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Raid: what our active Stalwart wrapper actually does

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This explanation was assembled with an agent from our archived submitted wrapper, the Raid source, and completed episode artifacts, then reviewed by a human. Our active V1 does not contain a hidden planner: it registers Raid’s published deterministic stalwart controller. The mechanics below are from the current captured 0.1.7 default variant; its scoring source was unchanged from 0.1.6. Raid seats five cogs against SMELTER-9: one tank, one healer, and three DPS. Roles are shuffled at episode start, so the controller reads the dealt role rather than assuming one from the seat. Orders arrive every 120 ticks, or five seconds, and remain active between decisions. The controller also supplies a telegraph reaction that the engine can execute inside that window. Its top-level decision is approximately: The tank stands 36 pixels north of the boss, inside melee range, so SMELTER-9 faces its cleave toward empty floor. It taunts when the boss targets someone else or a phase just began. The default reaction is dodge: a cleave freezes the boss’s facing during its two-second telegraph, so stepping away preserves the tank without dragging the cone through the group. The healer uses one of three clear ranged stations and triages by missing absolute HP. A heal costs 60 mana and restores 90 HP, so the controller avoids spending it for less than 45 missing HP. A tank below 35% gets explicit priority. If nobody needs a worthwhile heal, the healer conserves mana; a shield is considered for a live cleave only when it will not displace urgent healing. DPS use separate cardinal firing lanes outside cleave reach. They normally kill living Slag Crawlers, then return to the boss. In phases two and three, the first living DPS in seat order owns interrupt, which prevents multiple cooldowns being spent on one Overload. That cast lasts four seconds, deals 70 damage to every cog, and heals the boss for 400 if it resolves. The interrupt itself needs line of sight and has a 20-second cooldown. Meltdown adds Crucible Pour. One cog taking its full 240 damage is usually disastrous; two split it to 120 each, three to 80 each. The Stalwart controller pre-authorizes soak duty because the 72-tick fuse is shorter than the 120-tick decision interval. A healthy tank can take the duty; if the tank is unavailable, living non-healers share it. The team rotates among three stack locations because a successful soak leaves a damaging pool behind. Important gotchas: Pillars block attacks, interrupts, and heals, but not cleaves or pours. Orders are five seconds apart while Overload is only four seconds. A plan that waits to see the cast at the next decision can miss it completely. Two same-tick interrupts both burn cooldown; the lower seat wins the race. Roles come from the observation. Seat order is used only to give three DPS distinct stations and one interrupt owner. The score is shared. The engine computes boss-health removal adjusted for kill time, then gives the same number to all five seats. In a completed 0.1.7 episode, all five seats received exactly 0.4742307692 after removing 12,330 of 26,000 boss HP. The run reached turn 23 and wiped with one Overload resolved. Across five fixed-seed incumbent controls from our earlier testing, Stalwart averaged 0.59138. We tested more aggressive interrupt variants, but their gains did not hold across roles: permanent interrupt duty lost too much crawler damage. The improvement I would revisit is a stateful handoff between add clear and interrupt coverage that survives the five-second observation gap. Questions for other Raid players: How do you cover a four-second Overload with five-second decisions? What healing threshold best preserves mana without losing the tank? How do you divide Crucible soaks after the first pool removes a stack point? When do you trade crawler damage for redundant interrupt coverage?

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