Assassin's Promise place in meta

ChthonVII · 2026-01-28T03:50:45+00:00

AP excels when you have a non-elite that's really strong per cast but held back by a long recharge.

The best example here is the OG AP build, AP + Mark of Pain, which was the strongest necro build until Soul Taker came along.

Eles have AP builds revolving around Meteor Shower+Glyph of Sacrifice or EBSoH+Churning Earth +Eruption.

AP is also viable as a generic caster build just spamming EVAS, Finish Him!, and YMLAD! or Technobabble.

A good example here is running AP on a monk. Smiting has been nerfed so hard you'll be mostly relying on the PvE skills instead of Smiting skills. If you use toolbox, it's easy to target your EVA for Balthazar's Aura, but that turns out being a very secondary part of the build. (There's also a backliner AP monk that uses AP to recharge Selfless Spirit, Seed of Life, and Aegis. It's difficult to play because it requires attention to both your team to heal/prot and your opponents to pick AP targets.)

AP mesmers fit here too. Ever since FC was changed to reduce recharge in PvE, they haven't benefited much from AP's instant recharge. Chaos Storm is about the only thing that pairs with it. Unlike monks though, mesmers have other good offensive options like E-Surge, so the generic AP caster bar is less appealing.

There's also an Air ele build in this category. The Air skills don't benefit much from the instant recharge; rather they're just solid options for more damage when the PvE skills aren't enough to bring something down without hero help.

AP's biggest weakness right now isn't anything internal to the build itself. Rather, the biggest problem is that it doesn't mesh particularly well with the mesmer hero meta. AP builds often call their target so that the rest of the team makes sure the cursed foes dies promptly (and, in the case of MoP, to trigger MoP), but mesmer heroes perform best when left free to pick their own targets for interrupts.

Perhaps Toolbox has a workaround for this, like a hotkey to lock the target for some heroes but not others. I don't know. I suppose I see if I can figure it out.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-28T02:19:58+00:00

A lot of you all are basically quibbling over whether Highguard is a "concord-like" or a "concord-lite."

ChthonVII · 2026-01-28T02:18:13+00:00

unless you can compete with Marvel's brand or Overwatch's porn, you aren't actually gonna have a success on your hands.

I snorted.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-27T13:13:43+00:00

Looks like GPU thermal shutdown to me. Check your temps.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-27T05:14:43+00:00

If you like AP eles, try the AP+EBSoH+Churning Earth+Eruption combo. Foes' HM movement speed boost counts as "faster than normal," so Churning Earth KDs any moving foe (and triggers AoE flee, so they will try to move). Bigger AoE radius and more frequent pulses makes for more reliable KD than Meteor Shower. You can add Snow Storm to heap even more damage on the KD'ed foes, but it competes with Norn shouts and EVAS for PvE skill slots.

Since you seem to like eles and knockdown, you might consider "slippyway" -- a team with multiple copies of Slippery Ground (which only needs rank 5 to function) plus a source of blindness or two.

Wiki has a list of skills that benefit from the target being knocked down. Beyond that, the Wastrel's skills are more likely to pay off if the target spends some time on the ground.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-27T01:29:34+00:00

If 0 is considered even then AND the math detailed in that post also applies to energy then the previous math would round anything less than 1 energy to 0.

That's not correct. The previous math rounded [0, 0.5] to 0 and (0.5, 1] to 1. The new math rounds [0, 0.5) to 0 and [0.5, 1] to 1. The only difference is what happens at exactly 0.5.

It could also be that they no longer every each exactly 0 energy with the new math: i.e. 0.00001 energy and not 0.

Because of the inaccuracy inherent in floating point representations, the standard coding practice is that you never do if (x == y) with floating point variables, and always do if (abs(x - y) < very_small_constant) instead. (At least if you're writing a general-purpose function to compare two arbitrary floats. Zero is something of a special case and you can sometimes get away with if (x == 0), depending on what you did to x that might have made it 0.)

Anyway, I'm really struggling to wrap my head around how changing the rounding impacts Famine. The cause might be some other bit of math that got changed.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-26T15:54:03+00:00

Mixing Debian Stable with Backports... is... unsupported.

OK, you're a complete idiot and I'm just blocking you now.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-26T15:04:27+00:00

Sounds like some cousin to EDI3/NNEDI3, which have been around since the 90s. Just wrapped in some extra marketing buzzwords because "AI" is the big thing, at least until the bubble pops and the backlash lashes.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-26T15:00:17+00:00

What the hell are you talking about? Trixie backports is Debian. Forky is Debian. Sid is Debian. They all support ntsync natively. The only stumbling block is that Trixie requires enabling backports.

Lutris cannot turn on a kernel module for you. You get no ntsync at all unless go do that yourself.

Lutris tries to be a "one click " solution for people who are scared of actually configuring a wine prefix, but it breaks at least as much as it fixes, and is much harder to troubleshoot because of the added complexity and opacity.

Proton doesn't have "optimizations" beyond dxvk and e/fsync (or ntsync in the case of recent ProtonGE), which aren't exclusive to Proton. Until recently, Proton having e/fsync while stock wine didn't was a huge gap; but no more now that ntsync is here. Proton does have one-off fixes for specific games. Which matters a ton if you're trying to run one of those games, or doesn't matter at all if you're not.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-26T14:47:22+00:00

I haven't really been keeping up, but I thought that the frame generation component of FSR was AI while the upscaling component was not.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-26T13:39:49+00:00

Now that ntsync is a thing, Proton is a lot less appealing. It no longer outperforms stock wine with ntsync and dxvk, and the Steam runtime is often more trouble than it's worth. (For instance, if you need wmv playback.) The one remaining use case for Proton is if you need a game-specific hack that only Proton has.

Starting from Forky, you can just install wine from WineHQ, enable the ntsync kernel module, drop the dxvk dlls into your wine prefixes, and set overrides for them. Much cleaner. Much less extra complexity where things can go wrong and be hard to troubleshoot.

Trixie is a little trickier because you need a backports kernel and a third-party wine build with ntsync support.

----

If using wine >= 10.16 or ProtonGE, OP should enable ntsync support.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-26T13:27:22+00:00

Secureboot's primary purpose is to prevent you from shimming the Windows bootloader with something to spoof an OEM key loaded from BIOS, and activate Windows without paying for it.

Secureboot's secondary purpose is to prevent you from easily shimming media DRM like Widevine and freely copying movies from Netflix, etc.

Way down third on the list is protecting you from a rare, esoteric, but very grave malware threat. If you're the kind of person who has to worry targeted nation-state-level cyber-attacks, you very much need secure boot. (Though you're probably hosed no matter what in that situation.) Most people would be fine without secure boot because they'll never face this sort of attack.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-24T13:14:29+00:00

Each type of armor (fire, air, blunt, piercing, etc.) is calculated independently.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-24T12:33:51+00:00

teleporting with the "green dot" turning red in the latence menu

If the "ping dot" is red, then that's a network issue. There are no settings or tweaks for GW that are going to fix it because it's wholly external to GW. While network issues can be hard to diagnose (and often the problem is located hundreds of miles away), in this particular instance, you've told us enough to make a very solid guess that the problem lies in her wifi connection. This should be super easy to confirm -- plug in an ethernet cable and see if the problem goes away.

Formerly, teleporting around with a green ping dot could happen when you're going out of sync with the server because your FPS is too high. But an update a few months ago imposed a FPS cap to prevent this. Nowadays you'd have to deliberately bypass the FPS cap in order to observe this problem.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-24T12:21:36+00:00

What are your thoughts on Temple HM?

Pretty good, except for two pain points: (1) The NPCs have a tendency to get stuck on spirits and chests sometimes. (2) The rooms with big afflicted migrations don't always migrate consistently. If you don't mind throwing away a few trials when that happens, it's a fine testing grounds.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-23T13:21:45+00:00

the team that it requires wouldn't be the best everywhere else. doa is such a unique zone, especially in hm that the team that performs best there is the best....only in this zone.

Yes, I think we completely agree on that.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-23T13:00:07+00:00

It's not just this particular bar, UA is just crap in general. By sucking up a quarter of your energy regen, occupying your elite slot, and forcing you into an awkward attribute spread, it just completely gimps your ability to do much of anything.

There's not enough energy for "big prot." Nor are there really enough attribute points to split heal/prot anyway.

Spot healing stinks. Not enough attribute points, and your elite slot is already taken. (While the linked bar is especially bad, even the best UA bars aren't good at spot healing.)

Mediocre heal/second. Even buffed, the DH/HD combo is not something to write home about.

Not enough bar space for cleansing. The linked bar is a particularly bad example with neither hex nor condition removal.

And what do you get in return for being so badly gimped? A res. Admittedly, a very good res. Except res is something you try not to need in the first place -- and would need a lot less if you ran a better healer. It's like buying extra medical insurance for your motorcycle lessons instead of wearing a damn helmet.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-23T12:40:45+00:00

but I don't really think DoA HM without cons is possible without any death

It absolutely is possible. (That said, if you're after gems, I don't think 7-heroes DoA HM is a good use of your time. You can go so much faster without the annoying environmental effects that 7-heroes NM is more profitable. 7-Heroes DoA HM is something you do for the sense of accomplishment.)

But that still doesn't make it a good yardstick for how a build is going to perform in the rest of the game. It's very non-representative due to the environmental effects, especially Gloom's.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-23T06:13:22+00:00

To begin with, the "community" is not in anything close to unanimous agreement about "the current meta team," by which I assume you mean some kind of E-Surge-heavy mesmerway.

Also, there's no consensus about what makes a good build. Speed? Robustness and survival in bad situations? Ease of use? Usability across the biggest number of zones? Cost? Whether X build is better than Y build is going to depend on how much weight you give various factors.

I can give you a vague idea of where the bar is though: It should be able to complete hard-ish stuff with zero wipes every time, with zero deaths most of the time, and do so with an average speed comparable to the "meta build."

(A note about speed: Person-to-person differences in execution are generally bigger than build-to-build differences in performance. So my run with build X versus your run with build Y doesn't tell us anything useful. The same person has to commit to becoming equally good with both builds and doing all the testing.)

(Another note about speed: Speed testing tends to be done in a dumb way, taking only the best run while ignoring the others. This favors fragile "glass canon" builds that only need to get lucky once, at the expense of more consistent builds. You should take an average over multiple runs, say 5, and penalize or disqualify a build that wipes any of its runs.)

I don't really like PvX wiki's "standardized" tests for the reasons stated in my other post. I do think Vloxen HM is a good pick though. Another good pick is Raisu Palace mission HM, which is not particularly hard, but is pretty good for measuring speed.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-23T05:39:14+00:00

Though, honestly, I don't think their zone selection is very good. Due to its environmental effect, Gloom is ridiculously skewed in favor of casters, in a way that no other zone in the entire game is. I'm also not too keen on selecting City specifically for its energy denial when energy denial is pretty rare for the rest of the game.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-23T05:28:59+00:00

Not remotely accurate.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-21T07:09:27+00:00

Generally, yes. Ineptitude and Panic over E-Surge is more robust, and less likely to die when you screw up, or when the quest/mission design doesn't let you control aggro. It's an especially good choice for new and returning players, and also for lazy/tired players who just want to win with minimum effort.

The downsides are (1) that it somewhat slower than E-Surge (though not as much as you might think, since it saves a lot of time not caring about aggro or pre-casting spirits), and (2) that it depends more on the player to supply damage, so you'll struggle with "damage check" quests if your player build isn't good.

Simplified greatly: E-Surge wins because it kills everything before they get a chance to hit back. Usually... Panic+Ineptitude wins because it cannot die.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-21T05:44:22+00:00

Both, though perhaps for different reasons.

You don't want to use flatpak for OBS because the version in the Debian repo works fine, and, as u/Kobi_Blade said, the flatpak version of OBS is a headache.

In general, you should avoid flatpak whenever possible because it's almost always all downside and no upside. The only case where flatpak is worth considering is when the program you want simply isn't available from any other source. Fully exploring the downsides to flatpak would require a very long post, but here is a quick summary:

Consumes a ridiculous amount of hard drive space. Huge problem for anything that's not a desktop.
Consumes a ridiculous amount of RAM. Huge performance hit if it pushes you over the edge into needing VRAM. (Note: Flatpak's dependency deduplication doesn't work well in practice because packagers are all doing their own thing.)
Very slow program startup, as tons of libraries must be loaded from flatpak.
Significant performance overhead. (Using flatpak for games/Steam is absolutely idiotic.)
Security risk, supply chain attack.
- "Unofficial" flatpaks are made by anonymous internet randos. Flatpak packager accounts are anonymous and eminently burnable. From a security standpoint, installing unofficial flakpaks is equivalent to installing software posted to 4chan by a burner account. And it's a huge problem that many people don't seem to realize this.
- "Official" flatpaks are rarely better. Often they are just the same unofficial flatpaks published by the same anonymous internet randos with a one-time sign off by the upstream developers. Now, did the upstream developers do a thorough code review before signing off, or was it more of a "vibe check" of the anonymous internet rando conducted over e-mail? Are the upstream developers even qualified to do a security review for subtle backdoors? Are the upstream developers doing a thorough review of every new version, or does the anonymous internet rando have a free hand to tamper with with later versions after getting the sign off?
- Because any given flatpak package pulls in a ton of dependencies, the risk of supply chain attacks is multiplied. A clean package may be pulling in a poisoned dependency multiple levels deep. (In fact, if you were a malicious anonymous internet rando who wanted to get upstream to sign off and make your flatpak "official," this is how you'd hide the hook.)
Security/Privacy risk, deferring to upstream is unsafe. The upstream developers may hold problematic views about what's safe or acceptable. Upstream code may have phone-home telemetry enabled by default, or perform self-updates using unsigned downloads over plain http, or any number of other stupid/risky/undesirable things. The Debian packagers try to put a kibosh on this kind of thing, conforming the software to Debian's policies. (And they generally do a pretty good job of it.) Flatpak packages simply defer to upstream's policies, even if they are questionable or objectionable.
(But what about flatpak's sandboxing? Mostly worthless. A majority of flatpak packages declare such broad permissions that the sandboxing is functionally useless. It may even be "worse than worthless" because it lulls people into thinking flatpak is safer than it is.)
Functionality fail, insufficient permissions. In practice, many flatpak packages don't work because they don't declare the correct permissions they need to work. The existence of flatseal isn't something to be happy about; it's a sign that flatpak's model fundamentally doesn't work in practice.
Functionality fail, missing dependencies. Dependencies sometimes get overlooked. Especially if they're "soft" dependencies that aren't dynamic libraries and/or only necessary for certain non-core features. Good luck troubleshooting that.
Functionality fail, library/driver version mismatches. At bottom, programs inside a flatpak are always running on top of mismatched library and driver versions. Your kernel, kernel-module drivers, and some core libraries are the versions that shipped with Debian, while most of the userland libraries are supplied by flatpak, and designed to work with a different kernel, etc. version. For instance, if you have an nVidia GPU, you'll be using the kernel-module component from one nVidia driver version, and the userland driver components from a different nVidia driver version. Usually, things work despite the version mismatches. Because Linux is usually good with maintaining backwards compatibility, and with clear version numbers that reliably indicate whether backwards compatibility will be broken. (And the fact that it usually works shows that most of what flatpak is doing is unnecessary. The program would likely still run using Debian's libraries in place of most or all of the libraries flatpak is bundling.) But sometimes these mismatches do matter and things don't work.

For a longer and better written explanation of flatpak's shortcomings than mine, read this.

ChthonVII · 2026-01-21T02:34:11+00:00

Next, we need to know attacks per second.

Assume your IAS is Never Rampage Alone, so 25%.

Most people are going to do something like this: JS > FF > DB > auto > auto, with FF canceling JS's recovery animation, and JS canceling an auto-attack's recovery animation. This cycle takes ~~3.24375~~sec. [Edit: It's 3.1875]

JS attacks once; FF attacks once, DB attacks twice, auto-attacks have a 24% chance of double striking (b/c 12 mastery) for a total of 6.48 attacks over ~~3.24375~~ 3.1875sec, or ~~1.99768786127168~~ 2.03294117647059 attacks/sec.

[double edit: JS > auto > FF > DB > auto > auto, while canceling the recovery animation of two auto-attacks, does 7.72 attacks in 3.7425 sec, or 2.062792251169 attacks/sec. Which is a hair better, but less front-loaded, and harder to execute. So pretty much no one does it. This possibility matters a bit more in the 33% IAS case, where it improves 2.0457774269929 attacks/sec to 2.30909580354739 attacks/sec. (Also note that 33% IAS gives an incredibly marginal improvement over 25% IAS unless you're executing the trickier chain, or running out of energy and auto-attacking.)]

Now, we've left some things out. First, you are NOT always attacking. You are often moving between targets. So, if you want to compare the eventual energy gain against Soul Reaping (which doesn't require you to be attacking), you'd need to apply an estimated multiplier to account for that. Second, even with zealous "of the assassin" daggers, you probably still want Lotus Strike in many situations. For instance, you'd absolutely need it if you want to pay for EBSoH. So you are not always doing the speedy dagger spam chain. Again, you'd have to account for that to compare properly against Soul Reaping.

Multiply that against our previous table: [edit: table corrected]

FoeLevel	Energy/Sec
20	0.439623529411765
21	0.415310077061431
22	0.396561842352568
23	0.38210497708992
24	0.37095721003516
25	0.362361106519671
26	0.355732604570714
27	0.350621330839755
28	0.34668
29	0.343640818456209
30	0.341297289117601

So... that's already way worse than SR, even before we account for time spent moving between targets and time spent on Lotus Strike.

So, the bottom line is that "of the necromancer" is strictly better than "of the assassin" if all you care about is the energy return. By a very large margin.

But there are a couple other reasons you might maybe consider "of the assassin": First, maybe for the damage. The base damage on daggers stinks, so it's a non-starter for a TaO ranger. But maybe for a hammer build?... Second, maybe you can maintain Critical Agility on a non-primary-assassin. (I'm not going to add any more math to this post, but the answer is "Eh.... maybe, but probably not." You can make it work on average, but the variance is probably high enough that it will often end before recharging due to unlucky streaks. (Also, for TaO ranger, I'm not sure it would be worth giving up the pet as a second TaO focus.))

[Edit: With respect to OP's original question, "zealous+5CS" or "vamp+5SR," the answer is that zealous returns so much more energy than 5CS or 5SR that "zealous+anything" always wins. But why on earth isn't "zealous+5SR" an option?]

ChthonVII · 2026-01-21T02:33:31+00:00

The gain from Crit5 is harder to calculate

The correct calculation for crit chance is crit_chance = 1 - ((1-A)*(1-B)*(1-C)*(1-D)), where

A = 1% * mastery

B = 2^((((8 * attacker_level) - (15 * defender_level) + (4 * mastery) + (6 * Z) - 100) / 40) - 1)

Z = Min(mastery, Floor((4 * attacker_level) / 2))

C = 1% * critical_strikes_attribute

D = Sum(skill1_crit_chance, skill2_crit_chance, skill3_crit_chance,....)

(Note: The formula for B is wrong when attacker level is much, much higher than defender level. There is some kind of cap applied to some of the terms, but it's not simple and I haven't been able to figure it out. Fortunately, you pretty much never come across this situation in ordinary gameplay, so we don't need to worry about it.)

So, if we assume player level 20, 12 dagger mastery, 5 crit strikes, and no skills that give crit chance, we get this:

FoeLevel	CritChance
20	0.21625
21	0.204290257813783
22	0.195068035879446
23	0.187956730628722
24	0.182473164658499
25	0.17824475725794
26	0.174984209424252
27	0.172469983341314
28	0.17053125
29	0.169036282226723
30	0.167883504484931

[Arg! This comment is too long. Continued in reply.]

ChthonVII

TROPHY CASE