Yesterday had the last pick of the NBFL and it's time to start cheesing up some abilities. I found out how they manage to make this happen. You play a bunch of games against a team full of snotlings and beat them up to earn lots of experience. As you level up you pick whatever skills you want on the drafted guys and at the end of the leveling games they get an admin to go in and edit all of the drafted players and set their skills to the drafted ones instead of what they have. On top of this each of your other players can farm up 6 experience as well (enough for 1 level) and you get whatever you happen to roll.
I'm playing chaos pact which is a team featuring 3 'big guys' who are super strong, hard to skill up, and randomly decide to take actions off. I get a couple of one shot dudes from other rosters (a dark elf so I have an agile dude, a goblin so I have a crazy dude, and a skaven so I have a fast dude) and the rest of the team is guys who can mutate and get strength skills on regular rolls. People often play this race without the big guys and use the easy mutations and strength skills to kill lots of people with the dreaded claw-piling_on-mighty_blow combo. Drafted players couldn't get mutations which meant I wasn't going to be able to draft anyone with the combo anyway and with every team getting infinite cash and some free stars it didn't seem like keeping my team rating low was going to accomplish a whole lot. So I decided my primary goal in the draft was going to be getting hard to earn skills on my big guys to make them more useful with a secondary goal of getting a bunch of my regular guys into a position to be good guard dudes. I like punching over and over and I really want to have a strength and guard advantage.
The first guy I got to draft was in the expansion draft and I took a basic block/guard guy as my troll. Trolls aren't very good at much beyond being a large man in one location and those two skills are pretty much the only two I need on him. Block is a doubles skill on a troll so it was good to pick it up in a draft. As an added bonus he's only 9 SPP away from his next level and if he rolls doubles on that one he can get a mutation. Like tentacles!
Off to the main draft where I got to pick 9th, 34th, and 41st. There were some really, really good guys at the top of the draft (the first overall pick was a +ST, +AG, sure hands, strip ball guy who turned into a dwarf runner) and thankfully no one took the guy I really had my eye on. A big guy with block, guard, tackle, and enough SPP to need only 2 more to level. I turned him into an ogre which is pretty fantastic for me. Block and tackle are both doubles only skills and guard is super important for my team plan. Being so close to level is really good as, again, a double will turn into tentacles or maybe claw. I turned him into an ogre instead of a minotaur because I thought I might draft a juggernaut minotaur and even if I didn't a minotaur with one free skill can just take juggernaut. Minotaur has horns and wild animal so he's a better option to be the blitzing big guy if I need to have one of those so he should hold off and get juggernaut I think.
By the time the 34th pick came around the other big guy with block had been taken and there wasn't much exciting left. No bonus strength, no bonus agility, and no big guy with doubles meant I didn't have any obvious choices left. There was a guy with bonus armour and two with bonus movement if I wanted those. Most of my team gets practically every skill on a regular roll but my linemen actually don't get agility skills so if I wanted to get something like dodge it would be easier to get it here than by drafting it. Ultimately I decided that I didn't really want to put my minotaur on the line of scrimmage, especially if he didn't get lucky and get block, so I need a 3rd tough guy for the line. The guy with bonus armour also happened to have dodge and wrestle so I went with him. I don't really like wrestle on a guy who expects to get guard next level but getting the 9th armour was important for me. My three divisional opponents are dwarves, orcs, and lizardmen and they can't get claw which makes bonus armour a reasonable play. (Also having all three opponents featuring 9 armour dudes means my own claw is going to be VERY tasty.) Added bonus? This guy is only 10 SPP from leveling again to get guard. 10 is pretty far for a guy without mighty blow, claw, or block but maybe he'll get some MVPs or something.
Pick 41 had even slimmer pickings. The minotaur option was still on the table (break tackle, movement, juggernaut) but he was 19 SPP from leveling again and I'm actually not a huge fan of break tackle on a loner. I decided I would probably rather have a shot at doubles with a fallback of guard or juggernaut than have one of my 3 big guys so far away from either block or guard. I ended up taking another lineman instead, this one with block, dodge, and tackle. He's also planning on being a hard to knock down guy with guard. And he's only 5 SPP from leveling! That's one MVP or a handful of skinks. He might also be my go to ball carrier until I really level up the elf. I could see taking extra arms on his level instead of guard for a ball carrier.
I'm pretty happy with the draft and I'm excited to see how this league plays out. It'll be nice to skip over the 'flat broke and unskilled' section of Blood Bowl for a change.
Friday, January 03, 2014
Thursday, January 02, 2014
Path of Exile: Race 'Cheating'
I've been tuning in to Helmannn's stream during the week long race that started a couple days ago. I joined that league but I seem to spend more time watching him than I have been playing myself. Top 40 seems pretty unreasonable for me all things considered, but I'll probably keep playing the character to try to level up a scion to 65 for one of the challenges. It's 1 sleep in to the race and people are already deep into maps while I am level 26.
Anyway, one of the things that happened tonight is a truly awesome weapon dropped for someone who couldn't use it. It's worth about 100 chaos or so in the nemesis league and all items and characters that survive the week race will get dumped into the nemesis league at the end of the event. So what should the person who found the awesome weapon do? If he just banks the item he'll get 100 chaos in a week in the main league. No one has anywhere near that much currency in the week league right now but he could probably get 20 or 30 chaos for it... Should he take that instead? If he was really pushing to win this race and thought he could flip the 30 chaos into something to help him win then this could make sense. But otherwise if he isn't going to consume all the currency trying to be better he'll have thrown away 70+ chaos.
What ended up happening is Helmannn traded nothing at all for the weapon and agreed to trade the guy 4.5 exalts in the nemesis league.
This sparked quite a debate because he's essentially bringing in outside help for a race. This isn't just a group of friends working together and sharing drops... This is one of the richest players in the game using that wealth to dominate the race. Now, Helmannn was in 6th place on the ladder when he bought the item (and was grouped with #1) and is now up to 2nd place so it's not like he really needed this item to win. (Top prize is the same for #20 as #1 anyway.) His claim is he wants one of those weapons in the nemesis league anyway and probably would have paid that currency for the same item at the end of the week when it transfers over. Why not have it in the race for the next 5 days too? And it's not like the weapon is coming in from nowhere... It dropped in the race!
Helmannn got one of the developers onto voice chat and they talked about it a bit on the stream after he'd traded for the weapon but before he started using it. GGG's stance isn't officially known at this point because apparently the head guy really didn't like the idea of this sort of league crossing trade but there was no rule explicitly banning it at the start of the race and plenty of people have been making similar but smaller scale deals.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand I can see why items that are getting dumped into nemesis in a week should be held onto for full value. On the other hand the thing that really appeals to me about races is that they're self contained. Helmannn should beat me because he's had more practice, has more spare time (somehow), and has a guild of similarly dedicated people to play with. He shouldn't beat me because he plays nemesis and is filthy rich while I play domination and am not.
It's an issue with this race dumping into a main league and allowing trading. Solo races wouldn't have this issue. 2 hour races wouldn't have this issue. Races that dump into the void wouldn't have this issue. But those races don't get to count for the challenge achievements and I liked that aspect of this race.
I don't have a problem with what Helmannn did in this case because while it may go against the spirit of the rules it doesn't go against the rules. But I do hope they come up with some sort of solution for the next time they run this... The problem is I don't see what that solution could be while letting the race dump into a real league because enforcement is going to be erratic at best if they just try to ban people doing it.
Anyway, one of the things that happened tonight is a truly awesome weapon dropped for someone who couldn't use it. It's worth about 100 chaos or so in the nemesis league and all items and characters that survive the week race will get dumped into the nemesis league at the end of the event. So what should the person who found the awesome weapon do? If he just banks the item he'll get 100 chaos in a week in the main league. No one has anywhere near that much currency in the week league right now but he could probably get 20 or 30 chaos for it... Should he take that instead? If he was really pushing to win this race and thought he could flip the 30 chaos into something to help him win then this could make sense. But otherwise if he isn't going to consume all the currency trying to be better he'll have thrown away 70+ chaos.
What ended up happening is Helmannn traded nothing at all for the weapon and agreed to trade the guy 4.5 exalts in the nemesis league.
This sparked quite a debate because he's essentially bringing in outside help for a race. This isn't just a group of friends working together and sharing drops... This is one of the richest players in the game using that wealth to dominate the race. Now, Helmannn was in 6th place on the ladder when he bought the item (and was grouped with #1) and is now up to 2nd place so it's not like he really needed this item to win. (Top prize is the same for #20 as #1 anyway.) His claim is he wants one of those weapons in the nemesis league anyway and probably would have paid that currency for the same item at the end of the week when it transfers over. Why not have it in the race for the next 5 days too? And it's not like the weapon is coming in from nowhere... It dropped in the race!
Helmannn got one of the developers onto voice chat and they talked about it a bit on the stream after he'd traded for the weapon but before he started using it. GGG's stance isn't officially known at this point because apparently the head guy really didn't like the idea of this sort of league crossing trade but there was no rule explicitly banning it at the start of the race and plenty of people have been making similar but smaller scale deals.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand I can see why items that are getting dumped into nemesis in a week should be held onto for full value. On the other hand the thing that really appeals to me about races is that they're self contained. Helmannn should beat me because he's had more practice, has more spare time (somehow), and has a guild of similarly dedicated people to play with. He shouldn't beat me because he plays nemesis and is filthy rich while I play domination and am not.
It's an issue with this race dumping into a main league and allowing trading. Solo races wouldn't have this issue. 2 hour races wouldn't have this issue. Races that dump into the void wouldn't have this issue. But those races don't get to count for the challenge achievements and I liked that aspect of this race.
I don't have a problem with what Helmannn did in this case because while it may go against the spirit of the rules it doesn't go against the rules. But I do hope they come up with some sort of solution for the next time they run this... The problem is I don't see what that solution could be while letting the race dump into a real league because enforcement is going to be erratic at best if they just try to ban people doing it.
Wednesday, January 01, 2014
State of the Blog 2014
Another year down, another decent time to look at how things have been going chez Ziggyny's blogs. This makes daily post number 1024 in a row. I apparently missed thinking about number 1000 but 2^10 is a decent replacement. Woo!
Star Trek has been down for the count for almost a year now and I don't think it'll be coming back in the short term. SNES is still going strong and I'm happy to keep it running. It's going to be 8 months or so before I hit a game I'm really looking forward to but I don't recognize all the names so maybe there's a hidden gem in there!
The Final Fantasy marathon has stalled out and that makes me sad. The HD remakes of Final Fantasy X and X-2 are scheduled for release on March 18th. I _really_ want to play those and I'm only a few games away from FFX so I'm going to kick things into gear to get those knocked out in time for the 18th. I don't have a PS3 or a PS Vita but Byung mentioned a while ago that I could probably borrow his PS3 when the time arose. If I do that I'll want to play X and X-2 one after the other to minimize the time I need the PS3 which means I should consider playing the games between those 2 in the interim... There are only 3 such games. Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy XI, and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Wow, coupled with the bookends of FFX and FFX-2 that's a pretty great 5 game lineup! Ok, time to get back to the Chocobo Dungeon...
Top Ten Favourites also fell off the rails a year and a half ago. I think part of the problem there is I started just playing all the SNES games so posting about them felt wrong. But it's going to be a decade before that finishes up... It may well be time to resurrect that too!
Bridge posts are back, and I'm liking the one per week rate in terms of how often I post about it. It feels like not enough bridge though. I played some bridge at Andrew's yesterday and felt super rusty. Oh well. If only there were more time in the day to play games...
Blog stats remain a real annoyance to me. Blogger continues to fail miserably even when I know it has the numbers. It has a nice graph with a month by month comparison of site visitors but it skips around stupidly. Dec 2007, Jan 2008, Feb 2009. Actually, it works exactly like that for every year. It advances the month and year after December and again after January. So I lose basically all of 2008, 2010, and 2012. If only someone at Google could do something about that to fix it... I can't compare 2013 to 2012, but it's about doubled what it was in 2011. Woo! It doesn't even look like it's all spam bots either since my number of spam comments feels like it's gone down.
It's funny, but I actually feel like I've had less to blog about now that I don't work. I didn't really have the option to play games on break or while running scripts at work and I spent about 2 hours per day in transit. That time on the bus and the minor downtimes at the office meant a lot of extra time thinking about games. Thinking about games is how I get a lot of the post ideas, especially ideas about numbers to crunch. Now I'm in the state where I could sit down and crunch damage numbers for League of Legends or I could just play League of Legends. Now the answer is generally to just play the game. But I used to not be able to play the game at work, but I could sure look up stats and formulas and think them over on the bus. More time to game, less time to think? I got to spent more time browsing the internet for Path of Exile builds while out in NB with a bad computer than I seem to get here. Maybe I need to find a job so I can read more gaming websites? Eugh.
So posting every day feels more like a chore than it used to. But not so much that I actually want to stop. I know if I let up even a little it'll all fade away and that's not cool. 1024 posts in a row is not something to give up on lightly!
Anyway... That's how things are around here. Here's to post 1389 in 2015!
Star Trek has been down for the count for almost a year now and I don't think it'll be coming back in the short term. SNES is still going strong and I'm happy to keep it running. It's going to be 8 months or so before I hit a game I'm really looking forward to but I don't recognize all the names so maybe there's a hidden gem in there!
The Final Fantasy marathon has stalled out and that makes me sad. The HD remakes of Final Fantasy X and X-2 are scheduled for release on March 18th. I _really_ want to play those and I'm only a few games away from FFX so I'm going to kick things into gear to get those knocked out in time for the 18th. I don't have a PS3 or a PS Vita but Byung mentioned a while ago that I could probably borrow his PS3 when the time arose. If I do that I'll want to play X and X-2 one after the other to minimize the time I need the PS3 which means I should consider playing the games between those 2 in the interim... There are only 3 such games. Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy XI, and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Wow, coupled with the bookends of FFX and FFX-2 that's a pretty great 5 game lineup! Ok, time to get back to the Chocobo Dungeon...
Top Ten Favourites also fell off the rails a year and a half ago. I think part of the problem there is I started just playing all the SNES games so posting about them felt wrong. But it's going to be a decade before that finishes up... It may well be time to resurrect that too!
Bridge posts are back, and I'm liking the one per week rate in terms of how often I post about it. It feels like not enough bridge though. I played some bridge at Andrew's yesterday and felt super rusty. Oh well. If only there were more time in the day to play games...
Blog stats remain a real annoyance to me. Blogger continues to fail miserably even when I know it has the numbers. It has a nice graph with a month by month comparison of site visitors but it skips around stupidly. Dec 2007, Jan 2008, Feb 2009. Actually, it works exactly like that for every year. It advances the month and year after December and again after January. So I lose basically all of 2008, 2010, and 2012. If only someone at Google could do something about that to fix it... I can't compare 2013 to 2012, but it's about doubled what it was in 2011. Woo! It doesn't even look like it's all spam bots either since my number of spam comments feels like it's gone down.
It's funny, but I actually feel like I've had less to blog about now that I don't work. I didn't really have the option to play games on break or while running scripts at work and I spent about 2 hours per day in transit. That time on the bus and the minor downtimes at the office meant a lot of extra time thinking about games. Thinking about games is how I get a lot of the post ideas, especially ideas about numbers to crunch. Now I'm in the state where I could sit down and crunch damage numbers for League of Legends or I could just play League of Legends. Now the answer is generally to just play the game. But I used to not be able to play the game at work, but I could sure look up stats and formulas and think them over on the bus. More time to game, less time to think? I got to spent more time browsing the internet for Path of Exile builds while out in NB with a bad computer than I seem to get here. Maybe I need to find a job so I can read more gaming websites? Eugh.
So posting every day feels more like a chore than it used to. But not so much that I actually want to stop. I know if I let up even a little it'll all fade away and that's not cool. 1024 posts in a row is not something to give up on lightly!
Anyway... That's how things are around here. Here's to post 1389 in 2015!
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
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 besquare asleep!
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
Monday, December 30, 2013
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!
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!
Sunday, December 29, 2013
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.
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.
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%
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%
Friday, December 27, 2013
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...
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...
Thursday, December 26, 2013
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...
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.
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