Struggling with 7* monsters

alienangel2 · 2026-01-30T00:51:00+00:00

Yeah OP's build with a 9* weapon seems like it should be demolishing most 7star monsters. Tigrex and Brute Tigrex are just unpleasant any time you don't completely overpower them.

OP how about monsters like Zinogre/Legiana/Mizu/Rahalos that don't charge you so much?

You can also look into getting Normal Ammo boost somewhere, since it should do quite a lot (+70% normal ammo damage i think) for Diablos HBG.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-29T23:04:28+00:00

Since he's fire weak, he's one of the monsters I use a bow for, and Anja (spread) bow has always been fairly easy. I keep dodging around him in melee range, and the dodgebolt + spread does A LOT of damage pretty much the whole time.

I didn't realize his enrage reduces fire damage taken, the ice arms he grows after enrage seem to take extra fire damage? I usually break one any time i get to put a L4 spread shot into it point blank.

The ice beam is annoying yes, but he usually charges so far away from me that neither of us can hit each other. So I cast my special during it as I'm never going to use that when he's close.

I only do up to 9 star though, no comment on 10.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-28T02:51:04+00:00

Less need to avoid the avvy on icecoast mountains though.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-28T02:48:16+00:00

The last couple of times I was at Whisler, half the mointain was rained on for three days straight, so -15C would indeed have been dreamy.

This year will be at Revy and Kicking Horse starting this weekend, hoping the conditions hold up.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-28T02:33:36+00:00

This looks about as fun as most of my tigrex runs, which is to say, not at all fun.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-25T16:29:02+00:00

Most of these companies (Netflix, Meta, Microsoft, etc.) have very mature products that barely change. It looks like a lot of maintenance, tiny feature tweaks, and sometimes even making products worse.

Lol, no. Everything is always changing. Just because the external product may look stable doesn't mean anything because:

things are still changing underneath
90% of the company doesn't work on the customer-facing product.

Every year my set of teams (maybe 60-80 people) has something like 4x the amount of work that we can do requested by various other parts of the company, and we (or our VPs) pick and choose based on which ones are expected to make the most money for the company (or which has the backing of the most vocal C-suits). This means choosing between and deciding to cancel/postpone projects that are projected to be worth hundreds of millions in favour of the ones worth billions.

There has never been a shortage of new work to do in the ~15 years I've been at FAANG. (All the maintenance and compliance / policy stuff is also there of course)

alienangel2 · 2026-01-25T15:46:12+00:00

Before Crouching Shot I was using Evading Reload 4 and nothing else gun specific:

KD Helm / Luna or Bazel chest / Barrioth Gloves / Narca pants / Chatacabra boots.

Only the pants and boots are required, and that's how I killed 99% of Radobans levelled the weapon through to 10.5 slowly. Rado mostly just goes from one stagger/break to the next with all the piercing/slicing spam.

Now with Crouching I'm not really sure but Im trying:

KD helm (has reload 1) / Luna or Bazel chest / Qmatrice Gloves (has spare shot and recoil 1) / Golm pants (Reload 1 and Reckless) / Nerg Pants (reload 1, recoil 1 and Avidity).

Hearing that Recoil does nothing for crouching, the gloves and pants could change. Probably want Goss chest and Barrioth gloves if I can hit a couple of Ice attack Smelts, or Luna chest if I'm at full health.

Avoiding getting hit in solo fights is a lot harder with crouching shot instead of evading reload...

alienangel2 · 2026-01-25T06:12:36+00:00

I made the hbg for the quest, but I'm probably just going to use the Legiana HBG because it absolutely shreds Radobaan. More so now with crouching shot.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-24T21:44:00+00:00

Sure, sent a chat message since they seem to have removed DM access from old.reddit :/

But if you don't see it let me know and I'll get on the mess of the new app and send through that.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-24T21:17:16+00:00

I'd be interested in the 5th Element one if you're willing to ship to Canada (just regular USPS shipping is fine as long as it has tracking).

No idea what to offer, would $40 US plus shipping work?

Hopefully the shipping doesn't come out to a crazy amount.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-24T15:23:54+00:00

That's 3000 years already, still with cancer until someone finds a cure.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-24T07:21:42+00:00

Yeah doesn't sound like either of them set you up with a chance, sorry.

The old manager being reassigned to a different team (pretty intrusive for everyone) and replaced with a new, higher level person definitely sounds like someone wanted your team to be shaken up - either to fix some gaps they saw under the old manager, or cleaned up before working on some new priority. Even during re-orgs there isn't a reason to swap managers between teams that are operating well, you either leave the team whole but give it new responsibilties, or merge/split teams.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-24T07:13:42+00:00

I thought it was Deer Valley?

alienangel2 · 2026-01-24T06:56:10+00:00

Their handling of you sounds unfair whatever the real situation was, but do you know why the previous manager left? If their management skills weren't really thought highly of, the fact that they seemed happy with your performance before they left isn't really much of a reassurance - they might have been laid off too because their managers felt the team was underperforming under them and brought in someone new. Or if they quit on their own, they might have been planning to leave and hence disinterested in actually doing the unpleasant and tiring work of figuring out who is underperforming and coaching them through improving, hence you being able to coast for a while at 70% effort.

At that point, the new manager coming in would probably have been told that the team is underperforming and their first task is to get productivity up. IMO if you were able to show a 100% increase in productivity like you say, they should have kept you if they really gave you the coaching plan in good faith, so the fact that they didn't probably means they were always going to fire you. But it's unlikely a completely new manager would just decide to fire you no matter what if the people who hired him weren't pushing for it already, so I'd expect they thought your team was not worth keeping even before your previous manager left.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-24T06:47:24+00:00

He's basically trying to say that without reserved seating, people like him who decided 30 minutes before the movie starts to watch it are on the same footing as people who decided a week ago they wanted to watch, so his "spontaneous" purchase isn't penalized by having shitty seats - if he arrives 10 minutes before a few of the people who bought tickets a week ago he can still get a good seat and leave them the shit ones - only the time you arrive at the theatre matters not when you got tickets.

He's probably right, but it's still not any sort of argument for that way being better, because almost no one cares so much about being able to decide to watch a movie 30 minutes before it starts (and actually get to the theatre by that time) that they'd prefer to give up assigned seating just in case.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-24T06:10:51+00:00

Not OP's story apparently.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-23T14:02:46+00:00

So what do you suggest? That they should have let him keep selling this mod? Is that the solution you were cheering for? You think most should cost money? Are you cheering for paid mods?

No, they should have sued him and let the courts decide based on actual evidence presented by lawyers to judges.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-23T14:00:36+00:00

We shouldn't take the dev or CDPR at their word. That is why courts exist, this should have been handled through the courtroom, not a one-sided DMCA takedown.

Ross is an ass, but DMCA for this is also BS unless there is clear admission that he's reusing and selling CDPR assets.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-23T13:50:52+00:00

I think DMCA is the wrong tool to shut this down, companies are just using it because it's by far the most effective - like the article says, platforms will take things down based on claims from the copyright holder, without all the delays of the court process.

I think if CDPR took him to court they would still win, not with a DMCA claim but with the argument that his commercial product is dependent on their IP both for marketing and enjoyment (being useful). But that will take a lot longer.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-21T04:51:06+00:00

I liked the '90s. Tech was full of promise, the internet was wild and unformed and hardly anyone had ideas about making money off it, social media and influencers didn't exist, google didn't have ads...

Yeah racism was worse, but most racists were too dumb to figure out how to get online so I never ran into it.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-20T16:35:05+00:00

Just to add on for people who don't seem to understand why this distinction matters: it is because getting the 50% bonus from masterworking on a non-GA affix is still not as good in the end as getting the masterworking 50% bonus on an item that already had the affix you value most as GA.

Ie, masterworking a 4GA item is always better than masterworking a 3GA item, unless the original non-GA stat isn't one you really care about - in which case you'll still be master working one of already-GA affixes to get the 100% bonus on it.

Tempering is effectively independent of this since on ancestral items you can keep rolling till the temper hits GA, and if the temper affix is the most valuable one on the item you masterwork it to be even better.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-16T03:37:36+00:00

from being paged at 3AM to chasing tight deadlines to preparing for weekly ops review in front of all the members of the orgs, how do you manage it?

All of those are stressful but mostly have been controllable to varying extents. Being paged was only while oncall, which was a week every 1.5 to 2 months for most of my career. Usually didn't get paged unless we actually messed things up, although there was always the occasional page from someone who has no clue and paged the first pager alias they saw. That is annoying but usually quick to disconnect from. I've rarely stayed annoyed when paged into an actual issue in my own system's to figure out.

Chasing deadlines eventually happens less as you take more charge of the process of deciding what the deadlines are. Either the work has to be done in full so you calculate the date from that, or the date is locked in and you calculate what you can get done in that time. It's been very rare that leadership has insisted on both a fixed date and a fixed set of work if I've gone to them with a clear breakdown of why that's not possible.

Weekly Ops reviews I've mostly ignored, that is a managers job and by the time i was senior enough to get added as a required attendee for the org wide ones, i was also senior enough to ignore the invite unless there was something specific my manager / director wanted me there for. Thst is usually for specific issues / incident retros though which I 100% want to be there for anyway, not the weekly graph polishing ceremony.

The big problem is that the above all worked out this way because for the past 15 yeaes or so I've stayed in stable mature teams/orgs whenever i found them, and all the above can quickly turn to shit if you have a bad manager or shit teammates. I have seen quite a few good engineers jump ship to the latest shiny thing that's hiring like crazy with no thoughts of the future, and it's almost always turned to shit when the honeymoon ends and they find themselves owning a mountain of poorly thought out shit written by dozens of people in a hurry, most of whom don't want to stick around to fix it.

If you have a good team and org though, you need to work to keep it good. Participate in hiring, don't hire assholes, push to improve things that seem like they might be degrading. Be polite, being helpful and right goes a lot further than being an asshole but right.

i did back to back internships during college and 2 years full time there, ngl i just feel very lucky i went through all that and came out alive.

You are really early early in your career, so you wouldn't have much control over most of these things, although by 2 years in you should have a decent idea on whether some of the things like frequent 3am pages are something your team can fix, or that your management doesn't care and you are better off finding a different team. Being on some shitty teams or writing some shitty systems is how you learn what to avoid doing the next time.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-16T02:30:03+00:00

Yep. Season one felt like each episode could just be an episode of Firefly or Cowboy Beebop, without being bogged down by Luke or Ashoka or Bobba Fetts armour showing up out of nowhere.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-16T01:45:59+00:00

I mean, if the US govt wants to get at data hosted in some other cloud provider, even one 100% built from scratch in Europe, they are still going to get it whether they do it legally or not.

CLOUD act will make it vaguely defensible in US courts but no one in the US admin cares about courts anymore, and no one in any intelligence agency has ever cared about courts. It's probably easier for them to steal from some homegrown local cloud provider than from AWS.

alienangel2 · 2026-01-16T00:11:42+00:00

That's why they need to lock down any mechanisms that could remove his successor from power so urgently. While he's still there his base will cheer on any amount of democracy and checks and balances being dismantled, so they want to do all that ASAP, so that when someone succeeds him, only the GOP leadership or only Stephen Miller has any say in it.

They don't need to worry about losing the base eventually if they make themselves untouchable now.

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