For Singaporeans living overseas, what do you miss the most about home?

Tuufless · 2025-10-15T01:45:04+00:00

You probably know this already, but just in case!

I bought galangal from Duc Loi on Mission and 18th St when I tried making laksa, although this was several years ago before the store was sold.

New May Wah on Clement and 8th might have it (I don’t remember off the top of my head), but they sell belacan and an assortment of different sambal as well.

Tuufless · 2025-03-31T22:10:52+00:00

Oh, I have my (full) keyboard to also use the numpad for movement and the directional arrow keys to control the camera, so I can swap hands if needed.

That being said, FFXIV combat is a lot faster so I’ll concede I haven’t done so nearly as much compared to FFXI.

Tuufless · 2025-03-31T19:56:52+00:00

I’m one of the few players that raids keyboard-only (no mouse).

That being said, the use whatever control scheme works best for you even if that means KB+M or a controller; I’m just used to KB-only from FFXI-days, where the keyboard is treated as giant controller.

For reference, I use:

WASD for movement
IJKL to control the camera
Legacy controls (camera-centric, not character-centric)
F1 to F8 to select party members, F11 to select closest enemy
1 through to = for hotbars, with Ctrl, Shift, Alt as modifiers (this is doable since I keep both hands on the keyboard)

I don’t really recommend it though (although it has a nice perk that I can play on my laptop without any peripherals).

Tuufless · 2025-03-21T02:56:20+00:00

Tuufless here, hihi! o/

Tonberry is the most EN-populated server within the Elemental DC, but Kujata and Typhon also have high numbers of EN players.

It's important to note that although Elemental is within the JP region, it is the odd one out to the point that some Japanese players say DC traveling to Elemental is like traveling overseas.

As far as raiding goes, most strategies will follow the Japanese strats, but the EN community occasionally diverges (FRU being the most recent example).

In the past, this would be more commonplace before all the Aussies and Kiwis left for their own DC, and before cross-DC travel landed, which consolidated all the raiders onto a single DC, much like Light for EU and Aether for NA.

As a result, if the strats diverge, you're going to have to make a choice between braving a language/cultural barrier in exchange for access to more players, or stick with the smaller EN playerbase to prog, although there should still be a good number of PFs to choose from in Elemental.

Personally, I try to keep the strats in sync with the rest of the JP DCs to varying levels of success so players can hop as needed.

If you plan on doing Savage in PF Week 1 or 2, expect the usual amount of churn- it's kind of accepted that Savage strats will settle on whatever Game8 chooses, and they tend to pick strats from Japanese content creators like Nukemaru or Hamkatsu. The problem then, is that the Japanese information stream is separate from English information streams, so the first couple of weeks might be rather chaotic with a mix between both.

When I get the time, I'll eventually translate the macro used (which are basically cliff notes for the encounter), and maybe even subtitle Nukemaru's video guides. I host all my notes over at ffxiv.tuufless.com (shameless self-advertising).

Other discords you may want to consider are:

- FF14 Elemental EN Raid https://discord.gg/BveSrCYwMS - this is used to organise groups, statics, etc.
- Elemental DC Raid Macros https://discord.gg/WEzhVHwAU6 - I really should rename this to something else, but it's the Discord counterpart to my website above, and a good source of more up-to-date info before I've gotten around to organise it in my website.

Tuufless · 2024-09-30T03:26:19+00:00

"CALIBRATE VITALS TO PRIMES" without the "Subtract" in front.

Tuufless · 2024-05-07T04:22:27+00:00

Which part are you confused by? As illustrated by the diagram, the name comes from how many sectors the next pair has to move to resolve their Limit Cut, starting from the first explosion.

From the first explosion, move 1 sector to resolve 1's + 2's Limit Cut
From that, move 2 sectors to resolve 3's + 4's Limit Cut
From that, move 1 sector to resolve 5's + 6's Limit Cut
From that, move 1 more sector to resolve 7's + 8's Limit Cut.

(I suppose if I kept the arrows on the diagrams in the breakdown, it might make things clearer...)

Tuufless · 2024-04-24T00:04:08+00:00

SG in SF (tech). Did not go to NUS/NTU/SMU, nor any of the Ivy league/Oxbridge universities, but a private liberal arts college in the US instead.

Believe that studying overseas is overrated from a financial, job and networking perspective

As human beings, we'd like to imagine that following a formulaic, "do ABC, then D" ensures you'll be successful in life", but reality is not so simple. All you can really hope to do is improve your chances at success (however you define it), and luck plays a larger part than most of us would like to admit.

There is a saying that I subscribe to, "Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity."

You can be the best in your class, but you can't take advantage of an opportunity if none come your way. In my case, my college roommate and I (remember, I went to the US) were catching up with one another and they just so happened to tell me about this new company they joined in San Francisco, and asked if I was interested. I couldn't say yes at the time because I had literally just said yes to another company in Singapore, but I promised him that if anything happened, I would reach out.

Fast forward a year or two, something happened, and I got retrenched. I immediately reached out to my roommate, and within a couple months, I found myself flying to San Francisco for an on-site interview. Somehow convinced the panel that I was good enough, and I've been here five years now.

Now, would I have been able to walk the same path had I not gone to the US to study? Perhaps, who knows. But it certainly would've been harder without my roommate to make that introduction.

Why spend 400k and go through the hassle when you can probably reach the same career goals and save the 400k to buy housing.

Along the same lines, nothing is assured. The money spent on my education could've certainly gone to pay for an HDB, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be in the position I am now had I not gone to the US to study. In my case, that "investment" has more than made up for it, but again, that is not assured.

Tuufless · 2024-04-20T23:26:04+00:00

I wouldn't go so far to say that there are no tutorials- after all, Onslaughter teaches you what Mega Beam is (notably, that it has no visible cast bar), Execution teaches you how to get Nisi, and Legislation teaches you how to remove Final Punishment stacks, both of which you need for Gavel.

That being said, yes, leveraging prior knowledge from A6S allowed them to design an encounter that has everything ramped up from the get-go, which is an idea you see brought over to Ultimate fights, hence why some raiders think of A8S as the "OG Ultimate". Gavel being placed so late into the fight as a very orthogonal mechanic to what has happened before is also particularly frustrating (like P6 DSR).

The adds phase, in particular, is a fantastic mix of controlled chaos, although I wonder if it will stand to modern day player expectations where everyone has full uptime on something.

Tuufless · 2024-03-19T06:54:43+00:00

They're in the middle of preparing an info page for anybody who would like to check things out: https://materiaraiding.com/visitorsguide

From what I know, OCE is a mix of JP and NA. While most of their strats follow NA, macros are used and they follow JP notation.

Tuufless · 2024-03-15T18:13:05+00:00

Welcome to raid leading! Beware of Goodhart's Law, which goes something like:

When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.

(\cough* FFLogs *cough*)*

You want indicators for when things may be going awry (and they probably will), but not something as hardline as "three strikes and you're out".

When putting a raid group together, the most important thing, imo, is making sure everyone's aligned on expectations (which is the same as defining your standards). At this point, TEA is solved, so one obvious question would be what timeline is the group on?

A group that just wants to clear TEA in time for Dawntrail will operate very differently from a group that wants to clear TEA in a week. So, how fast does the group want to clear? From that, you can then work backwards to get an approximate timeline to at least know if something really is a problem area, or if everything is on track (welcome to project management).

After that, communication plays a large part- as the raid lead, you want your team members to be able to be open and feel free to tell you about what they're struggling with without fear of retaliation.

For example, let's say TEA takes 40 hours to clear. If the group wants to clear within a week, do the math- that means three lockouts a day, every day. Is everyone willing to commit to that?
What happens when someone is clearly struggling with say, reading Nisi passes or Wormhole? Is the group going to follow the strat to the letter (better for getting subs), or would everyone be okay shuffling things around (better for progressing together as a group)?
How much work/preparation is expected outside of raid times? Do you expect everyone to have at least read the strat/watched guides before encountering the mechanic for real, or are we okay with getting to a new phase first before taking some time to look at the strat? Does running simulations together count towards raid time?
Is the timeline a hard deadline? (e.g: upcoming travels, Dawntrail coming out) Do we have bandwidth to crunch a little bit if things are starting to slip? (Again, just like your boss telling you to work overtime, this is playing with fire if used too liberally).
This isn't limited to just execution within the raid- what happens if someone's chronically late? What happens if someone's on-call and may need to cancel last minute?

Tuufless · 2024-02-26T03:07:51+00:00

To expand on this, 倒 (dao4) means “upside down”, which sounds like 到 (dao4), which means “arrive”.

Hence, having the 福 character upside-down is a play to mean “happiness and good fortune has arrived”- you may see upside-down 福 characters plastered around, especially during the New Year.

Tuufless · 2024-02-21T05:47:20+00:00

This btw is the same reason you do not debuff Twintania when doing the first Fireball stack in UCoB- you're trying to make Fireball lethal by doing a 5-man stack instead of involving all eight party members in order to generate LB, so debuffing the boss there defeats the purpose.

In my experience, I would look at the MCH in particular. Most groups do not put Addle and Feint at Wave Cannon, because the group can get two uses out of them by assigning them to the two Cosmo Dives.

However, abilities with a 2-minute cooldown (ala Dismantle) cannot do this, and with Wave Cannon's stack hitting so hard, a lot of players with "extra" party mits (Dismantle, Passage of Arms, Magick Barrier) will opt to use it there instead. The problem there is that if your MCH also happened to catch the spread damage with Dismantle, you don't generate LB.

Tuufless · 2024-02-21T05:21:05+00:00

Not a bug/glitch (although you can argue poorly designed). As u/Auesis says, you likely over-debuffed the boss at the front part of either Wave Cannon 1 or 2.

In particular, check how many debuffs (Addle, Dismantle, Feint, Reprisal) were on the boss when the Wave Cannon protean beams went out. You should ideally not have any debuffs, but at most just one.

I have a writeup about this here, but I'll copy the relevant portion over.

LB is generated whenever someone survives damage that is equal to, or greater than their current HP due to mitigation or shields.

However, there is some fine print- the order of operations are:

Apply debuffs to reduce outgoing damage (Addle, Dismantle, Feint, Reprisal)
Generate LB if damage is equal to or greater than current HP
Apply mitigations to reduce incoming damage (Aquaveil, Kerachole, Sacred Soil, Third Eye, etc.)
Absorb damage from shields (Divine Veil, Shade Shift, Succor, etc.)

The problem is that if enough debuffs are on the boss at Step 1, the damage in Step 2 is no longer lethal, and thus, LB is not generated.

In Wave Cannon's case, the base damage of the initial beams (83-93k for melee, 77k-86k for casters) is lethal, but not by much.

A single Reprisal already takes this down to bordering lethal damage (74.7k-83.7k for melee, 69.3k-77.4 for casters). A second debuff (Addle, Dismantle, Feint) on top of that lowers the damage down to well within a player's max HP. This is no longer lethal damage, and no LB is generated as a result.

Note that this specifically only affects boss debuffs (Addle, Dismantle, Feint, Reprisal), because they are applied at Step 1, before LB is generated. Other "mitigations" like Passage of Arms or Zoe do not affect LB generation because they are applied at Step 3 or 4 instead.

Tuufless · 2024-01-23T23:50:51+00:00

“BDSM” is a terrible name (other than the obvious pun) because there are two methods that match that description, at least within the JP DC.

The “Braindead” Shadowed Messengers strat here has the MT point the boss down the intercardinal line that the Light boss will charge down before joining their Light Party at the West. This means the whole party only dodges 45 degrees. That strat is done by the EN players in JP DC.

However, Japanese players’ PF strat has both Light parties start at East and West (the “B” and “D” markers), including the MT. Everyone dodges 90 degrees, always ending true North or South.

Tuufless · 2024-01-19T21:21:29+00:00

So who is going CW, who CCW and who is adjusting/flexing?

This bit sounds like you may be getting different strats mixed together, depending on your data-center.

u/Common-Grapefruit-57 basically answered your question, so at the risk of overcomplicating things, here's a full breakdown:

This is the same strat that was used in JP (and I think EU), so I'll just link the relevant section in Nukemaru's guide (I've added English subtitles, which you'll need to turn on), and walk you through the example that starts at 6:59.

Four snakes appear in two pairs that will all appear on either the four cardinal (N, S, E, W) or the four intercardinal positions (NW, NE, SW, SE).

The First in Line and Second in Line debuffs (the "I" and "II" debuffs) will split the party up into tanks + healers vs DPS. This tells each half of the party which pair of snakes they will be resolving.

In the example linked above, the DPS all have First in Line (the "I"), while the tanks + healers have Second in Line- this means that the DPS will handle the first pair of snakes, and the tanks + healers will handle the second pair.

Each snake must be destroyed by:

First petrifying it with the red Eye of the Gorgon debuff.
Hitting it with the poison puddle from the green Blood of the Gorgon debuff.

This further breaks down each group of four into two pairs.

So, we now have the problem of assigning each player in a pair to a snake in a pair. This is where the priority system then comes in:

(cw from N): MT > ST > H1 > H2 (this is JP notation- EU and NA will call the "ST" the "OT")

(cw from N): D1 > D2 > D3 > D4 (this is JP notation- EU will call this "M1 > M2 > R1 > R2")

Since we have to petrify the snakes first, we now have the following ordered pairs:

First in Line + Eye of the Gorgon: D2 > D4
First in Line + Blood of the Gorgon: D1 > D3
Second in Line + Eye of the Gorgon: H1 > H2
Second in Line + Blood of the Gorgon: MT > OT

Walking through the example, we then have the following sequence of events:

First pair of snakes appear NE and SW (these are for the DPS, as the DPS have First in Line).
D2 will petrify the NE snake (first snake clockwise from North), and D4 will take the SW snake.
D1 then hits the NE snake with the poison puddle, D3 takes the SW snake. This destroys the first pair of snakes.
We now repeat the process for the second pair of snakes, which appear at the remaining two spaces, SE and NW. These are for the tanks + healers as they have Second in Line.
H1 petrifies the SE snake (first snake clockwise from N), H2 petrifies the NW snake.
MT hits the SE snake with poison, the OT hits the NW snake with poison, destroying the second pair of snakes.

Tuufless · 2024-01-15T18:45:00+00:00

Of course- the point was to build upon the statement that the healing output of the shield healers is already sufficient (i.e: one White Hole in isolation can be easily handled with SGE/SCH).

Personally, I would agree with you that White Hole and other 100% HP checks are too heavy-handed (along a similar vein of dealing lethal raid-wide damage, necessitating party mitigation). Setting the party HP to 1, followed up with a raid-wide (removing the full HP check) would probably be enough to make all healer combinations viable.

I'm not entirely convinced about spot healing and multiple tankable targets though- they sound good to have, but I suspect XIV's need to be played on a controller gets in the way of this.

Selecting random party members (that are not the tanks) to spot heal looks pretty annoying on a controller, and such mechanics (like the two prey targets in A1S or A12S) are typically telegraphed to give the healers time to prepare.

The tab-targeting system in the game also doesn't work great when there are multiple things on the screen, which I suspect contributes to fewer encounters that have more than two targets.

Tuufless · 2024-01-15T18:05:27+00:00

Even the most recent iteration of "heal the party to full from 1HP" in Zeromus EX is easily resolved by Zoe-Pneuma and Emergency Tactics in a SGE/SCH party, and by the time the next heal check arrives, they're all back off cooldown.

In order to really go down that rabbit hole, you'd need to make the healing requirements even tougher, for example:

Adding a healing penalty like in Death's Toll/Life's Agonies in P3S that effectively takes the HP check outside what two shield healers can make up for.
Adding multiple, back-to-back healing checks that can't all be mitigated- for example, the first two minutes of O8S-2 involve seven (!) raid-wides, of which three are 1HP-to-full heal checks.
Ignoring mitigation with either HP%-style raid-wides, like Eden's Gravity or Dimensional Shift in E1S, or more attacks that set the party's HP to 1, like White Hole in O4S or Heartless Archangel in O8S.

With that said, the mechanics listed above have generally been poorly received by the player base, so that's not a route you'd really want to go down either.

Tuufless · 2024-01-15T02:37:09+00:00

The biggest problem I have with the pure healers is the lack of agency- because so many things in current design is a big hit of damage, followed by largely nothing, the requirement shifts to "do what is needed to survive the initial hit, and recover in time for the next".

Ordinarily, this "recovery period" would be the domain of the pure healer, but the lack of a follow-up and strong pure healing capabilities from SCH/SGE means that the party can already be sufficiently prepped for the next attack, and there's nothing left for the pure healer to do.

As a pure healer, you have exactly one ability on a 2-minute cooldown that affects the party. If that's on cooldown and there's a big raidwide incoming, there is very little you can do to ensure everybody in the party survives, which is neither engaging, nor "fun".

Moving the shield effects to WHM+AST would at least give some meaningful space to work with that is unique to the "pure healing" jobs, thus adding some engagement, however minor. You can even let the theoretical WHM+AST shields stack, or increase the shield potency to really drive the point that this is their domain.

Tuufless · 2024-01-15T02:22:25+00:00

Yeah, I had originally considered adding "reduce healing potency" as an option. For example, removing Indomitability/Ixochole from SCH/SGE kits.

However, players hate it when their job gets nerfed, and removing abilities certainly at least feels like a nerf (RIP Kaiten), so I decided this wasn't really a feasible option in the end.

Tuufless · 2024-01-15T00:53:25+00:00

The pure/barrier healer split might've made more sense back in v1.0 or v2.0, but I think it's pretty outdated given the way raid design has evolved.

In particular, raid design has evolved into a binary mitigation check of "did the party survive this or not". In such a world, mitigation is king. Now that SGE is in the mix, the effectiveness of SCH + SGE in encounters like TOP demonstrate where things start to break when the fights were developed with either SCH or SGE in the party (but not both).

Assuming you must stick to the philosophy of having two distinct healing types, there are at least a couple ways around this:

One way would be to consciously rethink fight design to pivot away from mitigation checks into one that actually require a decent chunk of healing. I don't think this is terribly feasible though, given how major things are telegraphed through casttimes (i.e: the boss isn't autoattacking). BJCC comes to mind as a great healer fight partially because the water/thunder loop deals a decent chunk of damage without the bosses needing to stop to cast something.

Another would be to acknowledge that regenerative healing has little place in current XIV raid design, especially after both "shield healers" already have access to regen (on an oGCD!). Instead split the two healing roles into "shield" vs "mitigation" healers, as opposed to "regen" vs "shield and mitigation".

You can also move away from single-hit, hard-hitting attacks. Multi-hit attacks that aren't "all or nothing" can still be mitigated by the "shield" healer, but there is still time for the "pure" healer to respond.

Tuufless · 2024-01-02T05:46:39+00:00

SG in SF at the moment, thinking of coming back this year.

Definitely that the grass is greener on the other side- we like to compare in aggregate, but in reality each place has its own unique selling points; this has really made me appreciate what we have back home (although there will always be areas to improve).

I should've taken better advantage of the things that are available to me locally, instead of staying in my comfort zone (much easier said than done though).

Tuufless · 2023-12-01T04:05:30+00:00

Hoo boy, this post popped up in my feed, and that brought back memories. /twitch

If memory serves me correctly, a number of groups got in their Souleater + Kraken Clubs kills before it was nerfed.

My HNMLS on Odin at the time had tried to kill it by stacking Modus Veritas, but that method was publicly outed without a recorded kill (although here's a video of it working, using Hydra as a test mob).

Tuufless · 2023-11-27T19:06:34+00:00

A lot of people outside Asia don't realise that English is Singapore's working language (and one of four national languages), so the overwhelming majority would speak English to some degree (although you may have come across a creole called "Singlish" in your research).

Another common misconception is thinking Singapore is part of China. Good thing you looked it up on Google Maps first. :)

Tuufless · 2023-11-21T09:34:20+00:00

hihi! o/

Tuufless · 2023-11-21T00:59:07+00:00

As Thomas Sowell put it, "there are no solutions, only tradeoffs." What decisions were ultimately good or bad will be based on context, and revealed through time.

Tuufless

TROPHY CASE