#ratasum

For @ratasum !!

Sure sure!! :D

A. What nicknames do they get called?

Technically me calling her Cio all the time is a nickname, since that's not her full name, but it's the name she goes by to pretty much everyone! Pliarr calls her Cee sometimes, and Ari calls her Sparks.

B. Describe their family dynamic.

Cio's parents died when she was very little and she has no memory of them at all. Pliarr, who's her older brother, does remember them but has mixed feelings on them. He still told Cio some of the more positive stories he had about them when she was younger. Cio and Pliarr had a family friend as their guardian growing up, Yzzpa, who wasn't particularly parental but does care about them. They still send Cio and Pliarr letters reminding them that they're around to help if needed. They can write a very good recommendation letter should it be required. Slightly condescending, but well-intentioned. As for Cio and Pliarr's relationship, they're very close and love each other a lot, and make a point to touch base at least once a month despite the fact that they are sometimes on opposite sides of the world.

C. What’s their weirdest habit or quirk?

ashdjkf well you are partly to blame for reigniting my interest in Thaumanova again! And I thank you for that.

I've been trying to brainstorm on Ardjin for a while, and I was playing with the idea of him having some connection to the reactor somehow. I unfortunately didn't have anyone to dabble in my brainstorming with, so I put Ardjin on the shelf for like a year before I came back to him to work out the details on his life. And boy, I've been hitting this poor old rat multiple times with my wrench for the past couple of months!

I need to make a timeline for myself to see where everything takes place, but I headcanon that Ardjin had a hand at providing funding for the Inquest at the reactor. Being a member of the Arcane Council and having Flax as a close dear friend, Ardjin had quite the influence and the power.

Ardjin also had his own underground research facility nearby the reactor, in which he was creating bio-engineered monstrosities and living weapons. This had gone on for like a decade, up until the day the reactor blew, and Ardjin was in his facility when it happened. Shook the place up, nearly crumbled it all in and he was caught in the aftershock. He got messed up pretty bad, but thanks to his medical team he recovered well, only having to replace one of his eye.

Lately, I've been thinking maybe he's originally from the city above Thaumanova and that's why he built his research facility nearby. Still needa brainstorm on that some more, tho.

There's a lot I could talk about on Ardjin, but this reply is getting longer than it should, so I'll keep it barebones in relation to the Thaumanova Reactor aaa

I'm trying to get more into endgame content so I really would love the advice!!

Hey there! I'm happy to help how I can. Unfortunately this is going to be one of those questions that has a longer and more beneficial answer as well as a shorter, more direct but less beneficial answer, so I apologize in advance and thank you for bearing with me lol. The short and direct answer is that there are many instances in which runes of the Eagle, the Pack, Strength, and Rage can perform just as well as Scholar for a fraction of the cost. And even when they don't meet the exact output, whichever one works best for your build will get you pretty darn close. Berserker and Ogre are other very solid DPS runes for condi/power hybrids and power DPS respectively, but they've become frequently recommended alternatives to Scholar and their price has risen nearly as high now.

That said, my longer answer is that there is no general direct substitute rune that will work better for all DPS builds all the time, but this is also part of what is wrong with the way that Scholar runes are ubiquitously recommended on meta build sites.

Every rune in gw2 has a fairly unique set of circumstances in which they function best, just as the different classes and specializations all have different benefits and limitations, and the key to a well optimized (or min-maxed) build is to play into a particular niche of combat as hard as you possibly can. Scholar runes provide a total of 175 power and (now) 225 ferocity in pure stat points, but their main claim to fame is their 6th slot bonus: "Increase strike damage by 5% while your health is above 90%".

For clarity, "strike damage" in gw2 refers specifically to power-based damage or "direct damage". Damage that can critically hit. It does not apply to condition damage. Strike damage is also mitigated by the target's armor and Toughness stat. Condition damage, on the other hand, is not.

Scholar runes became so recommended because of two misguided notions:

That "strike damage" amplifiers increase all outgoing damage dealt by the player, making them the most important "stat" to stack. And,

That the best defense is always killing something dead faster than it can hit you, and that if you ever take damage the answer is always "git gud". (People treating defensive stats as "training wheels" for gaming is certainly not unique to scholar-runes enthusiasts, but nothing displays it quite as potently as tying your stats to how often you can keep your HP at 10k/11k.)

The truth of the matter is that there is no shortcut stat to a solid build in this particular game, and it takes balancing a number of stats and fine-tuning traits and skills to optimize your build.

As an example, I'm going to use this Power Deadeye build copied from a popular raid build website. Full details can be seen at the link, but notably it uses full Berserker armor, Scholar runes, and sigils of Force and Impact. These are the final stats on the Power Deadeye build as given:

This build is noted by its creators as not being beginner friendly, and having a rotation which requires "extreme precision and pristine conditions". I cite this only to better illustrate that this build is intended to be the most optimal thief build for endgame content.

The rotation's main loop is as follows, and the skill screenshots' numbers are based on the attributes of the equipment given assuming the player is above 90% health. It is stated that Malicious Backstab must be used from behind.

This loop provides a maximum total of 15,464 direct damage, plus an additional maximum 5,288 condition damage from one loop. Accounting for the build's perpetual fury bringing critical chance to 99.33%, and the fury-increased critical damage of 270.47%, this increases the total direct damage of this loop to 41,545, and leaves us with a grand total of 46,833 damage per loop. Now, how close can we get to those numbers on that exact rotation without Scholar runes?

For this comparison, I swapped the Scholar runes for Runes of Strength. Also, noting that the Impact sigils were only giving their base 3% strike damage bonus since this build has no stuns or knockbacks to make use of its secondary feature, I exchanged the Sigil of Impact for Sigils of Strength to synergize with the new rune choice. [Rebuild Link] The sigil choice plays on the build's near-100% crit chance by giving a stack of might on each critical hit, and with the runes' increased Might duration, this means you will passively accumulate and maintain 15 stacks of might while in combat. So what do the numbers look like now?

In this version of the loop, we get 16,565 direct damage, and 10,418 bonus condition damage. When we account for critical hit the same way we did before, this amounts to 42,035, giving us a grand total of 52,453 damage dealt per loop. So in this instance, replacing Scholar Runes and Impact Sigils with Strength Runes and Strength Sigils gave this build a DPS increase from the recommended build.

Now, this doesn't mean that every build could be improved by those same changes, but there are often very few changes that would need to be made to adjust a build for the removal of Scholar runes. If nothing else, I hope this helps to illustrate how there is no one-size-fits all answer to runes, let alone to builds as a whole, no matter how popular a specific item is with metagamers.

You get Minei rambles, cause she is constantly on my mind recently (and also tyty <3)

One of the things I find incredibly fascinating about Minei is her relationship both with death as a concept and with Grenth specifically.

Ever since a near-death experience as a very young child (during which her birth parents were both killed), Minei's been blessed by Grenth. She specifically credits him with being a large portion of the reason she's alive at all. However, despite that, she doesn't really worship Grenth in the same way that (for example) Kas worships the Six. I think I joked once a long time ago that Minei in this aspect is kinda similar to Edward Elric from FMA, who met the closest being to a god in his world and still proclaimed himself agnostic afterwards. Grenth, to Minei, is some amalgamation of a god and a patron and a parent who's never really been a parent. He's responsible for her life and is the reason she's much more powerful than the average necromancer, but that's about all she gives him credit for. And this perception of her god in turn affects how she sees death in general.

Death is not something Minei considers fair, regardless of what happens in the Mists afterward. It's brutal and cold and unforgiving, and that is not something she praises. She utilizes that power as a weapon to great and terrifying effect in combat though, as well as in smaller and happier ways--her little rat minion who's with her nearly all the time is one example of this.

At the same time as Minei holds this disdain of sorts towards Grenth, she's incredibly hurt and angry to find out during PoF that he and the rest of the Six had left Tyria entirely. She also parallels him/his associated domains quite often. Destruction and vengeance are the two things that built that connection between them in the first place, when a very young Minei lashed out with barely-formed power at the assassins who killed her parents. She walks the vengeance path often as a teenager, to the point that she has to check herself lest she be manipulated by it or killed because of it. And she's not meant to judge the dead, but she kind of does that as well after LWS4 when she grants a wandering soul who's become a good friend a second chance at life using her necromancy. Notably, this is only able to happen after she helps Desmina and co. defeat Dhuum, which is also something Grenth did--and one of Dhuum's original issues was the fact that he prevented resurrection.