Guild Wars 2

I think open world HoT hit the goldilocks zone. It’s just right.

And also I think defining difficulty via failure rates is stupid. If someone can reliably beat Gorseval 100% of the time and can reliably beat generic mobs 100% of the time, that doesn’t make Gorseval = generic mob.

Difficulty is effort. It is about how hard you have to try to accomplish something. The HoT mobs hit that nice space where the only conditions are victory are that you know the content, you’re paying attention, and you have the most basic problem solving skills. So it is basically Dark Souls.

The problem is that model is stupid and doesn’t work. That’s why Anet abandoned it.

Technically you already get Chak Eggs from ley-line crystals. Chak Eggs are a drop from Crystal Caches.

Here’s to hoping for swimsuits for spring break.

Well, I have 7 characters, and they take about an hour. So 3 times that amount would take 3 hours, probably extra for all the additional stuff that is done.

Personally, I only do flax farming for gold because it is so low maintenance that I can watch something on my other monitor at the same time. If all you’re doing is staring at your screen for 5 hours at the exact same screen, then yes that will cause medical problems. I’d recommend an ergo break once an hour, to stretch whatever twisted limbs you can and to look at something further away than a computer screen for a few minutes.

My best advice is to give up the hope that you’ll get a precursor from the sky. I’ve commented on this before, but it bears repeating now.

For as long as MMOs have had the RNG system, I’ve had to contend with the fact that I never, ever, in all my life, have gotten something that was significantly “rare” enough to warrant special mention. I’ve been playing these games for12 years now. And in these 12 years I’ve learned why it is that the lottery is called a stupid people tax..

#1: You aren’t going to get a precursor. Period. All the money you throw at trying to get one is figuratively going down the toilet.

#2: If you can’t measure your progress, it means you can’t make any progress. You are no closer to getting a precursor today then you were at launch. No amount of playtime or money spent entitles you to miracles.

#3: Luck is for other people. It may seem like it is for everyone, but that is because whenever someone is lucky they shout it to the skies. For every person who is lucky, there are tens of thousands who aren’t.

#4: Hard work is for you. It is much more profitable to sell and merch goods for trading than it is to buy and burn them hoping common sense is wrong. Take advantage of the fact that you can make money off of other people playing the lottery.

#5: Don’t even try to get one. It is a waste of time, money, effort, and hope. The sooner you accept failure, the sooner you can get over it and do something productive.

Well the thing is, with the release of HoT, what became a somewhat rare and minor problem has become a much more common and much bigger problem.

Not every species is as bizarrely sexually dimorphic as humanity is. The faces are different enough to tell apart males/females at a glance.

I’ve deleted several.

#1: Norn Female Mesmer. This is back when mesmers kind of sucked in PVE. It just wasn’t fun playing her. So I deleted her and rolled a Norn Female Elementalist of the same design.

#2: Human Female Engineer. This is back when playing engineer hurt my wrists. I wanted the character I made to be my main, but I couldn’t main the engi. So, I deleted her, deleted my human male thief, then made a human female thief of the same design.

#3: Human male thief. See above. Eventually when mesmers got good I rerolled the same character design into a human male mesmer.

#4: Norn Male Ranger. I wanted to know what the big deal over ranger was, so I rolled one. Found I didn’t like how intense the playstyle was, and figured “hey, I like engis better. I’ll just roll a norn male engi”. So I made a norn male engi of the same design. Definitely loving scrapper hammer.

When I deleted these characters, they were fully skinned, full exotic (and some ascended), and had two full gearsets. Salvaging did eliminate some of the costs that went with it making a new toon, but overall it is an expensive endeavor.

Come to think of it, the only toons that are original in my pantheon of characters are my necro and guardian. Never once have I sought to reroll them.

Personally I think that players should be open to new game types. I’m mostly a solo-PVEer too, but that doesn’t mean that I suddenly can’t do raids. Just give me a group that’s willing (raid LFG plz) and the time to do it, and yeah I’ll try a raid.

It is definitely unreasonable for Anet to cater to every self-imposed limitation that gamers put on themselves. Instead of demanding “me me me”, you should be more open to the things they do.

Its a cultural aesthetic, mostly. If you want braids and locs, you go norn. The norn are the braid-y bunch.

I sympathize and support this change.

For someone with a slightly better grasp of English writing, I’ll explain:

On the equipment screen of the hero panel is displayed every piece of equipment that is possible to equip to your toon. Regardless of level, rarity, or gear prefix. Many players, myself included, carry several different weapons and even different gear prefixes on the same class, so one may swap between weapons as needed, or even change weapons mid-combo for greater buffs.

The problem is that the hero panel doesn’t have any method to sort “gear I’m going to use” from “gear I’ve randomly picked up and am capable of equipping”, so changing equipment and builds becomes much more difficult as you collect loot.

The solution to this should be pretty simple: Have a rarity slider, that will only display equippable gear of the selected rarity or higher.

Glad I dodged that bullet. I’d hate to have bought a new hairstyle kit only to find that they’ve just added minute changes to blonde and brown.

Dashingsteel.3410:

Lots of entertainment of this era seems to be more about how many checks they can make on the sjw-pc quota list rather than telling a good story.

Didn’t you now? To make good entertainment you have to challenge sociopolitical norms. That’s why everyone does it; to not be the norm. ;D.

That aside, as far as this thread is concerned, I’m one of those guys who wants to have one of everything. My toon list is currently 2 humans m/f, 2 norn m/f, 2 sylvari m/f, and the oddball 1 asura f. I have to keep everything balanced because otherwise it bothers me. Even to this day, the fact that I haven’t come up with an asura m irritates me (no classes left I want to play).

I’m fine with raids myself. The biggest problem with raids in GW2 stems mostly from the fact that GW2 wasn’t built to handle raids. Having to get into squads to work around the party limit, no designated area or LFG system or Queue that would handle the difficulty of organizing a raid. For a loose and free player such as I, the inability to group together for a raid like that is quite problematic.

Second small issue is that certain ascended gear sets (viper) have their trinkets gated behind the raid.

I eventually watched the whole video. I suppose the biggest problem wasn’t that raids were bad for WoW, insomuch as it is that WoW was eventually made to be basically raiding and nothing else. As the game was expanded, raids kept being pushed further and further. Raids were the high level thing to do, so the game became much more focused on raiding content as a whole. The game was designed in such a way that raiding became as convenient as possible, constantly making everything in the game obsolete. This left the rest of the “World” of Warcraft barren and useless.

Having large member multiplayer content isn’t bad in any sense. It is bad when the entire game becomes just that. So long as Anet continues to expand the rest of the game, it shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

The video is by Fevir, right?

Seems like everything was quiet until 2-3 nights ago. Suddenly it is relentless spam on my end.

Just wait until the next wave of bans to come.

You don’t understand. It fulfills a need present in the hearts of many men to yell endlessly at these kinds of things. A large part of us are responding because we enjoy the act of taking him down.

I’m old enough to despise children.

Agemnon.4608:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Other than the practical side. The reason why discrimination based on racism is bad is because it is factually incorrect: the color of your skin doesn’t determine the content of your character. But if someone is “disabled” in such a way as to be extremely violent and dangerous, then of course they will be discriminated against. They’re operationally different, and in such a way that refusing to pass judgement leads to bodily harm.

I have aspergers myself. I literally cannot understand social etiquette and social norms. It doesn’t feel like I’m some kind of super unique snowflake that is equal to everyone else in my own unique snowflakey way. It feels like my head is broken; that I am deaf to the extrasensory noise that everyone else readily hears and understands. I’m horrible at customer service jobs (I’ve literally sent customers away crying before, not sure how), and if someone doesn’t want to hire me for a customer service job, that is the a practical, reasonable, and logical choice, not an evil one.

But if we were to apply statistical and psychological standards instead of scientific ones we could dishonestly correlate violence with certain ethnicities. Autism is a sensory disorder not one that infringes upon intelligence or reasoning capability and to label it as a disorder likely has a cultural or social construct rather than an objective one.

http://www.livescience.com/16849-autism-advantages-research.html

Goes over overlooked advantages of autism, which conveniently get ignored just to keep the framing as a “disorder” and therefore unjustly justify discrimination.

Dr.House has such an attitude himself (making clients cry) yet he gets the job done and is the best in his field within the show’s canon.

People stereotype people with autism as jerks, but where does this come from? In early childhood an autistic kid is viewed as different from his peers and gets bullied, this reinforces the normalcy of being unkind. Other kids are unkind so the bullying victim in turn learns said behavior and does the same to other kids so this too is learned behavior.

That doesn’t make sense. Your argument is that because you can misrepresent data, then a sensory disorder wouldn’t limit intelligence or reasoning. An inability to see things limits the information you can acquire, which indeed would limit your intelligence and also limit your ability to reason. To give the barest of examples, there are concepts that a blind person cannot understand, and it is because of the fact that they are blind that these limits exist.

The whole “advantages/disadvantages” game is looking beyond the basic fact and trying to nitpick. If some “disorder” has “advantages and disadvantages”, then it is “operationally different”. As an aspy myself, I can tell you that the notion of “advantages” to a disorder is itself a bad stereotype. Asperger’s doesn’t mean I’m Nikola Tesla or James Watt. It means I’m that weird kid who gets averages grades regardless. I’m not somehow smarter in another area because I can’t comprehend human behavior.

Also, try not to use fictional examples. Dr. House is a textbook “bad doctor” who’s conduct in real life would cost countless lives due to the inner strife caused by his hateful attitude. Yes, arrogant kittens of doctors get people killed.

Other than the practical side. The reason why discrimination based on racism is bad is because it is factually incorrect: the color of your skin doesn’t determine the content of your character. But if someone is “disabled” in such a way as to be extremely violent and dangerous, then of course they will be discriminated against. They’re operationally different, and in such a way that refusing to pass judgement leads to bodily harm.

I have aspergers myself. I literally cannot understand social etiquette and social norms. It doesn’t feel like I’m some kind of super unique snowflake that is equal to everyone else in my own unique snowflakey way. It feels like my head is broken; that I am deaf to the extrasensory noise that everyone else readily hears and understands. I’m horrible at customer service jobs (I’ve literally sent customers away crying before, not sure how), and if someone doesn’t want to hire me for a customer service job, that is the a practical, reasonable, and logical choice, not an evil one.

DGraves.3720:

I am going to put this to rest because honestly I don’t want to read all that over a simple linear equation.

I went and grabbed the ascended numbers.
Viper’s condition damage is 1192.
Sinister’s condition damage is 1382.

Taking a 1s bleed & burn I tested for when Sinister’s stacks outperformed Viper’s though this could be done with any trade-off between the two.

1382 * .155 * 1.73 = 370.5833
1192 * .155 * 2 = 369.52

1382 * .06 * 1.73 = 143.4516
1192 * .06 * 2 = 143.04

You’ve already done goofed. You’ve completely forgotten rune set bonuses and might. You’ve also specifically chosen a duration value for which Viper has redundant stats. If you already have a duration of 1.73% you wouldn’t go full Viper, because it caps at 200%. Let alone where this magic 73% comes from, because right now it is just an arbitrary advantage you’ve given to sinister, which itself only gives 0% duration. You also are completely omitting the base value for the condition, which is 22 per bleed and 131.5 per burn. You’ve literally gotten every single thing wrong. Not a word you’ve said is correct.. What’s more, you’re basically asking us to graph the product of the condition damage and its duration. You don’t need to do that. That value is already displayed in the tooltips of skills. So if the tooltip is higher for Viper, viper wins.

To correct your abomination of math, first, add 175 damage for the rune set to each stat. Then, add 22 or 131.5 points of damage, before the duration modifier. Then, pick a duration for Sinister which full viper does not have wasted stats (I.E. Sinister at 58% duration), because comparing the two sets when one literally throws stats into a void is stupid. If you’re over the condition duration cap for your build, you don’t just keep putting in more condition duration. You swap out the redundant pieces of Viper for Sinister. Optionally you can add 750 to each stat for maximum might. Now, lets look at the real formula.

(1,367 × 0.06 + 22) x 2 = 208
(1,557 × 0.06 + 22 ) x 1.58 = 182

(1,367 × 0.155 + 131.5) x 2 = 687
(1,557 × 0.155 + 131.5) x 1.58 = 589

(2,117 × 0.06 + 22) x 2 = 298
(2,307 × 0.06 + 22) x 1.58 = 253

(2,118 × 0.155 + 131.5) x 2 = 920
(2,307 × 0.155 + 131.5) x 2 = 773

Viper wins.

NatureNinga.1258:

Abridged to save space no disrespect

Right now, the biggest problem with DGraves is that he is trying to twist numbers around to make it look like intensity always wins out, period.

The nature of duration vs. intensity is something that has been discussed at length for awhile now, and we’ve all come to the same conclusion. You want to take Sinister if

A) The fights are short. Note: the definition of “short” changes between classes. I.E. necromancer condis take forever to tick away, but guardian condis apply and expire in mere moments, so there are enemies where you’d want a sinister necro, but a condi guard.
B) Condi cleanses are a significant factor, such that it is unlikely to get extra ticks from Viper.
C) Your class is mono-condition based and can already get max duration for that condi in sinister.

Take Viper if

A)The fights are longer.
B)The fights are dangerous enough that you need to disengage or heal fallen allies. This gives more time for those extra ticks to roll through.
C)Your class uses a wide range of diverse damaging conditions.

Now PVP is one of those strange cases. While cleanses are a factor, the fights are also dangerous enough that you might have to disengage for a period of time, or the enemy will be invulnerable for a period of time, leading to extra ticks from Viper.

If you’re talking about regular PVE mobs, then Sinister is definitely better than Viper. If you’re talking vets, then Sinister and Viper are probably about equal. If you’re talking silvers or higher, then Viper is definitely better.

Now, personally I’ve always had a certain motto when it comes to gaming: Always prepare for the harder fight. The pushovers, they die in 8 seconds anyway. In that time frame, viper will does 89% of the condi damage of sinister, so that enemy dies in 9 seconds instead. You’re not suddenly going to lose a fight because of that additional single second. But, when you’re fighting a legendary, who can sometimes take several minutes, with Vipers is shaving that time down by 15-20%, suddenly you’ve got a full 30 seconds to spare. Go into a raid, then Vipers can buy you an extra minute on the clock, easily.

DGraves.3720:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

No, you aren’t. 7 stacks of bleed at 135 damage per bleed is 945 damage every second. 10 stacks of bleed at 100 is 1000 damage per second.

Hence the product trap. 1,000 > 945 but (945/7) > (1,000/10). The ignored dimension is time. The longer the struggle the more time compression matters. The belief that the product is more important is wrong, and I purposefully used an extreme example (22@60s & 110@5s) to show this.’

This is a meaningless operation. You just did damage per stack x stacks / stacks. You ended up with damage per stack again. This value speaks nothing of the overall damage that is done, and provides absolutely no new information.

DGraves.3720:

Expansion trap. First you do less damage per tick, not more, when you trade condition damage for duration (or anything else) and by expanding the proposed crest (or max stacks) value incorrectly you basically make an inconsistent model. The easiest way to tell, and how I caught it from other’s claims, is to test ratios.

Since condition damage is linear the ratio between two values shouldn’t change based on condition used but often did. The error was in measuring:

You’d have to be less ambiguous. When you say “tick” do you mean the tick of a single condition or the tick of all concurrent conditions? Because if you mean a single condition, then yes you are doing less damage per “tick” of a single condition. But, you get more ticks per skill, which means that eventually you do more damage per skill use. If you mean the “tick” as in the damage of all concurrent conditions, then you are wrong: you do more damage per tick, because the longer duration ultimately stack higher, and this creates an advantage that overtakes the shorter but stronger conditions after some time.

DGraves.3720:

This.

The “once you get past” part often failed to account for damage lost during that particular phase. This meant that shorter timers were basically misrepresented. The 7 to 945 for instance actually does more, not less, because you have a whole 6 more seconds during the minute where it’s at crest and during “ramp up” a whole 7s where it does better, 1s where it’s marginally better in interval @800, and then your 900 and 1,000.

Problem is, I and many others have already done those calculations numerous times. Also, you are abusing ambiguity again, so I’m going to assume you are talking about an auto attack that has a 7 second bleed that attacks once per second. Given an extra 43% duration but a 35% reduction in damage, you get the 10 second 100 damage bleed.

The equation is this: When you’ve gained extra ticks equal enough to compensate for the difference in damage inflicted over the duration of the initial condition. Or for a more algebraic version

(D1 – D2 ) x T1/ D2 + T1 = Equivalence Point for each individual stack (in seconds)

Where D1 is 135, D2 is 100, T is the duration of D1. So, particular example (135 – 100) DPS x 7 seconds / 100 DPS + 7 seconds = 9.45 seconds. This is the equivalence point where the longer condition overtakes the shorter one. So, by 9.45 seconds, the first tick has already outdamaged the second. You know the math is correct when the units match.

Now you’re probably wondering how long it is that one set of continuously inflicted conditions will out-pace the other. This is… not a simple equation. Basically it works like this: When the longer bleed expires, it inflicts an extra 55 damage over the first one. This additional 55 damage can be seen as a deduction in the subsequent advantage gained by the high intensity bleed. So, while in 7 seconds the bleed gains 245 damage, in the subsequent 3 seconds it loses 55 damage. If I were to table the difference between accumulated damage between the two (assuming 1 attack per 1 second inflicts 1 bleed per specified amount of time)

35
105 (+ 70)
210 (+ 105)
350 (+ 140)
525 (+ 175)
735 (+ 210)
980 (+ 245)
1,125 (+ 145)
1,170 (+ 45)
1,115 (-55)
1,060 (-55)
1,005 (-55)

And so on. I’ll skip the rest of the table, since from there it is simple division: at 32 seconds into the fight, the 100 damage per tick bleed will overtake the the 135 damage per tick bleed in overall damage. From that point on, any fight lasting longer than 32 seconds will be shorter with the 10 second 100 damage bleed. Now, the equation for this is a bit… nasty…

(D1-D2) x ((((D1 – D2) x T1/D2 + T1) ((D1 – D2 ) x T1/ D2 + T1 + 1))/2) / (D2T2 – D1T1)

You’re probably wondering what the hell. I’ll break it down. The “table” above is a finite sum that has two actions applied to it. It is in the form of the difference of tick intensity multiplied by the sum from 1 to the equivalence point above, all divided by the difference in the overall product of damage. Now, Sum (i = 1) k to N has the following form:

N(N + 1)/2

Where N is the equivalence point (D1 – D2 ) x T1/ D2 + T1. I’ll substitute this as EQP for now. The difference in intensity between the attacks is 35 (D1 – D2), and the difference in overall damage per application is 55 (100 × 10 – 135 × 7). Putting that into the equation:

35 x (EQP x (EQP + 1) / 2) / 55
= 35 × 49.376 / 55
= 1,728 / 55 = 31.4

Which is the exact time where they have matched. Now, this method is ever so slightly inaccurate, as condition work at solid intervals of damage and are not continuous, but if they were continuous then this would be the moment where the attacks are equal. So 32 seconds (that is, the 32nd tick after applying the first condition) is when the longer condi beats out the shorter condi. From that point on, the longer condi will kill the enemy faster.

You’re probably wondering why you haven’t seen this equation before. The reason why is because this equation is for an unrealistic circumstance. Attack rates are varied, and the sustained rates of conditions are held up by a complex rotation of skills, and not just auto attacks. The rate at which extra ticks are gained varies depending on skill rotation, and in many circumstances a full set of a particular kind of condition can be applied and expired long before it gets reapplied.

This may seem like a lot, but keep in mind that your example was chosen specifically with very little difference between overall damage between the conditions. In my dreaded Sinister vs. Viper thread, I found quite consistently that the intensity between the two sets was actually quite small. Under full sets (exotic) with max might, the difference between Viper and Sinister in intensity was below 10% (I.E. 143 vs. 155 bleed), and the duration advantage was sitting at 39%. If we were to give maximum possible advantage to sinister without assuming redundancy and gave it 61% condi duration and Viper 100% condi duration, you’d get numbers much closer to 11.25 second bleed for 155 vs. 14 second bleed for 143. There, any advantage gained per stack in intensity is immediately consumed and overtaken the moment the longer condition ticks 1 additional time. Going with that 1 second auto attack inflicts 1 bleed model, the total advantage gained in intensity by sinister is gone by the 16 second mark.

I mentioned it in the other post before that the break even points between malice and expertise is around 1.1k malice for most conditions. If you’re running a condition build, expect to see 2k+ malice on a regular basis.

So the moral of today’s story is that whatever basis you’re using has nothing on stoichiometry and calculus.

DGraves.3720:

Ayrilana.1396:

It’s not about lengthening fights. It has clearly been stated to you numerous times in this thread and others that longer fights are better for viper armor due to the ramp up of conditions. I specfically told you this in the other thread you made recently. Nobody is saying that vipers is great for trash mobs that die quickly. That’s just you saying it and ignoring that part of what we said. So the only distortions here are from you.

The thing is that having a bigger number doesn’t actually mean doing better.

If you have 7 stacks of bleed at 135 you are doing better than 10 stacks at 100. You want to compress your damage, not elongate it, because then you’re wasting time. It’s just not as simple as “100% condition duration GO GO GO!” unless you can get it without giving up condition damage.

No, you aren’t. 7 stacks of bleed at 135 damage per bleed is 945 damage every second. 10 stacks of bleed at 100 is 1000 damage per second.

The whole point of condition duration is that, by making each individual attack do more damage in the long run, you end up doing more total damage overall than if you went with shorter but more intensity. Once you get past that initial ramp up time, going for longer but overall stronger conditions wins out. And by “wins out” we mean they have a higher overall DPS and make the fight shorter.

EDIT: found it. I’ve already explained all this to you before.

Reminds me of the Tideborne. From… some other game. I can’t remember what it was.

But yes, in MMOs the aquatic races are under-represented. Though we do have a one that could possibly become playable in the Largos, chances are it won’t happen anytime soon.

DGraves.3720:

In this case breaking rhythm has the adverse effect of distortion. The 8s bleed goes longer at a lower rhythm than the 5s bleed but only intervals that match can be compared.

For anyone wondering why it is DGraves is doing math from crazy land and refuses to explain what is going on (instead just declaring everything wrong ‘just cause’), this statement right here is the fundamental idea that DGraves has refused to budge from over the whole time he’s been fighting against the plainly understood mechanics of condition damage.

Basically, he is saying that it doesn’t matter if one bleed lasts 30 seconds and another bleed lasts 3 seconds. Because they last different lengths, they can’t be compared, and so that extra 27 seconds of bleed that inflicts damage once per second for every single one of those 27 seconds doesn’t count because reasons. The numbers displayed by the combat log, by the GUI, and in the tooltips are all lies. The system, deliberately designed by Anet to be broken, imbalanced, and deceptive.

This thinking is, of course, nonsensical. It is the equivalent to saying that a mouse is heavier than an elephant, because most of the elephant’s mass doesn’t count and they can only be compared under the same volume, and that volume must be the mouse’s because it is the smallest. You’re probably thinking “but, couldn’t we just choose a volume that encompasses the whole size of the elephant to get an accurate picture of their overall mass?”. Yes. Yes you can. Yes you should. That would be the reasonable thing to do, because that actually has real world implications, like what would happen if each respective animal stepped on you. Or, how much it would hurt if you received a 30 second bleed instead of a 3 second bleed. This “interval” of his doesn’t exist. It is an arbitrary value, and you can pick whatever value you to do whatever you want. Whereas most theorycrafters pick a volume that encompasses the full magnitude of their actions, DGraves has decided to measure a mouse against an elephant by seeing which one has heavier molecules.

I’m not even sure how DGraves has come to this belief. Maybe he believes that condition duration just squashes and stretches a fixed pool of damage that exists regardless of the duration. Maybe he believes that the increase in the number that each condition damage indicator displays is the cumulative damage inflicted by a single condition, and thus repeatedly adding more conditions does nothing. Maybe he’s never tested this idea by inflicting a single condition and seeing that the damage indicator displays the same amount each second. Maybe he doesn’t believe this and is being obtuse for the lols. But whatever the reason, one thing is clear. Discussing this further with him won’t work. It would take a dev to finally tell him that he’s wrong.

So until you see a red post, don’t post.

The other thing I’m wondering about is how common these “OMG awesome luck” people are. Most players come to the forum with this complaint and assume that their account is a bad luck count.

Fact is, I’ve never met a person in-game who’s had multiple precursors drop in a short amount of time. In all the time I’ve played, I think I’ve seen a precursor drop on a full map maybe once. So, after thousands of hours… that’s it. One precursor per the hundreds of people constantly around me.

When I say “luck is for other people”, I mean it. When a person is lucky it is a big deal and they announce it proudly. When someone is unlucky, it is business as usual and nobody says anything. So while we may know that guy who’s had 5 precursors fall from thin air since launch, chances are we know 10 times as many players who’ve never received a precursor drop, period.

Now, if it was the norm to receive several precursors as drops from enemies by now, and it just happens that your account has none while everybody else is showered with them, then we might have a case of accounts being utterly unlucky. But, with how things look, it seems more like the RNG is working as intended, and it just happens that a few players fall outside the norm.

I’ve played this “outside” game before. The worst part is, there are bad luck accounts.

Yes, I am one so unfortunate to have received a “bad luck account”. The RNG for Outside must be broken or something. As soon as I start it off, I’m swamped by a myriad of problems that prevent me from playing the game. Several permanent debuffs in the form of severe pains, half the food which is supposed to restore health just damages it, a graphical glitch that causes the subtle punctuation and emotes of other players to be completely invisible, a broken interface which causes a third of my button presses to not respond, the graphics are in Atari-2600 era resolution, and the worst part is my tutorial mission was completely broken and didn’t work right.

Until I read your experiences, I didn’t know that my game was broken. I just thought that it was supposed to be a convoluted and complicated mess to appeal to some kind of old-school challenge mode.

O.K. Guess I’ll have to be “that guy”. Excuse me while I whip out my ego.

The reason why it is everyone’s “claims” about HoT being good or not included everyone elses opinion, or appear to do so, is because those claims do not cater to opinions at all. They are the discussion of facts revolving around HoT, and the fact that you disagree means nothing to someone else.

While you may be used to a world that is full of “to each their own” and “live and let live”, the real world isn’t like that. The real world actually cares about what works, and what doesn’t. The real world is objective. So, when players discuss what the mistakes are with HoT, they aren’t talking about what is “bad for them”. They’re talking about what is bad, period. If you feel like that you are constantly being looped in with their discussions, then maybe it is your own ego that is to blame. When people disagree, they voice those disagreements, and get into a discussion where (hopefully) something productive will emerge.

There are many standards for which to judge the content of HoT:

#1: Teleologic. That is, what it is designed to do. If something is designed to do one thing (say, the megaserver system is designed to group like players together on maps), and it fails to accomplish this objective (random kicking and gathering onto empty worlds, random undisplayed map closing, forcing guild shards to close at full population, etc), then it is bad design. Not “bad design for me”. It is bad design, period.

#2: Technical Merit. This is what separates good art from bad art. This is the way the pieces come together and compliment each other. Issues like having voice acting that varies wildly in tone between lines, storylines that are too predictable, plot threads that are nonsensical or end abruptly, dissonance between gameplay and narrative, etc. When the tonal flow of the story is abrupt, jarring, or so narrowly focused that it leaves people unsatisfied, it isn’t “bad for me”. It is bad, period.

#3: Basic function. This is the ability for the game system to actually run. This is issues like bugs and memory overload problems, which would cause people’s game’s to crash near the end of event chains. If the game doesn’t function properly, in that pressing space doesn’t deploy the glider or the game can’t load a map that it is meant to load, then it is bad. Not “bad for me”. Bad, period.

There’s probably more, too. But, think of it from a basic standpoint: If you like something, you should be able to explain why it is you like it, and what is good about something. Your opinions don’t bampf into existence from nowhere.

Tamasan.6457:

Yes, we’ve been over this again and again. Particularly in the ‘RNG as a concept’ thread.

But you’re forgetting something:

Anet listened.

They gave us gauranteed ways to get precursors. The collections introduced with HoT.

And they gave us the ability to change stats on ascended items.

And they gave up map rewards for things like T6 crafting materials and lodestones.

And they even increased the drop rates of rare or better items in full level 80 zones.

What more do you want?

Times like this reminds me why I despise evolutionary psychology. It isn’t a science. It is a bunch of egos taking several pre-presumed deterministic qualities and pushing them somewhere on our theoretical history. So long as they’re creative enough to come up with a circumstance, regardless of whether evidence exists for this circumstance, in which this quality will be “fit”, they happily declare any nature of humanity as deterministic and evolved, and leave it there. Then they move on to the next quality, declare it evolved, declare there was some circumstance in which it evolved, and then worship themselves for being so knowledgeable and informed. So rather than default to generic humanistic worship, I’ll explain what really goes on.

Statistical analysis is complicated, mostly because it is trying to come up with a mathematical model to describe systems that aren’t based on math at all. Whenever someone comes up with a statistic (say, the average height of a man), that means nothing to the individual. There’s no math god out there that forces people to become a certain height because the average demanded it. Really, each person is a certain height from a contribution of factors, and they will be that height regardless of how tall other people get.

These “factors” are what people are concerned with. It is more important to know why an outlier exists than it is to just say “outlier” and leave it all up to the whimsy of a nonexistent math god. When someone is 8 feet tall, there’s an explanation why, other than “outlier to a random number generator”. This is true even with things that are purportedly random, such as roulette tables and keno.

The thing is, the idea that everything has an explanation, this carries over to systems that are very heavily based on random numbers. A random number generator is an imperfect system that is designed specifically to look like there is no explanation for its outputs. It is a system that tries to be defiant of the inherent “there’s an explanation” phenomena that we’re all familiar with. It is meant to defy logic. Regardless of being random, it will produce trends, even if in theory there should be no reason why this trend would exist.

With that diatribe aside, the whole point of getting a precursor as a drop isn’t about having a precursor. It is about having the equivalent wealth of a precursor fall from the sky.

Astralporing.1957:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Ayrilana.1396:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Right now I have yet to hear a disproof of unlucky people in general, let alone game accounts.

The burden is on those seeking to change the status quo to prove that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. There’s been no evidence shown in this thread (or any other) that demonstrates that the results are anything other than predictable.

At any given moment, some people have had better drops and some have had worse. Everyone agrees that happens.

The question raised in this thread is whether that same ‘luckiness’ applies to the same accounts tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…and there’s zero evidence for that.

tl;dr past performance cannot be used to predict future earnings.

The thing is, that conclusion is just pressing the prior assumption that these drops are all independent of each other. If they aren’t, well…

BTW I don’t think there are lucky or unlucky accounts. I just recognize that, without the actual code displayed for determining luck and drops, that there’s no evidence to discern between a fair system that has a random awards resembling a bell curve, or a system that is randomly unfair, and this distribution of unfairness itself resembles a bell curve.

Let’s assume that Anet released the actual code. Do you think most of the players would even understand it? They’d be relying on the what others say about it which is no different that relying on what Anet says about it.

It’s quite a bit different, really. Peer review and third party verification are useful things, and they speak volumes more than whatever company officially sanctioned post will say.

In this topic there are people seriously thinking there’s some hidden bug that Anet’s programmers can’t find. And you expect them to believe someone else who will say the code is clean? They will still think the same…

Nope. Independent verification carries a lot more weight than that.

I haven’t see much “harassment” myself. But I can definitely see where it comes from. The thing with squads is they are very handy for organizing numbers or distributing players, but they only work of players cooperate with squads.

I myself bought a commander tag, and the ability to rally players to my call has nearly paid for itself. The most use I get out of my tag is from Tangled Depths. I regularly command a lane there. Now, even though it was nerfed, King of the Jungle is still a marginally more difficult event than usual, and requires a degree of organization not found on most places.

I usually command Nuhoch or Scar lane, as those are the most important. And, every single time, I have to go through the same cycle over and over again.

Phase 1: while recruiting players for the lane, nobody shows up until 5 minutes before the event starts. This leads my numbers low, but generally once I have enough players I broadcast in map chat" Nuhoch lane is full! Please fill other lanes!".

Phase 2: Upon actually going into the lane, I will get several players (up to 10 or so) who will follow me into the lane who
A) Haven’t joined my squad
B) Haven’t messaged me saying they were going to become part of my “group” regardless of squad status.
C) Refuse to communicate
D) Or Cooperate
E) And refuse to go to the other lanes.

Keep in mind that Nuhoch lane is usually organized first. So, while I’m sitting at 10 extra, SCAR and Ogre are all sitting at 4 or 5 players, begging map and local chat for people to come help them.

Phase 3: Eventually half of those players will wise up, join my squad, and just go willy nilly anywhere doing anything, regardless of any instructions. Now, Nuhoch lane is divided into 3 subgroups specifically to deal with the complicated nature of the lane mechanic. It doesn’t work that well when a sudden influx of players piles on squad 1 and just runs around doing whatever anyway.

This… fails events. Much more so before the “bugfix”, in which a few misplaced players have literally killed the event countless times, but even after the bugfix there have been cases where swaths of unaccounted and uncooperative players have ruined the event.

Personally I’ve never been venomous. I’ve been extremely blunt and direct, but I don’t toss insults lightly. However, my skin is much thicker than others, and so I can definitely see where players might be coming from.

Ayrilana.1396:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Right now I have yet to hear a disproof of unlucky people in general, let alone game accounts.

The burden is on those seeking to change the status quo to prove that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. There’s been no evidence shown in this thread (or any other) that demonstrates that the results are anything other than predictable.

At any given moment, some people have had better drops and some have had worse. Everyone agrees that happens.

The question raised in this thread is whether that same ‘luckiness’ applies to the same accounts tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…and there’s zero evidence for that.

tl;dr past performance cannot be used to predict future earnings.

The thing is, that conclusion is just pressing the prior assumption that these drops are all independent of each other. If they aren’t, well…

BTW I don’t think there are lucky or unlucky accounts. I just recognize that, without the actual code displayed for determining luck and drops, that there’s no evidence to discern between a fair system that has a random awards resembling a bell curve, or a system that is randomly unfair, and this distribution of unfairness itself resembles a bell curve.

Let’s assume that Anet released the actual code. Do you think most of the players would even understand it? They’d be relying on the what others say about it which is no different that relying on what Anet says about it.

It’s quite a bit different, really. Peer review and third party verification are useful things, and they speak volumes more than whatever company officially sanctioned post will say.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Right now I have yet to hear a disproof of unlucky people in general, let alone game accounts.

The burden is on those seeking to change the status quo to prove that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. There’s been no evidence shown in this thread (or any other) that demonstrates that the results are anything other than predictable.

At any given moment, some people have had better drops and some have had worse. Everyone agrees that happens.

The question raised in this thread is whether that same ‘luckiness’ applies to the same accounts tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…and there’s zero evidence for that.

tl;dr past performance cannot be used to predict future earnings.

The thing is, that conclusion is just pressing the prior assumption that these drops are all independent of each other. If they aren’t, well…

BTW I don’t think there are lucky or unlucky accounts. I just recognize that, without the actual code displayed for determining luck and drops, that there’s no evidence to discern between a fair system that has a random awards resembling a bell curve, or a system that is randomly unfair, and this distribution of unfairness itself resembles a bell curve.

Nope. Power wasn’t presumed best. It was tested and found to be best. Besides, your whole point is bunk anyway because PVP build making is dynamic and built to fight what other players theorizes other’s builds will be, so its all future there.

Well, the whole point of theorycrafting is to create a better build for the future, so technically all we can ever care about are the undetermined sorties of the future. It’s not that hard. Just find the limit of f(x) as x approaches infinity.

It isn’t iterations per single sortie. It is iterations per every sortie, ever.

Right now I have yet to hear a disproof of unlucky people in general, let alone game accounts.

Aidan Savage.2078:

You make the mistake of translating Fury into a precision increase. It is not, and should not be considered one. It’s an “after math” increase wholly independent from precision. This is even more true when stats are downscaled, as fury’s one of the few buffs that down get downscaled as well.

Except that it is, for all intents and purposes, a precision increase. The effective of fury is dependent upon the amount of precision that already exists, and the more precision one has, the less of an effect on overall damage that fury will have.

It’s really easy to factor in traits and buffs. Just translate it to its respective stat (power, precision, ferocity), then multiply its effectiveness by its uptime.

For example, take No Scope from the Firearms line of an engineer. If we ignore the crit rate for now, we can assume that it’ll proc every 10 seconds or so. This means that you’ll get 40% fury uptime, with fury equivalent to 420 precision. Overall this will result in a scaled increase of 168 precision.

Keep in mind that buffs and traits only matter if they are affecting only one of the stats. If it is a trait that just affects damage overall, then it doesn’t do anything to the ratio between the stats.

Tim.6450:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Damage = K x Power x (1 + (Precision – 916) / 2100) x (0.5 + Ferocity / 1500)

This is plain wrong. Since it implies that while having 916 precison (zero crit chance) implies improved damage by crit damage. The real damage formula is:

Damage = K x Power x (1 + (Precision – 916) / 2100 x (0.5 + Ferocity / 1500))

So basically I misplaced a parenthesis.

Ally.4382:

It’s over. So. Long. Ago.
Just put a smiley and be done with it.

You know, there’s a certain saying I’ve heard once: “You have no control over the words that have already left your mouth”.

As it happens, this question is a very old one.

In that thread years ago, I was trying to figure out when it is that power became better than precision. This was before ferocity was a “thing”, and crit damage was just itself. Also, my calculus skills have improved since then.

But, you can do similar calculations today:

Damage = K x Power x (1 + (Precision – 916) / 2100) x (0.5 + Ferocity / 1500)

DDamage/DPower = K x (1 + (Precision – 916) / 2100) x (0.5 + Ferocity / 1500)
DDamage/DPrecision = K x Power x ( (0.5 + Ferocity / 1500)
DDamage/DFerocity = K x Power x (1 + (Precision – 916)/2100 x (751/1500)

That is, DDamage/Dpower is the change in damage as power changes. DDamage/DPrecision is the change in damage as how precision changes. DDamage/DFerocity is the change in damage as how ferocity changes. The breakpoints are where one is equivalent to another.

That is… a bit hard to deal with overall, as we’re talking about 3 separate variables that all multiply each other. Also, it is a bit hard to deal with, due to how frivolous it all is. The fact is, you choose stat sets, not arbitrary stats. What arrangements of stats you can have are already preset in stone.

So instead, most theorycrafters look at assassin vs. berserker, and which rune set gives more bang for its buck on which class. The general trend for how damage goes is this:

Power is the most efficient stat, starting out. 1000 power doubles the damage you do from base stats, and there is no cap on this growth. When compared to precision, you’d need 2100 points of precision just to do 50% more damage. Precision and Ferocity can be seen as modifiers to power.

Precision is the second most efficient stat, as it increases the chance you’ll do critical damage. With base crit chance, the breakpoint between power and precision is at

Power > 2100 / (0.5 + Ferocity/1500) + Precision – 916

Or when you have 4,284 power. You may have immediately noticed, but there’s no way to get 4,284 power. So when building, you opt for “as much as possible”.

Ferocity is the worst scaling stat, because it is the most dependent. Precision can function without ferocity, but not the reverse. If you put 1000 points into Ferocity with no precision, you get a 5.7% extra damage out of the whole things. It is a total waste, until you already have a lot of precision and a lot of power.

So, in short, power first, precision second, ferocity third. Don’t bother with skipping steps.

Well, other than getting ascended weapons and accessories on toons, whenever I have “spare gold” it usually goes to the gem store.

First I get myself a nest-egg of about 800 gems to sit on, in case there’s some deal that comes out later. Then, whenever I see skins or services I want, I convert gold to gems and buy it.

Definitely.

Current daily system.
Advantages: Low maintenance so I can watch stuff on the second monitor
Disadvantages: Soul Sucking boring

Previous daily dungeons:
Advantages: Interesting and dynamic, and highly rewarding
Disadvantages: had to deal with poor community.

Maybe it is because of my extensive background in PSO and PSU, but at heart I’m a dungeon kind of guy. The raiding environment doesn’t interest me nearly as much as the dungeon environment. I like smaller teams, less pressure, more free to explore and experiment.

The hardest part about proving that there’s a problem with the RNG is that you don’t just need a lot of trials. You need a boat load of trials. In order to actually reach the values of expected events (I.E. a dice roll or a coin flip), you need to run hundreds, if not thousands of trials. For something as simple as flipping a coin and rolling a dice (which we know is 50/50 and 3.5 average).

For something in the game as rare as a precursor to be determined to be fair or unfair, you’d probably need a million trials, total. Both to see what the drop rate might be, and to see whether some accounts are “luckier” than others and receive a higher frequency of drops per time invested.

As a player of below average luck myself, there’s always that part of me that is paranoid. I find that I am off-putting and usually diametrically opposed ideologically to many game developers, Anet being no exception. There’s always that lingering thought that, because I said something that bothered a higher up dev on their beliefs, that my account is purposefully flagged as “unlucky” by the devs, never to receive a super valuable drop. I can never prove it, but I do know that people are petty enough to do it.

I don’t have empty posts. I only have posts that fix forum bugs.

There’s always that part of me that is convinced that DGraves is just trolling. The biggest problem with all of his assertions is that, if you simply tested them out, you’d find they are very clearly wrong. It’s not that hard, either. Just go to the mists, and try out condition damage on one of the golems.

Experiment A: Apply one condition, then apply a second stack of that condition. Does the enemy’s health bar move faster, or stay the same speed after applying the second condition?
Experiment B: Apply one condition, then apply a second condition that is different from the first one. Then after they’ve expired, apply the second condition by itself. Does the enemy’s health bar move faster or stay the same speed after applying the second kind of condition?
Experiment C: Against an indestructible golem, try auto attacking with a condition weapon. Take note of how much damage ticks away each second. Do this for a sustained period of time. Then, equip traits/gear that increases your condition duration. Again, attack the golem for a sustained period of time. Do you do more damage, or do you have the same damage?

DGraves is aggressively arguing points that are proven wrong within moments of anyone actually playing a condition build. As for the complicated stuff (like “break points”), I’ve already done all that in my Sinister Vs. Viper Comparison. But, to make a universal formula that exists without any of that pesky “limited by stat combos available” stuff…

Technically, expertise adds 1/1500 x damage per each point of investment via extra ticks, whereas malice will add 1 x condition specific modifier in damage per tick. For example, with bleed each point of malice will add 0.06 damage, whereas expertise will add 1/1500 x current damage per point in expertise.

The solution is easy: when does 1/1500 x damage = 0.06? That is when malice is equal to 1,133. It is at this point that each point of expertise equals each point in malice, and the stats should be raised fairly equally… on a point by point basis. This is the same for the following:

Bleed: 1,133
Poison: 942
Burn: 652
Torment: 1,146
Confusion: 1,214 (DoT)

Here is where things get a little strange. The thing with our build system is that we don’t freely get to choose our stats. We select our stats based on the gear sets available. In the sinister vs. viper thread I made, the strength of viper came largely from the fact that it sacrificed 11% of damage intensity for 39% duration, making it outright better. It simply throws more stats at condition damage overall.

On the other side, condition duration is given out quite freely from other sources. The 20% from Rare Veggie Pizzas is equivalent to 300 points of expertise. The 45% per specific rune set is equivalent to 675. The 20% sigils, 300 more points. When looking at stat investment on an item by item method, condition duration beats out largely because it is so much easier to get a hold of..

Last I checked it was still silverwastes. That and playing the trading post. But any of the HoT metas are good.