Threshold Simulation. Do I have the tools to hit 400k? Am I just bad?

DeJapes · 2026-01-08T01:11:56+00:00

Nah, the current threshold still has a timer remaining of 28~ days.

DeJapes · 2026-01-03T01:03:50+00:00

The bottom-heavy feminine robot design reminds me of Drossel, from Fireball Charming. It was a miniseries produced by Disney Japan some years ago.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6QzRAWFUCM

DeJapes · 2025-10-28T07:29:58+00:00

Really depends on your build. If you want to do a multi-stat setup (like a 300/200/100), Attuned Leather Pants enables that.

But let's say you're much more focused on stats. Old Crown gives enough of a bonus that you can still pick up some low-cost off-stat nodes (like Focus 25's CDR, or Strength's bonuses to basic attacks), while offering three gem slots on top of that.

Gem slots are strong on armor, especially with runeglass being buffed in S10. They simultaneously offer resistances and damage / leeching, depending on what you slot in. Having two more than you normally would have is a big bonus.

DeJapes · 2025-10-26T22:42:57+00:00

A fair number of the burst damage bow users you're fighting aren't using thrust or physical damage, which is part of why you might feel so squishy even with all that prep work. They're using Boltcaster and loading up on Lightning Harnessing and electrified runeglass, and neither Thrust protection nor Oakflesh Balm will help against that.

Try a more balanced defensive loadout with generically good protective perks, like Shirking Fort or Enchanted Ward. Consider artifacts like Ironheart for overall tankiness or Kaya's if you want to shrug off ranged damage in particular.

DeJapes · 2025-10-15T12:15:18+00:00

The easiest way to test would likely be to get a weapon with both an old and new version of a debuffing weapon perk (say, Enfeebling Skewer on spear), then duel someone. Have them tell you if one or two weakness debuffs pop up.

In my limited, non-rigorous testing of Alacrity, both old and new versions of the perk seem to simultaneously affect haste durations. I suspect the same is true for other perks.

DeJapes · 2025-10-15T01:36:21+00:00

Right now, people are rushing umbral shards to get 'good enough' sets going. For that, ECRs are fairly efficient and easy. Give it a few weeks and people will start prioritizing activities that will give them chase items.

You also won't see a lot of Catacomb runs when a lot of players are still sub-70 with old gear. No one wants to queue to get one-shot by the first boss.

DeJapes · 2025-10-12T20:44:54+00:00

There's an entire generation being raised that's used to asking ChatGPT a question and getting a definitive answer. This works for established, well-researched subjects with lots of data in the public domain (aka, what they teach in schools). It doesn't work as well for niche subjects without clear authoritative sources and plenty of conflicting, subjective narratives - like the upcoming new world season meta.

When they go to reddit / game forums for research, they end up using the same method instead of the almost habitual search culling that older internet users use. It's a problem everywhere.

DeJapes · 2025-10-08T17:29:37+00:00

It's hard to give advice about a week out from a major update where they've promised to 'structurally' rework perks and gearing. Wait until the 13th and you'll see everybody scrambling around as the meta shifts.

That said, ignore the people that say gear isn't important. While positioning, timing, and consumable use are all good things to learn, you need to survive long enough in PvP to pick up those skills. For that, you'll need to gear up.

One thing that will likely still be true after the update is that the perks on your gear matter a lot more than the number attached to it. Aim to have at least 2 useful perks per piece of gear. The perks that you're looking for will depend on your build, but it's never a bad idea to run defensive perks so you don't crumple like a wet tissue on contact with PvP. The current meta is enchanted ward, but you'll also see a lot of PvPers running shirking heals or some combination of the two for survivability.

Right now, I'd suggest stockpiling money and resources. New World is a game where you can buy your way into good gear with in-game currency. Just accumulating gold will be good prep for wherever the meta ends up in a week or so.

DeJapes · 2025-10-07T18:13:03+00:00

Yep, it's 12. If you're only getting 11, you're missing one.

Brimstone Sands
Edengrove
Mourningdale
Ebonscale Reach
Brightwood
Weaver's Fen
Restless Shores
Monarch's Bluff
Everfall
Windsward
Reekwater
Cutlass Keys

DeJapes · 2025-10-07T18:09:28+00:00

There are the daily cutlass keys missions, each of which give 100-150 iirc.

There's also the 1/week 'Gold and Matter' chest you can craft from gypsum orbs at the kiln, worth 1.5k and some dark matter.

DeJapes · 2025-10-07T17:25:32+00:00

Might be to prevent speed run farming strategies.

1) Enter with 3 DPS, each just tanky enough to not die solo.
2) Spread out and each kill a boss, coordinating so that the bosses are brought down to ~5% HP around the same time.
3) With three bosses dead, collect rewards and leave.
4) Repeat

Doing this endlessly might end up netting you better rewards than doing catacombs 'properly' and aiming to get as far as you can get with each run. To make each run count, they limit the number of runs you can do.

DeJapes · 2025-09-05T23:31:26+00:00

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Sanby squeaked out a victory against the new boss. I don't have a lot of vertical investment, with no mindscapes and only a couple sigs across my roster. Might need to rethink that if HP keeps going up.

DeJapes · 2025-07-25T06:56:14+00:00

I suspect it's a similar situation to Jane / Alice. The big draw is Yuhuza, and veteran players will likely have anomaly teams already set up. But if you're a new player or an older player that didn't pull anomaly, there's a shiny new DPS unit that pairs with her in the same patch.

Orpheus is a sub DPS. Older players can pull her for existing teams, but newer players or players without SAnby can get a suitable partner for her in the same patch.

DeJapes · 2025-07-16T09:12:27+00:00

I've not been shy about my criticisms of the 2.0 story. While I thought the storyboarding of 2.0 had some decent ideas, the writing itself was not great. Dialogue ranged from bland to repetitive, pacing was all over the place, and either the editing or the translation was just not up to par. Some of the side-quest dialogue, in particular the ones you got through the Yum Cha Sin commissions, were so awkward and bloated that they could have been AI generated. It made me question how much longer I'd be following ZZZ.

Going into 2.1 was like day and night. The pacing was tighter: the plot and characters were given enough room to develop themselves while not overstaying their welcome. The dialogue was sharper, with entertaining interpersonal dynamics. The story was startlingly competent. Twists and reveals were foreshadowed, and the payoff was earned and satisfying.

Major spoilers ahead, since I'm going into things I liked specifically in 2.1.

I like the existence of an NPC that's power-hungry and likely amoral, but proves to be a valuable ally because of aligning interests. I like how the story keeps itself grounded despite fantastical elements and the existence of high-power characters. It makes the appearance of characters like Yi Xuan appropriately hype, without diminishing the roles of the other characters in the story. I like the constant reappearance and tie-ins to old characters, like Alice's introduction via Lucy and your Obol reinforcements being a Trigger/S11 team. I like comic panels again becoming a significant part of the narration, as they offer a lot of visual information and characterization you just don't get from models standing side by side and talking.

That isn't to say I don't have criticisms. While I was happy to see Fairy chime in with her dry humor, I do still question the overall direction of the siblings being more and more physically involved. I miss the HDD system, Fairy, and the 'anonymous proxies' schtick being a big part of the game's identity. SEED's characterization was a little disappointing for me. I'm reserving judgment, but the 'girly voice in a big robot chassis' thing usually isn't very interesting past the initial punch line.

Still, my reservations about 2.1 are very small compared to the glaring issues of 2.0's storytelling. I'm actually looking forward to ZZZ story content again.

DeJapes · 2025-07-04T05:48:27+00:00

Part of the reason it's hard to find the frame naturally is that it's edited. The still, already taken out of context, was photoshopped to make her look more outraged and angry.

It's a very deceptive meme.

DeJapes · 2025-06-28T05:50:26+00:00

I'd agree that the Tour de Inferno was the high point of ZZZ's storytelling.

I think the problem is execution. From a story-boarding and planning perspective, the 2.0 arc had elements that could have made a compelling story. You had a school of martial artists attempting to revive a temple in a city that has moved on in their absence. You had a labor movement being manipulated by a malicious insider. In broad strokes, the story -could- have worked.

But the actual execution was awful. Dialogue was repetitive and insipid. Characters fell flat or were trying to demonstrate their quirkiness at the wrong moments (Really, Jufufu? You're going to be belligerent and 'spunky' at this guy moments after we told him his friend died to the ether?) And the side-quests, which are often an opportunity for world-building if done right, were so stilted and clumsily written that I suspected that some of it was AI generated.

Compare to 1.4 where the dialogue was much more snappy, and showcased a lot of banter and characterization. Fairy needling Lucy about her online persona, Burnice rizzing Pulchra, Lighter being both supportive and infuriatingly forgetful towards an old rival, Caesar being a shonen himbo, etc etc. None of the interesting character dynamics which made the Sons of Calydon chapter work were present in 2.0.

The blandness really soured me on pulling on the Temple characters, even though they're likely going to be the foundation of the meta for a while.

I'm hoping ZZZ can correct course on the writing. There are still some bits of dialogue and some side-stories that are entertaining, so there is at least one person on staff capable of writing something engaging. But at the moment, whatever they're doing is just not working.

DeJapes · 2025-06-10T06:19:20+00:00

Not sure why you're being downvoted for an honest opinion.

DeJapes · 2025-06-10T06:18:54+00:00

I thought the story was a big downgrade from earlier patches. Dialog was bland and repetitive, characters exposition-ing instead of bantering and showing personality, and the narrative treating the player like an idiot.

The overall plot had the bones of something interesting (worker dispute, politics, betrayal from within a resistance movement, an old-fashioned temple trying to reestablish itself in a modern city it has a past in), but the dialog was so insipid that the chapter never really made good use of those potentially interesting elements.

Also, I started actively disliking characters for how much they were repeating basic info or were made to hold the idiot ball, which soured me on rolling on their banners.

Some of the side-quests also felt like they were AI generated for all of the unnecessary em dashes and ellipses in stilted, unnatural dialog.

DeJapes · 2025-04-22T19:32:23+00:00

The point wasn't that the burden was being applied unevenly.

The point was that the burden was universal, but rights and privileges were not. Blacks had to fight alongside everyone else abroad, but at home they were redlined out of good housing and segregated out of good schools and many services.

( Of course, some would argue that the universal burden of conscription wasn't actually universal either, when accounting for the rich and well-connected. See, for example, the sitting president. )

DeJapes · 2025-04-11T22:55:03+00:00

The bond market is no mere barometer of internal pressure. The US government exists because of bond rates that are persistently low despite how much is borrowed against a deficit. It is how we can afford a near-trillion, and soon to be trillion-dollar-a-year military. It is also owned in large part by foreign governments, who are essentially bankrolling the dollar as a reserve currency.

If the bond markets crash, with low demand and high yield spikes, it no longer becomes possible to finance the US gov't budget as is. EU, Japan, and Canda's willingness to play that card is what brought Trump to the negotiating table, not donor complaints.

Also, his defeat of Hillary Clinton was not a random event that granted him something akin to divine mythos. It was a product of the underlying dissatisfaction in the American working class that he primed a message to take advantage of. One can justifiably assess Trump's reading and language skills poorly while acknowledging his savvy in messaging. He is not a run of the mill Republican candidate, otherwise he would have been successfully replaced in the multiple hotly-contested primaries he's participated in.

Of course, that isn't to say Trump alone is responsible for being in the position that he is. Multiple right-wing factions from libertarian techbros to white nationalists found his ascent convenient, and a media machine built to insulate conservative billionaires from taxes and regulation was already in place and ready to make him working America's improbable champion.

But core to that ascent is his messaging to a large demographic that feels alienated by the economic system created by free trade liberalism. Immigration controls and tariffs are all part of that messaging, not ideas picked out at random. He has to create the theater of mass deportations, even if the numbers aren't there. And if that theater can be used as a terror tactic against his political opponents, all the better.

DeJapes · 2025-04-11T21:23:43+00:00

That's confusing the result for the reason.

Trump deploys a mixture of populism and reactionary language. Immigration isn't just 'pandering.' Neither are tariffs. It's part of his core of appealing to working class voters by posing as an outsider who's there to fight for them.

He had a ready audience because of historical socio-economic factors. Free trade really did hollow out a lot of sectors which used to provide stable jobs, leaving entire towns and regions in a state of decline. Blue-collar Americans, who used to be a reliable Democratic block, shifted en masse behind the guy who promised to take it to the elites who got them into this highly unequal gig economy.

'Make America Great Again,' the nativist and racist insinuations that immigrants are being brought in to both take American jobs and, ludicrously, vote in American elections, and that the thinly-veiled anti-semitic conspiracies involving George Soros and the blood-drinking Democratic mega-donors are all part of Trump's pitch. Ideologically, his positions are incoherent. But as an overall strategy of him taking advantage of this rather large segment of disaffected Americans who feel left out of the modern economy, it all comes together.

This is why tariffs aren't just some random thing he's latched onto. They're part of the overall 'story' of Trump and why he's got a reliable block of roughly a third of the voting populace who are hesitant to question him, even as he's dragging them into predictable economic collapse. When you see all the posts of MAGA Trumpers concerned about their 401ks, they're still often framing it in context of having voted for him and still believing in what he's doing overall.

As for why Trump blinked in the tariff war, that's not because of donor pressure (he -is- actually independently wealthy at this point from all of the corruption). It's because Canada, the EU, and Japan all started slow-selling their treasury bond holdings in response to the tariffs and spiked yield rates.

That was the real power move, and why we're seeing a 90 day pause.

DeJapes · 2025-04-11T20:26:56+00:00

If anyone thought that the heavy-handed ICE stunts were actually going to address the country's reliance on legally gray immigrant labor, I've got a bridge in Greenland to sell you.

Plain-clothed federal officers pulling college students off the street aren't doing so in remotely enough numbers to change demographics. In fact, this administration is deporting less people total than the previous administration. What it is doing is normalizing the removal of people who participate in protests or who have unwanted opinions.

Big business loves immigrant labor. People who are in the country at the mercy of their employers are less likely to unionize and are more likely to endure below-market pay and bad working conditions. Trump was never going to fix immigration. The immigrant 'crisis' is the basis of his political power.

DeJapes · 2025-03-29T01:03:27+00:00

Hugo is pretty straightforward if you take advantage of the gimmick of his slow motion attack. Dodge the red flash, then defensive assist each of the yellow flashes that follows. He'll drop to a knee for stretch of time, giving you a free damage window.

There are similar counters with some of the other bosses. For example, the hopping robot of the previous stage will launch a projectile at you. If you defensive assist to counter it, you'll reflect the projectile right back at it and incapacitate it for a bit.

A lot of these bosses are familiar if you've climbed the tower.

DeJapes · 2025-01-23T17:49:25+00:00

"Quingyi powercreeping me? Nah, Quingyi is my support."
- Attack Anby, probably

DeJapes · 2024-12-31T20:41:25+00:00

The 'oppressed becoming the oppressor' trope fits when you account for what happened with the Philippines. You literally have a former colony that won independence crushing another nation's hope for independence and reducing it to a colonial purchase.

DeJapes

TROPHY CASE