zircon

I actually did an electro-house remix of some themes from Team Fortress 2, but it's not posted yet. Be on the lookout for "Electrodispenser"!

Cover also seems to be a reference to the Duke Nukem 3D cover where Duke is sort of offhandedly shooting a monster off to the side of the pedestal.

Important post, please read. HoN is not a game necessarily suited for the 'casual' player. One player not pulling their weight can ruin a game, and make everyone else feel like their time was wasted. In fact, one can play as well as possible, but it is very hard to carry your ENTIRE team, even as an amazing player. The best you can do is try to lead and push them to victory, but even this doesn't always happen. It's definitely frustrating when you personally have a flawless execution, but "your team" loses the game for you. When I was reading the "good sportsmanship in games" thread I noticed how I was arguing that our community is generally pretty friendly when it comes to competitive games. However, with HoN, that unfortunately isn't really the case. I'm guilty of it myself, so I'm not saying this to implicate one or two people specifically. I really think we all need to take a deep breath and scale back our verbal/textual abuse which is often directed at newer or less-skilled players. Over the last few days there has been some serious berating and flaming, and the last thing we want to do is chase people away from this scene. You have to keep a few things from mind as you play: (a) If you're playing with teams of roughly equal skill, you have a FIFTY percent chance of losing. So, expect to lose. A lot. Don't whine about it excessively. DO analyze why you lost and try to do better in the future. ( When you lose, it is just as much your fault as anyone else's on your team. While I've been in situations where I was 5-6 levels above my team, super-farmed and still lost, even in these situations I probably could have done more to help. So, don't absolve yourself from all responsibility and blame it on everyone else. For example, in the last game I played, we were having a hard time dealing with Pandamonium, and Luke got blamed for our loss (inability to stun Panda.) But in hindsight, I should have bought Barbed Armor or a Void Talisman. Puppet Master should have gone a support build instead of DPS. Accursed should have KSed me less. Valkyrie should have had better initiating arrows. etc. © We're all only human. It doesn't feel good to be yelled at and called a screwup, or blamed for every loss. Do you really think this motivates most people? No. Try to be positive at least some of the time and help each other to correct mistakes AND compliment what they're doing right. This is not a simple game by any stretch of imagination so if someone doesn't spend hours every day playing/researching (like me) they might need to be reminded of concepts that would appear, to more skilled players, to be very basic. Let's not prove people in that other thread right about how "playing to win" makes us all assholes.

The point of the PTW philosophy is not just "win this match at all costs", but to become better and also improve your chances of winning future matches. Sirlin's article about the topological 'landscape' basically summed that up. If you do literally nothing but play to win whatever current match you're in, you may ignore the big picture - learning new characters and techniques, experimenting, maybe doing worse for a few matches or games but being better off in the long run. I guess you could say it's the difference between the student who studies hard "for the test" and puts all their effort into cramming material, and the student who really takes their time to understand what they're learning. The former might get as good or better grades, but they're not better off in the long run at all. If you only play people who are much worse than you, then you are not getting any real practice, and you will be dominated when you encounter someone who practices with people at their skill level continually.

That is exactly what I deny. I don't think "playing to win" at all equates with "being a dick." In fact being a dick is counter-productive to playing to win; you want MORE good opponents, not fewer, and if you force people away from the game by your attitude you are only hurting yourself in the long run.

Wow, that is actually pretty similar. The chords of course are the same, but the movement and rhythm of the melody is definitely similar. Same with the arpeggio patterns!

The two aren't even remotely analogous. We already have Remix.kwed, RTS, OCR, VGmix X and remixSite. It's not unreasonable to say that these cover pretty much any possible way of hosting remixes that you could think of. It's not like there are that many possible ways you can post music on a website. On the other hand, I like what Jake is describing, which isn't just another remix website, but rather functionality specific to WIPs, project management, etc. Of course I'd like to see that stuff on OCR too

Bardic is right (again). We're all agreeing on the point that good sportsmanship is important to the health and longevity of a game, and that good sportsmanship is, well, good to have. We just seem to disagree on whether "playing to win" inherently results in bad sportsmanship. Considering both he and I do play to win, as well as many others we know in this community, the answer would seem to be "no" and I'm not sure how much more proof we can really give of that.

I haven't been to any large-scale tournaments like EVO, and that's not really relevant to the debate. However, on SRK, he's pretty well-respected by a lot of the top-tier players there. The only times I've ever seen him disrespected by great players is because of his views on new fighting games like SF4 and BlazBlue, not because of Playing to Win. If you read his guides/thoughts/writeups on SF, he is in fact tight with a lot of the top SF players, which is why he consulted with so many of them while rebalancing HDR. What I'd like to ask you is this; do you actually think the best players in competitive games don't play to win? In other words, do you think the best baseball players have a made-up set of rules in their head, not accepted by the rest of the community and not written into the rules of the game? Do you think ANY major league baseball player thinks to themselves, "It's so cheap to steal a base - I won't do it"? Do you think the best SF players are like that? Do you think guys like Daigo, Alex Valle or Justin Wong EVER for a second say "I won't use that combo, it does so much damage and is so hard to predict!" You've only given one example of a "good" Smash player who doesn't believe in IC loops, but really, how common is it that great players say "I'm not going to pick this character; he's too cheap?" That's behavior I just about ONLY see in weaker players. It sounds like you are the one that has little competitive experience. The best players play to win. It's undeniable. Sirlin didn't invent this philosophy, he merely explained it so people who were having trouble getting to the next level could get better by changing their mindset. And, if you read his post-book comments, he's gotten tons of positive feedback from people across the board in every competitive gaming community about how true his words are. Also, it's funny that you should say that Sirlin wouldn't support picking a weaker character like Samus. You do know that in SF tournaments, he tended to pick underpicked characters, rather than the commonly "top tier" guys? He has written at length about how his playstyle (learning many characters, exploring all the tricks) is often at odds with how the best play (learning one character and exploiting their max potential.) Oh, and in HD Remix, his top character, which he brought to tournaments, is Fei Long, considered to be one of the worst in the game. This argument is honestly boiling down to this point right here. NOWHERE does Sirlin say that you need to believe you're "intrinsically better" than scrubs, and it's just pure B.S. So you keep referencing this quote, and I don't see what's wrong with it. He's pointing out that the scrub has these arbitrary personalrules, which, as I've established, the best of any game or sport simply don't have (you don't win by handicapping yourself.) That's because you don't become the best by not trying to win. Have you ever read a fighting game instruction manual? Or a board game? You know that section that says "Goal" or "Objective"? Think about how you would tell someone else how a fighting game works. "Your goal is to reduce the other guy's HP to 0." By default, the GOAL OF THE GAME IS TO WIN. The goal of the game is not to reduce YOUR HP to 0. THAT'S why he's saying the objective of "playing to win" is good, right and true, because that's intrinsic to the nature of games. The goal of the game is to destroy your opponent's base, or to score more runs, or to meet some other victory condition. Nonetheless, he's absolutely not saying that YOU are better than the scrub. He's saying your OBJECTIVE is. People that don't understand the difference are like Atomic Dog from PPR, who can't fathom a disagreement on a subject without personally attacking the person holding the view (ie. "You believe in abortion? Not only is your view wrong, but I am also better than you.")

He outlines as good a set of ban criteria as one could possibly make. Also, the assumption that the majority of people playing a game is right by default is pretty hard to deny (though actually what Sirlin is REALLY saying is that by default, the developer is right, until the players prove otherwise.) He might complain about those things, but I'm sure he uses a wide variety of tactics that many other players (including myself) would initially call cheap or unfair if we didn't know better. He does not have an arbitrary set of rules in his mind that he adheres to. He plays to win (or else he wouldn't be good). It makes some people not want to play. It makes other people - people that aren't scrubs - want to play harder. BardicKnowledge's brother, newt, beat me 20 times in a row as Vega against my Fei-Long. He used the same tactic over and over again. Did this make me want to stop playing? No, of course not. It made me want to play him MORE and figure out how to beat him, and talk to other Vega/Fei-Long players to understand the matchup more. That's the difference between me and a scrub. In Heroes of Newerth, I initially acted like a scrub when my team lost to a hero called Plague Rider. None of us had encountered him, and his ultimate attack seemed very unfair. At first I said I refused to play against Plague Rider. Classic scrub behavior. In top-tier competitive matches, Plague Rider is played constantly, and if I ever wanted to improve, I would need to practice against him (and playing as him.) I eventually decided to stop being a scrub, and, fast-forwarding to several months later, I know exactly how to counter Plague Rider, and how to counter those counters. I'm a better player because of it. That's funny, because while people like Bardic and I certainly believe in playing to win, and the concept that scrubs exist, we are VERY good sports and never talk down to people when we play TF2, HoN or Street Fighter. In fact, playing with us is actually a great deal of fun as basically anyone who has can attest. I HAVE been to tournaments of various different kinds of games (Magic, Street Fighter) and never encountered the sort of immaturity that you're describing. Nor do I act like that. Having watched videos of the biggest fighting game tournament in the U.S., EVO, I can also safely say that it doesn't occur there either. Players at this high level are quite nice, treating their opponents with respect, shaking hands before and after a match, etc. It sounds to me like the Smash community is simply immature, and the tournaments you've gone to are filled with assholes. People like that will generally act like that no matter what and justify it any way they can. If you're REALLY playing to win, you won't play against people that are far worse than you. If you do end up playing such a match - and it's for fun - you will go easy on your opponent and try to teach them, so that you can have a better opponent later. If it's for money (tournament), then you might play hard, but again you gain nothing from berating or mocking them, as you don't get any better from the match and you WANT more good opponents. So really the key problem in your logic is this: This just isn't really true among mature gamers, who tend to be actually decent and sportsmanlike. Case-in-point, the best fighting game players in the world are not assholes at all, but by your logic, they should be the biggest ones.

You're splitting hairs here. Yes, maybe when they first see that, any player would cry foul. However, that doesn't mean their reaction after seeing it 5, 10, 15, 20 times is going to be the same. It's a common question one asks in any sport. "Wow, bunting in baseball seems really awesome. It makes everyone come to you. Why doesn't everyone use it?" You want that mindset, where even if you don't understand how to beat something, your goal is to try to learn about it more, not try to dismiss it immediately. This comes up in HoN all the time. We encounter heroes or tactics that we don't understand, but generally, as an OCR group, we don't outright ban thins. We learn. Early on, we WERE all about banning things, until we all got better. Where did Sirlin tell anybody to "mock" them? That's not part of playing to win. If you're playing against opponents that much worse than you, you're playing the wrong opponents, which is not ultimately conducive to getting better (and thus, isn't even playing to win; it's being a dick.) He also never encouraged people to withold tactics or secrets. Again, the top SF players share their tactics. What point are you trying to make here? It seems irrelevant. You're trying to say people act like jerks at tournaments? OK? What does this have to do with the argument at all? It certainly doesn't have to do with Sirlin's article, which doesn't advocate that. This is just wrong. Sirlin would say in this case that there is certainly cause for a debate. A move that can end the match basically instantly is certainly worth looking into. He himself rebalanced Super Turbo to remove infinite loops that were virtually impossible to get out of. However, Super Turbo had over a decade of balance testing and thousands of tournaments worth of data to analyze. The decision to rework the game code to remove these infinite loops was thus a VERY carefully planned-out one, and it was done with the help and input of basically all the top SF players. Such techniques were never banned previously, and a few people still maintain that they shouldn't have been removed. I don't think you can be a good player at a game and still be a scrub. No pro SF players complain about throws. No basketball players complain about dunks. No baseball players complain about bunts. Do you understand what I'm saying? You don't see Kobe Bryant whining that Shaq is too big, and that it's "unfair". However even THIS is beside the point. COMPLAINING does not make you a scrub. It's the mindset where you make up your own rules of what is "fair" and what isn't, independent of the established rules of the game, and independent of those of the community at large. It's the mindset of "I should be able to block all the time and not take damage." It's the mindset of "You're not allowed to steal the ball from me in basketball - I should be allowed to take all the time I want to take a shot." It's the mindset of "It's not fair to fight two on one in a PVP game." This is the core point that Sirlin is getting at, and you're really missing it completely. There is a fundamental difference between the guy that rages because 2 people ganged up on him in a PVP game, and the guy that says "damn, I should have been more careful - I need to try that sometime."

But there's a big difference between an uneducated player and a "scrub". The uneducated player isn't very good, but wants to improve and learn the game more. They don't complain about every obstacle that they encounter and call everything "cheap", rather they strive to get better. You can be bad and not be a scrub. What do you think the whole point of the book Playing to Win is? You think he's NOT helping people to get better? On the contrary, as I've been saying, it's certainly helped me. He said he's received tons of letters from gamers in all communities saying the same thing. If you go to forums like SRK, which are very competitive, you will find plenty of pros helping others. Within our community you'll find the same thing in games like TF2 and HoN, where some people are clearly way better. What you're saying isn't really making any sense. The playing to win mindset is the standard in nearly any competitive game or sport, yet the communities surrounding all these games and sports are hardly falling apart. You're saying playing to win is DIFFERENT than "playing for fun", but it isn't. Games are fun. The whole point of them is entertainment. So, everyone that plays is having fun regardless. However, it's still MORE fun to get better at a game or sport, and try to win at it. What if everyone played basketball and only threw the ball "underhanded", like they did as 5-year old kids? The game would obviously be not nearly as interesting as all the many types of shots, layups and even dunks that exist. What if everyone played Counter-Strike without "camping"? HoN without half the "cheap" heroes? SF without throws? I could go on. The scrub encounters these things and doesn't understand why they're an integral part of the game, and how they must be learned to become better at the game (having more fun in the process - more tactics/depth is better than less, all things being equal.) The bad player might not knowing how to do or counter all that stuff, but they at least try.

The point of Sirlin's guide is to educate the scrub, not to say "be a dick to scrubs." Playing in his mindset has helped me to enjoy games (and be better at them) way more. When you stop thinking "oh that's so cheap" and start thinking "that's pretty powerful, I wonder if I can do it, or how I can counter it" it's a lot of fun. Also, where does he say you're not supposed to educate a scrub? If you go on the Shoryuken forums, it's a tough crowd, but there are countless topics for players of all skill levels to ask questions, share tactics, and get better. People that take away the message "it's OK to be a jerk, not teach anyone anything, and play as hard as you can vs. your 6-year old sister" from "playing to win" are missing the point.

The point of Sirlin's guide is to educate the scrub, not to say "be a dick to scrubs." Playing in his mindset has helped me to enjoy games (and be better at them) way more. When you stop thinking "oh that's so cheap" and start thinking "that's pretty powerful, I wonder if I can do it, or how I can counter it" it's a lot of fun. Also, where does he say you're not supposed to educate a scrub? If you go on the Shoryuken forums, it's a tough crowd, but there are countless topics for players of all skill levels to ask questions, share tactics, and get better.

Exactly. On the other hand, a scrub would say "ban throws". Throws do NOT break the metagame. They are an integral part of the game's design. If the opponent blocks too much, you throw them. Without throws, blocking becomes way too good and it unbalances the game. Not only that but it's easy to accidentally throw, so even if the ban WERE warranted, it's not discrete and not really enforceable. However, a scrub thinks throws are "cheap" because they have made up an arbitrary ruleset in their head where they should be allowed to block forever and not take any damage (trust me, this is how I used to think too - it's pretty common in fighters.) The game in fact is not designed like that and shouldn't BE like that.

Well, what other criteria do you want? That is the best possible 3rd criteria you can have. You can't have a ban if it's not warranted, but obviously you need some sort of consensus within the game's playerbase as to whether it is or isn't. If nobody thinks it is warranted, there's no way to objectively say "this should be banned." For example, new players of Heroes of Newerth want to ban Arachna because she's "too powerful." However, the better players, who have learned more about the game, realize she's not a very good character compared to many others, and is nowhere near worth banning. There's no consensus to ban her. On the other hand, everyone agrees that the Tempest character is extremely powerful, and thus he is rarely if ever used in competitive games. I think it is implied that playing a game is fun. Otherwise, why would you play it? Few people play games for reasons other than fun (ie. they are game testers or in it for tournament money.) That doesn't need to be explained by Sirlin or anyone else. So if you're going to have fun playing the game, would you rather have fun and win, or have fun and lose, all other things being equal? The former, of course. I have a great time playing TF2, or Heroes of Newerth, or Badminton, whether I win or lose. I'd still rather win and become better at all of these games, as the better you get, the more fun games tend to be.

Unfortunately it looks like Jill might not be going this year. I still might be, but we'll see...

Yeah, I noticed those things too. In fact, my "Nuclear Flash" remix was basically created when I was trying to mock up Showdown for fun and noticed it had the same chords as Flashman. Anyway, hey, I know a lot of 80s songs sound like this but find me one that matches so closely with Lava Reef. I listen to an 80s station almost every day on the radio and this one really jumped out at me for being particularly Sonic-esque.

There's nothing really wrong with games like that though. So they're very much movie-like. So what? I remember when I first saw the Matrix I thought the fight scenes were just unbelievable, and had at least a few fantasies where *I* was Neo and beating up agents (keep in mind I was maybe 12-13 at the time.) Movies play out the same way every single time. There's no input from the user. While "Press A to Jump" is lame, there's still a happy middle-ground where many games exist and you get to really FEEL like you're controlling a character in an epic movie. TFU I'd say is one of those games.

First of all, given that he's a competitive SF player and basically studies/designs competitive games full time, I think he might know a thing or two about what makes competitive games survive. He DID explain the criteria for a ban. http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/what-should-be-banned.html Please read it again: Also read this again: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/cheating.html To some extent there are no objective criteria because every game is completely different, but Sirlin EXTENSIVELY discusses a wide variety of situations and why it's generally better to NOT just ban stuff left and right. You need a lot of data before you can even realistically think about banning most things. IMO, the other bottom line is that bans should be left in the hands of the most competitive players. If someone really good can deal with a certain technique reliably, and they don't think that technique is overpowered, then it shouldn't be banned.

Not at all. Unlike sports - where rules are more arbitrary - games have clear rules, those being the game code itself and what the developer has enabled you to do. A properly-designed, non-degenerate video game will ideally have the perfect set of rules built-in. But not all games are like that; some of tons of bugs and are either unpatachable or the developer simply doesn't care enough to address the issues. Bans in competitive games aren't arbitrary. One person doesn't decide on them, typically the entire competitive community does. Typically what scrubs complain about are things that are clearly built into the game and are game mechanics, like throws in Street Fighter; things that the developer clearly intended and designed around. Bugs or techniques that were unintended are more of a grey area, but as Sirlin said, it requires a lot of thought to really decide on whether a ban is appropriate. You say that Japanese Brawl doesn't have the problems American Brawl does. OK. It's not like that in Street Fighter. If you actually read Sirlin's site more, you'd learn a thing or two; for example, the game Capcom vs. SNK 2 has a ridiculous technique called "roll canceling" which is extremely hard to do (and impossible to ban due to the nature of the game.) When the game came out, American players never really used this technique because it was so difficult, or maybe they never discovered its power. Regardless, the American CVS2 players eventually matched up against the Japanese and were dominated. All the Japanese guys used the same small handful of characters and abused the same technique over and over, a technique that you literally HAVE to use now to be competitive in that game. So much for the "sportsmanship" of the Japanese, huh? But this is really a misnomer. We'll get to that later. Sirlin points out that this is basically unavoidable because it's not possible to really ban roll-canceling due to the way mechanics work, but it means CVS2 is not a good game. It's degenerate, and that's not the fault of the players. You're mixing up "common decency" with "playing to win". The Japanese are generally considered to be better than Americans at serious fighting games like Super Turbo, SFIV, etc. Yet the best players share techniques all the time. In fact, the very best SF player (and arguably the best fighting game player) in the world, Daigo Umehara, is known to pretty much hang out all day at arcades with the other top JP SF players and basically just practice, learn from each other, etc. You can have sportsmanship and still play to win. The scrub mindset doesn't mean you never complain about anything or discuss certain things in a game that could be bannable, it's the mindset of encountering a challenge and not trying to overcome it, but instead simply crying foul and trying to avoid the challenge.

I'm with Bardic here. Not at all. He's exactly on the mark. All sports have evolved over the years. I'm sure at one point in the world of baseball, people weren't bunting or using curveballs. Is a bunt "cheap"? Should we ban it? No. It has its strengths and weaknesses. What Sirlin speaks out against is the mentality that some people have, basically creating a set of rules for themselves that don't actually exist in a game, and then getting upset when people break these made-up, arbitrary rules. He has written at length about how there ARE some things in some games that make them "degenerate" and supports the idea of bans in some cases. But these cases are more rare than many people make them out to be. http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/what-should-be-banned.html In some cases, even if something is bugged and completely unfair, if it is not "discrete" or enforceable, it can't really be banned. Moreover, many tactics or techniques that might have been unintended by the developers can be countered or done by many players. Someone spamming the same move against you over and over in SF? Learn the counter, or play that character yourself. It's simple. I think a lot of people have some sense of entitlement in games. For example, that every hero/character/team/class/tactic has to be just as effective. The sports world CERTAINLY isn't like this. Every sport has certain techniques that are far superior than others and are adopted by basically everyone who plays. Sirlin does NOT advocate being a dick, or ONLY playing to win. In fact he wrote quite a bit on this too. http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/love-of-the-game-not-playing-to-win.html http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-3-not-playing-to-win.html

OK, here's what you do. You need to open the plugin version of Kontakt 4 in FL. Click "Outputs". Select "Add Channel" and add a bunch. Underneath the first "Add Channel", select "Conf". Make sure Audio Channels is set to 2. Name the channel name "st. X" where "X" is the stereo output # (for example, by default you should have st. 1 and st. 2, so name the third channel st. 3.) Within the configuration, click on "physical out" next to 01. Scroll down. You should see "Kt. St. 1 [1]" and [2], which means those virtual outs are being used for "st. 1". Eventually you will stop seeing Kt. St. whatever and see Kt. Aux 1 [1] Kt. Aux 1 [2] instead. Select THOSE for your new channel. Repeat for as many channels as you want. When you're done, hit "Make Default", then restart FL and Kontakt. You will now see all your new channels are sending to new Kt. St. outs, and your Aux channels have realigned themselves properly.

Opposite for me... three really stupid losses that should have been easy wins. Ugh. Bad playing and bad decision-making all around. The last couple games tonight really proved how amazing Jester and Kraken are - Kraken's initiation is simply unbeatable and wins teamfights by itself, while Jester's Cursed Ground scales throughout the entire game and makes him an incredible threat. Also reminds me of how lackluster Blood Hunter is. Even with ridiculous farm he's just bad compared to many carries. Edit: New patch! Engineer is no longer auto-countered by Barbed Armor. Nome's Wisdom changes: I'd say this is now a must-have item on almost any caster - it's 200 gold cheaper than it was before, too. Other incredible stuff: * Turret... buffed? Nerfed? Hard to say * Forsaken buffed - big time (Crippling Volley ministuns, ult does even more damage at +400 range) * Maliken nerfed, hooray * Booboo nerf (renamed to Beardulon) * Tree buffed? Gotta play this Edit 2: OK, played the new Tree in practice. Wow. His base damage and HP is now VERY high (57-67 and 660 or so, respectively) but most importantly his abilities were buffed. His eyes have truesight now (though no regen aura.) His stealth ability now does not break when he casts his other abilities, meaning you can stealth/buff your entire team and root while staying invis - again, very cool. But most importantly, his garbage damage skill is gone, replaced with an armor/HP regen buff. It lasts a long time, is on a short cooldown, and doesn't cost much. At level 4 it's 12 armor and 4 HP regen for 40 seconds. Sick! I'd say these changes move Keeper up several tiers.

Pyro's stun = 600 range, 200 radius, 1.6 second stun. Longer buildup. Harder to land. Witch's stun = 700 range, 150 radius, 2.5 second stun. Much easier to land. How likely is it that a bunch of enemy heroes are bunched up in a 200 radius vs. 150? Also Pyro's stun simply can't be used to chase. Witch's graveyard WILL catch up with just about anyone due to its incredibly range and cast speed. Not to mention it lasts an entire second longer. I've also never needed more than one level in mana drain. Since it's 600 range, you can safely channel for at LEAST one second, so it's an absolute minimum of 10 free mana every 25 seconds (equivalent of a built-in 0.4 mana regen) but it's really not hard to get an extra second or two, which again effectively makes your mana regen much higher. I prefer to build Witch as a ganker so I always go Bottle meaning that between the two, I never have mana problems and can even stun -> bottle -> hex -> bottle -> ult if for some reason I'm that low. My preferred build involves going Nome's first actually since it synergizes pretty well with Witch's 4 active abilities, gives him nice armor to make up for his low base, and allows him to generally spam all day. Pyro/Hammer is strong, sure. But Witch/Hammer will keep them stunned even longer. Also, Panda/Witch is an incredible combo.