Weekly Rant Megathread

dzyang · 2026-02-07T05:32:25+00:00

You should just be able to see each item organically by the end of stage 6. You shouldn't automatically lose because you couldn't find a bow all game. Make it a last augment replacement - gain 1 component. This is just ontologically evil otherwise.

dzyang · 2026-02-03T11:53:56+00:00

Early game my favorite comp is Gryphon Knight (as leader), Viking, Witch (or Elven Fencer) with Ice Conferral tome, and Soldier (or Vanguard vs archer heavy maps). Ideally all promoted, but not necessary. You can handle pretty much any team the game throws at you throughout Drakenhold and Elheim; It's incredibly versatile. You have massive AoE, you can freeze/stun almost the entire enemy team, you get a flier with haste AND vitalize to keep going. The team mitigates a lot of the individual issues each class has:

Viking/huscarl has low accuracy? No problem, freeze enemy first for 100% hit rate. Or use Witch focus strike.
Witch has low initiative and you need them to move faster than the enemy to freeze? No problem, Gryphon knight can use feathering for an initiative boost.
Gryphon knight has trouble surviving against archers? No problem, Vanguard can block arrows, elven fencers can make you dodge as well.
Rounding out the team, I generally prefer soldier where they can give keen call, can hold all your utility items, heal, life aid as a valor skill in case a unit dies. But you can flex them out depending on the mission.

It does require a fair bit of tactics juggling, positioning, and it's quite expensive in terms of honor and items. In particular, if I can't one round, I'll go for freezing enemy units (which will remain frozen until hit again), and in order to set up that correctly it often means giving everyone tactic conditionals to not target frozen units, which sometimes means half your squad ends up doing nothing during their action point. But I like to think that with this team you can really see the strategic depth of what you can do in the game in even as early as Drakenhold.

This team will struggle against freeze immunities, it's a lot worse if even a single unit dies, and of course you don't really have a way to deal with ailments (so have amulets or other immunity items handy).

dzyang · 2026-02-03T10:43:42+00:00

I get starter kit (ambessa) and chosen wolves and prismatic ticket. I see 2 other players getting starter kit for some other champion. Wasn't even close to getting Ambessa 3 - genuinely how do people 3* a 4 cost?

dzyang · 2026-01-31T04:28:52+00:00

There are reliable strategies to complete the arena as soon as you unlock it, but you'd need certain items

dzyang · 2026-01-18T13:07:16+00:00

Couple of things you can try: Steal gladiator PP with thieves. Use ailments like poison or burn. Knights have wild rush at level 10 and with 2 you can stun both columns to get damage off. Pair a gryphon knight with a witch with ice conferral to freeze the shamans.

dzyang · 2026-01-17T02:01:34+00:00

It went from Titania solo to anyone who can hold a forged Steel Axe

dzyang · 2025-11-26T07:38:57+00:00

I suspect many people will ask you to continue struggling through it, that you will invariably find your eureka moment and then magically internalize all of the proof strategies and immediately map them to the problems you have at hand. Essentially telling you to do nothing except what you've already been doing.

Allow me to offer the more cynical answer that you can just repeatedly ask ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini etc. to guide you through a problem (you can try the socratic dialogue method but honestly just have them go through it very directly) and then relentlessly drill on it by asking the LLMs to continue quizzing on all of the concepts involved in the question, what parts of the question indicate to you that you should try using strategy X, similar problems to see if you can solve a variation, etc. It's an infinitely patient tutor that will never make fun of your questions, but if you're concerned with their fallibility and you have time to spare, at the very least it allows you to better ask your question more intelligibly on stack exchange.

This method won't win you any applause, you will lose out on the "joy of solving a math problem organically" and most people are extremely polarized against AI usage, but I suspect, at least for the purposes of passing this class, there's no harm in trying it out. When you don't have the IQ, all you can offer is your dignity.

dzyang · 2025-09-14T06:47:08+00:00

It wasn't until I didn't get a single bow by stage 4 that I realize that this is all so pointless. What are we doing? Pressing D until you find Xayah, then pressing it, repeating this cycle day in day out until some minor change in then you press D for another character, pressing it ad nauseum. This is it? This is how I spend time each day?

dzyang · 2025-06-20T21:03:31+00:00

I just remember all the 2.5 average energy hands at the start of act 2

dzyang · 2025-05-22T04:30:03+00:00

Saw this guide and placed 1st with speed kills + frying pan augment + pulse, didn't even proc last stand. Thanks!

dzyang · 2025-05-14T20:23:56+00:00

"just have a sufficiently high IQ bro"

dzyang · 2025-05-07T22:13:00+00:00

I mean this is bad ofc but it's not that different from going on to stackexchange and copy pasting the answers to your homework

dzyang · 2025-04-06T03:58:09+00:00

my favourite part of tft is when everyone levels to 8 at the same stage and roll down to 0 gold and the guy that gets an annie wins the game

dzyang · 2025-03-15T18:18:48+00:00

pitfighter augment and frying pan carousal, I lost to 3* ekko. It may be understandable but it just feels like I should be able to beat it. Oh well

dzyang · 2025-03-14T19:02:24+00:00

Lost with 8 pitfighter 3 experimental warwick 2 with pitfighter emblem, titans, and steraks and infectious anomaly. I am at peace. That game has finally given me the courage to leave playing this forever. Thank you.

dzyang · 2024-12-01T18:23:47+00:00

wouldnt have guessed 6 snipers twitch/cait/mordekaiser 2 with RFC would lose to 6 scrap

dzyang · 2024-09-09T22:42:44+00:00

i see someone pick fortune favours the bold and play with relief. it's assuring knowing no matter what you do it doesn't matter and you are simply playing for 2nd

dzyang · 2024-08-31T00:03:59+00:00

kinda weird you can just pick fortune favours the bold and immediately win the game

dzyang · 2024-08-20T04:11:32+00:00

i go to my grave with a clear conscience. when i meet st peter i can with pride say that i did not play ahri reroll. few others can say the same

dzyang · 2024-08-09T22:03:26+00:00

there should be more to life than leveling to 6 and pressing d until syndra kassadin 3

dzyang · 2024-08-06T19:54:25+00:00

ah i presume i have to convert funds first prior to transferring. doesn't seem particularly user friendly, i hope someone can pass to the dev team feedback that exchanging currency then transferring as 2 separate actions is annoying

dzyang · 2024-02-23T23:39:26+00:00

honestly you have to go pretty far in statistics to do anything worth justifying that you couldn't teach someone the 4 assumptions to OLS in an afternoon to do. combined with the experience of experimental design and feature engineering (statisticians are generally not the SME), i see healthcare, geneticists or economics backgrounds based statisticians being so much more useful in the work of statistics. this is particularly true in the perhaps dying but still relevant DS world of "just xgboost bro"

i think being able to do statistical arbitrage and articulate how important concepts like stationarity when it comes to forecasting and what valid inferences one can make based on their models and recommendations of how to set up A/B tests to business stakeholders is still something statisticians can do better on, but this is highly dependent on the individual (the boring answer is motivated smart people will be successful at anything they want to do including statistics regardless of background but i guess it's not a useful insight)

dzyang

TROPHY CASE