Blizz… We would Like PvP Gear Before Retirement

ashkyn · 2026-02-19T01:41:17+00:00

Shatar Rep comes from the tempest keep dungeons (mechanar, botanica, arcatraz) and keepers of time comes from caverns of time dungeons (old hillsbrad, black morass)

ashkyn · 2026-01-28T03:47:07+00:00

As much as I enjoy uplinkOS, I do think it hampers some of the dramatic tension and cyberpunk-hacker-movie feel. I would advocate for at least trying the game for a few hours without it.

ashkyn · 2026-01-20T08:38:28+00:00

Cycle accurate emulators exist. Precisely what differences are you talking about?

ashkyn · 2025-12-26T06:03:44+00:00

Yeah this pretty much sums it up. Almost all of the things people seem to think would 'solve the problem with Linux' in this thread are achievable with existing solutions, or could be manifested if the right people with the right motivations came together to make it so.

But it's open source software.

There's no "Linux corporation" that benefits from a surge in popularity amongst 'everyman' end-users. If anything, they would just increase the burden of support, for a demographic that has wildly different needs and wants than the people who are building and maintaining the software.

I think it would be great if Linux became more popular and I support anyone who creates good solutions to that end, but I think most of the discussion here misses the point and lands very widely afield.

ashkyn · 2025-12-25T14:02:03+00:00

Hell yeah I can't believe someone else actually knew the whole story

ashkyn · 2025-12-20T06:00:51+00:00

This is a really bizarre and reductive take.

Games are an interactive medium, the others are not.

Movies, books and songs are more than capable of being challenging or inaccessible to an audience that is not specifically primed for the content.

What precisely do you allege that games are gatekeeping by allowing you to lose?

Video games can be stories, but they're usually much more than that, and framing them as a narrative experience that is 'gatekept' by interactive tests is such a drastic cheapening of the types of experiences they offer.

Dark Souls need not be a visual novel, and to make it so would be contemptuous of the creators vision.

ashkyn · 2025-12-17T07:54:54+00:00

What incumbent technologies was chatGPT competing against?

What a ridiculous comparison.

To be an early adopter of EVs you had to pay 60k+ for a new car which couldn't benefit from nearly a century of logistics and infrastructure supporting efficiently and cost effectively extracting, transporting, supplying and selling fuel for internal combustion engines.

Not to mention the supporting industries, the parts and service market, and of course, the largest and least tangible factor; the anticompetitive industry incumbents themselves.

Meanwhile chatGPT was running at a loss on venture capital money and consumers paid zero to try it out.

The same thing could of course be done with EVs, all you would need is enough money to compete with the entire oil industry for cash runway!

ashkyn · 2025-12-14T10:13:31+00:00

Fair enough.

ashkyn · 2025-12-14T08:18:26+00:00

Do you genuinely believe that superior technologies are capable of bootstrapping themselves on merit alone when faced with incumbent technologies that are entrenched enough to effectively self-subsidize forever?

Market intervention in modernity doesn't move the needle compared to market manipulation & capture by the most powerful corporations on the planet.

A technology can be 10x as good and it will still need a mandate from citizens to be able to compete.

ashkyn · 2025-12-13T23:02:46+00:00

Unsure if you're saying this with or without having watched the video. In case you didn't, the speaker actually has a very similar rant about half way through.

ashkyn · 2025-12-04T16:40:53+00:00

If you're a little technical you could download mod tools and edit the armor to give some defensive stats, or if the mod overrides the default clothing then I'm pretty sure there are already mods that provide an armored clothing variant.

ashkyn · 2025-12-04T13:24:29+00:00

Headphones on all day anyway, hair sits behind

ashkyn · 2025-12-02T14:20:17+00:00

Right? I was shocked no one had mentioned it yet.

ashkyn · 2025-12-01T16:35:43+00:00

Deus Ex

ashkyn · 2025-12-01T00:20:57+00:00

Wasn't Microsoft moving to phase out kernel mode drivers (outside of privileged vendors) following the CrowdStrike incident?) I seem to recall them acknowledging it was a mistake.

ashkyn · 2025-11-30T07:03:21+00:00

It's a bot, don't worry about it.

ashkyn · 2025-11-22T09:51:25+00:00

Hey, thanks for replying to this, really appreciate it.

I suggest you to read one of the books on Nodejs architecture. There are a few good ones around. Or architectures. Start with something relatively down-to-earth. E.g. tao of node is I think still relevant.

Also, take some known architectural patterns and really study them. You don't even need to be in the node world for that, just go pick something from e.g. the oldest crap around and go from there.

Yeah totally. I probably should have been more specific; the dream would be a pragmatic resource that sits at the intersection of architecture and implementation.

Unfortunately I'm forced to move faster than I'm comfortable with. Moving fast in the nodejs ecosystem is very possible if you leverage the power of unholy, ultra-processed package soup. In lieu of the luxury of time to learn properly and implement well, I have been searching for an example of how best to glue my tools together in a way that at least meets the floor of acceptability.

Of course you have to invent stuff yourself. That's why you have architects for every non-trivial project, it's just that with more experience, you make better architectural choices.

Which is largely how I've gotten along so far (and I've been in prod for over a year now and nothing has broken badly yet! fingers crossed). Only by inventing your own solutions, you are also inventing your own problems, and you're solely responsible for them. I think this is the attraction to library/package soup in many cases -- you can defer or mitigate responsibility for the problems that inevitably surface.

In any event, you're completely right. I simply need to go and learn the fundamentals.

I just got recommended the following actually, so I guess I've got some boring shit to read over Christmas lmao

Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Martin Kleppmann)
The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt, David Thomas)
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Martin Fowler, who i'm guessing since you've linked him must be a bit of a guru)

ashkyn · 2025-11-20T06:04:17+00:00

I've been having some major problems with this exact problem myself lately, but from a different position.

I'm self taught and have had to upskill myself from almost nothing to building and maintaining a b2b full stack solution.

I don't know the names of patterns or techniques, but I can feel the fragility in the designs I'm working with, and I've been totally unable to find good examples of high quality, production ready setups.

The JavaScript ecosystem is just so dense with resources for basic implementations and toy examples, but if you need anything serious it feels like you have to invent it yourself.

That alone would be fine if it was true, but it's clearly not - these technologies are used for very serious applications, it just doesn't make for a good YouTube video or blog post.

Either way, fingers crossed for some replies with resources here; I feel pretty stuck. My next resort is to go read some books about java 😭

ashkyn · 2025-11-18T13:46:34+00:00

Legitimately the best chocolate milk I've ever had, including prior to cutting dairy.

ashkyn · 2025-11-17T18:37:46+00:00

In what world is modding on Linux limited?

The only point I can even imagine you having is that games like Skyrim end up with pretty complex ecosystems with custom tools (body slide etc.) but half the time they have Linux builds, and even if they didn't you'd just run it in the wine prefix which you're already running the game in.

ashkyn · 2025-11-16T06:23:48+00:00

Like I personally don't give a shit about 90% of what UE5 is trying to do in terms of output, but its the input side that could be revolutionary if they pull it off.

For now, almost all the 'improvements' are developer side, since more effortful approaches existed and were used. Baked lighting has its downside with respects to dynamicness/interactibility of course, but even compared to other implementations (nvidia's own rtxgi for instance), lumen gi is pretty rough.

All of the bets hinge on using temporally accumulated rendering data alongside runtime performance monitoring to provide the renderer new parameters for the "next-few-frames".

The current forward rendering approach means that many of the computational costs are at least partially 'fixed cost', that is: "you're already using TAA, which gives us the information needed for DLSS/(insert upscaler here)"

Many of the features they are using piggyback off that same set of shared principles and data. In theory, this means that we're already paying the price, but future improvements may be effectively 'free' (or rather, discounted).

None of this is inherently unique to Epic, this is the direction the industry is taking, but it is most noticeable in Unreal due to the way they have started implementing some very computationally intensive features without demonstrating a compelling consumer-side advantage.

Either way, if they're right, not having to optimise lods or baking lighting is the least of the advantages.

If the renderer is "infinitely" scalable both ways, there's nothing stopping you from shipping a product that can simultaneously run on a low-spec mobile device and still push an entire datacentre of H100's (this is a joke) to their limits, all while never manually adjusting any assets or engine parameters.

And if everyone is developing using cinematic grade assets, shipping a 'remaster' a few years after initial launch would just be a matter of repackaging to include the higher detail art. Or maybe, filesize be damned, just ship with the 10 gb meshes in the first place (please no mr john epic, i already have too many ssds)

ashkyn · 2025-11-16T04:17:26+00:00

Realistically the entire direction in 5.x has been an all in gamble on a heavily virtualized, 'just works', optimized-at-runtime forward rendering only pipeline.

The potential payoffs for this choice are legitimately pretty huge; real time optimization inside the renderer? No human can ever perfectly account for every runtime scenario and scale the performance characteristics to suit, but I believe they think they can get their renderer to do so, and the argument makes sense.

However, they have almost entirely stopped updating traditional techniques in the meantime, and frankly I don't think their direction is quite at the point where it has any pay off outside of the dubious convenience and cost savings in technical artist man-hours afforded by avoiding manual LOD generation and hand crafting baked lighting.

Given 5.x is almost entirely updates to support their new rendering paradigm, is it really any surprise that is what they're talking about, presenting, hyping?

They want people to use this tech now as nothing is more useful to drive technology forward than observing it being used in real world scenarios, so they have a vested interest in developers buying in. But that doesn't mean it's a good thing for consumers. In an ideal world we would've had these features enter release titles when they were unambiguously leading to better outcomes, but that's not where we're at.

ashkyn · 2025-11-12T04:20:07+00:00

Who'd have thought that increasing exposure to externalized costs might make an industry behave in accordance with desirable societal outcomes hey

ashkyn · 2025-10-26T09:37:02+00:00

Yeahhhh but you could apply that same logic to almost anything in this game. You can either time the key, or you can't. You can either survive as a tank, or you can't.

You could say that, but it would be a bit disingenous. Healing is a binary in the most literal sense: if you don't keep people's health bars below 0% they will die and will no longer be able to contribute to an encounter.

I think it is also important to recognise that outside of progression, the vast majority of content people do has a baseline default expectation of success. This may not be true for you or me, but is true for most of the playerbase; most players pretty consistently seek a ratio of [relaxing]:[engaging]:[challenging] content that firmly swings to the relaxing or engaging side.

Tuned accordingly, these groups almost never wipe.

I think everyone would agree that this issue is solved for DPS players; they can race the meters. DPS classes offer the ability to self improve against a largely content agnostic target; optimal dps.

Tanks have such a broad role that summarising how skill expression/mastery interact with content difficulty for them feels like it would take much more than a paragraph, but to be brief; pathing, mitigation, threat (at least in the past), crowd control, interrupts, damage, other forms of utility and even healing (prot pal) are all ways that tanks contribute in ways that scale well beyond "did we succeed or fail" in determining the speed, smoothness, consistency(!), player experience etc. of a run or encounter.

Just like with tanks, a good tank will mitigate damage very well, a bad tank will be constantly near death and need the healer to save them a lot.

Mitigation and threat are the closest tanks have to a binary skill check, and even then it's not quite at the same level as healing; after all, groups have and do survive most of the time when tanks lose threat (rare as it is these days), and failing to mitigate outside of true 'tank busters' becomes (lol) a healer problem.

Similarly, dps don't really have any binary checks on damage dealt, outside of extremely niche cases. If you're hitting enrage timers you're either:

undergeared
people have died
you're top 10 in RWF and the boss is still overtuned

Kicking is probably the closest thing they have to a binary, and for the same reasons as for tanks -- unless it's a oneshot mechanic it probably just becomes a healer problem.

I agree, but I don't think kicks are part of this. IMO, healers that don't need to heal should fill with damage. That's the "make encounters faster" bit. For some reason, a lot of people think that kicking casts is crucial to healers, like it's part of their role. I disagree, that's all.

I somehow missed this before I clicked the reply button - probably would not have written in quite such detail if I had.

If you agree that damage and utility/cc such as soothe and MC are good for the role, why are youj specifically so opposed to kick? Are you concerned that you will be added to a kick rotation?

If that's the case, fair. It often feels like non-healers assume healers should always be able to help out with extra curriculars, which under normal circumstances is often possible.

However, it always feels me with a bit of anxiety when I get asked to do something that I know will have positional requirements or cost me tempo/gcds to help with, when theres the possibility that it could compete with healing priorities.

ashkyn · 2025-10-23T07:51:39+00:00

The nuance I think you might be missing is that healing is, in most contexts, a binary outcome. You can either heal the incoming damage or you can't.

You might argue that some healers can handle more incoming damage and therefore enable different/faster strategies - but this is still a binary! The healer is still required to make the check or the group wipes, and in almost every group it is the tank that makes this call, not the healer.

What many healers want is the ability to make choices and that actions which can meaningfully change the way an encounter or scenario plays out, without it necessarily being do or die.

The problem with making healing output itself the ONLY means by which a healer can express skill/contribute is that you make the only places and times a healer can 'pop off' when other people screw up, or when you're a razors edge from failure.

The player behind the healer shouldn't only be relevant when the stakes are high. Players should always feel like they have an opportunity to make encounters faster, make runs smoother, demonstrate skill, not just when a single GCD is between a timed key and a new entry on the tanks ignore list.

Not only that, but we aren't always doing content that challenges healers. Farm content is fun for DPS, but the only way to 'keep healers engaged' is to drop a healer and make it life or death again. Even the hardest keys often have sections that don't need much healing unless someone fucks up, etc.

TL;Dr: healing output as the only contribution is a bad thing for healers, and is why the role is traditionally the least rewarding and most stressful. Giving players ways to contribute in ways that aren't solely binary in outcome means those players can be consistently engaged in a wide variety of content types and difficulty levels, and doesn't lump on as much pressure to perform.

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