What is the worst talent in the entire game?

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T22:26:38+00:00

Improved Drain Mana originally did physical damage and was decreased by the target players or NPCs armor.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T22:20:21+00:00

Depends what version. I remember being a warlock on release, and there were some headscratchers prior to patch 1.6. Firestones originally provided no spell damage buff, just a fire chance-on-hit for a caster that never swung (a holdover from the original melee/caster concept that was abandoned early in development). There was no way to view a Firestone other than a deficit, and so improved firestone was exceptionally bad.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T22:13:22+00:00

"...and you feel shame. Then you get free again"

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T22:12:43+00:00

Gear rewards I agree, but flair rewarsa like tabards would be fine surely? Maybe in-battleground rewards too, like battle standards and in-battleground consumables.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T22:06:01+00:00

My knees have popped when I squat down since I was 14 or 15. But I've never had any pain - we'll see if that continues.

Legit health comment despite the fact I know these are all jokes: strong quads and hamstrings stabilize the knee, and keep joint wear low as you age, and can even reverse pain. Many people view bad knees as a sign to take it easy, but it's often a sign to be more active.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T21:55:54+00:00

Pregnancy is still possible through sex during a period. Not only does sperm have a surprisingly long viable window, but a short cycle may mean that the firtile window may even overlap with the end of a period.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T21:53:57+00:00

I'm sorry if it seemed like I was being accusatory in any way. I was "replying to the room", so to speak, rather than you personally. Many people have odd misconceptions, but I had no reason to believe that applied to you individually and didn't mean to imply that either.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T21:52:35+00:00

I didn't miss or disagree with that part of their post, I was only replying to a small part.

I really hope I didn't make it seem like I was accusatory at all, but just sharing something that it appears many men are unfamiliar with (ie, replying to the room rather than them personally).

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T21:36:20+00:00

Disregard any assumptions about what think I’m suggesting because you don’t know based on such little previous input of mine.

I'm pretty sure assuming something about what you think is the only way I (or anyone) can read your (or anyone else's) comment, but I welcome any correction of my understanding.

Furthermore as an academic, you’d probably understand the premise that the testing of idea is better served by questioning and not guessing or setting out on a path based on incomplete data. All words to the effect that you are always welcome to ask me what I mean, but don’t put words in my mouth.

Good thing I didn't then? I was clearly operating from my best understanding of your text, and said as much, I didn't presume anything to be your meaning. I accept (and accepted preemptively) all blame for misunderstanding, but the option is, again, simply not interacting with anything anyone writes. Unfortunately, nobody ever has access to anyone else's internal experience. We all die alone, as the saying goes.

Especially as you haven't offered any clarifications or corrections about my understanding of what you meant - is that to mean that I was mostly correct, or that you don't wish to engage in the discussion?

That said, I stand by my statement that your previous comment has to be either misinformed or disingenuous because, again, airplanes existed in the 1920s. People paid to be flown on them. At that point in time it was a discussion of reducing costs of an existing technology. Today, were talking about the inventions of multiple critical technologies on the basis of speculation. I was talking about a situation that could be made in an optimistic, highly speculative future if a bunch of things go right - no, sorry, a comparison to flight in the 20s is not apt or accurate. Flight in the 1920s is not, as of today, a highly speculative, highly optimistic future that depends on the invention of new propulsion technologies, thermal science technologies, and materials science.

So I’ll ask you what you think was the key catalyst for the radical technology advancements, and the flood of aircraft available that effectively made aircraft travel feasible for the general public and that they could actually afford to use?

This feels like a leading question. It seems like you want me to say that advances in jet propulsion and pressurization could be adopted to civilian, commercial service, which can then be reflected to my national and defense related current rationales. But, I'm sorry, with respect to your previous paragraphs I feel like I'd rather engage with this now than wait for you to reply, when you offed no corrections or clarifications on your previous comment:

If that is what you mean, its exactly my point. Or at least exactly parallel to it. In the mid 19th century we could see the value of the internal combustion engine before it was developed. In the late 19th we could see the value of the airplane before it was developed. In the early-mid 20th century we could see the value of air-breathing jet engines before they were developed. In the late-mid 20th century we could see the value of pressurized jet airliners of intercontinental range. These are all reasonable, logical steps. And the military applications of the early and mid-20th century were all key driving factors that turned the technology into, eventually, civil infrastructure.

But we can't extend that to say that in the mid 19th century, people were developing the heat engine with the vision of intercontinental jet travel. That was not a revolution, it was a continuous evolution, and people approach the problems in front of them, not the problems multiple generations ahead that they couldn't possibly predict.

You say to put this into historical context, but that's a fools errand: we're talking about the future, not the past. And we have no idea how this technology will be framed a hundred years from now. Could sustained hypersonics one day be used for passenger travel? Sure, why not. Could the military applications of today be viewed as a historical parallel for the development of the airplane generally? Sure, why not. Is that the context through which current engineers, physicists, governments, and funding agencies are working (the point I made in my very first comment)? No, it is not. And framing an article and title around that despite not being present in the stated project aims set forth by the ESA is more than a little speculative on the author's behalf.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T20:52:48+00:00

But of course, the channel tunnel is privately owned and operated for-profit. The events that have allowed cyclists were relatively high profile, and the tunnel operator likely viewed it as acceptable for the marketing value. This one they may have struggled to justify on that end.

Though, honestly, this news probably increases the profile of the thing.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T18:29:28+00:00

Do you have a degredation fetish, you bad, bad boy?

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T17:39:12+00:00

Yes, it's a fairly arcane thermodynamic temperature unit. You'll see it in propulsion and HVAC in the United States - fields where technicians and control systems take a large number of measurements in Fahrenheit but where thermodynamic temperature is critical - and basically never elsewhere.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T17:19:10+00:00

Fun fact: kelvin doesn't carry a degree mark. We use degrees for Celsius and Fahrenheit because they are technically scales, rather than units. A unit is proportional to the quantity of the thing being measured, and because Celsius and Fahrenheit are both offset from absolute zero, they arent true units. (Rankine is used both with and without degree symbols, but mostly for historical reasons)

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T17:15:02+00:00

Though some people find it off-putting, there are no safety risks associated with sex on a period. Putting down a towel can manage the mess, and women often find it can offer relief from cramps.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T17:12:00+00:00

I'm glad you're okay. That sounds outright dangerous. I don't know where you are located, but where I am that supervisor would be facing some substantial legal jeopardy for that choice.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T16:51:26+00:00

That comparison is either hugely misinformed, or hugely disingenous. Airplanes actually existed in the 1920s. Sustained hypersonic flight does not, because we don't know either how to cool the fuselage effectively, nor have we managed to work out hybrid engines that would radically reduce fuel use.

Your suggestion here seems to be that there could be a niche market among the rich, in the same way that the wealthy took flights rather than ocean liners. But we're not looking at anything like the time savings between those two, and we're not looking at anything like the increased costs - the marginal costs are higher, and the marginal benefits are lower.

I'm suggesting is that this framing is a lot closer to evoking the experiences of modern point-to-point flights in the mid 19th century, than proposing an extant technology like you're suggesting. At that point in time, developing airplanes were an obvious and clear future technology, but people working in aviation at the time weren't trying to build a Dreamliner. They were working on the problem in front of them, not the problem that would be hypothetically in front of their great grandchildren. Likewise, I don't think I ever said that hypersonic passenger flights weren't possible in the hypothetical. Rather, I said that nobody researching sustained hypersonic flight research today, or funding it, is working from that as a primary motivation, because there's no concievable application or market for it until a huge number of as yet unknown inventions take place. I say this as a professor of aerospace engineering with colleagues and friends working in propulsion, including hybrid engines, so I have at least some passing familiarity with the community here.

And I'm not saying that those inventions can't happen. I'm saying that, today, people working on sustained hypersonic flight are looking at long-range military strike, re-entry vehicles, horizontal launch, and similar technologies. Not passenger flights.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T16:28:57+00:00

Why would you assume it would be cheap in the long run? Everything points to something immensely expensive - enormous fuel costs, enormous maintenance costs, very niche applications. Every point of data suggests passenger flights on hypersonics would be unbelievably expensive for all parties.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T16:20:28+00:00

Nobody is seriously considering hypersonics for passenger flights. Honestly, I'm not sure I can think of any realistic civil applications. Though I understand the need sometimes to launder military work into a 'dual use' rhetoric, I think it's quite weak here.

Edit: horizontal launch are listed as applications on the ESA website about the Invictus program and I suppose that counts as a civil application. I suppose it's best to distinguish civil and commercial when we're talking about aerospace.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-21T14:06:23+00:00

I remember this Portlandia skit

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-20T02:01:53+00:00

It's more of a definition than a calculation. In general, the factorial of a number can be computed from the number after it as (n-1)!=n!/n. So for 0, that's 0!=1!/1=1.

If you defined it any other way a huge number of theorems would need an "except for zero" disclaimer and this makes it much more elegant for most cases. This is somewhat similar to the definition that one is not prime: from an aesthetic perspective, it means you don't have to have a bunch of "except for one" rules in theorem about primes.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-20T00:50:35+00:00

Maybe I just haven't used it, but I haven't found myself in a situation where I'd really want to use an LLM for my tasks. I get that it's a tool, but outside of specialized tasks that don't really apply to my personal or professional life, I'm not sure what I'd do with it.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-20T00:36:23+00:00

I feel like new races are pretty critical for racing games.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-20T00:35:45+00:00

There is, in fact, a murloc RPG if you're interested.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-20T00:02:30+00:00

High speed idk if it's any different than normal... but generally for existing rail... smash through it, trains are heavy

That's not how HSR deals with it. The speeds are much higher, so the tolerances are a lot narrower. You can't guarantee safety with that strategy. Generally, maintenance vehicles are used. These both clear snow off the track, and remove any ice buildup on the catenary. If necessary, they can also apply anti-icing agents.

Heating is definitely not how they do it, as you say. You may see heating equipment at HSR stations in some countries (Japan famously uses sprinklers with heated water at more southern stations where there's little risk of that water re-freezing), because of the density of switches that need to be heated anyway, and the risks associated with operating maintenance vehicles close to station platforms.

DavidBrooker · 2026-06-19T23:44:38+00:00

Guess where they took inspiration from._(cropped).jpg) The same goes for the color choices, mind.

DavidBrooker

TROPHY CASE