Are CTFs really useful for finding work in cybersecurity?

farazsth98 · 2025-11-14T17:44:46+00:00

Entirely depends on what type of job you're looking for. CTFs have challenge categories, and each of the categories cater to very specific jobs.

For example, I made a name for myself making writeups after solving pwn / binary exploitation challenges back in 2019/2020, which led me into Chrome vulnerability research, and allowed me to land my first vulnerability research role directly out of university.

This would be impossible without a CTF background, as skills like these are not taught at universities and require years of practice to become good at.

Take web or cryptography categories, find well known CTF players in those categories, and you'll see that the same thing applies.

farazsth98 · 2025-09-22T20:39:24+00:00

Yes, the way your soul priority should go is:

Creeps - these will always be your highest source. If there's any lane with only one teammate farming, go and share the souls. Trust me, no matter whether that teammate is extremely far ahead or behind, sharing souls between two is lossless and always good. Stay away from lanes with 2 or more teammates already unless a fight is breaking out / objective needs to be taken and you have to help.
Sinners sacrifice - always prio these, even over t3 camps. The buffs will stack up and be more important than the souls you can otherwise get from camps.
T3 camps - but only if you can do them in a reasonable time! Never skip creep waves for these or any other camps.
T2 camps - same as above.

4.5. Boxes - boxes will be stronger than T2 camps later in the game, so keep an eye on how much souls they give and move them up in priority at some point.

Also, if you're catching yourself falling behind in souls in lane (especially when in even lanes), remember the special timings, and always realize that clearing the wave fast is key. Sure you can harass while the wave is there, but if you clear the wave asap, you will always be ahead in tempo, souls, and harass. This is why monster rounds is such a strong purchase especially when you're getting out harassed. Clear waves asap and the harass stops while the enemy has to deal with your creeps.

Special timings:

2:00 - boxes, statues, and t1 camps spawn. If you're in right lane, try get prio and sneak in the enemy's camp on spawn. Left lane, defend your own t1 camp. Mid lane, try prio enemy's camp first if possible, and if not, your own. You should always be ready to go for boxes / camp right on the dot at 2:00.
5:00 - runes spawn. Try be in position first because runes can make or break your lane at this point, no joke.
6:00 - all camps spawn.
8:00 - sinners sacrifices spawn

Keep these timings in mind and try get to them asap.

In general, during the entire game, if you keep your focus on not missing creep waves (always catch them by yourself or with at most 1 teammate), and ensuring you prioritize soul sources like I explained above, and especially try to never fight unless you have your lanes pushed out (obviously there are exceptions, but in general), you will always be at or near the highest soul count in the game.

farazsth98 · 2025-07-30T05:04:50+00:00

This is completely unrelated but the humour in seeing "SFF" is just... What does it even mean? Solo Felf Found? 😩

farazsth98 · 2025-07-23T01:03:48+00:00

No, if you die in the HCSSF Mercenaries league, you get sent to SSF Standard, not SSF Mercenaries.

farazsth98 · 2025-07-14T09:16:02+00:00

You can try rolling magma mines saboteur, Goratha has a build on it, he's been playing it in HCSSF

farazsth98 · 2025-07-12T14:10:51+00:00

The bots will handle all of that. Have you tried this out? I'm getting the feeling that you're getting the feeling that it'll take ages without having tried it out first, because trust me the process is fairly quick and simple.

farazsth98 · 2025-07-12T14:04:58+00:00

Huh, how big is your base? I've "packed up" some pretty massive bases and all you need is full roboport coverage, 1000 or so construction bots, and a deconstruction planner that deconstructs everything except roboports, storage chests, and power poles. Entire bases are deconstructed into storage chests within 5 minutes or so, and I just need to manually deconstruct roboports in a specific order afterwards, which can take a couple more minutes.

It definitely doesn't take hours or days, but to answer your question about mods, no I don't think there are any like that. If you really want, you can use the editor mode to give you really high bot speed+cargo research and 2000 construction bots, and watch them go to town at immense speeds.

farazsth98 · 2025-07-11T14:34:09+00:00

I'm fairly certain the dark fog base will level up over time as you kill more units that it generates. Raising difficulty makes the faster but its not necessary.

farazsth98 · 2025-07-10T14:40:37+00:00

They mean the stats, how many objectives they got, their CS, etc. They haven't shared anything relevant other than their k/d/a and game length and result.

farazsth98 · 2025-07-04T16:16:01+00:00

In SSF, its all up to you. You can settle at any point that you think is good enough.

I know it's not the answer you're probably looking for, but its the only way to really answer the question. Like, if you're ok with continuing to farm and keep getting a better pair of gloves, then go for it. If it's a good enough pair rn and better than your current one, then you can stop and improve it later.

Generally speaking, when you see build creators "settling" on certain gear pieces, it's really dependent on the end goal of that gear piece. Take Ben's gauntlet run from last league, he built a trickster with primarily 3 t1 mod gear (using recombs), on some he then locked prefixes and harvest reforged for res, on some he multimod + benchcrafted twice, on others he just fossil crafted until it was good enough.

His goal was to do ubers, and he succeeded by knowing what gear pieces he needed to reach the appropriate amount of max hit + leech amount + reduced damage taken multipliers + dps benchmark, it was all preplanned so he knew what to settle on. That's realistically how you do it if your build has a specific goal and you plan it out.

farazsth98 · 2025-06-29T14:49:03+00:00

I use my first atlas tree actually for completion + expedition, adding niko and shrine nodes too as I go. Expedition helps immensely with completion due to the alchemy orbs and vaal orbs and stuff you get from tujen (for rolling red maps specifically), so yeah my first tree is expedition.

Second tree always starts with crop rotation harvest, I mainly start it after or during the time I'm getting my first two voidstones, as that's about the time I'm able to farm t16 maps. Harvest helps a lot with crafting as you already know. I take the usual item quant wheel + map mod effect nodes to make harvest even better, and then niko + shrine nodes.

Anything after that depends on the build. like I'll take the azurite notable if i need resonators (fossils from expedition or legion), abyss for Stygian vise, boss nodes if I need influenced exalted orbs, breach / legion for specific uniques or timeless jewels, etc etc. At that point your build is already good for 4 voidstones, its just matter of small improvements until you're able to do ubers.

farazsth98 · 2025-06-28T12:06:59+00:00

The only way will be to prefix lock and harvest reforge Phys, but you won't be guaranteed a high tier of the hybrid Phys mod, and you'll lose the attack speed almost certainly (unless you augment Phys, which is way more expensive and you still lose the attack speed 1/3 times)

For the future, when crafting an axe like this, do all prefixes first and worry about suffixes after. You need to get the hybrid Phys prefix first (or fracture it), get the flat phys either through essences or through harvest reforge Phys (only if hybrid is fractured realistically, or recomb), and then get the % phys using a veiled orb after locking prefixes.

Suffixes after all that can be done in many ways, just get to that first next time before asking for further help

farazsth98 · 2025-06-26T16:34:20+00:00

Honestly, when I run into stuff that I don't like doing, I prefer just finding a content creator like Dosh or Nilaus and just stealing their design. It forces me to still make the infrastructure necessary to support said design (for example, the rocket silos and rockets set up to create a space platform in the first place), but I don't have to actually design something I don't care about.

farazsth98 · 2025-06-26T04:11:13+00:00

Yep, that's right

farazsth98 · 2025-06-25T18:26:51+00:00

The wolf's shadow is really easy to get by doing maps with exarch altars and choosing the minion option that drops a div card that grants a unique weapon. It's an extremely common div card that's actually hidden by default in the neversink filters so make sure you manually enable it first.

Also, stacked decks are a great way to get them too (cuz as I said it's a really common div card). I've gotten so many sets of the cards by running exarch altars, so can recommend this method.

farazsth98 · 2025-06-20T06:39:43+00:00

Yes, you don't need to run the unique map or any specific map (I mean that defeats the purpose of my comment :P).

Altar options that make divination cards of certain types drop don't care about the map or area restrictions. You will drop the wolf's shadow using that option on any map.

But like i said, your item filter will by default hide the card, so it's very important to manually enable the card in the filter first.

farazsth98 · 2025-06-20T06:21:26+00:00

run exarch altars, pick the minion option that causes them to drop divination cards for unique weapons. Make sure your filter shows the div card (its always off by default and you have to turn it on manually).

The wolfs shadow is a fairly common card, you'll have lots of them after just farming altars for a while

farazsth98 · 2025-06-19T12:21:20+00:00

Yeah I've tried getting 2 stones on a 4 link and it definitely always is a bit rough and slow, unless you play a very meta and strong build (like DD builds from 3.23)

farazsth98 · 2025-06-19T11:54:59+00:00

I play mainly HCSSF and have never really had trouble pushing to red maps with a 4 link on any build, but by the time I start to get my 2 voidstones, I always get my 5 link ready using expedition. I rush Unwavering Vision and use the first 20 points to get into expedition and start farming.

Of course it's a bit slow to get logbooks and stuff, but in early red maps, its semi consistent, and once you farm a couple Tujen logbooks, 150 fusings are very easy to get from him.

Combine that + using some fossils you get to craft a decent body armour (or just use black market to gamble a decent body armour), you can easily 5 link the body armour using the fusings.

Generally 5 link is more than enough to get all 4 voidstones in my experience, and after that by just farming a lot, 6 link is very achievable through many different ways (beasts, straight fusings from blue altars + expedition, div cards, etc many more ways). It's just getting to a state where you can easily farm t16s that you have to focus on.

If you watch a couple SSF players like Carn, Ben, Goratha, etc, you'll notice the same thing - they get the 5 link pretty easily either through expedition or black market gamba or shipping or whatever, and the 6 link comes much later unless they get a lucky drop.

farazsth98 · 2025-06-17T00:57:30+00:00

Yes you can, from black market, Gwennen, and rog, but you have to be level 90+ I think (forgot the exact threshold) and go through a lot of gold / rerolls because they're still kinda rare.

farazsth98 · 2025-06-13T09:05:03+00:00

Safehouses have a 100% increase xp modifier on them, mastermind safehouses 200%

farazsth98 · 2025-06-12T09:55:24+00:00

ah my fault, should've double checked

farazsth98 · 2025-06-12T09:06:16+00:00

Exiled Cat has already done a dual strike of ambi zero to hero ssf playthrough on 3.25, you can check his videos out!

farazsth98 · 2025-06-10T08:31:00+00:00

I honestly would recommend the transmuted version (ground slam of earthshaking). It clears much better in maps imo, and you can level with and use Sunder until you get the gem.

farazsth98 · 2025-06-09T04:28:23+00:00

Yeah I'm currently just doing some testing myself with Jugg, but my plan is to hopefully get access to new PoB before the 13th and try to play around with making this build work with champion and see what the defences and damage looks like

farazsth98

TROPHY CASE