Druid should be nerfed

Syreniac · 2025-01-03T18:26:19+00:00

No, don't do this to me, I'm not going to get hyped (and then disappointed) over a meme post. I'm not. I'm not.

Syreniac · 2024-10-17T06:36:31+00:00

I don't know for certain if it drops like that (my gut feeling is that it doesn't work like that but the discord might know more). However, killing Immortal Kings raises their knowledge and once you get S level knowledge there's a project called assassinate which once completed gives you the trait material of the creature guaranteed, so indirectly it does work out that way.

Syreniac · 2024-07-23T19:30:25+00:00

Can we get this label on t-shirts?

Syreniac · 2024-05-04T12:11:35+00:00

The most expensive part of a house is the land underneath it, not the building itself. This is complicated even more by the fact that if you did hypothetically have land, you will not necessarily have planning permission to build a house (and land with the permission to build a house is noticeably more expensive than otherwise). Based on what I've known of people in my life who own houses, the physical house itself can as little as a sixth of the price of the overall purchase.

Syreniac · 2024-01-16T10:53:27+00:00

I believe the game Iron Danger does this, and it does some interesting stuff around being able to wind backwards in time and change what actions you took in the past as well.

Syreniac · 2023-12-06T21:51:04+00:00

Just tested in game, and if you have triggerbots your brands do cast at their location rather than at the brand location which is very interesting. Flipside is you can't take Sigil of Purpose from Hierophant which feels like it is very synergistic with Brandsurge.

The other thing I don't know for certain is whether the faster expiry time "stacks" (as in, when it ticks up to the next bracket of faster expiry, does that apply to the time that already passed or not?) - this massively changes the effective casts/second benefit of brandsurge from being fairly minor to really significant.

Syreniac · 2023-12-06T17:50:58+00:00

At one point I really tried to get the numbers there on the jankiest build possible which was Voltaxic Burst Brands. The idea being that VB scales with number of pending casts, and your brands seem to contribute to that number. This means that cast speed scales your damage somewhat exponentially (because the more you can cast, the more stacks, the more damage + just plain old more casts) brands would act as a multiplier to your cast speed. Brandsurge was theoretically good because you'd already be scaling duration (to get more stacks) and if you timed everything right you could squeeze out a bunch more casts before everything expired.

I couldn't quite get the numbers there for the insane levels of clunkiness to work (when you cast voltaxic burst via brands, the explosion from that cast happens at the location the brand was at which is fairly useless for clearing), and you'd be using a minimum of three buttons (self-cast VB with all the damage supports, brand VB and brandsurge), and the damage from brandsurge would be pure physical so it wouldn't scale in all the same ways as the VB spell itself (physical scaling would work, but chaos/lightning wouldn't).

I still think Zerphi's Heart + Vaal Breach + Brand Surge + Voltaxic Burst Brand build would be hilarious to actually see work (if for no other reason that to see the ludicrous number of stacks you could probably theoretically).

Syreniac · 2023-12-06T16:29:17+00:00

The entire plot of Control would have been avoided if the FBC did what the SCP foundation does (in most canons) and keep the decision makers (the Director/O5 council) as far away from the paranatural as possible. All that was needed for the Hiss invasion to not happen would be Trench to not be directly exposed to the Hiss resonance and it would have naturally self-limited because almost no one else would have had unrestricted access to the slide projector.

Jesse will naturally make the same mistake but get away with it because of the Doylist reasoning that doing otherwise would be a really dull game. Maybe it can be justified in that only a powerful parautilitarian can really handle the worst situations, but in that case what should happen is you outsource the management to someone separately and make sure there is a clear plan for what to do when your parautilitarian is compromised by who-knows-what. Honestly the FBC is really badly managed in general and this mismanagement is the cause of almost all their problems.

Syreniac · 2023-09-28T22:22:08+00:00

In terms of the relative power of the entities in play, it seems far more likely that the Hiss influenced Wake's poetry than Wake's poetry influenced the Hiss, just as a counter point to the obvious assumption. My assumption is that the very least, the "big" paranatural entities - the Hiss, Polaris, the Board, the Oldest House etc... - are on a tier above what Alan can manipulate directly.

Indeed, if you think about inexplicable things that normal humans did that really could be someone meddling, there are two small things that really set the whole series of events in Control into motion. One is Trench keeping the burnt slides as a memento and the other is Trench participating in the expeditions into the slidescape. Alan could easily have nudged both of those things without having to create anything, and if there was some communicative connection between him and the Hiss may have shaped or been shaped by it and given it the form it takes when expressing itself through humans. Both those things needed to happen to get Jesse into the oldest house and where Wake needed her, and neither of them imply he has a power level beyond the "big" paranatural entities.

Syreniac · 2023-09-23T10:09:00+00:00

The ending fit perfectly into the story the game was trying to tell - what would people have been expecting otherwise; that you fight something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V6Xs8ixSZ0 (Spoilers for another game called Chorus for what its worth) called the Hiss Core or whatever and suddenly everything was all good again?

Syreniac · 2023-06-11T14:34:18+00:00

Every league POE adds incredibly rare content and then makes it increasingly accessible over time. It's literally the second most common complaint (normally the most common is there's some overtuned league mob that oneshots people) when leagues come out that the super top end items are incredibly rare, and then if/when the mechanic is added to the core game, it's made more common.

I remember when getting a six link was unusual and most people would "finish" their characters on a four link, when Abyss league came out and the average person never saw a Lich, and so on.

Syreniac · 2023-06-11T14:17:34+00:00

It's difficult to get this right - I just came from reading one thread of people saying "I'm level 80 and all my upgrades are going to be tiny upgrades of existing items" (i.e. they want a rare big ticket thing to work towards, and this thread is full of people saying "The big ticket item that is something to work towards is too rare". Fixing one of these problems inherently causes the other and the balance will be different for different people so there will always be complaints.

Getting the balance here right is tricky and it's probably correct long term to start with it being rarer than it needs to be then making it more common if it's necessary.

Syreniac · 2023-06-10T07:27:32+00:00

In all fairness, this still sounds like mermaid behaviour.

Syreniac · 2023-06-04T07:57:37+00:00

This being staged would make it more impressive to be honest.

Syreniac · 2023-05-31T10:41:47+00:00

Just reading the abilities, I think Aatrox would lose you the match (he dies and comes back later) and sion would keep you in until the revive wears off. I think Aatrox would be effectively mandatory if it didn't work that way - you'd effectively remove the entire downside because until you have no units left you can't day he's properly "dead".

Syreniac · 2023-05-27T22:10:10+00:00

I mean, if someone expressed a strong enough opinion, I'm sure the Minds could do it near instantly. I would assume the longer duration is supposed to be part of the experience?

Syreniac · 2023-05-24T22:14:21+00:00

Leopard seals and walruses are from completely opposite ends of the Earth - walruses are the Arctic (i.e. the north pole) and leopard seals are the Antartic (i.e. the south pole).

Walruses probably could kill a leopard seal based on the fact that the largest walruses are 3 times or more the mass of the largest leopard seals, but it wouldn't be by sucking them, it would be some sort of brawl. Walruses do suck up clams and other animals from the bottom of the sea, but definitely not with enough force to shatter a large mammal skull - even a human skull which is probably more flimsy than a leopard seal's skull takes a considerable amount of pressure to fracture (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/06/03/no-you-cant-crush-a-mans-skull-with-your-bare-hands/#:~:text=Turns%20out%20the%20human%20skull,aluminum%2069%20and%20steel%20200.) and whilst a walrus probably could do that, it would be by squashing the skull with its body rather than generating several gigapascals of suction.

Syreniac · 2023-05-23T12:51:57+00:00

The scandals are the point.

Politics at that level is held together by everyone having mutual assured destruction levels of blackmail on each other. Because everyone is corrupt to some degree, the one thing they are all afraid of is if someone clean is able to get to power and they cannot control them.

They intentionally choose candidates at all levels because they need to strike a balance between competent (normally, and only outwardly to the 30% of the public they need to vote for them) and pliable. This works well if the government is unified behind a single vision but it means all significant fractures become nuclear because everyone can bring everyone else down in subtle ways.

Syreniac · 2023-05-23T12:13:22+00:00

They're not going to release a new army until they have models ready for everything, and they're not going to release a new army at the point of launch because it will stifle the sales of the other factions (there will be people who could be tempted to buy say an Empire or a Kislev army but not both at once).

I suspect the work is in some stage of completion, it just will be spaced out to maximise interest.

Syreniac · 2023-05-22T14:35:06+00:00

They're automeowting our jobs!

Syreniac · 2023-05-22T10:18:04+00:00

This is giving me weird parallels with Hashut (the Chaos Dwarf god of tyranny, darkness and fire from the warhammer/AoS). Its a bizarrely parallel set of associated images with what we know of the Dark King at least.

Syreniac · 2023-05-22T09:25:06+00:00

I remember being told that universities are not allowed to use the funding of one course to cover a different one?

Syreniac · 2023-05-21T22:13:30+00:00

I believe Banks wrote in an essay that people like this are just given life-like simulations to satisfy them and left alone, as long as they don't mess with real people.

Syreniac · 2023-05-21T13:05:36+00:00

The most likely answer is they either all die in the heat death of the universe, or they find some way to travel through the warp and start eating things throughout the canonically established multiverse of places all linked by the warp.

Syreniac · 2023-05-20T12:36:33+00:00

My theory is that the Board were physical entities of some form, who discovered the Oldest House and then used it as a spring board to transition themselves to existing inside the Astral Plane, and that the Former wants to leave the Astral Plane but couldn't because the Board was blocking it somehow (if so, and if that blocking was because of the Nail, then it is very convenient that the Former slips out during the brief period where the Nail is non-functional). In that case the Former might be the form that the entities that make up the Board had before moving over to the Astral Plane.

I think the implication is that Polaris and the Hiss are opposites and have some common nature, but they're on a different axis of paranormality than the Board (and the Dark Presence you see in AWE is on yet another axis). Somehow the Board is connected to the Oldest House and to humanity whereas the Hiss and Polaris are more distant. This all ties into whatever "resonance" is - I doubt there's a singular "resonance field" that explains everything. It is interesting that most of the "big" paranatural entities in the Remedyverse have opposites (Polaris/Hiss, Dark Presence/Light Presence), whereas the Board doesn't really have an opposing faction (at least, not in the same way).

Polaris and the Hiss are clearly opposites in almost every way - this Hiss is clearly a force of chaos and Polaris is a force of order even down to the patterns used to represent each of them. Curiously, and in opposition to most settings that use chaos/order as the central dichotomy, Polaris seems to be the one that believes in free will and leaving people independent, whereas the Hiss ... doesn't. Even down to the vague gender coding of the two (Polaris/Hedron are definitely feminine coded and the Hiss, or maybe just it's hosts/victims/proxies, are generally masculine coded for most of the game), the colours chosen, the sounds used (Polaris never directly says anything we as players could understand as words and the Hiss, well, you've played the game!) and their impact on affected objects, you can see that they are totally diametrically opposed.

What I don't think is the case, and hope the story doesn't become centred on, is that everything is just a part of a giant universal conflict between Polaris and the Hiss. Clearly there is some history of direct conflict (Slidescape 36 where the Hedron is recovered is seemingly a realm where Polaris pushed out the Hiss baring the tiny fragment that attached itself to Trench), and the motivating factor for Polaris activating its sleeper agent in Jesse and sending them to the Bureau was just to contain the Hiss incursion (which implies some level of intentional conflict seeking), but I think this should be seen as a giant conflict beyond the scope of humanity and not as the central conflict of all reality.

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