The Last Ringbearer (Russian: Последний кольценосец, romanized: Posledniy kol'tsenosets) is a 1999 fantasy fan-fiction book by the Russian paleontologist Kirill Eskov. It is an alternative account of, and an informal sequel to, the events of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It has been translated into English by Yisroel Markov, but the translation has not been printed for fear of copyright action by the Tolkien Estate.

(snip)

Eskov bases his novel on the premise that the Tolkien account is a "history written by the victors". Mordor is home to an "amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic"

Mono teams got a lot of hype before and after Silver Wolf's release. As long as the boss has one of your two elements, you can reliably force your second element onto them. Basic knowledge, right? This also lets you do some extremely nasty things when she is combined with Pela, and lets you greatly reduce the amount of time you spend farming Stagnant Shadows.

Here is why the SW+Pela combo is hella broken:

• Damage applied at the end of quantum break is increased by DEF debuffs.
• Pela's technique and skill both stack with Silver Wolf's ultimate, bugs, and resistance shred. (at E0 and max traces: 45%+40%+20%+10% DEF, 10% all-type resist shred, 20% less resistance from guaranteed element weaknesses) This lets you burn through a boss quickly as long as you maximize the damage done before Pela's technique expires at the end of their second turn.
• Quantum and ice breaks both delay the boss's recovery from weakness break, further increasing their vulnerability windows.
• Attack-type techniques like Pela's can be used against Stagnant Shadows, and most of them are weak to quantum or ice. Don't forget to exit battle between fights so that you can enter with a technique again.
• This can also be used to speedrun any Simulated Universe stage where the elite sub-bosses are heavily biased toward quantum or ice. You can download three other characters as you go and reconfigure your team for the final boss, but don't forget to align your blessings toward the final team. Path Resonances benefit from defense debuffs as well, so remember to burn through those before the debuffs expire.

The standard team template looks like this:

• SW and Pela are the core of the team.
• A Hunt DPS. Seele and QQ are best because of how DEF debuffing interacts with quantum break. Yanqing can work if you don't have either, but you'll want to land the break with SW if possible.
• A defensive support. Gepard is ideal, March is workable but skill point hungry as usual. Fu Xuan and Lynx should also work a few patches from now, but I haven't looked at their leaked kits in any great detail.

The combat flow is pretty basic stuff:

• Your goal is to maximize damage done to the break bar. If the enemy is not weak to ice, do not use Pela's ultimate until after SW's skill. It won't do damage to the break bar otherwise.
• Wait until the boss makes their first action before using your debuffing ultimates in order to extend their duration. Ideally the boss will be vaporized before this becomes relevant, but it's a good habit to develop. You don't need to wait until the second half of the boss's turn is completed to abuse this. This is particularly helpful when debuffing the Guardian Shadow, because it lets you extend the debuff durations without getting nailed by the counters that are active after her second action.
• SW's ultimate does more damage to the boss than Pela's, so you usually want to drop it after Pela's. (especially when running SW with a sub-DPS build)
• If your skill points allow it, it's helpful to use Pela's skill once in order to increase the energy she has at the end of battle. If that means Pela eats a counter from Guardian Shadow, so be it.
• Try to avoid breaking the boss immediately before their first turn. (only a risk if they're very slow) You want their weakness break phase to be extended as deep into your character turns as possible. This maximizes the time the boss spends with a broken gauge which in turn increases your overall damage. It also reduces the likelihood that the debuff from Pela's technique will fall off before the boss is down.
• Obliterate the boss, delete the minions, repeat. If you're abusing the quantum break interaction, try not to overkill the boss. Switch off to the minions once you have a good feel for the ridiculous damage that a 5-tap quantum break deals under a mountain of defense debuffs.
• Don't rush to kill the minions if you need to squeeze in some extra energy gain. Use normals on characters who don't need energy, and save skill points for characters who need to fill theirs. (usually Pela and your Hunt character)

When farming a Stagnant Shadow, you'll want to chow down on Cheetos (Trick Snacks) and Mountain Dew (All Good Potion) between battles in order to maintain your gamer gremlin energy. The ingredients for these are extremely easy to farm with Assignments and you should not be shy about burning through them. The time that you spend in menu is much less time than you would otherwise spend fighting the boss since it lets you spam Pela's technique and ultimate at the beginning of every fight.

And there you have it, trivialized shadow farming. Too bad Pela's technique can't be used in Caverns of Corrosion...

Apparently one of the lemmy.ml admins was overzealous in banning all User-Agent strings that contained the word "bot". Bans were entered for all of the individual strings containing that word which were observed in their webserver logs, which impacted kbin's reported agent of "kbinBot".

The issue has been fixed, and I observed that one of my kbin posts to a lemmy.ml community was successfully pushed to the original instance.

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Edit:

Here are all the links that I've found with the lemmy.ml admins discussing the issue:

• https://lemmy.world/comment/1082149 (appears to have been where they first noticed and fixed the issue)
• https://lemmy.ml/post/1920972 (posted a few hours later, provides additional context for what happened)

This post was originally advising kbin users that lemmy.ml has been shadowbanning all of kbin since the beginning of the month, but that was corrected earlier today (7/10).

Content from this community should begin flowing in again. As proof, you can see this post actually made it to the original instance, despite this post only being third one that is visible to kbin.social.

Greetings from kbin.social! We can't see any of your existing four posts from our instance yet, so I figured I'd kick things off with a hot take to get people talking.

I've lurked in /r/lightnovels for awhile, and a common opinion that I've seen is that Disciple of the Lich is skippable because it is "another misunderstanding story with a dense and overpowered protagonist". I can definitely understand the burnout with those tropes, but I also think it's a selling the story's potential short.

To me, Disciple of the Lich is basically One Punch Man: RPG Edition. It takes the concept of an overpowered protagonist in an RPG world and plays it straight. The primary viewpoint character for this isn't the protagonist, but Pomera: the newbie half-elven shaman that he recruits early on. What is it like from a NPC's perspective to be power leveled against nightmare fuel enemies to the point where you are basically superhuman? (answer: recurring PTSD) What happens when an over-levelled healer accidentally uses her staff bonk on an average level adventurer? Exploring RPG meta jokes like these is what the series does well, and it functions at its best when it is being a genre parody like Konosuba instead of trying to tell a serious story.

Is Kanata dense? At the beginning, very. Like Pomera, he was power leveled in a small period of time. Unlike her, he wasn't born into the fantasy world and was misled by someone much more powerful than him into believing that the world is a scarier place than it actually is. The fact that his master still is more powerful than him anchors him to this mindset for two books. That's no small amount of time investment, and anyone who is already burnt out on clueless protagonists probably isn't going to have the time for that unless there is something else that grabs their attention. That goes double if they aren't a RPG fan and their ride isn't made any better by the genre jokes. Contrary to what some people have come away with, Kanata is not as oblivious to his master's crush as people seem to think he is, and I think the author recognized this sentiment enough to address it in one of the bonus stories.

Overall, I don't think Disciple of the Lich is perfect by any means, but what it does well it does very well. I just don't think it's the right series for everyone, and I say this as someone who didn't find Sword Art Online very appealing with how its main character was handled. I'm by no means a fan of protagonists who coast along through no real merit of their own, but I still like this series quite a bit. I think anyone who finds these bread crumbs I'm dropping interesting should give it a fair chance and make up their own mind. If you try it out on that basis and still think the series is meh, well, that just means I've got a strange attachment to it I guess. :)

Almost 15 years ago. Not my MC, but I worked at the same company for several years leading into it. None of the glory is mine, and I am not any of the named or fired characters in this story.

The setup needs some backstory for the MC to fully marinate, so bear with me for a moment. Tl;dr at the end.

---

Cast of Characters:

• Mr. Wheatley: VP of Technology. The protagonist, at least in his eyes.
• Lamprey: Lead Developer Career Backstabber Director of IT at time of MC, and sycophant attached to Mr. Wheatley
• Bottom: Director of IT Manager of Systems Guy who gets demoted every time Lamprey or Wheatley's knives need sharpening. He stubbornly refuses to quit despite the messages being sent, which is why he earns this moniker despite my like for the guy.
• Chad: Originally our phone guy. Dispenser of MC who enters late into the story.
• Chadette: A floor manager. Single mom with cancer and two sons that she struggles to provide for.

I once worked IT for a callcenter selling a morally questionable study product. The scam isn't obvious when you're interviewing for the position, but once you start walking the halls long enough people start talking and you learn what's really going on. The company has changed its name and product several times for legal reasons since I left, a fact well-known to us worker bees helping our later employers verify that the shithole company listed in our work history actually existed at some point.

In addition to the questionable nature of the product, the company itself was basically a bingo card for corporate corruption. Shipping department pocketing the difference between standard and expedited shipping if the customer requested expedited and was within a certain mileage of the package carrier? Check. President knocking up his executive assistant behind his wife's back? Check. Friends of that executive assistant being given casual walks around the block while being told to keep their faceholes shut about what they know? Check, and probably because the CEO is the wife of the President. Oops?

It was in this environment that the protagonist enters the story. We shall call him "Wheatley". Wheatley is an IT enthusiast (particular emphasis on this word) and stakeholder in the company who had recently returned from setting up a chemical plant in a country known for its lax safety standards. For reasons unknown to us worker bees, Wheatley had decided that he wanted a position of leadership over the IT department. The powers that be granted his wish, inserting a "VP of Technology" above the Director of IT.

• Bottom is the Director of IT. Intelligent, but occasionally pensive and nervous when pressured. Despite these tendencies, he will usually stand up for what he feels is the decision with the most objective merit. Poor guy never stood a chance.

• Wheatley has a doctorate. Some of you working under douchebags probably know where this is going already. Wheatley wanted everyone to know that he had this doctorate, as evidenced by his insistence in correcting any employee who did not address him as "Dr. Wheatley". He will be henceforth referred to in this post as Mr. Wheatley. Mr. Wheatley is an abusive narcissist who is convinced that he is a comedian and knows technology better than the people reporting up to him. His standard joke is to scrutinize the opinions of employees multiple rungs beneath him and joke about firing them. These "jokes" are always given a halfway serious delivery that communicates to the target that he is in fact halfway serious and could have them defenestrated if the mood suited him. He has an unhappy marriage and occasionally unleashes his scowling daughter on the mostly empty cube farm where IT resides, whereupon she crayons on those cube walls in a desperate bid for attention from the father who is too busy palling around with the executives upstairs or making a nuisance of himself in front of the worker bees who would rather be spending time on their actual jobs.

• Lamprey is the lead developer and began palling around with Mr. Wheatley during a transition between buildings. When we arrived for our first day at the new location, we learned that 1) Bottom had been demoted into "Manager of Systems" (a role created specifically for his demotion) and 2) Lamprey had been given the Director title in his place. Questionable, but okay.

So begins their reign of terror.

---

In his new role, Lamprey is a standard issue IT egoist who knows a few things and has let this get to his head. This self-assuredness is what won him a seat at the table of Mr. Wheatley. He does not like having his authority questioned, regardless of the merits involved in the opposing arguments, and will ensure that a disciplinary slip lands in your HR folder the next day if you fail to follow his direction on implementing something to the letter. (warnings? what are those?)

Chad is hired around this time. He was brought into the systems team to help wrestle with the phone system, but also dabbles with Linux in his spare time. He is not an actual Linux guy and makes sure people know this. For reasons unknown to Chad, Mr. Wheatley immediately takes a shine to him. It's probably because Chad has a good sense of humor, but also because he's not as worn down as the other worker bees and able to keep a smile on his face while laughing at Mr. Wheatley's shitty jokes, all the while hating his guts just as much as the rest of us.

A few months pass. Chad strikes up a relationship with Chadette, a single mom with cancer struggling to provide for her two sons. They are both cool people and this was a genuinely awesome thing. This was, unfortunately, one of the few high notes that year for their mutual work friends.

• One of the two guys in helpdesk who everyone knew had a baby on the way gets laid off with no notice.
• Disciplinary slips continue to fly on a whim, including to an employee who worked a night of unbilled overtime at his own discretion to try and make a solution work after Lamprey decided that he didn't want any more time being spent on it. (incidentally missing a call from a friend who committed suicide that night)

Needless to say, morale in the IT department is at an all-time low. So what does Mr. Wheatley decide to do out of nowhere? Demote Bottom again! Chad is stunned with disbelief when he (the phone guy!!) is promoted to manager over Bottom and the Linux admins, who he previously reported to. Bottom is no longer a manager at all, and his direct colleagues are people who have been with the company prior to the VP of Technology role even existing. He stubbornly refuses to quit despite this, but this is the last straw for some of his colleagues and they bail out of respect for him even if he is unwilling (or unable?) to do so for his own pride.

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The MC

Chadette is still fighting against cancer, and some days are much worse than others. Chad had started living with her recently, and occasionally comes into work late because he is helping to get her sons to school.

For this next part, it's important to understand that most IT employees enter the building through a side entrance that is closest to the server room. It is immediately adjacent to a stairwell, and only leadership and IT have access to badge through the door. For this reason it is generally a low traffic area.

One day, Chad arrives late from dropping off Chadette's sons and finds Mr. Wheatley standing on the other side of the door waiting for him. It is very deliberate. It is at this point that he drops a quip that is stunning, even with his well-entrenched reputation for being a shiteater.

"You know, at some point, you really need to think about what is more important..."

Chad is stunned into silence with disbelief for a moment. Did he hear that correctly? He knows that Mr. Wheatley is aware of the extenuating circumstances, so is it actually possible that he just said that out loud? It takes a moment to process, but Chad was given his name for a reason in this story, and he has balls of steel.

"OK"

Chad turns right back around, walks back to his car, and drives home. Message received, motherfucker.

When Chad doesn't show up to work the next day, it probably begins to sink in with Mr. Wheatley the extent to which he just fucked up. Particularly since the only person who is good at wrangling the phone system has ditched -- arguably the most important person in callcenter ops. To his credit (unless it was because something broke), he waits two weeks before he finally gives Chad a call on his cell. Wheatley plays it cool with Chad and starts with making small talk, completely ignoring the elephant in the room. Everyone is cordial. Once Mr. Wheatley has a good sense for the temperature and determines that hands are not going to emerge from his phone and repeatedly slam his face into a wall, he finally broaches his main reason for calling.

"So, when do you think you're coming back to the office?"

Chad could get justifiably quite angry here, but he's already thought this through ahead of time.

"That was my notice." click

A few months later, I'm hanging out with Chad and Chadette at their house and this story is relayed to me over showing him BlazBlue multiplayer on PS3. They were awesome people who deserved each other, and I couldn't be more proud of how he chose her over one of the biggest workplace douchebags I've ever had the displeasure of encountering.

Bottom finally quit sometime after this if I have my timeline straight. Poor Bottom. :( Eventually there was a near full turnover of everyone who had been in the IT department since before Mr. Wheatley joined the company, and he got grilled for it. Lamprey was still there because, well, he's a goddamn lamprey.

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tl;dr

IT "enthusiast" with partial ownership in company has a VP position created for himself over IT department, erects a hegemony of asskissing around himself, demotes a director twice until he is no longer a manager at all, lays off an employee expecting a baby with no notice. Douche canoe finally gets his comeuppance when the most vital ops employee quits without notice after being told to choose between work and his girlfriend with two sons and cancer. Eventually there is a full turnover of IT, minus the sycophant who got promoted for his asskissing. Get fucked, Mr. Wheatley.

Edits: Neglected to mention that there had been a full turnover of IT under Mr. Wheatley's watch, minus Lamprey. Age of Blazblue on PS3 used to better approximate when this happened. Importance of MC wielder's job function.