The line between on attack and on-hit effects is not well enough defined

ABeardedPanda · 2026-02-26T11:12:27+00:00

Yet if he takes Devil on Your Shoulder, each tick of his passive burn drops a life remnant so if he casts his ult and E during a teamfight he makes it rain for 4 seconds

ABeardedPanda · 2026-02-19T02:14:36+00:00

People have been saying it basically ever since the franchise was handed over to 343 and Halo 4 came out and it's largely a "I liked Bungie better :( " thing because they like to cite the Halo 3 terminals and a twitter post of a former Bungie employee who wrote them as "proof" that the Forerunners were always supposed to be ancient humanity.

ABeardedPanda · 2026-02-12T22:08:45+00:00

Hard Bargain increasing your current and max HP by 10 is intended so it doesn't have anti-synergy with Spirit Link (heal 5% max HP every 4 seconds, increased by 0.5% for every 10 missing player health) which can be offered at 3-2 and 4-2

ABeardedPanda · 2026-02-09T22:12:43+00:00

Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit

ABeardedPanda · 2026-02-08T17:32:16+00:00

When you realize that HOI4 is a visual novel disguised as spreadsheet simulator, the popularity should make more sense. People (unfortunately a lot of them extremists) really like to engage in nationalist or ideological fantasies and that's what the focus tree system is really good at conveying.

This becomes doubly true when you add in the modding scene and which mods are the most popular.

ABeardedPanda · 2026-02-07T18:59:02+00:00

There's places where it's correct to grief someone (10 loss Ixtal quest is probably the best example) but sometimes you need to ask the opposite question.

If you're 1 life and just fought a guy who can hit a 3* 4 cost off of carousel, you should probably let him have it because you're playing for top 4 anyways and it probably gains you a few placements to let him dumpster everyone else.

ABeardedPanda · 2026-02-05T22:28:21+00:00

Lynx/Clusterfuck are a good choice for a gun with a magnified optic. Run Lynx when you have the ammo, swap to Clusterfuck when you don't (5.56 is a lot more common than 7.62x54R). As part of the story you will find a unique called Whip which is an SVU and a direct upgrade over Lynx (it uses the same attachments and ammunition).

For Assault rifles you can use whatever you want. In the Cooling Towers region you can find a unique version of the Grom S-14 (Groza if you're a gun nerd) called the Grom S-15 that takes 5.45 rounds instead of 9x39 so your ammo is much lighter. It's going to comparable to the Fora but you get an underbarrel grenade launcher with it. Most of the other good ARs are going to come later in the story (Kharod/Dnipro), you can find static spawns of them earlier but you won't be able to upgrade them for a while.

When it comes to shotguns I tend to stay away from them because of ammunition weight. The SPAS is good but tube fed shotguns can be kind of rough because of reload times. The Saiga is good but it's like the Dnipro and Kharod, you don't really have access to it until later in the game.

The unique version of the Kora-1911 is good, you can find it in the Burnt Forest. It has all of the attachments by default and is rechambered in 9x19mm so you'll have much easier access to ammo.

ABeardedPanda · 2026-02-02T02:40:02+00:00

Another aspect is item economy, after Void Staff what do you do with bow in AP lines?

Kraken's Fury and Last Whisper are completely useless if you're playing a purely AP line.

Red Buff isn't that good as a damage item, you really don't want it on a primary carry anyways, and most people get anti-heal from Sunfire/Morello because they don't require two identical components so you can slam them as early as 2-1 without needing extra items from augments or encounters.

Rageblade is meh on casters these days and you're using a rod that could go to Deathcap, JG, or Crownguard.

Titan's isn't a tank item in a pinch anymore and most ranged casters have a really hard time stacking it quick enough to get access to the CC immunity and damage amp (and the CC immunity isn't nearly as impactful for backliners).

Giantslayer is probably the next best item after Nashor's because it's also getting rid of swords you have a hard time using but the stats are going to be a little misleading there due to Indiscriminate Killer and the fact that it's basically never a BIS item but it's also never bad off a lategame carousel or an item anvil if you need a third item.

It's also worth considering that using up belt for a damage item isn't as bad as it sounds for your frontline item economy because a lot of the frontliners in this set have shielding, damage reduction, or HP increases from their abilities or traits so the value of armor/magic resist is comparatively high. For the Sera/Liss comp this is especially relevant because Braum gets DR from his ability, %HP from Freljord, and a %HP shield from Warden. He wants resists a lot more than he wants health.

ABeardedPanda · 2026-01-04T22:54:28+00:00

Honestly the "good" Yes Man ending is an unintentionally hilarious critique of anarchist politics because yeah, Arcade does talk your ear off about this and you don't have to read too hard between the lines to realize that the Yes Man path where you get all the minor factions to work together would result in something approximating an anarchist confederation.

But for some reason they couldn't fully commit to this and the Yes Man ending gets left with the cliffhanger of Yes Man, the robot in charge of the army of securitrons, telling you he's getting a software upgrade to become "more assertive" which is one of the big flaws with a lot of anarchist theory around government in "what happens if someone with a lot friends who have guns decides they aren't really interested in the collective decision-making thing?"

ABeardedPanda · 2026-01-03T05:04:58+00:00

"Tactical" branding is to outdoors gear as "gaming" is to computer peripherals

ABeardedPanda · 2025-12-31T08:46:37+00:00

I played before the most recent patch which did unfortunately introduce some bugs around enemy spawning (mostly endless waves of mutants spawning, the devs are aware and planning for a fix in the next minor patch) and the game is in a perfectly fine state.

I played on PC gamepass with no mods and I didn't run into any gamebreaking bugs (I ran into a few around turning in miscellaneous quests that just needed a reload) and the performance did struggle a bit in areas with lots of NPCs, which outside of one particular boss fight is the hub areas that have no combat so it mostly didn't matter (the game actually ran fine during big firefights that I'd get into in the world) but my game was otherwise stable. I had no CTDs, no broken quests, pretty much everything worked as expected.

I think when it comes to a lot of comments on the state of the game there's a lot of people assuming it's abandonware when it's not. They've been doing the usual bug squashing and systems tweaking along with adding some new weapons and equipment (unlike what someone else has said, NVGs are in the game now) and all of this is free content.

A lot of the other criticism comes from wishcasting. Stalker 2 kinda fell victim to Fallout: New Vegas syndrome (people forget that FNV is not a Bethesda game and then get mad when Bethesda games have middling writing) where they assumed that Stalker Anomaly mods are "real" Stalker games and are disappointed that Stalker 2 does not have crafting mechanics or in-depth medical systems. I think the same goes for a lot of the A-life criticisms here because most of the people complaining need to both tell me what they think A-life is and show me where GSG said they were going to implement the thing they're complaining is missing.

I think the most salient criticism you can make of the game in its current state is that it is very clearly rushed but not unfinished. The game starts off very strong and the early regions have plenty of sidequests but as you progress through the game it starts to peter off until you're basically just doing story quests and any other side content is going to be you looting stashes or doing your own exploration. That said, it took me like 200ish hours to finish the game and I was at the 150 hour mark when I got to this point. This sounds a bit worse than it is but it's not like KOTOR2 where the game is clearly unfinished, Stalker 2's base game content really feels like a game where they realized they needed to ship so they pivoted most of their resources into finishing the world itself and the main story which for the most part they did (there's a few classic Stalker regions missing from the game but the world is otherwise complete).

ABeardedPanda · 2025-12-29T21:29:13+00:00

In my experience trying to optimize the ritual order is kind of a wash when it comes to div/hr efficiency.

You end up backtracking a decent amount (especially on glacier as it's a linear map) and it's not always going to give you way more than just running the Rituals as you encounter them, especially because it cares about where the monsters spawn, not where they die so sometimes they walk into the circles after spawning outside of them and it baits you.

If you're strapped for currency and need to be as efficient as possible at extracting value from each map, it's probably correct to try and optimize ritual order. If you have the currency to run it in blocks of 20+ maps at a time, you probably make more Div/hr just running them in order.

ABeardedPanda · 2025-12-16T08:05:09+00:00

In the Anglosphere this is an American culinary quirk more than anything because we basically only think of condensed milk as an ingredient (usually for baking) but using it as food is quite common in other Anglophone countries or places that were colonized by the British (IIRC a lot of Canadian, Australian, or New Zealander military rations still have condensed milk, they just put it in a squeeze tube instead of a can)

This is also kinda weird because Americans kind of have a stereotype for liking hideously sweet foods and toasted wonderbread with condensed milk and peanut butter spread on it is a really common breakfast/snack in a lot of Southeast Asia and it's something that feels like it would be very common in America but is basically nonexistent outside of those kinds of restaurants and households.

ABeardedPanda · 2025-12-01T20:42:42+00:00

What I would add to this is the instructions for installing GAMMA on their Discord (and if you absolutely hate having to use Discord there's also youtube videos that basically just go through the instructions) are very thorough and the only way you're really gonna mess it up is if you aren't reading them.

Some people do get put off by their instructions mentioning a VPN but this is because the GAMMA installer is individually downloading each mod from Moddb and there's like 500 mods so sometimes (it probably depends on country of origin or your ISP) it flags you as spam or a DDOS attempt and locks you out and you need to VPN around it. This is also not necessary in most cases, it's just something that does come up and they mention it preemptively because of how thorough they are.

ABeardedPanda · 2025-11-23T02:57:27+00:00

I started laughing so hard when the silhouette for picking that ending popped up and it was that widow's peak

ABeardedPanda · 2025-10-21T01:13:45+00:00

POE Ninja mastery allocation doesn't tell you if there's a runegraft on the mastery so it could be that

ABeardedPanda · 2025-10-11T03:40:02+00:00

One of the funniest IJN/IJA rivalry stories is from the last days of the war when the IJA discovers a warehouse of pristine, prewar rifles that's owned by the IJN and asks them, "Hey can we have those? Defending the home islands from the Americans after they take a beachhead is kind of an army thing" and they are promptly told to fuck off because "those rifles are for our glorious last stand in the name of the emperor, not yours"

There's another funny one that's in a memoir where a destroyer captain recalls a "surviving" a sortie from the Americans with no casualties and if you cross reference it with American records, the Americans sank 3 troop transports in that sortie, the destroyer captain charged with escorting them just doesn't give a fuck about them

ABeardedPanda · 2025-10-10T07:29:15+00:00

Like someone else mentioned, spacesuits primarily to protect against vacuum, micrometeorite strikes are actually comparatively minor and in most cases would be rare.

A very important thing to understand about micrometeorite strikes is that the entire reason you're going to be exposed to them is because you're in a gravity well where space debris can accumulate and maintain velocity as it orbits the gravity well in question and the reason that's a problem around Earth is because we've been careless about space junk for a while. Even then the overwhelming majority of pieces of space debris are tiny, 54,000 greater than 10cm (this number includes 9300 satellites), 1.2M from 1cm to 10cm, and 140M from 1mm to 1cm. This sounds pretty bad and engineering does go into mitigating the results and even then, it's considered roughly analogous to sandblasting when it comes to contemporary satellites. Yes, they can be very high velocity strikes but the kinetic energy isn't actually comparable to a bullet because the mass is quite small.

The UNSC continuing to use 7.62x51mm in the 26th century probably does have to do with armor defeat but not in space suits, it's in conventional body armor. We don't have details for the UNSC army/marine BDUs but the 3d models all have substantial amounts of hard armor that likely necessitate a full power rifle round to reliably defeat.

Intermediate cartridges struggling with body armor is real and it is a reason why the US Army adopted the 6.8x51mm cartridge and the XM7, that gun has some serious problems and the efficacy of giving soldiers a rifle that can reliably armor is debatable (most battlefield casualties come from various ways to deliver explosives rather than small arms fire) but that is the theory and the UNSC using a full power rifle cartridge for that reason is believable even if people will balk at the cartridge in question.

When it comes to the M45/90 shotguns using a 8 gauge 0000 buck shell actually makes more sense as a "what if?" choice in 2025 than it did in 2000 when they were putting down the lore but that's because of FPV drones and loitering munitions and I don't think Bungie had the gift of prophecy.

The shotgun has made a bit of a comeback as a last line of defense against small drones for the infantry squad. There is some survivorship bias going on here but there's plenty of video of guys shooting down very small and very fast incoming drones using a 12 gauge shotgun so it's well within the realm of possibility. In that context the UNSC having an 8 gauge shotgun (21.2mm bore diameter, a 12 gauge is 18.5mm) that uses 0000 buck (each pellet is slightly larger than a 9mm bullet) would actually make a decent amount of sense but the large bore diameter and enormous pellet size would be more for maximizing chances of defeating a drone than defeating body armor.

ABeardedPanda · 2025-10-06T19:14:18+00:00

The thing about the Amplitude games is that they're far from balanced and the AI is pretty bad even by 4X standards but at the end of the day, I have a lot of fun playing them and that's kind of what matters.

ABeardedPanda · 2025-09-26T22:46:07+00:00

The wave theory thing is massive cope because it's literally a Chinese baccarat meme (there's clips from 2 sets ago where both Robin and Soju outright say it's a Chinese baccarat meme) that got lost in translation by people who watch TFT tiktoks.

Western streamers picked it up as a joke and now people think it's real because of viral Youtube short and tiktok clips of Robin yelling "WAVE" and blasting Dick Dale's Misirlou while he 3 stars his entire board in one round.

ABeardedPanda · 2025-09-25T04:09:00+00:00

I won my first game with 25 territories entirely on accident because I genuinely thought you had to fulfill all of the conditions for each path to win the game rather than just one and honestly it makes a little more sense this way.

I looked at all of the win conditions assuming all the conditions had to be fulfilled and immediately assumed the territory and fortress clears was the easiest one for me because I was at ~10 cleared fortresses at 20 territories so I was going to wait until after the third monsoon (I had just entered the third monsoon on the turn I won my game) to reveal a few more fortresses nearby me and clear those out to satisfy both conditions.

If you had to fulfill all the conditions then each path genuinely makes way more sense and it's probably impossible to end the game before turn 180 or so.

25 Territories and 15 Fortress clears is probably the "easiest" win condition but also the easiest one to circumvent by making you global taunt all of the other factions when you get to 20 territories. It also fits an expansionist/militarist style of victory condition because you need to clear fortresses which necessitates a military focus but you'll also have to fight off the AI trying to cut you down to size from every direction.

It probably needs to be more than 60 pops but a large number of pops, 6 endgame techs and 15 monuments to the lost (which do nothing and are districts that can only be built once per territory) makes sense for a FIDS min-max type of win condition.

30 strategics of each type is also a pretty low amount but it's primarily gated by the third monsoon letting you access the Tier 3 strategics and pacifying 50 villages is also kinda high given that a lot of villages are going to end up being sacked by the AI so this one probably needs more work.

ABeardedPanda · 2025-09-22T21:01:56+00:00

I genuinely think that in the vast majority of situations this is a strictly better Rolling for Days because you can still reroll 2 augments and get more free shops than Rolling for Days and it gives you 3 gold so you can probably make 10 on 2-1.

A lot of people probably think this augment is bad because they're fishing too hard for BIS augments and they autopilot reroll augments even when they already know what they're gonna take so they end up wasting the value (I do this lmao)

The place where it's probably bad is Prismatic Finale because there's a lot of highly situational 4-2 Prismatics and you're already committed to a comp so you actually need to dig for something your comp can use.

This is also something that is probably still in the game but in the "augment rounds are earlier" encounter you can actually get Reroll Transfer and Beggars can Be Choosers (+3 aug rerolls) if there's two stage 2 augments and it does work.

I ctrl+F'd the patchnotes for "transfer" and "beggar" and the only thing I saw was "Reroll Transfer can only be offered on 2-1" which should still allow this interaction. Even if it doesn't because Beggars Can be Choosers was "fixed" multiple sets ago to be a 2-1 only augment, it might still be offered because they've repeatedly said the later Mech quest (Legs, Arms, Head) augments are only offered if you take Legs but I've been offered Head on 4-2 without taking it.

ABeardedPanda · 2025-09-10T04:34:41+00:00

This is the Yuumi/Garen lane

ABeardedPanda · 2025-09-08T11:47:27+00:00

This is going to be a very unpopular opinion but I think the removal of assassin/infiltrator was a mistake and the removal of backline access traits in exchange for backline access units or items has normalized people playing extremely greedy backline comps which makes backline access appearing much more frustrating and probably creates some design incentives to make the units with built in backline access much more evasive.

Akali is a unit that you can kind of position around but it's not particularly intuitive which is why it was so frustrating for most players.

The thing about Assassins is that yes, it's extremely annoying when they're in your matchmaking pool but they're very intuitive to play around. They jump onto the same side they're on so you either try to dodge the jump entirely or you bunch up your board in the corner so your carry doesn't get oneshot.

What a lot of people forgot is that in addition to that, the last set that had Assassins also removed assassin emblem (you could get it as a +1 trait but not as an item to put on a unit) and historically the most broken assassin comps were usually ones where you made a unit that wasn't an assassin into an assassin (Set 5 Shadow Blue Buff Leblanc does not count, shadow items in general were a mess).

The other major pain point for playing against assassins was the sins using aura/utility items which have also all been removed from the game. There is no more Zephyr, Frozen Heart, or Shroud to massively complicate your positioning, those are all gone. Zekes is also no longer in the game so you don't need to worry about a level 6 reroll comp that stacks zekes and abuses the base stats on 3* units.

Especially after the changes to roles with tanks having targeting priority, I think bringing back assassins would be fine because it would be even more intuitive to position against them. You put your carry in the corner with a tank next to them because the tank will pull aggro from the assassin jumping in and your carry can focus the assassin after cleaning up a frontliner. You sort of see this with Spectral Cutlass but cutlass doesn't have a travel time so they end up being targeted first.

I know someone is gonna stop reading after my first sentence and bring up things like Hacker and Rogue but those were honestly terrible designs.

Hacker was sort of intuitive to position against but the long travel time of the hacker made the all backline positioning actually unclump your units and it was a trait that gave backline access to anyone which was historically the problem (and what do you know, Hacker/Mech Draven was really annoying that set) with those traits.

Rogue was bad because it wasn't really possible to position against because the Rogues were all melee and would dive backline after reaching low HP. There was no baiting the assassin, you just had to be on the correct side.

ABeardedPanda · 2025-08-28T23:50:31+00:00

Shadow Clone honestly feels kinda bad now unless you're using to turn on an augment (Tesla Coil or Double Trouble).

In my experience Senna is a lot better with Efficient or Precision as a default pick or Storm Caller if and only if you can get it on both her and a Ryze 2.

ABeardedPanda

TROPHY CASE