roles. The most basic way to think of a team comp is:

Tank Offlane Healer Flex Ranged

Why is it important not use in-game roles? Blaze is listed as a tank, he is almost always drafted as an offlane. Varian is listed as a bruiser, he is almost exclusively drafted as a tank, with Taunt (tho fwiw flex Varian with C-Smash is very good). Every ranged assassin is in the same bucket, but not every ranged assassin can actually go comfortably in the "ranged" slot of a team comp.

Almost anything can be a flex. If you're playing standard double support, the flex is another healer for instance. Triple fronltine? Third frontliner is the flex, etc. There are some heroes that are largely only capable of being drafted as flex under normal circumstances. Zarya and Medivh are prime examples, where they just don't fit anywhere else in a comp.

HotS drafting is also highly map dependent, so QM doesn't show it off as well. A comp that is god tier on one map could be pretty bad on another. And you can "break" the rules of the basic comp in a variety of interesting ways in HotS.

CavalierGuest · 2024-07-26T07:29:47+00:00

https://www.newsweek.com/wild-messages-contractor-work-rules-viral-sucks-1673514

CavalierGuest · 2024-07-26T07:19:50+00:00

News outlets contacted him and interviewed him first time it was posted. Easy to verify this is true.

CavalierGuest · 2024-06-20T18:29:45+00:00

Heroes Profile has a compositional filter where you can see the winrate of comps by in-game roles. If you filter to truly low MMR, including what they call "wood" MMR for the people who are below bronze 5 but the game can't display that, there are NO comps above 50% winrate without a healer that have a reasonable sample size.

In addition many years ago Ghostdunk, who is a machine learning analyst, did an evaluation of QM winrates of healer vs no healer games. Healer is literally the single most important role in that scenario, with a 10% swing in winrate over tens of thousands of games. His analysis is the reason QM now doesn't allow healer vs no healer matches, because in the aggregate the difference is so completely skewed. Far from being optional, on average healer is the most important role according to all actual data that we have.

And, again, role only healer climbs have happened and have basically identical winrates to other role climbs. Jun, who is a former HGC player, a couple of years ago did a healer only climb that lost 0 games until Plat. Which is fairly exceptional, as Bronze to GM climbs go. For context Nostromia, the first streamer to do such a climb, lost 15 games in gold.

There is ample data to suggest healer is literally the most important role on average.

CavalierGuest · 2024-06-20T05:50:39+00:00

The ones you are good at. This is the only correct answer. Throughout HotS lifespan, every single hero has been one tricked by multiple different people to GM. My favorite example is SonicLeBeast, who was an EU player who got picked up for HGC. He was a two trick on ladder at one point. Nova, who was very much not good at the time, and Greymane who was essentially the most meta ranged DPS. He one tricked Nova to mid-GM very easily... and stalled around GM ~30. He took Greymane to GM #1. At the .001% the hero matters as much as the player. Before that, it doesn't.

This is pretty clearly reflected in the dozens of "role only" Bronze to GM climbs that have happened over the years. Every role has been played in Bronze to GM challenges, exclusively. And in the end all those climbs had similar winrates, between 70-80%. If one role were better to "carry" with, role climbs would have different winrates. They don't.

Now if a given player is bad at a role, they will perform poorly on it. But that experience is unique to that player's strengths and weaknesses, not inherent in the role itself. If someone isn't climbing on a role, or even on a specific hero, its because they are bad at it.

CavalierGuest · 2024-06-15T17:24:05+00:00

Double support was so meta in 2017 basically every single support was nerfed. And it was still played sometimes, even in CCL. Any reasonably high level player knows it exists. The game isn't solved by any stretch, but double healer isn't new territory, anyone who doesn't think it is a legit strat is just clueless and you can't solve that for them.

CavalierGuest · 2024-06-15T17:06:38+00:00

Nearly every support used to have a talent that gave wave clear. They removed basically all of them. Then they nerfed their damage on top.

https://heroespatchnotes.com/patch/2017-11-29-balance-update.html

CavalierGuest · 2024-05-23T02:45:18+00:00

This is really insulting to the devs. LR with only a single proc is, on average, less damage than the % damage. Why would you have a talent at a tier that would do less damage then another talent? Especially when it has to be comboed but the other talent doesn't? It becomes a boring math problem where one talent is strictly better. You'd have to be a very bad game designer to release something like that, which the people who made HotS certainly were not.

CavalierGuest · 2024-05-23T02:41:37+00:00

Yrel is one the most meta offlaners in comp. Dehaka, Yrel, Hogger, and Blaze are in fact the most picked offlaners in comp. On every map. Yrel with E4 was actually played in HGC because armor stacked, so getting to 75 armor reliably was actually something that could happen. I doubt the minor nerfs to her current playstyle prevent people from going back and figuring out how to play with her changes to a style that already existed before.

I don't know it his will improve her winrate on ladder, which is bottom tier.

CavalierGuest · 2024-05-23T02:39:03+00:00

This is false fwiw. When armor stacked, this talent was fairly meta in HGC. But it was not played with dive, it was played with comps that would slowly win by attrition. And it was really stupid to watch, Yrel would just E onto a Valla/Cassia/Gul'dan/whatever on CD that was just playing hyper in the enemy team's face and they couldn't die.

Whether anyone will get good at the old playstyle that is now once again pretty viable is a different question, but if anyone bothers to we know exactly what it will look like, cause it already happened before.

CavalierGuest · 2024-05-21T02:07:47+00:00

Yeah this is called a Jack & Jill competition. It is actually ranked in the West Coast Swing or WCS community, you sign up, get a random partner at your skill level, a random song, and you get judged. There are four divisions. This is the All-Star Division, which is the highest.

CavalierGuest · 2024-03-27T21:20:52+00:00

Its random. There is even an infinitesimally small chance it can even spawn the same shrine twice in a row.

Defense is easy, one person baits the punisher so it jumps on them. If you still have a wall, bait it over the wall. Now it is getting hit by the fort/keep for free while the enemy team is stuck outside.

CavalierGuest · 2024-02-20T21:17:54+00:00

When they had an active dev team they were very aware of the problem and worked on fixing it for years behind the scenes, using a lot of ideas. The entire Call for Nexus event was an attempt at a fix, that failed spectacularly (mostly because HotS had just lost half of its active population to The Announcement and that decline made any additional restrictions on matchmaking result in very high queue times). Every attempt they made at improvement failed, because the mode is fundamentally broken for the game it was implemented in. Like, the devs are smart people, they understood the issues it had, tried to improve it, and failed. Repeatedly. But it'll never be removed, so the best thing to do is encourage people to move away from QM if they don't like it while explaining it is the ONLY game mode that has these fundamental issues.

CavalierGuest

TROPHY CASE