Path of Exile: Week Race!

They're currently between race seasons in Path of Exile with the last season having ended yesterday. I finished in 1201st place, having stopped racing as soon as I got the legendary item I wanted. I knew I couldn't finish very highly overall because of going away for two weeks and doubting my laptop could play the game very well. (Turns out I was right and it can't.) The next season has not yet started but they've thrown a little something interesting in between the seasons... A week long race!

This race has a few interesting twists going on compared to the races I've done thus far. It lasts a week, for one! It also is running as both a nemesis and domination league for the purposes of getting challenge achievements. This means all rare monsters will have a nemesis mod and that shrines will spawn on the map. I don't need the shrines but I do have one more nemesis mod I need to pick up. At the end of the week any characters that are still alive will get transferred not to the normal hardcore ladder but to the nemesis ladder.

It's also a party event which means the guild stash tab will work for the week. It also means trading is an option and will probably be a real important thing. Real builds might be possible since you can plausibly acquire low level legendaries and a full suite of gems. I also have to assume that the really good people will hit end game in less than a week so there's going to be people running maps and such in a race which is an interesting idea. I wonder if people will group with strangers?

I'm going to give it a shot, of course, but I'm wondering what I should play. My normal race character would be a leap slamming duelist but I wonder if a tankier plan might not be in order for a week long race. Running a playstyle that will result in a death per hour on average is fine if your goal is to win a two hour race. You'll die in most of them, but win every now and then. In a week long race you're just going to die. So ignoring all life nodes seems like it's got to be wrong. Shaving 20 minutes off your early game time is also probably not terribly relevant, especially if you end up worse in the long run.

The race starts at 6pm on Jan 1st. Be there or be square asleep!

Go Buy Alan Wake!

Last summer I bought Alan Wake on sale for a whopping $4 and it was awesome. I posted about it and tried to get people to get it, but no one seemed to really want to pay the full price for a game with a fantastic story. Well, it just went on sale for the winter holiday sale for only $3.

There is no excuse. Alan Wake has Steam cards and an awesome story. You need to play this game and $3 is a steal. DO IT NOW!

Bridge Match 2 - Board 35

Board 35 - Dealer South - EW Vul

Opponents convention card: Standard American Yellow Card
Opponents playing strength: Adequate

My hand: ♠ A T 8 6 5 ♥ 5 4 ♦ Q T 4 ♣ Q 6 4

Partner opens a weak NT in 3rd seat. My 8 with his 12-14 is a decent shot at making 1NT. Probably a better chance at making 2 spades though? It's not like I have reliably entries in NT so we should take an extra trick in spades I think. I'm convinced. West decides to get frisky and bids 3 clubs. Partner competes to 3 spades which gets passed out.

West leads the J of clubs.

	NORTH ♠ J 7 3 ♥ Q 9 ♦ A K 8 5 3 ♣ A 8 3
WEST ♣ J
	SOUTH ♠ A T 8 6 5 ♥ 5 4 ♦ Q T 4 ♣ Q 6 4

West	North	East	South
			Pass
Pass	1NT	Pass	2♠
3♣	3♠	Pass	Pass
Pass

I have 3 diamond tricks, a club trick, and probably 3 spade tricks if they split 3-2. I need two more tricks from somewhere. I can get a club by floating this around to my Q and I might well be able to get 2 more diamond tricks as well. As far as losers go I have 2 heart losers, 2 club losers, and likely 2 spade losers. That's 2 losers too many. The club goes away if I float this club around and a spade goes away if I pull off a finesse? I can also pitch some losers in diamonds if those get set up. My problem is I'm going to have to give up the lead when I draw trump and then they might well cash out. Certainly if I hop the club here I'm in big trouble. So I guess I have to duck. J-3-K-4. East shifts to a heart. J-4-K-9. West cashes a heart. A-Q-3-5. Now a club. T-A-2 of spades-6.

Ew. I guess I really should have seen that coming what with the 3 club bid out of nowhere. Well, I'm up other than spades. I ruff the heart return on board then lead the J around. East covers and I win my A. I return to dummy with a diamond and play another spade around, catching East's 9 with my T. West shows out. I lose to East's K for down 1.

	NORTH ♠ J 7 3 ♥ Q 9 ♦ A K 8 5 3 ♣ A 8 3
WEST ♠ 4 ♥ A K 8 2 ♦ J 6 ♣ J T 9 7 5 2		EAST ♠ K Q 9 2 ♥ J T 7 6 3 ♦ 9 7 2 ♣ K
	SOUTH ♠ A T 8 6 5 ♥ 5 4 ♦ Q T 4 ♣ Q 6 4

This felt really bad but it turned out to be a good board for us. 6 pairs played 3 spades and they all went down. 2 went down 1, 2 went down 2, and 2 went down 2 doubled. One EW pair made 3 hearts up 1 and one EW pair went down 1 in 4 hearts. This was worth 11 MPs for our team. Woo!


Captain Jack agrees with me all the way!

Ranking after board 35/60: 1/16 with 58.16%

Path of Exile: Tanking Stats

Almost everyone in Path of Exile gets attacked by monsters. My summoner witch rarely gets attacked and therefore gets to mostly ignore defensive stats but all my other characters have needed to worry about dying from everyday monsters. Many build guides take it as an absolute given that armour is just better than evasion in this game and pretty much all recommend taking the talent point which converts your evasion into armour. My ranger is up to level 61 and I ended up taking the talent point which cuts your armour in half in order to get dodge which goes against all those recommendations. Respeccing out of it will be too expensive but I like using lightning arrow so I've been considering starting a new character to use the same gear and abilities but going to get the other defensive talent.

If I was able to actually play the game on this laptop I probably would already have a high level lightning arrow scion to be able to compare the two by feel. But the game lags super badly and crashes all the team even on the lowest possible settings so I haven't been able to do that. Instead I've been doing some reading about the game to get my fix and that's included reading a bunch about the underlying mechanics. I don't need to play with both builds... I can math them out! Somewhat, anyway...

Every main piece of equipment in the game has one or two of the three main defensive stats: armour, evasion, and energy shield. Armour works against any source of physical damage. Evasions works against any attacks (physical or elemental) but not against spells. Energy shield works against everything except chaos damage but doesn't replenish in combat so it's not a long term tanking solution but it's just fine for someone who takes incidental damage every now and then. On top of those three defensive stats you also have life and magic resist which can come on items as mods. Life is like energy shield but can be replenished in combat and magic resist reduces incoming elemental damage regardless of originating source. Pretty much everyone caps out magic resist at 75% reduction so it's not terribly interesting.

The amount of damage prevented by armour approaches 1 damage prevented per 12 points of armour but only when you actually take a large amount of damage at once. I found a post indicating the average damage done by a level 77 monster is 756 and the function works out to make it so armour is linear in terms of hits until dead.

Evasion works differently in PoE than is pretty much any other game I've played. Normally if you have a 25% chance to evade an attack you expect to get hit 3 in 4 times but you might get lucky and evade 4 hits in a row or you might get unlucky and get hit all 4 times. Path of Exile keeps a counter on each unit and adds on the chance to get hit each time they get attacked. If that counter crosses the 100% threshold that specific attack hits you and you knock 100% off the counter. So you don't just expect to get hit 3 in 4 times with a 25% to evade... You WILL get hit 3 in 4 times. Which hit will be the single miss is randomly determined by whatever number your counter got seeded to but as soon as that miss happens you know for sure that you'll get 3 times and then get missed. Evasion also doubles as crit mitigation. If you get hit by an attack and that attack gets rolled as a crit then you get to make an extra evade check. This one doesn't use the counter and will turn the crit into a regular hit if you pass the evade check.

Normally I hate evasion when I'm tanking in an MMO because I have a healer spamming me up and my goal is to reduce bursts of damage. Evasion doesn't do that very well and armour really does. I would take an ability that swaps chance to evade into flat mitigation every single time in a game like World of Warcraft. That's actually exactly what I did in The Burning Crusade expansion when I switched to playing a druid tank instead of a warrior tank. But here in PoE evasion seems to not have as big of a spike damage flaw. I'd definitely rather have 25% flat mitigation over a 25% evade chance but I'm not so sure I wouldn't rather have a 90% evade chance over 90% mitigation, considering the other talent tree things that exist for evasion...

There's one node that doubles your evasion chance against projectile attacks to a max of 95% evasion. Most importantly there's a set of nodes that reduces your armour and energy shield by half but gives you 40% chance to dodge attacks and 30% chance to dodge spells. Dodge is slightly different from evasion in that it gets checked separately and works the way most MMO dodges work in that it doesn't keep a counter or anything. The chance to dodge spells is also the only way to avoid spells since they typically always hit. On top of it all, every 5 points of dex increase your evasion rating by 1% and that bonus doesn't work if you convert evasion into armour. On the other hand there's a node that makes you immune to stuns but prevents you from evading at all. It combos well with the conversion node!

Anyway, a level 77 monster apparently rates to have 540 accuracy and 756 damage on average. I took a look for an end game character screenshot for someone going full evasion and they had 5300 life, 140 armour, and 13000 evasion rating. They had 340 dexterity being included in there, which was a 68% increase in evasion that wouldn't be able to carry over to armour. It looks like he has 52% increased evasion from his tree so the dex is worth about 4000 evasion rating. He's also using a shield with 844 evasion rating on it and my archer wouldn't be able to use it... So I'll take that away. He's also not all that close from the evasion to armour node, but let's pretend he can get it for free... Should he want it? I'm also assuming he'd take the node that prevents being stunned and throw away the base 5% evade chance though that's even further away...

With the node he gets hit every time and gets crit 5% of the time. He gets hit for 406 damage most of the time and the overall EV from an incoming attack is to take 416 damage. With the evasion setup he gets hit only 29% of the time and crit only 2.4% of the time but when he gets hit he takes 750 damage. But with a health pool over 5300 he's going to have plenty of time to heal up between those hits for 750. The overall EV from an incoming attack is to take 222 damage. That's significantly less damage to need to heal up and will require a smaller amount of life leech. On top of it all he's going to take almost no damage from ranged attacks (he hits the 95% evade cap) and he's going to dodge 30% of all incoming spells. The downside is that any time he gets hit there's going to be a decent chance he gets stunned and he may well end up stun locked to death by something like Piety's lightning storm or lightning ball while the other guy just walks away. But maybe the 30% spell dodge with all that health is enough to survive it. The fact that he's pretty much immune to Piety's ice form is pretty hot!

What about for other characters? My hardcore guy wants those nodes but he's more of a strength based character and is nowhere near the dodge nodes. So he won't get those regardless, and he'll have more base armour, and more base health from the extra strength, and he'll have a much smaller dex pool. Plugging those into my spreadsheet comes out to the evasion build taking EV 394 per swing and the armour build taking EV 386 per swing, and gets to be immune to stuns. He wouldn't have the double evade against ranged attacks or the spell dodge either way. In this case it seems pretty straightforward to take the smoother damage and never get stunned.

Ok... I'm happy with the way my hardcore guy is going and am now reconsidering wanting to change my ranger around. I wonder if my ranger tree can be salvaged into a good build now keeping the dodge? Hmm...

SolForge: Zimus the Undying

Zimus the Undying is a legendary card featured in pretty much every single good deck I've seen in constructed tournaments. I happen to have two of him myself (snagged one in my free coupon draft) though I was still winning with him when I had a single copy. I was wondering how big of a difference having 2 or 3 would be compared to having just the one. Playing the level 3 version of him on the first turn of age 3 seems like an auto-win in any situation that isn't critical so maximizing the odds of that happening seems like it should be strong. But how strong is it, really?

Level 3 Zimus the Undying is actually only a 14/7 creature. 14 is an average power for a level 3 card but 7 toughness is terrible. That can trade with pretty much every level 2 creature and some of the level 1 creatures! He won't even trade with many level 3 creatures. Why is he so good? Oh, because he's actually undying. If he dies at level 3 you put him back in play in a random empty slot (guaranteed to exist because he was in one of them that is now empty). Come back into play makes him a new creature so he loses all debuffs and comes back at 14/7. So your opponent can easily 'trade' with him, but trading with him doesn't do anything because he just comes back. He does 28 damage per turn (14 on yours, 14 on his) unless your opponent starts treating him as a double abyss. You basically can't beat it if you weren't in a position to win soon. Or play your own! Actually, a level 3 Hearttree might be a good answer to him since that's a 30 toughness creature that regenerates 6 per turn. So at least he gets to absorb 3 attacks? That's not actually very good. Maybe power reducers and never kill him? But a good deck probably has a way to sacrifice him if it needs to. Anyway... I've mostly found I need to ignore him and win fast or else I lose. And the same is true when I play him. I lose fast (probably from some obscene grimgaunt dude) or I win.

The later you play him, the more likely it is that you're going to lose fast. So clearly you want to maximize the chances of playing him as soon as possible. That means playing any low level version as soon as you draw them and playing as many copies as possible in your deck. The low level versions aren't even terrible! His level 1 version is a basic 5/2 dude. Not exciting but trades with most things on defense which is just fine. His level 2 version is a basic 10/5 dude. Still not exciting, but it trades with many level 2 things. Oh, and it comes back to life once, so it pretty much trades with at least 1 thing (or 2 half things) and could very easily trade with 2 or more things. Only losing half the card to a removal spell is a pretty big deal too.

To work out the odds of getting to play an early level 3 Zimus I need to make a few assumptions...

• You're not playing any card drawing and you're not playing any incidental levelers.
• You always play an on age Zimus when you draw him even if it isn't your best immediate play. I can actually envision situations where you need to play a removal spell and a Zimus out of a hand containing 2 Zimus and a removal spell but I don't want to have to worry about guessing how often that comes up.
• You never play a below age Zimus even if it would be your best immediate play. This isn't actually true and often playing a level 2 Zimus in age 3 is a good idea. But for now I'm only caring about the early level 3 Zimus and this case doesn't lead into an level 3 age 3 Zimus.
• If you're playing with 3 copies of Zimus you'll actually draw all 3 of them in the same hand almost 1% of the time! This isn't an assumption, this is a fact, but I found it moderately interesting and wanted to stick it in here anyway.

I made a spreadsheet, because if I was a carpenter Excel would be my hammer, and came up with the following results...

# Zimus in deck	By Hand 1	By Hand 2	By Hand 3	By Hand 4
1	7.4%	14.8%	22.2%	29.6%
2	14.4%	27.7%	39.8%	50.9%
3	20.8%	38.6%	53.5%	65.9%

This is looking at the odds of not drawing 0 level 3 Zimus' by that particular hand of age 3. Going from 1 copy of Zimus to 2 copies of Zimus puts me over the 50% mark to play a level 3 Zimus sometime in age 3. Going up to 3 copies makes me likely to have played Zimus by the third turn of age 3 and makes it more than 1 in 5 that I do it at the absolute first opportunity. I've marveled at how unlucky I've been in games to have my opponent bust out his Zimus on turn 1 of age 3 but looking at it now it's actually not that unlucky. Someone who owns 3 copies of Zimus is going to do that a noticeable amount of the time. Having 2 Zimus is pretty good but getting up to 3 copies is a huge deal. And that table is neglecting the times you get out a 2nd one! If you have 3 copies in your deck you're 20.3% to play at least 2 of them by the end of age 3. GG!

Looking at the numbers makes it seem even more wrong to play constructed right now. I need to scoop up a 3rd copy of Zimus (likely from winning drafts) and then I can think about it again. But throwing away a turn 1 age 3 level 3 Zimus more than 6% of the time just seems terrible.

SolForge: Tournament Changes

I mentioned on Monday that my brother told me all about going infinite in drafts but then my payouts didn't seem nearly as lucrative. Tournament payouts are random so I was chalking it up to some combination of Jamie being lucky and me being unlucky. I neglected to consider the other option which was that SolForge pulled a bit of a bait and switch. When he was playing at tournament launch the prizes were good enough to easily go infinite. When I was playing they were not. Because they secretly lowered the prize structure in the couple of days between when he got to start with his free tickets for being an early backer and when I finally decided to pay up to supplement my free tickets!

This is a little unbelievable to me. How do they not have someone on staff able to simulate the results of a given prize scheme? I used to do that at my last job for estimating the end result of a given sales contest and there I had to actually guess things. Here you know the inputs and you know the exact output function! Of course there is another option in that they DO have someone on staff and they knew exactly what they were doing and deliberately were trying to pull a bait and switch by priming the system to start and then lowering it to what they wanted. I accused Diablo III of trying the same sort of thing with their golden chest nerfs after the early adopters of act 2 inferno got enough weapons to prime the economy. I don't know if it's incompetence or nefariousness but both situations really make me angry because I know I'm smart enough to have avoided both situations if only I was in a position to stop them.

Anyway, they've actually gone and changed the prize scheme yet again which had me leaning more towards incompetence in this case. They completely removed the randomness of the prize split. 3-0 is worth 9 tickets and a premium pack, 2-1 is worth 5 tickets and a regular pack, 1-2 is worth 3 tickets and a regular pack and 0-3 is worth a full regular pack instead of the basic pack I got Monday when I went 0-3. Now you know exactly what you're getting yourself into when you sign up which is nice. Always getting a legendary card for going 3-0 is a big change as well and may well help deal with the constructed problem I ran into. Well, it may well let me get an optimal deck and smash people anyway.

They also gave all accounts a free 'draft coupon' which lets you do a draft for free. This seems like a really nice thing to do, even for people who haven't logged on in a long time. So if you played SolForge in the past you might want to log in and give a draft a shot because they're pretty fun. Drafts tend to be much slower than constructed and the level 3 versions of the creatures tends to be the important thing to look at. Well, level 2 also. I did die on turn 7 once but my opponent's deck was absolutely insane and he drew his aggressive legendary twice in the first 5 turns. (This was one of the games below...)

On the nefarious hand I noticed something from my free draft today... I got a legendary and 5 heroics. I hadn't seen a single legendary (mine or an opponent) in the 4 drafts I did prior to the free draft. I asked my brother about it and he said he's only had maybe 2 legendaries in his dozens of drafts. So maybe I just got lucky? Try this on for size... All three of my opponents in that draft also had a legendary. I then did another draft and didn't get a legendary but my first opponent did. I left after that to go visit my father and when I got around to finishing the draft out none of my opponents had a legendary. Nor in the next draft I did. Nor in the one after that.

My current theory is the free draft is rigged to feed people really good cards. Try to convince them to pay some money to draft for reals after the free draft only to discover that they can't actually have the absolutely sick decks they got in their free draft. Another bait and switch? Maybe! If you do log in to use your free draft coupon let me know if you get a legendary at any point in the draft.

Bridge Match 2 - Board 34

Board 34 - Dealer East - NS Vul

Opponents convention card: Standard American Yellow Card
Opponents playing strength: Adequate

My hand: ♠ A K J 4 ♥ A Q 9 5 ♦ A 9 7 ♣ T 2

We're playing weak NTs so I have to open this hand 1 diamond. West overcalls 1 heart and everyone passes it back to me. I bid 1NT. Partner jumps to 3NT which gets passed out.

West leads the 4 of hearts.

	NORTH ♠ 7 5 3 ♥ T 6 3 ♦ Q 8 6 ♣ A K J 7
WEST ♥ 4
	SOUTH ♠ A K J 4 ♥ A Q 9 5 ♦ A 9 7 ♣ T 2

West	North	East	South
		Pass	1♦
1♥	Pass	Pass	1NT
Pass	3NT	Pass	Pass
Pass

I have 2 spades, 2 hearts, 2 clubs, and a diamond trick off the top. With no long suit setting up two more tricks is going to be a little tricky. I can brute force a club, actually. After that I can maybe finesse a spade, or set up a long spade, or get a diamond trick when they play them nicely for me. I may even get a 3rd heart trick? Let's see how this one goes. 4-3-J-Q. Yes, I will get a third heart trick. Might as well get that now and force East to start pitching. 5-2-T-3 of clubs. Ok, clubs are a little safer now. I think I'll play a spade to hand and then finesse a club? Wait, I don't exactly have board entries... Shoot. I should do clubs now, I guess. 7-6-T-Q. West plays a spade for me. 6-7-Q-K. There's another trick! Let's find out if spades are 3-3 so I can get one more for free...

Turns out no, as West pitches a club on the 3rd spade. I go to cash clubs and East shows out, pitching a diamond. So I know for sure that East started with 4-1-6-2 and West with 2-5-1-5. Can I do anything with this information? I can force East to lead a diamond to my Q by throwing him in with a spade, but that makes me pitch my diamonds. So there could be something to do, but there isn't...

I cash clubs first anyway and East pitches his high spade. Interesting. Maybe I was squeezing him without knowing it? I love when that happens. Or maybe he's just bad. I like that too. I lose to the K of diamonds at the end. Making 5.

	NORTH ♠ 7 5 3 ♥ T 6 3 ♦ Q 8 6 ♣ A K J 7
WEST ♠ 6 2 ♥ K 8 7 4 2 ♦ J ♣ Q 9 8 5 4		EAST ♠ Q T 9 8 ♥ J ♦ K T 5 4 3 2 ♣ 6 3
	SOUTH ♠ A K J 4 ♥ A Q 9 5 ♦ A 9 7 ♣ T 2

All 8 tables played 3NT but the results varied wildly. One pair went up three, one went up two, three went up one, one was just in, and two went down one. That puts us up near the top and we get 12 MPs this time. I'll take it! This is also enough to push us into the lead! Woo!


Captain Jack disagrees with my bidding. He doesn't like bidding 1NT and would rather I bid 1 spade. I feel like I don't have enough spades and do have a strong NT so I disagree with him here. He also disagrees with my club lead. I think he wants me to finesse the black suits back and forth. This isn't terrible on the actual hand but it also isn't very good. And it could be a disaster! When East has the Qxxx of clubs and holds up on the first round I never get to board to cash those clubs.

Ranking after board 34/60: 1/16 with 57.56%

SolForge: Tournaments

SolForge recently patched in tournaments and I gave them a bit of a spin over the weekend. A constructed tournament costs 3 event tickets to join and a draft tournament costs 7 event tickets. You have a chance to get a ticket from each of the daily chests (log in, win a game, win 3 games) and it seems to average out to be about one per day. So if you stay on top of logging in and winning 3 games every day you can draft for free once a week. That's not so bad, especially since you get to keep the cards and are guaranteed to get at least one card of the second highest rarity per draft.

My brother let me know they have trading planned at some point and have an interesting setup for collection management. It turns out every object in your collection is tagged to show if it originated from a free source or a paid source. So all the cards you get from daily rewards and all the cards from packs in the daily rewards and any prizes/cards drafted from tournaments entered with free tickets will all be tagged as untradeable. Anything you paid money for gets tagged as tradeable which I would think has to eventually increase the value of them. At least for the most rare items, anyway? At any rate if at least one of the tickets used in the entry for an event is paid for then all of the drafted cards and all of the prizes get tagged as paid for.

I'd picked up 4 tickets from 3 days of daily rewards and was itching to draft. I'd played the game for 88 hours according to Steam and while some of those would have just been open in the background idling hours I have definitely played the game a lot. So I figured I should give them some money. It would accelerate when I could draft and it would tag the drafted stuff as tradeable should that ever matter. Unfortunately their pricing scheme sucks. They have the standard scheme of costing things in terms of 'points' instead of actual dollars, and they have the standard setup of giving bonus points the more you buy at once. $4.99 will get you 1300 points or $9.99 will get you 2750 points. Tickets costs 260 points each, or 10 for 2500. So you can get 5 tickets for 5 dollars, or 10 tickets for 10 dollars with 250 points left over. That's the one I went with since I figured 10 tickets with the 4 I already had would give me a couple drafts but now I have 250 points kicking around and it feels terrible. I can't buy anything of note for 250 points and have no way to get the 10 points I need to top up to get one more ticket. The smallest amount I can buy is that $4.99 package and it buys an exact amount of tickets... I'm stuck with this terrible uneven value and it feels awful. Especially since I know they did it on purpose to keep tempting me to pay more to 'fix' the bad number. If they sold points on demand I'd only need to pay about 4 cents for the 10 points I need and I'd do that in a heartbeat but they're trying to get more than 4 more cents and I hate it.

Anyway, I did get some tickets, and I did a few drafts. They were fun enough but the initial assertion of how easy it was to 'go infinite' from my brother seemed a little off. Part of the problem there is the rewards for winning are random. Going 2-1 could be worth 4 tickets, or 6 tickets, or possibly more. You also win packs along with the tickets but you can't do anything with packs except open them up. It felt like my rewards with smaller than expected tickets had a higher number of packs but that didn't make me feel much better since packs mean practically nothing and tickets mean more drafts. This reward scheme feels terrible the same way the point rounding does. It feels like it's set up to let people think they 'could' go infinite if they just put a little more money in and stop getting 'bad' rewards, and to occasionally make people feel great when they hit an awesome result. It's like a slot machine in a casino. Designed to keep people pumping in money!

I also gave constructed a shot despite concerns from my sister that I'd be up against a constant stream of legendary filled decks. My first game in my first tournament was just that. His second turn was two copies of the phoenix! I think he played one card the entire game that wasn't a legendary. My deck does have 8 legendaries itself and has pretty good synergy among the rest of the cards so I felt like it was pretty good. I ended up beating that super legendary deck because he didn't have a lot of thought behind his cards and had some bad draws in the 3rd age. My next two opponents didn't seem to have a legendary between them and got truly smashed. I went 3-0 and got a whopping 4 tickets and 2 packs. Not bad for an entry fee of 3 tickets, but not a big gain in terms of being able to draft again. I then went 2-1 also for 4 tickets and 1 pack. I did a few more and eventually went 0-3 for 1 basic pack and no tickets which made me very sad. I ended up running into a bunch of people with more legendaries and well built decks and it felt like I couldn't do much to beat them. A lot like those guys with no legendaries where I felt like I couldn't lose. So playing constructed feels very much like a crap shoot with play skill having very little to do with the outcome. Do I randomly get matched against people with better decks than mine or worse decks? If it's worse decks I go infinite. If it's better decks I just throw tickets away. Neither is terribly fun. Mostly I was doing it to try to get back up to enough tickets to draft.

Overall I feel like drafting was fun enough, but the cost and annoyance factor is pretty high. I liked constructed to get a feel for where my deck stands... But unfortunately my conclusion is that my deck is only flawed in that I don't have as many legendaries as other people. In both cases it feels like I really need to spend more money in order to play the way I want to and that feeling sucks. Drafting was fun enough that I'll probably set up a dummy deck and try to farm tickets for a while in order to draft every now and then but I'm not terribly happy about it. I hate those 250 points sitting on my account and I suspect I'm eventually going to end up needing to pay more money to use them up or quit in disgust. I hope I quit.

Bridge Match 2 - Board 33

Board 33 - Dealer North - None Vul

Opponents convention card: Standard American Yellow Card
Opponents playing strength: Adequate

My hand: ♠ Q 9 8 7 ♥ T 8 ♦ Q 7 2 ♣ K Q J 9

Partner opens a weak NT. I have a balanced 10 count to go with his balanced 11-14 count. I have a lot of high intermediate values but I really don't think we're making 3 so I pass. West doubles showing a 17+ count, partner passes, and East bids 2 spades showing at least 5 spades and 0-4 points. Well, I know we have at least 6 trump and more than half the deck. Feels like they've bitten off more than they can chew. Will my double be penalty? I sure hope so! West runs to 3 hearts and East continues to 4. I don't have the hearts to actually punish this but there's no way they're making. But it also feels like they've been driven way higher than they would be at other tables so I don't need to double to get a good result I hope. So I pass. Partner, on the other hand, thinks for a while and does double.

Partner leads the J of spades.

	NORTH ♠ J
		EAST ♠ 6 5 4 3 2 ♥ 9 4 ♦ T 9 8 4 ♣ 8 2
	SOUTH ♠ Q 9 8 7 ♥ T 8 ♦ Q 7 2 ♣ K Q J 9

West	North	East	South
	1NT	Pass	Pass
Double1	Pass	2♠2	Double3
3♥	Pass	4♥	Pass
Pass	Double4	Pass	Pass
Pass
117+ points
25+ spades, 0-4 points
3Penalty
4Penalty

J-2-9-A. Declarer shifts to a club. 3-4-8-9. I lead partner's led suit back for him. 8-K-T-3. Declarer fires back another club. 5-7-2-J. Time for an uppercut! I fire back another spade. 7-6 of hearts-Q of hearts-4. Partner decides to draw trump. 2-4-8-J. Declarer ruffs a club. 6-A-9 of hearts-Q.

Declarer is tight and plays a diamond around. 4-7-K-A. He's not tight anymore. He's down, down, down. Partner draws more trump. 3-5 of spades-T-A. West decides to keep drawing trump. 7-5-6 of spades-2 of diamonds.

It now turns out declarer has a trump left, and a small diamond, and a small club. So I get to take my high diamond and high club. They are down 3, doubled.

	NORTH ♠ J T ♥ Q 5 3 2 ♦ A J 6 5 ♣ A 7 4
WEST ♠ A K ♥ A K J 7 6 ♦ K 3 ♣ T 6 5 3		EAST ♠ 6 5 4 3 2 ♥ 9 4 ♦ T 9 8 4 ♣ 8 2
	SOUTH ♠ Q 9 8 7 ♥ T 8 ♦ Q 7 2 ♣ K Q J 9

Lots of different results this time. My side played 2NT making, 1NT+1, 2NT-1, and 2S-1. Their side played 3H-3, 2SX-2, and 4HX-3. We've got a solo top board thanks to partner's double. Without it we'd have only earned 300 points and tied with one pair. 14 MPs to the good! I really don't understand that 4 hearts bid!


Captain Jack disagrees with my play on the first spade trick. He wants me to try to overtake with the Q. That felt like it would potentially be losing a trick to the T at some point and I didn't see a gain? He also disagrees with my play when I got in. He doesn't want me to set up a spade ruff for him; he wants me to draw trump to prevent declarer from ruffing a club. That would have been a good idea! We set them 4 if I do that. Oops!

Ranking after board 33/60: 2/16 with 56.71%

Bridge Match 2 - Board 32

Board 32 - Dealer West - EW Vul

Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Fair

My hand: ♠ Q ♥ Q 8 7 6 ♦ 5 2 ♣ A Q 8 7 5 3

Partner opens 1 diamond in second chair. East overcalls 1 spade. I make a negative double since I have 4 hearts. West makes a jump cuebid of 3 diamonds showing a constructive raise. Partner supports my hearts and East jumps to 4 spades. I don't have the hand to decide if we should double or bid on or sit so I pass the decision to partner. He decides to be wimpy and pass. Doh.

I'm on lead and decide to lead partner's suit. 5 of diamonds away!

WEST ♠ A 9 4 2 ♥ J 5 3 ♦ A Q 6 ♣ T 9 2
	SOUTH ♠ Q ♥ Q 8 7 6 ♦ 5 2 ♣ A Q 8 7 5 3

West	North	East	South
Pass	1♦	1♠	Double1
3♦2	3♥	4♠	Pass
Pass	Pass
1Negative
2Constructive Raise

5-6-J-7. Partner fires back the K of clubs. Am I supposed to overtake to fire back another diamond? That's a bad plan if declarer has Jxx of clubs which is not unreasonable. They're down off the top if he does. Or are they? If declarer has Jxx then partner has stiff K and I have no entry to my clubs. Overtake it is! K-6-A-2.

Question time... If partner had a stiff club then I should cash the Q and play another to him for a ruff to set them. If partner has KJ4 of clubs then doing so puts declarer in but what can he really do? Ok, that sure seems better than just playing back a diamond. Q-9-J-4. Right, they could both have 2 clubs. Well, I've set up the club on board. Do I need to take that away now? Probably. Force the ruff-overruff to happen and then hope declarer can't get to 10 tricks. 3-T-T of spades-4 of hearts. Or I guess partner could just set them right now.

Partner goes diamond to dummy. 3-T-2-Q. Declarer then draws trump. 2-4 of diamonds-K-Q. What? Partner had stiff T and declarer let him score it? That's odd. But I guess he had a heart loser and no way to get rid of it so he decided to lose it right away. He is certainly up now. Down 1.

	NORTH ♠ T ♥ K T 9 2 ♦ K J 9 8 4 3 ♣ K J
WEST ♠ A 9 4 2 ♥ J 5 3 ♦ A Q 6 ♣ T 9 2		EAST ♠ K J 8 7 6 5 3 ♥ A 4 ♦ T 7 ♣ 6 4
	SOUTH ♠ Q ♥ Q 8 7 6 ♦ 5 2 ♣ A Q 8 7 5 3

6 EW pairs played 4 spades. 3 made, 3 went down 1. One NS pair got to play and make 4 hearts up one. And the last table passed this board out. Game made at 4 of the tables, some by each side, and one table didn't bid at all. What a bunch of wimps! At any rate we got 10 MPs for our result.


Captain Jack disagrees with my play of the heart suit. I signalled count incorrectly. Fair enough, but the hand was over at that point Jack and I simply stopped caring. My bad.

Ranking after board 32/60: 2/16 with 55.36%

Antichamber

Antichamber recently had Steam cards added which meant it was high time I gave that game another spin. I'd played it for a brief period of time when it first came out and then sadly forgot about it. It's a very weird puzzle game built out of the Unreal first person shooter engine. My mother said it reminded her of Portal, which is rather true. A crazier Portal!

The game is about figuring out what's going on in the weird ways the rooms of the game connect and trying to figure out how to use the weapons you find in ways to solve puzzles. There's a timer which was counting down from an hour and a half. It hit 0 several hours ago and I don't know that it did anything. My best guess is it's just there as a time trial challenge thing so once you've figured out how to beat the game you have something to strive towards.

I find the controls to be a little annoying. A good chunk of the game involves playing cubes into a 3 dimensional space and I have a hard time making it put them where I want them to go. It also feels like this is a game that should have controller support (since it's essentially a first person shooter) but it doesn't and that makes me sad.

Despite that it's still a reasonably fun game. I may well try to finish it off later this week. I may just end up not returning to it. I got my cards, anyway!

SolForge: Drafting!

I haven't played SolForge in quite some time but I just caught wind on Facebook that the servers are currently down for a big patch. The patch is bringing in 24 new cards, a bunch of balance changes, an iPad version, and drafting. Yay, drafting!

Drafting in Sol Forge sounds like a mix between Hearthstone and Magic. You open a pack of 6 cards, keep one, and 'pass' the rest on. The draft is a solo experience so you don't need to wait for other people to start drafting but other people do impact what you get passed. Not in the sense that you get what some specific other person passed on... Instead the game generates a 6 card pack and removes one of the cards from that pack based on historical drafting trends from other players. So you should end up with a similar experience in terms of getting 'stuck' with bad cards towards the end of a pack without needed to actually have other people kicking around and making choice along with you. It's also set up such that once you have cards from two of the four colour you only ever see cards of those two colours for the rest of the draft. You play every card you draft so they really couldn't stick you with a third colour without breaking the rules of the game.

Games get played out whenever you want to play and you get paired with a random person with the same current draft record. You get to play three games and can play them back to back to back or spread out over weeks. Then you get to keep the drafted cards and you get prizes based on your record. The claim is the prizes will be sufficient to cover going 'infinite' while drafting if you're good enough. You can also earn draft tickets through the daily rewards so starting tomorrow I'm going to have to start logging in again to scoop up daily rewards in the hopes of getting some draft tickets.

Draften und spielen, ja? JA!

On 'Vacation'

I don't know if it's fair to call something a vacation when realistically I'm just going to be playing games all day in New Brunswick for two weeks instead of games all day in Ontario, but it is what it is. After taking the subway, a bus, a ferry, an airplane, and a car I have arrived safely in good old Riverview. Internet looks to be working fine and my laptop survived the trip so I'm sure I'll find plenty of things to post about while I'm here.

At the very least I installed a few Steam games that have cards to give a spin and I'm sure I'll find a post about those. I installed Path of Exile but it was running very chunkily. I'll need to try turning all the settings to minimum and see if that gets me anywhere. I also transfered over my PSX emulator... Maybe it's finally time to move the Final Fantasy marathon forward!

I also did up some extra bridge posts in case I don't have the time to write something on a couple of days. I spent a chunk of yesterday finally making a spreadsheet to simplify the bridge posts (it handles showing the right hands and formats the bidding table and such) and it was so much faster and more enjoyable to pound the hands out. I wish I'd had more time to build up more of a buffer. Oh well! I also did two SNES posts so those are ready to roll out.

Bah Humbug!

Path of Exile: Elemental Proliferation

One of the gems used in the trapper build I found is the elemental proliferation gem. It says that elemental status effects caused by the supported skill spreads to other enemies. The build wanted me to use 3 of these gems, one on each of the three elemental traps, which is a lot of status spreading. But what does that really do? Could I stack 3 shock stacks up with one spell as as result? Would an enemy with 15 ignites burn for 15 times the damage? This could get silly in a real hurry with big clumps of enemies, especially if the spreading can chain!

I did some research and it turns out the way the gem works makes sense, but is completely counter to how I would have thought it would work. How the gem works is it turns any elemental debuff on an enemy into an aura based on that enemy. Anything that happens to wander into that aura gets the debuff too, but only the base version of it. They don't get an aura as well, so this stuff doesn't spread to cover screens and screens. Shock does stack up quickly this way. If I hit 3 enemies with a single lightning crit then all 3 of them will have a shock aura debuff. As long as they stand beside each other they'll end up with 3 shock debuffs each. (Shock makes an enemy take 30% more damage and can stack up to 3 times... Making all enemies take 90% more damage for a single spell cast is pretty hot!) Ignite does as well, but only the biggest ignite on any given enemy actually deals damage. So all the enemies in a pile will take the most ignite damage possible, but I won't be shelling out a cubed amount of damage.

Frozen as an aura is interesting. Someone who is frozen will stand still and then other enemies who wander up beside them will suddenly get frozen too. In this case the spreading really works out better than expected because I wouldn't have thought new enemies would get debuffed when in fact they do.

Also interesting is the fact that corpses can have debuffs. And those debuffs can be auras. So standing beside a dead shocked dude will make another enemy take extra damage. This is pretty crazy and means enemies fighting on a pile of their friends corpses are potentially in a really bad way. Debuffs last an amount of time based on the damage done relative to the enemy max health. This means a boss won't get a shock debuff for very long normally. But if they had a friend with 1/100th the health then they'll actually end up keeping the shock 100 times as long because the friend's corpses will just lie there giving out a shock aura. Ignite works the same way. Frozen does not, because a frozen enemy shatters without leaving a corpse behind. In fast this will turn off the shock and ignite! So people seem to really hate doing cold damage when using this gem with regular attacks and have to use subpar quivers and such. My spells all do only one type of damage and I alternate them in order to get 50% resist penetration from elemental equilibrium so I don't have to worry as much about this as other people do.

The combination of EE with EP and shock is actually really crazy. Shock is a 'more damage' mod which means it's a multiplicative buff and not an additive one. Resistance is also a multiplicative buff. So assuming an enemy with 0% fire resist to start I'm going from doing 138% damage (I have some fire pen already) to doing 357% damage if I first lay down 3 shock stacks from a shock nova. That is insane!

Normally you need to crit to put a shock debuff up and spells in this game either crit all enemies or no enemies (you don't roll individually per enemy) so getting 3 shock stacks with one spell is normally really easy or really hard. If you crit you get 3, otherwise you get 0. Shock nova, however, gets a chance to shock on it when it's a quality gem. So my shock nova, which is 13% quality, has a 19% chance to shock an enemy and the shocks will last 39% as long. This check is rolled for each enemy which means hitting a big clump of enemies is actually pretty likely to put some shock debuffs up. I'm strongly considering spending the 7 gemcutter prisms needed to put this up to 20% quality in order to have a 30% chance per enemy hit to shock them. Oh, and I have multiple traps on this spell so I actually cast 3 shock nova traps at once which really increases the odds... It's normally hard to hit people with shock nova because it has a huge inner dead zone so anyone triggering the trap won't get hit by it, but my belt makes the traps go off instantly! So there are 3 overlapping circles of shocking goodness!

I love EP on shock nova trap. I'm less convinced I want to keep it on the ice nova and fire traps. I want to actually get this build up to end game and run maps with other people to see how much I care about freezing and burning things. I suspect just being able to consistently lay down 3 shock stacks and 50% fire/cold pen will make people very happy.

Bridge Match 2 - Board 31

Board 31 – Dealer South – NS Vul

Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Fair

My hand: ♠ Q 9 ♥ A ♦ K Q T 6 3 2 ♣ J T 8 2

I open 1 diamond. Partner responds 1 heart. I bid two clubs which gets passed out. Huh.

West leads the 4 of spades.

	NORTH ♠ A K J T ♥ J 9 8 6 2 ♦ 5 ♣ 9 7 4
WEST ♠ 4
	SOUTH ♠ Q 9 ♥ A ♦ K Q T 6 3 2 ♣ J T 8 2

West	North	East	South
			1♦
Pass	1♥	Pass	2♣
Pass	Pass	Pass

Well, we sure have spades locked up. I have 4 spade tricks, 1 heart trick, and 1 club trick. As far as losers go I have 1 diamond and 3 clubs and none of those are going away unless they misplay their clubs. So there are 3 tricks up for grabs and I need 2 of them. Well, and I need to not have my spades ruffed away.

I actually don't see how I get 2 of the tricks by playing suits. I can set up a diamond? Maybe my best play is to go for a crossruff? I have lots of little red cards that aren't doing any good. I may be able to squeeze out some extra clubs that way. I lose a spade by not drawing trump for sure. But I may be able to end up with 3 spades, 1 heart, and 4 clubs on the crossruff? That just needs them to each have 3 of each red suit... That's not entirely unreasonable. This also has the potential to work against some brutal club split too? Maybe? Eh. Let's see what happens.

4-A-8-9. That 8 is scary. It's the biggest spade they have and there's no reason for East to encourage. So that makes me worry that he has a singleton. Well, losing a diamond and seeing what happens is still probably the best play. It's not like I can draw all his trump if he has a stiff spade anyway. 5-A-2-7. Well, now I have 2 diamonds setup! East returns a heart. 5-A-T-2.

Ok, East didn't return a spade which really makes me think he only had one. West played low on diamonds so he probably has an odd number. Hopefully 3. I do have 8 tricks if nothing bad happens, should I start drawing trump now? What if East is out of spades? He's probably something like 1-4-3-5 in that case. But then why didn't he draw trump? I guess he needed to establish his hearts first. That's scary. Ok, I don't think I can draw trump. I guess I should cash high diamonds. K-9-6 of hearts-4. Q-J-8 of hearts-8. Diamonds did split 3-3, that's good. Another diamond is just giving them a ruff and sluff. Well, I have no way to draw trump so if spades get ruffed they get ruffed... I play one. Q-5-K-6. J-3-3 of diamonds-2. Oh. Well then. I need 2 more tricks and don't think I can get them. Oh well, down one is good bridge. I'll ruff a heart first. 9-7-2 of clubs-Q. Ok, turns out I can get them. Good stuff. I just need to cross ruff high and I'll get another club. I play a diamond. T-7 of spades-9 of clubs-K of clubs.

East draws trump 3-J-Q-4. A-7-6-8. West cashes a heart but I ruff high. West wins the last trick with his club. Making 2.

	NORTH ♠ A K J T ♥ J 9 8 6 2 ♦ 5 ♣ 9 7 4
WEST ♠ 7 5 4 2 ♥ K Q T ♦ J 9 7 ♣ A Q 5		EAST ♠ 8 6 3 ♥ 7 5 4 3 ♦ A 8 4 ♣ K 6 3
	SOUTH ♠ Q 9 ♥ A ♦ K Q T 6 3 2 ♣ J T 8 2

7 of the 8 tables played 2 clubs. 3 of them went up 1, 3 were just in, and 1 went down 1. The last table went down 3 in 2NT. So we get 6 MPs. Not great, but not terrible.

Captain Jack agrees with me all the way!

Ranking after board 31/60: 3/16 with 54.84%.

Top 10 First Songs

Last month I posted that I was going to work on Josh's song game and it's been great fun. I made a spreadsheet with every band and artist I could think of that I liked (using things like Jango and Youtube likes to beef the list up) and end up with 232 names in my spreadsheet. Then I went through each one on Wikipedia to find their first song off their first album and gave them all a listen. (I mostly did this while playing Path of Exile!) I assigned each song a letter grade and at the end of it all I had 11 S songs and 34 A songs. When I was putting the grades down I was mostly assuming I'd be listing all of the S ones and then have to pick through the As to make my top 10. Having more than 10 Ses was a little awkward but I decided to just run through all 45 of them again without caring about the initial grade. I made a Youtube playlist!

A lot of the bands on my list I only knew for one song. Typically these were 'one-hit wonders' from the 80s, and I was surprised to find their first songs tended to be the one I knew. In retrospect it shouldn't be that surprising. Most likely these people had one good song and then some label convinced them to make a full album or something. Stick the good song on first so people who pick it up recognize what's going on. I didn't know if I should discount these in the rankings or not. Ultimately I decided not, but mostly because while I liked these songs they just aren't as good as some of the other contenders.

I was also surprised at how many bands started off with either a song called 'introduction' or with a cover of someone else's music. I hate cover songs. Going through this exercise has made me realize it's more I hate things that are wrong and cover songs sound wrong to me. But it's not so much that it's a cover as much as it's different than what I know. So in some cases I do like a cover and the original song is wrong just based on the order I heard them. I know that's not very fair and I stand by the original assertion that I hate cover songs but it isn't quite as black and white as all that. The big one for me in this exercise, oddly, is Paul Simon's first song. I Am A Rock. It's my all time favourite song, but I mean the version done by Simon & Garfunkel. The original (which is really quite similar) just sounds wrong. So wrong I left it off my top 10 here. Which makes me a little sad.

The whole Paul Simon thing illustrates another tricky door... What actually counts as a first song? Should I only have been considering You Can Tell The World, which is Simon & Garfunkel's first song? Did his solo career open him up as a second category? What about the strange case of Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship/Starship. Should they get three cracks at the list? If so, why shouldn't a band that changed significantly over time get a second crack at it? The Phil Collins led Genesis, or the Stevie Nicks era of Fleetwood Mac. I ended up allowing all second chances and such in, if the name changed, but I think I was a little too critical of them as only one ended up making my list. I think Tom Petty's Free Fallin' probably should have found a spot but I don't know which of the actual first cracks I'd drop for it.

I also wasn't sure what to do about bands I think are awesome but who had a less than stellar initial offering. Soul Deep by Roxette is actually a pretty good song, for example, but I don't know if it would even crack my top 50 Roxette songs. This is the other side of the 'one-hit wonder' coin I guess. I don't know if Animotion should get dinged for only having Obsession in their library and I don't know if Roxette should get dinged for being really awesome later on. I ended up deciding to just go with the song on its merits and in this case it didn't quite make it in. I like Soul Deep, but I suspect I like it because of the other Roxette songs and not so much on it's own.

At any rate... I'm going to include YouTube links for all of them which is going to make the post pretty long. So I'm sticking in a break. Songs to follow!

Path of Exile: Traps!

I've been toying with the idea of making a trap dude for a while now because I read in a forum post somewhere that it was a safe way to kill lots of enemies. I like killing lots of enemies and I like being safe! Yesterday I was cleaning out the guild bank gem stash again and found we had many extra multiple trap gems lying around. So I went searching for a trap build to see if they were actually of much use. I found one that wanted to use two copies of the multiple trap gem so I decided I'd give it a go. Clean out the bank and try something fun at the same time! As an added bonus the build makes use of the elemental equilibrium tree node and I've really wanted to find a use for it.

Today we did some maps and got wrecked by the boss of the villa map. This is an enemy that casts a ton of traps himself and I have no idea how to deal with it other than die. With the hope that using traps myself might provided some insight I went to start leveling my trap dude. Sceadeau suggested I just level up with some awesome low level smashing gear we have in the bank but I wanted to actually get a feel for how traps work. I still used a bunch of low level health items, of course!

I played around a bit with traps and discovered a couple things. Traps have a weird cooldown mechanic. They work like Akali's ult in League of Legends in that you have a small supply of traps on hand and they recharge slowly over time. So I can quickly throw out 3 fire traps but I need to then wait 3 seconds between each subsequent fire trap. Interestingly each type of trap has it's own small supply so I'm able to bust out 3 fire traps and 3 bear traps. This explains why elemental equilibrium could make sense here. Normally you have one best spell to cast and you just want to spam it as much as possible. I'm sure I'll have one best trap but the game prevents me from spamming it. So alternating elemental damage with the EE node could be awesome. (Doing damage of one element makes the enemy resist that element but become very vulnerable to the other ones.)

Looking around the skill tree there's a node for making your traps immune to damage for 5 seconds. But then I was throwing out traps and the enemies weren't attacking them. Why not? It turns out traps have 1 health but can't be targeted. But if they happen to get hit by an AE spell they will take damage and die. This makes me wonder if running frost nova or something for the trap boss would be a good idea. Spam it and take out the traps as he casts them?

Traps are also interesting in that they are neither attacks nor spells so you can't speed them up with attack speed or cast speed. There are a couple nodes that increase trap lay rate though. I'm not sure how much that will matter. There are nodes that increase trap damage and one interesting one that makes trap damage penetrate 10% of enemy resistances. This seems particularly good since it's an extra multiplicative source of damage while most sources of damage in the game are additive. In fact it's the only node in the entire tree with any sort of penetration of any kind. I guess EE is a second kind if you're willing to swap damage types. I can start to see why traps might actually work out reasonably...

There are also two unique items that deal with traps. One is a set of boots that increases trap lay rate, gives you a speed boost after laying a trap, and supports any gems inside it with the trap gem (which lets you lay traps that use any spell). These boots seem awesome and we had a copy of it in the bank that I yoinked. The other is a belt that increased trap damage, decreases trap duration, but makes traps trigger when they time out. Normally you need to wait for an enemy to actually walk on the trap but this belt will let the traps explode on their own. Seems like it could be pretty good with the right trap? The guide I found wanted to use it with lightning nova and ice nova. I don't know how that'll work out but I figure it's worth trying out. Along with the actual fire trap that covers all three elements for EE! We don't have any of those belts, unfortunately, but I figure I'll buy one if I hit level 37 and want to keep playing this character. It's been interesting so far!

Traps are also apparently invisible after they've become armed, which is good to know when fighting the trap boss. Also frustrating that the game works like that. Need to remember where they all land!

Aggressive Options

I played a game of Bruges today and decided to give an attacking strategy a spin. One of my very early cards let me use a worker to give all of my opponents a red threat. Other abilities that can be used for a worker typically are worth a full action (draw and play a card, play a card from your hand) or can have a game state set up to make them much better than an action (Duncan was getting 12 gold for a single worker each turn where typically you earn 4-6 gold in an action). Threats on their own don't do anything but for every 3 something bad happens. In this case, for the red threat, each opponent would have to destroy a building or a canal. So I could spend 3 workers over the course of 3 rounds in order to kill one thing from each opponent. It takes that long to pull off so people could plan out a cheap canal to get burnt if they wanted to so most likely it would be costing them 1 gold and 1 action. So I'm paying around the value of 3 actions to deny each opponent a little more than 1 action.

There were 3 opponents so the overall damage inflicted was around a little more than what I paid to do it. But it was spread out 3 ways which is bad. I was hurting myself far more than I was hurting any individual other player which means this was a terrible line of play. Unsurprisingly I managed to come dead last in this game. I made a couple other mistakes and had one gamble fail spectacularly but I think the biggest problem was spending my first person on an attacker instead of on something that would help build my own board position.

I don't like this type of mechanic. At least in Bruges you can use the cards for 5 other actions on top of playing it as the attacking card. This makes it better than the attacking cards in Mage Tower which just caused the game to death spiral quickly. Don't get me wrong... I'm all for playing games with attacking cards when those cards are actually a reasonable part of the game. Through The Ages has attacking cards and they mostly serve to force people to stay close in military strength or risk getting beaten up. Titan is all about attacking each other! It's when you have a fairly peaceful game that has a little bit of attacking bolted on that I get really bothered. I've heard Lords of Waterdeep suffers from this and it's made me a little leery about trying it out.

I guess I just like to be able to know what plans I'm trying to make in a game. Having most of the Bruges cards be about building your own engine and scoring points but having a small number of them inflict random amounts of damage on your opponents just feels like something that can't be planned around. My attacker was giving out red threats which weren't terribly strong and giving out a ton of other threats in a planned manner probably wouldn't be very good either. But giving out a single yellow threat and wiping out someone's gold right after they've gained money but before they can spend it seems like a potential blowout. Should you play around it? I was in this game and it cost me big time. But if you ignore it because it will almost never happen you will get blown out once and that'll be a terrible feeling. Well, maybe it will be a good feeling for the guy who pulls it off? I don't think I like it regardless.

Blood Bowl: Interesting League Rules

I've recently joined two leagues on FumBBL to go with Duncan's league (NWFL) I joined earlier this year. All three leagues run with very different rules and two of them are going to have some interesting decisions coming my way in the near future.

The most basic league is the 3DB Highlander league. It has the interesting twist of only allowing one of each team to exist in the league. There is one copy of each of the 24 races in the league and new players get assigned a race completely at random from one of the available races. You then have to start a team from scratch and get thrown into games. They divide the 24 teams into 3 pods of 8 based on the success of the races from previous seasons with some sort of relegation involved. I was randomly dealt the High Elf team which happened to be in the highest division. So I get to play against races that did well in previous seasons, many of which are established teams. I've already played one game and it pitted my 1000TV team against a 2060TV team. He had more cash in his treasury than my team was worth! I ended up winning 1-0 thanks solely to star player Morg 'n Thorg. I won the game, which was nice, but I didn't earn a single star player point other than the MVP which thankfully didn't go to Morg or Moranian. I also suffered two injuries but thankfully they were only miss next game results. I may well be able to win a bunch of games with this team because elves can make plays and inducements are pretty valuable but I don't know how fun the games are going to be. Such a huge team value difference right from the start is plain silly. On the plus side that was the harshest difference scheduled this season and there are 2 other fresh teams as well so there will be some balanced games too. I like playing Blood Bowl but this setup feels wonky. At the end of the season I can throw High Elves back into the pot and get a new race at random from the races other people threw away. I don't think I'll be doing that since that would involve starting over again, but if my team gets ruined and is worse than a starting team I could see doing it for kicks.

Next is the NWFL. Teams in this league also start off from scratch and can get thrown to the wolves in much the same way as above. My first team in this league joined mid season and it was a disaster. I got smushed every game. On the plus side finishing so poorly ended up giving me first pick in picking a new race. NWFL restricts races, but not as much as the 3DB league does. I was able to get Chaos Dwarves which have been awesome for me. The perfect team for my style of stacking guard, punching a lot, and scoring with a low agility dude. Starting at the start of the season was also very good because I got to play 3 games against other fresh teams to get a little building done and then get thrown in with the wolves. But the wolves are slightly defanged because NWFL has a salary cap and all established teams need to fire down to fit under the cap.

I have one game left in the regular season then somewhere between 1 and 4 playoff games. After that I'm going to have to do said cutting. The cap for next season is going to be 1750 but I'll get a 20TV bonus for winning my division and could earn another 30TV if I win my conference and 50TV more for winning the title. My team is at 1910TV right now and I'll need to cut down to 1770, 1800, or 1850 depending on how things shake out. I suspect I'll end up getting rid of most of my dirty players and probably replacing some of my dwarves with rookies. I haven't rolled doubles on any of them and losing my 8th guard in the short term is probably worth it to get another chance at claw. Not that I'd do that in a vacuum, but it's a fine way to shave off 20TV if I need to. Oddly it feels like keeping my guard hobgoblins is probably right even though they pay 30TV for guard instead of 20TV. It's harder to earn back on them because they'd need to roll doubles again and hobgoblins are really terrible in general. At least with guard they fit into my playstyle. Dirty player does too, to be fair, but I don't expect to get many bribes next season so they won't be nearly as good. Of course someone may well die in the next 2-5 games and make this decision for me!

The last league is the NBFL which is a league designed to feature higher team value teams. They have a unique setup where they run a sister league modeled after US College football and then they draft the best players from those teams into the NBFL. They then use a system of fake games where someone plays a team of snotlings against you to feed star player points onto the right players in order to let you build the drafted players for your team. It's not clear to me yet how they ensure you get the right skillups to make sure you get the double skills and stat ups and such. Maybe you just fire and rehire guys until you get the right rolls? Maybe they have some admin access to change skills? But you still have to play the feeder games so they don't have full access to edit teams so I'm not sure. I've also been told not to worry about cash because they'll funnel enough into the team to buy all the players and rerolls and stuff that I want after the draft. And every undrafted player gets to farm 6 experience so they get at least one skill.

Most teams in this league get one draft pick and they draft in reverse order of finish. New teams also get to draft 2 more players after the first draft round, and they also get to draft a bonus player from the teams that quit the league. This seems like a really cool idea. It means no team is stuck in a terrible starting position against a team worth more than twice their team value. It lets slow to start and expensive teams get rolling by getting a free skill (probably block) on every player. I've decided to give Chaos Pact a try in this league. They've always interested me but have a bit of a bad reputation because they're so abusive at low team values. (Most of the players on the team are 6/3/3/8 dudes with regular access to S/M/G/P.) On top of those linemen they also have 6 different positionals with a max of 1 per. They get a dark elf lineman, a skaven lineman, a goblin lineman, a troll, a minotaur, and an ogre. The three special linemen all get mutation access on regular rolls along with their normal stuff and the three big guys get mutations on doubles. Three big guys is a good way to have your plans go awry but it's also a good way to be huge! I like that I can get guard on most of the team with regular skills and then I can use the three special linemen to do crazy things. A 4 agility dude, a 7 movement dude, and a stunty dude! The goblin getting mutations on a regular roll is a huge deal because it'll let him get things like two heads or horns and be a real problem.

The draft will be happening in the next couple weeks and I have the 9, 34, and 43 picks in the main draft and the 2 pick in the expansion draft. So I get to build a team with 4 established players and up to 12 more guys with a single skill. What should I be looking to do? I suspect the dark elf will be easy to skill up under normal conditions anyway. I think the big thing is getting block on as many people as possible. 4 of my guys don't have general skill access on regular skills so the best way to get block on them is going to be drafting a block player for those positions. Well, the goblin probably doesn't need block? Wrestle could be interesting if I'm going to use him as a cage buster with stunty and two heads to make a 2+ dodge into a cage. But the big thing is going to be getting block on my big guys...

Unfortunately the big guy position isn't very deep. There are only 4 of them total in the main draft and not all of those 4 are interesting to me. There's a guy with block, guard, and movement who would be awesome as any of my guys. There's a guy with block, guard, and tackle who would be even better. One with guard, piling on, and multiple block who seems a little smelly. Three regular rolls (and not even good ones) is not very appealing. The last guy is break tackle, movement, and juggernaut. 2 regular skills and movement is not exciting, but on a minotaur actually isn't so bad. Juggernaut combos well with frenzy and may let me do interesting things. I'd prefer block but I can see blitzing a lot with the minotaur due to wild animal and horns so juggernaut is reasonable. I'm pretty sure taking one of the block guys for my ogre is a no-brainer with the #9 pick if they're still available. Using #34 or #43 on the juggernaut minotaur might be a reasonable thing to do too. I don't know if much is going to be on the board at #43 anyway? There are only 66 players on the board total.

The expansion draft features me in the 2 slot, but the 1 slot is a Nurgle team. He might well want a big guy with the 1 pick. There are some very sweet other players available too, so he might go a different way. There are 3 big guys in the expansion draft. A terrible one with three regular skills (guard, grab, mighty blow) but two very good ones (block, guard, movement, piling on) and (block, mighty blow, guard). Beast of Nurgle and all three of my big guys have might blow so I think we just get a SPP discount and only two skills off that last one. Block and guard is still a pretty good set of skills for a troll though! I don't know if I like the piling on guy? But to get block, guard, and a movement for a troll or a minotaur is still pretty spectacular. Putting my guy with guard on the ground makes me sad for sure but if it kills someone it may well be worth it. Though I will probably build a kill stack marauder at some point to do my piling on. Skipping the big guy here could net me something like agility, block, dodge, sure hands, and accurate or agility, block, dodge, and sidestep. Either would be fantastic on the dark elf, the skaven, or the goblin! Or a strength/agility for a marauder. Maybe strength/block/guard for a marauder instead?

Getting a 4th agility on the goblin feels like it could be really, really good. Maybe even better than blocking up a big guy. I do have three big guys and I'm probably not going to need to punch with all of them... Just getting guard on my free skill on the troll and using him as a road block is probably going to be decent enough. Goblins start with dodge so I'd get a refund of some kind too I think. I'll need to figure out how that works before I need to make that decision.

I also note that not a single player in the draft has a mutation. I guess because most teams can't make use of them? But it is rough for a team like mine that gets mutations on regular rolls. Getting a ton of skills on a player through the draft is probably going to be a worse player than one I could build on my own. The exception being big guys with block and stat boosts I guess.

Wait... Goblins count as linemen! Holy cow. I could draft the strength/agility lineman and make him a goblin. Having a 3 strength/4 agility/stunty player could be insane. He'd need to skill up again to get horns or strip ball or something but no cage would ever be safe! And I'm sure I can feed SPP to him. Ooh, that could be spicy...

I'll have to see how it actually shakes out but this whole drafting and ramping up thing is really piquing my interest. All the leagues I'm in are, actually. Blood Bowl is just really awesome!

Path of Exile: Leech Mechanics

My first and primary character in Path of Exile has been a witch that does damage by summoning an army of friends to do the attacking. This meant I got to ignore most of the stats on gear (damage, crit, accuracy, life leech...) because they all have no game effect. I want to make the enemies drop more loot and be harder to kill! More recently I've been playing a ranger and actually killing things for myself. This has opened up both life and mana leech as things I need to worry about since I'm attacking 5 times a second and am incredibly fragile.

Two of the stats you can get on gear are X% of physical attack damage leeched as life and X% of physical attack damage leeched as mana. These sound like pretty straightforward abilities. I expect that if I have 2% physical mana leech and shoot an enemy with an arrow that does 170 physical damage that I'd instantly recover 3.4 mana. Attack for 17000 physical damage and I expect to get healed for 340 mana. My ability only costs 25 mana so I don't need nearly that much mana leech but it sounds pretty sweet!

Unfortunately it is too sweet to be true. They put in caps on leeching to restrict how fast you could get life and mana back. That 17000 damage attack that restores 340 mana can actually only restore 12.5% of my maximum mana per second. I have 378 max mana so I can only get back 47.25 mana per second regardless of how much mana leech and physical damage I may have. This is a problem because I spend 125 mana per second attacking! It doesn't matter how much damage I do or how much mana leech I put on. In order to get more mana leech I actually need to increase my maximum mana pool! (Alternatively a high quality mana leech gem will increase the maximum rate of mana leeched. I have a 13% one of those, so my lightning arrow has a leech cap of 53 mana per second instead of 47.25. Still not nearly enough.)

Life leech is capped the same way except there the cap is 20% of maximum life and I have other incentives to increase my maximum life pool. It's still a very real cap (I can only get back 226 life per second right now) and is a real problem in terms of staying alive. I don't do much damage (2774 DPS with frenzy) but I should be leeching 270 life per second. So even with my mediocre damage I don't get the full impact of life leech.

There is an option here for life leech that changes things up a little. One of the skill nodes in the tree is called Vaal Pact and causes all of your life leech to happen instantly instead of being spread out like normal. This comes with the downside of preventing all other sources of life regen, including flasks. This still seems awesome though! It's an actual solution to reflecting monsters (even if you'd normally life leech enough to offset the reflected damage the reflected damage in instant and your leech is over time) and it removes the crazy cap which means adding more life leech or more damage will both help me out as opposed to right now where neither one will cause more life to get leeched.

Mana leech is still going to be a problem. Possible solutions are to switch to blood magic for my attacks, or to get mana regen from another source (clarity maybe?), or to decrease the cost of my attacks, or to increase my mana pool which will allow for more leeching to happen. There are a few really good max mana nodes spread out over the place and I may be able to fit those into a built. Or I could just get some more max mana on gear?

Bridge Match 2 - Board 30

Board 30 – Dealer East – None Vul

Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Fair

My hand: ♠ 6 ♥ 8 5 ♦ K Q J 9 7 2 ♣ J 9 5 2

East opens 1 heart. I'm feeling frisky so I jump to 3 diamonds. West makes a crazy 4 clubs bid alerted as being a mixed cuebid with support whatever that means. Clicking on it shows he should have at least 17 points and 3 hearts. East settles for 4 hearts. West cuebids 4 spades. East bids Blackwood, West shows 2 aces and the Q of trump and they settle into 6 hearts.

I'm on lead. Diamonds feels safe but I don't know that this is the time for safe. Though maybe partner can just ruff it? Eh, safe it is. I lead the Q of diamonds.

WEST ♠ A Q J 8 7 4 ♥ Q J T 3 ♦ ♣ A 6 4
	SOUTH ♠ 6 ♥ 8 5 ♦ K Q J 9 7 2 ♣ J 9 5 2

West	North	East	South
		1♥	3♦1
4♣2	Pass	4♥	Pass
4♠3	Pass	4NT4
5♠5	Pass	6♥	All Pass
1Weak
1Mixed cue with support
1Control in spades for hearts
1Ace asking for hearts
12 aces and queen of trumps

Q-3 of hearts-8-4. Looks like partner has the A of diamonds and that void is really well placed for the opponents. Declarer decides to play clubs. 4-3-K-5. Now he draws trump. 2-5-T-4. J-6-7-8. A club to the Q. A spade back, finessing into partner's K. Partner cashes a diamond but it gets ruffed on board. Dummy is way up, except declarer has trump so he's up too. Making 6.

There was a chance to set them if I'd gone with my other potential lead. If he takes the spade finesse I get to get a ruff. It seems very wrong for him to try it, but it might have worked. What I did sure didn't.

	NORTH ♠ K 5 3 ♥ 6 4 ♦ A T 8 6 5 ♣ T 7 3
WEST ♠ A Q J 8 7 4 ♥ Q J T 3 ♦ ♣ A 6 4		EAST ♠ T 9 2 ♥ A K 9 7 2 ♦ 4 3 ♣ K Q 8
	SOUTH ♠ 6 ♥ 8 5 ♦ K Q J 9 7 2 ♣ J 9 5 2

7 of the EW pairs played 6 hearts making 6. The last one played 6 spades making 6. 7 MPs for everyone!


Captain Jack disagrees with my club play. He wants me to play high to show an even number. I feel like I did exactly that by playing the 5. He wants the 9. The 9 is a little too high for my liking...

Ranking after board 30/60: 3/16 with 55.24%

LCS Qualifiers

Starting yesterday and running through this weekend there have been a couple of near-pro level League of Legends tournaments running. One for Europe and one for North America. Six teams in each one which qualified through various other tournaments and are currently playing a round robin format. Top 3 teams advance to the next round which will take place in a couple weeks. Those will feature the 3 qualifier teams facing off against the bottom 3 teams from last season's big league in a single best of 5 match. Winner gets to be a pro team!

I've been watching the games the last couple days and while the casting has been a little suspect the games have been interesting. I haven't actually played any real games with the new big patch so it's been nice to see some high level games using the new items and such. Supports building death fire grasps and zhonya's hourglasses is a nice change of pace!

I believe a list of upcoming games can be found on Leaguepedia which Lino told me about today. I think it's been worth tuning in for the games.

Path of Exile: Affix Maximum Levels

Yesterday I ran some more higher end maps with Tom and Sceadeau and we ended up doing a 74 map and got a 75 map to drop. A 75 map can drop ilvl 77 gear from the rare/boss monsters and that's really starting to be legitimate best in slot potential gear. For some items and some builds 77 is probably way too high, even, and I should be looking into picking up white items far below that level as potentially awesome items. In order to know which items those are I need to find an affix list with a listing of levels for each mod.

I thought I could just put one together myself but it turns out different affix tiers spawn on different items. Cast speed, for example, can spawn with a max of 7% on a ring, 13% on an amulet, and 22% on a wand/staff/scepter. So if you just care about a cast speed ring you only need to find one with ilvl 2 or higher and you're set! One of the weapons on the other hand requires at least ilvl 72 which I won't be finding in my typical grinding ground of a level 68 map.

I found a list of which affixes can spawn on which item type and set to work building a spreadsheet I could filter to only show the highest one of each type. Then I went went back to the same list and saw someone had already done that work for me. Huh. So here it is!

As far as gear for my character goes I'm stuck using uniques in many slots in order to actually get magic find stats for my glass merchant build. It turns out most of the magic find affixes flat out can't spawn in the current league so the only way to get item quantity is from these uniques. This means I really need to get great defensive stats out of the remaining slots...


Base Item Type - Hubris Circlet (69)

Helmet - Prefixes - IIR (62), ES (51), ES% (72), ES%/SR (78), Minion levels (65), Mana (75)
Helmet - Suffixes - IIR (75), Cold/Fire/Lightning Resist (72), Int (74)

Base Item Type - Titanium Spirit Shield (68)
Shield - Prefixes - ES (69), ES% (72), ES%/SR (78), Mana (75)
Shield - Suffixes - Resist All (60), Cold/Fire/Lightning Resist (72), Int (74), Block Chance (58)


Base Item Type - Archon Kite Shield (68)
Shield - Prefixes - ES (69), ES/AR% (72), ES%/AR%/SR (78), Mana (75), Armour (73)
Shield - Suffixes - Resist All (60), Cold/Fire/Lightning Resist (72), Int (74), Block Chance (58)

Base Item Type - Vaal Regalia (68)
Chest - Prefixes - ES (75), ES% (72), ES%/SR (78), Mana (75)
Chest - Suffixes - Cold/Fire/Lightning Resist (72), Int (74)

Base Item Type - Saintly Chainmail (70)
Chest - Prefixes - ES (75), ES/AR% (72), ES%/AR%/SR (78), Mana (75), Armour (73)
Chest - Suffixes - Cold/Fire/Lightning Resist (72), Int (74)

Ring - Prefixes - IIR (62), ES (68), Mana (75)
Ring - Suffixes - IIR (75), Resist All (60), Cold/Fire/Lightning Resist (72), Cast Speed (2), Int (74)


So ideally I'm looking for ilvl 78 for all of the armour slots. Hat I can probably get away with 75 since I want IIR, ES, and ES% as the optimal three prefixes I think. Rings have to be 75. Interesting that IIR is both a prefix and a suffix in some slots.