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wed posted: Wed 2022-09-21 11:47:59 tags: n/a
Some while back someone on Facebook posted a meme connecting "being neurodivergent" to reacting to other peoples' self-revelation with a relatable story about one's own similar experience. But I don't believe that's "neurodivergent". I believe it's a very natural reaction and what's UNnatural and needs to be trained, modeled and practiced with conscious intention, is the clinical counselor/analyst mode of affirming, rephrasing and echoing back, and a constellation of related responses, without injecting our own strategy, values and goals.

There was a more recent meme from a tech forum where a character is explaining "often people just need to feel heard and by offering direction, you're just making the conversation about you". Then the "aha" moment, the person is first-tier support tech and their supervisor says "we made a terrible mistake hiring you" and the tech replies "wow that must be so frustrating". So yes of course there are roles in which "support" is very much expected to take the form of taking charge, initiating solution steps, and seeing the process through to a "resolved" status. The "listening ear" role goes against the grain of all our self-image of competence and success.

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Castle Age 13th Anniv event aftermath
The event prizes introduced some subtly game-changing mechanics. The paramount general, Lord of Inferno, is a +pierce/+resist type, but his power applies even when not equipped. So, at one-star rank and leveled to 15, he gives +20.07 each to pierce and resist, nothing to write home about, but even unequipped he's adding +10 each. Huge hero leveling resource sink for a pretty modest boost, but it's a boost outside the bounds of normal general alliance configuration.

Just before the event, we saw roll-out of the ability to slot 2 pets at once, with the pet in the secondary slot providing reduced power. Several new pets were unlocked in the event:
- Crystal Whelp: base 10% chance to recover a bonus stam point at each recovery tick
- Hell Viper: base +10% crit chance and crit damage +15% of crit chance

I also scored a copy of legendary general Moonlight Dragon: +x% crit chance, +y% crit damage.
Reportedly the crit% scales same as general Dolomar, but being a legendary chest pull, there's just no way for non-billionaires to promote Moonlight Dragon past a few stars, and getting all of both effects means placing it first in an alliance configuration. So I think it's a bit of a white elephant, which is sad for a legendary. But we've seen other white-elephant legendaries, Wraith King being a prime example.