Lurker > tiornys

Bad_Mojo posted...

But you can make Steal better with Concentration, just not by much. It bypasses the Evasion still, so Stealing from the front will be just as good as stealing from the back.

Yes? I mean I basically said that.

But something like Attack UP and/Or Martial Arts is better.

To improve Steal, yes. Bit of a tangent from the discussion about Concentrate.

To clarify, Concentration means you will never miss because of a unit's evasion from job (front attacks only), shield (front and side), or mantle (any direction). Inherent success rates for abilities like Steal and Break will not be changed, and reaction abilities like Shirahadori will still function normally.

Even with those limitations it's a very good ability, arguably the best thing to pick up with your Archer JP.

Edit: and yes, it works with any weapon.

Shotgunnova posted...

IIRC, archers also get accuracy penalties on nighttime maps.

Yep. Also in rainy weather.

Bows are actually decent weapons, especially early on. Later they're a bit hamstrung by good bows not being available in shops, although guns share that issue. It's too bad that their use is restricted to the Archer job.

Magic, guns, Jump, Throw, Shockwave from Martial Arts, Kiku-ichimonji from Iaido--there are lots of ways to do ranged damage that are better than being an Archer.

Gakk86 posted...

Doesn't that only work on enemies using the "attack' command, while abandon works on all attacks able to be evaded?

You're probably confusing Blade Grasp/Shirahadori with Hamedo. Blade Grasp works to evade most physical attacks at Bravery percentage, whereas Hamedo preemptively attacks but only against a few commands (Attack, Battle Skill, Throw, Charge). Hamedo is great against humans. Blade Grasp is great if you aren't worried about evading magic. Abandon is great if you want to evade everything that's evadable.

Teleport is strictly better than Ignore Height and all but strictly better than Fly. And it's cheaper and easier to access than either of those abilities. It's probably the best movement skill in the game, toss up between it and Move +3.

If you want to do "power grinding" for the more expensive job unlocks, you can do it without gaining a ton of levels by exploiting the XP gain calculations. Basically, the amount of XP you get from a non-lethal successful action is equal to 10 + (target level - your level), minimum 1. If your action kills a unit (for the first time), add 10 XP.

The easiest way to exploit this is to bring a low level unit into battle along with four other units, and once you've subdued the battle and are ready to grind have those four units stand around tossing stones (or otherwise doing low damage) at the low level unit along with occasional healing. Useful for e.g. unlocking Dark Knight or Mime without gaining a bunch of levels.

It's also canon that different force users are better in some talents and worse in others. So it's reasonable to assume that Luke just wasn't very talented with healing.

Disengaged posted...

Except these odds arent independent. It's only independent for the person who draws first. Every other players odds are dependent on the draws that came before them.

Doesn't matter in this case. Because of the structure of the problem, you'll get the same result either way you calculate it, so you might as well use the simple and straightforward calculation.

Jagr_68 posted...

Lightspeed skipping

Anteaterking posted...

They made everything too close together. Both The Last Jedi and ROS imposed unnecessarily short deadlines on their plots which then made traveling across the galaxy in seconds necessary.

These are the biggest continuity issues for me. Anything Force related, whatever, it's not like we've ever had a definitive and exhaustive treatment of what the Force was capable of.

But even if we assume these are the results of advancements in hyperdrive technology, the improvements are so insanely big that we deserve at least some sort of explanation about how the breakthroughs happened.

All of the fighters having hyperdrive isn't as big of a deal for me because that's a reasonable extrapolation from previously existing tech.

TLJ is a better film when evaluated on its own. But it's a terrible middle of trilogy/episode 8 of 9.

RoS is not a very good film when evaluated on its own. But a lot of that is because it has to devote so much runtime to making the oddball elements of TLJ fit into the overall continuity. As a concluding episode it's pretty solid.

Extreme_light posted...

I can't imagine how annoyed I would be in city traffic with constant stops and shifting.

It's not an issue in normal traffic, where you're just stopping for lights/stop signs and whatnot. But when you start getting jams and major slowdowns with unpredictable shifts between stops, low speeds, and high speeds, that's when it's a pain.

I know how to drive manual and I generally enjoy them, but my current car is automatic and I don't foresee myself getting another manual unless I move away from cities or I reach a life situation where it makes sense for me to have two+ vehicles.

Have people forgotten that you could customize SM's controls?

Irony posted...

Oy

Perfect.
mine is Oys

Veggeta_MAX posted...

This is an illusion in Super Metroid. People think that back tracking means open world which means more freedom which is false. The main difference between Fusion and Super was the fact that you were told where to go in Fusion and you weren't in Super so that notion of not having a guide tricked yall into thinking there is more freedom.

Wrong. Super Metroid rewards exploration by offering multiple paths through the game even without sequence breaks, plus multiple tiers of available sequence breaks to open up even more paths through the game.

I have minimal experience with Fusion so I can't offer original analysis, but if it really is linear and it lacks sequence breaks then that's why old school Metroid fans dislike it.

ChrisTaka posted...

That article is 5+ years old ...

Here's a followup: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/once-a-national-model-utah-struggles-with-homelessness-idUSKCN1P41EQ

Basically, when they stopped giving homes to the homeless they experienced a resurgence in homelessness: "Once lauded as a leader among U.S. cities struggling to relieve homelessness, the number of people sleeping rough in Utahs capital has spiked in the past two years, as funding for its groundbreaking housing program dried up."

cardoor123 posted...

This is the main problem with society. People care way too much about strangers. Strangers are in the same tier as bacteria or rats for me, I simply don't give a fuck about them. Like why does it matter if they're human?

Like why would you care if I was having an heart attack and dying? You shouldn't, I know I wouldn't care if you were dying. You simply add no value to my life, and likewise, I (and these homeless people as a matter of fact) have no importance to you, it's fucking dumb to waste your time and energy on these people.

It's that simple.

Actually, it's to my overall benefit to care about the health and welfare of strangers like you. If you are not healthy, you are creating a drain on medial resources that might impact me or my family. If you and your family are unable to pay for your healthcare, you are creating a drain on my tax revenues because we still end up paying for your healthcare. If you die and your family is unable to pay for your funeral, you create a further drain on my tax revenues because we end up paying for the handling of your remains.

Conversely, if you are healthy and productive, you are contributing taxes and helping to share the burden of paying for essential community-funded things that I use every day like roads and utilities, as well as things that I really want to be available and functioning when I need them like Police, Fire Departments, and other emergency services.

Some of my favorite Chrvches:
https://youtu.be/BZyzX4c1vIs
https://youtu.be/e1YqueG2gtQ
https://youtu.be/_mTRvJ9fugM

Honestly, I put almost no stock in 1 vs. 1. But granted, a low faith character invalidates almost half of the job tree in that type of comparison.

5 vs. 5 a calculator remains extremely potent even if the enemy is low faith, because they can still play excellent support for their own team.

Oh, those AI battles. Yeah, I can believe Calculators having issues in that setting. Besides the various restrictions, the AI is nowhere near as good as a player is at exploiting Arithmeticks.

Bad_Mojo posted...

Again, Math Skill is only useful against the AI or large groups. You can have all the spells you can get and throw them all at me, who has 3 Faith and will take almost do damage or even get a status on them

Not to mention the gear, HP Switch, Half Damage, Damage Split and Auto-Potion

Math Skill is only broken against the computer. During the AI Battles we do, Calculators get eaten up

Do you ban the Quickening or do the people using Calculators not know how to pull that off?

Calculators are not necessarily great. I maintain that the Arithmeticks skillset is ridiculously broken.

Arithmeticks is so broken that we barely bother mentioning it most of the time on the FFT boards. In any discussion about powerful things or broken builds, the consensus is that Arithmeticks already won first prize and we're just talking about what comes in 2nd.

This topic reminds me of this classic:

https://youtu.be/lIES3ii-IOg

Makeveli_lives posted...

What flaws? And don't say linearity because 10 was linear as fuck when I played it. Didn't beat it but got at least a good 15+ hours in, maybe as high as 20 before I gave up. Each area only had 1 entrance and exit up to then. Or they had 2 exits with one that led to a treasure after a few seconds then right back on the main path. Or multiple exits with nowhere to go until the cutscenes /boss fights like the airship.

As someone who's a big fan of FFXIII, serious flaws:

• It takes too long for the actual battle system to arrive. Even after you have the actual battle system, the game takes it way to slow in terms of adding in the various pieces of the battle system.
• The game has a lot tutorials for the battle system, but those tutorials fail to explain several of the more important aspects of the battle system. Even the things that are explained are so poorly explained that players end up with serious misconceptions about integral things like the chain gauge and stagger system.

Controversial elements that can be flaws depending on what you like in RPGs:

• The game has minimal exploration elements, almost no mini-games, and all of the sidequests involve combat. This makes it a very streamlined experience consisting almost entirely of story and combat.
• The game has very little customization available for character builds.
• The story begins in media res and does not explain various terminology and backstory until later, sometimes very deep into the game.
• Most characters are introduced when under stress and behaving badly, often resulting in poor first impressions that can overwhelm later character development.
• The game restricts you to strategic-level control for 2/3rds of your party, and you can only make specific ability selections for the lead character.

Bad_Mojo posted...

Yeah, we're not casting the spells and they're missing . We're just wasting turns not doing anything because the spell will miss.

Again, this is a very minor issue because like I said, no one is using Thieves or Ninjas to cast those sort of spells. Well, maybe Time Magic with Short Charge on a Ninja so you can get a Haste

White Mage has a significant speed bump. Plenty of gear adds speed including the two best hats. Levels add speed.

It's a minor issue for experienced players like us who understand the CT system (although I will say that I often adjust equipment so that my mages have the same speed as the enemy instead of 1 higher just to avoid having to do CT manipulation in the early rounds). It's often a significant issue for inexperienced players who don't know how to manipulate CT, because they can easily end up never finding a window for casting a spell and that makes your mages feel pretty useless.

Put it this way. Rice is answering the question "how do I tell if my spell goes before or after the enemy?"

We're discussing the question of "how do I best arrange things so my spells always go before the enemy?"

Ricemills posted...

it was fucking simple.
check the turn list.
if the spell will land before they move, cast it. if it will land after they moved, don't cast it.
caster's speed has nothing to do with this.

Wooosh!

Ricemills posted...

like i said, check the turn list.
you can see if the spell will land before or after they moved.

You're missing the point. It does me no good to know that the spell would land after they moved if I don't know how to arrange things so I can get a spell off before they move. I've seen plenty of complaints from inexperienced players about mages becoming "useless" because their mages were just barely faster than the enemies and they didn't know how to compensate.

More age is generally better up to 20 years.

Every group has a different playstyle. Pay attention to how your group handles stuff like in character vs. out of character, mostly serious vs. mostly joking tone, etc. and follow along.

Ignoring the questions of what order you are or what surges you have access to, ignoring the blade and the armor, just basic stormlight healing is worth far more than 1 million dollars. You'd never be sick and you'd shrug off any injuries. Stormlight, easily.

Dalinar is awesome. The most important step is the next one.

I love Shallan, and part of why she's one of my favorite characters is precisely the various disconnects between how she views herself and how she really is.

spanky1 posted...

1328 pages in paperback.

That is just insanity! It's like 4 or 5 books in one.

Yes, it is. And it may help to approach it like you're reading a series rather than a single book. Here's what Brandon has to say about how he plots the Stormlight Archive books:

For those who don't know, I plot each Stormlight book as a trilogy written as a single novel (though in five parts) with a short story collection spliced into it. That "trilogy" then connects to the five book mini arc (in this case, the first five books) which in turn ties into ten book mega arc of the series.

My parents loved their LG washer/dryer so I also got LG, and I've been loving them too. 10+ years and no issues.

Edit: I should add they are front loaders and I do some maintenance on the gasket.

Iron Motherfucker Man

Ok, let me get a little more explicit.

If your deck consists entirely of 1 and 2 mana spells, then you only need 2 lands to operate and I would expect you to almost never consider yourself to be "mana screwed". At the other extreme, if a third of your deck costs 5+ mana and you expect to hit your 5th land drop by turn 6 at the latest, then I would expect you to feel "mana screwed" reasonably often.

I expect your cutoff for feeling mana screwed is actually about when you get your third or your fourth land drop, but I don't know which, and mathematically there's a big difference between consistently getting your 3rd land drop on turn 3 (or maybe even by turn 4-5) vs. consistently getting your 4th land drop on turn 4.

That's why I qualified my comment, because other things you've said make me think you're running a deck with a relatively low mana curve--mostly 1-2 mana spells with some 3 mana spells and maybe a few 4 mana spells. I'm a lot less surprised if you're never mana screwed with a deck like that than if you're never mana screwed with a traditional control deck.

Also, thinking about this some more, it's possible you could be injecting some bias via mulligan decisions. Possibly you could stand to be more willing to mulligan for too few spells in your opening hands than you currently are.

Curve impacts the working definition of "mana screwed".

Hmm. Unless your mana curve is extremely low, that does point towards something odd going on.

So I think, but am not sure, that what is happening is a phenomenon of different information levels. When you analyze what's happening with your deck, you know everything about the deck, so you know both what you have drawn and what you haven't. When you analyze what is happening with your opponent's deck, you only know what you see, which is cards they draw and reveal (whether by playing, discarding, etc.).

If the odds that you draw 0 of a Shock, as calculated above, are 8.3%, and you have 10 unique non-land cards with 4 copies each, then the odds are 45% that you draw 0 copies of at least one of those cards in a 20 turn game. That's going to happen a good amount of the time.

Properly calculating the odds of drawing 3+ copies of any one of those 10 cards is a lot more complicated, and even though I'm a math guy I'm not sure how to run the calculation. But the odds are pretty good.

So to be clear, if it's Shock every time, then yes, that is bullshit. But if you're noticing that some (differing) card of yours isn't showing up and some other (differing) card is showing up for your opponent 3 times, that's not only not bullshit, it's actually expected.

Anteaterking posted...

Bad_Mojo posted...

That

How many turns is the game going?

Also, is either deck running any deck manipulation and/or extra card draw?

Bad_Mojo posted...

How is it not comparable?

I have a 60 card deck with 4 Shocks in it
They're running over a 100 with 4 Shocks in it
I draw zero, they draw all 4

And every time you're complaining about, it's Shock specifically that you aren't drawing and they are drawing?

Bad_Mojo posted...

tiornys posted...

If I'm running a 100 card deck (with, say, 36 lands) I could easily have 16 different cards that might come up 3+ times. That's a lot of chances to have one of those 16 cards show up 3 times.

Im no math guy, but running 60 cards and never drawing 1/4 and ruining 100+ and drawing 3/4 is bull shit. Over and over and over and over again

Not comparable. You're failing to draw at least 1 copy of a specific card. They're succeeding in drawing 3 copies of some non-land card in their deck.

If I'm running a 100 card deck (with, say, 36 lands) I could easily have 16 different cards that might come up 3+ times. That's a lot of chances to have one of those 16 cards show up 3 times.

Bad_Mojo posted...

What?

People said it was conformation bias, and I said it wasn't. It's true. That's it

It still might be confirmation bias. It depends on how you were tracking whether people were drawing 3/4 copies of a card. Did you decide on a specific card you didn't want to see, check to see if your opponents drew that specific card 3+ times, and have it happen 12 times in 14 trials? Or, did you simply notice that 12 out of 14 opponents played some good card against you 3+ times?

The first case is very unlikely, and if that's what you observed then you are indeed not just falling for confirmation bias. The second case is not unlikely at all and it's probably confirmation bias that is causing you to fixate on it.

If it's the second case--and I suspect it is--what you're overlooking is that each game involves numerous trials for having 3+ copies of a card drawn. In a basic 10x4 + 20 land 60 card deck, there are 10 trials per game. Most decks will have anywhere from 8-10 trials per game (and I'm simplifying because these aren't independent trials). The odds of at least one card showing up with 3 copies are much, much, much higher than the odds of a specific card showing up three times.

DDirtyDastard posted...

Women want equality? They can kiss chivalry goodbye then. I go out of my way to NOT hold doors for women these days. I'll hold a door for the elderly, other men, and children,

So... you refuse to treat women equally in any way? Either you treat them differently by being chivalrous or you treat them differently by being anti-chivalrous? Right then.

DevsBro posted...

Watch this have an origin that actually makes total sense, like doors on 12th century farms being made of cast iron or something.

It does have an origin that makes sense. At various points in history, women's fashion has been exceedingly impractical.

Watch Literal Dogs