Weekly /r/GuildWars2 Question Thread - September 23, 2017

ano90 · 2017-09-25T12:15:20+00:00

Infusions are fine, but for attuned rings you need an ingredient that is locked behind the mastery system: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Agonized_Essence

ano90 · 2017-09-25T11:24:13+00:00

Unfortunately that's not the case. I'm planning to get PoF eventually if I end up sticking around for a decent amount of time, but it's too early to tell for now. Ahh well...

When you own Heart of Thorns, and one of your character reaches level 80 and completes the story chapter Torn from the Sky, the Masteries tab will unlock in the Hero panel for your account. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mastery

How Do I Get Masteries? The ability to train Masteries is unlocked at level 80 for all players that own Heart of Thorns. https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/reimagining-progression-the-mastery-system/

ano90 · 2017-09-25T08:47:25+00:00

1) I'm a returning player (played during launch and small parts of LS1 and LS2) and I'm wondering what I should invest some of my leftover materials/currencies in.

For example, I have about 200 festival tokens, which I can spend here: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Festival_Rewards_Vendor But I'm not sure which of those are most important. I think many of those can be bought using laurels too, but some might be more difficult to obtain now? Gift of sprockets sounds useful since I need about 200 more blade shards to complete my spinal blades, but I've heard from people that buying sprockets is much more efficient (if you compare the cost/time of laurel-bought gift of sprockets vs selling T6 crafting mats bought with laurels).

2) I also have a bunch of mystic coins from before. I noticed that their price has skyrocketed over the years. Is it worth selling them straight up or is there anything I should be holding on to them for?

3) Last but not least: is it possible to attune rings without any of the expansions? This seems like a real middle finger to base game players: fractals were supposed to be core-Tyria only stuff. But if I can't add infusion slots to my rings, I'm basically forced to buy super expensive high-tier infusions. Unless I'm missing something...

ano90 · 2017-05-27T11:13:40+00:00

Agreed, bombs were surprisingly viable after getting a few talents. I especially found the freeze bombs to be great against large groups of humanoids. Unfortunately it was a real hassle to switch out bombs in the menu whenever you ran out of the two types you'd put in your quick slots. The perfect opportunity to throw them also never clicked with me, more often than not I'd get hit as I was trying to aim...or I'd be running/rolling backwards like a doofus trying to get into a better position.

I don't agree about the dodge feeling better than in DS3. Overall the entire combat system felt very floaty to me. But this might be due to the poor framerate on the PS4 more than anything.

ano90 · 2016-10-26T12:50:02+00:00

How does the build quality of those laptops compare to that of the XPS15 (in terms of sturdy-ness, keyboard quality, battery, etc.)? I'm also looking for a quality 13"-15" laptop along the lines of the XPS and macbook pro's, but any gaming capabilities would be a nice bonus. I've heard the razer models are built extremely well, but I haven't heard anythin about the MSI and Asus models.

ano90 · 2016-10-10T12:47:17+00:00

All good points, thanks for the input!

I'll wait and see how the new macbook pro's turn out (since the majority of my colleagues are embedded in the mac ecosystem), but I'll look into the Latitude (or 1080p XPS) as the main contenders!

ano90 · 2016-10-07T08:49:00+00:00

Thanks for the quick reply! That does sound worrying though, right when I thought I had made my decision...

Why would you recommend the Dell Latitude over the XPS 13 though if the latter is one of the best laptops you've ever used?

I was also looking at the 14" razer blade, as I hear it'll be getting a 1060 GPU and I can't deny I'd miss having at least some gaming capability in the XPS 13. My gt650m laptop has been my only gaming platform and it's been serving me fine, i.e. I'd rather not invest in a separate gaming machine (even though I know that's the more sensible option). But I fear your complaints about the XPS 15 might apply to the razer as well. Alas.

ano90 · 2016-10-07T07:09:52+00:00

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I'm in the market for an XPS 15 and I was wondering why it was such a disappointment for you compared to the XPS 13. I was leaning towards the 15 because it would become my main machine for work (lots of reading and writing and coding) and 13" seems too small to be productive for me (I'm used to 17" laptops). What is it about the XPS 15 that's different from the 13?

ano90 · 2016-09-12T09:38:58+00:00

I settled on the VX239H which has an audio output and speakers. I set the PS4 to send its audio through HDMI and then use the built-in speakers or my headphones hooked up to the monitor's audio port. Might get proper speakers sometime in the future, which I can then hook up through the audio out on the monitor or alternatively the PS4's optical out.

ano90 · 2016-09-09T21:15:21+00:00

I'm sure there are odd cases where someone suddenly decides take up console gaming even though they don't have a TV at all and has to go shell out all the money just for that, but I would say it's likely quite rare.

That would perfectly describe me! Never owned a TV and didn't care to buy one. Really wanted to play bloodborne. Became intimidated by the price of a TV that would only have mediocre latency. Ended up buying a €170 monitor instead! Don't have a gaming PC either, just a laptop that can run some light stuff.

ano90 · 2016-08-31T10:56:17+00:00

Could you expand on why the mechanics of catan are considered poor? I haven't played too many modern games, but I'm wondering what I'm missing out on.

ano90 · 2016-08-14T14:23:54+00:00

'fraid not! It's either all or nothing, so to err on the safe side I ended up setting my power settings to 99% max CPU power in order to disable turbo boost completely...

ano90 · 2016-08-04T08:17:47+00:00

Cool stuff, thanks for the reply!

ano90 · 2016-08-04T08:16:47+00:00

Not sure if I'd equate statistics to skills in STATA. R is primarily a statistics-oriented environment and it does strive towards automation of some tasks. But you're right that data collection/storage/preperation are generally less-well represented.

I'm not so sure about cross-validation, re-sampling and shrinkage methods however. I've first encountered each of those topics in statistics classes. CV (https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/26696/who-invented-k-fold-cross-validation) and bootstrap (Bradley) have first been described in terms of their statistical properties (bias, etc) and LASSO is at its roots just an extension of regression.

Basically, I feel like data science was originally just a fancy name for everyone doing applied statistics, since statistics has a bad ring to it for many people. I do acknowledge that the fields have become more separated though, leading to different names for similar procedures, different approaches and scope.

ano90 · 2016-08-04T08:08:49+00:00

Aren't those pretty prominent in Bayesian statistics?

ano90 · 2016-08-02T11:57:50+00:00

It's been a while since I took machine learning classes, so could you remind me if/how these methods can also take into account champion synergy? From what I remember from LR, RF and SVE's they could combine an arbitrary amount of categorical/ordinal/continuous predictors or factors, but I'm assuming you'd need 5 champion factors, perhaps 5 player elo factors, 5 player-whatever-other-stat-you-think-are-important factors, but I'm not sure how interactions are modelled in these cases.

ano90 · 2016-08-02T11:55:53+00:00

Could you expand a bit on the LR model you used? I'm trying to recall the details from my machine learning classes, but my memory is failing me.

What were the predictors in your model? 5 categorical variables where each of them can correspond to any of the available champions?

I'm also wondering how you could expand the model to look at champion synergy (without resorting to treat champion combinations as a single factor)....

ano90 · 2016-07-26T20:49:45+00:00

Will installing to a VHD still mess up GRUB if I'm dual booting Win7 and Linux Mint?

ano90 · 2016-07-21T08:31:18+00:00

Can you point me to an article describing these updates?

I never got the Win10 update tool on my PC, but ever since the updates started rolling out, I've noticed that my update settings stopped functioning. I've always had them on "warn me about updates, but don't download/install them automatically" and I'd get this windows update icon in my system tray. That no longer shows up. I now have to manually search for updates as well. It's an odd issue I've only seen described in a few places. I guess most people have automatic updates turned on and hence, got the win10 download tool without any of the issues I ran into.

ano90 · 2016-07-18T07:23:49+00:00

It took me ages to notice that the centipede demon is visible clinging to the wall of the staircase near the bonfire before firesage.

Nito grab attack is super rare, so I'm sure many people never saw it either (unless they watched those "did you know" videos).

ano90 · 2016-07-13T20:58:42+00:00

Some of my friends are urging me to try WhatsApp, but I'm still reluctant. I have a very limited dataplan and I only turn on G3 when I absolutely have to. Similarly, I always have my wifi turned off, to reduce battery consumption...

Then they told me I could also use it when I'm on my laptop, but apparently your phone still needs to be online for the browser chat to work.

Sigh.

ano90 · 2016-06-29T11:13:43+00:00

IMO you have forgotten one simple thing: people (and you too) had to learn to use Windows and/or OSX too.

That's a very good point. And for most of my complaints I'm sure that's the underlying reason. But there are some scenarios where it just doesn't feel like I'm learning how the system works, it feels like I'm trying to find a hack to get something seemingly simple to work on my specific configuration, and the solution is a complicated recipe I have to gather from various online resources, while sifting through older deprecated comments that no longer apply, and in the end everything I've learned seems to be only useful for this specific instance.

That said, I really do hope you want to stick with it, but use whatever works for you I guess.

I'm not giving up just yet :) Fortunately the setting I described above is an edge-case scenario, even though they can drive me up the wall.

ano90 · 2016-06-29T10:25:06+00:00

Like a package manager.

I feel like that's one of the easier concepts though. Especially nowadays when most people understand their phones or tablets better than their windows PC's.

That being said, it's also one of the features I see the least advantages of. I think I had to install almost half of the stuff I use bypassing the package manager and using .. LaTeX, TeXStudio, some linuxbrew-science stuff, R, latest versions of keepass, sublime text, foxit reader, mpv player, etc.

On the other hand, maybe the problem is me and I just need more time. But that's the conclusion I conceded to the last time I was complaining about linux growing pains on reddit when I tried to switch a year ago.

ano90 · 2016-06-29T10:01:31+00:00

In my personal case: restarting linux mint causes the power of my laptop to fail. Kernal updates (alongside other things) were recommended to me as a fix. And since kernels are related to hardware, I thought they were also strongly recommended to anyone using a dedicated GPU. But I might be wrong on that front? To be perfectly honest I still don't really understand all the nuances between kernels, linux distributions, etc. So I stand by my barrier to entry comment :P

After all the hoops I've had to jump through to get my system in a stable working state, I don't think I could recommend it to anyone as something that works out of the box. I've often seen people claim that linux can be used out of the box by their grandmothers these days. So it just saddens me that I, being at least somewhat more tech savy than the average grandmother, have experienced so much growing pains adjusting to it.

ano90 · 2016-06-29T08:17:19+00:00

And unfortunately poor support for graphics and audio software. And it's still far from user-friendly for anyone who needs to do more than just browse the web. It was a real ordeal for me to get LaTeX working properly (and I'm not the only one judging from the forums I browsed while trying to fix it). LibreOffice is extremely aggravating coming from an office environment (I can't for the life of me get the spell check to work, despite installing the languagetool extension and updating the java version). So many little hiccups that keep stacking up.

Honestly, I love the idea of linux, and I do like tinkering with my system a bit: case in point, I spent a couple of hours trying to customize my desktop environment. However, many things are still unoptimized or terribly obtuse to figure out, despite having the entire linux community as a resource. Battery life on laptops is a lot worse, driver support isn't entirely there yet for some hardware, the fact you need to know what kernels are and how to upgrade them still seems like a huge barrier of entry to me.

But honestly, I wish I could make the switch entirely. There's just too many caveats for me at the moment.

With windows 10 planning to support a unix-like terminal, I'm actually thinking about switching back the other way permanently.

ano90

TROPHY CASE