User talk:Jdavis

Hi! If I left you a message at your talk page, then please respond there; I am watching it. If you leave a message for me here, then I'll respond here, so please check back. Jdavis 21:51, 16 August 2011 (UTC) Shut up can't tell mr what to do!

Cutter Charge

The cutter lines do NOT have a terrible charge. It has a highly SITUATIONAL charge--Trying 15:22, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

I spent a lot of time using a DVS in the old days. I could never learn to use the charge attack well. Some people claim that they can use the charge attack well, but I have not seen compelling video of this. I tell you what: I know from your forum posts that you are not a newbie or an idiot. So I'll look into it again, and maybe refine my opinion. Regards. Jdavis 16:20, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

did you look at the last post here? [1]--Trying 15:23, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

I never watched that last video, but I have now. My conclusion: You can release Cutter charges on slow monsters, when there are no fast monsters aggro'ed on you. Do you agree? There is only one other kind of example in that video, of using a charge against two gremlins in a deconstruction zone. What's your opinion on faster enemies like this? Jdavis 15:36, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Yeah it's pretty much only for bosses and slow enemies, though I think if you charge up and have a bunch of greavers spawn and charge at you in one direction, you might be able to pull it off.--Trying 18:28, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Okay, so I'll refine my advice to take all of this into account. Thanks, Trying. Jdavis 21:29, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Armor Page Additions

Hi Bopp, this is just a suggestion for your armor guide, but what do you think of including Antistone's research on armor mechanics? It would be useful to have the information from that page in an easy-to-read format for those interested in the main idea of the subject but not the details surrounding it, and also it would be good to have an experienced player draw conclusions from the research and explain the implications to a swordmaster, gunslinger, or bomber role. Whether this latter suggestion should be included in your armor page or the respective swordsmaster, gunslinger, or bomber pages is up to you. The link to Antistone's page is at the bottom of the swordmaster's guide.

Anyways, just thought it would be a nice addition to your armor page if you are still working on it. Take care! - Blaisem 22:37, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi, Blaisem. I am aware of Antistone's research. See also Kalaina-Elderfall's research, here and here, if you haven't already. I really admire them for doing such tests. If I understand correctly, the current thinking is that the damage blocked by a helmet or suit is proportional to the displayed statistic bar on the helmet or suit. In other words, we can trust appearances (unlike in some parts of Spiral Knights).

I am still working on my armor guide, but slowly. I have decided that quantifying damage protection at the bar/pixel level should not be part of my guide. It is too detailed of information, especially since my advice is to go for offensive bonuses rather than optimal defense. I mean, whether a helmet offers 6.3 bars of piercing or 7.3 bars of piercing should not be a major consideration. But you are probably right, that I should include some mention of this issue in the "Basic Concepts" section of the guide.

Thanks for writing, and for your recent edits to the Swordmaster Guide. Jdavis 03:09, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Great! I hadn't seen that second link by Kalaina-Elderfall!

Well, they did show that the bars are proportional to the defense blocked, but the biggest discovery was that armor scales linearly. Linear scaling means that the more you stack armor, the more valuable it becomes, and the less you stack it, the smaller the difference it will make.

A Skolver armor + Divine Veil combination might very well do no more than allow you to withstand one additional hit, while a double Skolver set has the potential of applying not only double piercing bonuses, but also versatile double normal bonuses. If we can say that one approach to preparing your armor loadout not better than another, then it's just not worth it to take armor into consideration for your load out, until you can afford to make specialized load outs. It's just more evidence that armor type should be subservient to offensive bonuses, and perhaps dangerous status effects like shock or freeze that can result in your death with one untimely proc.

The test also showed that UV-medium +defense bonuses (such as trinkets) struggled to display even a half bar difference in damage taken, and UV-max! was about 3/4 of a bar difference in damage. This is possibly not even capable of making a difference in how many hits you can survive before dying, unless you are making a specialized loadout where you stack two or three sources of them. So, worrying about these UVs or trinkets probably shouldn't be worth a newbie's time.

I don't know if you think it worthwhile to put into your guide, but I agree a link might not be a bad idea. Anyways, hope this could be of some use to you. Cheers! --Blaisem 05:24, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Right: When you combine armors, their defense bars combine linearly, and the research by Antistone and Kalaina-Elderfall suggests that defense bars are proportional to the hit point reductions. So everything about damage defense is proportional and easy to understand. But, as you note, what one really cares about is how many hits you can sustain before dying. The same thing is true on offense, of course. You don't care about your sword's damage-per-second, but rather kills-per-second or hits-per-kill.

The problem is that it's hard to measure, analyze, and communicate hits-until-death and kills-per-second, because they are sensitive to slight changes in the tactical situation. For example, does a damage increase on an Acheron actually decrease the number of hits needed to kill a jelly? When I'm fighting solo on a specific depth, I can easily measure this. But the answer may vary with depth, the number of knights in my party, which weapons those knights are using, which knights are poisoned, etc. And if we're talking about armor, the same thing goes for poison on monsters, rate of heart drops, presence of damage from fire and shock, etc.

So I agree with everything you're saying, but I'm not sure what to say in my guide. Maybe I should repeat what you've said about status. If you're shocked, then you can go from full health to dead in a few seconds, even if your armor is matched to the damage type of the monsters. So status defense is really important. Jdavis 13:58, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

I think what you might want to say is that the further you go the more important status resists are and the less important armor defenses are.--Trying 15:09, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, that might be a good rule of thumb. I'll continue thinking about it. Thanks for your advice, too. Jdavis 16:23, 25 August 2012 (UTC)I guess this trick assumes the default skin. :( -- Bopp

Armor in Lockdown

Since we were speaking of armor before, what do you make of this:

http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/63022

So far, it seems to go against what we learned from the past studies. I am reluctant to think Kalaina and Antistone could both have been wrong, and they presented their studies with well-defined conditions, so I am still a little speculative of the new study. But assuming it is correct, perhaps Lockdown just has a completely different set of rules than PvE.

But Kalaina and Antistone did do their studies a long time ago. Do you think there is a chance that OOO changed things without mentioning it? Presumably, a player like yourself would have likely noticed a change in the damage you were taking since you have been around since the beginning...--Blaisem 17:12, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm very interested. Cooperation between two Lockdown teams seems like the ultimate way to gather damage and armor data. But very few of those tests have known resistances attached. I would want to know the exact armor on the victim.

Three Rings is often accused of "stealth patches" that change the rules without announcement. I believe that these changes are largely unintended consequences filtering through the software. Anyway, I have not noticed any big change to Lockdown damage. But I am far from the best Lockdown player. Jdavis 23:04, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Shard bombs

When I was working on compiling my observations on shard bombs, my goal was to be as objective as possible and let people watch videos, read my findings and come to their own conclusions regarding the bombs. What I never shared on the page is just the sheer amount of levels I ran with the shard bombs, the amount of times things went poorly, and all the failed attempts at clears I had with shard bombs.

I didn't use these on test server but I used them extensively after the patch. I don't think there is a single run that I didn't dedicate one of my slots to a shard bomb. I wouldn't be surprised if I've used these bombs more than anybody else on SK.

You mentioned finding some secret niche the shard bombs might fill but I never found it and trust me, I was looking for it. Whenever a weapon has a unique mechanic a situation usually arises where it's better than other weapons at one specific thing, even if small and insignificant. I just never found it. The damage is way too low which makes them uncompetitive out of the door. The discrepancy between bonus and neutral damage is something that isn't found on any other weapon which makes all the specialty bombs completely one-dimensional. The neutral bomb, as a result, isn't just uncompetitive, it's unusable IMO (the clears are ~2.6x slower than other neutral bombs!). In terms of utility, they are slow, unreliable, etc. I don't see any redeeming qualities.

Slow Approach

You can argue that these bombs are meant to be used more methodically, baiting enemies into the inner ring and then hitting them with the outer ring. I disagree. The bomb doesn't even synergize with itself; often you'll knock an enemy back with the inner explosion but the outer ring is timed so that the enemy has many chances to move out of the way. Doing the 1 bomb at a time thing is probably the SLOWEST way possible to kill anything in the game.

Fast Spam Approach

This seemed like the best but the knockback is insanely disruptive here. It's unpredictable. You'd need to be completely cerebral to maximize the damage of the bombs and even when you luck out and manage multiple double-triple hits in a row, the bomb bugs out and prevents you from getting double and triple hits.

Support Bomb

Yeah you can deal damage and spread status (stun, lol!) but VT/EV is still better at spreading shock and stun is completely bugged. The bomb has the slowest set-up of any weapon in the game and as such is a poor support bomb since you lose a ton of mobility despite it having "normal" bomb walking speed.

Damage Bomb

Specialty bombs cleared ~1.2-1.3x slower than neutral damage bombs. Everything I've seen suggests that they should be ~1.4x faster, but they're not. Neutral damage bombs cleared 2.6x slower. Keep in mind I ran levels multiple times with shard bombs and only did single-pass with other bombs.

CC Bomb

Nope. These things will push on one bomb, pull on another.

PvP

Let me first say that I don't PvP. My specialty has always been PvE but I went in an tried these bombs out to see if they work at all. The slow set-up time kills them and the damage is so low that it's nearly impossible to kill people. For the most part, people just completely ignore shards because the damage is pitiful.

Conclusion

I didn't read any of the "petition to bring back RSS" threads or QQ threads regarding shard bombs until after I was done compiling my results as I didn't want to taint my findings but unsurprisingly most bombers in this game came to many of the same conclusions as me. Trust me, I didn't do a single run with these things and come to a "conclusion" that they weren't the old RSS and therefore they are bad; they are bad on their own right.

As far as being an ambassador for these bombs, fighting for them or for buffs for them, it's not really my job and I've been down this road before with OOO. The turn around time for their actions is way too slow. A lot of the bomb balance issues I suggested needed changing arrived 8-12 months after I posted about them. I talked about how poor the stagger storm was and how bugged stun was a year ago and it wasn't even acknowledged until recently. I'll let someone else fight for these bombs and wait 8-12 months for changes. Until then I'll happily let these things collect dust in my inventory. -Eek5 01:41, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

As always you've given a thorough and well-composed analysis. I didn't really have an agenda when I asked you about it. I've used RSS (both old and new). My hunch was that fast spamming might be able to deliver decent sustained damage output to a crowd of monsters. But your experience contradicts that idea. Well, thank you. Jdavis 16:43, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Danger Missions revision

Hey Bopp, I read your edits in the Ghosts in the Machine danger mission, i was wondering if you can edit the rest of danger missions too, because my english grammar is not really good to check it, many thanks! - Sir Onox

Sure, I will try to do more edits on them. Cheers. Jdavis 18:44, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

"Category: Allusions" project

Hello, was wondering how you wanted to handle things like the unclean aura - I've been working on a few niche category formats, but I'm pretty sure they're not appropriate for this. For your category, I'm not sure if you would want to do...

• A redirect page (which most accessories do not have) with the tag on it (it would of course show up italicized in the category page itself) or...

• A category tag on the image of the aura itself, or...

• something else.

IMO, a tag directly on the image file would be most appropriate regarding the format of the entire wiki, but it would look a bit weird until we get a few more images, but then it might confuse users as to why some things are images and some things are not on the actual category page.

Good project!

PS the "unclean aura" is a reference to "Deadly Premonition," as noted on the aura page.

-Novaster 17:12, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

I've encountered a few cases like this. My approach has been not to create new wiki pages, but just to tag (and clean up) the existing wiki pages. So, in this case, I would edit Aura like this: Change the "Trivia" section to "Notes", because what's trivial or not is subjective. Then add [[Category:Allusions]] to the end of the page. Also, I would change a lot of the bulleted lists into paragraphs, per this Wiki Editors thread. Does that sound okay?

I have not tagged any image files, but I am not specifically against it.

I'm glad that you like the project. And thanks for all of your editing too. It does not go unnoticed. Jdavis 01:53, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

-Novaster 21:30, 6 July 2014 (UTC): I added a general response to that forum post. Anyway, regarding bullets vs. paragraphs - if the information reads like a paragraph, then it should be in one. But a bunch of distinct information points didn't seem to go well in a paragraph (multiple previewing of the pages made for personal frustration in finding the information desired without using ctrl+F). Bullet in this coding format also help with this sort of thing:

• Hey, watermelons are green.
  • most of them are striped.
• Some apples are green.
• Cucumbers are dark green.

But it's the wiki - if you feel that it's better, change it, but change it for all pages in question. And sometimes that sort of change a much bigger pie than it seems. So, considering that... use this excuse: "if it's not broken, don't fix it" - but when it comes to this sort of thing, it's not really an issue of being "broken", haha.