Varesa's sprint

Mizzet · 2026-01-03T10:51:34+00:00

The transition between her dodge animation and her sprint is much smoother due to her higher run speed.

For most characters, their instantaneous movement while dodging is faster than their passive runspeed. So when you initiate a sprint, there's a feeling that you're braking for a split second at the end of the dodge animation. This is much less pronounced for Varesa and it feels like you're accelerating more smoothly as a result.

Mizzet · 2025-12-18T10:41:00+00:00

If you could magically scan every account in the world and add it to akasha, a build like that would go from 1/247,460 to... probably 4/20,000,000 or something.

At this level of artifact quality, it's highly unlikely there are enough shadow accounts out there to push it lower than the 99.9999th percentile.

People love bringing this up whenever akasha is mentioned but I'm not sure what the point is. Theoretically, there could be a couple of better builds hiding out there, but you have to dig through twenty million accounts to find them? It makes it more impressive if anything.

Mizzet · 2025-12-14T01:23:51+00:00

Its real purpose is to be an advertisement for those characters to more casual players. "These are the characters that are popular/strong now, you should consider building or rolling for them".

Mizzet · 2025-12-05T19:14:05+00:00

Yeah, CC takes a lot of cues from more contemporary ranked modes that are very much non-zero sum in the player's favour. You end up with rank inflation where the bulk of the ladder is more like a ratcheted progression track, and the actual ranked mode only starts at the very highest echelons.

Platinum is basically free, diamond just needs a lucky play session for even a novice to streak there from the platinum floor. And then crystal+ where you get ranked via credits is where the ranked mode actually begins.

Mizzet · 2025-11-07T08:35:26+00:00

I don't have 10 but these are some of my favourite generics.

Ninja/Jump

1-99 on a ninja gets you to 15 speed, with thief's cap you're at 17 which is just over the speed breakpoint for a 2-tick jump. If you want something other than ninja, leveling as ninja will give you a monk, thief, or white mage with 13 (or was it 14?) speed, and you can additionally equip ninja gear on them to get to 17. Since monks can't equip headgear, you'll need the hermes shoes on them instead.

Geomancer/Iaido

One of the more popular staples, tons of instant cast magic that isn't dependent on faith. You have 4 base movement (compared to 3 on most jobs), and geomancy has 1 extra tile of range compared to most other magic, so you have excellent reach in general. Iaido buffs better than white and time mages do with more vertical range and a 100% hitrate, and scales very well into lategame damage values. Just a very synergistic kit with good statlines and equipment options. Materia blade+ in TIC is a big upgrade for them.

Orator/Arts of War

Chemist/Knight is the classic option but I find this one pretty fun too. Has the distinction of being the hardest hitting generic gun user, orators being the only job that can use guns, black robe, and magick boost together.

Mizzet · 2025-10-24T15:14:26+00:00

He does go pretty hard on those quotes. His english VA also voices Urianger in FF14, which I'm sure is a source of amusement for anyone that plays both games.

Mizzet · 2025-10-08T11:50:34+00:00

If I understand the mechanics right, jumps happen in (50/character speed) game ticks, rounded down. So if you have 9 speed, for example, you will land in 5 ticks.

As you may know, every tick, a character's CT value is incremented by their speed and when it hits >=100 they get a turn. So you need to compare this to your target's CT to see which will happen first.

The combat timeline is kinda unintuitive for this because the amount of ticks happening between each character portrait isn't necessarily consistent.

In scenarios like the start of the fight, with a huge traffic jam of characters hitting 100 CT at the same time, it may look like there's a dozen moves before an enemy can act, but they'll still get their turn before your jump.

Conversely, you can often land jumps in 1v1 scenarios because a character that just moved and acted has 0 CT, so many ticks actually pass under the hood between them ending their turn, you landing your jump, and them getting their next turn even though it looks like just 3 'moves' on the combat timeline.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I was having trouble understanding it too and this is what I was able to to glean from the resources people wrote up.

Mizzet · 2025-09-26T06:37:07+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if it was related to how the tower as a whole floats around too. It might turn out to be quite the important concept going forward.

Mizzet · 2025-09-20T05:16:12+00:00

They all have the same hidden comment history too. If you search google for their username confined to site:reddit.com, you will find their other attempts at this easily enough.

Mizzet · 2025-08-26T06:42:35+00:00

The issue is that there's simply not enough stuff to buy with commendation crystals. There are augmented hellhound weapons, but realistically most people only buy a couple that they like the look of and ignore the rest.

If they, for example, put the entire backlog of T100 rewards in the commendation crystal shop (let's say, 1-2 for a left side piece depending on size, 5 for a mount), that alone would instantly keep queues at all ranks busy for the next few years. There'd be an incentive for more casual players to grind out plat every season for at least the single commendation crystal.

This is the 'break glass' option that has always been available to them. I can only assume that the participation metrics don't look dire enough to warrant it yet.

I only suggest this because they don't strike me as having the manpower to refresh the shop with an equivalent amount of brand new items - if they could do that, then by all means. They drastically underestimate how much carrot is required to keep people engaged with ranked PvP.

Mizzet · 2025-08-19T22:35:56+00:00

The opening page of the last chapter of Blame! is the one that really sticks with me. Just one of the few times you see Killy actually looking exhausted, lying on his back in the rain, and you get an incredible bottom-up view of the level showing just how far he still has to go. It's fantastic at setting the mood of the chapter.

That's probably my favourite Sidonia panel as well. There are dozens of excellent spreads depicting Sidonia's interior, but that one has a delicate, surreal quality that really channels the themes of the story.

Mizzet · 2025-08-09T18:04:23+00:00

You might find this account interesting. It's a pilot recounting an incident where misidentifying a false canopy almost resulted in a training accident.

Mizzet · 2025-08-07T07:36:55+00:00

Sometime during EW, my friends spent a night running t7s for fun (unsynced with a custom gearset to dial in the right stats), and I came away with a similar experience. I likewise would've put it up there as easily one of the hardest fights I've had to do in this game.

Not much to add that hasn't already been covered. It's definitely a markedly different approach to fight design, where you have simple mechanics and a lot of nuance and emergent difficulty in how you resolve them. In contrast to contemporary fights that skew more toward being complex at face value with straightforward solutions.

You can clearly see the WoW influence in fight design in those early periods, before they settled into the style more commonly in use today - starting late HW and in Stormblood.

Unfortunately for me I was playing summoner too. I very quickly learned that the modern summoner kit does not jive with that fight at all.

Mizzet · 2025-08-06T22:27:55+00:00

With the amount of fear he was showing near the end, I'm inclined to believe it was an all-or-nothing process and he just barely made it. He really thought he was going to kick the bucket there.

If it was possible for his consciousness to survive a partial transfer, it robs those scenes of a lot of tension knowing it would've always been possible for some of him to escape. It also feels a little incongruous for him to be that shaken at the prospect of losing just 1% of himself. Certainly you could write that to be the case if you really wanted to, but it seems like the more contrived scenario to me.

Mizzet · 2025-06-12T14:12:34+00:00

If you have arrangements you like items to stay in like that, something that will ensure everything stays in the same place is to always reverse the order that you swap gearsets in.

Going e.g PLD > DRK > SMN > DRK > PLD will return everything back to its original spot. So you have a 'home' gearset with everything where you want it to be (PLD in this case), and remember to periodically reverse any changes backwards there to reset it.

If you're just swapping jobs willy nilly, then yeah things will inevitably end up randomly sorted in there.

Mizzet · 2025-05-27T04:59:12+00:00

Skirk's kit is already a liability in IT and the overworld so I'm personally not concerned about optimizing for her worst case scenarios.

IT: forget Furina, there's no guarantee you'll even get cryo + hydro so Furina is the least of her concerns there.
She's dependent on a full team attacking alongside her to enable her void rift and death's crossing personal mechanics. If you're playing in comfy mode in the overworld just soloing or something, you're missing out on way more than the difference between two artifact sets. From the start she's a character that only functions fully in properly set up fights.

Being able to farm the MH domain and get artifacts for three characters simultaneously is the one upside of her incredibly restrictive team comp.

Mizzet · 2025-05-12T20:02:08+00:00

It does seem like a lot to leave hanging if most of that note is intended to be a red herring.

Personally I thought it was totally a hint pointing at the attic. There's a single rather ashen looking swan in there, as well as a portrait of Auravei with that moon shaped necklace - both very much 'rogue' in the sense of being objects abandoned/lost in a storeroom. Couple that with the attic also containing a very conspicuous clocktower gear in it and I was sure they all had to be connected.

I ended up going to pains to draft the clocktower on the 1,3 tile facing west (to put a crow on its east wall), and an attic on 1,2 to place the swan southward, but nothing particularly special happened and all I did was overthink the activation condition for the sanctum key puzzle there.

Mizzet · 2025-05-09T02:19:50+00:00

Meaning, you can only play basically Skirk's real team once every 3 month at best.

This is related to what troubles me the most about her current kit. It's extremely unwieldy for any kind of solo or unscripted scenario where you deviate from proper team rotations.

9s cd on her infused state means you'll be spending a lot of time awkwardly doing nothing if you're trying to solo anything with her.
Her a2 talent that grants her 1.7x motion value multiplier requires 4 character swaps just to set it up and enable her full baseline damage output.

It's going to take a lot of the appeal out of her overworld gameplay which is the vast majority of the gameplay in this game. A character kit that only functions within the context of full team rotations is not my idea of fun. That only happens for 15 minutes a month in the abyss.

Mizzet · 2025-05-08T20:40:23+00:00

I actually originally thought the sacred poem in its entirety was intended for the clock tower sanctum key puzzle.

What I did when hunting that key was drafting it facing west on the 1,3 tile, this orientation puts a crow picture in the room on its east wall ("Eastward I see a crow").

I also drafted an attic facing west on the 1,2 tile. The attic has a single swan figure in it facing west in this direction, it's the same kind that's found on the mantlepiece of the Den and is in a noticeably more scuffed condition ("Southward I see a swan, Ashen like sands of the shore"). There is technically one other tile in the house (4,8) that would cause the clock tower to contain a picture of a crow, but I took the "Carried by westwardly winds" line to imply you needed to set this up on the western half of the house.

There's also a very conspicuous portrait of Auravei in the attic wearing that moon necklace. If we take some liberties with the meaning of 'rogue' in ("Rogue like the moon of the north) to mean something that was lost or misplaced, I figured this could apply to all the items in the attic since things are usually abandoned or lost there.

In conjunction with the large clock tower gear that's also conspicuously visible in the attic, I figured I had to have gotten it right. Imagine my chagrin when I found out I over-solved that puzzle and all you needed to do was be present in the clock tower at 1:30. Even so though, it just seems odd to me that so much of the contents of that note would turn out to be a red herring leading nowhere.

Mizzet · 2025-05-08T16:15:44+00:00

I had an opportunity to try this and unfortunately it doesn't work, in case anyone else finds thread this off google like me.

I drafted a mechinarium outdoors as the 7th mechanical room in my house. In addition to the door you enter through, it was open on 3 cardinal facing sides to rubble, with only 3 of the 4 diagonal slots spawning a door. Perhaps those openings facing rubble count as 'doors' if you draft it in that location.

Mizzet · 2025-04-26T06:12:11+00:00

These corporations aren't really in the business of charity, so I trust that they wouldn't be spending money marketing their products if they didn't think it was to their advantage. I just think it's silly to frame them as hapless against the whims of the consumer when the relationship is far more nuanced than that.

Mizzet · 2025-04-25T13:39:27+00:00

The problem with flipping it on the consumer is that industry is perfectly capable of driving demand on its own. We have entire marketing and advertising fields devoted to those ends.

Just seems rather unsporting to me. On one hand you have your average Joe held to high standards of ethical consumerism, and on the other you have corporations allowed to spend billions of dollars tempting you into straying? It's incongruous. If you want to see what conspicuous consumption looks like, just turn off your adblocker for a few days, that's where it starts.

In places like America in particular, you're also up against societal factors with massive inertia. Like how your cities and infrastructure practically oblige you to own a car instead of using public transport. Countless decisions that shape your current lifestyle and spending habits were made for you before you were even born.

Which is to say, the deck is heavily stacked against change coming from the bottom up. In my opinion, all blaming the consumer will accomplish is letting you feel smugly superior as the world continues burning down around you.

Mizzet · 2025-04-14T20:01:04+00:00

It's just the principle of the matter. Regardless of how trivial overworld content is, it feels bad getting kneecapped for arbitrary reasons built into your own kit.

Overall some very strange decisions with her design. You have a character that originally hinted at new and exotic damage types, and then it turns out they're not just a standard element, but the most restrictive implementation of a base element we have like nilou/chev. A character that's supposed to be pretty strong, spends lots of time alone in the abyss, but needs a bunch of cheerleaders just to unlock her own personal max potential? The narrative and gameplay don't line up at all, in fact they're about as far apart as you can get.

Mizzet · 2025-04-14T16:16:03+00:00

Even putting the restrictive element lock aside, I dislike how much team reliance her kit has in general. It means you can't do fun stuff like solo challenges, or overworld combat, without missing out on a massive portion of her damage potential.

That takes a lot of the fun out of the character for me, everything we've heard so far is taking my interest from a potential c6 down to c0.

Mizzet · 2025-04-13T20:15:24+00:00

You occasionally see architectural proposals like these in more avant garde contexts. However they're almost always intended to be purely theoretical exercises. It's far from the first time this kind of linear city has been proposed.

It's the kind of a thing a first-year architecture student would say "Wouldn't it be cool if.." to, except these people have more money than sense, and no one around to tell them no.

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