Okay, so tonight is the last session of semi-drifting. Just like always, I’ll be operating on Lewis Carroll in Wonderland mode. You’ve been warned. Actually, you should have already been warned by now.
Firstly and foremost, have I discovered my chosen one? I’m not referring to my future girlfriend (seriously, only an abnormal or absurdly brave girl would consider the closest living person to Emiya Kiritsugu as her anata), but the PC. Just one word: Bolt. It ain’t got nothing to do with Usain Bolt btw.
https://www.aftershockpc.com/welcome/products/desktops
570 SGD onward sounds good to me. Considering the format of site, I’m gonna risk it and assume they included the hard drive without specifying it. Then again, I may be wrong. Either way, even if the hard drive would be calculated separately, I don’t have to spend more than 700 SGD since I don’t see myself needing the add-ons. Hopefully, I can get this deal at Heliopolis City tomorrow.
At the same time, I’ll most likely be ditching League Of Angels and Game Of Thrones: Winter Is Coming for a reason: A more permanent change to my daily schedule (i.e. my daily life). I know it sounds like bummer because it truly is. Before them, I already forced myself to ditch Tera Online and Rift. So you know it’s definitely a bummer on the correct side rather than the wrong end.
Another key reason behind this possibility is how Cryptic revamped Undermountain like Halaster experimenting stuff under his mountain. There’s no point running the other 2 games on auto while trying to readjust my brain for Neverwinter. I can be terribly obsessed once I start doing things and it’s not entirely a good trait even though this may sound like Guts’ most badass trait. After all, we all know he’s not going to give it up until he does in Griffith like how the Visigoths did in Rome in real life. Wait, is Miura Doragon-koroshitaro a history student in disguise? Maybe, I guess.
And speaking of Berserk, you can’t blame Game Of Thrones fans for going... well, berserk. If you think waiting for Berserk to exit from the other end of hiatus interstice was sheer torture, finale for the final season was said to be... well, you can ask your BFF who may still be crying her eyes out because Jon Snow stabbed Dany. No, that’s not a double entendre btw.
https://www.ricemedia.co/watched-game-of-thrones-endgame-biggsest-mistake-ever/
Reading this article actually reminded of how I got into writing in the first place. You see, writing can be therapeutic as a form of escape. If the rules of your society happened to pragmatically dickish, there’s another option called writing dark stuff. Originally, I believed it all started from the typical English contemporary literature. When my classmates were obsessed with getting a pretty girlfriend to boast about (I still remember this particular sweet beautiful girl one year older than me tbh), I was already reading the story of Ivanhoe. While they were talking about a popular and busty girl named Daisy, I was already familiarising myself with the heroic Drizzt Do’Urden. Since this was at an era of Gan Eng Seng School where there’s no primary school kids and 90% of the student population were either Ah-Sengs or the female equivalent of that, being part of the environment was like Chen Ping sharing the same school as Xiahou Ying, Fan Kuai, Guan Ying, and Zhou Bo. And it didn’t help that I was effectively that persona non grata of the system in the same way Chen Ping was the same before the generals as well.
Surprisingly, the chief influences ended up coming from a combination of epic fantasy and Japanese manga/anime. This was where difficult times arrived. Actually, they’re always there. Maybe that’s why I’m able to appreciate Interesting Times written by Sir Terry Pratchett.
No one supported me because no one understood me. This was best summed up by my ex-AS1 during my NSF days at the now defunct 32 SIB one fine day. His name was Steve Ang, but everyone called him Steve instead of Steven since he’s no Steven Lim. Steve was right about me as in being so obsessed with Japanese 2D stuff would turn girls off. But Steve was also wrong because he might have gotten the wrong idea about Japanese 2D stuff. To Steve, this video is for you since you’re definitely mature enough to deal with the contents.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H9Kqa_KJd3g
As of now, I’m still a struggler. But that’s beside the point. The point is, I never realised the fundamental difference between Japanese fiction and Western literature until just recently. It’s not just about not giving a damn to the influence of gaijin politics in America (a fact which earned the initial part of Rise Of The Shield Hero quite a fair bit of criticism due sensitive issues surrounding rape accusations and slavery). Above the whole “I care only about my Emperor and not your Captain America-vs-Iron Man civil war”, Japanese fiction is all about prioritising characters over plot. Sounds like what G.R.R. Martin would do so long as he’s still alive and not yet icy blue? Not really. Western fiction emphasises plot over characters. In short, they’re proponents of using the plot to drive the characters. That’s why in A Song Of Ice And Fire/Game Of Thrones, it’s the characters wrangling over that iron chair of swords. Japanese fiction, however, places importance on using characters to drive the plot. I know this sounds more confusing than trying to differentiate between wartime Japan and wartime U.S. where the government model was concerned. So let me just simplify this below:
Western fiction tend to have a faster pace due to how the plot dictates the characters while Japanese fiction tend to move at a slower pace to allow readers to understand the characters before moving onto the plot.
So was Steve wrong about me? The answer was no. Is he still wrong about me? The answer is definitely yes.
This is not to say I’m out to do a Berserk. For one, there’s no way I can attempt the insane level boasted by the guy who created a sane Godo (which is still very important since Berserk is all about a world where the closest thing to God would be the human desire to be... well, God). Another factor would be how easy it would be for me to try the #IMPOSSIBRU! only to fail miserably because a substandard Fett Mk III was conceived as a result. I’m not about to try something I know will fail.
However, there’s a need to conceive my own style and story. As a result, I deliberately used a few paragraphs at most to portray scenes which churches and liberal political parties would agree in unison are morally wrong. Ever wondered why a child rapist can get around 10 years’ worth of probation instead of 10 years in jail plus getting flogged ten times the amount given to Michael Fay N years ago? I’m not a fan of using even a single full page to describe child rape. And besides, my brain works more like Emiya Kiritsugu instead of Kotomine Kirei. The way my words flowed read like a bastard born from a Japanese tanka Targaryen dad and an English Stark mum. But that’s fine.
Hopefully, I can finish the edraft (i.e. edit+draft) for the next chapter of A Requiem From Winter Past. After all, the IED set off by Monica Baey actually set off my writer’s IED as well. Before I end this nonsensical post, please allow me to clarify that my writer’s IED going off had got nothing to do with Monica Baey versus NUS ideas wise. For the lack of a better way to phrase it, I was meant to be abnormal. Hence, I’m abnormal.
P.S: A Wikipedia link for Japanese fiction here.
Disclaimer: Views are of the blogger's own and does not (necessarily) reflect actual common-sense.
Thursday 23 May 2019
Friday 17 May 2019
Semi-drifting until end of May (16/5/19)
Okay, I should have started on the second chapter of The Children Of Hurin asap. After all, I managed to build up a momentum despite having to adjust my brain to the KJV style of J.R.R. Tolkien. Thankfully, my brain is currently in optimal shape for that. However, my sis will be getting married this Saturday. This means plenty of mad scrambling resulting in attempts to drive poor Victor and his lol bros mad. Also, we’re nearing the end of May where hopefully I can make a fruitful trip to Heliopolis City next weekend. At the same time, nearing the end of May means nearing yet another year of beautiful June. Minus Hatsune Miku ofc.
It was a very beautiful June.
Okay, that’s actually a lie.
I know above links are very emo. But it’s not as if the world will be facing the nearest person to Emiya Kiritsugu come this June. That’d be horrible and utterly terrible considering Singapore was recently reminded of Aloysius Pang’s untimely death in the most unfortunate manner conceivable.
I’m just going to mess this post around. In other words, it’s going to be harmless stuff. At least I hope so.
When I first started off reading The Children Of Hurin, I didn’t start from the actual deal. To better appreciate the story, one must begin from the very start. In this sense, I find The Children Of Hurin to be a good start if you want start reading the more notable works starring heroic nobodies from Singapore. Oops, I mean Shire. Sorry.
The reason why I say that is because the starting point was never a prologue. Rather, it’s teaching the reader how to speak the Tolkien language. This is not a joke, his son Chris really compiled his dad’s archaeological creations. Understanding proper Elvish won’t earn you a girlfriend from Mediacorp, but that’d surely be like getting to know your future girlfriend better. No offence intended by the way because I don’t blog like Xiaxue but rather Lewis Carroll in Wonderland.
This inspired me to try emulating Tolkien Sr on this end. At the same time, I’m under no illusion that it’s one thing to try, quite another attempting to trace Excalibur. There’s no way I can do that because we’re of two very different worlds. One was of Avalon, the other... well, was from Singapore. But knowing I’ll fail doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. Unlike the typical Singaporean, I can be as relentless as a Relentless One, Aeravor or no Aeravor.
So in this post, I’m going to try doing some pronunciation tips. Not that this will amount to something unless Tolkien Jr chooses to out something absolutely nuclear, no Original Guy’s iCloud leak could hope to outdo it. That’d be like Emiya Shirou’s Unlimited Blade Works beasting Gilgamesh’s Gate of Babylon, only that it’s not going to happen. I mean my side of circumstances since the other situation did happen.
Also, I’m going to talk some crap that’s not even 1/10 Instagram worthy. Like Goblin Slayer talking non-stop about goblins, something which every human being in Singapore and beyond would just switch off as a result.
Pronunciations according to vowels:
There are two aspects of this if we’re talking about elven names alone. Because they’re living relics from the past known as Age of Renown, pronouncing any of their names is like trying to speak proper French by using the English way of saying things. You know it’s not going to work. How France surprisingly defined Singapore’s standard of English was quite another story.
Elven names are surprisingly un-English. Both genders have a middle bridge between the first name and last. This bridge denotes the gender. For men, it’s the word “de” while for the women, it’s “von”. Quite obviously, the former sounds like French while the latter sounds like German. So just treat it like saying “it tastes like meat” rather than “it tastes like mutton” or “it tastes like beef”. However, in the same way beef doesn’t taste like mutton and vice versa, there’s a distinctive difference between pronouncing “de” and “von” beyond the alphabets. Interestingly, “de” is pronounced according to the alphabets while “von” has a longer pull. No matter which gender, the tone used is one of a softer type while the first and last names are to be more clearly pronounced.
Interestingly, places with names always start with the capital D as the sole prefix. Pronouncing this D is like saying “D” in a distinctively clear way after which the pronunciation swiftly transits to the main word itself.
Elven names comprise of either of the three vowels A, E, or I. Pronouncing the first letter means pronouncing it according to the original vowel. After that, any subsequent vowel will be pronounced in the secondary manner. However, Elven names are also meant to have some kind of French twist. At least some of them.
One thing of vital note is that Elven last names are not given based on family. Rather, they’re given on the basis of exceptional character capability and/or personality. As a result, the nobility are identified by a formal title unique to the individual’s clan. The sole exception would be the monarchy where no other person beyond royal family members can have it.
Since there’s no point in continuing like Goblin Slayer talking non-stop about goblins, I may as well list down a few names as examples.
Aeravor: {Aee-rah-vor}
Edit: I made a terrible mistake on this just now, hence the correction. Wouldn’t be surprised if Safari and Apple got me again.
Edeaux de Serpentwine: {Ee-day-ou de Ser-pen-twine}
Ioin de Bladefort: {Eye-o-in de Blayd-for}
Ines von Stormhearth: {Eye-neys vo-on Storm-hayf} with the last part sounding in an unconventional manner due to the presence of “ea”. Not to be confused with Ea btw because that’d entering actual mythology and the Epic of Gilgamesh (plus his noble phantasm)
Eijon de Morte: {Ee-yon de Mor}
Alaudea von Stormhearth: {A-low-dia vo-on Storm-hayf}
D’Estat: {D Ee-sta}
P.S: Doing this with Safari’s auto-correct is truly not for the faint of heart. I swear anyone with a lesser grip on his/her mind would have screamed and curse like an Anglo-Saxon instead of staying calm like an Anglo-Norman, university graduate or no university graduate. Needless to say, I achieved the fortitude of an Anglo-Norman for some funny reason beyond getting used to the OS taunting.
It was a very beautiful June.
Okay, that’s actually a lie.
I know above links are very emo. But it’s not as if the world will be facing the nearest person to Emiya Kiritsugu come this June. That’d be horrible and utterly terrible considering Singapore was recently reminded of Aloysius Pang’s untimely death in the most unfortunate manner conceivable.
I’m just going to mess this post around. In other words, it’s going to be harmless stuff. At least I hope so.
When I first started off reading The Children Of Hurin, I didn’t start from the actual deal. To better appreciate the story, one must begin from the very start. In this sense, I find The Children Of Hurin to be a good start if you want start reading the more notable works starring heroic nobodies from Singapore. Oops, I mean Shire. Sorry.
The reason why I say that is because the starting point was never a prologue. Rather, it’s teaching the reader how to speak the Tolkien language. This is not a joke, his son Chris really compiled his dad’s archaeological creations. Understanding proper Elvish won’t earn you a girlfriend from Mediacorp, but that’d surely be like getting to know your future girlfriend better. No offence intended by the way because I don’t blog like Xiaxue but rather Lewis Carroll in Wonderland.
This inspired me to try emulating Tolkien Sr on this end. At the same time, I’m under no illusion that it’s one thing to try, quite another attempting to trace Excalibur. There’s no way I can do that because we’re of two very different worlds. One was of Avalon, the other... well, was from Singapore. But knowing I’ll fail doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. Unlike the typical Singaporean, I can be as relentless as a Relentless One, Aeravor or no Aeravor.
So in this post, I’m going to try doing some pronunciation tips. Not that this will amount to something unless Tolkien Jr chooses to out something absolutely nuclear, no Original Guy’s iCloud leak could hope to outdo it. That’d be like Emiya Shirou’s Unlimited Blade Works beasting Gilgamesh’s Gate of Babylon, only that it’s not going to happen. I mean my side of circumstances since the other situation did happen.
Also, I’m going to talk some crap that’s not even 1/10 Instagram worthy. Like Goblin Slayer talking non-stop about goblins, something which every human being in Singapore and beyond would just switch off as a result.
Pronunciations according to vowels:
There are two aspects of this if we’re talking about elven names alone. Because they’re living relics from the past known as Age of Renown, pronouncing any of their names is like trying to speak proper French by using the English way of saying things. You know it’s not going to work. How France surprisingly defined Singapore’s standard of English was quite another story.
Elven names are surprisingly un-English. Both genders have a middle bridge between the first name and last. This bridge denotes the gender. For men, it’s the word “de” while for the women, it’s “von”. Quite obviously, the former sounds like French while the latter sounds like German. So just treat it like saying “it tastes like meat” rather than “it tastes like mutton” or “it tastes like beef”. However, in the same way beef doesn’t taste like mutton and vice versa, there’s a distinctive difference between pronouncing “de” and “von” beyond the alphabets. Interestingly, “de” is pronounced according to the alphabets while “von” has a longer pull. No matter which gender, the tone used is one of a softer type while the first and last names are to be more clearly pronounced.
Interestingly, places with names always start with the capital D as the sole prefix. Pronouncing this D is like saying “D” in a distinctively clear way after which the pronunciation swiftly transits to the main word itself.
Elven names comprise of either of the three vowels A, E, or I. Pronouncing the first letter means pronouncing it according to the original vowel. After that, any subsequent vowel will be pronounced in the secondary manner. However, Elven names are also meant to have some kind of French twist. At least some of them.
One thing of vital note is that Elven last names are not given based on family. Rather, they’re given on the basis of exceptional character capability and/or personality. As a result, the nobility are identified by a formal title unique to the individual’s clan. The sole exception would be the monarchy where no other person beyond royal family members can have it.
Since there’s no point in continuing like Goblin Slayer talking non-stop about goblins, I may as well list down a few names as examples.
Aeravor: {Aee-rah-vor}
Edit: I made a terrible mistake on this just now, hence the correction. Wouldn’t be surprised if Safari and Apple got me again.
Edeaux de Serpentwine: {Ee-day-ou de Ser-pen-twine}
Ioin de Bladefort: {Eye-o-in de Blayd-for}
Ines von Stormhearth: {Eye-neys vo-on Storm-hayf} with the last part sounding in an unconventional manner due to the presence of “ea”. Not to be confused with Ea btw because that’d entering actual mythology and the Epic of Gilgamesh (plus his noble phantasm)
Eijon de Morte: {Ee-yon de Mor}
Alaudea von Stormhearth: {A-low-dia vo-on Storm-hayf}
D’Estat: {D Ee-sta}
P.S: Doing this with Safari’s auto-correct is truly not for the faint of heart. I swear anyone with a lesser grip on his/her mind would have screamed and curse like an Anglo-Saxon instead of staying calm like an Anglo-Norman, university graduate or no university graduate. Needless to say, I achieved the fortitude of an Anglo-Norman for some funny reason beyond getting used to the OS taunting.
Tuesday 14 May 2019
Semi-drifting until end of May (14/5/19)
Okay, it’s like 10 more days before I set off to Heliopolis City for PC hunting. At the same time, this will cover the final member of the current crop of active adventurers in my Neverwinter character roster. Namely, a drow wizard named Sheallyn Melarn. More specifically an Arcanist.
Wizards are now interesting to play. The problem last time around was that the thaumaturge tree was effectively anti-boss but nothing else. By this, I mean control wizards should just spend Les Zen on an anti-boss loadout slot for a thaumaturge. Which was never practical. It’s worse than carrying a magic sword and entering a goblin lair in Goblin Slayer. You know it’s not going end well because it’s not going to start well in the first place.
Mostly SFW except for the Japanese brand of 2D waifu aesthetics
The plan for the next Neverwinter post would possibly involve a few screen grabs on my current character roster. Hopefully, no idiot is going to say that sun elf Devout cleric looks like He Ying Ying or that drow Arcanist wizard looks like Shalynn Tsai. Because that’s not true and there’s no need for POFMA and the most metal Tamil in Singapore to prove me right. Arylos is weirdly (?) based off Emiya Kiritsugu and Archer, though. Pretty sure I pulled off a Koutetsujou no Kabaneri where Ikoma was concerned. Those who know where Eren Yeager came from should know what I’m talking about.
Back to the wizard. The changes to this class can be summed up in two things: AoE spec and single-target spec. While it’s not entirely true, Thaumaturge does have better AoE options while the same could be said for Arcanist when it comes to single-target. If you think Thaumaturge is mainly good for debuffs, I can testify that a hdps Thaumaturge is 100% doable so long you got the right gear and correct feats. That actually happened during a previous Master of the Hunt run. The fight was swiftly done with the Thaumaturge hitting more than 2 million points of damage while Arylos only racked up more than 1 million. I swear if that wizard was never self-handicapped in the first place, the damage might even breach the 3 million mark. And one more thing: Unless I remembered it wrong, that Thaumaturge happened to be a tiefling. Increased damage once target’s HP drops to 50% or less? Considering the current state of combat advantage damage, I wouldn’t be surprised if tiefling population is now increasing at a rate that’d make Planned Parenthood wonder what to do next.
Now the tricky part in using an Arcanist is that how would you ensure a lack of AoE options won’t give you problems. Thankfully, the lesser the number of options available, the easier to plan. It’s like deciding your best and winning XI in soccer (football if you’re as pure as an English football fan), be you a Nordic-Teuton broomstick named Jurgen Klopp or a bald salty Catalan called Pep Guardiola (note that for some reason, Pep seems to be a popular name in Catalonia just like Jurgen in Germany).
For Arcanist, you’ll need to make the most out of three things in solo running: Evocation, Storm Fury, and Icy Terrain. Icy Terrain should be a no-brainer since it’s a magnitude 200 encounter power that comes out faster than Jeremy Clarkson’s jokes (something which logically and naturally got him into a fight with George Michael before). Modify the engine with Evocation and there you have it. So what about Storm Fury? While I’ve yet to test it against Benicio Del Toro’s fellow furries in Barovia, a combination of moderate Briartwine reflecting 3% damage back to the dealer and Storm Fury is naturally good. Unless you’re running with a taunting companion, you may need this combination so that your counter-offensive game can help taking down at least 70% of the enemies in the map. This comes to using Shield via Spell Mastery. It’s... well, a useless strategy to me. The devs closed the gap between normal version and Spell Mastery version of almost every, if not every encounter power. Shield got it especially bad. However, normal version remains useful on a relative basis. This means a decent balance between surviving and using counter-offensive lightning bolts to maintain the dps momentum. You don’t have to worry about your HP dropping too fast and you don’t have to ask whether the damage is worth it. Remember, moderate Briartwine now deals better damage than previously. This leaves us the Spell Mastery and final encounter power slots. You most likely need an effective dueling strategy, so Ray Of Enfeeblement should be a decent option. Yes, it’s just a single target debuff. But the damage is quite good for a debuff power. Most importantly, it’s fast to come out. That suits the fast execution style and my inner Saxon, so feel free to dismiss my opinion and mess around especially if you favour unleashing the hold-and-execute style and your inner Roman. And yes, I know Jeremy Clarkson comes from a nation of Anglo-Saxons.
For Spell Mastery, it’s a no-brainer for me to use Repel. Yes, the damage for Spell Mastery version isn’t good, but I’m not a chooser when it comes to jailbreaking, beggar or no beggar. And besides, Repel got low cooldown. You don’t get that now everyday.
This comes to Oppressive Force. My advice to every Arcanist is... well, just use it. Seriously, just use it especially if it’s solo running. The damage is now so good, you can one-shot the average mob without blinking and teleporting. The first shot of damage is already good enough, the second shot would just go full Magneto. Trust me, you only need to try it, not knock it.
So effectively, anti-mob strategy should look like this: Magic Missile to apply pressure, Icy Terrain modded by Evocation for AoE damage, and Spell Mastery Repel for maintaining distance after some time of applying fast pressure. And yes, Oppressive Force as well for the full Magneto.
If it’s dueling especially anti-boss: Magic Missile to apply pressure, Ray Of Enfeeblement to add damage, and Ice Knife for that cool 1400 magnitude damage. Which is a lot given it’s just a well crafted giant popsicle. Okay, it’s not. That one is really a dagger shaped guillotine never seen before in France.
Just a note on the feats: It doesn’t matter whether it’s solo’ing or raiding, if you want to choose between Assailant and Chaos Magic, then just take both. The reason why being that either feat requires 10% probability to proc upon encounter or daily power usage, so you might as well maximise the usage of practical mathematics. Personally, relying on either instead of both doesn’t feel right. It’s like having one row of nukes instead of two. Feel free to prove me wrong, though. After all, I don’t supervise the Weave whenever Mystra goes out dating with Kelemvor. Seriously, I don’t.
On the raiding, the challenge lies in the choice of class features. Should I go for Eye Of The Storm and Storm Spell for maximum damage output or something else altogether? The way critical chance works is very different from the maximum 50% Captain Nonsense stated before the mod was released. At least that’s how I see it. The thing with deflection and critical ratings seems to point toward a comparison between actual numbers instead of percentage. Simply put, it’s a case of X vs X instead of X% vs X% when it comes to critical chance vs critical avoidance, accuracy vs deflection, and combat advantage vs awareness. This means planning a critical based build involves a fair bit of dealing with the unknown. In short, how would you know your opponent’s critical avoidance in the same way the other party wouldn’t know the cards in your hand? There’s no foolproof way to do a critical based build unless it’s healing. The best advice I can offer is to make sure your critical rating manages to hit the 30K mark. Either that or your critical rating reaches between 20K to 30K with Eye Of The Storm for adding 10K more. Actually, that’s what I did for Sheallyn.
This comes to Storm Spell. 30% to deal magnitude 100 lightning damage upon critical hit didn’t seem right to me. Should 100% magnitude be seen as worth it? It’s like Toto Tan waiting to strike Toto (i.e. the Singaporean version of Powerball minus the balls. I guess?). Actually, there’s a way to better the odds. Not that it’s tantamount to Rig It Like Raj because the devs would ban my account for that. Ray Of Frost. Yes, that seemingly useless death ice ray. Why I say seemingly instead of not using this word at all is very simple: Just hold the mouse button instead of mashing it and you’ll know what I mean. Even in the event where the target is control immune, the reverse defibrillator will still work. The last time I tested this was the first time I tested it. If you want to know how decently good your Arcanist is, just do a live firing drill via Master of the Hunt skirmish. I know it sounds easy enough, but the mobs and boss there have high resistance against arcane damage. While it’s easy for Thaumaturge to bypass this handicap due to having a ridiculously versatile damage game, Arcanist doesn’t have such luxury due to the tendency of relying on arcane damage. I wasn’t expecting much, but... the seemingly absurd actually worked. Top of the damage dealer ranking ladder even though it’s just a live firing exercise.
To end this post, allow me to give a personal recommendation for Spell Mastery if you’re raiding as an Arcanist: Disintegrate.
P.S: I won’t be surprised if this scene is only other SFW video available on YouTube where Goblin Slayer is concerned. So please don’t risk it unless you’re of legal age and legal maturity. Don’t make life harder for the school authorities out to rectify a serious problem. At least I hope something good will happen after Instagram and all the justified panic.
Definitely SFW so long your eyes are on the protagonist instead of his rumoured girlfriend
Add P.S: Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder whether the Japanese are actually a bunch of accidental theologians. Emiya Kiritsugu’s brutal brand of justice highlighted the reason why everyone including homosexuals and heavy death metal fans needs the Gospel. Psycho Pass is all about original sin while the world of Berserk is one where God doesn’t exist. As for Hellsing, it’s a case of 404 God not found, be He real or not. Then you have Goblin Slayer where the seemingly least significant of monsters are the most dangerous since everybody else was too obsessed with demons, dragons, etc.
Wizards are now interesting to play. The problem last time around was that the thaumaturge tree was effectively anti-boss but nothing else. By this, I mean control wizards should just spend Les Zen on an anti-boss loadout slot for a thaumaturge. Which was never practical. It’s worse than carrying a magic sword and entering a goblin lair in Goblin Slayer. You know it’s not going end well because it’s not going to start well in the first place.
Mostly SFW except for the Japanese brand of 2D waifu aesthetics
The plan for the next Neverwinter post would possibly involve a few screen grabs on my current character roster. Hopefully, no idiot is going to say that sun elf Devout cleric looks like He Ying Ying or that drow Arcanist wizard looks like Shalynn Tsai. Because that’s not true and there’s no need for POFMA and the most metal Tamil in Singapore to prove me right. Arylos is weirdly (?) based off Emiya Kiritsugu and Archer, though. Pretty sure I pulled off a Koutetsujou no Kabaneri where Ikoma was concerned. Those who know where Eren Yeager came from should know what I’m talking about.
Back to the wizard. The changes to this class can be summed up in two things: AoE spec and single-target spec. While it’s not entirely true, Thaumaturge does have better AoE options while the same could be said for Arcanist when it comes to single-target. If you think Thaumaturge is mainly good for debuffs, I can testify that a hdps Thaumaturge is 100% doable so long you got the right gear and correct feats. That actually happened during a previous Master of the Hunt run. The fight was swiftly done with the Thaumaturge hitting more than 2 million points of damage while Arylos only racked up more than 1 million. I swear if that wizard was never self-handicapped in the first place, the damage might even breach the 3 million mark. And one more thing: Unless I remembered it wrong, that Thaumaturge happened to be a tiefling. Increased damage once target’s HP drops to 50% or less? Considering the current state of combat advantage damage, I wouldn’t be surprised if tiefling population is now increasing at a rate that’d make Planned Parenthood wonder what to do next.
Now the tricky part in using an Arcanist is that how would you ensure a lack of AoE options won’t give you problems. Thankfully, the lesser the number of options available, the easier to plan. It’s like deciding your best and winning XI in soccer (football if you’re as pure as an English football fan), be you a Nordic-Teuton broomstick named Jurgen Klopp or a bald salty Catalan called Pep Guardiola (note that for some reason, Pep seems to be a popular name in Catalonia just like Jurgen in Germany).
For Arcanist, you’ll need to make the most out of three things in solo running: Evocation, Storm Fury, and Icy Terrain. Icy Terrain should be a no-brainer since it’s a magnitude 200 encounter power that comes out faster than Jeremy Clarkson’s jokes (something which logically and naturally got him into a fight with George Michael before). Modify the engine with Evocation and there you have it. So what about Storm Fury? While I’ve yet to test it against Benicio Del Toro’s fellow furries in Barovia, a combination of moderate Briartwine reflecting 3% damage back to the dealer and Storm Fury is naturally good. Unless you’re running with a taunting companion, you may need this combination so that your counter-offensive game can help taking down at least 70% of the enemies in the map. This comes to using Shield via Spell Mastery. It’s... well, a useless strategy to me. The devs closed the gap between normal version and Spell Mastery version of almost every, if not every encounter power. Shield got it especially bad. However, normal version remains useful on a relative basis. This means a decent balance between surviving and using counter-offensive lightning bolts to maintain the dps momentum. You don’t have to worry about your HP dropping too fast and you don’t have to ask whether the damage is worth it. Remember, moderate Briartwine now deals better damage than previously. This leaves us the Spell Mastery and final encounter power slots. You most likely need an effective dueling strategy, so Ray Of Enfeeblement should be a decent option. Yes, it’s just a single target debuff. But the damage is quite good for a debuff power. Most importantly, it’s fast to come out. That suits the fast execution style and my inner Saxon, so feel free to dismiss my opinion and mess around especially if you favour unleashing the hold-and-execute style and your inner Roman. And yes, I know Jeremy Clarkson comes from a nation of Anglo-Saxons.
For Spell Mastery, it’s a no-brainer for me to use Repel. Yes, the damage for Spell Mastery version isn’t good, but I’m not a chooser when it comes to jailbreaking, beggar or no beggar. And besides, Repel got low cooldown. You don’t get that now everyday.
This comes to Oppressive Force. My advice to every Arcanist is... well, just use it. Seriously, just use it especially if it’s solo running. The damage is now so good, you can one-shot the average mob without blinking and teleporting. The first shot of damage is already good enough, the second shot would just go full Magneto. Trust me, you only need to try it, not knock it.
So effectively, anti-mob strategy should look like this: Magic Missile to apply pressure, Icy Terrain modded by Evocation for AoE damage, and Spell Mastery Repel for maintaining distance after some time of applying fast pressure. And yes, Oppressive Force as well for the full Magneto.
If it’s dueling especially anti-boss: Magic Missile to apply pressure, Ray Of Enfeeblement to add damage, and Ice Knife for that cool 1400 magnitude damage. Which is a lot given it’s just a well crafted giant popsicle. Okay, it’s not. That one is really a dagger shaped guillotine never seen before in France.
Just a note on the feats: It doesn’t matter whether it’s solo’ing or raiding, if you want to choose between Assailant and Chaos Magic, then just take both. The reason why being that either feat requires 10% probability to proc upon encounter or daily power usage, so you might as well maximise the usage of practical mathematics. Personally, relying on either instead of both doesn’t feel right. It’s like having one row of nukes instead of two. Feel free to prove me wrong, though. After all, I don’t supervise the Weave whenever Mystra goes out dating with Kelemvor. Seriously, I don’t.
On the raiding, the challenge lies in the choice of class features. Should I go for Eye Of The Storm and Storm Spell for maximum damage output or something else altogether? The way critical chance works is very different from the maximum 50% Captain Nonsense stated before the mod was released. At least that’s how I see it. The thing with deflection and critical ratings seems to point toward a comparison between actual numbers instead of percentage. Simply put, it’s a case of X vs X instead of X% vs X% when it comes to critical chance vs critical avoidance, accuracy vs deflection, and combat advantage vs awareness. This means planning a critical based build involves a fair bit of dealing with the unknown. In short, how would you know your opponent’s critical avoidance in the same way the other party wouldn’t know the cards in your hand? There’s no foolproof way to do a critical based build unless it’s healing. The best advice I can offer is to make sure your critical rating manages to hit the 30K mark. Either that or your critical rating reaches between 20K to 30K with Eye Of The Storm for adding 10K more. Actually, that’s what I did for Sheallyn.
This comes to Storm Spell. 30% to deal magnitude 100 lightning damage upon critical hit didn’t seem right to me. Should 100% magnitude be seen as worth it? It’s like Toto Tan waiting to strike Toto (i.e. the Singaporean version of Powerball minus the balls. I guess?). Actually, there’s a way to better the odds. Not that it’s tantamount to Rig It Like Raj because the devs would ban my account for that. Ray Of Frost. Yes, that seemingly useless death ice ray. Why I say seemingly instead of not using this word at all is very simple: Just hold the mouse button instead of mashing it and you’ll know what I mean. Even in the event where the target is control immune, the reverse defibrillator will still work. The last time I tested this was the first time I tested it. If you want to know how decently good your Arcanist is, just do a live firing drill via Master of the Hunt skirmish. I know it sounds easy enough, but the mobs and boss there have high resistance against arcane damage. While it’s easy for Thaumaturge to bypass this handicap due to having a ridiculously versatile damage game, Arcanist doesn’t have such luxury due to the tendency of relying on arcane damage. I wasn’t expecting much, but... the seemingly absurd actually worked. Top of the damage dealer ranking ladder even though it’s just a live firing exercise.
To end this post, allow me to give a personal recommendation for Spell Mastery if you’re raiding as an Arcanist: Disintegrate.
P.S: I won’t be surprised if this scene is only other SFW video available on YouTube where Goblin Slayer is concerned. So please don’t risk it unless you’re of legal age and legal maturity. Don’t make life harder for the school authorities out to rectify a serious problem. At least I hope something good will happen after Instagram and all the justified panic.
Definitely SFW so long your eyes are on the protagonist instead of his rumoured girlfriend
Add P.S: Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder whether the Japanese are actually a bunch of accidental theologians. Emiya Kiritsugu’s brutal brand of justice highlighted the reason why everyone including homosexuals and heavy death metal fans needs the Gospel. Psycho Pass is all about original sin while the world of Berserk is one where God doesn’t exist. As for Hellsing, it’s a case of 404 God not found, be He real or not. Then you have Goblin Slayer where the seemingly least significant of monsters are the most dangerous since everybody else was too obsessed with demons, dragons, etc.
Monday 13 May 2019
Semi-drifting until end of May (12/5/19)
It’s... I don’t know whether it should be called ridiculous or absurd, but it truly felt surreal when I logged into my blog account just for fun. And no, I’ve yet to come to the point where the need to self-express online becomes the need for internet weed instead of actual weed, legal or not. Anyway, this blog has always been written in English apart from exceptional moments of non-English words being used. Like kono hito de nashi.
Hence, imagine my surprise when I saw an unexpected spike. 70 hits/views may seem nothing to you. But because I knew blogging like Lewis Carroll in Wonderland has always been a bad idea, 70 looked like an unnatural case of suspicious activity coming from China. See what I’m saying about blogging like Lewis Carroll in Wonderland. Long story short, 5 hits/views hailed from the nation of Emma Watson, Emilia Clarke, and the Anglo-Saxons. That’s natural except I didn’t remember when was the last time this happened. Then I got 38 hits/views coming from the Dutch. That has to be a moment of smoking weed. Something wasn’t right, but I was sure Simona Halep won the Spanish clay. Then came the greater moment of smoking weed: Kiki Bertens became Kicki Bertens. I’m utterly convinced this was nothing more than coincidence. Then again, like what I said about the nation of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Celts, I didn’t remember when was the last time this happened.
Anyway, I’ll be looking to finish my Neverwinter tactical guide. Which means I need to get the wizard and barbarian done. And one more thing: I wouldn’t be surprised if a Greek pep talk is what Belinda Bencic needs. Hopefully, I won’t get myself into trouble over this.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jHFA7x_IogE
Let me first start with the barbarian. Otherwise known as Wolfhawk, the dilemma I was facing was whether I wanted to try testing my limits or be content with the great weapon fighter status quo. To choose Swordmaster would have been perfectly okay, but to choose Sentinel means you should have been born a Greek rather than being a Singaporean. As it turned out, I was crazy enough to choose being a Greek.
Sentinel tanking game is a different kind of monster compared to Iron Vanguard fighter and Oath Of Protection paladin. This is due to how the Tab mechanic works. In one sense, tanking as either a fighter or paladin is easier due to how the human brain works in the face of status quo. In other words, we tend to be more comfortable with the things we’re used to doing. You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung to understand this. In fact, you don’t even need a degree from NUS or any other university to know that. Maybe that’s why the likes of NUS and NTU are still getting the likes of Tom LeVoyeur rather than the likes of Remy LeBeau.
At the same time, however, Sentinel tanking can be easier once you get used to the idea that holding Shift is more important than that of the other two tanking options. In short, learning how to use a Sentinel properly requires the determination of a tactician. And the finest tacticians are the ones willing to grapple with unknown territory.
Quite obviously, no one is telling you to be the next William Sherman. And besides, if you’re a Singaporean, it means the rules of society would most likely ban you from being like the daring son of an American gun who actually won the American Civil War for the Unionists at the final lap despite the presence of Robert. E. Lee among the Confederates.
Using the Sentinel means understanding the fact that Tab spamming is legal and part of the SOP. In other words, you’ll need #UNSTOPPABRU! for more than half of any fight. There are two ways to plan a Sentinel build. Either you go for a more offensive strategy (but definitely not as offensive as Conan/Conanina the Swordmaster/mistress) or the typical defensive tank more than half of the gaming community would be comfortable with. Most likely, anyway. On the attributes, you only need to choose one out of two: Strength and Constitution or Strength and Dexterity. The former is more direct, the latter requires a higher level of tactical sense. If you’ve played the game long enough (I actually started playing since 2014 during mod 4), you might have already developed the feel. Not the feel of a dealmaker, but the feel of a tactician. In other words, how sensitive are you when it comes to detecting whether the dps momentum is for you or against you? I won’t be surprised if tanking in Halaster’s titular base under a mountain now requires more of this tactician’s instinct.
Because Constitution also affects AP increment and tanking now needs more daily power activation, a Strength-Constitution Sentinel is strongly recommended for beginners. A Strength-Dexterity build, on the other hand, is more raid friendly due to Dexterity now affecting movement speed instead of slotting Dark enchantments in your gear utility slots. Personally, I’m a fan of offensive tanking at least where the Sentinel is concerned. This is because choosing Sentinel means having to deal with a 10% drop in damage. I won’t call this the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, but I have to say I never liked the idea of letting a 10% damage drop resulting in an actual trade-off. This is why I favoured a Strength-Dexterity strategy. Yes, I admit my feel for the momentum is decent enough. At least it should be.
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2019/05/just-another-goblin.html
Before I continue, allow me to point out that Negation is officially crap for every build unless you’re a tank. Please note the second half of this statement. The reason why being that racking up 10 stacks of 0.01% damage resistance doesn’t square with my view as a dps gamer. After all, I do main a ranger. However, auto-heal upon 10 stacks being reached (and cleared) can do quite a bit for tanking due to how combat advantage damage now works on both ends. Before Undermountain went live preview, let alone officially live, I decided to purchase a few enchantments on a low(er) budget basis. So I got myself a lesser Flaming weapon enchantment, a moderate Briartwine armour enchantment, and a moderate Dread weapon enchantment. Something I did more for the fun of it turned out to be a case of pleasantly unintentional consequences. Right now, Negation enchantment is only useful for tanking. But Briartwine is definitely now more of a decently multi-purpose usage. As a result, I have to do a bit of switching. Negation is now strictly for tanks while Briartwine is now for the rest.
Tanking in this mod is now all about how you grab the aggro. In solo running, you don’t need to grab it like Trump because solo running means the aggro would only go after you. Initially, Angel of Protection looked like a a good companion. Auto-shielding and high-end healing. Then I realised it didn’t do much for bringing in combat advantage damage. Actually, Kasca never did anything on that part. This made the Lantern of Revelation artifact half-useless, the reason why being combat advantage being its 3rd stat. This is not to say Kasca will be discarded. In fact, I’m planning to use her for raids. But for solo running, the plan is to use Vesuvius. Not the Roman volcano but a . Not a Roman Cambion, by the way. Right now, that guy is at green rank. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll up him to blue just to unlock the final form of aesthetics plus the actually useful level 30 bonus effect. But I’ll need 250K astral diamonds. Thankfully, I currently have no impulse to spend. This gives me plenty of space to carbonise the aforementioned 250K.
Now because I favour constant rage building, one thing I noticed about rage gauge increment was that rage building is now a game of actual fluctuation. In other words, actual combat would involve the rage gauge going up and down like the global stock market if it’s neither a bull nor bear. As a result, running on a Strength-Dexterity build requires more moments of #UNSTOPPABRU! than what I was used to before Halaster joined Cryptic. The adjustment wasn’t that bad, to be honest. You now don’t have to wait for a half-full rage gauge to become angry. Just a two-third empty gauge and you’re most likely be able to be one angry and unstoppable immovable object.
On the shielding, I find holding Shift to be more useful if you’re in the red zone. So unless you’re in it, my suggestion is to keep calm and carry on being angry. And one more thing: Shielding now only protects you for half of your maximum HP. This is why I did recommend Strength-Constitution build for beginners.
P.S: Okay, it’s getting a bit late. So yeah, I can only afford to start a lecture on Arcanist wizard in another post.
Add P.S: Don’t we love what YouTube can throw at us at times?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AsbONudibqo
Hence, imagine my surprise when I saw an unexpected spike. 70 hits/views may seem nothing to you. But because I knew blogging like Lewis Carroll in Wonderland has always been a bad idea, 70 looked like an unnatural case of suspicious activity coming from China. See what I’m saying about blogging like Lewis Carroll in Wonderland. Long story short, 5 hits/views hailed from the nation of Emma Watson, Emilia Clarke, and the Anglo-Saxons. That’s natural except I didn’t remember when was the last time this happened. Then I got 38 hits/views coming from the Dutch. That has to be a moment of smoking weed. Something wasn’t right, but I was sure Simona Halep won the Spanish clay. Then came the greater moment of smoking weed: Kiki Bertens became Kicki Bertens. I’m utterly convinced this was nothing more than coincidence. Then again, like what I said about the nation of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Celts, I didn’t remember when was the last time this happened.
Anyway, I’ll be looking to finish my Neverwinter tactical guide. Which means I need to get the wizard and barbarian done. And one more thing: I wouldn’t be surprised if a Greek pep talk is what Belinda Bencic needs. Hopefully, I won’t get myself into trouble over this.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jHFA7x_IogE
Let me first start with the barbarian. Otherwise known as Wolfhawk, the dilemma I was facing was whether I wanted to try testing my limits or be content with the great weapon fighter status quo. To choose Swordmaster would have been perfectly okay, but to choose Sentinel means you should have been born a Greek rather than being a Singaporean. As it turned out, I was crazy enough to choose being a Greek.
Sentinel tanking game is a different kind of monster compared to Iron Vanguard fighter and Oath Of Protection paladin. This is due to how the Tab mechanic works. In one sense, tanking as either a fighter or paladin is easier due to how the human brain works in the face of status quo. In other words, we tend to be more comfortable with the things we’re used to doing. You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung to understand this. In fact, you don’t even need a degree from NUS or any other university to know that. Maybe that’s why the likes of NUS and NTU are still getting the likes of Tom LeVoyeur rather than the likes of Remy LeBeau.
At the same time, however, Sentinel tanking can be easier once you get used to the idea that holding Shift is more important than that of the other two tanking options. In short, learning how to use a Sentinel properly requires the determination of a tactician. And the finest tacticians are the ones willing to grapple with unknown territory.
Quite obviously, no one is telling you to be the next William Sherman. And besides, if you’re a Singaporean, it means the rules of society would most likely ban you from being like the daring son of an American gun who actually won the American Civil War for the Unionists at the final lap despite the presence of Robert. E. Lee among the Confederates.
Using the Sentinel means understanding the fact that Tab spamming is legal and part of the SOP. In other words, you’ll need #UNSTOPPABRU! for more than half of any fight. There are two ways to plan a Sentinel build. Either you go for a more offensive strategy (but definitely not as offensive as Conan/Conanina the Swordmaster/mistress) or the typical defensive tank more than half of the gaming community would be comfortable with. Most likely, anyway. On the attributes, you only need to choose one out of two: Strength and Constitution or Strength and Dexterity. The former is more direct, the latter requires a higher level of tactical sense. If you’ve played the game long enough (I actually started playing since 2014 during mod 4), you might have already developed the feel. Not the feel of a dealmaker, but the feel of a tactician. In other words, how sensitive are you when it comes to detecting whether the dps momentum is for you or against you? I won’t be surprised if tanking in Halaster’s titular base under a mountain now requires more of this tactician’s instinct.
Because Constitution also affects AP increment and tanking now needs more daily power activation, a Strength-Constitution Sentinel is strongly recommended for beginners. A Strength-Dexterity build, on the other hand, is more raid friendly due to Dexterity now affecting movement speed instead of slotting Dark enchantments in your gear utility slots. Personally, I’m a fan of offensive tanking at least where the Sentinel is concerned. This is because choosing Sentinel means having to deal with a 10% drop in damage. I won’t call this the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, but I have to say I never liked the idea of letting a 10% damage drop resulting in an actual trade-off. This is why I favoured a Strength-Dexterity strategy. Yes, I admit my feel for the momentum is decent enough. At least it should be.
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2019/05/just-another-goblin.html
Before I continue, allow me to point out that Negation is officially crap for every build unless you’re a tank. Please note the second half of this statement. The reason why being that racking up 10 stacks of 0.01% damage resistance doesn’t square with my view as a dps gamer. After all, I do main a ranger. However, auto-heal upon 10 stacks being reached (and cleared) can do quite a bit for tanking due to how combat advantage damage now works on both ends. Before Undermountain went live preview, let alone officially live, I decided to purchase a few enchantments on a low(er) budget basis. So I got myself a lesser Flaming weapon enchantment, a moderate Briartwine armour enchantment, and a moderate Dread weapon enchantment. Something I did more for the fun of it turned out to be a case of pleasantly unintentional consequences. Right now, Negation enchantment is only useful for tanking. But Briartwine is definitely now more of a decently multi-purpose usage. As a result, I have to do a bit of switching. Negation is now strictly for tanks while Briartwine is now for the rest.
Tanking in this mod is now all about how you grab the aggro. In solo running, you don’t need to grab it like Trump because solo running means the aggro would only go after you. Initially, Angel of Protection looked like a a good companion. Auto-shielding and high-end healing. Then I realised it didn’t do much for bringing in combat advantage damage. Actually, Kasca never did anything on that part. This made the Lantern of Revelation artifact half-useless, the reason why being combat advantage being its 3rd stat. This is not to say Kasca will be discarded. In fact, I’m planning to use her for raids. But for solo running, the plan is to use Vesuvius. Not the Roman volcano but a . Not a Roman Cambion, by the way. Right now, that guy is at green rank. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll up him to blue just to unlock the final form of aesthetics plus the actually useful level 30 bonus effect. But I’ll need 250K astral diamonds. Thankfully, I currently have no impulse to spend. This gives me plenty of space to carbonise the aforementioned 250K.
Now because I favour constant rage building, one thing I noticed about rage gauge increment was that rage building is now a game of actual fluctuation. In other words, actual combat would involve the rage gauge going up and down like the global stock market if it’s neither a bull nor bear. As a result, running on a Strength-Dexterity build requires more moments of #UNSTOPPABRU! than what I was used to before Halaster joined Cryptic. The adjustment wasn’t that bad, to be honest. You now don’t have to wait for a half-full rage gauge to become angry. Just a two-third empty gauge and you’re most likely be able to be one angry and unstoppable immovable object.
On the shielding, I find holding Shift to be more useful if you’re in the red zone. So unless you’re in it, my suggestion is to keep calm and carry on being angry. And one more thing: Shielding now only protects you for half of your maximum HP. This is why I did recommend Strength-Constitution build for beginners.
P.S: Okay, it’s getting a bit late. So yeah, I can only afford to start a lecture on Arcanist wizard in another post.
Add P.S: Don’t we love what YouTube can throw at us at times?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AsbONudibqo
Friday 10 May 2019
Semi-drifting until end of May (10/5/19)
Okay, I won’t be getting a rare fungus for sure. Otherwise known as Halaster’s ‘shroom, the free pack giving out a rare Myconid companion among other things won’t be entering any of my character’s inventory. It’s quite interesting when I tried finding life lessons from my circumstances since birth. Yes, I do complain at times. Then again, every Singaporean does complain regardless of race, language, or political allegiance. To complain is to be human. Otherwise, you’re a case of kono hito de nashi.
It’s interesting to know that Drizzt Do’Urden has no need for potions. He only needs what is truly necessary. Bonus stuff and potions can create a psychological barrier slowing down progress. And besides, that rare mage’s mushroom is no Regis. Sour grapes joke aside, have you ever ask yourself what should you do if the education system called you a dog? Note that I’m not referring to anybody from NUS, Nicholas Lim or no Nicholas Lim.
A valuable lesson I’ve learnt was that if you’re seen as a dog, then live like a wolf. I’m not telling you to be cynical, vindictive, horny, or a Roman soldier. Rather, the difference between a dog and a wolf lies in dignity built upon the proper understanding of what you have instead of what others have.
If you can do something, choose whether or not to do it but be prepared to live with the consequences.
If you failed someone, admit to it.
If you can’t control the situation before you, don’t react as if it’s the opposite.
If you think there’s something wrong with the world, you’re correct. That’s why people suffer, be they Monica Baey, Nicholas Lim, or Ned Stark’s bastard.
This comes to mind my analysis of the first chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien’s DC novel. If possible, I hope to do a chapter analysis post by post. Hopefully, Christopher Tolkien won’t get to read this. After all, it’s not as if I’m some kind of genius who would eventually humiliate the Singaporean education culture in an epic manner no different from Turin Turambar slaying a dragon (apparently, only three heroic figures managed to do so, the other two being Bard and that son of gun Earendil).
Now before I begin, here’s some advice to you, my fellow Singaporeans:
The Children Of Hurin is a book like no other. If you desire an epic comeback where the big dark boss upstairs finally lost the battle, this book isn’t for you. If you desire the typical Singaporean feel-good script synonymous with everybody’s favourite citizen of a Jewish state, forget about it. In this story, you’ll be seeing heroism, tragedy, and why the world actually sucks more than others would like you to believe in. In the words of the Japanese perspective...
There is no rainbow but only fire and loss.
There is no gold but only iron and blood.
There is no peace but only strife and tragedy.
There are heroes but they are mocked.
There are men of valour but alas driven mad.
There is still hope but darkness reigns for now.
There is still light but not today.
The armies of Elves and Men, the hordes of evil
One armed with radiance, the other shrouded in black
Bows were drawn, arrows loosed.
Swords glimmered, blood was spilt
Mourn with a mother for a son lain dead.
Grieve with a maiden for her lover slain.
The old stripped of armour, the young fed the crows.
When, O our Gods, will you avenge our woes?
~A Song For This Very Age
By Cuorn Clearlight (aka Kuok Ming Hui)
When you first flip open a book, what do you expect? Do you expect a likable plot? Do you expect heroes worthy of adoration and antagonists worthy of vilification, as terribly Nicholas Lim and horribly moralistically cookie cutter as this may sound? As unexpectedly pro-K culture as I sound, being drawn to the words and sentences used is a must. It’s called the flow of words amounting to alternative hypnosis. Ever wondered why the Twilight novels were so popular despite the legend of Lestat de Lioncourt, Tom Cruise or no Tom Cruise? Ever wondered how the 50 Shades trilogy became countless times more famous than the star couple of Han Solo and Princess Leia, as unfortunately accidental this statement sounds?
It’s called whether the words and sentences can suck you in. Sometimes, it’s due to personal taste. Sometimes, it’s just a question of your intelligence. Unlike contemporary works both good and bad (let alone mediocre), Tolkien’s works are not for the faint of heart. Faint of heart as in the sentence structure can be intimidating. As human beings, we’re used to shorter sequences of words. It’s okay to use long sentences so the pacing is fast enough. This is why there are fans preferring Harry Potter and it got nothing to do with how intelligent, beautiful, and sexy Emma Watson is.
As a Singaporean just like Kevin Kwan, I know how it feels to read a chapter while wondering when the paint would dry. If Americans are consumers of the fast food industry, then we Singaporeans are the consumers of a fast food culture. As a result, a few things got compromised along the way. Discipline and actual intelligence happened to be two of them.
Discipline isn’t just about not peeping at that pretty girl taking a shower at NUS, NTU, or just about anywhere else. Actual intelligence isn’t just about surviving on pragmatism alone as if surviving on junk food won’t ensure your death at SGH, NUH, or just about anywhere else. Reading Tolkien’s works require two things: The discipline of an intellectual and William Shakespeare’s level of linguistic excellence. Okay, that’s a lie. You just need to decide for yourself whether your mental fortitude is good enough and whether you want to go ahead. Also, please don’t forget your command of English. Unless your level of written English exceeds that of the average Singaporean university student, you cannot enter the kingdom of Tolkien. So why am I able to say that? Go figure.
Enough of making fun of people and my fellow Singaporeans. Let’s continue the journey of madness and darkness. Hopefully, we won’t end up in Angband unless your boyfriend is Beren and your girlfriend is Luthien Tinuviel.
Speaking of the greatest love story in Tolkien literature (yes, the story of Aragorn and Arwen paled in comparison and I don’t care how many Singaporeans actually heard of the original and greatest deal), The Children Of Hurin took place many years after this Shakespearean tale of man and elf. The mention was blatantly there. At the same time, it must be stated that the tale of Beren and Luthien was directly linked to a set of jewels famously known as the Silmarilli. Long story short, there’s this race of Elves called the Noldor. Known as the elite of the living races of Arda, their most notable feat ended creating a disaster worse than any financial meltdown in human history. Actually, that’s an understatement. There’s this major power of darkness, his name was Morgoth. Originally named Melkor, we can also call him the big dark boss upstairs. Or the big dark boss for the sake of convenience. So Morgoth stole the Silmarilli and the head of the Noldor wasn’t amused by this act of theft. To Feanor, stealing his people’s racial jewels was an act countless times worst than IP theft, the heist a far greater act of thievery than any feat committed by the duo of Bonnie and Clyde. So there you have it. A summary of how the most epic war in epic fantasy started. Remember, it took only one guy, a set of racial jewels, and a pissed off Elven lord. Also, Feanor did stupid things in a bid to heal his stupid pride. The most notable feat of stupidity actually involved the mass murder of other Elves. Kono hito de nashi...
Now in The Children Of Hurin, the impact of what started the whole damned war was still sorely felt. Feanor started it and no one could reverse it. As for Feanor, he actually died a long time ago. So how dark were the days since war continued raging? Let’s do a bit of Singaporean historical maths here:
During World War 2, Singapore endured the darkest days of its existence. More specifically, we’re talking about three years and eight months. That’s way worse than Winston Churchill turning emo upon hearing word of the impossibru happening.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Singapore#Aftermath
So imagine this: Singapore renamed as Syonan-to as a trophy to the Showa Emperor. Not for three years and eight months but three centuries and eight decades. Not to mention still counting as well. That’s how terrible things were to the necessary alliance of Elves and Men.
At this point, I must mention that not all Men decided to be the good guys by helping the good guys. In The Children Of Hurin, the Three Houses Of Men (i.e. the aforementioned good guys) never mentioned why their forefathers decided to rage quit the East and flee West. It’s apparent, however, that either the trauma, anger, or both were too much for them to even speak about. Of course, this would have resulted in the Elves casting their suspicions. Rightfully so, to tell the cold hard truth. I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but it’s a good thing that Feanor died. No, I don’t have a Beorning axe to grind despite my past and the upcoming general elections.
The first chapter wasn’t so much about our most tragic hero. Rather, it’s more about his heroic dad, Hurin. Now please be warned that for some reason, Tolkien chose to write some serious genealogical stuff. You know the deal. Who gave birth to who and who was the grandfather to who... boring stuff, I have to say. But if you want to, you can try tracing the genealogy as you keep reading. I have to say that worked tremendously well in carrying on with the book. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be Hajime to do that. And besides, that’d mean your girlfriend is scary, attractive, and have an envious figure at the same time.
This chapter focused on two notable aspects of bravery in dark times like this: Pragmatism and faith. In life, it’s very hard to have both. Even more so if you’re a Singaporean. But then again, no one ever said Hurin was from Singapore. His pragmatism shows in the simple form of understanding. He knew what was going to happen. The conversation between him and his beloved wife Morwen. They say a picture tells a hundred words, some may even say a comic strip tells a thousand more. Tolkien’s genius proved that this is no absolute logic. In a sequence of spoken words, the reader would embark on a trip reaching to the very depths of Hurin’s personality and humanity. While not all things were revealed, Hurin’s unwavering fortitude was for all to see. Remember, we’re talking about the dark age of warfare, funerals, and whether you’re going to die in the next 24 hours. This was a global war zone, not some family feud incapable of making a City of Atlantis out of Singapore.
This comes to three other characters. Namely, Morwen, Sador, and Turin. These three represented three different outlooks to life. Namely, sorrow, unworthiness, and innocence.
Let’s start with sorrow. Morwen, on the first glance, may turn off the typical angry Singaporean. Why? Because of two things: The fact she was part of nobility and looked down on Sador. In particular, her attitude towards Sador may result in some unwanted reminders. Yet, it was already explained in the story that she’s literally a war survivor.
[...but she was somewhat stern of mood and proud. The sorrows of the House of Beor saddened her heart; for she came as an exile to Dor-lomin from Dorthonion after the ruin of the Bragollach.]
~The Children Of Hurin; Chapter I: The Childhood Of Turin
We all know a person’s childhood is linked to his parents. Sometimes, things went well because your parents were blessed with love and wisdom. If it’s neither, that’s called abusive childhood. Since it’s impossible to have wisdom without love, love without wisdom means you’re going to screwed as well. Most likely an emotionally abusive childhood in the most insidious way. Turin was lucky. Even though his father was rarely at home, his mother was more than up for it. A note to all you married men before I continue: Please don’t use Hurin as an example to neglect your family due to work. I know it’s hard, but please take seriously the fact that unlike Hurin, your job doesn’t require you to risk death. Literally.
This comes to Sador. Fact one: He’s crippled. Fact two: It was due to an accident. Fact three: Morwen looked down on him as a result. Here, I’m going to talk about fact one and three. For the last one, it seemed unacceptable to have Morwen to look down on a poor crippled servant. This was definitely a different case from Monica Baey entering Israel mode against NUS. However, it must be pointed out that in another scenario and another world, it’s very likely Morwen would have behaved in the opposite manner. There are ways to cope with grief and loss, but not all are good. Through her attitude towards Sador, one could sense a destructive coping mechanism against grief. Years of understanding the cold hard truth made her a cynical lady. This was in contrast with her husband where years of understanding the same cold hard truth made him a courageous lion of a lord.
As for fact one, this was tied with Turin’s childhood. Sador’s existence wasn’t just an eyesore to a subtly cynical Morwen. He was effectively a fatherly figure to Turin due to his physical disability hindering his life. Contrary to Morwen’s short-sighted realism, reality proved to us that disability can result in pleasantly unintended consequences. This is proof that no man’s world view is the absolute truth unless it’s proven that there’s a man who is also God. Otherwise, no man can ever be called God.
It must be noted that there were two aspects of Turin’s childhood that would eventually shape the tragic hero he was meant to be.
[But Turin was loved less than she (i.e. his sister Urwen). He was dark-haired as his mother, and promised to be like her in mood also; for he was not merry, and spoke little, though he learned to speak early and ever seemed older than his years. Turin was slow to forget injustice or mockery; but the fire of his father was also in him, and he could be sudden and fierce. Yet he was quick to pity, and the hurts or sadness of living things might move him to tears; and he was like his father in this also...]
~The Children Of Hurin; Chapter I: The Childhood Of Turin
It’s been commonly said that local Singaporean women are materialistic, arrogant, and pro-white regardless of skin colour. In fact, things got so bad that I was left wondering whether it’s legal for a Malaysian doctor in Australia joining the dark side of Sammyboy forum. To all my fellow Singaporean guys, my advice to you is this: Please learn from Hurin. He’s your role model. My advice to local Singaporean girls is this: It doesn’t matter if you’re Chinese, Malay, Indian, or Eurasian. Unless you’re married or attached, please understand that a man like Hurin is far more of any you see in dramas and movies.
So why was Turin less loved than his sister? Was it because it’s easier to be adored if you’re the younger child and that your older sibling happened to be a guy? This part of Turin reminded me of myself, I’m not joking here. From this excerpt, we know that Turin was one hell of a complicated kid. He’s not the kind of boy any parent could manage. In the eyes of the typical Singaporean parent, Turin would be unmanageable at worst and nigh impossible to understand at best. Wait, am I referring to myself? Anyway, it must be pointed out that his maturity was way ahead of his peers. In any Singaporean school, be it good or exceptional, this kind of guy would have been hailed as a boss. Unfortunately, there’d also be a higher chance of him being the only Jewish kid in the chaotic world of schoolyard democracy and hegemonies.
Because it’s getting late now, I have to close it with an interesting part of the chapter. While it’s logical for Tolkien to begin the tale from Turin’s genealogy, the reader wasn’t introduced straightaway to Hurin’s. Tolkien chose to give the reader a Stone Cold Stunner even though he wasn’t born in an era known for Vince MacMahon and, later on, Donald Trump. This is not a joke, guys and girls. Donald Trump really appeared on the wrestling TV before he became President Trump. The following scene took us to the only flying transport available to the good guys: Eagles, be they bald or golden, so long they’re big enough. Just ask Gandalf, he knows.
Long story short, Hurin and his brother Huor ended up in Gondolin. This was an Elven city of great renown. At the same time, it’s the Elven version of North Korea. Surrounded by a ring of unnavigable mountains with the only entrance being secret and heavily guarded, Gondolin was a sight to behold. Atop a hill overshadowed and surrounded by a fortress of mountains, one might wonder whether New Zealand could afford this manner of natural bulwark of beauty and strength.
At that point, I couldn’t help but wonder where this part would be heading. Roughly one-third of the chapter was spent on Gondolin and related scenes beyond the walls. With that, I’m going to end this with two more excerpts from the first chapter.
[Huor wedded Rian, the cousin of Morwen; she was the daughter of Belegund son of Bregolas. By hard fate was she born in such days, for she was gentle of heart and loved neither hunting nor war. Her love was given to trees and to the flowers of the wild, and she was a singer and a maker of songs. Two months only had she been wedded to Huor when he went with his brother to the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and she never saw him again.]
[Then at last Hurin sprang into his saddle, and his golden banner was unfurled, and the trumpets sang again in the morning; and thus Hurin Thalion rode away to Nirnaeth Arnoediad.
But Morwen and Turin stood still by the doors, until far away they heard the faint call of a single horn on the wind: Hurin had passed over the shoulder of the hill, beyond which he could see his house no more.]
P.S: Due to the limitations imposed by Apple and Safari, there’s no way I was able to proof read. Thankfully, I doubt the Tolkiens would read this. Otherwise, it’s going to be a disaster.
It’s interesting to know that Drizzt Do’Urden has no need for potions. He only needs what is truly necessary. Bonus stuff and potions can create a psychological barrier slowing down progress. And besides, that rare mage’s mushroom is no Regis. Sour grapes joke aside, have you ever ask yourself what should you do if the education system called you a dog? Note that I’m not referring to anybody from NUS, Nicholas Lim or no Nicholas Lim.
A valuable lesson I’ve learnt was that if you’re seen as a dog, then live like a wolf. I’m not telling you to be cynical, vindictive, horny, or a Roman soldier. Rather, the difference between a dog and a wolf lies in dignity built upon the proper understanding of what you have instead of what others have.
If you can do something, choose whether or not to do it but be prepared to live with the consequences.
If you failed someone, admit to it.
If you can’t control the situation before you, don’t react as if it’s the opposite.
If you think there’s something wrong with the world, you’re correct. That’s why people suffer, be they Monica Baey, Nicholas Lim, or Ned Stark’s bastard.
This comes to mind my analysis of the first chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien’s DC novel. If possible, I hope to do a chapter analysis post by post. Hopefully, Christopher Tolkien won’t get to read this. After all, it’s not as if I’m some kind of genius who would eventually humiliate the Singaporean education culture in an epic manner no different from Turin Turambar slaying a dragon (apparently, only three heroic figures managed to do so, the other two being Bard and that son of gun Earendil).
Now before I begin, here’s some advice to you, my fellow Singaporeans:
The Children Of Hurin is a book like no other. If you desire an epic comeback where the big dark boss upstairs finally lost the battle, this book isn’t for you. If you desire the typical Singaporean feel-good script synonymous with everybody’s favourite citizen of a Jewish state, forget about it. In this story, you’ll be seeing heroism, tragedy, and why the world actually sucks more than others would like you to believe in. In the words of the Japanese perspective...
There is no gold but only iron and blood.
There is no peace but only strife and tragedy.
There are heroes but they are mocked.
There are men of valour but alas driven mad.
There is still hope but darkness reigns for now.
There is still light but not today.
The armies of Elves and Men, the hordes of evil
One armed with radiance, the other shrouded in black
Bows were drawn, arrows loosed.
Swords glimmered, blood was spilt
Mourn with a mother for a son lain dead.
Grieve with a maiden for her lover slain.
The old stripped of armour, the young fed the crows.
When, O our Gods, will you avenge our woes?
~A Song For This Very Age
By Cuorn Clearlight (aka Kuok Ming Hui)
When you first flip open a book, what do you expect? Do you expect a likable plot? Do you expect heroes worthy of adoration and antagonists worthy of vilification, as terribly Nicholas Lim and horribly moralistically cookie cutter as this may sound? As unexpectedly pro-K culture as I sound, being drawn to the words and sentences used is a must. It’s called the flow of words amounting to alternative hypnosis. Ever wondered why the Twilight novels were so popular despite the legend of Lestat de Lioncourt, Tom Cruise or no Tom Cruise? Ever wondered how the 50 Shades trilogy became countless times more famous than the star couple of Han Solo and Princess Leia, as unfortunately accidental this statement sounds?
It’s called whether the words and sentences can suck you in. Sometimes, it’s due to personal taste. Sometimes, it’s just a question of your intelligence. Unlike contemporary works both good and bad (let alone mediocre), Tolkien’s works are not for the faint of heart. Faint of heart as in the sentence structure can be intimidating. As human beings, we’re used to shorter sequences of words. It’s okay to use long sentences so the pacing is fast enough. This is why there are fans preferring Harry Potter and it got nothing to do with how intelligent, beautiful, and sexy Emma Watson is.
As a Singaporean just like Kevin Kwan, I know how it feels to read a chapter while wondering when the paint would dry. If Americans are consumers of the fast food industry, then we Singaporeans are the consumers of a fast food culture. As a result, a few things got compromised along the way. Discipline and actual intelligence happened to be two of them.
Discipline isn’t just about not peeping at that pretty girl taking a shower at NUS, NTU, or just about anywhere else. Actual intelligence isn’t just about surviving on pragmatism alone as if surviving on junk food won’t ensure your death at SGH, NUH, or just about anywhere else. Reading Tolkien’s works require two things: The discipline of an intellectual and William Shakespeare’s level of linguistic excellence. Okay, that’s a lie. You just need to decide for yourself whether your mental fortitude is good enough and whether you want to go ahead. Also, please don’t forget your command of English. Unless your level of written English exceeds that of the average Singaporean university student, you cannot enter the kingdom of Tolkien. So why am I able to say that? Go figure.
Enough of making fun of people and my fellow Singaporeans. Let’s continue the journey of madness and darkness. Hopefully, we won’t end up in Angband unless your boyfriend is Beren and your girlfriend is Luthien Tinuviel.
Speaking of the greatest love story in Tolkien literature (yes, the story of Aragorn and Arwen paled in comparison and I don’t care how many Singaporeans actually heard of the original and greatest deal), The Children Of Hurin took place many years after this Shakespearean tale of man and elf. The mention was blatantly there. At the same time, it must be stated that the tale of Beren and Luthien was directly linked to a set of jewels famously known as the Silmarilli. Long story short, there’s this race of Elves called the Noldor. Known as the elite of the living races of Arda, their most notable feat ended creating a disaster worse than any financial meltdown in human history. Actually, that’s an understatement. There’s this major power of darkness, his name was Morgoth. Originally named Melkor, we can also call him the big dark boss upstairs. Or the big dark boss for the sake of convenience. So Morgoth stole the Silmarilli and the head of the Noldor wasn’t amused by this act of theft. To Feanor, stealing his people’s racial jewels was an act countless times worst than IP theft, the heist a far greater act of thievery than any feat committed by the duo of Bonnie and Clyde. So there you have it. A summary of how the most epic war in epic fantasy started. Remember, it took only one guy, a set of racial jewels, and a pissed off Elven lord. Also, Feanor did stupid things in a bid to heal his stupid pride. The most notable feat of stupidity actually involved the mass murder of other Elves. Kono hito de nashi...
Now in The Children Of Hurin, the impact of what started the whole damned war was still sorely felt. Feanor started it and no one could reverse it. As for Feanor, he actually died a long time ago. So how dark were the days since war continued raging? Let’s do a bit of Singaporean historical maths here:
During World War 2, Singapore endured the darkest days of its existence. More specifically, we’re talking about three years and eight months. That’s way worse than Winston Churchill turning emo upon hearing word of the impossibru happening.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Singapore#Aftermath
So imagine this: Singapore renamed as Syonan-to as a trophy to the Showa Emperor. Not for three years and eight months but three centuries and eight decades. Not to mention still counting as well. That’s how terrible things were to the necessary alliance of Elves and Men.
At this point, I must mention that not all Men decided to be the good guys by helping the good guys. In The Children Of Hurin, the Three Houses Of Men (i.e. the aforementioned good guys) never mentioned why their forefathers decided to rage quit the East and flee West. It’s apparent, however, that either the trauma, anger, or both were too much for them to even speak about. Of course, this would have resulted in the Elves casting their suspicions. Rightfully so, to tell the cold hard truth. I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but it’s a good thing that Feanor died. No, I don’t have a Beorning axe to grind despite my past and the upcoming general elections.
The first chapter wasn’t so much about our most tragic hero. Rather, it’s more about his heroic dad, Hurin. Now please be warned that for some reason, Tolkien chose to write some serious genealogical stuff. You know the deal. Who gave birth to who and who was the grandfather to who... boring stuff, I have to say. But if you want to, you can try tracing the genealogy as you keep reading. I have to say that worked tremendously well in carrying on with the book. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be Hajime to do that. And besides, that’d mean your girlfriend is scary, attractive, and have an envious figure at the same time.
This chapter focused on two notable aspects of bravery in dark times like this: Pragmatism and faith. In life, it’s very hard to have both. Even more so if you’re a Singaporean. But then again, no one ever said Hurin was from Singapore. His pragmatism shows in the simple form of understanding. He knew what was going to happen. The conversation between him and his beloved wife Morwen. They say a picture tells a hundred words, some may even say a comic strip tells a thousand more. Tolkien’s genius proved that this is no absolute logic. In a sequence of spoken words, the reader would embark on a trip reaching to the very depths of Hurin’s personality and humanity. While not all things were revealed, Hurin’s unwavering fortitude was for all to see. Remember, we’re talking about the dark age of warfare, funerals, and whether you’re going to die in the next 24 hours. This was a global war zone, not some family feud incapable of making a City of Atlantis out of Singapore.
This comes to three other characters. Namely, Morwen, Sador, and Turin. These three represented three different outlooks to life. Namely, sorrow, unworthiness, and innocence.
Let’s start with sorrow. Morwen, on the first glance, may turn off the typical angry Singaporean. Why? Because of two things: The fact she was part of nobility and looked down on Sador. In particular, her attitude towards Sador may result in some unwanted reminders. Yet, it was already explained in the story that she’s literally a war survivor.
[...but she was somewhat stern of mood and proud. The sorrows of the House of Beor saddened her heart; for she came as an exile to Dor-lomin from Dorthonion after the ruin of the Bragollach.]
~The Children Of Hurin; Chapter I: The Childhood Of Turin
We all know a person’s childhood is linked to his parents. Sometimes, things went well because your parents were blessed with love and wisdom. If it’s neither, that’s called abusive childhood. Since it’s impossible to have wisdom without love, love without wisdom means you’re going to screwed as well. Most likely an emotionally abusive childhood in the most insidious way. Turin was lucky. Even though his father was rarely at home, his mother was more than up for it. A note to all you married men before I continue: Please don’t use Hurin as an example to neglect your family due to work. I know it’s hard, but please take seriously the fact that unlike Hurin, your job doesn’t require you to risk death. Literally.
This comes to Sador. Fact one: He’s crippled. Fact two: It was due to an accident. Fact three: Morwen looked down on him as a result. Here, I’m going to talk about fact one and three. For the last one, it seemed unacceptable to have Morwen to look down on a poor crippled servant. This was definitely a different case from Monica Baey entering Israel mode against NUS. However, it must be pointed out that in another scenario and another world, it’s very likely Morwen would have behaved in the opposite manner. There are ways to cope with grief and loss, but not all are good. Through her attitude towards Sador, one could sense a destructive coping mechanism against grief. Years of understanding the cold hard truth made her a cynical lady. This was in contrast with her husband where years of understanding the same cold hard truth made him a courageous lion of a lord.
As for fact one, this was tied with Turin’s childhood. Sador’s existence wasn’t just an eyesore to a subtly cynical Morwen. He was effectively a fatherly figure to Turin due to his physical disability hindering his life. Contrary to Morwen’s short-sighted realism, reality proved to us that disability can result in pleasantly unintended consequences. This is proof that no man’s world view is the absolute truth unless it’s proven that there’s a man who is also God. Otherwise, no man can ever be called God.
It must be noted that there were two aspects of Turin’s childhood that would eventually shape the tragic hero he was meant to be.
[But Turin was loved less than she (i.e. his sister Urwen). He was dark-haired as his mother, and promised to be like her in mood also; for he was not merry, and spoke little, though he learned to speak early and ever seemed older than his years. Turin was slow to forget injustice or mockery; but the fire of his father was also in him, and he could be sudden and fierce. Yet he was quick to pity, and the hurts or sadness of living things might move him to tears; and he was like his father in this also...]
~The Children Of Hurin; Chapter I: The Childhood Of Turin
It’s been commonly said that local Singaporean women are materialistic, arrogant, and pro-white regardless of skin colour. In fact, things got so bad that I was left wondering whether it’s legal for a Malaysian doctor in Australia joining the dark side of Sammyboy forum. To all my fellow Singaporean guys, my advice to you is this: Please learn from Hurin. He’s your role model. My advice to local Singaporean girls is this: It doesn’t matter if you’re Chinese, Malay, Indian, or Eurasian. Unless you’re married or attached, please understand that a man like Hurin is far more of any you see in dramas and movies.
So why was Turin less loved than his sister? Was it because it’s easier to be adored if you’re the younger child and that your older sibling happened to be a guy? This part of Turin reminded me of myself, I’m not joking here. From this excerpt, we know that Turin was one hell of a complicated kid. He’s not the kind of boy any parent could manage. In the eyes of the typical Singaporean parent, Turin would be unmanageable at worst and nigh impossible to understand at best. Wait, am I referring to myself? Anyway, it must be pointed out that his maturity was way ahead of his peers. In any Singaporean school, be it good or exceptional, this kind of guy would have been hailed as a boss. Unfortunately, there’d also be a higher chance of him being the only Jewish kid in the chaotic world of schoolyard democracy and hegemonies.
Because it’s getting late now, I have to close it with an interesting part of the chapter. While it’s logical for Tolkien to begin the tale from Turin’s genealogy, the reader wasn’t introduced straightaway to Hurin’s. Tolkien chose to give the reader a Stone Cold Stunner even though he wasn’t born in an era known for Vince MacMahon and, later on, Donald Trump. This is not a joke, guys and girls. Donald Trump really appeared on the wrestling TV before he became President Trump. The following scene took us to the only flying transport available to the good guys: Eagles, be they bald or golden, so long they’re big enough. Just ask Gandalf, he knows.
Long story short, Hurin and his brother Huor ended up in Gondolin. This was an Elven city of great renown. At the same time, it’s the Elven version of North Korea. Surrounded by a ring of unnavigable mountains with the only entrance being secret and heavily guarded, Gondolin was a sight to behold. Atop a hill overshadowed and surrounded by a fortress of mountains, one might wonder whether New Zealand could afford this manner of natural bulwark of beauty and strength.
At that point, I couldn’t help but wonder where this part would be heading. Roughly one-third of the chapter was spent on Gondolin and related scenes beyond the walls. With that, I’m going to end this with two more excerpts from the first chapter.
[Huor wedded Rian, the cousin of Morwen; she was the daughter of Belegund son of Bregolas. By hard fate was she born in such days, for she was gentle of heart and loved neither hunting nor war. Her love was given to trees and to the flowers of the wild, and she was a singer and a maker of songs. Two months only had she been wedded to Huor when he went with his brother to the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and she never saw him again.]
[Then at last Hurin sprang into his saddle, and his golden banner was unfurled, and the trumpets sang again in the morning; and thus Hurin Thalion rode away to Nirnaeth Arnoediad.
But Morwen and Turin stood still by the doors, until far away they heard the faint call of a single horn on the wind: Hurin had passed over the shoulder of the hill, beyond which he could see his house no more.]
P.S: Due to the limitations imposed by Apple and Safari, there’s no way I was able to proof read. Thankfully, I doubt the Tolkiens would read this. Otherwise, it’s going to be a disaster.
Thursday 9 May 2019
Semi-drifting until end of May (9/5/19)
Okay, the original plan was to write up some of my thoughts concerning the first chapter of The Children Of Hurin. However, I’m not feeling that well today. While this shouldn’t be an excuse for the Green New Deal to bypass the Congress instead of going through both ends of the red and blue powers, this also means I need to come up with a substitute. Thankfully, I still got Myrreas, Sheallyn, and Wolfhawk.
Before I continue, allow me to share a few videos.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6wyk5tGYTjY
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hrpQgcMRpbY
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FhBxRe9_POk
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hmF0kP4zy9A
Please note that above vids have got nothing to do with events in recent days amounting to why the dream of seigi no mikata has always been an unattainable one.
Now onto the characters. I’m going start from Myrreas first since he’s one of my two alts/secondary mains together with Cyrea.
Running with a Whisperknife can be fun. Yes, it’s a shooting class. While this is not to say melee isn’t an option, plenty of the dps options revolve around mid to short range dagger sniping. In other words, this is a paragon class “defined” by two professional super criminals. Namely, Jarlaxle and Elaith Craulnober.
First things first, Brett Kavanaugh likes beer. And so does Steve Ang by my guess. Secondly, like how Brett and Steve like their beer, l like my Smoke Bomb. Seriously, it’s a fun thing trying to adjust to the stealth mechanic change for this encounter power. Gone were the days when you can afford to throw it minus the stealth. At least I didn’t really need the slow debuff effect since daze was enough to do some serious damage from the resultant acid trip. But with the revamped stealth effect that gives you free combat advantage so long you’re inside the gas cloud and not choke on the CO2, this has to be the best thing the devs could ever give to rogue users. There are two options to make this work well: Cloud Of Steel and Shuriken Toss.
Initially, Shuriken Toss intrigued me. That was during the live preview test run. Suffice to say, I didn’t like it. It’s not that this at-will sucked worse than the ongoing Brexit wrangling. Actually, I’m pretty sure Brexit wrangling was and still is a much worse case. The fact is, Shuriken Toss comes out way too slow. And note the present tense here, please. Ask me and I’d say the slow firing approach should be workable since Shuriken Toss is the only AoE at-will available for Whisperknives. If you’re going for a prolonged stealth based build instead of relying on high frequency of entering stealth, then Shuriken Toss may be your kind of thing. But if you prefer a quick firing game no different from the Celts, Anglo Saxons, and the other type of Saxons from Saxony, you wouldn’t want that. I play like that and I didn’t like how imitating the likes of Hattori Hanzou, Sarutobi Sasuke, and Fuma Kotaro turned out for me. Or Myrreas.
This left Cloud Of Steel as the only option for right click. Originally, I wanted Disheartening Strike in right click with Cloud Of Steel going to the other side of the mouse. Then I realised I still got Sly Flourish as Myrreas’ main hand weapon bonus. I considered buying cubes of augmentation for the change. That’s until my style wouldn’t allow me to stick Disheartening Strike onto more than one target in a go. As terribly Kloppish as this sounds, I thrive on momentum and maintaining it.
This decision ultimately resulted in a more evenly rounded range-or-melee at-will dps game that serves to add a tactical edge. After all, opponents are going to close in eventually, Smoke Bomb or no Smoke Bomb. This comes to the remaining two encounter powers: Path Of Blades and Lashing Blade. The first is used as compounding dps. Stealth bomb, then drop this. I have to say the dps went quite nicely. For Lashing Blade, it’s tempting to stealth and hit. But there’s a problem: Unless specified otherwise in the tooltip, encounter powers always break stealth. So no, you can’t execute two encounter powers via stealth mode and hit confirmation. Sorry to break this to you. In other words, please choose your stealth encounter power wisely. For me, non-stealth Lashing Blade wasn’t an issue to Myrreas. Due to massive dps compounding, Lashing Blade minus stealth was good enough to assassinate whoever unlucky enough to be targeted. And I didn’t even have to take into account which fellow got the lowest HP bar. In other words, this build relies on rotation once the mob closes in. Before that, it’s B2 Smoke Bomb plus Cloud of Steel to bait and damage.
As a result, cooldown reduction became a must. Initially messing around with Razor Action and Talisman Of Shadows for the sake of dps, Sneak Attack was surprisingly effective. Because Myrreas has Shady Preparations for the sake of cooldown reduction, Sneak Attack would just hike cooldown reduction efficiency. That plus 25% movement speed bonus in total due to this and Skillful Infiltrator.
Hidden Attacks felt a bit dodgy to me but that’s because I chose it for stealth survivability. After all, 50% passive stealth loss reduction means being able to stealth more often and pulling off stunts. I mean stealth encounter powers. This made the 10% stealth drain when using at-will powers felt really weird. Actually, that’s the reason why this feat felt a bit dodgy to me. Then again, maybe this is the devs’ own way of making this feat more useful during raids.
Daily powers wise, I went for Whirlwind Of Blades and Hateful Knives. Former was for crowd clearing, latter was for dueling.
Raiding loadout wise, I’m going to tinker a bit once l got a new PC. The reason why being that I need to experiment with an encounter power move set involving Blitz, Smoke Bomb, and Shadowy Disappearance. Smoke Bomb-Blitz two-hitter should be fun so long stealth is used first. As for dailies, it’s Whirlwind Of Blades and Killing Storm. That’s until Lurker’s Assault is unlocked. Then it’s Killing Storm and Lurker’s Assault.
Okay, change of plan here. I need to stop here because of my throat, drowsiness, and sweating like an Ainu living in Singapore.
Before I continue, allow me to share a few videos.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6wyk5tGYTjY
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hrpQgcMRpbY
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FhBxRe9_POk
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hmF0kP4zy9A
Please note that above vids have got nothing to do with events in recent days amounting to why the dream of seigi no mikata has always been an unattainable one.
Now onto the characters. I’m going start from Myrreas first since he’s one of my two alts/secondary mains together with Cyrea.
Running with a Whisperknife can be fun. Yes, it’s a shooting class. While this is not to say melee isn’t an option, plenty of the dps options revolve around mid to short range dagger sniping. In other words, this is a paragon class “defined” by two professional super criminals. Namely, Jarlaxle and Elaith Craulnober.
First things first, Brett Kavanaugh likes beer. And so does Steve Ang by my guess. Secondly, like how Brett and Steve like their beer, l like my Smoke Bomb. Seriously, it’s a fun thing trying to adjust to the stealth mechanic change for this encounter power. Gone were the days when you can afford to throw it minus the stealth. At least I didn’t really need the slow debuff effect since daze was enough to do some serious damage from the resultant acid trip. But with the revamped stealth effect that gives you free combat advantage so long you’re inside the gas cloud and not choke on the CO2, this has to be the best thing the devs could ever give to rogue users. There are two options to make this work well: Cloud Of Steel and Shuriken Toss.
Initially, Shuriken Toss intrigued me. That was during the live preview test run. Suffice to say, I didn’t like it. It’s not that this at-will sucked worse than the ongoing Brexit wrangling. Actually, I’m pretty sure Brexit wrangling was and still is a much worse case. The fact is, Shuriken Toss comes out way too slow. And note the present tense here, please. Ask me and I’d say the slow firing approach should be workable since Shuriken Toss is the only AoE at-will available for Whisperknives. If you’re going for a prolonged stealth based build instead of relying on high frequency of entering stealth, then Shuriken Toss may be your kind of thing. But if you prefer a quick firing game no different from the Celts, Anglo Saxons, and the other type of Saxons from Saxony, you wouldn’t want that. I play like that and I didn’t like how imitating the likes of Hattori Hanzou, Sarutobi Sasuke, and Fuma Kotaro turned out for me. Or Myrreas.
This left Cloud Of Steel as the only option for right click. Originally, I wanted Disheartening Strike in right click with Cloud Of Steel going to the other side of the mouse. Then I realised I still got Sly Flourish as Myrreas’ main hand weapon bonus. I considered buying cubes of augmentation for the change. That’s until my style wouldn’t allow me to stick Disheartening Strike onto more than one target in a go. As terribly Kloppish as this sounds, I thrive on momentum and maintaining it.
This decision ultimately resulted in a more evenly rounded range-or-melee at-will dps game that serves to add a tactical edge. After all, opponents are going to close in eventually, Smoke Bomb or no Smoke Bomb. This comes to the remaining two encounter powers: Path Of Blades and Lashing Blade. The first is used as compounding dps. Stealth bomb, then drop this. I have to say the dps went quite nicely. For Lashing Blade, it’s tempting to stealth and hit. But there’s a problem: Unless specified otherwise in the tooltip, encounter powers always break stealth. So no, you can’t execute two encounter powers via stealth mode and hit confirmation. Sorry to break this to you. In other words, please choose your stealth encounter power wisely. For me, non-stealth Lashing Blade wasn’t an issue to Myrreas. Due to massive dps compounding, Lashing Blade minus stealth was good enough to assassinate whoever unlucky enough to be targeted. And I didn’t even have to take into account which fellow got the lowest HP bar. In other words, this build relies on rotation once the mob closes in. Before that, it’s B2 Smoke Bomb plus Cloud of Steel to bait and damage.
As a result, cooldown reduction became a must. Initially messing around with Razor Action and Talisman Of Shadows for the sake of dps, Sneak Attack was surprisingly effective. Because Myrreas has Shady Preparations for the sake of cooldown reduction, Sneak Attack would just hike cooldown reduction efficiency. That plus 25% movement speed bonus in total due to this and Skillful Infiltrator.
Hidden Attacks felt a bit dodgy to me but that’s because I chose it for stealth survivability. After all, 50% passive stealth loss reduction means being able to stealth more often and pulling off stunts. I mean stealth encounter powers. This made the 10% stealth drain when using at-will powers felt really weird. Actually, that’s the reason why this feat felt a bit dodgy to me. Then again, maybe this is the devs’ own way of making this feat more useful during raids.
Daily powers wise, I went for Whirlwind Of Blades and Hateful Knives. Former was for crowd clearing, latter was for dueling.
Raiding loadout wise, I’m going to tinker a bit once l got a new PC. The reason why being that I need to experiment with an encounter power move set involving Blitz, Smoke Bomb, and Shadowy Disappearance. Smoke Bomb-Blitz two-hitter should be fun so long stealth is used first. As for dailies, it’s Whirlwind Of Blades and Killing Storm. That’s until Lurker’s Assault is unlocked. Then it’s Killing Storm and Lurker’s Assault.
Okay, change of plan here. I need to stop here because of my throat, drowsiness, and sweating like an Ainu living in Singapore.
Tuesday 7 May 2019
Semi-drifting until end of May (7/5/19)
To be honest, I plan on taking a break from writing up on my observations concerning some of the Neverwinter class changes. For now, it’s a pause.
In other news, a huge congratulations to Avengers: Endgame. It’s not everyday that you get to see a 8.9/10 score. MCU slew it like a Guts. Again, congratulations to MCU and may Deadpool join a new batch of Avengers. With that being said, when will Gambit burst into the MCU scene? If DCEU can make a massive success out of Shazam!, it means no excuse for Remy LeBeau.
Would it make it big as a heist film? Well, a better bet would be Marvel using Bonnie Loo as a visual blueprint for an Asian X-girl named Bonniclyde. A mutant and member of the Thieves Guild, she joined the X-Men due to the legend of Le Diablo Blanc.
A romantic comedy? Erm, we’re not talking about Kodi Smit-McPhee and Elizabeth Olson getting it on as Nightcrawler and a shotacon Scarlet Witch.
The ideal Gambit movie should feature a few things:
1. The fact that the life of Remy LeBeau sucked so badly, it makes the viewers see a fatalistic thief whose Casanova persona was nothing more than a facade hiding a wounded soul.
2. Remember Julien Boudreaux? I’m referring to Bella Donna’s terribly elitist brother. Apply his elitist attitude towards Remy to the background characters while upping the contempt where Julien himself was concerned. After all, we’re talking about the streets of New Orleans where scoundrels aplenty resided. Countless times more than the number of Tom LesVoyeurs in NUS and NTU combined.
3. You have Bella Donna. Then you have Rogue. Love triangle, mon’ami. Because this is da Ragin’ Cajun we’re talkin’ ‘bout, no?
4. Gambit has always been part of the X-Men. And besides, Jennifer Lawrence adopted a kid. Erm, I mean Mystique. Seriously, I don’t know how to make this work beyond using parallel universes. Bishop is definitely too early to pull off.
5. Le Professeur X, meet Marrow. Marrow, meet your new family because your previous family just died less than 24 hours ago.
6. If Mr Sinister isn’t in the movie, it means we’re better off waiting for the next Ah Boys To Men movie, stereotypical Indian or no stereotypical Indian.
7. The Cajun knows not a home, a thief seeks redemption.
So what should be Bonniclyde’s mutant ability be? Linear teleportation capable of ripping through any obstacle literally. At the same time, storing up the “teleportation” energy and releasing it like an invisible spear cutting through everything in its path sounds cool. Albeit messy and visceral as well.
And speaking of spear, there’s this famous joke involving Lancer (i.e. Cúchulainn) always dying. Hence, the reply to every scene in Carnival Phantasm whenever he died: KONO HITO DE NASHI!!!
In Japanese, it means “you’re not human!”. Commonly used as a reaction (?) by victims of sexual misconduct, Fate/Grand Order somehow managed to forge a weapon of irony from it.
KONO HITO DE NASHI!!!!!!
This post will be me messing around here and there. After all, the more sorrows you see in this world, the more you’re able to appreciate the freedom to do what many would call pointless things. I learnt that from Tohno Shiki of Tsukihime. To think a 2D visual plot can have so much better storyline value than dramas and movies starring real 3D human beings.
Tentatively entitled Dungeons & Dragons: Twenty Faces Of Fate, the format is that of a collectible card game. If you played games like Hearthstone and Gwent, you should have a decent idea what this is all about.
Because I’m too lazy/incapable of coming up with a decent plot, I decide to use the enter-another-realm plot involving you, the player, as someone from the real world. Doesn’t matter whether you’re from America, Canada, or the U.K; France, Germany, or Switzerland; Singapore, Japan, or South Korea... point is, Tenser popped up to say hi. Yes, that very same crazy Tenser. That’s why he’s insane enough to enter your room and say, “My multiverse needs you, heroic one. And you have no choice but to oblige”.
Fun fact: You can choose your character’s gender and customise the look. To make things even more real, you can opt to look Asian apart from being white, black, or brown.
So you enter a temple. Not the Chinese, Buddhist, Hindu, or Jewish type by the way. In this mysterious temple, Tenser told you to move around freely in the multiverse carving out your own epic legend. Only through this can you hope to return back to where you actually belong. To aid you in your quest(s), Tenser offers you aid in the form of three things:
1. A twenty-sided die.
2. His assistant whose name is Thormaz. Yes, he’s a guy.
3. A crystal pendant containing the power of your chosen patron deity.
As your assistant, Thormaz will guide you through the game. At the same time, he’s also in charge of your inventory where buff items for your heroes, currency, and other necessary stuff are stashed.
Your patron deity is one of your choosing. Not only does your patron deity gives your heroes specific effects, there’s also an activated power known as Divine Invocation that gives your party a massive boost for a fixed number of turns.
The twenty-sided die, also known as D20, is for a very special purpose. Namely, deciding which hero you can get per weekly login. At the same time, this D20 is also rolled daily for items which you can either use, sell, or trade.
When it comes to heroes and items, there are four tiers according to the die score rolled.
1 to 7: Standard grade items and two hero cards ranging from one-coin to three-coin.
8 to 12: Rare grade items and a three-coin hero card.
13 to 16: Superior grade items and a four-coin hero card.
17 to 19: Epic grade items and a chance of getting a five-coin hero card.
20: Choice between one hero upgrade token or a random five-coin hero.
The first roll of the day/week is free. Beyond that, you’ll need money. Seriously, every F2P game needs a workable business model. Ever wondered why Marvel wasn’t the most assuring name in this industry?
Note: Hero tokens automatically bind to your character’s inventory and cannot be traded. Let alone sold or auctioned.
Add note: In case you’ve yet to realise it, the coin mentioned here belongs to Tymora.
If I have the time, drive, and a cat’s willingness, I’ll be doing more in the next post. Hopefully. Until then, tomorrow’s New Orleans beckons.
In other news, a huge congratulations to Avengers: Endgame. It’s not everyday that you get to see a 8.9/10 score. MCU slew it like a Guts. Again, congratulations to MCU and may Deadpool join a new batch of Avengers. With that being said, when will Gambit burst into the MCU scene? If DCEU can make a massive success out of Shazam!, it means no excuse for Remy LeBeau.
Would it make it big as a heist film? Well, a better bet would be Marvel using Bonnie Loo as a visual blueprint for an Asian X-girl named Bonniclyde. A mutant and member of the Thieves Guild, she joined the X-Men due to the legend of Le Diablo Blanc.
A romantic comedy? Erm, we’re not talking about Kodi Smit-McPhee and Elizabeth Olson getting it on as Nightcrawler and a shotacon Scarlet Witch.
The ideal Gambit movie should feature a few things:
1. The fact that the life of Remy LeBeau sucked so badly, it makes the viewers see a fatalistic thief whose Casanova persona was nothing more than a facade hiding a wounded soul.
2. Remember Julien Boudreaux? I’m referring to Bella Donna’s terribly elitist brother. Apply his elitist attitude towards Remy to the background characters while upping the contempt where Julien himself was concerned. After all, we’re talking about the streets of New Orleans where scoundrels aplenty resided. Countless times more than the number of Tom LesVoyeurs in NUS and NTU combined.
3. You have Bella Donna. Then you have Rogue. Love triangle, mon’ami. Because this is da Ragin’ Cajun we’re talkin’ ‘bout, no?
4. Gambit has always been part of the X-Men. And besides, Jennifer Lawrence adopted a kid. Erm, I mean Mystique. Seriously, I don’t know how to make this work beyond using parallel universes. Bishop is definitely too early to pull off.
5. Le Professeur X, meet Marrow. Marrow, meet your new family because your previous family just died less than 24 hours ago.
6. If Mr Sinister isn’t in the movie, it means we’re better off waiting for the next Ah Boys To Men movie, stereotypical Indian or no stereotypical Indian.
7. The Cajun knows not a home, a thief seeks redemption.
So what should be Bonniclyde’s mutant ability be? Linear teleportation capable of ripping through any obstacle literally. At the same time, storing up the “teleportation” energy and releasing it like an invisible spear cutting through everything in its path sounds cool. Albeit messy and visceral as well.
And speaking of spear, there’s this famous joke involving Lancer (i.e. Cúchulainn) always dying. Hence, the reply to every scene in Carnival Phantasm whenever he died: KONO HITO DE NASHI!!!
In Japanese, it means “you’re not human!”. Commonly used as a reaction (?) by victims of sexual misconduct, Fate/Grand Order somehow managed to forge a weapon of irony from it.
KONO HITO DE NASHI!!!!!!
This post will be me messing around here and there. After all, the more sorrows you see in this world, the more you’re able to appreciate the freedom to do what many would call pointless things. I learnt that from Tohno Shiki of Tsukihime. To think a 2D visual plot can have so much better storyline value than dramas and movies starring real 3D human beings.
Tentatively entitled Dungeons & Dragons: Twenty Faces Of Fate, the format is that of a collectible card game. If you played games like Hearthstone and Gwent, you should have a decent idea what this is all about.
Because I’m too lazy/incapable of coming up with a decent plot, I decide to use the enter-another-realm plot involving you, the player, as someone from the real world. Doesn’t matter whether you’re from America, Canada, or the U.K; France, Germany, or Switzerland; Singapore, Japan, or South Korea... point is, Tenser popped up to say hi. Yes, that very same crazy Tenser. That’s why he’s insane enough to enter your room and say, “My multiverse needs you, heroic one. And you have no choice but to oblige”.
Fun fact: You can choose your character’s gender and customise the look. To make things even more real, you can opt to look Asian apart from being white, black, or brown.
So you enter a temple. Not the Chinese, Buddhist, Hindu, or Jewish type by the way. In this mysterious temple, Tenser told you to move around freely in the multiverse carving out your own epic legend. Only through this can you hope to return back to where you actually belong. To aid you in your quest(s), Tenser offers you aid in the form of three things:
1. A twenty-sided die.
2. His assistant whose name is Thormaz. Yes, he’s a guy.
3. A crystal pendant containing the power of your chosen patron deity.
As your assistant, Thormaz will guide you through the game. At the same time, he’s also in charge of your inventory where buff items for your heroes, currency, and other necessary stuff are stashed.
Your patron deity is one of your choosing. Not only does your patron deity gives your heroes specific effects, there’s also an activated power known as Divine Invocation that gives your party a massive boost for a fixed number of turns.
The twenty-sided die, also known as D20, is for a very special purpose. Namely, deciding which hero you can get per weekly login. At the same time, this D20 is also rolled daily for items which you can either use, sell, or trade.
When it comes to heroes and items, there are four tiers according to the die score rolled.
1 to 7: Standard grade items and two hero cards ranging from one-coin to three-coin.
8 to 12: Rare grade items and a three-coin hero card.
13 to 16: Superior grade items and a four-coin hero card.
17 to 19: Epic grade items and a chance of getting a five-coin hero card.
20: Choice between one hero upgrade token or a random five-coin hero.
The first roll of the day/week is free. Beyond that, you’ll need money. Seriously, every F2P game needs a workable business model. Ever wondered why Marvel wasn’t the most assuring name in this industry?
Note: Hero tokens automatically bind to your character’s inventory and cannot be traded. Let alone sold or auctioned.
Add note: In case you’ve yet to realise it, the coin mentioned here belongs to Tymora.
If I have the time, drive, and a cat’s willingness, I’ll be doing more in the next post. Hopefully. Until then, tomorrow’s New Orleans beckons.
Semi-drifting until end of May (6/5/19)
Okay, it’s now official. The most metal Tamil in Singapore has spoken. If you’re a victim of any Tom LeVoyeur, it doesn’t matter whether you’re Monica Baey or He Ying Ying and it doesn’t matter whether the offence is committed in NUS or anywhere else. So long it’s in Singapore, Tom LeVoyeur is in trouble, Korean Tom or no Korean Tom. The most metal Tamil in Singapore has spoken.
https://www.businessinsider.sg/voyeurs-may-get-caned-following-changes-to-penal-code-shanmugam/
With that being said, let’s continue onto whatever stuff I’m planning to stuff people with. Allow me add on a bit about what I’ve said previously.
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2019/05/semi-drifting-until-end-of-may-5519.html
I suddenly remembered Arylos got the Assassin’s Covenant mount insignia bonus. So what this means is that I’ll need to do some major switching. This may (or may not) involve boon respec. Two things I need to do here:
1. Switching the gear enchantments here and there. Not wholesale switching though since that’d be no different from giving myself a bait and switch.
2. The same goes for active companion bonuses. The numbers game now makes more sense and it’s likely that being a ranger means having your gameplay defined by the choices made. So rejoice, all you ranger users. In Undermountain, you’re now given the freedom to formulate your strategy like a Batman. Okay, that’s an exaggeration.
So does that mean Arylos should ditch the cat while retaining its active companion bonus? To be honest, I already upped that critter to legendary rank. So a large part of myself would loathe to switch to either Reus or Klarke. If my memory has yet to fail me, it means switching the active companion bonuses shouldn’t be an issue. At the very least, I should be able to get a combination of Siegemaster, Redcap Powrie, Cat, Alchemist Experimenter, and Battlefield Medic. Using the 10% mathematics, however, it means only 850 power given via the AC bonus. Thankfully, there’s a rank 14 Azure enchantment for me to switch around. Maybe two Silvery enchantments on the off-hand weapon? If I can sneak in a Blink Dog, that’d be a power bonus of 1450 instead. That’s a more comfortable number to me. Then again, I’m not sure whether active companion bonuses do contribute to Assassin’s Covenant since boons are most likely excluded from the equation.
Okay, Azure enchantment rank 14 gives 1000 in defense for the defensive slot. That means +100 power in Altair’s pouch. 1550 power should mean 3% bonus in damage since I read somewhere that every 500 of any stat=1% bonus. Wait, I think the Cat can be shifted to the bottom right active bonus slot. If so, then I can smuggle in a Blink Dog companion bonus and a (hopefully) neat AC power bonus of 1550. Wonder whether a combination of two Aspects of wolves can work unexpectedly well in this case since the HP bar now fluctuates easily enough in any raid, RLQ or no RLQ.
Now with that being done, it’s onto Cyrea Durothil. It feels a wee bit weird for me to say she looks like an accidental visual similarity to He Ying Ying. Thankfully, it’s due to the hair. In other words, she’s not the only girl with the shoulder length hairstyle.
Because I do have an un-Singaporean tendency to tinker like a Teutonic Low or a Catalan Pep, l decided to respec her from Arbiter to Devout. Now there’s a practical reason to this, however. And that is the annoying possibility of getting no tank and no healer in a RIQ raid unless it’s instances like Valindra’s Tower, Malabog’s Castle, and Kessell’s Retreat. Along with her, I plan to convert Kariss Locras from a Hellbringer warlock to a Soulbinder. If my choice of healers sounds offensive to anyone, that’s because I don’t care about my nation’s PC culture.
I only had a brief run with Cyrea the Devout before my decision to visit Heliopolis City come end of May (or Marina Bay Shinar if this doesn’t work out). Suffice to say, you don’t use a Devout with a Gond car companion. Simply put, don’t contemplate using an augment companion. Arbiter, sure go ahead. But Devout? That’d be worse than going home empty handed two years in a row despite decently high hopes of getting something.
This comes to mind an important question: Can my Devout use a taunting companion? Trust me when I say your Wild Hunt Rider white knight isn’t going to bail you out. I tried, the white knighting strategy didn’t work. If it’s not going to work in Halaster’s titular base, it’s definitely not going to work anywhere else. So how absurd circumstances could get in this case? Running an Arbiter with a white knight works because the taunting actually... well, works. Since the Arbiter is more of a store-and-nuke class, it means plenty of fire and radiant fury without the risk of things going Chultan south. Unfortunately, Devout doesn’t operate like that. The aggro is not going to care how attractive your Devout is, male or female, sun elf or no sun elf. White knighting won’t work on them. Your Devout’s aggro bar would just remain in the red. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a bug unlike so many buggy riding since N mods ago.
This is not to say that augment companion is a better choice because I’m very sure it’s not since testing the mod on live preview server taught me a few tactical lessons in advance. Quite obviously, using a healing companion for a healer character has to be the dumbest strategy imaginable. Which means only one option available: Damage oriented companion. Now it must be pointed out that the companion role category is officially scrapped. So you may need to trial and error so long it’s not someone like an Angel of Protection or Battlefield Medic. I chose a blue rank Fire Archon due to its damage potential. The outcome? Payload.
The hilarity behind this absurdity wasn’t lost on me. There I had a companion whose job was to hold aggro. Then the next thing I noticed, the Fire Archon said, “Hold my beer” in primordial language. Which now comes to an interesting question: Would choosing a ranged dps companion work if you happened to be a Devout? I’m not just talking about the Fire Archon. We’re actually dealing with companions like Neverember Guard Archer and Wayward Wizard. Companions synonymous with the North Korean weapon technology.
This resulted in a pleasant situation: Should I still go with Apparatus of Gond in raiding? Of course, there’s this theoretical risk of aggro attraction (note that I only mentioned theoretical). The first time I tried that, aggro attraction wasn’t an issue. The second time I did my raiding experiment, the Fire Archon became the guinea pig. That guinea pig turned out to be a nuclear option. At this point, let me point out that role specification now plays a major part in raids. If you’re a tank, it means you’re not going to deal the kind of damage expected from a dps unless you’re a paladin running on an Oath Of Protection paragon class and planting holy bombs (e.g. Bane+Sacred Weapon). Even more so if you’re a healer. In this sense, party gameplay is now better balanced since total item level now plays a lesser role in the damage department. To be honest, I got no problem out-dps’ing a tank with a total item level around 2K+ higher than mine.
The fun thing about using a Devout is whether you want to pull off Exaltation. That encounter power won’t hike your damage game in such a way that it’s possible to out-dps an actual dps party member. But it does decent enough damage while upping your outgoing heal. Coupled with a Fire Archon and the offensive momentum can easily be upped since combat advantage damage can scale up pretty fast in this mod. For now I’m still stuck with a locked raiding loadout . Using the solo loadout for RLQ, however, was fun enough to mess around with. For some funny reason, Cyrea could afford to use her Divinity gauge sparingly. But I had to tinker quite a bit to get it right. Initial testing involved high amount of Divinity being used. To me, being this wasteful in a RLQ skirmish means not good enough. Channeling Divinity sounds like a useful thing. Yes, it’s useful. But refilling Divinity in this manner was very slow. The chief reason why was that I was messing around with Healing Word just to test the synergy.
After realising that too much Divinity was being wasted over something I’m not confident about, I decided to change some things. Basically, the encounter powers looked like this:
Intercession, Exaltation, and Cleansing Light. The base healing game wasn’t much to shout about, but using Exaltation as a compounding effect did seem to work decently enough. Note that this is just about raids like Master Of The Hunt and Dread Legion, so things are still subjected to scrutiny. At the same time, the last Dread Legion run actually involved two Oath Of Protection paladins. Funnily enough, that didn’t prevent Cyrea from topping the Field Medic ranking at 2 million plus HP healed. I didn’t know how that happened to be honest because the only major healing done was when a party member was revived and Intercession came out as a result. Then again, the only way to decently explain this would heal over time instead of a one-shot heal. Otherwise, there’s no logical way to explain how healing beyond full HP can be treated as actual HP healed. But there’s a problem: Healing Word does have HoT effect listed in the tooltip.
Which now comes to whether Blade Storm can proc from range. Believe it or not, Undermountain isn’t the only mod making Unlimited Blade Works out of this class feature. If you’re observant enough, you’d realise that Blade Storm could proc from ranged attacks instead of just in melee mode. I truly doubt it’s a bug because the devs did spend some time fixing buggy things where this class feature was concerned. At the same time, it’s likely that part of the coding done for Twin-Blade Storm was reflected on Blade Storm since Twin-Blade Storm can be done from range. So yeah, the tooltip was lying. Not that it matters anyway.
https://www.businessinsider.sg/voyeurs-may-get-caned-following-changes-to-penal-code-shanmugam/
With that being said, let’s continue onto whatever stuff I’m planning to stuff people with. Allow me add on a bit about what I’ve said previously.
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2019/05/semi-drifting-until-end-of-may-5519.html
I suddenly remembered Arylos got the Assassin’s Covenant mount insignia bonus. So what this means is that I’ll need to do some major switching. This may (or may not) involve boon respec. Two things I need to do here:
1. Switching the gear enchantments here and there. Not wholesale switching though since that’d be no different from giving myself a bait and switch.
2. The same goes for active companion bonuses. The numbers game now makes more sense and it’s likely that being a ranger means having your gameplay defined by the choices made. So rejoice, all you ranger users. In Undermountain, you’re now given the freedom to formulate your strategy like a Batman. Okay, that’s an exaggeration.
So does that mean Arylos should ditch the cat while retaining its active companion bonus? To be honest, I already upped that critter to legendary rank. So a large part of myself would loathe to switch to either Reus or Klarke. If my memory has yet to fail me, it means switching the active companion bonuses shouldn’t be an issue. At the very least, I should be able to get a combination of Siegemaster, Redcap Powrie, Cat, Alchemist Experimenter, and Battlefield Medic. Using the 10% mathematics, however, it means only 850 power given via the AC bonus. Thankfully, there’s a rank 14 Azure enchantment for me to switch around. Maybe two Silvery enchantments on the off-hand weapon? If I can sneak in a Blink Dog, that’d be a power bonus of 1450 instead. That’s a more comfortable number to me. Then again, I’m not sure whether active companion bonuses do contribute to Assassin’s Covenant since boons are most likely excluded from the equation.
Okay, Azure enchantment rank 14 gives 1000 in defense for the defensive slot. That means +100 power in Altair’s pouch. 1550 power should mean 3% bonus in damage since I read somewhere that every 500 of any stat=1% bonus. Wait, I think the Cat can be shifted to the bottom right active bonus slot. If so, then I can smuggle in a Blink Dog companion bonus and a (hopefully) neat AC power bonus of 1550. Wonder whether a combination of two Aspects of wolves can work unexpectedly well in this case since the HP bar now fluctuates easily enough in any raid, RLQ or no RLQ.
Now with that being done, it’s onto Cyrea Durothil. It feels a wee bit weird for me to say she looks like an accidental visual similarity to He Ying Ying. Thankfully, it’s due to the hair. In other words, she’s not the only girl with the shoulder length hairstyle.
Because I do have an un-Singaporean tendency to tinker like a Teutonic Low or a Catalan Pep, l decided to respec her from Arbiter to Devout. Now there’s a practical reason to this, however. And that is the annoying possibility of getting no tank and no healer in a RIQ raid unless it’s instances like Valindra’s Tower, Malabog’s Castle, and Kessell’s Retreat. Along with her, I plan to convert Kariss Locras from a Hellbringer warlock to a Soulbinder. If my choice of healers sounds offensive to anyone, that’s because I don’t care about my nation’s PC culture.
I only had a brief run with Cyrea the Devout before my decision to visit Heliopolis City come end of May (or Marina Bay Shinar if this doesn’t work out). Suffice to say, you don’t use a Devout with a Gond car companion. Simply put, don’t contemplate using an augment companion. Arbiter, sure go ahead. But Devout? That’d be worse than going home empty handed two years in a row despite decently high hopes of getting something.
This comes to mind an important question: Can my Devout use a taunting companion? Trust me when I say your Wild Hunt Rider white knight isn’t going to bail you out. I tried, the white knighting strategy didn’t work. If it’s not going to work in Halaster’s titular base, it’s definitely not going to work anywhere else. So how absurd circumstances could get in this case? Running an Arbiter with a white knight works because the taunting actually... well, works. Since the Arbiter is more of a store-and-nuke class, it means plenty of fire and radiant fury without the risk of things going Chultan south. Unfortunately, Devout doesn’t operate like that. The aggro is not going to care how attractive your Devout is, male or female, sun elf or no sun elf. White knighting won’t work on them. Your Devout’s aggro bar would just remain in the red. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a bug unlike so many buggy riding since N mods ago.
This is not to say that augment companion is a better choice because I’m very sure it’s not since testing the mod on live preview server taught me a few tactical lessons in advance. Quite obviously, using a healing companion for a healer character has to be the dumbest strategy imaginable. Which means only one option available: Damage oriented companion. Now it must be pointed out that the companion role category is officially scrapped. So you may need to trial and error so long it’s not someone like an Angel of Protection or Battlefield Medic. I chose a blue rank Fire Archon due to its damage potential. The outcome? Payload.
The hilarity behind this absurdity wasn’t lost on me. There I had a companion whose job was to hold aggro. Then the next thing I noticed, the Fire Archon said, “Hold my beer” in primordial language. Which now comes to an interesting question: Would choosing a ranged dps companion work if you happened to be a Devout? I’m not just talking about the Fire Archon. We’re actually dealing with companions like Neverember Guard Archer and Wayward Wizard. Companions synonymous with the North Korean weapon technology.
This resulted in a pleasant situation: Should I still go with Apparatus of Gond in raiding? Of course, there’s this theoretical risk of aggro attraction (note that I only mentioned theoretical). The first time I tried that, aggro attraction wasn’t an issue. The second time I did my raiding experiment, the Fire Archon became the guinea pig. That guinea pig turned out to be a nuclear option. At this point, let me point out that role specification now plays a major part in raids. If you’re a tank, it means you’re not going to deal the kind of damage expected from a dps unless you’re a paladin running on an Oath Of Protection paragon class and planting holy bombs (e.g. Bane+Sacred Weapon). Even more so if you’re a healer. In this sense, party gameplay is now better balanced since total item level now plays a lesser role in the damage department. To be honest, I got no problem out-dps’ing a tank with a total item level around 2K+ higher than mine.
The fun thing about using a Devout is whether you want to pull off Exaltation. That encounter power won’t hike your damage game in such a way that it’s possible to out-dps an actual dps party member. But it does decent enough damage while upping your outgoing heal. Coupled with a Fire Archon and the offensive momentum can easily be upped since combat advantage damage can scale up pretty fast in this mod. For now I’m still stuck with a locked raiding loadout . Using the solo loadout for RLQ, however, was fun enough to mess around with. For some funny reason, Cyrea could afford to use her Divinity gauge sparingly. But I had to tinker quite a bit to get it right. Initial testing involved high amount of Divinity being used. To me, being this wasteful in a RLQ skirmish means not good enough. Channeling Divinity sounds like a useful thing. Yes, it’s useful. But refilling Divinity in this manner was very slow. The chief reason why was that I was messing around with Healing Word just to test the synergy.
After realising that too much Divinity was being wasted over something I’m not confident about, I decided to change some things. Basically, the encounter powers looked like this:
Intercession, Exaltation, and Cleansing Light. The base healing game wasn’t much to shout about, but using Exaltation as a compounding effect did seem to work decently enough. Note that this is just about raids like Master Of The Hunt and Dread Legion, so things are still subjected to scrutiny. At the same time, the last Dread Legion run actually involved two Oath Of Protection paladins. Funnily enough, that didn’t prevent Cyrea from topping the Field Medic ranking at 2 million plus HP healed. I didn’t know how that happened to be honest because the only major healing done was when a party member was revived and Intercession came out as a result. Then again, the only way to decently explain this would heal over time instead of a one-shot heal. Otherwise, there’s no logical way to explain how healing beyond full HP can be treated as actual HP healed. But there’s a problem: Healing Word does have HoT effect listed in the tooltip.
Which now comes to whether Blade Storm can proc from range. Believe it or not, Undermountain isn’t the only mod making Unlimited Blade Works out of this class feature. If you’re observant enough, you’d realise that Blade Storm could proc from ranged attacks instead of just in melee mode. I truly doubt it’s a bug because the devs did spend some time fixing buggy things where this class feature was concerned. At the same time, it’s likely that part of the coding done for Twin-Blade Storm was reflected on Blade Storm since Twin-Blade Storm can be done from range. So yeah, the tooltip was lying. Not that it matters anyway.
Monday 6 May 2019
Semi-drifting until end of May (5/5/19)
Well, tonight feels a bit weird. I was intending to read The Children Of Hurin until the end of first chapter. But there’s this sense of foreboding telling me not to rush it. It’s like watching the final season of Game Of Thrones despite knowing your favourite character most likely going to die. It’s a tug of war between wanting to progress and not 100% prepared for the ride. Either way, it’s only a matter of time before I truly start my reading engine going since finishing The Hunter’s Blades trilogy. Ask me and I’d say this was R.A. Salvatore’s best job done since The Dark Elf Trilogy. It’s not everyday that one got to see a massive heroic BSOD story instead of just another heroic BSOD moment from Drizzt Do’Urden. With that being said, though, I stopped at there because my family was (and still is) too poor afford books. That plus the impact of digital age on those more used to the screen rather paper, ink, and the ancient ways.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeroicBSOD
I’m not sure whether I want post some of my personal thoughts about what I’m about to read here. The reason why being that I prefer having something substantial to say on a consistent basis instead of trying to force it and risk massive disrespect to a titan of a man. Thankfully, I have something else to say. I’m going to try seeing how much I can write on my personal take on the current class changes to Neverwinter. Note that for now, I’ll just do these classes below:
Warden, Devout, Sentinel, Arcanist, Whisperknife
Warden will be a given since the deliberate visual similarity to Archer has always been my main. In fact, this is about my personal experience with this ranger paragon class. As for Devout, the accidental visual similarity to He Ying Ying’s current look will be done in a future post as well. As for the Arcanist, the accidental naming and/or visual similarity to Shalynn Tsai may (please understand the meaning of the word used) take up the same space as Whisperknife and a Sentinel who happened to be a poor man’s tribute to an awesome man of guts named... well, Guts.
These are the classes I managed to mess and tinker around with so far, so any further progress involving two more tanks and one more healer will require a day or few after end of May. More specifically from 27th May onwards unless that Heliopolis of a Suntec is unable to fetch me a PC. In this case, I’ll need to move on to Marina Bay Shinar for the PC Show.
Now onto the only intentional tribute to a fictional character apart from Wolfhawk.
The changes to the ranger class were much welcomed. The reason why being that there’s actual balance struck between ranged dps and melee damage. Of course, there’s always a trade deal involved. And it’s called downscaling the range dps. I need to check after 27th May or so to see whether base damage for off-hand melee gear has been upped. Suffice to say, this is a far better trade deal than the one NUS and other educational institutes are trying to set right currently.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/education/recommendations-for-nus-disciplinary-and-support-frameworks-ready-by-mid-may
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/smu-ntu-review-sexual-harassment-procedures-monica-baey-nus-11474380
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=my99WOLiKyo
The third link is not to speculate whether Emiya Kiritsugu was a pathetic rat graduated from ITE, let alone whether Kayneth was some big shot university graduate (he’s an elitist, though. A fact ensuring Waver Velvet being the most suitable Master for Alexander the Great due to a matter of ego). Rather, it is to point out you can now adopt the Kiritsugu approach if you want to. An analysis involving the Hunter paragon class would require some massive theoretical work inside my cranium (not that I never did this before since my brain is never meant to be Singaporean), therefore I’m not going to touch on that.
Now what are the attributes I chose to up? The intuitive answer would be Strength and Dexterity. It doesn’t matter whether you think like a Singaporean or not. And therein lies the catch: I mentioned the word “you”, not “we”. Because Arylos was meant to be a personality tribute to Kiritsugu (an idea which requires much more work if I’m serious in creating a serious protagonist out of him), I decided to make him as true to character as possible. This involved upping Intelligence and Wisdom right to the max via leveling up.
Intelligence now affects two things: Power of your control effects and magic damage. This ties in perfectly well with the fact that the Warden paragon class has great options in terms of the dps. Moves like Electric Shot, Split The Sky, and Call Of The Storm involve magic damage. I’m not 100% sure about ES, but the tooltip strongly hinted at this. Anyway, this sets the Warden apart from other dps paragon classes in that it’s a strategically flexible class to use. Unless you’re going Vorpal, please bear this note in mind. In other words, the payoff offered by overall damage due to weapon enhancement can result in unexpected/unintentional consequences on the positive basis. Again, please note that Vorpal is an exception unless proven otherwise.
To highlight how potentially insane this can get, let me point out that in most of my RLQ raids so far, total item level didn’t mean a single thing when it comes to the dps race. Using Bronzewood meant I shouldn’t expect high end damage dealing in Master of the Hunt skirmish. After all, the enemies there have higher/high end resistance to arcane damage. That plus Bronzewood isn’t the best dps option out of every weapon enhancement. The result? Total item level didn’t matter because Arylos took the top spot more oft than not.
The chief reason behind the seemingly illogical and outright IMPOSSIBRU! was due to the aggro not breaking, tank or no tank. To make this work, you”ll need a dps game revolving around four things: Electric Shot, Split The Sky, plus the feats Focused and Storm Conduit. This would result in a mass nuking game only a Hellbringer warlock can hope to outdo. This can be terribly devastating in raiding if you’re to consider the presence of an augment companion.
Which now comes to possible changes recently. Apparently, this legit strategy is now considered illegal. I tried the same strategy in one of my previous Dread Legion skirmishes. Turned out it didn’t work according to plan because the aggro broke towards me. As a result, I had to press Shift+2, albeit I didn’t have to do that if the warlock behind never sabotaged me by ignoring the need to revive a fellow party member. Let’s be honest here: Not even the likes of Geralt of Rivia and Goblin Slayer could have survived that. The latter needed Priestess to work in tandem with him behind the shadows in order defeat the goblin lord while the bad ending of Witcher 3 involved logical combat advantage. That didn’t prevent Arylos from taking the top spot in the dps race ladder, so one could conclude the act of sabotage, intentionally or not, failed to achieve its purpose.
This comes to mind the fact that copper, silver, and gold are now actually useful. A fact not lost to us after countless mods’ worth of this fact being lost to the devs. You really need injury kits, trust me. You need them for RLQ tier raids so long we’re talking about anything from the Sharandar challenge level onwards. If even a tank can realistically respawn in Master of the Hunt (I got no idea how that could be possible until I start running RLQ with a tank), it means either there’s something dodgy about the scaling, the player him/herself, or both. You’ll really need to consult gamers far savvier than me on this one. I’m serious here.
Either way, this means a change in approach. I can choose to stick with the cat (the literal one, not that other Fluffy from Chult). That’d require me to rely less on Call Of The Storm and more on Forest Ghost. Which by itself isn’t a bad idea since it’s 25% AP cost to jailbreak. But the dodgy part would be trying to hike the AP gauge since the game is now going harder on overall AP gain. In other words, either you need a standard artifact giving you active AP gain or Artificer’s Persuasion mount insignia bonus to make this decently workable. Thankfully, Arylos got the Siegebreaker’s Banner. So long the right person becomes the focal point instead of the tank, this shouldn’t be an issue. After all, Arylos got the AP gain boon (read: This strategy is only doable due to the said boon).
Another approach would be switching down the cat and bringing in either the Blink Dog (for direct dps due to combat advantage) or Siegemaster Klarke for a more tactical approach (note: The name Klarke was done half in jest and half due to lack of creativity, hence nothing to do with Emilia Clarke).
So which option is the better option?
On the first glance, it should be Reus or Klarke instead of a cat named Crytt. However, having an augment companion in raids means having better critical rating. For Wardens opting the Skirmisher’s Gambit feat, this is important as it can contribute a lot to the dps since the ranger gameplay no longer discriminates against either stance. But would having a direct damage companion help in downgrading the aggro bar colour?
This comes to mind another question: Which feat is better at this point? I’m referring to the final tier feat choice between Nature’s Envoy and Enhanced Conductivity.
To be honest, I won’t be surprised if I need one respec token to set things right. Thankfully, there’s Simril every year. And that included 2018. But maybe I’ll try and see whether strategic adjustment can be enough. After all, there’s a reason why I now bind Constricting Arrow to E with Split The Sky going to Q since my index finger has always been the trigger finger.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeroicBSOD
I’m not sure whether I want post some of my personal thoughts about what I’m about to read here. The reason why being that I prefer having something substantial to say on a consistent basis instead of trying to force it and risk massive disrespect to a titan of a man. Thankfully, I have something else to say. I’m going to try seeing how much I can write on my personal take on the current class changes to Neverwinter. Note that for now, I’ll just do these classes below:
Warden, Devout, Sentinel, Arcanist, Whisperknife
Warden will be a given since the deliberate visual similarity to Archer has always been my main. In fact, this is about my personal experience with this ranger paragon class. As for Devout, the accidental visual similarity to He Ying Ying’s current look will be done in a future post as well. As for the Arcanist, the accidental naming and/or visual similarity to Shalynn Tsai may (please understand the meaning of the word used) take up the same space as Whisperknife and a Sentinel who happened to be a poor man’s tribute to an awesome man of guts named... well, Guts.
These are the classes I managed to mess and tinker around with so far, so any further progress involving two more tanks and one more healer will require a day or few after end of May. More specifically from 27th May onwards unless that Heliopolis of a Suntec is unable to fetch me a PC. In this case, I’ll need to move on to Marina Bay Shinar for the PC Show.
Now onto the only intentional tribute to a fictional character apart from Wolfhawk.
The changes to the ranger class were much welcomed. The reason why being that there’s actual balance struck between ranged dps and melee damage. Of course, there’s always a trade deal involved. And it’s called downscaling the range dps. I need to check after 27th May or so to see whether base damage for off-hand melee gear has been upped. Suffice to say, this is a far better trade deal than the one NUS and other educational institutes are trying to set right currently.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/education/recommendations-for-nus-disciplinary-and-support-frameworks-ready-by-mid-may
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/smu-ntu-review-sexual-harassment-procedures-monica-baey-nus-11474380
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=my99WOLiKyo
The third link is not to speculate whether Emiya Kiritsugu was a pathetic rat graduated from ITE, let alone whether Kayneth was some big shot university graduate (he’s an elitist, though. A fact ensuring Waver Velvet being the most suitable Master for Alexander the Great due to a matter of ego). Rather, it is to point out you can now adopt the Kiritsugu approach if you want to. An analysis involving the Hunter paragon class would require some massive theoretical work inside my cranium (not that I never did this before since my brain is never meant to be Singaporean), therefore I’m not going to touch on that.
Now what are the attributes I chose to up? The intuitive answer would be Strength and Dexterity. It doesn’t matter whether you think like a Singaporean or not. And therein lies the catch: I mentioned the word “you”, not “we”. Because Arylos was meant to be a personality tribute to Kiritsugu (an idea which requires much more work if I’m serious in creating a serious protagonist out of him), I decided to make him as true to character as possible. This involved upping Intelligence and Wisdom right to the max via leveling up.
Intelligence now affects two things: Power of your control effects and magic damage. This ties in perfectly well with the fact that the Warden paragon class has great options in terms of the dps. Moves like Electric Shot, Split The Sky, and Call Of The Storm involve magic damage. I’m not 100% sure about ES, but the tooltip strongly hinted at this. Anyway, this sets the Warden apart from other dps paragon classes in that it’s a strategically flexible class to use. Unless you’re going Vorpal, please bear this note in mind. In other words, the payoff offered by overall damage due to weapon enhancement can result in unexpected/unintentional consequences on the positive basis. Again, please note that Vorpal is an exception unless proven otherwise.
To highlight how potentially insane this can get, let me point out that in most of my RLQ raids so far, total item level didn’t mean a single thing when it comes to the dps race. Using Bronzewood meant I shouldn’t expect high end damage dealing in Master of the Hunt skirmish. After all, the enemies there have higher/high end resistance to arcane damage. That plus Bronzewood isn’t the best dps option out of every weapon enhancement. The result? Total item level didn’t matter because Arylos took the top spot more oft than not.
The chief reason behind the seemingly illogical and outright IMPOSSIBRU! was due to the aggro not breaking, tank or no tank. To make this work, you”ll need a dps game revolving around four things: Electric Shot, Split The Sky, plus the feats Focused and Storm Conduit. This would result in a mass nuking game only a Hellbringer warlock can hope to outdo. This can be terribly devastating in raiding if you’re to consider the presence of an augment companion.
Which now comes to possible changes recently. Apparently, this legit strategy is now considered illegal. I tried the same strategy in one of my previous Dread Legion skirmishes. Turned out it didn’t work according to plan because the aggro broke towards me. As a result, I had to press Shift+2, albeit I didn’t have to do that if the warlock behind never sabotaged me by ignoring the need to revive a fellow party member. Let’s be honest here: Not even the likes of Geralt of Rivia and Goblin Slayer could have survived that. The latter needed Priestess to work in tandem with him behind the shadows in order defeat the goblin lord while the bad ending of Witcher 3 involved logical combat advantage. That didn’t prevent Arylos from taking the top spot in the dps race ladder, so one could conclude the act of sabotage, intentionally or not, failed to achieve its purpose.
This comes to mind the fact that copper, silver, and gold are now actually useful. A fact not lost to us after countless mods’ worth of this fact being lost to the devs. You really need injury kits, trust me. You need them for RLQ tier raids so long we’re talking about anything from the Sharandar challenge level onwards. If even a tank can realistically respawn in Master of the Hunt (I got no idea how that could be possible until I start running RLQ with a tank), it means either there’s something dodgy about the scaling, the player him/herself, or both. You’ll really need to consult gamers far savvier than me on this one. I’m serious here.
Either way, this means a change in approach. I can choose to stick with the cat (the literal one, not that other Fluffy from Chult). That’d require me to rely less on Call Of The Storm and more on Forest Ghost. Which by itself isn’t a bad idea since it’s 25% AP cost to jailbreak. But the dodgy part would be trying to hike the AP gauge since the game is now going harder on overall AP gain. In other words, either you need a standard artifact giving you active AP gain or Artificer’s Persuasion mount insignia bonus to make this decently workable. Thankfully, Arylos got the Siegebreaker’s Banner. So long the right person becomes the focal point instead of the tank, this shouldn’t be an issue. After all, Arylos got the AP gain boon (read: This strategy is only doable due to the said boon).
Another approach would be switching down the cat and bringing in either the Blink Dog (for direct dps due to combat advantage) or Siegemaster Klarke for a more tactical approach (note: The name Klarke was done half in jest and half due to lack of creativity, hence nothing to do with Emilia Clarke).
So which option is the better option?
On the first glance, it should be Reus or Klarke instead of a cat named Crytt. However, having an augment companion in raids means having better critical rating. For Wardens opting the Skirmisher’s Gambit feat, this is important as it can contribute a lot to the dps since the ranger gameplay no longer discriminates against either stance. But would having a direct damage companion help in downgrading the aggro bar colour?
This comes to mind another question: Which feat is better at this point? I’m referring to the final tier feat choice between Nature’s Envoy and Enhanced Conductivity.
To be honest, I won’t be surprised if I need one respec token to set things right. Thankfully, there’s Simril every year. And that included 2018. But maybe I’ll try and see whether strategic adjustment can be enough. After all, there’s a reason why I now bind Constricting Arrow to E with Split The Sky going to Q since my index finger has always been the trigger finger.
Sunday 5 May 2019
Semi-drifting until end of May (4/5/19)
Okay, this is John L’Otter taking a break from his PC until end of May. The reason why being that I (yes, you’ve read it right) decide to buy a new PC instead. From 23rd May to the 26th, the City of Sun(tec) will be having the yearly Consumer Electronics Exhibition. This is most likely my best bet in getting a new PC.
This also means three things:
1. I will be swearing off Neverwinter until that day comes.
2. I will need Archer’s mind of steel against the tag team duo of Apple and Safari.
3. It’s not that bad. I’ve survived more than 30 working days of having no PC and the day I get a smartphone with online access is the day I have a girlfriend. In other words, there’s no need for rehab.
https://www.thecabinsingapore.com.sg/blog/gambling-addiction/teen-gaming-addiction-in-singapore/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=14ax9TL7GZM
In the first piece of news, we have the Baey of NUS expressing her optimism.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/monica-baey-sexual-misconduct-nus-university-instagram-11494822
Now it must be said that most likely the reason why Nicholas Lim was being bullied online wasn’t due to Singapore becoming more righteous overnight. We’re living in a world full of post-modern people. That’s why there will always be people saying that’s only your opinion. Then we have people doing things to make themselves feel emotionally fulfilled. I’m not referring to Monica Baey by the way. It’s about human beings feeding their sense of higher awareness to the animals which don’t have any of that at all.
If there’s a 100% legitimate reason for NUS to be serious about changing both the disciplinary measures and campus culture, this would be it. There’s no point making two people suffer if you can make zero people suffer instead. We’re not talking about Emiya Kiritsugu’s pragmatic brand of justice where every one person has to die in order for every ten others to be saved. That’d be terribly dark.
And speaking of dark, I don’t know how true this is. But apparently, a blind busker was robbed in Yishun. While I wholeheartedly support letting the SPF handle this case, there’s something about this that made me go “Hey, that’s so deja-vu”. And it has got nothing to do with whether the robber was a stereotypical resident of stereotypical Yishun.
Recently, I decided to read The Children Of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by his son Chris, and illustrated by a certain Mr Lee. Not Stan or the ones making the news for all the wrong reasons, but
Alan Lee (pretty sure he’s unrelated to Christopher Lee even though they’re both Brits. Yes, Christopher Lee was a Brit, not someone else from Mediacorp). Actually, I only got started less than an hour ago and I’m still in the preface.
This is not to say I don’t know the plot and characters. Unlike many of my fellow Singaporeans, I know the story of Beren and Luthien. Unlike Sun Xu, I know about the Hound of Valinor whose name was Huan.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMfF5fjC-LY
In other words, The Children of Hurin was the darkest tale written by Tolkien. Of course, this is not to say that Tolkien only went DC mode there. In The Hobbit, my preference defied that of my fellow Singaporeans once again by deciding Thorin Oakenshield was that standout character. Unlike Frodo Baggins, Thorin was an anti-heroic protagonist. Unlike Aragorn, he was an anti-heroic king. Interestingly enough, both Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit seemed to feature two protagonists instead of just only a heroic midget whose original concern was no different from any Singaporean.
I’ pretty sure The Children Of Hurin will be an enjoyable read. That’s until 27th May. This comes to mind an interesting question: How would Tolkien write dark fantasy if he belongs to the current era of G.R.R. Martin, Stephen King (yes, I consider The Dark Tower as fantasy, Claudia Kim or no Claudia Kim), Miura Kentaro, and a possible Stephen Kim?
When I started out on A Requiem From Winter Past, it was entitled A Ranger’s Tale. Because I don’t want to give anybody a reason to hire Drew & Napier in order to sue a poor man till he loses even his pants, I decided to change the title. The first draft was a disaster, but I’ve never cringed whenever looking back at the past. The same couldn’t be said about the rest I’ve written. Apart from depoliticising Lukas Brun (note that I never said degaying him), the most notable alteration was changing the DC aspects of language and portrayal. Don’t ask me why, though. You wouldn’t like my answer.
In the past, I’ve never thought about whether what I’m doing might have been what Tolkien would have done if he’s still alive, cryogenically or not. Now that I’m starting to read a story which not many Singaporeans would know, this question popped up. Quite obviously, Tolkien was a maestro. And he still is. Coupled with an overly practical attitude in Singapore involving artistic creativity (unless you’re the correct Jack Neo), I’d be worst than an idiot to compare myself with a true master.
With that being said, I’m going to risk my hide and neck by re-upping the current edit here.
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-requiem-from-winter-past-chapter-1.html
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2019/01/a-requiem-from-winter-past-chapter-2.html
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-requiem-from-winter-past-chapter-3.html
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-requiem-from-winter-past-chapter-4.html
This also means three things:
1. I will be swearing off Neverwinter until that day comes.
2. I will need Archer’s mind of steel against the tag team duo of Apple and Safari.
3. It’s not that bad. I’ve survived more than 30 working days of having no PC and the day I get a smartphone with online access is the day I have a girlfriend. In other words, there’s no need for rehab.
https://www.thecabinsingapore.com.sg/blog/gambling-addiction/teen-gaming-addiction-in-singapore/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=14ax9TL7GZM
In the first piece of news, we have the Baey of NUS expressing her optimism.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/monica-baey-sexual-misconduct-nus-university-instagram-11494822
Now it must be said that most likely the reason why Nicholas Lim was being bullied online wasn’t due to Singapore becoming more righteous overnight. We’re living in a world full of post-modern people. That’s why there will always be people saying that’s only your opinion. Then we have people doing things to make themselves feel emotionally fulfilled. I’m not referring to Monica Baey by the way. It’s about human beings feeding their sense of higher awareness to the animals which don’t have any of that at all.
If there’s a 100% legitimate reason for NUS to be serious about changing both the disciplinary measures and campus culture, this would be it. There’s no point making two people suffer if you can make zero people suffer instead. We’re not talking about Emiya Kiritsugu’s pragmatic brand of justice where every one person has to die in order for every ten others to be saved. That’d be terribly dark.
And speaking of dark, I don’t know how true this is. But apparently, a blind busker was robbed in Yishun. While I wholeheartedly support letting the SPF handle this case, there’s something about this that made me go “Hey, that’s so deja-vu”. And it has got nothing to do with whether the robber was a stereotypical resident of stereotypical Yishun.
Recently, I decided to read The Children Of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by his son Chris, and illustrated by a certain Mr Lee. Not Stan or the ones making the news for all the wrong reasons, but
Alan Lee (pretty sure he’s unrelated to Christopher Lee even though they’re both Brits. Yes, Christopher Lee was a Brit, not someone else from Mediacorp). Actually, I only got started less than an hour ago and I’m still in the preface.
This is not to say I don’t know the plot and characters. Unlike many of my fellow Singaporeans, I know the story of Beren and Luthien. Unlike Sun Xu, I know about the Hound of Valinor whose name was Huan.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMfF5fjC-LY
In other words, The Children of Hurin was the darkest tale written by Tolkien. Of course, this is not to say that Tolkien only went DC mode there. In The Hobbit, my preference defied that of my fellow Singaporeans once again by deciding Thorin Oakenshield was that standout character. Unlike Frodo Baggins, Thorin was an anti-heroic protagonist. Unlike Aragorn, he was an anti-heroic king. Interestingly enough, both Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit seemed to feature two protagonists instead of just only a heroic midget whose original concern was no different from any Singaporean.
I’ pretty sure The Children Of Hurin will be an enjoyable read. That’s until 27th May. This comes to mind an interesting question: How would Tolkien write dark fantasy if he belongs to the current era of G.R.R. Martin, Stephen King (yes, I consider The Dark Tower as fantasy, Claudia Kim or no Claudia Kim), Miura Kentaro, and a possible Stephen Kim?
When I started out on A Requiem From Winter Past, it was entitled A Ranger’s Tale. Because I don’t want to give anybody a reason to hire Drew & Napier in order to sue a poor man till he loses even his pants, I decided to change the title. The first draft was a disaster, but I’ve never cringed whenever looking back at the past. The same couldn’t be said about the rest I’ve written. Apart from depoliticising Lukas Brun (note that I never said degaying him), the most notable alteration was changing the DC aspects of language and portrayal. Don’t ask me why, though. You wouldn’t like my answer.
In the past, I’ve never thought about whether what I’m doing might have been what Tolkien would have done if he’s still alive, cryogenically or not. Now that I’m starting to read a story which not many Singaporeans would know, this question popped up. Quite obviously, Tolkien was a maestro. And he still is. Coupled with an overly practical attitude in Singapore involving artistic creativity (unless you’re the correct Jack Neo), I’d be worst than an idiot to compare myself with a true master.
With that being said, I’m going to risk my hide and neck by re-upping the current edit here.
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-requiem-from-winter-past-chapter-1.html
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2019/01/a-requiem-from-winter-past-chapter-2.html
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-requiem-from-winter-past-chapter-3.html
https://republicofotters.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-requiem-from-winter-past-chapter-4.html
Wednesday 1 May 2019
Just another goblin
Yes, John knows this has got nothing to do with Undermountain. But there's a very good reason why he's using this title. Now before this typing otter starts his strategy guide, allow him to make two announcements.
1. John decided to abort the racism post series at Pt 1. The reason why being that it's a poorly conceived idea. Attempting a post on phenotypes without an actual plan? At least this isn't about goblins. Oh, and one more thing: John L'Otter is pro-life even though he cares about justice.
2. The reason behind the post title was due to something Goblin Slayer said. In ways more than one, it was a right-in-your-face moment. However, the Goblin Slayer series has gotten for itself quite a massive controversy. Hence, John is unable to up the relevant YouTube video. However, he's able to up something else. Namely, the song being played during one of the many goblin raids (and attempted rape).
"You're no lord. You're just another goblin."
So what this post will be all about?
1. John decided to abort the racism post series at Pt 1. The reason why being that it's a poorly conceived idea. Attempting a post on phenotypes without an actual plan? At least this isn't about goblins. Oh, and one more thing: John L'Otter is pro-life even though he cares about justice.
2. The reason behind the post title was due to something Goblin Slayer said. In ways more than one, it was a right-in-your-face moment. However, the Goblin Slayer series has gotten for itself quite a massive controversy. Hence, John is unable to up the relevant YouTube video. However, he's able to up something else. Namely, the song being played during one of the many goblin raids (and attempted rape).
"You're no lord. You're just another goblin."
Note: This has got nothing to do with NUS, Sammyboy Forum, and a Malaysian doctor because Goblin Slayer DID say the above quote. And besides, the reason why this BGM was upped was that John really likes the song.
So what this post will be all about?
Nothing much by John's estimation. This post is about whatever very little he can offer strategy wise. Quite obviously he's no Goblin Slayer. Otherwise, he'd win the gods hands down when it comes to rolling the die.
Riding the buggy (as always)
We all know what to expect come a new mod. Undermountain is no exception. In other words, glitches. Out of all the new mods played so far, Undermountain has gotta be the buggiest ride.
If there's anything John is waiting to be fixed, it'd be locked loadout for his Arbiter Cleric. But it must be pointed out that this is more of a random chance situation spanning more than a mod or two. Given the need to iron out the kinks, John won't be surprised if fixing the locked loadout glitch would take the devs quite some time. And yes, John did try the whole unequip+re-equip trick. Doesn't work.
Making your life easier
Because difficulty level of the game has increased in this mod, it's strongly recommended that you get the Barovian gear instead of sticking with the previous Primal gear. Seals exchange now goes one for one instead of one for three, so it shouldn't be that difficult. This is not to say you can't run the labyrinth of insanity with Primal gear (or just about any gear lower level than Barovian). Rather, that'd make your life easier. Especially for the dps builds.
The AI in this mod is currently done in such a way that using augment companions can pose a risk when it comes to open world. Unless you're running as a tank, it's not advisable to use this companion type. When John had his first taste of action via an invitation to the live preview server (pretty sure the devs wouldn't mind him leaking this since Undermountain is already here), running solo with an augment companion means the aggro would have only one target. Namely, you. This is very important because mobs no longer allow you to utilise muscle memory to outlast and outfight them. While damage output from the individual enemy is arguably lower, combat advantage now results in high-end damage escalation. This is effectively dealing with goblins in the world of Goblin Slayer. You know those things don't and won't play it nice especially when it comes to women, local Singaporeans or no local Singaporeans.
In constricted space, it's not a problem. But such terrain is never a major part of the gameplay. More often than not, you'll have to fight the Undertakers, Xanathar Guild, and pretty much everything else in either open space or a large room. This gives the mob plenty of space to manoeuvre and zerg. Even if you're running as a tank, attracting aggro all around you is asking for trouble. Trust John, he tried that in preview server and he was forced to think of a better alternative. Namely...
Ever wondered why Goblin Slayer is such a difficult guy to deal with despite never being the most powerful character in the series?
Back against the wall
There are two ways to define the term.
1. You got yourself into trouble. Basically, you've got no one to blame except for yourself.
2. You use it as a legitimate tactic against those attempting to zerg you, goblins or no goblins. Basically, this is called using your imagination.
It's not just the Undermountain mobs. It's pretty much the case in every zone. However, Halaster's titular base is a good way of honing your tactical sense. The reason why being that it's a cavern environment. So what this means would be walls, walls, and plenty of walls.
Not really. Okay, it's not.
Currently, John has reached Terminus. Basically, this means Arylos has cleared the Catacombs, Twisted Caverns, and Wyllowwood. The first two weren't a problem. Catacombs zone has plenty of narrow space. This makes the back-against-the-wall strategy extremely effective. But that alone won't make you become a Goblin Slayer. Twisted Caverns zone is all about large caves. However, those stoned kuo-toa won't pose a problem. Seriously, if you can't take these stoners down, there's no way John can understand how you're able to survive mobs of Undertakers and Xananthar Guild guildies.
While Arylos has yet to take on those heavy death metal horrors in Terminus, Wyllowwood proved itself to be the first actual challenge. Catacombs zone was all about warming up his tactical senses while Twisted Caverns was there to maintain the sharpness (the aboleth boss fight was surprisingly easy even though John was just messing around with the atomic slime created by some kuo-toa named Einsteiner). Wyllowwood was quite okay, but the boss fight against Arcturia was the stuff of metal. Basically, guano loco worshippers of Malar would be out to zerg rush you. And this is where your tactical class shows itself to be (somewhat of) a Goblin Slayer or... well, otherwise. John isn't gonna elaborate here.
A dummy's guide on how to slay like a Goblin Slayer
Before John gets to Arcturia, here are a few tips on slaying stuff apart from those murderous and horny goblins.
Behold your beholder(s)!
For some funny reason, it seems that those abominations tend to spawn randomly in expeditions. Either way, there are two types of beholders: The big one and small ones. No, this isn't meant as a joke.
Small beholders tend to be part of any mob. As such, it's very important to take them down asap. The biggest challenge in doing this may not be due to the dps value, but rather the AoE bombing. If you're out to take down even 50% of the rest first instead, then good luck trying to run about and not getting yourself killed. One single daze from a beholder is like getting zapped with a taser gun. You won't die, but the mob will make sure you die. In the event the unthinkable happens, just run. Not to run into another mob but rather run around in a circle. You'll get hit, but at least don't let them nailed in one clean hit after another. This is where deflection and critical avoidance come in. The combination of both stats should ensure at least a decent chance of survival. Beyond that, there's nothing you can do apart from waiting for the effect to wear out.
If you're to ask John, small beholders don't pose a challenge since Arylos (and Sheallyn) never got tasered by them. The big beholder is the real pain in the cranium. There's only one mob boasting a combination of small beholders and a big one. This means a massive AoE mayhem involving hitting any target close enough to attack while attempting to nail the small beholders first. Now this fight was done solely the Left Hand of Kelemvor (i.e. Arylos the Warden because the Tel-quessir are never his people and Corellon Larethian is never his god), so there's plenty of space to trial and error for Myrreas (Whisperknife), Cyrea (Arbiter), Sheallyn (Arcanist), Kariss (Hellbringer), Bhaasmond (Oath of Protection), Wolfhawk (Sentinel), and Doyle (Iron Vanguard).
This is the kind of fight where you'll have to kill the small beholders asap. If this was your first try, there's nothing to be ashamed of if you made the wrong call to target the big (beholder) boss first. Since there should be nothing wrong or shameful with actual repentance in real life, why should a fictional game matter more? If Plan A doesn't work, just make sure your Plan B is a better plan.
Of course, targetting the small beholders is something easier said than done. After all, one of the roles of the big boss is to make sure its underlings don't die. Kill the small ones and the big boss will be in trouble. This type of fight will take quite some time, getting drunk on healing potions, and moving about until the end of the fight. Not to mention dodging the AoE bombing, be it literally (if you're anyone but a tank) or not (if you're no one else but a tank).
Apart from the Arcturia boss fight, this has to be the most metal clash done so far. If you're not confident enough for this type of high tempo fight, please get at least a couple of Scrolls of Life.
Big Boss Thing
At the end of every expedition stands a boss. A big one. Literally. This isn't hard so long you have a dps companion. Or even better, a BFF like Man-at-Arms, Adbar Shield Maiden, or Wild Hunt Rider ("I am the most dangerous game."). If you're using a healing companion, then you better be a tank. There's no point using a dps build with a healer companion. Let alone a healer build. So long the dps momentum is fast enough, taking down the Big Boss Thing shouldn't be an issue. Combat advantage is your BFF here, so better treat it like your BFF stat.
For Arylos, fighting the every Big Boss Thing requires only two main components.
1. His role as the alpha wolf
2. A blue rank combat advantage bling dawg named Reus
The role of the alpha wolf refers to Aspect of the Pack where one nearby companion alone is enough to give combat advantage free-of-charge. Just make sure you don't use an augment companion because the class feature won't accept this loophole.
As for Reus, he's a Blink Dog. Although to be fair, John is pretty sure a green rank one would do nicely.
Note: Yes, John knows Reus sounds Teutonically cool. In other words, this got nothing to do with another Reus named Marco. That one doesn't belong to the Feywild.
The gods roll the dice, you won the fight
Okay, this is a personal experience. As for whether it's a personal achievement, that's something subjected to debate among post-modernists.
This involves two things.
1. The fight against Arcturia
2. The big beholder fight mentioned earlier
Let's talk about the Arcturia fight first. We all know how mad Halaster Blackcloak was. At least Raistlin Majere decided not to be a god. And we all know Caramon's cynical anti-heroic brother never attempted planting his own Garden of Eden. But Halaster? Well, he's crazy enough to play a god. Literally. Actually, we're all like that. It's just down to whether we end up like Raistlin or Halaster.
This fight involved four waves of bloodthirsty worshippers of Malar. They're not gonna care which god you worship. They just want to make you pass through the fire. Which is a very sick way of killing a life. Okay, that's a lie. They just want to disembowel you while hearing you scream until you're too dead to make any noise.
Anyway, this fight was interesting as in the initial dps momentum wasn't going fast enough for Arylos while fast enough for those bloodthirsty terrorists. If things don't improve after two pops of healing potion, it means you'll need to do something to throw off-guard these fang crazy Johnnies and claw crazy Jennies. Thankfully, there's a way. It's called a rock.
No, this isn't a joke. John is talking the truth here. So how this worked was very simple. The rock was no ordinary rock. It's a sloping rock. What this means was that Arylos just climbed up the rock as high as possible. Sounds familiar? By doing so and staging a "last stand", the horde of Malar failed to win the nearest thing to the Battle of Camlann. It's actually that simple, but you'll need to hold your nerves and use the correct level healing potion.
After defeating the men, women, and livestock belonging to Malar, it's Arcturia's turn to be pwned. Turned out the dps momentum was insanely high for a duel. In other words, Arcturia got some sort of Arcane Power Field which only the likes of Elminster Aumar, Khelben Arunsun, and Alustriel Silverhand could outdo. Again, this was a fight where a mind of steel and usage of the correct (level) healing potion were a must. Unlike the fight against Malar's mooks, however, you don't need to move about. That is unless you're interested to know the territorial limits of Arcturia's nuclear radiation zone. John won't advise it, though.
It's a dps game where if you can survive the fight with Arcturia's HP bar down to half while your HP bar is also at around the same range, then it should be an indication of a winnable fight. Seriously, you don't need to be a righteous faker because she's no Artoria Pendragon. Let alone Gilgamesh.
This comes to the part on the big beholder boss. The Arcturia fight was a case of deja-vu. The reason why being that the HP bar would always be the first in the line of fire. Against Arcturia, the onus was for her to drop down dead before Arylos ended at the other side. Upon getting tasered by the big beholder, it's a closer call. Unlike the Arcturia fight, there's no way to use a healing potion since everything got locked. Actually, the big beholder fight might be the reason why Arylos got the nerves of steel to dish it out against Arcturia. This was a Goblin Slayer moment for Arylos as it might have involved the gods rolling the dice.
Some ending notes
John L'Otter is going to end this by pointing out what you should do in random queuing. Yes, a lot of players are now complaining over an unplayable mod. But that's because they've never had to endure that ground zero called Elemental Evil. There's a difference between that Elemental Evil and this Undermountain. Mod 6 nuked the gear system. Period. As a result, the gamers were mistaken for a guy named Daigo.
In Undermountain, you don't have to be Daigo. You don't even need to be a genius in strategy and tactics like Goblin Slayer or Emiya Kiritsugu. You just need to understand the importance of critical avoidance when using it as a synergy stat with defence. This is vital to survival because every sane-minded guild should be having the stables guild building for a reason. If your guild doesn't have one, please destroy a guild boon building of your choice and replace it with a stables guild building. After all, it's very easy to complain about dying easily until you realised a wizard managed to outdo you in surviving your previous Master of the Hunt skirmish.
This comes to another point. It's more of a controversial call from the devs if you're to ask John. In the random intermediate queue, there's something seriously off with the auto-matchmaking code. While this may not register in most of the RIQ raids, the same couldn't be said for Manycoins Bank Heist skirmish. Until the devs said something, John strongly discourages players without a good set of level 80 gear from queuing the RIQ. The reason why being that at least for this particular skirmish, the standard rule of 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 dps doesn't register. In other words, you can end up with 4 dps and 1 healer. If it's a Devout, your party is most likely screwed. If it's a Soulbinder, then there's a decent chance of getting bronze. Albeit it may require divine intervention to get any reward higher than that. If it's 1 tank and 4 dps, the risk would be too high because combat advantage now results in high damage escalation. Which is bad news for both the tank and dps. Simply put, the only way to have a decent chance of winning this (or just about any other skirmish format RIQ raids like Merchant Prince's Folly and Throne of the Dwarven Gods) is to get the correct roll of the die. Otherwise, you're better off waiting until having a pure Spy Guild gear set. Or something like that.
So does that mean rough astral diamonds are now unearnable? The answer is no. You have the random levelling queue, right? Start from there. The enemies are now harder to kill, but at least that'd keep you alert instead of relying on muscle memory. Actually, there's nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to relying on muscle memory so long you recognise the severe limitations. After all, Goblin Slayer didn't need to graduate from any university to be called... well, Goblin Slayer.
P.S: The mention of letting the gods roll the die and a mere mortal winning reminds John L'Otter of a super metal scene in Goblin Slayer where there's this scenario of two dice being rolled and a super wrathful revenant of a boy standing up like a man. While John didn't watch the anime, he did see the YouTube clip. And yes, the Japanese are still known to be more insane than H.P. Lovecraft himself. Don't believe John L'Otter, go ask the Notorious UBG.
Apparently, this song is unrelated to Goblin Slayer. But John L'Otter still likes it. Now if only he can find the lyrics translated in English on Google.
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