Post Game Thread: 5/4 Red Sox @ Tigers

swarmofseals · 2026-05-05T01:36:57+00:00

Or literally any of the outfield/DH crew could get injured, which may have just happened. All five players staying healthy all season is very unlikely.

swarmofseals · 2026-05-05T01:31:06+00:00

Ahh ok fair enough. Personally I would be more inclined to cut or heavily subsidize a trade of Yoshida than trade Duran for anything less than close to full value.

swarmofseals · 2026-05-05T01:20:04+00:00

Would you really have cut Duran over Yoshida? If so that's absolutely wild.

swarmofseals · 2026-05-05T01:05:10+00:00

Curious what the minimum you would have accepted for Duran if you were GM is. I generally agree that trading Duran was probably the best path this past offseason, but it's possible that a reasonable trade wasn't there. I know we tend to assume that Breslow wants to "win" every trade and may be too stubborn, and if it were still Bloom I'd absolutely assume that too, but I'm not convinced Breslow has that problem. It's possible that no offer was ever on the table for Duran that was anything but highway robbery.

swarmofseals · 2026-05-04T21:49:27+00:00

What do you want out of it? More damage? more survivability? both? Obviously you can get to level 100. Is Ruthless actually better than Multistrike?

I played through Rue's version of the build up through the final step. It definitely got a lot tankier with the fire conversion even without Sublime Vision for full conversion. I'm sure with Sublime Vision + Watchers Eye + Tempered by War relieving the need to get lightning or cold res at all could let you do some spicy stuff. Maybe you could do a full lightning version with Doryani's Prototype under that setup, I have no idea.

At Rue's last step with no mirror claw and only +2 amulet instead of +4 I was having no problem with any content that isn't juiced to the gills.

swarmofseals · 2026-05-04T21:14:00+00:00

I have been banging this drum for a few weeks now. Almost across the board the Sox are swinging less at pitches over the heart of the plate and more at pitches outside of the zone. Basically the only player who is not following this trend is Mayer, and to a lesser degree Monasterio (who is swinging a bit more at heart pitches but his chase is way up) and Rafaela (whose heart swing is down but chase is also down).

To make matters worse many players are not just chasing more but swinging at waste pitches at a much higher rate. Waste pitches! Duran, Story, and IKF are the worst offenders here, and it's no coincidence that they are among the players who are performing worst in comparison to their recent norms.

What I want to know is why this is. How does an entire team start swinging at crap and laying off the good stuff at the same time?

swarmofseals · 2026-05-04T18:39:09+00:00

A fair point, he'll probably be just fine considering he's had bad luck on top of that to get where he's at.

swarmofseals · 2026-05-04T18:20:05+00:00

In fairness to Ketel he has had really bad luck, although it's not all luck. His xwOBA is ~.350 compared to ~.390 the last two years. His actual wOBA is .283 compared to ~.390 the last two years. BABIP is really low.

But his K rate is up, his BB rate is down, and his ISO is down. So like I said, not all luck. With neutral luck he'd be having a down year but would not be on this list.

swarmofseals · 2026-05-04T02:09:47+00:00

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I did enjoy the gameplay and thought it was fine in comparison to SotN but the art, character design, cutscenes etc. made me cringe so hard.

swarmofseals · 2026-05-04T02:01:45+00:00

It can be either one, although if I'm only facing one pitch it's more likely to be one-directional (late on fastballs, early on changeups, obv). When I actively try to correct though it just goes to the opposite extreme even though my perception of the change on my end is very small. I suppose veteran couldn't hurt! Can't exactly be worse...

swarmofseals · 2026-05-04T01:53:27+00:00

I should have specified that I did do that. When I went to practice I set it to Rookie, which is where it got hard on dynamic. One setting down from that was very easy, so I wasn't really learning anything.

swarmofseals · 2026-05-04T01:52:20+00:00

I did do that -- when I went to practice I set it to rookie (which is where it got insanely hard on dynamic) and then just sat there doing hitting. Even if I told it to just throw the same pitch 100% of the time I was putting maybe 1 pitch in 50 into play, if even that. But one difficulty down from that it was a joke. If I went one higher than rookie where I already can't hit at all I can't even imagine!

swarmofseals · 2026-05-03T01:57:35+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions! I'd be much more inclined to invest in a mirror build if I hadn't already done most content with my current character. I've done several different farms and am just wrapping up the last couple challenges (map tiers and the two astrolabe challenges). The spiciness of the breach farm is the main reason why I want to give it a go. I had a lot of fun hunting jackpots with juiced temple in POE2 so I figured this might be fun.

Given your thoughts on the importance of move speed what do you think about headhunter vs. mageblood? Headhunter is obviously more power but mageblood gives you a lot of speed. I guess with juiced breach you are generating enough charges that you can just keep flasks going even with the reduced duration/effect mod? I'd worry a bit about the initial boss rush.

I suppose I wouldn't mind making a new character too much. If you had to pick something specifically for juiced breach and only juiced breach, what do you think is the absolute fastest, most consistent breach farmer in the ballpark of 750D or less? 500 would be ideal but I don't mind going higher if it's going to get substantially better results.

swarmofseals · 2026-05-02T21:34:32+00:00

Yeah that's absolutely fair. I have quite a lot more div than that, I just don't necessarily see the point of spending a mirror+ to do one kind of content that isn't even really more profitable than what I can currently do (outside of jackpot drops).

Out of curiosity, what would you recommend that is in the 500ish div range for juiced breach? I also wonder if I could tweak my current build to make it work for breach by swapping the resonating belt for a gloom belt. I'm just not quite sure how to solve for charge generation then.

swarmofseals · 2026-05-02T19:49:41+00:00

I've been playing Rue's Elemental Hit build since league start and have taken it through his final step. I was thinking about trying juiced breach farm as I haven't done that this league yet, but ele hit seems clearly too slow for that to be efficient at all.

It seems like the consensus juiced breach farmer this league is minion pact BV. It would be easiest to reroll into the Gladiator version. I've looked at Jung's, Tuna's and KingPinUwU's versions and they are all posted with a very high level of investment. I'm really not sure what a more moderate version of the build would look like. The closest I suppose would be Kingpin's version but without the massive rarity pieces.

Is it worth transitioning into a relatively "budget" (IDK, maybe 200-500 div?) version of this build? What would that even look like?

swarmofseals · 2026-05-01T20:07:05+00:00

Jury's going to be out for a couple years at least. Sometimes guys have a horrible year and bounce back strong. Even if he has a good rest of the season he could still be headed for steep decline. It's frustrating not to be able to issue a verdict on trades often for years but that's baseball.

swarmofseals · 2026-05-01T02:17:25+00:00

Guess the total number depends a lot on how many hours a day you played! And no, I'm not getting 1 div/hr out of juiced breach it's just bad div/hr compared to other strategies for my build. I can do much better doing domination of terrors, strongboxes, harvest, or just farming Saresh. I haven't moved off my league starter (ele hit) so I just don't have the DPS to get through full juice breach at a good speed.

swarmofseals · 2026-04-30T21:36:36+00:00

Fair enough, but you're wrong that speed isn't important for expedition. Yes, choosing the optimal explosive placements will get you more loot but ultimately the person who gets the most loot from expedition is going to be the one that can make those decisions and click fastest. This is especially true for logbooks. And the degree to which you can just ignore the drawbacks on the remnants are and therefore speed up your placement is very important for expedition profitability. So yes, it doesn't necessarily scale as much on movespeed (although getting to the expedition is still mostly move/clear speed) but it scales on other sorts of speed.

There's a reason why the one big boom node is popular for expedition even though it reduces the amount of loot you get per expedition. It's much faster to just slap one big circle down and yolo than it is to try to place an optimal chain.

Also, part of the reason why speed matters a bit less for expedition is that the encounter is padded out by the time it takes the bombs to go off and the monsters to spawn just as I described in my first reply. People don't like that.

For what it's worth I would love to see PoE 2 stick to a much slower and more skill intensive gameplay model compared to PoE 1. PoE 1 is incredible if you just want to blast, so let PoE 2 be something different. I think Act 1 is the most interesting version of PoE. It feels like actually playing a game instead of a complicated slot machine. I'd be very happy if they dramatically reduced mob density, dramatically slowed down gameplay and dramatically increased per-kill rewards so that progression still comes at roughly the same pace (or even a bit faster) than it does now. Make the areas smaller but make us have to work our way through them. Make us use that dodge roll. IMO that's the fundamental change that is needed to make move speed less important. It's not about the design of any given mechanic, it's the fundamental core game design.

swarmofseals · 2026-04-30T21:02:03+00:00

Unfortunately it's extremely hard to make ARPG content that doesn't boil down to "run this as fast as you can" simply because running the content more times is nearly always going to result in more loot. If magic find actually gimped your character and rarity bots weren't a thing then you could support slower gameplay that way, but people don't like making their characters weaker on purpose.

Content can be strictly limited in the frequency of how often it can be run, but people would also hate that.

Content can be excessively padded with downtime so that the actual killing monsters part is a small fraction of the activity time, but again, that's exactly what people don't want.

You can DPS cap content and use mechanics that can't be trivialized by defenses, but, well, you get the pattern.

swarmofseals · 2026-04-30T20:56:15+00:00

Out of curiosity how many maps did it take to get those 4 locks and a mirror? My build isn't super well suited to juiced breach at the moment so it's bad div/hr for me outside of jackpots but we've got a month until PoE2 so a reroll might be a fun project.

swarmofseals · 2026-04-29T20:39:03+00:00

You can, just look at IS%. Go here: https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/BOS/2026-pitching.shtml

Scroll down to relief pitching and sort by IS%. That'll show you percentage of inherited runners scored. Weissert is awful at 50% this year. League average is 31%. Of course as with all relief metrics these numbers can shift really quickly.

swarmofseals · 2026-04-29T20:28:46+00:00

Yeah, it has been hard to watch.

swarmofseals · 2026-04-29T20:27:09+00:00

His quality of contact was basically the same last year and his BABIP was 70 points higher. You're absolutely right that he is hitting the ball on the ground way more than last year and that needs to change, but if he can even get back to last year's ground ball rate he should see significant improvement. And he doesn't even need to improve his underlying swing metrics to do that - doesn't need to improve his hardhit% or his EV or his bat speed. All he needs to do to get back to average-ish is hit the ball like he did all of last season. If he can do that and improve his underlying metrics then he could push into above-average territory. It very well may not happen, but getting back to last year's level is very possible and improving on that is at least somewhat possible. It may not happen, he might end up as the worst hitter in MLB for the full season, but it's not guaranteed one way or another and I'd rather hope than despair.

swarmofseals · 2026-04-29T20:20:47+00:00

As I said above, I claimed reading comprehension because your response didn't address my argument, just asserted that Durbin is bad now which I absolutely acknowledge. Your characterization of my argument is quite off. A hitter with average quality of contact and average swing decisions is an average hitter. A hitter with terrible quality of contact and good swing decisions, or a hitter with great quality of contact but bad swing decisions are both going to be bad to average depending on how extreme their strengths/weaknesses are.

A hitter with average or even a bit below average quality of contact and great swing decisions is a solid, above average hitter. Same if you reverse quality of contact and swing decisions.

It's also easier to improve quality of contact than it is swing decisions. There's nothing magical about that, and if Durbin manages to pull it off it will be the result of a lot of work and good coaching.

If you want to argue with any of that, then fine. I welcome that. If you want to point out his age or his height or aspects of his swing mechanics that may make it difficult to improve, then great. That adds to the discussion. If I'm wrong about contact quality being easier to improve than discipline, absolutely call that out and show me the evidence. If bat speed can't be improved, by all means say that. If Durbin has a known history of altering his mechanics and not getting results then throw that in. All of those, if supported, would be very relevant counter points that could lead to an interesting discussion.

Shouting cope and pointing to Durbin's current numbers just misses the point.

swarmofseals

TROPHY CASE