MTG Arena: Efficient Card Acquisition

'Free to play' games have evolved over time to have more and more obscure monetization schemes. Humans are bad at making many decisions on a row and the developers have figured this out, so they tend to make things take more effort to figure out. The less clear it is what you're doing, the more likely you are to make a purchase that you wouldn't actually make with a clear head and perfect information.

You'll never find an actual price tag on a thing you want to buy. In League of Legends, for example, the new champion costs 7800 blue essence or 975 riot points. What does that even mean? Blue essence you get over time for playing the game, riot points you can buy with cash. 490 points for $5, with 'bonuses' if you buy in bulk. So Senna is priced at $9.95, but you can't spend exactly that amount. In this case the next highest amount you can actually spend is $10, so really close, but often that is not the case. They make you buy extra points and then you're committed to the platform by having more currency to spend later. But not too much more! You'll need to top up if you want to buy something else. The idea is you spend more now, so if you don't come back they get more than they would have with an actual price. And if you do come back you're hooked and more likely to spend more. And by having to look at all this math your brain gets a little overwhelmed, and if you have money to spare it's easy to just spend rather than work it out. They've also worked anchoring in there by giving you a base price for points but then giving you even more if you buy in bulk. Lots of marketing trickery going on.

MTG Arena has lots of this happening. Not necessarily maliciously evil, but it's certainly using things that worked in the past for other people and those things work by taking advantage of people. MTG Arena also seems to have extra systems making it more convoluted but I suspect this was more no one had an actual vision for how to do things so more people tacked things on that they thought was needed. It certainly has kept me from really figuring out what I should be doing to build a collection properly. But I've qualified for some sort of tournament so I need to play a wider variety of decks. So I need more cards. So I need to work this all out.

MTG Arena doesn't use a disenchanting system like Hearthstone does, so you never need to make a decision about keeping cards you've opened. You always keep them, you can't destroy them, and if you get more than the max amount you get a very minor boost elsewhere in your collection. I think this is an actively good decision. I've hated that I've had to blow up Hearthstone cards to build decks in the past because it actively hurts my collection to make short term progress and that's a bad feeling no matter which side you're on.

There are a bunch of different currencies going on. You've got gold, which you earn by doing daily quests and as tournament prizes. You've got gems, which you buy with money and earn as tournament prizes. You've got XP, which you earn by doing daily quests. You've got wildcards, which you earn by opening packs. You've got packs, which you can buy with gold, or gems, or cash, or earn as prizes, or earn from XP. And you have the individual cards that you can get by drafting, or playing sealed, or opening packs, or doing dailies, or as prizes, or from earning XP. They all switch back and forth in different ratios depending on different tournament formats!

But for now, all I really care about is getting more cards. How do I make best use of the different currencies in order to get more cards? Gold and gems are the two hard ones to look at, so I'll do the rest first and hope that makes it easier to look at those.

XP - There's a cap on how much XP you can earn and not really anything to spend it on. You can get at most 750 XP per day (first 10 wins and the daily quest) and every 1000 XP gets you a level on their mastery system. You do also get 3750 XP per week (first 15 wins) for a max of 9000 XP per week. There are 110 levels with rewards and 112 days in the season for a max of 144k xp. So you do have some extra to spare, but you really need to go hard to get all the rewards. (For every 1000 XP above the cap you get an extra uncommon for whatever that is worth.) You need to spend gems to get access to all the rewards, with the following being available.

everyone - 42 packs
old players - 6 packs, 10 uncommons
3400 gems - 20 packs, 2000 gems, 10k gold, 10 mythics, 3 rares

wildcards - These are how you actually make specific cards that you want. There are wildcards for each of the different types of cards (common, uncommon, rare, mythic) and nothing to do with them except trade them for cards. You earn more wildcards in one of three ways. You can open them in packs as a replacement for an actual card (1:3 packs for commons, 1:5 for uncommon, 1:24 for rare/mythic). For every 6 packs you open you get an uncommon wildcard and a rare wildcard. (Every 5 rare wildcards in this way are mythic instead.) And you can get wildcards out of 'the vault' which turns extra commons and uncommons into 3 uncommon, 2 rare, and 1 mythic wildcard. It takes 1000 extra commons to get this reward, with extra uncommons counting as 3 commons. You get these extras by opening packs and doing drafts/sealed events.

packs - Opening a pack gets you 5 commons, 2 uncommons, and a rare. (1 in 8 rares will be mythics instead) Getting your 5th copy of a common or uncommon gets you vault progress. A 5th copy of a rare gets converted into a different rare from the same set. If you own every rare you get 20 gems. Same with mythics except you get 40 gems when full. You also get 1/6th of an uncommon wildcard and 4/30ths of a rare wildcard and 1/30th of a mythic wildcard each time you open a pack.

individual card rewards - Daily reward uncommons have a 9/80 chance to become a rare and a 1/80 chance to become a mythic. If you already have 4 of the assigned card you get vault progress, 20 gems, or 40 gems.

gold - 1000 gold gets you a pack

gems - 200 gems gets you a pack

Ranked draft events cost 750 gems or 5000 gold. You draft 3 packs and keep the cards, with 5+ copies replaced by vault progress or 20/40 gems. You do not get wildcards from the packs. You do not get wildcard progress for opening packs. You do get 14 cards per pack instead of 8. You also earn prizes based on how well you do in the event, which are packs and gems. If you have a 30% win rate then you rate to get 1.23 packs and 153 gems. A 50% win rate is worth 1.33 packs and 347 gems. A 70% win rate is worth 1.62 packs and 672 gems.

Traditional draft costs 1500 gems with the same cards drafted. It's best of 3 instead of best of 1, and the prizes are spikier. A 30% match win rate is worth 1.85 packs and 244 gems. 50% gets you 4.4 packs and 1350 gems. 70% match win rate is 6.9 packs and 2361 gems.

Sealed aren't up right now, but the info for the last sealed shows it was 2000 gems to join and you got the cards from 6 packs. You don't get to rare draft them. You always won 3 packs and then scaling gems based on your wins. 30%-524, 50%-1002, 70%-1672

Standard events cost 95 gems or 500 gold. The rewards are gold and three uncommon cards. The cards have upgrade chances based on how many wins you get. The gold return is 230 for 30%, 410 for 50%, and 715 for 70%. As for card upgrades, you have a 7% chance of an upgrade with 4 or fewer wins,. A guaranteed upgrade (and 6% more) at 5 wins. And another guaranteed upgrade (and 5% more) at 6 or 7 wins.

Traditional standard is 190 gems or 1000 gold, with a best of 3 format. Prizes again are 3 uncommons and some gold. Gold returns are again spikier, with only 415 for 30%, 1470 for 50%, and 2396 for 70%. The card upgrades are better here, but not twice as good so you definitely lose out here compared to the best of 1 event.

Ok, so, let's assume I'll hit the 70% win rates for everything except ranked draft, where 50% is more reasonable. (The problem with ranked draft is it pairs by rating, not by record in the draft, so I expect to only play good players the whole time. The other events aren't on the ranking system so I expect to get a decent mix of everyone interested in playing events. Constructed I'd need an actual good deck to hit that, unfortunately, but let's pretend we get one.) For building a collection the main thing that matters is rares. Rare wildcards, in fact, since there are a lot of junk rares out there, but any rare is decent. For now I'm going to assert I get enough mythics, uncommons, and commons. I'm going to count a random rare as half as good as a rare wild card. Well, mythic wildcards I'll count as rare wildcards even though they're worse because if they're worth nothing I won't have enough and it makes things a little easier for my spreadsheet.

An opened pack is worth .7385 rares. Constructed uncommon rewards are actually worth .64 rares if you win 70% of the time. The best of 3 constructed uncommons are worth 1.16 rares. A limited pack is worth .557 rares, but you do get some selection in a draft and can choose to rare draft the shock lands and not the garbage rares. And if you do end up with most of the rares you can get small gem rebates.

So a ranked draft is 5000 gold or 750 gems for 2.65 rares and 347 gems. This is a better use of gems than buying packs (you spend the gems that would buy 2 packs to get 2.65 rares). It's actually a bad use of gold compared to buying packs.

A traditional draft is 1500 gems for 6.77 rares and 2361 gems. If you could actually win 70% of your matches this would be an absurd rate of return. I feel like this can't actually be a fair potential win rate. Looking at a 50% win rate is 4.94 rares and 1350 gems which is still really, really good.

Sealed is 5.56 rares and 1672 of your 2000 gems back. Or 1002 of your 2000 gems back at 50% win rate. So just worse than the traditional draft, but also probably an easier place to get a high win rate.

Standard events are both essentially infinite ways to grind up small amounts of value. They don't actually make wildcards is the big problem, so while you can still use the random rares they both seem good. They do also let you build up gold to spend on something else. That something else could be packs, but probably it should be drafts so that you can launder the gold into gems in order to do more drafts.

It's really not much clearer now than it was before, but I think what I've learned going forward is that sealed events are actually a pretty good deal. They only show up right after a set is released so saving up some gems to do some for the next set makes sense. Beyond that if you have a good constructed deck you should grind cards in constructed tournaments. Drafting should be used to convert gold into gems, and then the gems should be spent drafting or sealeding.

New cards likely get banned tomorrow, so it seems like I need to see what happens there, then build a new deck and play tournaments for uncommon upgrades. I should also spend most of my uncommon wild cards to make it more likely I get vault progress out of drafting.

September Humble Bundle

The September Humble Monthly prepurchase games have been announced and they've added a new twist in this month. I'm not really sure why exactly, but they're giving you the choice between three games or a single game that was in a previous Humble Monthly. I'm guessing maybe the distributors for Rise of the Tomb Raider wanted to be featured again but Humble really didn't want to give away the same game to someone who's been a subscriber of their system forever. At any rate, you can get that single game ($70) or you can get Sniper Elite 4 ($67, but currently on sale on Steam for $10), Tales of Berseria ($65), and Staxel ($22). I've decided I intend to stream Humble Monthly games on the weekend going forward to shake things up from always playing Blood Bowl and decided to go with the three game option primarily because my sister keeps trying to get me to play a Tales game.

The three games are a sniper shooter game, a jRPG, and a farming simulator. A good variety that probably hits a lot of games with at least one of the games and seems like it should really hit me with two of them. I remain bad at aiming but jRPGs are ostensibly my favourite game genre and I really like Stardew Valley. I say ostensibly because I was thinking about it earlier and haven't actually played a new jRPG since probably Final Fantasy XIII in 2009 and I didn't even finish that one. So, well, I have high hopes but maybe my mental image of the genres I like doesn't line up with who I am today? Hard to say.

I'm going to stream Tales of Berseria tomorrow and see how it goes!

World of Warcraft: Expansion Additions

There's a new World of Warcraft expansion coming out in two weeks and I thought I'd take a look and see what stuff they're adding in this time around. This was probably a mistake because it turns out it sounds pretty sweet and now I'm probably going to end up wanting to play it again. They're adding two new game modes that sound pretty fun and they added one in the last expansion that I didn't really play that they're continuing on that really seemed up my alley. Thematically it sounds like this expansion is trying to return to making the Alliance and the Horde be fighting each other again instead of teaming up to fight the big bad. I don't much care about this one way or the other, but it does mean the mechanics are more PvP focused.

The first new mode is a Warcraft II mode to take over control of a zone from the other faction. Oddly it isn't PvP at all; it seems they actively want the zone to flip back and forth and if it was PvP then on most servers it wouldn't flip at all. Instead it's like a 20 person PvE fight where you build resource gathering buildings and barracks and stuff and then lead dudes into battle. It sounds neat, but probably not something you're going to want to do a ton of. You could just go play WCIII (which got a patch recently to revive that game) instead. But it should be fun.

The second new mode is a 3v3 race to score the most points by doing WoW type things. Kill monsters, do quests, open treasures, etc. The map is covered by a fog of war so you need to explore around and adapt your plan based on what actually spawned in this particular instance. There are a bunch of different islands to create ground rules but the location of things is procedurally generated so you need to adapt on the fly. Blizzard claims to have designed good bots to play the other 3 person team for the easier difficulty levels but the hardest mode requires you to have a premade group of 3 and pits you against another 3 person team. Spread out and get treasures? Gank squad to kill the other team? Someone with stealth and a lot of CC? Healers? Lots of options and it should be fun. Small scale skirmishes are the sort of PvP I can get behind, so hopefully this mode is done well.

The last mode, which existed already, is mythic+ dungeons. It's a system that's been evolving for a while, and has stolen some things from Path of Exile, and seems to be in a pretty good spot now. The basic idea is you do a hard 5 man dungeon with a time limit. Finish under the time limit and you get an item to let you run another harder 5 man dungeon. Beat that one in time and you get an even harder one. As you get harder and harder ones you start getting affixes on the dungeons that change the way things work. More enemy damage, less healing, weird dots... All sorts of options, and they're adding new ones. The loot is good and I think people pushing the really high mythic+s is a fairly competitive thing so I'd like to get in on the ground floor for it this expansion and see what I can do. It takes 4 other people and I don't know people who play anymore, but I imagine my old guild will at least have a few people interested at the start. I'm pretty sure Death Knights rate to be really good tanks for mythic dungeons at any rate, so I have a niche to fill! And who knows, maybe streaming mythic dungeons is a thing people are interested in watching?

August Humble Monthly Bundle

Humble Monthly is a subscription service run by the Humble Bundle people where they sell you a fixed bunch of games for a low price. The bundles tend to be 'worth' about $200 and it costs $12 per month but they are using a non-discounted MSRP to determine that value and you don't get to pick the games you get so chances are you're going to get some games you're simply not interested in due to genres or whatnot.

The trick they use to get people to sign up is they announce some of the key games for the next month shortly into the current month. Typically this will be three games, but when they get a particularly big game they have it as the only headliner. Civilization VI and Destiny 2 are examples of those sorts of games from previous months.

My brother got me a year long subscription for Christmas last year and it's been pretty sweet thus far. I spend too much time playing a lot of individual games (like Blood Bowl in recent times) to play all of them but I have played some of them, that I never would have played on my own, which were great. Quantum Break was a movie/FPS hybrid that I would have never considered getting on my own but it was very cool.

I have recently signed up to be a Humble Partner. Basically this means I advertise for them and if people buy things through my link I get a cut. I did a little bit of this for the game Cultist Simulator which I was given a copy of to stream and generate hype for them prior to release, but I could and should do more.

I think what I should start doing is streaming the preview games for the Humble Monthly with my chat bot periodically spamming the link. Humble really wants their partners to sell the Monthly bundle in that I actually get most of the payment for someone who signs up for the first time. It will also give me a little structure for playing different games, which is always a good thing for me.

The advance games for August were just announced and they are A Hat in Time, The Escapists 2, and Conan Exiles. A cute platformer, a cool looking prison break simulator, and some sort of open world crafting game. The first two were both on my wishlist from browsing through various Steam sales, the third I'd marked uninterested. But it's one of the top sellers of the year, and has a $50 base price, so I'm going to give it a try. Letting people know they can get it (and some other stuff) for $12 could be a useful thing!

Path of Exile: Ultimate Party Buffs?

Path of Exile is a game that can be played in a group of up to 6 players and has a massive number of different options for how one character can do things to help the other characters in their party. Group buffs, enemy debuffs, specialized roles... The world is your grouping oyster!

And yet right now I feel like I get very little benefit from playing with my friends right now. We've all built characters in order to be able to successfully play alone which means they're all self sufficient. They haven't really put any effort into buffing a group (since it tends to be more expensive skill point wise to buff a group than to just find something to buff yourself) and the efforts put into debuffing the enemies will often come into conflict with each other (curses overwriting each other, elemental equilibriuming away an ally's damage, knockbacks, non-magic finders killing things).

So we started mulling over the idea of creating characters actively designed to work well together. If a character is built knowing they're going to get buffs from friends then they can make tradeoffs as they build their character. For example, if I know someone is going to make some really good curses to put on the enemy then I know I don't have to put any skill points into making my curses better. I don't have to waste skill gems on a curse setup. If I know someone is going to focus on doing a lot of damage then I don't have to worry about taking any damage nodes in the tree at all! Everyone can focus on being tough and doing a couple of good things for the group and actually play together without feeling bad about it.

I'm a little hyped, but now I want to make sure I pick up all the ways to help that I can! So I wanted to go through the list of skills and uniques and stuff to see what the different ways of helping out would be. It's important to not try to take too many helping things and end up squishy but it's entirely possible there are some fairly trivial buffs that people could pick up as long as they know about them. So I want to have a list of broad 'roles' and then a list of extra add-ons that could be picked up.

Roles:
- AoE damage dealer
- single target damage dealer (for bosses)
- aurabot(s)
- multi-curser
- magic finder
- super tank

Specifics:
- elemental equilibrium (would need to coordinate to use the right element)
- conduit to share power, frenzy, and/or endurance charges
- consecrated ground
- no stun after blocking from Guardian
- speed buff after warcry from Guardian
- armour, energy shield, physical reduction, life regen from Guardian auras
- attack/cast speed, damage, resists from Necro auras
- maim
- blind
- culling strike (@20% from Slayer)
- taunts (double reduction from Champion)
- damage and move speed from Champion
- bleeds buff Bloodlust support gem
- knockback (reverse with unique gloves?)
- stuns/freezes
- hinder
- warcries?
- corpse consumption?
- vaal auras
- frost bomb (cold resist reduction)
- spirited response jewel (rallying cry -> mana regen for party)
- the vigil jewel (vigilant strike fortifies the party)
- dying breath weapon (curse, aura, damage amp) {animate guardian?}
- shaper's seed amulet (health/mana regen aura)
- leer cast hat (damage amp) {animate guardian?}


Enemy damage increases
- Inquisitor (nearby 16% elemental damage)
- Champion (taunted 20% damage)
- intimidate (Champion)
- Warchief (near totem 16% phys/fire damage)
- maim support gem (10-14% physical damage)
- shocks!
- wither (140% chaos damage)

Path of Exile: Perma-Freeze Bosses

I have been playing a lot of Path of Exile lately. My current character is running the freezing pulse skill gem because they added a unique jewel that buffs it and I had fun with it years ago. The goal of the build is to do a bunch of cold damage and inflict the 'freeze' debuff on all of the enemies. This means they can't take actions, which means they can't do damage, which means I get to be invincible! Mwahaha!

The theory turns out to be better than the practice, however. I can absolutely crush trash monsters but I've been having trouble with bosses. I've been trying to straddle a line of being able to still deal with bosses that aren't frozen so I've ended up with a mishmash of a build where I have some survivability and some freezability but not really enough of either. I will be getting more of both with more levels (both in terms of getting more passive points in the tree and in terms of leveling up my skill gems) but I'm starting to feel like I need to really go all in on one or the other. Running a bunch of curses and instant leech and the like is fine if enemies aren't frozen but if they are then it's not really doing anything for me and maybe I'll be better off without 4 item slots dedicated to doing all my cursing.

Alternatively maybe I'm better off doing all the cursing and leeching without worrying about freezing at all. If I'm building up to being able to leech tank bosses I can do the same for all the trash too and I'd be better off without all the freeze related points in the tree. At that point I may even be better off just using a different spell entirely!

So I think the way to proceed is to work out what I could do to go all in on freezing. See if I think that'd be good enough to freeze some bosses. If so, great! If not, well, probably start a new dude.


Ok, so, freezing... What are the specific mechanics behind freezing enemies? For our purposes only cold damage can freeze and a hit of cold damage will freeze if two conditions are met:

- The hit is a crit OR an inate 'chance to freeze' roll succeeds.
- The hit does enough damage to freeze the enemy for .3 seconds, which at base means doing 5% of the enemy's max health in cold damage.

The first condition is relatively easy to meet. In my current setup I have a 19% chance to crit, 20% chance to freeze, 20% chance to freeze a chilled enemy, 13% chance to freeze a frostbiten enemy, and somewhere from 0-25% chance to freeze based on distance from my character. So while not every hit will meet this check a significant number of them will. If bosses were getting frozen some but not all of the time I would worry more about working on this condition, but they aren't, so I won't.

The second condition is the one I'm getting stuck on. Having to hit a boss for 5% of their health in order to freeze them actually seems a little silly. If I only need to hit them 20 times in order to kill them I don't think I care that they're not frozen. I can kite and/or use flasks for the 7 seconds it'll take to burn them down! Fortunately damage isn't the only way to work on this condition. You can also work to extend the duration of your freezes so that smaller amounts of damage are good enough to hit the .3 second threshold. If you had 100% freeze duration you'd only need to hit them for 2.5% of their max health. 400% freeze duration would mean you only need to hit them for 1% of their max health. I'm not quite sure that would be good enough, and I really doubt I could get that much freeze duration anyway, but I might as well look into it.

Currently I have 60% increased freeze duration, which is every freeze duration node in the tree. There is one 10% ailment duration node which probably also applies, but I don't have. Other potential sources of freeze duration would be:

- jewels which can add up to 16% freeze duration each
- 20%+ freeze duration from quality on a frostbite gem (and maybe more if my curse nodes impact the quality boost)
- elemental proliferation support gem would be up to ~29% freeze duration (and 20% chance to freeze)
- The Halcyon unique amulet has 30% freeze duration (and 10% chance to freeze, and potentially 80% cold damage)
- Southbound unique gloves have 25% freeze duration
- Rashkaldor's Patience unique amulet had 20% elemental ailment duration

And that is all. The last two unique items don't feel very good while The Halcyon runs over 150 chaos to buy. I do have that much, and I suspect I can flip the amulet back if I don't like it, so possibly that is what I need to do if I'm going forward. I can probably grab jewel sockets to get 3 of those jewels, and I can easily get a quality frostbite gem. I currently need my amulet for life and resists, so switching to The Halcyon hurts my health to the point where I probably need to give up on the Kitava's Thirst 4-curse plan. I also _might_ be able to stretch my tree to get that last 10% ailment node at the assassin start location.

All told I can probably get my freeze duration up to 164% without elemental proliferation and 203% with it. That's almost twice what I'm currently sitting at (303 compared to 160) which almost certainly gets me a little closer to freezing some bosses. That's enough that it's probably worth working on...

On top of that, I can also work on doing more cold damage. With all the freeze duration I can manage I only need to do enough damage to hit for 1.7% of the enemy's max health. I'm still not sure if that is good enough... That's 60 hits to kill them, and I attack almost 3 times per second, so it's probably trivializing a fight that would be lasting 25 seconds otherwise? That's actually a lot of dodging... I don't think I can facetank a lot of these fights for 25 seconds with my current setup, so it is probably worth trying. But let's max out our damage too...

Initially my thinking was that if I'm doing a perma-freeze plan I don't want to be relying on the swings involved in crits. So I've taken the node that makes me do 40% more damage if I've crit in the last 8 seconds. This is way better for consistent damage and it saves me taking crit nodes but it's entirely possible I could be freezing some of the time with crits instead of the current none of the time. At this point I'm really committed to this line I think (I'd want a different bandit reward and probably an entirely different class for critting) but maybe I want to create a different character to do crit freezing pulse...

Anyway, with crits totally abstracted away there are really 4 ways to boost the damage of my spell. I can increase the base cold damage of the spell with flat damage (including leveling the gem itself), I can add to the 'increased damage' multiplier in a variety of ways, I can get extra 'more damage' multipliers, and I can lower the enemy cold resistance.

There are so many ways to change all of those things so I went and built a spreadsheet. It was a little surprising to me in some ways, in particular that a level 4 empower gem isn't really worth using. I suspect that's because of how much flat damage I'm adding to the spell via herald of ice? It means there isn't a red gem worth using which makes me sad... I'm going to have to spend a bunch of chromatics to change my 6 link away from BBGGGR into BBBGGG. (I only have a level 2 empower gem anyway...)

At any rate, here's the support gem ordering for different criteria:

30 cold resist (standard boss), freeze duration - controlled destruction > hypothermia > ice bite > slower projectiles > empower (4) > cold penetration > unbounded ailments > added cold damage > pierce > efficacy > empower (3) > elemental proliferation > iron will > empower (2) > faster projectiles > faster casting > spell echo

30 cold resist (standard boss), DPS - spell echo > controlled destruction > ice bite > hypothermia > faster casting > slower projectiles > empower (4) > cold penetration > added cold damage > pierce > efficacy > empower (3) > iron will > faster projectiles > empower (2) > elemental proliferation = unbounded ailments

85 cold resist (cold boss), freeze duration - controlled destruction > hypothermia > cold penetration > ice bite > slower projectiles > empower (4) > unbounded ailments > added cold damage > pierce > efficacy > empower (3) > elemental proliferation > iron will > empower (2) > faster projectiles > faster casting > spell echo

85 cold resist (cold boss), DPS - spell echo > controlled destruction > ice bite > hypothermia > cold penetration > faster casting > slower projectiles > empower (4) > added cold damage > pierce > efficacy > empower (3) > iron will > faster projectiles > empower (2) > elemental proliferation = unbounded ailments


Basically it seems I have enough spell penetration that unless a boss is overcapped it barely isn't worth using the cold pen gem. This is only true if frost bomb is up, and that's not a given.

The spreadsheet wants me to use slower projectiles, but the spreadsheet don't understand that freezing pulse loses damage the longer it travels so slower projectiles has an invisible less damage multiplier in it. This depends on how close I get to the enemies, and it really hurts my trash clear because the size of my attack is based on how fast it travels. Similarly the faster projectiles damage is better than it seems here (but it still seems quite bad).

Spell echo is the best for doing damage, but it's actively bad at freezing a boss. This means I may want to carry one around to swap in on bosses I can't freeze? I suspect I'd rather have faster casting instead for mobility reasons if I can't freeze the boss? Hard to say.

Ice bite looks good, but that's because it's a way to get frenzy charges. If I can get the charges up then it is worth using. If I can't then it's trash. You get them for killing frozen enemies, which will happen all the time on trash and on boss fights with tons of adds but never on a standalone boss.

I think what I'm ultimately going to want to run is controlled destruction, hypothermia, ice bite, cold penetration, and faster casting. It feels like a good setup for trash with a reasonable shot at freezing most bosses. I can swap in a slower projectiles for the ice bite when I can't keep up the frenzy charges and just get right up in the single boss' face. Either way I do want my colours to be BBBGGG so I should get on that.

Blood Bowl: How Bad is Stab?

A couple weeks ago I played against a Dark Elf opponent that was running two assassins on a relatively unleveled team. This means they chose to take the assassin over other positionals, which means they must have valued them pretty highly. Twitch chat was not very charitable to the skill level of my opponent, and the assassins actually accomplished basically nothing. They spent a lot of time intentionally standing beside my guys and then getting hit for it with their 7 armour, but that held up just fine.

It got me wondering... Should I have been able to just get free SPP for killing them? Should he have been able to hurt any of my guys first? Is conventional wisdom about how bad they are correct or should I be trying them out? Setting up with 2 of them on the line, making stabs, and then blocking away anyone who didn't get stabbed feels at least worth investigating. (My opponent tried this, but I was playing necro and the players he was stabbing had 9 armour and stand firm so blocking them away couldn't happen.) What are the odds here?

	Nothing	Stun	KO	Cas
7 AV	58%	24%	10%	7%
8 AV	72%	16%	7%	5%
9 AV	83%	10%	4%	3%

	TO	Push	Down	Stun	KO	Cas
7 AV	3%	22%	44%	18%	8%	5%
8 AV	3%	22%	54%	12%	5%	3%
9 AV	3%	22%	63%	7%	3%	2%

	TO	Push	Down	Stun	KO	Cas
7 AV	11%	33%	32%	14%	6%	4%
8 AV	11%	33%	40%	9%	4%	3%
9 AV	11%	33%	46%	5%	2%	2%

	TO	Push	Down	Stun	KO	Cas
7 AV	11%	58%	18%	7%	3%	2%
8 AV	11%	58%	22%	5%	2%	1%
9 AV	11%	58%	25%	3%	1%	1%

The first table is for stab against the 3 likely armour values the target is apt to have. The next one is the odds for a 2 die block with block against someone without block. The next one is the odds for a 2 die block without block against someone with block. The last one is the odds for a 2 die block without block against someone with both block and dodge.

The first thing to point out is that there is no downside to the stab. Throwing a block without block has an 11 percent chance of knocking yourself down. You can reroll it, of course, but burning up rerolls on opening line blocks feels really bad. Especially when the upside of throwing the block is only a 4% chance of removal!

Then there's the fact that even if you give up a 2 die block back after failing a stab they are only 13% to remove you back. If you're stabbing a 7 AV person that means the stabber has the advantage. Otherwise you're less likely to hurt them as you are to be hurt back, so you really need the followup block from a friend trying for a push to free you up. Hitting a flesh golem with an assassin is not a good play.

That all said... A 13% chance to be removed back is actually a really big deal. And that's assuming they don't have mighty blow, which, now that we mention it...

	TO	Push	Down	Stun	KO	Cas
7 AV	3%	22%	31%	20%	13%	11%
8 AV	3%	22%	44%	15%	9%	8%
9 AV	3%	22%	54%	10%	6%	5%

Now we're up to a 23% chance of being removed! Those are the sorts of numbers I'm talking about. Mighty blow really lets you murder the 7 AV dudes with no skills. No wonder my rats keep dying...

The next thing I notice is just how hard it is to hurt someone with block and dodge with a regular hit. Even with 7 armour you're only getting removed on 5% of hits. 5% of regular hits, anyway. Throw on tackle and mighty blow and things get a lot scarier. But it's not like a Dark Elf team is going to have many (or any) players with those skills. If we're trying to kill a gutter runner or a skink or something then maybe the assassin is the way to go. 17% instead of 5% is a pretty big change!


My feeling now after looking at things a little is that blitzing anyone except for a low armour dodgy dude is a mistake with an assassin. This means they have to start in contact on the start of your turn to get a hit off, which is very dangerous for a 7 armour dude with no defensive skills. Using them against enemies on the line feels pretty good though. Take a free armour roll, then hit them with a regular block to push them away (or knock them down) afterwards. If you knock them down beside the assassin then next turn they have to dodge away or give you another stab...

It also feels like they just aren't likely enough to knock anyone down to justify using them on the ball carrier if you have an actual ball removal player. Tackle, wrestle, strip ball... These are all better tools than the assassin. But those all require a lot of levels; the assassin comes straight out of the box with stab.

Another downside is the stab doesn't earn any experience, so the assassin is a removal tool that doesn't level through removals! Can you feed them touchdowns to level them up? All the players on a Dark Elf team want to level up through touchdowns, can you justify feeding the spp onto the assassin?

And really, that's what it comes down to... Assassins are expensive players on a team full of expensive players. They're pretty much the squishiest player in the game, too, since they have only 7 AV and no defensive skills. Even goblins, which have stunty, start with dodge, so they're harder to hurt. Harder to hurt for everyone but an assassin, anyway!


So I feel like I'd maybe want an assassin (or two!) against some specific teams but very much not against others.

Good: Skaven, High Elf, Brettonian, Wood Elf, Lizardman, Norse, Khemri
Ok: Human, Dark Elf, Undead, Chaos Dwarves
Bad: Orc, Dwarf, Chaos, Necromantic, Nurgle

Hmm... Looking at it there are actually 7 of 16 teams where I'd probably want an assassin and only really 5 where they'd be a real detriment. Of course on the champion ladder it turns out that the bottom group there contains a lot of the most played teams. Orcs are #1 by a large margin, with Chaos and Chaos Dwarves as the next two. Those 5 bad teams represent 40% of all games played and that really makes me question wanting to play assassins on the ladder.

But in a league? That's more tempting. Especially if the league enforces some kind of race parity like the NWFL league I played on FumBBL did.

Of course you could just be looking at having your expensive defenseless 7 AV player die in the first game...

Blood Bowl Puzzle

An interesting situation cropped up at the end of a recent Blood Bowl game, and I wanted to look into it in more detail while not being under a 3 minute timer to make all of my moves in a turn. In some senses it's a very straightforward position and in other senses there's a lot of things going on that need to be considered. I thought it might be interesting to provide the situation as a puzzle and let people decide what they would do and then go through all of the things to consider in another post.

The Blood Bowl 2 interface is pretty good for watching things live, but pretty sketchy for easily seeing things at a glance for people who aren't used to it, so I'll explain what's going on in this picture first.

This is turn 16 of a game where we're down 2-1. We're a brand new Necromantic team, dressed in pink, and we're playing against Dwarves. We have possession of the ball, in the hands of a werewolf who is 8 spaces from the endzone (indicated by the blue pillar of light). Werewolves have an 8/3/3/8 statline and their only relevant skill is frenzy. We don't have any rerolls and the only thing we care about is maximizing our odds of scoring a touchdown to tie the game. No other player on our team can reach the endzone and there aren't enough players on the field to set up any crazy chain push plays (I don't think, anyway!).

The other players we have access to are 2 flesh golems (4/4/2/9), 3 zombies (4/3/2/8), and a wight (6/3/3/8 block). Our second wight is lying on the ground beside the ball carrier but unfortunately he is stunned. There are not many dwarves left in play, but the ones that exist are in annoying positions. All dwarves have 3 strength and all of them have block except for the one hiding behind the flesh golem in the upper left hand corner. The remaining dwarves are marked one on the werewolf, one on the second flesh golem, and one on a zombie. We have 2 free zombies and a free wight, all a fair ways behind the play.

What is your plan for the turn?

Hearthstone Constructed Revisited

I've spent the last week or so watching a lot of constructed Hearthstone VoDs. Blizzcon was this past weekend and the World Championships were held there, so I've been watching 16 of the top Hearthstone players compete in a format where they had to bring 5 decks from 5 different classes to the table. The opponent bans one of them and then you each pick a deck and play. Winner's deck gets removed from the pool and you repeat until someone has won games with all 4 of their unbanned decks.

I find this kind of format fascinating, though it has pretty much nothing to do with the constructed available to me. Laddering is a very different beast since you have very different goals and opponents to play against. In a very real sense laddering is just a grind so playing a faster deck tends to be better because you can pound out more games. Everyone is aware of this too, so your opponents skew way more towards faster decks than they probably should. In the tournaments you're more choosing decks that are very powerful on their own, or that all target a specific weakness you're expecting to exist in your opponent's decks. One of the players swapped his warrior deck between the top 16 and the top 8 because he anticipated his opponents in the single elimination portion would target his control warrior. He switched to an aggressive dragon warrior instead, which was way better against his first opponent's heavily controlling decks.

Watching all these cool powerful decks has me itching to play cool decks. Watching these top players made me realize that I really would be just as good as they are if I put in the time practicing. And if I actually had cards. One of the interviews they kept showing between games at the tournament talked a little bit about how the player bought tons of packs each time a set came out. Now, maybe he does that to get golden cards, but I simply can't do that. I've slacked a lot on getting my quests done, and I haven't drafted much at all of the last couple sets, so my collection is really pitiful...

I did a bit of thinking about that, and it's not all bad. Sets rotating out after a couple years is actually set up to help me out now. Goblins vs Gnomes leaving was terrible for me since I played a ton when that was the newest set, but the next set to leave is going to be The Grand Tournament, where I don't even have half of the commons and have none of the legendaries. That rotation is expected to happen sometime around March, so I'd still have 5 months of suffering through not having any cards from that set, but I'd have plenty of time to work on picking up cards from the more recent sets.

Another thing I realized is that I don't actually need to keep any of my GvG cards. I have 6 legendaries from that set and a lot of the lesser rare stuff too. I could just dust all of those to give my collection a shot in the arm.

So I went and updated my collection spreadsheet and reality punched me squarely in the face. All of my cards that will not be standard legal come March are worth a total of 8165 dust. To craft all of the cards I'm missing from Classic and Old Gods would cost 115640 dust, and that doesn't account for the fact that TWO sets will be released between now and then.

Of course I don't need every card. I can survive without crafting up a Lorewalker Cho, a Milhouse Manastorm, or a Nat Pagle. There are 11 legendaries from Classic that seem completely unplayable, and 10 more from Old Gods. That shaves off 33600 of the dust from that number above. And even though something like Lord Jaraxxus is playable, I don't need him unless I really want to play control warlock.

So it's still kinda feasible to build up a collection capable of playing the tournament formats, but I won't be able to have all the options that everyone else does. That puts a damper on the whole thing. I even went and checked out some of the coolest decks from Worlds and most of them cost way more than the 2205 dust I have on hand. Throw in all the dust from GvG and I can make any single deck... There's a lot of overlap between the decks too (almost every deck at Worlds played Ragnaros, for example, so if I crafted him it would make all the decks 1600 dust cheaper).

I think this all means it's time to start putting in some time playing Hearthstone again. I need to earn another 445 gold in order to buy the last wing of the Karazhan adventure, and then I'll want to save up some gold to do a bunch of arena runs when the new set comes out to start building up cards from Gadgetzan. I am still missing half of the rares and 13 commons from Old Gods, and it's a set sticking around for a year and a half of standard, so maybe I should draft before Gadgetzan too even though I don't know a ton about the format.

I also need to craft up a Ragnaros and then play some decks. I'll probably hold off on disenchanting all my GvG stuff in case I come up with a good reason not to, but I suspect I'll be doing that soon.

Path of Exile: Fire and Ice

Many leagues ago Sceadeau and I created characters to level up together. He wanted to test out a unique jewel which increased fireball's radius by what sounded like a ludicrous amount. I wanted to test out using freezing pulse and projectile speed to permanently freeze bosses. Both ended up working out pretty well, and it was a lot of fun to play them.

Apparently there's a new Path of Exile league starting today, and Sceadeau sent me the following snipit from the patch notes.

Fireball: 50% more damage. Ice Spear: 70% more damage.

Ice spear is a different spell than glacial spike but it would probably work about the same in practice and 70% is a really big number. PoE has a history of overbuffing things when they buff them, so I wouldn't be surprised if both of these spells end up being really good. Also the game has a much higher power level now than it did back when we last did this, because of the whole ascendancy system.

So I think we're going to go back to Path of Exile for a while... I really like the game because it simply has so many different ways to play it. It often gets compared to Diablo III and I like PoE a lot more, especially when playing with other people, because the game feels so different when running with different builds.

Now there are two things to figure out... How exactly does ice spear work, and what ascendancy class do I want to use with it?

Ice spear is a spell with 2 stages. The first stage has 100% pierce chance, so it's useful for clearing out packs of dudes who are nearby. After it travels a set distance it switches to the second stage where it no longer pierces but has a 600% increased chance to crit. Considering the spell has a base crit chance of 7% this means the end portion will crit almost half the time without any other investment. Ice spear also has an increased modifier to chill duration, but not to freeze. So it probably isn't as good for perma-freezing things... Except crits also freeze, and this crits a lot, so maybe it still works. Chilling things is still good, especially if you have other abilities that get better on monsters that have an elemental debuff on them.

The first thing this brings to mind is the Inquisitor ascendancy for the Templar. One of the points in that tree is 100% increased crit chance against enemies with no elemental status ailment, and 45% to crit multiplier against enemies with an elemental status ailment. If Sceadeau hits the enemy first it'll have a fire debuff on it most likely, and enemies that I hit a second time will certainly have a debuff from the first hit. So that's already pretty strong. The big point behind that node says your crits ignore elemental resistances and your non-crits penetrate 10% elemental resistances...

Penetrating elemental resistance is a _huge_ deal. The best nodes in the tree for casters in my experience have always been the ones that penetrate resists. I've always supported my spells with resist penetration. So completely ignoring resistances sounds incredibly good. It would have the downside of not being able to use a good support gem or take some good nodes in the tree, but I can adapt to other things.

One other thing that immediately leaped to mind is the node elemental equilibrium. It makes it so enemies you hit get 25% resistance to your element and lose 50% resistance to the other elements. If I'm playing with Sceadeau, and he's casting fireballs, then this node would drastically amplify his damage while only hurting my damage some of the time. This feels really good, but would require putting a huge focus on extra crit chance. And I hate relying on feelings... Let's look at some math!

These numbers assume I crit 75% of the time for triple damage and that both Sceadeau and I would be running 34% penetration unless I'm an inquisitor in which case I have none and he still has 34%.

Mob Resist	Sceadeau EE gain	Inq gain	EE gain	EE gain w/ Inq
0	37%	-25%	-19%	-2%
25	46%	-10%	-23%	-3%
50	60%	14%	-30%	-3%
75	85%	58%	0%	0%
100	42%	58%	0%	0%

What we see here is that my picking up EE boosts Sceadeau's damage by anywhere between 37% and 85%. This is a more multiplier and is an incredibly big deal. Even with nothing special going on, EE would only cost me 19% to 30% of my damage, so overall as a team we'd be doing better if I took EE even with no mitigating circumstances. Inquisitor by itself actually hurts at low levels of mob resist because I won't have the penetration to drive the enemies into negative resists. I will have an extra support gem and other tree nodes, so that's going to be fine, and I'm pretty sure mobs with no resistances aren't going to be a concern one way or the other. Inquisitor is a 58% more damage buff at high levels of monster resist which is insane. Marauders have to take 10% extra damage to unlock their 40% more damage point! I just get it for free! Of course, it's only this high because my spell of choice has 42% extra crit chance on it, and this all assumes I'm cracking hard enemies with the sweet spot...

The best thing, though, is when I compare Inquisitor to Inquisitor with elemental equilibrium. I lose somewhere between 2 and 3% of my damage at low monster resist levels to give Sceadeau a huge boost. I think I'm pretty ok with that.

So assuming Sceadeau isn't also going Inquisitor I am definitely going to try it out, and will take EE to boost his damage by a ton.

Time to play around with the tree tool to see how much extra crit chance and multiplier I can actually pick up...

The Binding of Isaac: Instant Start Mod

I personally haven't played very much Isaac lately, but the racing community has chugged along making new mods and coming up with new ideas for races. I saw the details for an upcoming race (tonight at 6pm EST) that really got my brain churning. There's a mod out there that lets you give your character items at the start of the game, so you could start with a godhead or a brimstone or whatever. The race is to beat blue baby in the chest with all 13 of the characters in the game as fast as you can, with the added twist that each of the 13 characters has to use a different one of the starting items.

Whoa! It's one thing to figure out what the best item would be for each individual character but then adding in that extra restriction really kicks things up a notch. There are 3 characters, for example, that all really want to start with Judas' shadow. Most of the others probably want a knife or an epic fetus if I'm using my prior racing knowledge... But in previous races I couldn't start with a godhead if I wanted to, or a brimstone. Would those be better than a knife? Especially for me, who is distinctly mediocre with a knife? Oh, and then it turns out the mod has 31 starts, and some of them aren't single items, so it's really tricky to compare. For reference, the 31 starts are:

1. 20/20
2. Chocolate milk
3. Cricket's body
4. Cricket's head
5. Dead eye
6. Death's touch
7. Dr fetus
8. Epic fetus
9. Ipecac
10. Judas' shadow
11. Lil brimstone
12. Magic mushroom
13. Mom's knife
14. Monstro's lung
15. Polyphemus
16. Proptosis
17. Sacrificial dagger
18. Tech .5
19. Tech X
20. Brimstone
21. Incubus
22. Maw of the void
23. Crown of light
24. Godhead
25. Sacred heart
26. Quad shot + triple shot
27. Technology + coal
28. Ludovico technique + parasite
29. Fire mind + 13 lucky foot 
30. Kamikaze + host hat
31. Mega blast + habit + battery + AAA battery

Some of those seem like silly things people wanted to fool around with. Having a fire mind that always explodes seems like a disaster when it comes to going fast, for example, and I can't imagine ludovico is ever very fast either. Mega blast feels like it would be very fast, but I just can't handle it. I tried it out on Maggie yesterday with no success at all, but I also didn't double charge it with the battery. But if I'm going to struggle through a few floors with Maggie... That's slow too!

Anyway, my initial idea was to run:

??? - Judas Shadow (10)
Maggie - (31)
Samson - Maw (22)
Cain - sacred heart (25)
Isaac - quads (26)
Judas - Magic Mushroom (12)
Eve - tech x (19)
Azazel - coal (27)
Lazarus - ipecac (9)
Eden - Epic Fetus (8)
Lost - Godhead (24)
Lilith - Knife (13)
Keeper - Brim (20)

I ended up making some changes on the fly. I gave Maggie the only other item with a speed up in it, the magic mushroom, and gave Judas 20/20 instead. Then I had real trouble using the knife on Lilith. I thought she'd get to use a knife even though she had the blindfold but that wasn't the case at all. On the suggestion of a viewer (who is also the guy running the race, it turns out) I ran epic fetus on her instead. She does get to use that item with the blindfold, which is sweet. I gave Eden the knife instead, and that was fine.

I died with multiple characters. Some of that was just bring rusty for sure, but some of it is how terrible The Lost and The Keeper are. I gave Judas' shadow to Blue Baby because his base stats are garbage and I hate how he can't get red hearts, but Keeper is even worse. Not being able to take any good devil deal is just such a deal breaker. So I think I need to give the shadow to Keeper. That means I'd need to find a new item for Blue Baby, and it should be a good one because he's pretty bad.

I think what I should do is give sacred heart to Blue Baby, shift 20/20 over to Cain, and tag in the crown of light for Judas. Apparently it adds a couple of soul hearts on top of doing double damage, which is good for Judas.

Azazel is also not really enjoying coal. I was hoping the tech 1 would override his short brim, but that was not to be. I think I'll give him the brimstone freed up in the previous swap. Does anyone else want tech+coal? Tech X is really good, but it hurts my hand to use, so maybe I should try giving it to Eve. Or actually, maybe the Lost should take it since he starts with spectral? Does spectral stack with technology in a good way? A quick test says yes, the laser goes the whole screen even over rocks. That frees up a godhead to use on Eve. So now I think my lineup is going to be...

??? - sacred heart (25)
Maggy - Magic Mushroom (12)
Samson - Maw (22)
Cain - 20/20 (1)
Isaac - quads (26)
Judas - crown of light (23)
Eve - Godhead (24)
Azazel - Brim (20)
Lazarus - ipecac (9)
Eden - Knife (13)
Lost - coal (27)
Lilith - Epic Fetus (8)
Keeper - Judas Shadow (10)

I'm certainly open to opinion and suggestions!

Path of Exile: Talisman Crushing

The current temporary league running in Path of Exile is called the Talisman league, and the new mechanic added for it is the addition of a new item type: the talisman. You can equip a talisman into the neck slot instead of an amulet. They have the twist that they're all corrupted, so you can't craft them in any way, but their implicit property is selected from a new pool of properties which are way more powerful than the normal amulet implicit properties.

These properties are divided out into 3 different tiers of talismans. The first tier are found sporadically on monsters out in the wild. There are also altars that can spawn which allow you to crush 5 tier 1 talismans into a tier 2 talisman. Or 5 tier 2 talismans into a tier 3 talisman. Or 5 tier 3 talismans into a portal to a challenge boss fight. Kill that boss and scoop up a tier 4 talisman which has two implicit properties!

The level of the resulting talisman is based on the average level of the talismans used as input, with a twist. The highest level one is worth 50% more than it should be worth, and the lowest level one is worth 50% less than it should be worth.

There's a challenge for killing the boss while the boss is at least level 80. The easiest way to make sure this happens is to just use 125 talismans which are all level 80. But that requires killing things in tier 11 maps at the very lowest. Is there a way to abuse the weird averaging to cut down on the number of 80+ talismans I need to find to do this challenge? One talisman is going to be the lowest tier 1 of the lowest tier 2 of the lowest tier 3. That means it's only going to be worth 1/8th as much as a true average talisman. One talisman is going to be the highest tier 1 of the highest tier 2 of the highest tier 3. It's going to be worth 27/8th as much as an average talisman, or 27 times as much as the lowest.

There's also the question of rounding... How does it work? Does a talisman remember decimal points, or is it rounded at each step of crushing? And is it rounded up, down, or properly?

If there is no rounding things are pretty straightforward. Getting a single higher level talisman is worth a ton. An 81 talisman lets your lowest level talisman fall all the way to 53! Unfortunately only one talisman can get such a big benefit. Here's a breakdown of the 125 talismans and how many points they could be worth:

Points	Quantity
1	1
2	9
3	3
4	27
6	18
8	27
9	3
12	27
18	9
27	1

I guess the way to think about it is you can earn points for each talisman above level 80 that you can spend to offset some underleveled talismans. The really common situations are going to be trading 12 points for 4 pointers, so assuming you can get a decent selection of 81s you can afford thrice as many 79s, or an equal number of 77s, or any such combination. But it feels like you really don't want to be using too many very low level ones. You get a lot of 79s, but once you dip down even lower you're paying a lot of points.


Can we actually discount rounding? How can we find out? I guess it's time for some quick testing...

Ok, things are now clear. I crushed 8 talismans (7 sets of tier 1s, 1 set of turn 2s) and things followed very simple rules. Rounding happens the way it should and decimals are not carried over.

This means you can gain or lose some levels depending on how you crush. Ideally you want to always be creating a level X.5 talisman, so it gets rounded up to X+1. Stay away from creating an X.4 talisman.

Adding on to the stuff above, we can shave off a full 5 levels from each 'lowest' talisman in a given transaction and end up in the same spot for free. Or a couple levels off of one of the middle talismans. And since the effects bubble forward, you can actually end up shaving an awful lot off of the talismans that get crushed into the lowest tier 3 talisman.

Awesome Games Done Quick 2016

It's that time of year again! The nice speedrunning people are putting on their annual January event to raise money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It's brought my own streaming down to a minimum as I'd rather watch the awesomeness live than play my own games.

I wrote about the blindfolded Punch Out runs from two years ago, and how intense they were to watch. I just watched a run that made me feel a very similar way. There's a roguelike game called Crypt of the Necrodancer where a song plays and you need to take actions on the beats of the song, and only on those beats. Fail and you take a point of damage. I watched Ike play it a while ago and it's really hard!

There's a challenge character where you only have 1 health, so if you take damage for any reason you're dead. Also you can't get a better weapon than the base dagger.

There's a challenge character where you die if you ever pick up money. Every monster you kill drops money, so you can't ever walk into a square where you've killed an enemy.

There's a challenge character where everything moves at double speed. (Interestingly, the character is genderqueer, which I think may be the first time I've seen that particular characteristic used as anything other than 'comic' relief.)

Then there's a challenge character which combines all of the aspects of the previous three challenges. Move at double speed, with a terrible weapon, and die if you ever pick up gold or take damage or miss a beat... The developer didn't know if anyone could ever beat the mode. Apparently to date only 10 people have ever beat it. One of them was at AGDQ, and he actually managed to do it. It is so absolutely ludicrous and had me completely riveted.

Go check the marathon out. There's bound to be more awesome stuff! (Like, apparently, a blindfolded Punch-Out race!)

Path of Exile: Patch 2.1

I haven't played Path of Exile since September 2014 when I hurt my wrist playing the game. I was really pushing to try to win a t-shirt and ended up putting too much strain on my wrist. This apparently combined with anxiety issues (presumably about becoming homeless) to make my hand go numb. But that issue got dealt with via drugs and I've been pretty capable of streaming games for 12+ hours a day without hurting my wrist. I definitely don't want to play super hardcore to win a t-shirt or anything, but I think I can play the game again without hurting myself.

There have been a lot of patches in the last 15 months, with a big one launching today. So many things have changed in the game, and they sound really, really good. Standard things like a new act, tons of new items, better balance... But also some other cool stuff...

An item filter so you can write a text file to alter what loot you see on the ground. You can change font sizes, colours, and add sound effects!

An experience per hour meter!

Revamped map system which keeps all the cool things with end game maps while extending and enhancing things to make them better for more casual play. Map pools are easier to build up at lower levels, and harder at very high levels, but the high maps are worth it.

A card collecting system to trade cards for loot at a vendor, so you can farm specific areas to get specific useful unique items.

Skill gems you can get from quests are sold from vendors so you don't need to create alts or store tons of gems in a guild bank anymore!

Even more customization in the sphere grid system, with new jewels you can stick in the grid!

Integration with Twitch so stream chat is a channel in the game client!


It remains to be seen how good this stuff actually is, but I have really high hopes. I don't intend on playing nearly as much as I used to, but maybe if they still have races and stuff I can get into streaming it... We'll see!

Frankenstein: Master of Death

Every now and then I look on Steam for the absolute cheapest game. If it has Steam cards and looks vaguely interesting I tend to pick it up in the hopes I'll eventually play it. Frankenstein: Master of Death is a game that was on sale for 16 cents a couple weeks ago and said it was a 'hidden object' game. I enjoyed playing a 'hidden object' game on Facebook but eventually got put off by the free to play business model... So I thought putting up 16 cents for a game without those annoying paywalls was a worthy risk.

It ended up being more of a point and click adventure game in the sense that you had to find keys that fight the right doors to progress through the plot. Finding the keys was pretty trivial; remembering where the lock was happened to be a little annoying. Only occasionally did you get into a 'hidden object' minigame and those only ever had a fixed 12 things to find. Not the best offering for someone who just wanted to click on a bunch of hidden objects.

Ultimately I beat the game in a little under 3 hours. I wouldn't say it was the most fun I ever had playing a game, but it was reasonably fun. I had to leave the game running in order to collect up the Steam cards that came with it (they added in a refund option to return a game with under 2 hours played so now cards won't drop until you've clocked at least 2 hours in a game) and ended up selling the cards off for 26 cents after Steam fees.

All told I made 10 cents and got to play a decent enough game. I'm not sure it was actually an optimal use of my time, so maybe buying the cheapest game on Steam is actually not a very good idea...

On the plus side, it is now the second game in which I've earned 100% of the achievements. Huzzah!

Hearthstone Ranked Prizes

My brother came over for supper a week or so ago and in the course of conversation let me know that Blizzard apparently added minor prizes to the constructed system. The higher up the ladder you get, the more free stuff they throw at you. The free stuff really isn't very much, but it's more than the absolutely nothing you used to go. (You get one golden common at rank 20, with increments of 5 extra dust per rank most of the time, with sometimes extra cards thrown in instead.) The biggest jump is at rank 5 where you go from getting 2 golden commons and a golden rare to getting 2 golden commons and a golden epic. Not a huge deal, but it is a bunch of free cards and since they're all golden they're worth more if you want to blow them up for dust in order to help put together other decks.

I haven't played constructed in an awfully long time, since I grinded up to Legend a couple of times at the start of the year. But I figured I like free stuff, and I wanted to stream more Hearthstone anyway, so I played for a few hours on the 21st and then a little bit yesterday and today. I was learning patron when I last played and the newest set didn't seem to change anything for that deck so it seemed like the thing to try out as I went to scoop up some free stuff.

When I last hit Legend it took me 148 games to go from 25 stars to 71 stars, which is where rank 5 kicks in. This month it took me 47 games to go from 1 star to 71 stars. That's a whole heck of a lot faster! I was winning around 52-54% of my games back then. This time I won a little over 87% of my games. There are likely a few reasons for this difference. Patron warrior is a much better deck than mech mage used to be. I started much later in the month, so the people I played against at each rank rated to be a fair bit worse this time around. Perhaps most importantly the metagame shifted and a new paladin has emerged that is terribly positioned against patron warrior. I don't know if it beats other things, but it sure can't beat me!

I'm still not sure I really know how to play the deck well. I am getting a better feel for things just through practice, and it definitely makes me think I'd need to invest a lot of time into constructed to actually have a shot at doing well in tournaments. And that would also require way more cards than I currently have... Which means more drafting?

Diablo III: Season 4

The next season of Diablo III starts in less than an hour, and it's looking pretty sweet. They put out a new patch this week to use in the new season and it has a ton of interesting changes! The biggest one is the addition of a new 'cube' with powerful new recipes. It lets you reroll legendary items to get better stats, or trade in an extra copy of a set item for a different piece of the set, or convert a rare item to a legendary. You can swap gem types, or crafting material types. You can remove the level requirement from an item to really power level an alt. But the best part is you can destroy legendary items and then equip 3 of their passive abilities onto your character! One of the constraints to builds in the past was which slots you could get passives from while maintaining overpowered set bonuses... Now those options have multiplied! So many more builds should become playable as a result!

On top of that they've added in higher difficulty levels (useful since the previous highest difficulty for the base game was massively eclipsed by the greater rifts)! New items! Quality of life changes to crafting and rifting!

On the downside they decided to put crowd control (CC) caps back in. This was part of the initial game and it sucked since you couldn't permanently CC hard enemies which meant everyone had to build to be invincible. Eventually they decided that was a bad idea and took the cap out. Now they put it back in and I'm not sure why. On the plus side it came with massive damage nerfs across the board to enemies so maybe they've decided everyone needs to be invincible again but actually made that feasible this time? I guess the setup where every group needed a CC bot that did no damage was pretty bad too. So if everyone can mostly survive just fine with the damage nerfs and you can use short bursts of CC to help against bursty monsters or something that could be good.

I tried out my old crusader on the highest difficulty just to see what it was like. He was built to infinitely CC things, and couldn't anymore, so that sucked. On the plus side I was able to kill all the monsters in torment X. I died to most of the blue packs. But my build was undoubtedly bad now, and I had none of the new cube bonuses, and I wasn't tip-top as it was, so the new difficulties are probably just fine.

All in all I'm pretty pumped to get playing Diablo III again. This version of the game is probably going to be the best one yet, and that's really sweet.

Rocket League

Rocket League is an online MOBA game where you drive around in a car, with a rocket strapped to the back of it, and play soccer. It seems to have pretty good physics for a rocket boosted car game... At the very least it seems to be consistent! So even if it isn't 'realistic' for the real world, it feels realistic for the Rocket League world.

Ike is always on the lookout for games we can stream together, and he really wanted to get into Rocket League. I wasn't sure it was for me, but mostly I wasn't sure the price tag was for me. But then Ike was awesome and gave me a copy of the game on Steam. Hurray! I ran through the tutorials and was pretty bad, but it was fun.

Last night after my WoW raid I played some games with Snuggles, Sceadeau, and one of Sceadeau's friends. The game plays up to 4v4, and we were pretty terrible, but it was really fun. We played for close to 3 hours all told and there were noticeable improvements in both our mechanics and our strategy. Still really bad, but not quite as bad as at the start!

I watched Witwix playing H1Z1 this morning, and then he finished his stream by playing Rocket League. It was like he was playing an entirely different game! My tactics pretty much boiled down to driving fast near the ball and hoping it did good things if I hit it... He was able to do these jumping dashing hits that actually made the ball move fast, and in a planned direction! Definitely some more practice will be needed... But it seems to have a reasonable matchmaking system, so even if I always suck I should just play against other people who suck and then we can have fun driving around near the ball!

One big plus the game has is you only play a 5 minute game with almost instant queue times to get into the next game. So even if you start getting blown out, the game is almost over! It's not like some LoL games where it's obvious you've lost in 6 minutes but have to play for another 20+ minutes until the game actually ends.

It's definitely worth checking out if the idea of car soccer sounds interesting.

The First Rule of Don't Starve Together

Eat.


Easy enough, right? Actually, it is pretty easy. There's a ton of food all over the place! I'm much more likely to die from bees, or spiders, or tentacles than I am from starving. Of course, I tend to be fighting those things in order to get at more food...

Anyway, I've been playing a fair bit with Ike recently and we figured out a couple of recipes in the crock pot device which lets you combine 4 pieces of food into a meal. We found out that meatballs seemed to give lots of food but no health while honey nuggets gave lots of health but not nearly as much food. We wanted to know more details, but it turns out my interface with a controller doesn't seem to show any numbers at all. We wanted to explore the game without just reading all the stuff about it, but not having a real way to get numbers for things was frustrating. So we decided to actually search for the crock pot recipes and see what was actually going on.

It turns out it's a pretty complicated system. There's a ton of recipes, but the real key is that many foods are interchangeable in the recipes. For the most part all of the meats are the same. All of the vegetables are the same. All of the fruits are the same. Some specific recipes care about specific items (turkey dinner needs turkey drumsticks for example) but otherwise a drumstick is the same as a frog leg is the same as a morsel of rabbit meat. Cooking food before sticking it in a crockpot also doesn't do anything in the vast majority of recipes.

The only real twist is that each category of food has some foods that are just bigger than others. Meat, monster meat, and the cooked/jerkied versions of those are twice as good as all the other meats. Berries and cooked berries are only half of a fruit. All of the mushroom varieties are only half of a vegetable.

Because there's so much interchangeability between the different categories it turns out there's a lot of overlap in terms of what you can make with 4 given ingredients. They put in a priority on every recipe and the highest priority recipe gets made if multiple legal recipes are put in the pot. If there's a tie then each recipe has an even chance of being made. This actually means there are ways to turn monster meat into real food!

And in a weird turn of events, twigs are a legal item to be put in a crock pot. I tried to cook with poop, but I didn't try to cook with twigs. Oops!

So there's this huge list of recipes... What recipes are the 'best' ones? A given world layout will have different levels of access to the kinds of food, but is it worth killing frogs in order to make frog leg sandwiches? Are honey nuggets as awesome as it felt like they were? I decided to go through everything and crunch some numbers, because that's just the sort of person I am. Unfortunately this meant reading a little more about some other aspects of the game (base stats and the like), but I still have no clue what the actual goal of the game is, so I don't feel like I've actually spoiled anything relevant yet!

Ike tends to play Willow, and I tend to play Wilson, so I didn't have to do too much poking around. Both have 150 max health, 150 max hunger, and lose 75 hunger per day. Wilson has 200 max sanity, Willow has only 120, but she can gain sanity back by standing in fires. (And is immune to fire damage!) So if one is planning on going on a multi-day adventure to explore the map one should bring 75 hunger worth of food per day.


I built a spreadsheet and tried to guess the cheapest way to make each cooked food. Then I compared the gain of the ingredients against the gain of the result and I was actually pretty surprised. A lot of the recipes didn't seem to actually help all that much. Roasted berries are actually really good, it turns out, so using them as the main ingredient in most things isn't helping all that much. The real gains seemed to be found in terms of sanity. Eating basic ingredients doesn't give any sanity for the most part, while some of the recipes can give some decent sanity.

Roasted berries are worth 1 health and 12.5 food. That's the same value of most things that I thought were better than berries, like cooked fish, cooked frog legs, fried drumsticks, raw carrots, and cooked morsels. Cooked carrots are actually better than all of those at 3 health and 12.5 food.

Honey nuggets, which I thought were really good for health, give 20 health, 37.5 food, and 5 sanity. The ingredients are worth 6 health and 46.875 food. So you actually lose almost 10 food by cooking them up, but they give an extra 14 health and 5 sanity. I'd say that's pretty worth it if you need healing.

Froggle bunchwiches give the same amount! But you can make them with mushrooms and twigs instead of honey and berries so they're actually really good.

Trailmix gives 30 health and 5 sanity, but only 12.5 food. You lose a lot of food value making the trail mix, but you get even more health than the honey nuggets.

If you're looking for a big food boost you're looking at wanting to make meaty stew or meatballs. Meatballs actually are only worth 25% more food than the base ingredients, so they're not fantastic. The meaty stew is a full stomach in one item and also gives 12 health and 5 sanity. The real cool thing about the meaty stew is you can use one monster meat in there with no risk of monster lasagna. So 2 morsels, a meat, and a monster meat will make a meaty stew. Getting the normal meat is rough, and it may be better to use it in a honey ham recipe, but it is a good way to use monster meat to good effect.

The best use of monster meat is probably bacon and eggs. You can use a full 2 monster meat with a tallbird egg and a twig for that recipe which gives 20 health, 75 food, and 5 sanity. Even with regular eggs (which I've never seen) you can use one monster meat with a morsel and 2 eggs for this recipe.

Some of the fancy fruits and veggies have individual recipes which are pretty cool.

Turkey dinner is awesome. More food than meatballs, the same health as honey nuggets.

Fishsticks actually restore 40 health, 37.5 food, and 5 sanity. Which is way better than trailmix! I found a way to mine for fish the last time I played with Ike, and it now seems like a really good idea.


At any rate, what I learned is cooked carrots are better than I thought. Cooked berries are as good as most of the meats, so throwing them in as filler is not as good as I thought. The recipes are still pretty good if you need the extra health or sanity from them, or if you're using them to convert garbage items like monster meat or red mushrooms into real food. Trail mix is bad for food, but really good for health. Stuff you get by fighting low level monsters (bees, frog...) makes the same sort of stuff which is good but not fantastic. Meatballs are not as good as I thought but still worth making I think. Runs to collect up berries and carrots are looking like a really good idea.

World of Goo

Sceadeau and an anonymous blog commenter (who was probably Sceadeau) urged me to play the game World of Goo that I'd picked up in a prior Steam sale. That someone I know says a game is worth playing is reason enough to give something a try, especially when I already own it! It also makes me feel less guilty about buying games during this Steam sale, so it's win-win!

Anyway, World of Goo is a physical based puzzle game. You have a bunch of goo balls which you can connect up with each other. The connection is a little like a girder would be, in that it provides some support to your structure. But it's goo, not steel, so it's bendier than steel would be. Gravity exists, and can drag your structure to the ground if it isn't secure enough. The goal varies by level, but it's mostly to build a structure from a starting point to an ending point on the level using as small an amount of time, moves, and balls as possible.

It reminded me a little of Lemmings. I like Lemmings a lot, and this game was pretty interesting.

Unfortunately, it isn't all sunshine and roses. My primary goal for a game most of the time now is a game I can stream that might be of interest to other people. World of Goo as a puzzle game actually felt like it would fit in pretty well there. People worse at the game than me might want to watch to pick up tips. People better than me might want to watch to provide tips and make themselves feel better. People around the same skill might want to tune in and feel like they could help out with suggestions some of the time. Hurray!

But then it turns out the game is pretty old, and was not coded with my computer in mind. It only runs in full screen mode. It only allows you to scroll the screen by positioning the mouse on the edge of the screen. It doesn't restrict the mouse to staying on the monitor. And it jams up the resolution of my second monitor. These issues combine to make it hard to navigate around in the game, really hard to make quick moves, and impossible to watch chat while streaming.

It was also set up to have internet leaderboards, but couldn't find my internet connection. I like leaderboards. But I can't use them, despite having an internet connection. Maybe their servers are down? Or they don't understand wireless connections? Regardless, it makes the game less fun for me to have a broken feature than it would for that feature to not exist at all.

I certainly won't be streaming the game again, and I suspect I won't play it again on this computer either. But I might well put it on my laptop to have a fun puzzle game to play. And it was worth a dollar.