Guild Wars 2: Legendary PvE Armor Modification (19.09.2018)

This is not a new post but more of an update news thingy. Since the patch, something has changed for the legendary armor, hence why the calculation needs to be updated.

Check the Original Post >>

What has Changed?

Due to the update, the number of Legendary Insights you get was changed. The raid instance Hall of Chains no longer rewards Legendary Insights. This means you get four Legendary Insights less a week.

Luckily the event before Gorseval in the Spirit Vale of the Forsaken Thicket and the event before Xera in the Stronghold of the Faithful also from Forsaken Thicket now reward each a Legendary Insight. This means there's a total of 15 Legendary Insights available currently per week.

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Gift of Prowess

The Gift of Prowess for PvE armor requires

• 25x Legendary Insights
• 1x   Eldritch Scroll
• 50x Obsidian Shards
• 6x   Cube of Stabilized Dark Energy

The Legendary Insights is a drop mostly from bosses and a few events from the raids and they only drop once per boss per account. This resets every week. Since these are limited, as there are only 17 15 weekly rewards in the raids that pass you these insights. The Eldritch Scroll item can be bought by Spirit Shards, a currency that is awarded for each level up which happens a ton after reaching your maximum level as you can continue to level up for these. Obsidian Shards can be bought in amounts of "Scrooge McDuck's safe". It just takes some karma which is awarded constantly by simply doing some events. Last but not least the Cube of Stabilized Dark Energy consists of materials. Sure, you need to salvage ascended armor, but this can be crafted and dropped - even if rarely. So, technically it's farmable. Again, we don't need to worry about this since the Legendary Insight time-gate is much, much higher than this one. For your first PvE armor, you need 150 Legendary Insights and for your second you need 300 Legendary Insights. This means we will need between 150 / 17 = 8.82 weeks and 300 / 17 = 17.65 weeks. This means you will now need between 150 / 15 = 10 and 300 / 15 = 20 weeks. Of course, this assumes you get all 17  15 every week. So, here's a table showing the correlation between the number of Legendary Insights you get and the time it would take you for the 300.

Legendary Insights	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17
Time in weeks	Inf.	300	150	100	75	60	50	42.9	37.5	33.3	30	27.3	25	23.1	21.4	20	18.7	17.6

Guild Wars 2: Funerary Collections: How Many Legendaries Have to Die?

Finally, the patch is out, but something I wanted to do before the release of the patch: finishing a collection. Which collection? The Funerary Weapon collection. This was really painful and took quite some time. You may or may not wonder why but lemme tell you mathematically why.

Funerary Weapon and Armor Collection

The funerary weapon and funerary armor can be bought for a measly few gold and elegies. Well, actually it's quite expensive. There are - of course - 18 armor skins and 16 weapon skins. The weapons cost between 36x Elegy Mosaic and 2 gold 88 silver and 72x Elegy Mosaic and 5 gold 76 silver depending on whether it's a one-hand or two-hand weapon. There are 10 one-hand weapons and 6 two-hand weapons. Accumulating all their prices you need 792x Elegy Mosaic and 63 gold and 36 silver.

Of course, there is one armor piece for each armor slot from foot to head and for each armor class from light to heavy too. This means 18 pieces as mentioned earlier. The price of these pieces depends again on which slot it fits in. With armor pieces that yield more stats being more expensive. The prices step from 6, 12, 18 Elegy Mosaic and varying 1 gold 20 silver, 2 gold 40 silver to 4 gold 80 silver. Additionally doing your achievement you get one full armor set.

That means we only need to buy two more. Buying a full set costs 12+18+6+6+18+12 = 72 Elegy Mosaic and 1.20+4.80+1.20+1.20+2.40+2.40 = 13.20, 13 gold and 20 silver. We have to take these times two since we get one through achievements and buy two. Of course, we can calculate times three if we assume we're not doing the other achievements to say what difference it makes.

Alright, so accumulating everything assuming we buy two armor sets and get one from achievements we need: 

72 * 2 + 792 = 936 Elegy Mosaic
and 13.20 * 2 + 63.36 = 89.76 gold, 89 gold 76 silver

Assuming we don't do the achievements we need to buy three armors, thus we need

72 * 3 + 792 = 1008 Elegy Mosaic
and 13.20 * 3 + 63.36 = 102.96 gold, 102 gold 96 silver

Elegy Mosaic

The Elegy Mosaics drop mainly from legendary bounties, according to the wiki from meta events as well. Though I didn't really check that one. Anyways something I've seen that aligns with the information on the wiki is that each legendary drops [2; 25] (between 2 and 25 inclusively) Elegy Mosaics. Though the exact amount is not rolled equally. Getting more is increasingly rarer.

I don't have any data on this as of now but the fact is: you get at least two and at most, you seem to get 25. From experience it feels like on average it's about 4-6, I'd guess. So let's go with 5.

How Many Legendaries Need to Die?

Let's start with the low end. We need 936 or 1008 Elegy Mosaic and we have the worst luck possible only getting 2 per legendary. In this case we need to kill 936 / 2 = 468 bounties or 1008 / 2 = 504 respectively.

However, if we have impossible luck we will get 25 every time. This means it will take us only 936 / 25 = 37.44 that is 38 since there are no 0.44 bounties and 1008 / 25 = 40.32 which is 41 respectively.

Now if we go with our average of 5 it will take 936 / 5 = 187.2, 188 legendary bounties and 1008 / 5 = 201.6, 202 legendary bounties.

So, this means we do not only skip about 20 bounties by doing the achievements on average, but we also have to do a lot of legendary bounties. Luckily I'm done with it so, good luck to you if you haven't and happy legendary slaughtering.

Thanks, to all the commanders and lieutenants who did these runs on a near basis daily until the patch. They will probably continue in a few weeks again. I guess that's time to mentally prepare yourself?

Everything in Balance - The Concept of Ying and Yang

A few weeks or months ago I was talking to amount about this and it's a really interesting topic. You might have heard of Ying and Yang or the idea of balancing your life or you might have seen the thought experiment that went into a slightly different direction.

The Concept of Ying and Yang

The idea of there being a perfect balance that needs to be kept is something that appears in a lot of works from the eastern world. The idea of there being as much evil as there should be good and the idea of living a balanced life. It may seem far fetched or just some weird way of thinking but actually it's obvious if you think about it.

You know what. I'll tell you a few examples and if I can't convince you with these then you do you. :P

Balancing Your Body

Did you ever go to the doctor and let them check your blood? Our blood contains so many different things and it gets checked only for certain elements. For example, Vitamin D is not checked as it required a different procedure they can't do when doing the normal check. You probably know what I mean if not here are a few out of the top of my head: sugar, fat, (cholesterol, potassium, sodium).

So something you might have noticed is that on the paper you almost always have a top and bottom value. If you're below the minimum, it's bad, if you're above maximum, it's bad.

Additionally you probably also know that if your heart rate is too high, it's unhealthy since your heart could skip beats resulting in an irregular rhythm which means an inefficient amount of blood is pumped which most likely leads to death.

Another Story: Sunlight

Ah, the sun, isn't it awesome? It keeps our planet warm and people enjoy being tan. Well turns out the sun doesn't have sunlight only but UV rays as well. And these UV rays cause skin damage and skin cancer since they also decrease the skin's capability to regenerate. But you need UVB rays for vitamin D. An important vitamin for the bones especially.

Consumption of Alcohol and Drugs

In Vino Veritas. Wine or alcohol for that matter is believed to be healthy. We all know that people that drink a lot of wine, beer or any alcohol for that matter are intoxicated and with enough consumption die.

The Theme

You should be able to see it already. If not there's an awesome video from CollegeHumor that plays a good example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPz9Fcvb1II

Versus Vegans and Vs Meat-Only

I'm sorry, I can't leave this out. There's this discussion on whether eating meat all the time or not eating meat at all is healthier. Well reading this blog post and pondering over it you should see, guys, like our ancestors it's important to eat meat. We've been eating meat for years. No plant includes the whole composition meat has, maybe we can synthesize it, though I don't know if that will do us any good. So eating meat in small amounts is okay. A bit of meat every two weeks or having just a bit of chicken in your salad every 3rd day or so should probably be fine.

However, if you're vegan because you can't eat an animal thinking about them or if you avoid eating meat to reduce the demand of meat resulting in a decrease of production of meat thus meaningless animals are killed then don't let me stop you! You're doing a great job even if it's just this small thing. 

Conclusion

"Everything will kill you eventually."

 However, having a too high or too low consumption of things you will die faster. Thus the best idea would be to find the perfect balance of everything. Unfortunately, it's not as easy since in comparison to games we don't have a bar that tells us whether or not we're above or below a certain vitamin.

WildStar: Spellslinger Bug Rotation - The Ins & Out

Alright, since there are no more Redmoon Terror or Genetic Archives Prime 1 runs inside of our guild I pretty much closed up with WildStar for the time being. Thus it doesn't bother me too much if this gets me banned but I wanted to talk about this topic for quite a while since it's really interesting from a game design perspective.

I'm not going to explain every little detail but I try to tell you the most important things if you're not a Wildstar player.

Spellslinger & Redmoon Terror Set

The Spellslinger is one of a variety of classes that can be played. As weapons they use guns and their skills focus on guns and magic. Redmoon Terror is the last raid that was released in Wildstar. In this raid, every class can get a rune set referred to as RMT Set or risen class set. Each class has its own set.

The Spellslinger's risen class set basically works like this:

Every second you can get a stack when you use an auto-attack. Once you reach six of these stacks you can use an ability called assassinate that will deal 300% more damage and remove all the stacks upon hit replacing them with a buff that increases critical hit chance and critical hit severity.

Where's The Bug?

If you have played WildStar then you know that it is possible to remove a buff from your buff bar or from the stacks in your buff bar by right-clicking them. If you gather six stacks from the class set's buff you can use assassinate and the six stacks are not gone yet. Remember they are only removed when Assassinate hits. This means if you right click your six stacks before assassinate hits the enemy.

The next thing that happens now is that you have removed one stack and you have only five. Since you don't have six stacks they won't be removed you keep your five. The assassinate however still deals it's 300% more damage since this is checked when the skill is activated and not while the skill is in animation or assassinate is traveling.

With five stacks you only need one more auto-attack to shoot out another assassinate that will have the damage bonus and you can remove one buff from the class stack before it hits, just to find yourself in an infinite loop. An infinite loop of pain and damage.

Why Is the Bug Rotation Considered Difficult?

The biggest difficulty in this rotation comes from the fact that your distance from the boss defines how much time you have to remove the stack additionally the stack may not always be in the same position. Some add-ons place this buff to a fixed position in the buff bar or let you customize the position size and much more. Unfortunately, the buff bar changes its position when you gain or lose an absorb and the helper add-on throws all the buffs together in one spot and then filters all others out. So there's a chance to always click at the "wrong" moment resulting in not taking away one stack and losing all six gaining the other buff for multiple seconds. Seconds of damage loss. From experience failing this can lead to a DPS loss of around 25k. When I tried this rotation I got between 40k and 70k damage numbers in the raid.

The other issue is to balance your Spellsurge between assassinates and your auto attacks while still rotating between rapid fire and quick draw respective to the cooldowns. Each and every assassinate should be Spellsurged if possible.

How to Fix the Bug?

To fix the bug you need to know where the issue lies exactly. Luckily my explanation should have pointed you exactly to where we're searching for. So, one easy way to fix this bug is for Assassinate to instantly remove the six stacks and replace them with the other buff once it has been cast. This allows the player to have no chance to remove one stack before something could go wrong.

This would be the easiest way to fix it and quite simple.

Another way to fix it would be to prevent the player from dispelling or removing buffs on their buff bar. However, this could prevent the player from getting rid of certain buffs they don't want to have any more or that they don't want to have during damage tests. This does fix any related bugs in the future though.

Opinion

If Wildstar wouldn't be in such a bad shape as it is this issue would probably get fixed in just a few days. To be honest though, even if the DPS meter mentions one skill dealing 80% of the damage or so, actually performing the rotation is not an easy feat. As such the resulting damage is worth the work put in. Thus I would deem this to be a bug but not an exploit. Especially since the Spellslinger pretty much stays on par with the other classes damage numbers. Yet, still fixing this bug and buffing the Spellslinger damage would be the best option.

Toaru Kagaku no Railgun: Personal Reality and Bubble World Concept

I wanted to make another post about magick since it's been a while at the same time I kinda felt like watching an anime. So I got a suggestion to watch Toaru Kagaku no Railgun and yes I'm enjoying it. Something that they kept repeating was this stuff about personal reality and probability and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. おもしろい (Interesting).

Story

I can't talk about an anime or movie or other content without talking about the plot. :P Toaru Kagaku no Railgun plays in a scientifically-driven city called 'Academy City' in which pupils or people, in general, are taught to be espers. The main plot focuses on a student called Misaka Mikoto who is considered a level 5 esper and she can control electricity.

That should give you an idea on the scope of the anime without revealing anything that's happening.

Personal Reality

In some of the teachings, the anime keeps repeating the idea of finding your personal reality or your own reality. This goes well with a principle in magick that I and a few people in my contact circle often like to call bubble worlds. The basic idea is everyone lives in their own world or in their own bubble. Everything they believe in is real in this bubble. If two people get near each other those bubbles merge to a certain degree. If both bubbles are the same (same beliefs) nothing changes. However, if those bubbles differ the intersected area can be considered to be in a superstate as first. Which means it is at first not clear what it's gonna be like. What it will actually be like is later determined by the probability of which of both bubbles matches better.

Magick User vs Magick User

Even if both magick users or espers believe in magick to work differently it will still exist in both worlds depending on how open-minded they are both systems may work or both systems will work to a lesser effect.

Magick User vs Skeptiker

Assuming the magick user knows about the real world and sees it as one of many realities there's a higher chance for the normal world or real world as we know it to be the one the superstate will result in.

Skeptiker vs Skeptiker

The probability of magick to exist is nearly zero. The result of the superstate will be the normal world as we - and probably them too - know it.

In Context with the Anime

So, if we take this back to the context of the anime the idea is for your esper ability to improve you need to find your own reality, the reality in which your ability exists to a high degree. Unfortunately, this is not so simple as it sounds and it may be even more difficult in real life. The issue is that there are more than just millions of people on the world and each of their bubbles almost completely intersects with another. There's hardly any space that does not intersect. Hence why magick users create their own room or area to perform magick. At the same time, this is also the reason why magick users form groups to perform rituals as multiple bubbles with the same beliefs overlap resulting in a higher success on magick. Additionally with an increase of people believing in magick or simply being open-minded or not denying it would increase the probability of successful rituals as well. Hence why academy city houses mostly espers and almost only people who believe in it.

Outro

Lastly, it's really interesting to see another form of artwork to base itself on a concept that is used in modern magick. It makes one think if the author was inspired by those beliefs had the same thought process of maybe it's something we all unconsciously know and believe in? Whatever it is it's our best bet to explain magick scientifically. Whether or not this explanation is correct is something we will figure out as we continue to understand quantum physics and as we dive deeper into the lowest levels of physics. Funnily enough, people already believe in the placebo and have proven which amazing feats it can do and they keep on studying it. "Glaube versetzt Berge" (Faith can move mountains) is a German saying that matches this too well.