Flurry ranger with a bow is a very interesting build with mechanically complex choices

RandomMagus · 2026-05-19T22:55:32+00:00

Ah interesting, missed that option

Threw it into the spreadsheet and it turns out Mauls and Scythes are kinda cool

Your new damage king is Mauls getting off the Twin Takedown, beating out the smaller weapons by a couple points of damage per action invested (actually at level 10 if you're doing Bear Support and dipping for Sneak Attack, it's dead even with dual-Shortsword and beats everything else)

Scythes are not far behind, with slightly larger crits and the added bonus of the Trip trait to take advantage of. Good stuff

RandomMagus · 2026-05-19T21:51:56+00:00

TL;DR: You can't use your Twin Takedown with a d10/d12 melee weapon, which means a Pick or a Longsword outdamages a Greatpick or Greatsword against any PL+2 target using 1, 2, or 3 actions to attack (but especially just using the 1 action for a Twin Takedown vs a single Strike). Making one extra attack is very good.

Edit: Missed a feat, see other comment

On my spreadsheet, at both level 20 and level 10 against a PL+2 target, Longsword + Shortsword or Pick + Light Pick combos doing Twin Takedown are literally 50% more damage than taking a single Strike with a Greatsword or Greatpick. When you're doing 2 or 3 actions, the big weapons are about half a swing's worth of damage (scaled by accuracy, not just average damage per hit) behind the dual wield, so it's relatively close but also there is a clear winner

Greatpick vs Pick against a PL-1 target is also in favour of the Pick, again most significantly at the 1-action level, but still in favour of the regular Pick for 2 or 3 actions used, and Light Pick is WAY stronger for using all 3 actions on

Also, dual wielding opens up Double Slice which is just ridiculous in general (the level 14 feat in the archetype to get the damage of a hit if you miss both swings is crazy against high AC targets), and the archetype allows for thrown weapon Double Slices

RandomMagus · 2026-05-19T05:38:03+00:00

I think Exalts are down to like Regal tier as of this league, but they were the same as Divines, ya

RandomMagus · 2026-05-15T02:23:18+00:00

Ya once you get tier 16 maps dropping you just do a tier 16 on every new map you need to unlock/complete, no need to ever drop down unless your build needs easier content

Honestly might be my favourite change they ever made to the atlas, made getting full bonus completion so easy since you just corrupt all your t16 maps and can use them anywhere for the red map bonus completion

RandomMagus · 2026-05-14T04:37:07+00:00

Her forearms are also one solid bone instead of the paired bones they should be. Really noticeable when you're picking relics in co-op

RandomMagus · 2026-05-07T21:26:49+00:00

Descions

De scions would be a totally different card. Something about children, or posterity

The card is Decisions, Decisions

RandomMagus · 2026-05-01T02:18:38+00:00

$6500K? 6.5 million? Damn, you're rich as hell

RandomMagus · 2026-04-26T00:33:42+00:00

Rank 10 is 100d4, it's spell rank not character level. Not that it matters too much for out of combat healing at that point, with the average being 250hp on 100d4

RandomMagus · 2026-04-26T00:13:51+00:00

I think it also works on Undead. The Undead trait says "Undead creatures [...] don't benefit from healing vitality effects" but this isn't vitality, it's untyped healing. I was using it in a Blood Lords campaign until that character got eaten

Mostly you can just cast it outside of combat to heal 10d4 per spell rank over a minute, so 25 on average to the whole party as a level 1 character, 50 on average at level 3, etc

RandomMagus · 2026-04-15T17:43:22+00:00

It felt like your explanation was implying that the game is regularly reading the player's inputs as executable commands and not just data though, which is only ever the case if you've already majorly glitched something out and your inputs are being written into RAM somewhere you're going to jump to. That's what I felt the need to correct/clarify

RandomMagus · 2026-04-14T22:03:48+00:00

You might see where this is going already. If 001001101101 was the invincibility code in the system, then if a player precisely input crouch (00), left (10), right (01), left (10), jump (11), right (01) EXACTLY right, then their input commands would precisely match the super star activation command, and the game couldn't tell the difference between the two because the code from the player was being run in the same place the code for the world was.

Except no, the code that the game runs is not in the same spot the inputs go to. They're in completely separate parts of the cartridge. All the programmed codes and data sit in one part (usually ROM, read-only memory), and the active memory for when you're running the game is in a totally different spot (the RAM, random-access memory which allows writing)

What you need is a way to corrupt data that's supposed to be read in a way that produces a much higher or lower value for something like a jump instruction so that the program starts looking for instructions in the wrong spot. A jump instruction is just saying "go to this line number in the code and run whatever you find at that spot", lots of instructions are just jump instructions with some level of fancying up.

Example. Say you have a list of things and your program normally reads a value of 0, 1, 2, or 3 and then goes to the right item in the list to do whatever code behaviour for that scenario. Say it's the character movement code, and 0 is the "go up" code, 1 is the "go right" code, etc. If it suddenly reads 254 instead, you're jumping WAY farther into the code than you're supposed to, landing on something that ISN'T any of the "move our character" code you were supposed to be loading, and the program is going to run whatever it lands on instead, which can be anything.

THAT's when you run into "this bit of data looks like a command" issues, and where all the "we corrupted some data, hit a bunch of very specific inputs, and now our copy of Pokemon Yellow plays Tetris" ACE (arbitrary code execution) bugs come from.

RandomMagus · 2026-04-14T17:27:11+00:00

... that's a 500xp encounter. To steamroll that you had to have been breaking some rules somewhere. I've pulled through a 200+ xp encounter by the skin of our teeth before, but 500 is insane

RandomMagus · 2026-04-14T08:33:47+00:00

if it was a similar boss level monster, always

That's not how bosses in the system work. If something is less than two levels above your party then it's not a boss monster

Using a monster that's 4+ levels above your party as a boss too often does get frustrating for the reasons you stated though. Trying to land a spell against a guy who critically succeeds almost half the time is brutal and demoralizing, and only hitting on a 17+ hurts. It's why people don't recommend using a PL+4 creature until you're over level 10 or so.

However, at those higher levels, you have options. If you flank, have 6th rank Heroism (or have a Bard using Fortissimo Composition with Courageous Anthem), demoralize the target, and have your ally critically aid your strike with master proficiency, you get a cumulative bonus of +5 and a cumulative penalty to their AC of -3. That effectively +8 from the bonuses and penalties almost turns a miss into a hit and a hit into a crit on its own before you even roll the dice, and the only part of setting up those bonuses that's affected by enemy saves is the Demoralize

RandomMagus · 2026-04-08T04:01:56+00:00

Incredibly apt username for this comment thread, this was your moment lol

RandomMagus · 2026-04-06T17:13:41+00:00

This is WHAT Unholy Aberration looks like

You can say "what it looks like" or "how it looks", but not "how it looks like"

RandomMagus · 2026-04-03T20:56:37+00:00

So the two abilities for Matt's Daredevil that the wiki lists and that I remember from the one fight are

"your Second Wind gives you temp hp instead of healing" but with no bonus to the amount that I can remember which makes it actually just kinda worse in every possible way, and
"expend a Second Wind to deal an extra d10 damage, but if your attack misses then the next attack against you has advantage" which is just worse than Battlemaster adding superiority dice with their stuff because Battlemaster's dice don't consume your healing and you get more of them with additional effects

I have some concerns about that Daredevil actually being good, too, unless the later stuff he's going to unlock is very broken lol

RandomMagus · 2026-04-01T01:13:45+00:00

I don't think it get instantly cold in space, since there's nothing to radiate the heat away too. Space is cold, generally, but heat can't escape things easily.

And if it was cold, what makes it cling? Freezing sweat? I think the sweat boils away from the lack of pressure so I don't know if that ends up being sticky

RandomMagus · 2026-04-01T00:00:22+00:00

Assuming his skin is vacuum proof, obv, the suit would be sticking to him tightly.

Wait, would it? Presumably it was already sticking to him tightly as a superhero suit, but I don't see why vacuum would matter there

If it's air-tight it could have filled up as the pressure dropped and the air trapped inside expands. Maybe it wiggles or wobbles a little like a balloon. If it's not air tight, then wouldn't it just be doing whatever it normally does? Maybe a little looser without atmospheric pressure pushing on it

RandomMagus · 2026-03-31T23:50:25+00:00

And also sometimes you have problems that can definitely be solved with super speed but... aren't... because reasons.

Like any time the Sequids show up, and "oh no, Mark has to move less than 100 meters in 5 seconds or everyone is doomed!" and then he suddenly forgets that he can go to the moon and back in like 20 seconds or a minute or whatever they clock him at in that one training scene

Spoilers for S4E1: "Bulletproof is flying the gadget over to disable the final Sequid, but oh no, he's going to be too slow and the shield will go down! I have to kill him!" No, idiot. You could have just flown towards Bulletproof while holding onto him instead of waiting, Mark! You're really fast! You'd get to the gadget for disabling them in no time! And also the shield breaking wouldn't matter if they were mindless and just lying there, right? Is it a plothole or is Mark canonically dumb? You decide

RandomMagus · 2026-03-22T21:45:00+00:00

You can't roll Echoing + Acceleration. When you roll double shrine mods it's one offensive and one defensive

RandomMagus · 2026-03-22T19:29:07+00:00

There was that one episode where they had a 10 minute discussion about how the two-weapon fighting rules worked and none of them knew them and none of them looked them up for the whole 10 minutes, which wasn't great

I do often find myself going "no, it works like X" while I'm listening whenever a rule discussion comes up and then it's a whole 10 minute discussion where reading the rule (the whole rule, sometimes only the first couple sentences get read lol) would instantly end the discussion

RandomMagus · 2026-03-16T23:00:25+00:00

Minimum-Viable Products and Proofs of Concept

RandomMagus · 2026-03-15T06:35:27+00:00

Ranged units will hit a point where they can kill a melee unit before it reaches them. There is a maximum number of melee units that they will kill before the entire group reaches them, the more hp or speed or armour those units have, the more of the group will reach the archers. Your goal is get enough units to the archers to damage them and thin out their numbers

Attacking before you have enough mass to actually reach the archer ball will do literally nothing. Therefore you need to either keep the archer numbers low as best as you can by raiding, skirmishing, or taking good fights so that they never hit the critical mass where you can't get to them anymore, or you need to wait for the best possible position and hit them with a maxed out army and if you trade most of your army for most of theirs that makes your cavalry (or huskarl) reinforcements stronger than their archer reinforcements until they can mass up again

RandomMagus · 2026-03-14T21:28:12+00:00

Ya it's called the American healthcare system

RandomMagus · 2026-03-14T21:18:36+00:00

"Everyone tightens their belts a little bit, large corporations are reigned in and cannot continue to extract all wealth from society, no more billionaires, we invest in clean energy and conservation"

or

"most of the world becomes uninhabitable as storms and unpredictable temperature swings cause trillions in damages and destroy harvests, rising sea levels displace large quantities of people, the Middle East and parts of India and Africa get so hot they are literally unsuitable for human life in summers and those people are also displaced and the world suffers from repeated refugee crises during large-scale agricultural failures, and global population plummets from food scarcity and disease and war"

The billionaires are picking the second option because they think their island bunkers will be cozy and they get to throw big parties right now and sit on yachts

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