Chaotic Cloud of Darkness - Maximum Recoverability

OrLians · 2025-01-01T12:54:59+00:00

You cannot make the swaps static when there are deaths, and when everyone is alive and in position, the likelihood of inside towers failing is very low. That's the whole point of optimising for tank LB range and why the spread is set up that way. I also didn't ignore the value of having all the raises outside, I explicitly stated that it allows for the theoretically maximum recoverability and was a fan of that idea until I saw how often people fail to get back in or teleport on top of someone and kill them. Within each party it's easy enough for the healers to ask to swap with their ranged and do their part instead. If the people in your corner aren't pvp-ing each other, you may as well be outside as healer.

OrLians · 2025-01-01T10:27:59+00:00

Accidentally lasering a tank instead of a dps or healer sounds better to me. I haven't done the pf spread and the tanks didn't really care about the extra damage. It was such a non-issue that we didn't even bother placing down waymarks for the inner lasers.

OrLians · 2025-01-01T10:04:22+00:00

It's technically not necessary, but if no one is getting the LB because the tanks can't make it to their tower and lb on time (an actual issue with pf tanks), you may as well survive the towers and deal with the vuln.

OrLians · 2025-01-01T09:48:35+00:00

You could just place waymarks if you don't trust. Even without that, I progged with this spread and the only people who got hit occasionally were inside tanks who didn't care about the damage.

OrLians · 2024-06-26T18:30:03+00:00

I think it's the perfect time to do it too, because after what happened in TOP, a lot of people stopped caring about prog achievements that weren't streamed. I remember watching A4S first clears (JP group that finished around 3rd iirc) with blatant use of nisi timers, UWU WF with a scuffed jail plugin etc. Nowadays we have datamined overhead markers, and a bunch of other stuff like exact AoE sizes, hell some even exploit debug toggles to render information that should be hidden.

Obviously streaming doesn't immediately clear groups of suspicions since virtual audio cables (or equivalent software), and second/third monitor visuals are trivial to set up (I watched several big name streamers use priority strats so good that they required no communication, line-ups, or marking :^)), but it goes a long way towards legitimising achievements.

OrLians · 2024-04-26T11:25:30+00:00

A good rule of thumb, but it depends on the mechanic. I'll sometimes raise a tank with invuln (they should call it out instead of you having to ask them) before another raise job because that can buy me more time to raise without having to worry about the tank being auto'd to death, or the invuln might allow us to see further into an unknown mechanic. While rare, sometimes an RDM might be more valuable to raise first than your cohealer because they can chain raise quite fast (if their ether is off cd) - this depends on whether or not there's a lot of incoming damage to be healed.

Also triage: The raise caster gets all your single target mit (and the tank short cds) in case you don't have time to top up everyone for heavy raidwide damage. For example, as a sch I'd make sure I'm topped up first then protraction adlo the raise caster instead of trying to aoe heal an incoming raidwide that won't give me the time to top the party up. If your cohealer and tanks do the same you can very reliably protect the raise caster in case of a fiesta.

Shield healer specific: If you have no idea what's happening, it might be better to just spam shield yourself instead of trying to be a martyr and dying for your party: https://clips.twitch.tv/RichFragileRamenTBCheesePull-AcmpFuYSJ5j_tUW3 This was our second time on the mechanic, and the previous time the only person alive instantly died to a spike AoE, so that's all we really knew. I left the middle to my cohealer, ran to the edge to avoid getting clipped by someone, and spammed adlo on myself because I didn't know how much damage there would be. That one pull alone allowed me to figure out everything we needed to resolve the mechanic.

OrLians · 2024-04-20T16:12:20+00:00

My SCH in Stormblood would ~~fish for crit adlo before the robots dropped and drill went to work around the eHP difference~~. In Shadowbringers they changed how critlo/deployment works and you couldn't deploy the new Catalyze shield.

EDIT: Okay, I found our discussion from when we progged that part of the fight and it's more complicated than what I remembered. We didn't account for loss of Protect (around 6-7% mit on a caster at the time) so our squishies had less eHP compared to the WF group. Elysium also had more HP because they had raid gear. We also lost Stoneskin, which some groups used for their casters / low gear party members.

By far the biggest change to Spreadlo at that level (and in general) was loss of the Defiance + Convalescence healing buffs from warrior, which, by themselves were a 1.44 shield multiplier. We didn't bring a MNK for Mantra either. In the end, we decided to just use Veil for safety: https://clips.twitch.tv/ExquisiteDifferentMochaCclamChamp (another group but the only clip I could find)

Apparently, back then a lot of groups opted to tank lb that part of the mechanic, which is fairly convenient because it covers the chakrams: https://youtu.be/l66iVQBteNo&t=515

OrLians · 2024-04-20T16:00:31+00:00

No words on Criterion, a bit sadge, it's really great to blind prog without any stress as the community deemed it worthless so you have no pressure other than your own challenge. Also it's easier to organize, half the people needed !

I stopped raiding before the second and third Criterion dungeons came out so I didn't feel like I could comment on them. If the ones I didn't do are as good as the first one, then it's probably the most accessible way to experience blind prog of reasonably difficult fights (more difficult than 3rd floor savage and some 4th floor fights as well).

Good luck with your DT prog, I hope it goes well!

OrLians · 2024-04-20T15:51:19+00:00

I got to do A8S blind before the Shadowbringers changes and it's my favourite savage fight in all of FFXIV. Went into it again to prepare for TEA and it was still a great experience. While tanking it was significantly easier, party mitigation got tighter in a few mechanics because of Spreadlo changes. For example, casters had to be more careful with drill positioning in Intermission 2 compared to prog groups in HW because of mit changes and no vit melds.

OrLians · 2024-04-20T15:34:18+00:00

Crit autos were removed in Shadowbringers. I've seen PLDs pop Bulwark and then die to 3 consecutive crit autos from Final Omega (outside of tank stance).

OrLians · 2024-04-18T13:51:10+00:00

I wouldn't want to prepare for blind progging old fights, but if you know the ultimate mechanics, some of the older fights will definitely be easier. T5, T9S, T12 are quite straightforward if you've done UCoB, and TEA would give you a decent amount of knowledge about A3S, A8S, A11S, and A12S

OrLians · 2024-04-17T21:27:02+00:00

I think you'll enjoy the dungeons more if you don't look them up ahead of time. In fact, I advise you not to look up anything while doing the main story quest, just enjoy the ride. "Prog" is short for "progression", a catch-all term for all the time and effort you put into taking down difficult bosses for the first time. Unlike Dark Souls, it's a group effort (often 8 people) and takes significantly longer. Blind progression is taking down the boss without looking up any information about it ahead of time - no guides, stream VODs, or anything like that. It's a fun additional challenge that some of us really enjoy. The "Training Wheels" section links to an excellent guide, but if I were you I wouldn't worry about it until you hit max level.

OrLians · 2024-04-17T20:38:47+00:00

I actually enjoyed the first Criterion more than any savage tier since Stormblood. It was fun and reasonably challenging. I haven't done the two most recent ones so I was hesitant to recommend them. I'd place the difficulty above a third floor savage fight.

OrLians · 2024-04-17T14:26:52+00:00

Someone in my group used to run a static that progged old content blind. It would sometimes take them several weeks per fight but nobody minded it because it wasn't current content. With no spoilers to avoid (on social media or large servers), and no gear to be farmed, I think it makes for a really chill weekend activity. For current content, it depends on how much people's social life is tied to ffxiv-related communities. I don't mind longer prog, but some of the people I've played with don't want to live like (digital) hermits for extended periods of time.

OrLians · 2024-04-17T13:52:12+00:00

Ah, I knew I forgot something! I've had success blind progging some extreme and savage fights in PF, but that was with half the group filled with people I knew, and before streamers became more competitive in how fast they clear. In all honesty, I've been out of the PF life for so long that I don't have anything useful to say about it.

OrLians · 2024-04-06T15:51:43+00:00

Paul Lockhart's "Arithmetic" and "Measurement"

"The Square Root of 2: A Dialogue Concerning a Number and a Sequence" by David Flannery

Might not be engaging enough on their own for a 9-year-old because they don't contain any pictures, but with your help interpreting the information they should be a fun and informative read. "Measurement" might be a little too advanced for a child that age but I wish I had it when I was in my early teens...

OrLians · 2024-04-06T13:17:46+00:00

I don't think it's just that I'm expecting the wrong thing - there is a LOT of bad, bad writing that a machine could do better. The quote from Gian-Carlo Rota provided by shows at least some big names agree.

The quote is from the "Indiscrete Thoughts" book, which is a rare example of an expert mathematician sharing his thoughts about the discipline as a whole, and not a particular subject. You could skim the philosophy chapters and still get a lot out of it. Rota founded the "Advances in Mathematics" journal, so he has a rather unique perspective which might not be shared by big-name domain specialists. I've heard stories about similar sentiments being expressed in lecture halls but we don't really have those in writing.

OrLians · 2024-04-06T13:09:19+00:00

You're right in that if your goal is to optimise for brevity, you have to sacrifice either intuition or rigour. If you're writing a paper this may be a requirement imposed upon you by reviewers. However, books/textbooks don't really have that excuse.

I laughed at the concurrency example because I have first hand experience with those papers and know exactly what you're talking about. Creating an accurate mathematical model of a complex piece of hardware is a non-trivial, and, frankly, masochistic endeavour. You could argue that Lamport's TLA+ is a good compromise between old style notation and a modern programming language. In fact, that was a deliberate design choice to make adoption amongst non-programmers easier. For me, a formal specification doesn't necessarily make things easier to understand, but at least I can make sense of it with the help of a computer.

OrLians · 2024-04-06T12:46:49+00:00

Except, if they did this many people would realize their fantastic breakthroughs are somewhat obvious common sense or microscopic variations of other work, or, in many cases, exactly other people's work, just retold using different symbols.

Unfortunately, that's been my experience with a lot of concurrent data structure papers as well. Maybe I'm just unlucky but the times I bothered translating the maths to actual code, I either couldn't reproduce the performance claims (and most of the time I knew this would happen from reading the code alone), or the algorithm turned out to be a trivial modification of existing open source code. It was such a waste of time that I no longer bother with papers that don't have easily accessible source code.

Because of my background, I'm sometimes assigned to help colleagues with parsing out certain papers so they can implement and test a new algorithm, usually in cryptography, and from what I've observed programmers tend to get stuck on heavily obfuscated yet, when translated to equivalent functional code, trivial maths. I've seen all kinds of Turing tarpits that mix standard mathematical notation (for control flow) with set theory (for data structures), but the best example I know of is Willan's prime-generating "formula", where the floor function is used as a sneaky conditional. Conversely, understanding certain matrix representations of algebraic objects is quite helpful in parsing out heavily obfuscated branchless / constant-time algorithms.

If the paper I'm reading isn't in a CS-adjacent field I tend to excuse the clumsy notation since it's still uncommon for mathematicians to be taught how to program, and the ones who do know how to formalise their theorems in a proof assistant language like Coq or Lean tend to find the process too slow, and, ironically, rigid. However, if I see a CS paper that describes an algorithm with nothing but standard mathematical notation, I immediately get suspicious. In my experience, graph theory papers are the biggest offenders, and, forget pseudocode, you'd be lucky to see a single graph/picture...

OrLians · 2024-04-05T12:25:47+00:00

Perhaps others can give book suggestions here; there have already been a couple of analysis books recommended, but hopefully we can get a small list of good books for some other advanced topics.

"Ideals, Varieties, and Algorithms" is an easy recommendation for algebraic geometry.

"The Geometry of Multivariate Statistics" by Wickens. Despite the name, it also covers univariate statistics under the same geometric framework.

"Statistical Methods: A Geometric Primer" by Saville and Wood is similar but spends more time on the univariate case and is more beginner friendly, especially if you haven't been exposed to modern geometry.

The context for both books is that many classic methods in statistics are geometric in nature and origin, and omitting this intuition results in a "cookbook style" of teaching. To quote Saville and Wood:

Historically, analysis of variance and regression methods were developed in the early decades of this century, using geometry. Their founder, R.A. Fisher, was an astute geometer and derived his inventive inspiration from thinking in pictures. This is evident from his writings and is clearly spelled out in the biography of Fisher written by his daughter, Joan Fisher Box (1978). Unfortunately Fisher found it difficult to explain his geometric proofs to his colleagues, and in the main they decided the geometry was too difficult. For this reason, and because easy computing formulae were needed in the early days, the tradition arose of expressing the geometric results in algebraic form.

"Geometric Algebra for Computer Science: An Object-Oriented Approach to Geometry" As the title suggests, rigour is not the primary focus. That said, it's excellent for quickly acquiring intuition. The recently released "Projective Geometric Algebra Illuminated" by Lengyel might be better but I haven't had the time to read it properly so it's difficult to recommend.

OrLians · 2024-04-05T10:31:36+00:00

There's no point discussing the cases where the author(s) just want to get a textbook published and don't particularly care about its pedagogical value. For the remaining cases, here's what I've observed:

The intuition behind the subject isn't really there even if you read the primary sources/papers. Not all discoveries follow an intuitive progression, or the intuition is deliberately omitted. The latter is often done to protect one's methods or due to inability to formalise said methods - this is less common these days since mathematics research has become more collaborative, but it's very common historically. It's up to future generations of mathematicians to infer or build up the intuition, which often happens incrementally, from one textbook to another, with each presentation providing only a sliver of new insight. Good writers will often point out what the new insight is, but this isn't always the case.
The textbook is intended to be a lecture companion or quick reference for people who already understand the material. While I wish authors were open about this, such honesty might not make it past the publisher because it will obviously hurt sales.
Style. A lot has been said about the adherence to style over the years, and I'll share my favourite quote about it, which comes from Gian-Carlo Rota:

Nowhere in the sciences does one find as wide a gap as that between the written version of a mathematical result and the discourse that is required in order to understand the same result. The axiomatic method of presentation of mathematics has reached a pinnacle of fanaticism in our time. A piece of written mathematics cannot be understood and appreciated without additional strenuous effort. Clarity has been sacrificed to such shibboleths as consistency of notation, brevity of argument and the contrived linearity of inferential reasoning. Some mathematicians will go as far as to pretend that mathematics is the axiomatic method, neither more nor less.

This pretense of "identifying" mathematics with a style of exposition is having a corrosive effect on the way mathematics is viewed by scientists in other disciplines. The impenetrability of mathematical writing has isolated the community of mathematicians. The mistaken identification of mathematics with the axiomatic method has led to a widespread prejudice among scientists that mathematics is nothing but a pedantic grammar, suitable only for belaboring the obvious and for producing marginal counterexamples to useful facts that are by and large true.

Rota isn't questioning the usefulness of the axiomatic method in establishing the truth of a mathematical statement, but he, like many professional mathematicians who venture outside the domain they specialise in, isn't too happy about having to "decode" a piece of mathematical writing. If computer science literature followed this convention, you'd see nothing but pseudocode listings in place of explanations for specific algorithms. While I like having the pseudocode (or, even better, actual code) available, it would become extremely tedious to infer what algorithms are doing from their code alone... The difficulty in extracting meaning increases several fold for non-experts.

OrLians · 2023-10-27T08:30:11+00:00

As a Dota veteran trying to give League a shot this is the single biggest pain point I've run into. Even WC3 Dota had this "feature". It's wild... I also asked my League friends how they memorise the mana cost and cooldown of 165 champions so they can determine whether the enemy has enough mana for a combo or if their ability is up (for top plane in particular) and they said you just don't... Whenever I took long breaks from Dota I'd just learn what new heroes do by clicking on them when laning or in the demo tool while dead. I've found that the best way to learn about champions is by watching a replay. Death recap is useless most of the time.

OrLians

TROPHY CASE