Lurker > HeroDelTiempo17

Ah yeah I've seen quote a few PotD scythes. Gotta love early expansion where there's no good glam weapons for the new jobs. Did we really not get any new crafted EX ones with the new recipes?

Either way, it's an absolute shame they got to Hades already, that would have been perfect for Reaper.

Noelle carried my ass through the early and midgame with her shields, heals, and general unkillability, but I only have her at C2 so I couldn't give her the build she deserves.

And then I ended up pulling for Itto who is her C6 but better <_<

I'll still always have a soft spot for the battle maid!

I did my first 200 run right before Endwalker and while it was pretty neat it was also just kind of an exercise in patience and could get tedious. We had a couple of close calls but outside of those it isn't actually very difficult if you know what you're doing. Maybe HoH fares better.

Really can't relate. I've been going out to eat sporadically and even been to a few big events since getting vaccinated and the whole experience is more stressful than ever before. Especially with Omicron I don't even want to bother anymore. I've also been working in-office since...May 2020 (relatively low risk job that can't be done remotely) which is somehow MORE demoralizing, not less. The only thing that could relieve my stress over a global pandemic is if had actually been handled well.

agesboy posted...

Early alexander is what taught the playerbase that healer DPS was important, lol.

Except you had to meld accuracy! Dark fucking days indeed.

I was going to make a snide comment based on my experience with PF's inability to kill P1S but player skill really was worse.

Additionally, cross-world party finder did not exist back then. You were limited to the pool of players on your own server and it was legitimately very difficult to find people good enough to clear even Extremes on an average sized server like Cactuar (yes I know it's come a very long way lol).

Thankfully the devs spent the final tier of Alexander smoothing out the raid experience

UshiromiyaEva posted...

The 89 gear is FREE, buddy.

maybe they're roleplaying as someone who hates tataru and throws all her gifts in the trash

DRKs used to be able to do that pull. What actually changed? Did they get fucked up more numerically by the squish? Cause they have all the same abilities.

It's so odd that they voice incidental dialogue in the fights or in the stinger leading up to the raid quests but not the quests themselves.

foolm0r0n posted...

No shit

ok just so you know you're just doing the fucking turkey topic again

you're getting bad al pastor my guy

also if it comes with pineapple don't skip it

KCF0107 posted...

I like street tacos, so just give me:
1. soft round shell
2. al pastor or carnitas preferred
3. diced onions
4. cilantro

Simple but full of flavor

yep. corn tortilla btw, plus any homemade salsa they got

Fate parties. When the mob fates reach max scaling it's a ton of exp.

Not to mention that variants form and spread because they come to exist in the unvadxed population, and the ones that become dominant are the ones that can also survive in the vaxxed population. Denying care doesn't solve this.

I realize everyone's frustrated and just venting but the denial of care argument doesn't go anywhere good. Arbitrary deciding of who lives and who dies on a mass scale is basically just eugenics in a different coat of paint. Direct ire at the government all you want for being too ineffective to implement any good solutions but we don't have to start entertaining awful ones.

well Peter Parker was already a dumbass and Strange is an asshole so that's not a stretch

KamikazePotato posted...

Kinda feel like this story hasn't aged well in several respects, but we'll see

I kinda feel that way too. From what I can remember it's not necessarily aged badly but it's essentially about the toxic elements of the 2000s "hipster" culture that...no longer exists in that way? So I have no idea how it lands in (or is updated for?) 202X.

Now we can make jokes about how anime fans don't get laid either and everyone will stand up and clap

Just keep in mind getting through the overworld is kind of a different need than building endgame teams in that case. You'll have to swap characters in and out to deal with puzzles or bosses so you have a little leeway as long as you don't spread your resources too thin. When it comes time to invest more heavily focus on your favorites and/or the "safe" characters Azuarc listed.

Xingqiu gets better with constellations but doesn't need them. He's just good. He's a bit of a different role than Barbara though, he can apply hydro and do damage from off-field extremely well but his healing isn't great.

As for Kaeya and Rosaria, you probably can get a lot of mileage from using both of them on the same team and using one to support the other. Using two characters of the same element gives you a unique bonus and Cryo's happens to be real good because it buffs crit.

Just wait until 7.0 when Shinra lands on the planet and starts trying to extract energy from the lifestream!

Yeah honestly if our education system was more robust people would have a lot more confidence in its ability on functioning through and recovering from shutdown.

People love to point out how closures and remote learning have disproportionally hurt low income and marginalized students and it's like. Damn guys. I have some bad news about how the system works when it's "functional"!

Honestly that's probably just spin. I don't know how else you would sell it to people. We don't have a lot of data on the long term effects of learning loss or if it can be mitigated in the future and Americans don't seem to take being told to suck it up and deal with it to prevent the pandemic well so what else is there to be said?

let's just say there's probably a reason that the plan to have Matsuno continue writing the Ivalice-related stories fell through

He is the combination Supreme Court and religious figurehead, Guy Fieri's character is rich and deep

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Illuminati will claim Homestuck Pope

Don't be absurd, the Homestuck Pope is Guy Fieri. Please learn the lore.

WazzupGenius00 posted...

I played this game for a week or so when it came out, and then picked it up again about a week and a half ago. I just reached Act II of Chapter 1. Not sure what I should focus on for now, just rush through the main story? Should I even bother powering up weapons and artifacts if Im likely to replace them at some point?

Try to at least get through the Liyue story and new interlude quest so you can access the events coming up soon. You should have a few weeks to do so, not a huge rush.

As for weapons and artifacts, they are generally safe to level up because you can use them as fodder and get 80% of the exp back. It's important to level them to keep your damage up, especially artifacts. That said, I'd avoid investing too much into 3 star weapons outside a few exceptions. 4*s are good though and what most of your team is going to end up using.

Leafeon13N posted...

Besides getting vaccinated anything we could expect people to do on even the smallest level to control covid people have basically reverted to full "cant someone else do it" mentality.

I can't really blame this mindset because I'm of the opinion that individuals can't mitigate a global pandemic in a meaningful way. Any effective response has to be an organized and collective effort.

Leafeon13N posted...

Party line seems to be that the vaccinated are fine and the real worry is for the unvaccinated.

Dont think its effective but probably better than blaming Trump.

True, and I guess this was my earlier point I lost track of. I personally don't agree with the plan but I think the public seems to have bought it for now and I can't argue that point. We'll see if it holds.

red13n posted...

Nah still fully true. I think you are forgetting that I started with "most of the people" not "all of the people".

Didn't say Biden is blameless but the unvaccinated are making up a huge portion of deaths. And most of those are unvaccinated because Trump never attempted to reel in the MAGA crowd and lost control of the monster.

Okay fine it's fully true due to hedge words. Whatever.

It is not a persuasive argument and if the party line is to blame Trump that's gonna open them up to more of his inane lies that have often proven to make the truth irrelevant

red13n posted...

Most of the people still dying are dying because Trump essentially told them to.

I mean this is half true. Trump irrevocably made the pandemic worse by enabling the antivax and antilockdown crowd but pretending like it's still his fault and Biden couldn't have prevented more deaths with more robust policy seems blatantly false. BBB completely failed and that's not even getting into effective but unpopular policies yet.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

I dont think vaccine only is free of political consequences when the numbers are still bad, kinda weakens their position if Trump, who is pro-vaccine by the way, runs again.

I don't think they care about the numbers. The push for a long time has been that you get vaccinated and if you get COVID it's either extremely rare or your own fault for being unvaccinated. Omicron has thrown a wrench in that but there's an overall resignation.

The political benefit to this is that they don't have to compete with Trump on it because he'd do the same thing. If Democrats don't do lockdowns or restrictions, what can Trump even argue he'd do differently? (I mean it doesn't matter if it makes sense he's going to say some ridiculous boast people will believe anyways but whatever)

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

We were completely shut down under Trump and was pilloried for his handling of Covid.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/04/1070218466/1-million-us-covid-cases-omicron-surge

1 million new cases.

Wow

I'm not sure what your point is here by making this comparison but the difference is the vaccine. And it's a huge difference. Trump wanted to open up the economy with zero protection. With the vaccine's existence, the Biden admin has been able to sell a "vaccine only" strategy to the public and can push to open without the political consequences.

There's a coherent ideology being pushed here. I don't agree with it but it's not just media bias or liberal hypocrisy or something.

no one has a musical number without Mirabel being present, her power is the ability to summon Lin-Manuel Miranda and inject him into conversations

opposing certain identities is itself identity politics

Oh good we've arrived at the Metaverse

There's no guarantee this would ever be built. Even for basic cross-compatability it would require an immense amount of work and coordination so that I could, I dunno, use my unique ape skin in Fortnite and Call of Duty or whatever.

banananor posted...

imagine a pvp game like total war: warhammer where you can trade specific units or heroes with your friends between battles. wouldn't it be cool if your unit remembered a history of all of the battles it's been in, all the times it's died, and all of the victories it has achieved?

maybe it'd gain exp or develop unique AI preferences like an amiibo

you are describing the nemesis system from the recent Lord of the Rings games, except with a PvP and trading element

Why does this need blockchain

Forceful_Dragon posted...

The way that some blockchains verify transactions is energy hungry. People are increasingly transitioning towards cryptocurrencies that require significantly less energy to validate.

Do you expect these currencies to surpass the energy hungry ones in value? Because if they don't, we haven't really fixed the issue.

LordoftheMorons posted...

Isnt the reserve list pretty unequivocally acknowledged as a mistake by Wizards (even if theyre going to honor the promise)?

Not that I think theyd reprint Black Lotus anyway given how broken it is

Yeah the Reserve List is a bad example in retrospect besides the speculation aspect. WotC does not (directly) profit from the secondary market and they probably COULD gain money from reprinting Black Lotus for Vintage but we have no way of knowing that.

It makes more sense if you know the history of why they even made the promise. In its early years MTG was helped to establish itself as a game where your cards retained some value. When they started reprinting a bunch of rare cards, people started freaking out because suddenly their value wasn't safe. So WotC promised them a list of certain cards that they'd never reprint.

Nowadays they have the clout to say it was a mistake. But any company trying out experimental NFT video games that are being promoted as investments is going to have their reputation on the line and be in a shaky position.

LordoftheMorons posted...

That also seems like a really dumb thing for a gacha to do specifically. I don't spend any money on the one I play (FFRK) so maybe I don't understand whale psychology, but I have to imagine that a big part of the temptation is the fomo of not being able to get the new thing while it's relevant. If they know they can buy it from somebody else if they fail to get it in their pulls that motive seems like it would be undermined!

Well that's where asset appreciation theoretically comes in. Your thing might increase in value over time because it's limited so you better compete with everyone else to get it while it's hot! It sounds abjectly miserable.

Also a big part of FOMO is the potential of a rerun for characters you missed, to get you to continue playing and amassing resources. If these are gameplay pieces, you wouldn't be able to easily reissue Waifu [Series 2] without pissing off these speculators because you would devalue the existing Series 1 Waifus. If anyone is familiar with Magic: The Gathering this is called the Reserve List, it's why Black Lotus sells for thousands of dollars, and this type of speculation I'm describing is hated by the huge majority of the playerbase that isn't directly profiting from it.

So I've played gachas and MMOs and digital TCGs. I've spent money on them! They're all different levels of psychologically manipulative. I enjoy these games so that's not a dig, it's just a fact. And it sounds to me like this just evenly distributes the exploitation among the entire player base?

So I log in to Genshin. I do my grinding (worst part of the game btw) and get my verified token for a 5* character or level boost or whatever. I sell it to a whale who is buying them up. Mihoyo takes a cut. So my grinding (labor) has been directly transformed into value for the company and I get whatever cut the game seems fair. I've turned my gameplay into app economy work. This is Uber for waifus.

And this only works if there are hundreds or thousands of players all doing this and the company skims from all of them. I just don't understand how this is remotely sustainable. Knowing how much normal gachas can bring in I find it completely unrealistic. Each cut would have to be big as what a whale would normally pay or they'd have to have a shitload of transactions to skim multiple times off the same dollar which means more resource trading in a closed economy. Except all the resources have to be unique and scarce because Blockchain for some reason!

I can already point to games and platforms that do this without crypto. Steam marketplace. MTGO and tix. Roblox. What does the crypto actually do besides provide investment from venture capital?

Forceful_Dragon posted...

In Axie in particular there is a large enough playerbase and demand for game assets that people in countries with a low enough cost of living have actually been able to make a living by playing Axie full time. But similar to cryptopunks this is the exception and not the rule. Many other projects simply put "making a game" on their road map to make people believe it's the next Axie when in reality their team doesn't have the technical knowledge required to create something on that scale or have a large enough player base to be self-sustaining. If nobody is playing the game the money for it's economy wont exist. Or if a game has a lot of players, but they are ALL trying to earn+sell there wont be anyone else to sell the assets to. It's similar to WoW gold, if nobody is buying the gold the price goes way down

Ok but the history of WoW gold farming is rife with labor exploitation, right? All the stuff about Chinese gold farms using dirt-cheap labor to sell fake money for real money, which causes inflation in the in-game economy, requiring people to buy more gold. I mean, you're talking about poor and developing countries when you mention "low cost of living," right?

Shouldn't we avoid this?

Well since you bumped I thought about it more yesterday after posting and I think it has to do with the twist

The reveal that the protagonist's trauma isn't from being the child victim of imperial violence but because he was the soldier perpetuating it is something I don't really know what to do with. It's a fine twist, but it makes me empathize with the protagonist less and I'm not sure if that's the intent. It paints the game in a new light but not too much because the protagonist is being used for the same ends regardless. I'm also ok sitting with a little discomfort but I just...don't have a main takeaway. It feels like it's pointing to a lot of different things at once and going "all of this is bad" which is a cool story but is just alright. So what I'd want from the DLC is some kind of direction for this character taking the backstory revelation into account.

agesboy posted...

not sure how much they fixed for endwalker but it was absolutely a literal dead stat before to the point where it was better to wear lower item level gear if your new piece had big sks on it

So it turns out it buffs wildfire, autos, and queen after all which means there are some "efficient" skill speed tiers for MCH. However if you can't naturally arrive at them it's wasted, and due to misalignment and heat management you mentioned it results in an all-or-nothing scenario. The jury is still out but 2.5 gcd is generally assumed to be best.

Dels posted...

yeah, MCH doesn't like skill speed either, but it's not completely worthless like it is on dancer.

and yeah, that's the other thing, dancer gets better as everyone else gets better. i mean, bard does too now more than before though, right? so, we'll see. but i heard that's the reason dancer always starts a bit weaker and gets stronger every week.

I think more of Bard's rDPS is in party buffs now than before, proportionally speaking due to the stat squish, but that said I think it's flatter than Dancer's. Devilment boosting crit rate benefits a lot from the partner getting better and stacking crit. Battle Voice is extremely good but direct hits don't scale as hard. Radiant Finale is also very good but is mitigated by only being 2% in the opener (I think we are supposed to pot at 2 minutes now, though?). I have no idea though, we will see.

Honestly I think it's very odd that Bard's rDPS is comparable to or better than Dancer's in this way. I feel like an asshole complaining about Bard because numbers-wise it's in a great spot and it flows pretty smoothly. My issues boil down to 1) ranged balance and design seems haphazard as a whole and 2) it feels genuinely awful that it's optimal to spend less time in Mage's Ballad. also 3) aoe/multitarget is boring now but I won't rehash that

MCH also has a similar issue with skill speed and crit. Hypercharge and its OGCds are unaffected by skill speed, I think Queen as well, and crit is high value. So I'm not sure it'll be entirely solved by gear, although it's possible DNC scales even better than MCH. I know the least about it of the three ranged.

I think the best hope for Dancer is that it remains the best ranged for boosting people at very high level play

I mean as a Bard main, Mage's Ballad being worse than Army's Paeon feels like an unintentional fuckup deserving of an fix that could also be remedied entirely with potency changes but I dunno man.

It's also weird that Dancer didn't get any potency buffs considering it's behind the other two ranged in a similar way to how SMN/DRG/NIN were buffed, but it could be the number squish flattening the need to do that or they're banking on it getting better with time or something.

Wow, I was expecting way more adjustments than we actually got. Oh well.

tried to do a last minute normal raid for tomes and rolled P2N because some absolute MADLAD must have been trying to get a weekly drop. and got owned when the server kicked a healer lol.

Anyways it's time for patch notes waiting room. I am manifesting Bard changes. Yoshi-P fix Mage's Ballad or else I will...play Machinist or something IDK.

If you've ever played the Arkham games these are obviously lifted from, it's the same thing. It's a lot of twitch reflexes and different inputs for unique gadgets to get around different enemy types and...yeah. It can get to be a lot.

Dels posted...

ohhhh really? like waking up that morning and making that stuff? i hadn't thought of that. never really done any crafting before lol

as long as i stay a raider i'm just always going to have a conflict on day 1 of raid patches so trying to make the combat gear will likely never be the best idea.

but i'll try it tomorrow anyway since i'm prepared

I've never tried but you can probably make good money on the ground floor that way selling new gear to gatherers who are trying to make money on the ground floor selling mats to crafters. Might not spike as hard as battle gear. But you don't really have to! I'm with tcaz here and consistent money > huge bursts. DoH/DoL gear just has more longevity and consistent sales because there are more gatherers than there are crafters, plus new people who hit max level and want to gear.

Right now the only thing that'll be totally consistent like that is food and pots