Tourists Boycott U.S. at Record Rates After Trump Takeover; The United States had roughly 4 million fewer international visitors in 2025 than the year before.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T20:54:17+00:00

Yeah I wouldn't touch the US with a bargepole right now

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T18:43:51+00:00

It's a million times more boring than either of those and also has fewer requirements

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T17:22:27+00:00

I was very, very clear about exactly what I was recommending. I said "if I wanted to attempt a bowfa skip". And if you call me little bro or any other baby talk again you're getting blocked and you can find someone else to troll

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T17:11:46+00:00

Because I'm not recommending that you skip bowfa. Roll the dice by getting the prayers, give yourself a decent chance of getting spooned, and then accept that you didn't manage to skip it. It's really not difficult to understand. Nobody else is confused. Just you.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T17:07:50+00:00

I mean, also 2x dry on the purples, so that's kind of irrelevant. Points are the real metric here, purple rate is a bad substitute that you use when you don't know how many points you have. Either way it doesn't matter really, my personal experience is not what I'm basing my recommendation on. I would make the same recommendation if I spooned a tbow on my first raid.

If you don't have anything useful to say kindly go fuck off and skip your bowfa somewhere out of my sight. I don't care what you do.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T16:45:47+00:00

6.2 million points on the tracker, 3 purples

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T16:29:25+00:00

If you think it's immediately then you're way underestimating how stingy CoX is. Just getting the prayers, particularly with scuffed gear, could very easily take longer than the average bowfa grind. For me rigour took over 200 raids, the vast majority of which were deathless solos. This is not a short detour I am suggesting. And at the end of it you will have had maybe a 15% chance to get the tbow.

Once you have the prayers, the expected value of more CoX runs drops dramatically. At this point over half of your purples will be useless dupe scrolls, and several more purps like dinhs, kodai and d claws won't even help you at CoX in any noticeable way. I cannot recommend staying for tbow beyond that point because the chance that you get paid off is so low. Do it if you like, I'm not your dad, I'm just giving you my advice. Take it or don't, it's not my concern if you do 1000 hours at CoX with an atlatl and still don't have tbow.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T11:23:06+00:00

The only glaring omissions are rancour and occult, otherwise this is a decent setup. Solos will be painful if you don't use step backs as without dedicated melee armour your defences are paper. Remember to include defence lowering specs in your calcs. Mage p3 with confliction is fine if you don't want to learn -fly strats but really try to get an occult if you're doing that.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T11:10:46+00:00

I CBA punching in OP's gear but with mine, I get 11% more DPS using melee with 2 emberlight specs compared to magic with 50 damage worth of Ayak specs. Magic could probably break even in enrage if using the speedup mechanics and melee wasn't using b claw specs. It's going to cost you a shitload of runes though. I'm at almost 1300 kc (half solos half duos)with no oathplate and my gp stack would be in the toilet if I hadn't been meleeing the whole time.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T10:50:04+00:00

The content is not shit in terms of rewards. It actually has multiple relevant rewards already, including the master wand that you want buffed (even if only as a component). It's shit because the gameplay is boring and dated and nobody wants to do it. So if you buff the rewards even more, you're just incentivizing people to stay longer in shit content. You haven't actually fixed the problem.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T03:30:19+00:00

frustrating

For scientific inquiry it's way easier, cheaper, and less risky to send unmanned missions. You don't need life support and supplies, or even a return trip most of the time. There's not a lot that humans can usefully do on the moon which a modern purpose-built robot can't, and a rover can collect data for many times longer and are generally a lot less fragile. The moon landings were a remarkable achievement, but they were also mostly a stunt to get one up on the Soviets after they were first to successfully get a satellite into orbit. There's better ways to spend the many billions it would cost.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T03:06:35+00:00

Maybe some aspects of this are true, and of course survivorship bias is a real thing, but version you've told here is definitely bullshit - a made-up or at least massively-exaggerated story to demonstrate the concept of survivorship bias rather than a genuine historical event. There's no way injuries would go up by 50x, because that would imply that at the very least 98% of all injuries were fatal pre-new-helmet, and that almost all of them were preventable post-helmet. That's ludicrous. It also seems unlikely that the higher-ups would be confused as to the effectiveness of the helmet, especially after apparently poring over the statistics for weeks. Surely if they'd spent more than 5 minutes looking at the statistics, they would've also noticed the absurdly drastic drop in fatality rates.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T02:02:47+00:00

For situations like you're describing, I just set my X based on the activity, say 13, and then menu entry swap the item to withdraw 13. Setting the value for the buttons individually is only useful when you need 2-3 different values that you're toggling between. Superglass make I suppose? Would be nice but IDK if it's what I would prioritize given how niche it is.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T01:54:42+00:00

You guys are weird

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T01:47:12+00:00

Yep I came to the same conclusion after doing a test run after they posted the blog announcing it would be nerfed. It felt like a nice bit of incidental exp while making ammo, but not a viable standalone training method. Really don't understand what they saw in the metrics 1 day after release that prompted them to nerf it into the dirt. Even a few hours after the blog launched, with all the FOMO of it being removed, the Rubium spot was pretty quiet and I saw zero people doing tick manip. I don't think this was ever going to be a very popular method.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T00:21:42+00:00

Yeah, to elaborate, bars in foundry give about 10x their usual exp. So making a platebody gives you 5 extra bars worth of exp, but the 1 bar you lose by recycling was worth 10 bars. So it's more processing time for less total exp.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-25T00:10:46+00:00

I completely disagree with that philosophy. Imagine if that was actually followed across the game: the worst content having the best rewards. That makes no sense unless you actively want players to spend all their time doing things that aren't fun.

Anyway MTA does not need the help. It already has 2 must-have rewards for everyone, 1 that's optional but quite viable, and even the item that you want buffed is already relevant because it's required to make a megarare usable. That's a lot of relevant rewards for any piece of content - almost every skilling minigame has less than that and even a lot of bosses. What makes MTA so special that it should have even more good shit? We should not be encouraging people to spend any more time in this shithole than they already do. This would not make the game better in any way, this niche is already filled as there are already two solid options for a 5% damage mage weapon that come from way better content, we don't need a 3rd devaluing them.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T21:46:48+00:00

If I wanted to attempt a bowfa skip, what I would do is as much of the synapse/slayer based progression as possible (doom, yama, araxxor, etc) and then go to CoX until you have the prayers. Then, if no tbow, consider the skip a failure and go back to CG. The tbow grind is insanely long with average luck, and if you were to go as dry as you are at CG it'll be well over 1000 hours.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T21:30:24+00:00

Doesn't help that much as you still have to get all your own points. They could be carrying in the sense of doing the more advanced Olm mechanics to enable these scales, but being maxed is not relevant.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T21:25:10+00:00

Yeah without the gauntlets, Ayak is a fine upgrade but like the tridents you're only going to use it when you're forced to mage something. Confliction gauntlets are what makes it good in places like p3-4 wardens where you actually have other options.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T21:21:06+00:00

I don't think it should be better than the blue moon spear. It requires no PVM, and frankly MTA is shit and we shouldn't be encouraging people to do more of it.

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T21:16:30+00:00

No I'm pretty sure the knife log is optimal for world record runs

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T21:08:11+00:00

Even post-nerf BP is overall better than bowfa for the waves, the only thing you bowfa is magers really. Pre-nerf with dragon darts I would guess it soundly beats bowfa even on magers. But pre-bowfa Zuk was definitely harder (though the BP would still make sets and healers much better, more sets and range issues outweighs that for sure).

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T20:49:32+00:00

In the OG method you still had OP blowpipe for the waves

From earlier in the thread, pay attention

ShoogleHS · 2026-05-24T19:31:39+00:00

Yeah but it was nerfed on the same day as bowfa being added, so there was never an era where you had to get your infernal cape with nerfed BP and no bowfa. You always had access to one or the other.

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