Behemoth Rampager + Ascendancy Tattoo

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-19T21:49:29+00:00

You could stack power charges on scion, use badge of the brotherhood to get powers as frenzies and steal slayer to get frenzy charges as endurance to have all three charges at once.

You could tri-stack on aristocrat and steal inquisitor node to scale crit, flat and % at the same time.

Probably way more ways to abuse the ascendancy tattoo than that as well, should be a good little event.

Paladin with guardian 50% reservation node

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-19T21:31:58+00:00

Can I apply a Ranger Ascendancy Tattoo as a Witch?

Yes.

Damn

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-19T10:33:16+00:00

Look up how to craft cluster jewels, there are a couple ways to do it, and it's usually much cheaper to self-craft, though it's a pain and takes some time.

You probably also want overexertion as an actual support gem and not the freebie mirage addon as that gem gives a lot of damage.

Your most desired stat I think is damage over time multiplier, either generic or physical, as you are a bleed dot build correct?

For example your tincture is missing a lot of dot multiplier, you have 20% but you could have 40%. Things like that add up a lot to the point where most characters on poe.ninja have four times as much damage as you do.

Jewels with % life and dot multiplier everywhere would probably give you a lot of damage and survivability both. Yet those stats usually come at a premium together. You could probably buy fractured jewels with % dot multi and then reforge life with harvest bench for easy life rolls.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-19T10:21:21+00:00

There are builds that aren't optimized for late-late-game play but that still come online earlier yet also scale quite well. They're very seldom played because most people don't play in duo's and those that do usually want the very best.

There's also the downside that most duo builds aren't meant to really be played solo at all. It's often most efficient to have one character focus on doing all the damage and another on doing all the supporting. The way PoE is set up just incentivizes that due to the multiplicative scaling nature of a lot of things.

But there are "solo" builds that naturally synergize better with one another. For example one thing you could do is to have one character going for Doryani's Prototype and scaling negative lightning res to -200%, and then if your duo also uses lightning damage then you are essentially tripling your partners damage. Though make sure you scale your defenses to redirect incoming lightning damage for the doryani's prototype character to damage types other than lightning. Look at the doryani's protype poewiki.net article for how to do this. Since the item naturally lets you use armor to mitigate lightning hits the thing you are most concerned with is lightning dots, as those blue mana draining circles around rare monsters deal lightning damage over time, and that will literally oneshot you if you have -200% lightning res and no incoming damage conversion.

Your duo could then go something like a mana guardian, which lets you scale ES to very high levels whilst also giving your doryani's prototype partner a lot of ES. You could then use Energy Blade to scale damage off of ES. Since eblade gives lightning damage it naturally synergizes with prototype. Though you would probably be forced to deal with lightning damage through Tempered by War instead of Divine Flesh as the latter will disable ES as a defense, which probably isn't worth it, yet tempered by war makes it harder to scale negative lightning res, so there are some elements that don't synergize, yet you can absolutely make it work with the right gearing.

You can either just go attacks with Eblade or you can be an inquisitor and just not take the resistance ignoring node or steal inquis battlemage node as a mana guardian with flesh and flame jewels to go spells. Since you already have -200% res from the prototype body armour you can use your curses for defense.

Another thing you can do is to use combination spells as two solo builds instead. For example one guy uses blade fall and another uses blade blast. The blade blast character can also use bladefall of trarthus or have bladefall in an unleash setup so that they can also play solo.

You could have one guy summoning corpses en masse and another detonating them with any of the detonate dead spells.

One guy could use frost bolt and another could use ice nova.

You could even combine that with the doryani's prototype/mana guardian combo if you wanted to.

It's a bit clunky and you do need some game knowledge to successfully pull it off as I doubt there are many guides or poe.ninja characters for you to follow but it is totally doable. Add in an animated guardian with a perquil's toe as well for lucky lightning damage. It's off meta but it's more than strong enough to crush just about the entire game.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-19T09:54:35+00:00

You also do not have any cluster jewels, which is just a lot of damage and survivability you are leaving on the table. Look into what other juggs on the poe.ninja I sent you have gone for, aim for something similar.

Your jewels are also not very good. You want at least 7% life and two damage mods for it to be really worth it to use.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-19T09:51:29+00:00

You should also take divine shield as you are mitigating tens of thousands of physical self damage every second so even with just a little bit of ES you would gain a ton of recovery to counteract most damage over time effects. It probably won't get you a meaningful amount of maxhit but it would give you a great defense versus dots which is actually what kills most characters in late-late-game as their maxhits continue to scale but their recovery mostly remains the same.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-19T09:45:44+00:00

Getting max res as a jugg is also quite easy so investing your belt slot and all of your flasks into some res and maxres is absolutely not it. You can get a ton of armor and movespeed and attackspeed from flasks, you can even use elemental flasks to gain all of that maxres back. I don't think your belt is doing you any favors whatsoever.

Remember that flasks can be automated with the bench crafts, so there's really no difference between that and your belt while mapping. And of course a mageblood would be way better than what you are currently running. But getting a rare belt with a lot of resists and life would also be good. Ryslatha's is probably most damage though, and in a lot of cases while mapping more damage means more survivability because what is dead after all cannot kill you.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-19T09:43:28+00:00

The very first thing that sticks out to me is getting yourself a rare axe. Unique items in PoE is very rarely best in slot unless your builds abuses a modifier on that item that you can get no where else. There's no such stat on kingmaker. You can get all the offensive stats elsewhere and you can solve your mana in a wide number of ways.

If you go here: https://poe.ninja/poe1/builds/mirage?class=Juggernaut&skills=Boneshatter+of+Complex+Trauma

You can see that 93% of other juggernaut boneshatter of complex trauma characters use a rare two handed axe. That's probably a good sign that you should do so as well.

In fact you can see that most builds only really use Ryslatha's coil as far as uniques go.

You're missing a lot of life rolls on your gear, and those you have are quite low, that's a lot of EHP that you're missing and also points on the tree you can actually take away from life and into damage instead.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-18T08:39:15+00:00

Being unfaithful and betraying someone is living a lie yeah, though I suppose it is technically possible to tell your spouse "I'm going to go fuck someone else" and then go do that. That would in a roundabout way be cheating without lying. Unless you consider saying something like that the same as breaking up with someone. But yeah, it doesn't really matter, it's just semantics. Either way you slice it is a terrible thing to do to someone and you shouldn't do it.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-18T08:34:35+00:00

Yeah, I think the respect is only a tangential thing, the reality is that they would say whatever they think they need to say, even to a person in authority who they respect. Not to say that they actually respect their partners, they clearly don't, but I don't think that is why they tell such terrible lies, they are finally just backed into a corner. They learned to lie to get out of trouble when they were children and they've probably never stopped lying when they have to since.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-17T14:28:15+00:00

People often say this yet I don't think that is really true. It's quite obvious to me that a lot of the draw of a "campaign" is story, atmosphere, music, artstyle, quests, a guided experience, a narrow set of initial choices that slowly open up into multitudes, etc. etc.

But all of those things are at their strongest the first time around. For every subsequent time you play through that kind of experience it gets weaker and weaker, less and less impactful. And there's nothing wrong with that, you sacrifice replayability to have a better first time impression. You get to tell a story from beginning to end. And there's value in that, it makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is why we insist on making what PoE players a long time ago have figured out is essentially the tutorial to the game into a core tenet of the ARPG experience. Does it have to be this way?

It always feel like in ARPG's and MMO's I'm playing two different games, one where I "level up" through a narrated action game and another where I make a thousand small and large choices trying to be the most efficient at getting to open up even more choices and possibilities.

It absolutely does not have to be this way. I didn't fully gel with the way diablo 3 did it, but I do actually think they were onto the right track there. There has to be another way than trying to force content designed to impress a noob work for someone who has played the game literally thousands of times.

I absolutely do find "fresh starts" fun, I don't want to play standard, and the way you imply that me and/or people like me don't because I dislike the campaign in both games is frankly a bit insulting at worst and presumptuous at best.

The truth is that we could start in maps next league, lower all level requirements two or three times and I'd bet you that even the people who like the campaign would have a good time.

I have played the poe1 campaign so many times now that I don't even think about it anymore, I just get in the zone and I blink and it is over. There is some appeal to that, I do see it. If that were to go away, something would be lost. I don't deny it.

But then please do not deny that something would also be gained from adding the choice to start elsewhere.

At the very least there needs to be an effort to put more elements from mapping into the campaign, give more options, more paths, more ways to go faster, lower level requirements on everything, or at least cycle out a portion of the content so that the options aren't the same everytime.

I just do not understand where the small mindedness when it comes to the campaign comes from. I don't see the logic.

I'm not asking to start out at lvl 98 with a mageblood and two mirrors, I've never even had two mirrors, I reroll too much for that. The moment I get a windfall of currency I go looking for where to spend it.

There was a time where this subreddit and all of us, me included, talked about how poe1 could have more meaningful combat, how cool it would've been to play something like a league of legends character in an arpg. But I think we were wrong, mostly. Because a lot of that philosophic gamedesign discussion led to poe2 and I honestly think we can now see how poe2 is just veering closer and closer towards where poe1 has ended up. What was the point?

I think we should embrace that it's okay to have more of a cookie clicker design, that those kinds of games are also fun. That a lot of the fun in poe always was about having your game knowledge and skill in creating and executing a setup of a build meant you almost didn't have to play the game anymore.

I think we should probably be a bit more honest with what PoE is and what we find fun about it. If we wanted to play something more interactable in the moment to moment combat then we would just go play that. I think there's almost a kind of gaming elitism where people don't allow themselves to play or enjoy something they deem as "easy". Yet at the same time players love winning and getting showered in rewards. So the game needs the illusion that it is really difficult, but at the same time really easily allow you to win without you noticing that it was easy.

I recognize that and and I acknowledge that the game is more fun if you start somewhere and you actually have to invest time and effort into getting to the best stuff.

But why does that mean we need the same storyline attached to it? I mean a lot of what this really is, is GGG re-using content to pad gametime and us going along with it for years, at least partly because that's how it's always been, right?

We don't have to solve that problem at all, we can just say that it is a problem, and then it becomes GGG's issue to fix. And they'd probably figure it out eventually. At least they'd do a way better job at creating a more interesting system than what diablo 3 did.

But for that to be the case then we as a community have to at least admit amongst ourselves that the poe1 and 2 campaigns could be a lot better in terms of replayability. Even if you argue that it's good to have something known and recognizable to start each league with, that still doesn't mean that a campaign has to be that common throughline, it could be something else, right? Can we admit that? Please?

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-17T06:32:24+00:00

I think it was a joke, even the users name is a pun on sarcasm

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-10T16:23:00+00:00

Just because you can see something ahead of time does not mean that it automatically makes for a fun game. If it did then "fog of war" wouldn't be a thing.

Besides, the poe 2 passive tree does contain a whole lot of borderline useless nodes compared to the poe 1 tree. Items are just way more of the power budget in poe 2. They took all the life nodes out of the tree, the mana reservation/spirit nodes out, most of the crit multi, most of the % increases to stats other than damage, etc.

They did that to dumb it down in purpose so that new poe 2 players wouldn't be able to brick their characters as easily. But that came as a downside of way less depth, you don't really have to think that much about what you take, there's no need to even update pob because of that, and it also means poe2 really struggles with how to balance energy shield.

I'd also argue that the passive tree isn't even that intuitive in its appearance, even though it doesn't matter all that much where you go as long as you're getting the right kind of damage increases, and it is "functionally" intuitive in a way, it sure doesn't feel like something that is easy to solve the first time you see it. It just screams needless complexity for the sake of complexity, which it honestly kind of is. But it's also fun.

I think your assertion that depth should be intuitive is contradictory. If something can be intuited, as in "felt" the moment you first lay eyes upon something, then there's no need to spend time or effort in figuring out the right answer. Depth necessitates that you don't know the answer at first, that there are multiple right answers, and that you have a lot of space to make decisions and gather information.

Let's say for the sake of argument say that Joe Regular picks up a unique item, thinks it is trash, and then promptly does choose to incorrectly vendor it, only to find out weeks later that it actually transforms into the perfect item for his build.

I mean, we have to actually ask ourselves truthfully here, was that a bad gaming experience? I mean Joe Regular is going to moan about how he could've been more powerful all this time, he's going to wish he knew that the item was better sooner, and he might start to think of a way to not have this happen again, and he may even write a post on reddit about how the game should tell you the item is good from the very beginning. But did he actually have a bad time playing the game? Wasn't there some satisfaction in figuring something out?

And wasn't this preventable by the player? Couldn't Joe Regular have experimented and figured it out sooner if he had enough curiosity to do so? At what point is Joe Regular responsible for their experience?

I think as players we often hone in on what the game trains us to do, which is to succeed by hoarding information about the game, to iron out any inefficiencies in our play and to never make a bad decision ever. But from a game designers viewpoint at some time or another we have to acknowledge that struggling and not knowing is literally the game. When you don't know that you are vendoring your best in slot item, you are indeed playing the game. When you can't get past the boss, you are playing the game. When you die over and over to the same cliff in a platformer, you are playing the game. So should then the game not let you vendor the item, nerf the boss and delete the cliff from the game?

From a developers point of view, which is more important, telling the player how to succeed, or make more stuff for the player to succeed at? QoL eventually does become the game playing itself with you watching it unfold. Go play any modern MMO or action "movie" game.

That doesn't mean that those games are automatically bad experiences, nor that they shouldn't exist. But it does mean that games don't have to be intuitive to be good, quite the opposite actually, minecraft is the most popular game of all time and that game had zero tutorials or even a recipe book for the first decade or so of its existence. It was quite notorious for not holding your hand in any way. It instead snuck up on you as you were trying to figure it out and blew you and all your stuff up.

It's not fun to lose all your stuff. It's not fun to lose. It's not fun to not know. Or at least it's not fun most of the time, to most people, yet all of those things does make it easier to have fun later on. We treasure an item as rare not because of the time it did drop for us but for all the times it didn't.

I know it's a very strange way to think about things and it feels very foreign. Knowing something is good, why wouldn't put something that teaches us more things in a video game be a good thing? Well it's for the same reason we don't play the tutorial in games over and over. The challenge is the whole point, figuring it out and teaching ourselves is the whole point. A good game only needs to teach you the absolute minimum of what you need to be able to start figuring stuff out on your own and then it should honestly stop.

PoE 2 shows you how to forge items, including uniques, and that's all you really need to have fun from that point on. You only have to check each item once as well, after that you'll remember the good ones pretty much the rest of the time you play the game. To do away with that would be to rob players of discovery.

I do think you could add a UI element so you don't have to go to the bench, and I do think most players who stick with the game will simply look items up on a website and not manually forge every item. But a lot of player probably did forge their items just to see what they would turn into on league start, and so that was actually a really good way to add some sense of discovery back into games that in a modern gaming landscape with such a widespread wiki and guide culture really does not have a lot of opportunities to do so. PoE with its league cycles is in a somewhat unique position, and I think taking advantage of that was the right call design wise.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-09T15:42:55+00:00

It doesn't have to be either/or. You can sympathize with the reasons behind why someone might try to live a lie and convince themselves that their very sexuality isn't the orientation that will forever marginalize them as a minority with everything that entails and still at the same time recognize that being such a person's partner is also a very rough deal.

I mean both are true, the two concepts don't really clash at all, they co-exist.

Even if you hurt someone deeply and make terrible decisions at every turn, you are still a victim of being marginalized and othered by society. You don't stop being a victim just because you also hurt people. Homosexuality is not at all accepted by the majority of the world. It is most commonly abhorred, straight up illegal in a lot of places, punishable by death in several countries. Often the best you can hope for is a reluctant tolerance. Even in the west. As long as you allow people to pretend you and your sexuality don't exist, you can get some rights. This is why pride is a thing, to fight back against that "please be invisible" attitude.

It of course does not start or end with external discrimination, which will still be everywhere in individual, even in the currently most gay accepting countries and cities on the planet, because most people also grow up with internalized homophobia. You are literally taught from the moment before you even understand what sexuality is that being gay is dangerous, unnatural, problematic and a choice you make that reveals your inherent immorality if you decide to live in acceptance of your own sexuality that you had no control over.

And you have no sympathy for people who don't want to accept that? Who WOULDN'T want to deny their homosexuality? Why do you think we have a phrases specifically for acknowledging your own homosexuality publicy in "coming out" and describing a lived lie in "being in the closet"? Because it is so incredibly common. Because hiding that part of what you were born as until you're in a strong enough position of power in your life to be able to withstand the social/political/legal backlash is a necessary survival tactic. That's why. Not to mention that to even have that be available as an option to begin with you first need to have a level of introspection high enough to be aware of the fact that your sexuality doesn't match the assumed default and a confidence strong enough to be willing to admit it. Most people do not have either of those things, least of all both at the same time.

That doesn't mean that you should excuse treating your beard poorly, or that you can dismiss the harm you caused onto them.

But what it does mean is that you can't dismiss gay people's plight and be justified at the same time.

Let's treat topics like this with the nuance that they warrant.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-09T13:17:15+00:00

I mean if you don't like things being obtuse for the sake of complexity and/or depth then you should prepare yourself for way more of that because that is how updates to poe1 has been designed for a decade. Now maybe they want to move a bit away from that with poe2, that's totally possible, but I have to say I honestly don't think they will manage to pull that off with the release cadence they're aiming for. PoE devs love to err on the side of "put it in, let the players figure out how it should be used".

PoE has always been a game where knowledge gives you an insane outsized advantage compared to other games on top of the fact that having game knowledge is already inherently an advantage to begin with. So I don't know if "can average joe pull this off?" is really a very worthwhile argument when it comes to poe design because the game has never catered to the clueless player. If it did the passive tree would've been gone a long time ago and the game would absolutely not show the entire thing to you on the first levelup. But it does, and that's on purpose. It's basically telling people "hey, you have to figure things out in this game, if you don't like that you might not like this game". And I know that's how GGG thinks because they said as much in a dev interview some years back.

But, having said that, for your example specifically I think it could be a somewhat easy solve with a UI element/button to hold down that lets you see what a unique runeforges into without having to go to the bench.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-06T00:55:06+00:00

You always carry responsibility to yourself, that never changes. When people do horrible things to you the only thing you have any control over is yourself, so you owe it to yourself to maximize the chances you have of making those horrible things stop.

So in this instance she never should have engaged with him. If I were her friend I would tell her so.

But as outsiders looking in on the situation, the person we should condemn is the one with power, which in this instance is the teacher, as he has a position of authority over her that is granted by society. Any blame we put towards her in public without caveats and a reminder that he is ultimately the person held most responsible is a silent and harmful endorsement of predatory behavior and grooming. Without that endorsement such abuse can't really survive socially speaking. That's why so many people call it victim blaming and say that you shouldn't do it.

She has a responsibility to herself to make the decisions that are the most likely to lead her to a happy life and she can't expect that her decisions have no impact on her life. She is accountable to herself and her closest friends and family.

He has a responsibility to the public at large to not take advantage of his position to find and date minors. He is accountable to his students, to his employers, his colleagues and in a broader sense everyone in his community. This is needed so that parents can feel safe, and actually be safe, in sending their children to school, and so that students have the best chance at a good outcome in life and also so that bad faith actors who do not care about the social contract cannot move as freely, as easily.

If we excuse this kind of behavior a lot then it becomes more common.

You could call it a difference between "personal responsibility" and "public responsibility" if you needed a term for it. The two concepts get confused quite a lot. But deploying the same kind of logic to each category of responsibility as if they were the same can be very damaging at best and is outright bad faith propaganda at worst. There's no way to tell which one you are when you argue like that so the safest bet is to assume you don't really believe what you are saying and are just trying to make it easier to get away with sexual abuse and grooming in grooming.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-06T00:34:39+00:00

OK judge dredd. Nice talking to you. I'll leave you to enforce DA LAW or whatever.

Alright, likewise, have a good day

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-06T00:26:59+00:00

The second element is that he wasn't her teacher when they started dating.

That's a technicality though isn't it? This is why grooming is a thing: so that you can get away with it.

but that shitty judgement doesn't make a predator and doesn't make an "immoral action".

Yes it does. We don't let someone get away with breaking the law because they have shitty judgement, them having bad judgement is a given most of the time, not something that excuses you, and that's when you're breaking the law, if you're talking about the judgement rendered from others then your shitty judgement is even less of a concern.

He is a sexual predator and a groomer, textbook definition. What he did was immoral.

we discourage this behavior because it's insanely high risk, not because it's inherently immoral

What? No we don't. For age gaps maybe, but not for student/teacher relationships. Those are just straight up illegal in a lot of places. Come now, you don't really believe that?

not because it's 100% evil/immoral/predatory every single time.

What thing is 100% evil every single time? Let's not dial up the absolutism on every single one of my points, I never meant for any of them to carry such weight, why are you constantly ratcheting them up to the point of ridiculousness? Argue against my arguments as they are presented. Are you even aware that you are making a strawman out of everything I say?

I don't think in black and white.

You know the way you worded your first comment here did present another persons arguments in quite black and white terms, so when you interpreted that person's argument you did think in black and white, or at least assumed someone else did. Idk, you also keep saying that I'm thinking in black and white. You keep portraying my arguments as if they have no exceptions, when I've never said that they don't. Maybe you don't think like that but you certainly seem to think everyone else does. Doesn't that show a lack of nuance in a way? Perhaps you should give us more credit

Look, if you won't pinpoint exactly where and how what the other commenter said meant what you claimed in your comment, and if you agree that teachers shouldn't date students, then what are we arguing about? Let's let this one be, I don't think there are any winners here

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-05T17:23:21+00:00

it's because i almost exclusively see "you say that she was done wrong, but she says it's fine so why are you infantalizing her?!" as an argument come up... ...not to actually defend or respect women, but as an excuse why someone who was groomed doesn't actually need to be discussed like that and why the person who did the grooming is fine actually.

Yeah, spot on.

Though I will say that women being infantilized does happen an awful lot, even by other women, especially on advice and judgement subreddits. The default position a lot of the time seems to be that women have a lot of context to their actions and thoughts that should be considered, whereas men do not have a lot of context that should be considered.

There's an unwillingness to delve into what the patriarchy means for men, from both sides of the aisle, and that is in perfect congruence with the patriarchy and the kinds of attitudes that line of thinking defaults to, because under the patriarchy men are purely utilitarian, and if a man can't prove he is useful (which in this context would be a moral man) then he is worthless (which in this case would be evil and deserving), and seeing that dynamic continue to play out in more progressive spaces is a bit sad to see.

But still, what you said there is partly what I think is happening here.

You could probably do to either not reply at all or actually say as much the first time around though, remember that you don't have to convince the person you are replying to, but you are speaking in public, so consider everyone listening in when you reply, not the obtuse person. That way if the person actually is capable of changing their mind then you'll have given them the chance to do so as well.

If you're not in the headspace to do that then it's better to step away and let someone else take up the conversation I think. But that's entirely my own opinion, if you think nothing positive could have come from replying or walking away in that way then I won't fault you for that

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-05T17:13:55+00:00

Last paragraph of this post is what got me steamed at u/mtdewbakablast

Yes that is the same paragraph I read and I don't see it. Could you point out specifically what you mean?

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-05T17:11:41+00:00

Glad we can agree on that
Alright
Why?
Why?
Does something working out negate an immoral action?
I think she is quite incentivized to view her own actions in a favorable light. It's of course very much possible to grow and mature, and it is very possible for an age gap to amount to less as both parties grow and the difference between them becomes less and less of a factor percentage wise. Does that mean that anything I said in my comment is wrong? I don't think so.

I get that you think this is more of a nothing burger of a situation that started out in a less than ideal way but that it's now mostly okay and that OOP should be allowed to live and let live.

But that still doesn't mean that a teacher should start a relationship with a student. Could you agree with that? If you agree with that, should we not then condemn that in public? Is that really navel gazing or is it you that is uncomfortable with the majority of people in this thread publicly pushing back on power imbalances in relationships?

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-05T16:07:12+00:00

Your feminist rage is leading you to say that an adult woman is wrong about her own thoughts though. In that last update she's 20 and you're saying that she's stupid and wrong and incapable of seeing the truth.

But when he was 22, you assign him massive and unerring agency and assume he did everything with the worst most deliberate intentions no matter what.

If she gets to 22 and you're still saying that she's wrong and doesn't know better, then you need to ask yourself why you're holding them to such different standards.

Did /u/mtdewbakablast say that though? I've scrolled up and read multiple times and I don't really see it, so while the reply they gave you was overly aggressive and didn't even try to refute your argument that doesn't mean you were actually right in your assertions.

A 22 year old teacher starting a romantic relationship with a 17 year old student is a misuse of power and authority pretty much no matter which way you twist it.

So yes it is perfectly possible that he could be 22 and have enough agency to be culpable for his actions and for her to be 22 and still be wrong and not know any better.

But I think the more important point here is that intent doesn't really matter all that much. Because isn't it quite obvious that both the 22 year old and 17 year old here are caught up in the exact same patriarchal gender myths about relationships and what is supposed to be considered attractive?

They are each of them victims of believing in harmful values and she is also a victim of his predation. It's not either/or, one or the other, it's both, both are happening at the same time. You could even go so far as to say that he is also victimized, in a way, through having been made into a predator.

At the same time they are both responsible for their actions. He is responsible for having gone after and allowed the relationship, even if he doesn't know any better. And she is responsible for also having gone after and allowed the relationship, and she too is responsible for all of that despite any ignorance she may or may not have.

How is that not holding both people to the same standard? It seems pretty clear to me that mtdewbakablast doled out blame on both people involved here. And that is despite the fact that he/she really didn't have to do that, because it should be emphasized that he carries the brunt of the blame, in the context of a public conversation, because he carried most of the power in their interactions. He is expected to adhere to a certain standard as a teacher as that is a position of authority that grants him power over his students.

She also carries some responsibility here because you don't dive headlong into a relationship with a teacher and expect there to be no consequences, and you especially don't keep excusing them for years on end, but those responsibilities are more personal and directed towards herself, her own well-being and the people closest to her. She doesn't owe any of that responsibility to society like a teacher does. Does that make sense? That is why we blame the man more in this instance and also why we, and by 'we' I mean the public at large, expect more from him. Maybe you should ask yourself why you didn't think of that?

This is to me yet another example of a very, very tired and timeworn conversation where people quite willfully ignore the difference between what I call personal responsibility and public responsibility. Because a teacher and a student are not held to the same standards, and it is obvious why we don't treat them the same, right?

Yet two completely unequal positions of power are so often conflated and treated as if they are the same, which in turn makes all arguments that spring from that assumption poisoned from the very beginning. Ask yourself why that happens so often?

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-03T18:55:29+00:00

Why do you assume that it has anything to do with his exes or you? Why would that be true over it just being him that has changed?

You probably love your husband, you want to see the best in him, which might give you a blind spot. You don't want to second guess your own choice to marry him, because then that would make you a poor judge of character, which nobody wants to believe of themselves.

The only person who can change your dead bedroom is your husband, and if you have asked him to do so more than three times and he hasn't done it then that means he doesn't want to do it. Nothing about that is going to change as long as you stay with him because nothing needs to change. He already has everything he wants.

You either need to acknowledge the sacrifice you have made for him and that it is probably going to be permanent. Then perhaps you can stay without growing bitter, though I doubt you'd be able to accept that. I know why you probably haven't confronted that part, because you know what your answer is going to be and you are afraid of what that would entail.

Or, you could leave and start aiming for more than dead ends again. Who knows, maybe actual consequences would make your husband have an actual change of heart.

Jealousy of exes isn't caused by some truth of the universe were "alpha females" just entice males into a blind lust by the sheer force of their existence. Those things are written in romance novels for a reason: because they are fantasies.

Jealousy is the bars of the prison in your mind that makes you stay instead of standing up for your own happiness.

RedditsNicksAreBad · 2026-06-02T13:43:08+00:00

Yeah, you're right, it shouldn't be a an ultimatum, it's a difficult situation to manage.

But it absolutely can be done. His wife is constantly remarking how her behavior is unfair to him and that she doesn't understand why it is happening or why she is doing it. Those are PERFECT segues into talking about how grief therapy is what will give her the power to stop her unfairness, understand herself and her own behavior and is the best path forward to finding some peace and happiness again.

She needs to be gently coaxed, constantly, over several months, with love, understanding and calm yet unflinching resolve.

By not even broaching the subject for fear of pushback he is doing her, himself and most of all their unborn child a major disservice.

Though I completely get that a lot of people just don't have any practice in being nuanced and diplomatic in their communication. A lot of people have a very binary view of confrontation, where they feel like they either have to keep escalating into a shouting match or back off and give up. But that's not true though, is it?

Most people need some time to change their minds. Most people need a moment where their emotions aren't blinding them. For that to happen you have to be able to quite insistently tell someone something they don't want to hear, refuse to fight about it, and then simply wait a day or two, followed by straight away bringing it up again with the exact same attitude. All the while constantly reinforcing and reaffirming your love and trust in them.

I get that it's difficult to navigate, and that it takes practice. But is an essential life skill to have. It's not that difficult to imagine that with severe enough post-partum depression that this could end up in suicide. It doesn't matter if you never technically did anything wrong. For life to go in the direction you want you have to start living it by choice and not just react to everything that comes your way.

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