u/moal09

For some background, I developed minor issues swallowing with a persistent dry cough/nose/throat for the last year or so. This later developed into major issues breathing all of a sudden back in October and after months of things going from bad to worse (severe throat tightness, muscle spasms, chest tightness, panic attacks for no reason despite no history of ever having one, etc) with no answers, we finally managed to narrow down reflux as a big contributor. Tests for asthma were negative other than some minor issues with gas exchange, and trying an inhaler made no difference, especially since I was having trouble inhaling and not exhaling.

But taking steps to manage that reflux made a lot of the worst symptoms go away. I was having severe issues inhaling due to what I now suspect was VCD being caused by acid hitting my vocal cords and causing them to spasm/partially close for hours on end. The pulmonologist I saw also thinks this was likely.

Switching to a GERD healing diet, sleeping upright and avoiding food 3 hours before bed made a huge difference within like 2 weeks, and things have slowly improved since then over the last 8 months. Literally within 4 or 5 days of doing this, I stopped having the vocal cord spasms, although other symptoms like the throat/chest tightness took months to start improving significantly.

For me, it was also silent reflux/LPR with no heartburn. It seemed to flow straight into my throat/sinuses instead, and x-rays showed old/mild scarring in my lungs, so we think I was probably micro-aspirating acid in my sleep for years (I would often snack on chips or yogurt right before bed).

In addition, I found out that a lot of the most extreme symptoms I experienced early on are pretty textbook for severe GERD because the acid irritates the vagus nerve and causes your body to start freaking out.

One thing is not really getting better however, and it's the fact that I can't really take a deep breath when I try to inhale, and my breathing still takes more physical effort than it should. I should add that I had no history of asthma or allergies growing up, and no problems breathing up until very recently. Outside of snacking, I also eat a very healthy/bland diet mostly consisting of brown rice, plain steamed chicken breast and vegetables.

The biggest thing is that, since all this started, it's felt like there's something in my abdomen that shouldn't be there. Like there's a balloon in there that gets squished when I bend over or move around too much. I never felt this sensation before October of 2025. The sensation gets worse when I'm full after a meal, and it becomes noticeably harder to breathe. Also, if I do something like sit down very suddenly, it would feel REALLY weird and unpleasant. I don't know if I'd call it painful, but it just didn't feel right.

That part of my abdomen was also very stiff and felt completely locked up for the first few months when this all started like the muscles there were stuck or something.

My doctor is skeptical that it's a hiatus hernia because I'm still under 40, and I'm skinny and don't fit the usual risk profile, but I also have a chronic GI condition after an ulcer bleed that caused near permanent constipation and led to me straining very severely on the toilet for the last 10-12 years (we're talking 30+ minutes of straining to have a single bowel movement sometimes to the point where I'm nearly in tears on bad days). I suspect that constant heavy straining is what did it.

It would also explain why I suddenly developed such severe LPR seemingly out of nowhere.

I'm waiting on an appointment with a GI to investigate further, but any thoughts in the meantime?

I've read conflicting reports that this helped some people sooth their reflux due to the good probiotics, while others recommend against it because all yogurt is still moderately acidic.

I would add that I specifically struggle with LPR/silent reflux. I never get heartburn, but flare-ups will cause significant breathing difficulties. Also kinda sucks 'cause it means I can't really tell when I'm eating something that is causing issues until many days or weeks later.

I've been hearing talk all season about how easy S1 of Midnight has been, and I agree -- if you're DPS. There's fewer interrupts to worry about, and timers are extremely lenient outside of AA, which takes the pressure off DPS up until the very highest keys.

However, I feel like what actually happened is that the difficulty got mostly offloaded to healers who now have to deal with almost constant unavoidable group rot rather than just prepping for big damage events here and there and DPSing in between like you used to. If your group lives, you probably time, but ensuring that happens gets pretty spooky the higher you go.

Doing a dungeon like WS or Seat from 21-23, I don't think I've ever sweat this hard as a healer. Feels like someone is constantly 1-2 GCDs away from dying for the entire 30m of a dungeon, and CPM requirements are much higher than they've ever been to keep people topped or outside of danger range.

So at least a healer, I feel kind of disconnected when people talk about how easy the season was. Am I alone in this? Was there a season that was harder to heal?

Built flamewood totem, and it performed as advertised. Great in Delve/Ultimatum/Simulacrum.

It is clunky as all hell though, and even in Ultimatum/Delve sometimes, it's a pain in the ass 'cause I get a specific enemy type that doesn't seem to trigger the totem taunt properly, and it takes forever to clear. It's also awful for mapping, but that was to be expected.

I have a mageblood, progenesis, Svalinn and all the optimal jewels. Looking for something that's similarly really tanky, but less clunky to play

Seems like another bad sign that Blizzard is cracking down hard on Project Ascension, since he's a creator that's been known to work with them.

This along with the devs taking down the official reveal video on YT makes it seem like the end is pretty nigh. I've heard through the grapevine that they have until early September to respond to the cease and desist before Blizzard's lawyers come at them full force.

11k life, max block, 2k regen and still feel like paper in maps. Have another character with 90% resists and 1k+ regen, and it's also dying constantly just doing random T16s. Mobs with projectiles seem to be doing especially insane damage.

I played a ton of Mirage league and never ran into issues with survivability. Something feels very different in 3.29, but I can't figure out what it is. It's almost as if the mobs have a ton of hidden ele exposure or something.

Makes me wonder if the old PoE 2 bug with elemental conversion got added into PoE 1 somehow 'cause this patch also introduced the PoE 2 shader compilation bug into PoE 1 until the recent hotfix.

The added fire doesn't seem to be boosting their damage as much as it should on paper.
Is it not applying 1:1?

Is there a big penalty that hasn't been mentioned?

This has happened multiple times to me now where the tank did some insane psycho pull late into a +21, and when we ask why, he says "needed to because we were behind", but then when we point that we're actually like 2-3m ahead of the timer, they usually go "Oh, my bad."

I've felt this as well. Sometimes things just feel super slow, despite actually having high DPS and being ahead/green on time, so unless you look at the timer regularly, it's easy to feel like you're lagging behind when you're not.

Weak Auras doesn't have native support for any of the new custom skills. All I want to do is setup a standard class CDM. A lot of classes don't have an existing one to import either.

I developed major issues breathing back in October. More issues with breathing in than anything. No standard asthma symptoms. PFTs several months after it finally started improving came back mostly normal except some evidence of gas trapping, which matches symptoms I was having where the longer I breathed throughout the day, seemingly the more out of breath I would get over time.

Have identified longtime undiagnosed LPR/silent reflux and an aggravated chest injury as the most likely cause along with a possible hiatal hernia (need to get testing, but my stomach feels very weird when I move/bend).

Doctor put me on Symbicort 200/6 in December to see if it would help. I also identified that treating reflux at the time made a significant difference (sleeping upright, not eating 3H before bed, eating a bland/strict acid watchers diet, etc). I could never tell if the medication was also helping, or if it was mostly time + my anti-reflux measures.

My breathing issues have not gone away, and are still heavily affecting my quality of life, but they have improved significantly. I can take semi-deep breaths again, and even though the air always feels kind of thin, I'm at least not feeling like I'm suffocating constantly anymore.

I've tapered my Symbicort usage to once a day for several months with no noticeable issues. My doctor said I try stopping it completely and see what happens.

I'm kind of afraid to do this though. Things were so bad for the first 3 months that I was genuinely suicidal because of how badly I was struggling to breathe.

I kinda want to taper it off slowly like doing once every 2 days, then 3, etc, but my doctor suggested just going cold turkey starting tomorrow.

Should I follow her advice or taper more slowly?Also, if I start noticing negative effects within a week or two, will restarting it immediately fix things within a week or so? I'm just terrified of relapsing into the torturous state I was in for the first 3 months.

Outside of incursions/raids, shields/firewall are pretty much completely unviable. Shields don't scale well at all, so everyone just goes full glass cannon damage, since you're gonna die in 1-3 hits anyway, and threat generation is a joke that doesn't work.

This makes an entire specialization tree and gameplay archetype useless, which makes me wonder why they bothered putting them in the game in the first place.

There's been no discussion of this being on their radar or something they care about at all either, so it doesn't seem like it's going to change before TD3 if at all. Big bummer for me too because the close range tank archetype is a really fun playstyle in theory.

Why not have some kind of %-based DR the way games like Warframe do? Or a similar system to shield gating where your shield could have a short invincible armor gate that scales off your armor value. That's how people typically survive in the endless endgame modes in that game where enemies scale to the point where they're one shotting you.

Windows orders them based on the order in which they're initialized, which means you basically need to restart Windows if you want to change the order because simply unplugging and replugging them won't change anything.

Many games, especially non-Steam games will use whatever the "first" controller is and refuse to acknowledge or allow you to select another, which makes it very annoying if you have one type of game that requires the use of one type of controller and another that requires a different one.

For example, some games I use an arcade stick, while others, I will use a traditional gamepad, and others maybe a racing wheel.

You'd think it'd be so easy to just implement a basic GUI that allows you to swap the order, but I guess it was never a priority for Microsoft?

I only own the base game. What do I need, DLC-wise, for the purposes of downloading popular community mods?

Also, what are some must own mod packs?

It's something I see people comment on regularly, and I feel the same way. The ring had an especially satisfying sound during impact that no one else seems to have replicated. The closest thing I've heard to it is the way the Japanese rings sound.

Was there something different they did?

Back in October of 2025, I injured the left side of my throat/neck by straining the muscles for way too long. Sort of the same way you tense those muscles when you're trying to hold your breath, I did this for over 8 hours straight (Don't ask why. I'm a moron, and it's a long story) even though I was getting major pain and warning signals from my body to stop after about 40 minutes. Unsurprisingly, it caused major issues afterwards.

Within about an hour of stopping, I developed vertigo with severe jaw pain, major issues breathing in (also, when I would breathe out, barely any air would leave my nostrils), the left side of my face/neck went partly numb, and something felt really wrong with my left nostril also -- as if it wasn't really getting much sensation anymore, my throat became EXTREMELY tight to the point where I could barely lift my head without severe discomfort, a bunch of muscles in my chest/ab area felt "frozen", my nervous system starting freaking out for several days, and I lost all sensation of air moving through the left side of my body for lack of a better way to put it -- as if my body was tightly shut all of a sudden. I don't know how to describe it exactly, but everything just felt "wrong", and it was pretty scary.

The really severe symptoms lasted for 1-2 weeks, and then I spent another 3 months having major difficulties breathing. My blood oxygen always stayed 97 or above when I felt like I would breathe in, and barely any air was getting in. X-rays would also come back normal, so doctors just kinda shrugged at me.

Things very slowly started to improve in January. Since then, it gets a tiny bit better every 3-4 weeks. My face is feeling less and less numb, I can feel air moving through my body again, and my breathing has been slowly improving, although it's still not back to normal. In particular, when I breathe out now, there's a significant amount of air coming out of my nostrils again.

My throat isn't really super tight anymore, but the left part of my neck/throat that I strained the worst still feels "off" like someone always has their hands there. If I strain my neck muscles in any way like when I'm on the toilet, I can feel that the area is still very irritated and uncomfortable even though it's been 8 months. I dunno if I'd call it pain exactly, but it doesn't feel good.

Did I somehow manage to cause some major nerve damage by straining my neck for way too long that one day? What are the odds the damage is permanent? I've talked to doctors about this, but they all said it's incredibly unlikely that I could self inflict something that serious even if I did basically tense a bunch of muscles for 8+ hours straight, and they refused to do any soft tissue scans to check because they didn't want to expose me to any unnecessary radiation. The most I got was an ultrasound on my neck that came back relatively normal.

There is some progress from month to month, so it seems like something is happening, but it's very very slow, which is why I suspect some kind of nerve issue 'cause I read that it can take years for nerve tissue to regenerate enough -- especially because the symptoms started like immediately after I injured myself like that. I know there are nerves in the neck that control breathing muscles like the diaphragm, so I wonder if I might've injured or badly compressed one of those

Anyone have any thoughts?

My mom's side of the family was from China and used to be quite wealthy until the communist revolution where most of their assets were seized, since they were part of the "bourgeois" or whatever.

Prior to that however, my grandmother lived in a big house with maids and whatnot. One night, there was a really nasty thunderstorm, and apparently one of the maids was cleaning near this big open window when all of a sudden, lightning struck, and the last thing she remembers is the maid running terrified through the hallway and screaming "SIU JE", or "miss" in Cantonese before being consumed by a bright fiery ball, which killed her.

She told this story to my mother who then told it to me when I was a kid. They never referred to it as ball lightning, only as a fireball of sorts that seemed to come from the storm.

It wasn't until years later when I read about the debates around ball lightning and thought it sounded awfully similar to what my grandmother described. Makes me wonder. I have no skin in the debate either way, but it sure as hell sounds like my grandmother watched someone get killed by ball lightning, in which case, that would've been like a literal 1 in a billion occurrence.