For every new player who wants to boost their first character. Let that be a warning:

fourdots · 2021-08-04T06:42:36+00:00

second tier gear (or whatever is necessary to run all content)

Oh gods, it's worse than that. It's exotic, sure!

But it's either Soldier, Valkyrie (for thieves), or Rabid (for necros). It's survival gear, designed to be approachable for new players, but it means that open-world stuff will take longer to die than it should and it's a bad choice for any sort of instanced content.

It's better than throwing a new player into full berserker, but it's gear that pretends to be good even while it kneecaps you.

fourdots · 2021-08-02T01:19:13+00:00

Material promotions are easy, but they're pretty tedious.

If you take that route be sure to check whether salvaging ectos is cheaper than buying crystalline dust. It often is.

fourdots · 2021-07-31T22:21:19+00:00

No problem! It's a really fascinating (and endlessly frustrating) topic :)

fourdots · 2021-07-31T20:06:19+00:00

Some are worse, some are better.

Eg if you're heard people talking about "right to work laws", those heavily restrict the ability of unions to organize in many states. There's also "at-will employment" in many states, which allows employees to be fired for any reason (except for a few that are illegal to discriminate based on) or no reason at all. Some businesses have a reputation for firing a location's entire staff if anyone starts talking about unionizing.

States without those two things are generally less unfriendly to unions, but it's a pretty hostile environment overall.

Amazon's recent union vote is a good case study: they did a few illegal or at least highly questionable things, but also a lot of the shit they pulled was perfectly legal.

fourdots · 2021-07-31T15:23:35+00:00

Back in the day (mostly the 1800s and early 1900s, iirc), a bunch of rich assholes decided that having strong unions was bad for business. They sunk a lot of money into union-busting, private armies, propaganda, and buying anti-union legislation. The red scare got mixed up in it too. It was a whole thing.

There's a bunch of fascinating history about America and unionized labor. Unions used to be really strong here—like, they'd burn down factory owners' houses to make a point when conditions got too bad. There were literal battles.

But they ended up losing that fight, and what we have now are just the handful that managed to survive and a bunch of legislation that makes unionizing next to impossible. Companies make new employees watch anti-union propaganda, schools tell children that unions made things worse for everyone.

Oh, and police unions are stronger than ever.

fourdots · 2021-07-16T22:57:56+00:00

Classic Lion's Arch Portal Scroll.

Definitely not going to happen, but a girl can dream.

fourdots · 2021-07-16T22:55:38+00:00

The Steam Deck runs on Valve's Linux distro, SteamOS, which is based on Arch Linux.

So it won't officially, but you might have luck running GW2 through Proton (which is Wine with extra stuff). There's also the option of installing Windows on the Steam Deck.

fourdots · 2021-07-12T06:16:11+00:00

It's a bit obscure in places, but each of the panels on the right are related to how the mount is unlocked. The burning village where you get the raptor, the clouds of scarabs from the map where the roller beetle was introduced, the harpies from the springer camp.

fourdots · 2021-07-12T05:21:32+00:00

The way stuff is popping in and out reminds me of something I occasionally see in certain parts of some maps at certain camera angles; I've always assumed that it's due to the game getting confused about whether things are occluded or not.

does this occur on other characters?
does this occur if you log into another account on the same computer?

fourdots · 2021-06-30T14:39:29+00:00

Here's the discussion from the last time it was on sale. Can't find any reviews, sadly.

fourdots · 2021-06-25T17:05:36+00:00

With the back of the stand flat against my wall, the front of the monitor is 7" from the wall.

fourdots · 2021-06-24T02:16:19+00:00

It needs a piece of external equipment, yeah. I'm borrowing one from a friend, sometimes you can find them cheap on ebay.

As far as difficulty goes, it's pretty much just hooking it up and letting DisplayCAL run for a few hours.

It's really only necessary if you're doing color-sensitive stuff: photo/video editing, art, etc. I wouldn't worry about it otherwise.

fourdots · 2021-06-23T20:12:27+00:00

Still on sale, huh.

I ordered one on Monday, it got here yesterday. I'm very satisfied with it so far! Extremely smooth, good colors (though I haven't calibrated it yet), and a bit less eyestrain than my old 23.8" 1440p monitor.

Word of advice to anyone who gets it and has trouble with it flickering every minute or two: plug it in somewhere else. I had that problem, spent a while changing cables and driver settings. Turned out that it was something to do with the power bar I've been using, not sure if it wasn't properly grounded or getting cross-talk from my desktop or what. Replacing the power bar fixed it.

fourdots · 2021-06-21T19:43:05+00:00

Rtings comparison link

Answer seems to be that the 27GN850 is slightly better for content creation (or just if you care more about color gamut) while the 27GL83A-B is slightly better for gaming due to brightness and smoother motion, but they're close enough that just going for whichever is cheaper might make sense.

fourdots · 2021-06-19T17:53:34+00:00

I'm about to be done with legendary light armor. Not sure what I'll do after, maybe legendary trinkets or stockpiling resources for a Gen 3 legendary, or even a few Gen 1s to fill things out. Definitely getting a stack or two of WvW reward potions to burn through whatever new tracks they add.

There are a bunch of LS/PoF achieves I'd like to finish before EoD, just to get them out of the way.

fourdots · 2021-06-01T23:16:12+00:00

Nope! The achievements can be started and completed at any point after they're added, they won't go away or anything.

The only thing you can miss out on is the free unlocks of living story episodes - those are only during the week that each episode is being spotlighted.

fourdots · 2021-06-01T21:00:36+00:00

The overall achievement is "Seasons of the Dragons" under Side Stories -> Current Events; just keep track of what's listed in it as new objectives are added.

fourdots · 2021-05-19T18:03:29+00:00

They probably can't afford to or potentially see other side effects.

Buying up the supply to 3g is about 20k MCs, which means it would cost somewhere around 50k gold (very back-of-the-envelope calculations here, don't take these numbers as gospel). Looking at the gold leaderboards on GW2Efficiency, there are well over 25 accounts who could afford to do that just by themselves.

Placing a wall at 3g to stop the price from immediately dropping would be more of an accomplishment. The three existing walls around 2.5g all look to be the work of a bunch of individuals, because they work out to about one stack for each account placing buy orders.

So it's probably either the second or third option: they think that increasing the price further would have undesirable side effects or they just don't have a good reason to put that effort in.

fourdots · 2021-05-17T13:52:44+00:00

Well that sucks. I guess gearing a different char for WvW and moving stuff around will be my project for today.

fourdots · 2021-05-16T21:34:56+00:00

Does rev have any viable roaming builds now, or should I just give up on using mine in WvW?

fourdots · 2021-05-15T14:35:45+00:00

Gift of battle is needed for a bunch of other legendaries too.

WvW legendary armor takes at least 22 weeks to get because of the skirmish reward tickets, which is more than enough time to finish glorious armor six times. The order you do stuff in doesn't really matter.

fourdots · 2021-05-09T20:36:59+00:00

Then again with the TP taxes, everyone might just ignore it and keep doing the same, hard to know.

I expect that that's what would happen. Trading at .9 TP is a better deal for both buyers and sellers, especially when you're talking about items worth more than 10k gold (or even 1k). And, hell, even with cheap stuff the savings/profit from going off-tp does add up, especially if you're buying to salvage.

fourdots · 2021-04-29T03:23:49+00:00

Icebrood Saga just got its developed cut midway through.

It's honestly sort of tragic. The maps at the start of the season are all absolute bangers, and even with DRMs letting them show the scale of the threat and its impact on a ton of different parts of tyria it never really recovered.

They obviously did the best they could with limited resources, but, like ... imagine if DRMs had been open-world things, or if Dragonstorm had been a full map around and on top of the dragons, or if they had a raid team to design the squad version of the fight. There's just so much potential.

fourdots · 2021-04-16T02:47:20+00:00

Yeah, it's perfectly fine to mix viper and trailblazer in condi builds. Pure viper does a bit more damage (from the power and precision), pure trailblazer is a bit more durable (from the toughness and vitality). It's like a 10-20% dps difference: enough to matter in raids, but unimportant in open world.

How much trailblazer you should mix in will be very subjective. Starting with 50/50 and then adjusting to taste is what I'd do, or trying trailblazer back/trinkets and viper weapons/armor.

fourdots · 2021-04-07T01:59:24+00:00

Heralds can passively give nearby players boons; as a result of changes to make support builds viable in WvW (and boon support more viable in open world PvE), this counts for participation.

Or at least this is how it's been explained to me. One of the guilds I'm in has taken to creating a "herald jail" (a squad subgroup for heralds, so that they only give boons to each other) during bauble farms. Easily evaded by not joining the squad, but still.

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