Finishing the Rumble Grimoire. Also, Fuck Sepsis

When I assigned myself the task of completing the grimoire wins for each crucible playlist, I was between houses - sans prime family - and staying at my parents' place.  Just me and my dad for a couple weeks, aside from the few days I stayed overnight in NYC for work.

As an aside, it's coming up on a month since my dad passed away after an unexpected and extraordinarily brief fight against sepsis (blood toxicity from a bacterial infection).  I am filled with regret, anger, disbelief and sometimes despair, but I am also glad for the times we spent together lately.  Particularly those aforementioned couple weeks when it was just the two of us.  I indulge this personal aside as background for the following entreaty: learn the signs of sepsis and be prepared to advocate for yourself or your loved one when facing medical providers and/or ER intake personnel.  This thing destroys bodies with a frightful quickness.  My dad went from "I think maybe my lunch meat was bad" to comatose in about 12 hours, and from that point, aggressive medical intervention could only get him another 44 hours of life.  As I wrote in clan discord server just before heading off to the airport to try to reach my dad before the inevitable: "Hold your peeps close, peeps.  Life can be a real MF sometimes." From sepsis.org:

I had already completed the Elimination wins without even realizing it.  So I started, in grimoire card order, with Clash and Control.  The 30 or so wins I needed in each of those playlists took just a couple days each, running juggernaut Titan with Feedback Fence, LitC/rangefinder/reinforced Eyasluna and LitC/aggr/reinforced Matador.

Since then (it was August 2016; now it's January 2017) I've been working on the Rumble grimoire.  I was at just under 30 wins when I started the process.  Now bumping up against 70.  So, yeah.  A few days for 60 Control/Clash wins.  Five months for 40 Rumble wins.  Holy hell.

Part of the drip drip drip of wins is from reduced playtime.  Part is the nature of the playlist.  By design, you should be winning about half your team-based playlist games.  Rumble, though?  Technically, you should be winning about 16-17%, or a sixth.  I'm a bit above 10%.  And that lines up with the matchmaking, I think.  I have:

·         a pretty good shot at about 80% of my games, where opponent ELOs are all within a couple hundred of mine;

·         an excellent shot at about 10%, where the ELOs are pretty tight to mine; and

·         no fucking chance at the other 10%.  

In those "no chance" games?  I'm against players on an entirely difference plane of existence.  A sampling of such opponents from my Rumble grind:

Guardian dot gg Rumble Rank	XBONE GT
24...................	Snipelogic
66...................	Conjector
95...................	Dzizy
115.................	Grip Funky
121.................	Cam
159.................	Mikke
174.................	Artyk
217.................	Vonify
256.................	Xayah
280.................	Ripsta
332.................	More Velocity
338.................	Edd1biP1nP1n
339.................	Flucz
371.................	Texas Prod
380.................	Narzuh
546.................	McNug
and.................
.......................
.......................
.......................
.......................
790.................	I Am CoolGuy

These players have short, simple GTs devoid of numbers subbed for letters and the injudicious application of the letter x (mostly). They don't sport scarab emblems (which emblem, paradoxically, more often signifies an opponent I can readily beat). They are not streaming (again, mostly). They don't emote or teabag (and yep, you guessed it: mostly *ahem, looking at you, McNug*). And they play differently from the rest of us. The play in a fashion that evinces (i) crazy good movement skill, (ii) crazy consistent mid-range eyasluna 3-tap ability (usually; some of these folks are artists with complete shit weapons, like Conjector with the Zarinaea-D) and (iii) *throwin' salt here* the ability to consistently survive shotty-melee-melee in the rare instance I'm able to get the jump on them.

Slightly exaggerating that last bit, which really is a function of the aforementioned crazy good movement skill, in the sense that there's no hitting these guys dead-on.

Anyway . . .

The recently-reduced skill-based matchmaking priority has made my grind a little more difficult, but I figure to wrap it up by the end of March if I can keep up my pace of an hour, maybe two, of gameplay four nights a week, minus Iron Banner weeks.

My loadouts for the grind are, lately:

-- bladedancer with quickdraw and invis super, extra-mag silvered dread machine gun, shinobu's vow double skips and either (i) vendor palindrome + trespasser or (ii) last word and but not forgotten or 1000 yard stare, memory of jolder;

-- striker with shoulder charge, transfusion and shockwave super and max agility, same machine gun as above, MIDA (or sometimes a max range shadow price), matador (yr1 matador, recently re-rolled with cascade and replenish for ammo purposes), mk.44 standasides, memory of jolder (this is a shoulder charge-focused build - MIDA gives more agility, jolder eliminates sprint cooldown, and standasides prolong the time during which your sprint can activate a shoulder charge; transfusion then triggers life support with each successful shoulder charge); and

-- voidwalker with life steal, embrace the void and scatter 'nades, same machine gun and matador as above, LitC/rangefinder/reinforced Eyasluna, Ophidians, memory of jolder.

This may be of interest to no one, but I close with a microtage of a few Rumble win clips from the first month of Rise of Iron:

"Recent ROI Rumblings" mid-November 2016