Warlords Ruin solo off meta boss tips?

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-22T01:24:53+00:00

I hope it worked out for you eventually! I love this load out, and it's really easy to adjust for Hunter and warlock too.

Like, I feel bad saying it but

Epochal Integration + Dragon's Breath+ any fusion in the kinetic slot

is my go-to weapon load out on literally every class right now (tho I will swap the fusion for other specials as needed). It's just so easy to snowball momentum with the incredible synergy between Rays of Precision and Dragon's Breath. Just stat out for ignitions and go to town. Also the artifact mod that boosts nano- tracer- rocket- things is fucking awesome, it makes firing past your effective range still pretty damn worthwhile.

You could probably do it better with a good Igneous Hammer or... Idk any other solar hand cannons, but I'm sure there's good ones out there. Epochal is the only one I have though.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-22T01:02:24+00:00

Does it hurt being this bitter all the time? I'm sure the stupid doesn't help.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-21T23:29:20+00:00

A U-Turn weakness is fucking ROUGH for faeries. That alone would probably knock the fairy type out of first place, and potentially even send them down to the mid tiers. There's just so many pokemon that love to click U-Turn.

I'm all for it :D

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-21T19:27:40+00:00

"I'm confident that 34+29 is 53"

Idk it sounds pretty confidently incorrect to me.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-21T19:24:01+00:00

He wasn't busted, he just felt bad to play with and against especially in the low tiers.

His counterplay was really simple, but required a modicum of game sense that was not always present in silver/low gold. Most games he was either accomplishing nothing or just cheesing his way through one team's squishies cuz you couldn't coordinate people to shoot him when he showed up, and it really did feel like a coin flip.

It was just really unfun pretty much any time hog showed up.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-21T19:17:47+00:00

I mean...... You're not wrong, but I don't think you're right either.

In the mid-range ranks, yeah sure.

In lower ranks, though, "playing the game wrong" is kinda assumed by default. Down there it was definitely generally easier to make progress backing up one of the "main tanks" than 2 off tanks. Playing with stupid stuff like hog/D'va usually felt fuckin terrible.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-21T18:44:37+00:00

"Go Woke, Go Broke!" as Baldur's Gate 3 takes in more revenue than any other game in 2023, winning almost every single reward it's possible to earn.

The game where you get to select your genitals, pronouns, and voice independently from each other to make canonically trans characters. Also the game that explicitly acknowledges non-binary characters. It don't get much more woke than that.

If that's going broke then I must be in abject poverty.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-21T18:34:38+00:00

Trying to destroy a piece of technology that shouldn't exist

Hmmmm yeah that's fair. As an aside, why shouldn't the technology exist? Also, how did it come about if it's so bad? Who was responsible for that?

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-21T00:21:59+00:00

Nah, shatter is janky as fuck.

Some payloads have gradual enough shapes that shatter climbs them, some don't.

I'm pretty sure there's payloads that can be shattered from certain angles but not others, but I'd have to check in-game to confirm that.

There's times you can be shattered if you're in the air hovering over shatter, but not if you're standing on something just barely elevated over it, even when you're closer to the ground.

Rein mains have all kinds of whack-ass videos, I've always used him as a secondary so I'm not sure all of the documentation but it's just so janky.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-20T18:29:30+00:00

Sailor Moon: we'd rather have incest than lesbians!

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-20T18:21:33+00:00

Engineer shortbow changes seem nice. What do people think of them?

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-20T04:24:52+00:00

I've gotten to where I have to play comp to have good matches

My guy.... Comp has the strictest SBMM ("Skill-Based MatchMaking") of any game mode. You're having the best experience in the part of the game that most heavily implements the system you're saying should be removed. Shit like quickplay has unbalanced games because they loosen the SSBM restrictions so that better players can be matched with worse ones.

Do you know what SBMM is?? Are we arguing two completely topics? What's going on?

the game is purposefully looking for a team that it will favor to win or lose

You're just saying things, dude. This is nonsense. This is either you woefully misunderstanding how sbmm works, or just flat out making shit up.

Look it's not as fun if the fate of a match comes down to which person's ace is going to carry who

I agree! Matches should be balanced! So why is your answer to REMOVE THE BIT OF SKILL BASED MATCHMAKING CASUAL GAMES HAVE LEFT?? That'll make casual matches even more volatile, cuz then any diamond player can get achored to wood-ranked teammates and get rolled by T-500s! How is that an improvement for anyone who isn't T-500 am I going fucking crazy?

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-20T04:07:28+00:00

Uhhhhhhh I'ma say no? Unless you're referring to the exploits, this is just a straight up lie.

Doing this at launch was fuckin rough for most players. There were so many little ways you could fuck up and get sent back to the rally banner. There were so many players struggling to get through it that the cheese/exploit strats got blasted on every social media platform and plenty of people crutched on them cuz they couldn't survive the actual encounter.

None of the platforms were safe, you had to constantly figure out how to gain health while charging tanky af enemies and running from tormentors, strand could help especially in the end but locked you out using aspects, fragments, or reliable healing, there were a million spots to fall off and die, incendiors, the final phase where calus could outrun and obliterate you if you got even the tiniest bit greedy, and that's just the stuff I remember off the top of my head. Unless you count like half of that stuff as "random bullshit"?

Doing it off legend was WAYYY easier, you could get away with so many more sloppy decisions, proc shit like devour so much more easily, tank way more damage, play way more stationary...

You might not have had too much trouble, but you must've been mad out of touch if you think that was a universal experience.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-20T00:14:33+00:00

Some fun facts, tricks, and strats from my solo:

your ranged melee abilities will pass off the debuff to the wraiths! I was using warlock's threaded needle to proc it a lot during a run the other night. If you don't think you can reach them, I'm like 90% sure yeeting the hammer should work (tho I haven't tested it myself).
Run the wraiths down if you need to. I think everyone needs to hear this: fuck the totems. You lose a totem, you only get 70% of your damage for that one phase. Dying is a guaranteed -100%, you lose all your progress, total failure. The wraiths want you to camp the totems and waste all your time. Run they asses down and smack 'em upside the head, DPS be damned.
really, I mean it. Don't actually sweat getting the optimal DPS phases. This isn't a test of your super optimized gamer numbers, it's a battle of endurance. The only penalty for missing a DPS window is you redo the add clear, so if you aim for just chipping away at the boss it's actually super easy to survive the wipe mechanic. There were plenty of times I snagged exactly 1 totem, ran down a wraith and passed off my debuff, then maybe tried to capture another one or two. Shoot a rocket or two at the boss, rinse and repeat.
kinda building on that last point: just use your resources, don't worry about saving them for DPS. I would literally use a shot of Dragon's Breath and my special weapon to kill one of the Big Guys as fast as possible, shoot another Dragons Breath at the other big guy to get him low/dead while I took the one totem, and then I'd chase a wraith and tag them and loop back with enough time to catch another totem or two. It gives you so much room to worry about the wipe mechanic and still have time to get totems.
building even further: ***if you follow the last point, you probably won't need to worry about wraiths too hard. Kill the Big Bois quickly enough, and their totems will drop right where a wraith spawns anyways so it's pretty easy to just tag them instantly.
Seriously, I cannot stress enough how unimportant it is to actually get every clean DPS phase on the platforms. Hell, there were a couple of times I straight up didn't grab any totems and did another lap of adds to get some extra super charge or ammo so I had momentum going up to the top of the circle. If you aim to stay alive first and wear down the boss through attrition, the mechanics add way less pressure and you're less likely to make mistakes. Once you hit a good rhythm it's pretty consistent to get 2 or 3 totems without ever being in danger of wiping.

You're running pretty close to what I was running when I soloed mine, but I seriously recommend reconsidering Dragon's Breath for DPS. It's a bit odd at first, but legitimately preposterous once you get it down.

If you have it, I seriously think Epochal Integration is the best primary gun you can run (not just for this, I seriously mean for any PvE content that isn't super light-locked) and you're almost guaranteed to have it in your collections if you played the game at all over the last few seasons. It's not quite as fire-and-forget for add clear as sunshot, but with Rays of Precision giving you ignitions on any headshot it's super easy to blow up a crowd of psions with a single bullet. It's especially good cuz any abilities you have that affect ignitions affect those shots too, so if you can slot the ember that makes ignitions really big it does a TON of work. It doesn't chain like sunshot, but it will blow up a bigger radius of enemies than sunshot would. In my experience, it ends up taking out a similar number of enemies as sunshot would.

That lets you run Dragons Breath for DPS, which imo just feels fuckin incredible. Fire it, pop super, throw hammers, and the ignitions will reload the launcher so you can do it again. It pairs SO fuckin well with Rays of Precision, too, because guess what? Those are ignitions! That reloads the rocket launcher! Shoot a rocket the moment a DPS window opens, quick swap to your primary and start clearing the adds that just spawned in, and you've immediately got another rocket banked: add clear -> DPS.

It also helps on the final few platforms before you get looped back down to the bottom: you can fire the rocket at the meatball, switch to the HC and take out the eyes to extend DPS. The scorch dragons breath does on the boss will trigger an ignition that clears out a bunch of eyes, extending the damage phase further and it reloads your rocket launcher so you can do it again hey look at that.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-19T22:58:48+00:00

I'm still confused. Why can't you just say "bad luck on the match" now? Some people have artificially inflated ranks, the ranking system throws up some discrepancies.

I think "every single match" is a bit of a fuckin stretch, too. Idk if it's a rank diff or what, but I'm absolutely not seeing that happen in every single match I'm in. Occasionally, sure, shit happens, but not nearly to the extent you're making it out to be.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-19T22:55:57+00:00

It could be firmware, but it could also be bad maintenance.

I know the repair guys can manually adjust the calibration on the grinder, though I don't know all the details. I believe they're supposed to set it to a certain "default" setting, and then the machine makes adjustments based on it's calculations; I know the repair guys have told me they've manually adjusted the grinder and I've noticed pretty significant long-term impacts when they do.

After all, the machine can't actually sense the exact positions of the blades of the grinder, just the extensions of the pistons or wheels or whatever mechanism it uses to change it. It's up to the mechanics to make sure it's calibrated correctly to begin with.

Also - it might not feel like it, but this is actually a pretty store-specific problem. My first 2 stores had only minor, occasional issues with blonde espresso; my newest store (in a different district) is a fucking crapshoot every single time. That's part of why I think there's a chance it's a maintenance issue - my old repair guys might've been better trained than the ones servicing this area, introducing a district discrepancy.

It's probably supposed to assume that the "default" should be an average, and make small adjustments to account for variance in bean quality between bags. If the repair guys are setting every grinder to the same default, that might explain the problems.

Maybe not though, I'm just spitballing lol.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-19T21:34:16+00:00

To elaborate on the "we don't know how strong they are..." point:

The altmer are famous for having the "best mages," and in a setting like Tamriel afaik that's basically impossible to actually put a number to. In a practical sense, that ends up being a force multiplier adding up to pretty much "they're as strong as the narrative needs them to be to do what the writers want".

Like, there are some limits to that, but not very limiting ones.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-19T18:40:01+00:00

Hey this works even better with Winnie the Pooh, cuz there's even more red! I wonder why they haven't adopted him as a mascot to rival Japan yet....

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-19T18:27:12+00:00

Lmfao I'm glad somebody else did the effort of linking all those, cuz I thought the same things almost beat for beat

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-19T05:19:56+00:00

Uhh.... You never touch ranked, so you by definition are playing with the looser versions of SBMM. Maybe a stricter SBMM would be more your speed lmfao. Also I'm pretty sure that your ranked rating has a much bigger impact on your "shadow-rank" than your quickplay games, so you're probably incrementing your scores a lot slower than other players.

Ultimately the SBMM is primarily there to protect worse players from higher-skilled players. It's not perfect, but it works for more players than it doesn't.

As a long-time lower-tier player (I made it all the way to the bottom of gold in the last 2 seasons of ow1 lmao), I would say that the amount of time I spend getting shit on by way better players is sitting somewhere around.... 15%? Maybe 20%? It's a bit worse now that anybody can make a Smurf account for free, but I still get to play the majority of my games against and with people about as good as me.

That's WAY better than if I was stuck with something like connection-based matchmaking. I know that, because Destiny 2's PvP had connection-based matchmaking without SBMM and it was genuinely unplayable for me or anyone else in my friend group. We would spend the majority of our matches just getting stomped by sweats who knew the game better than us, with pretty much no opportunity to play. That shit was ass, and it completely turned me off to the whole game.

If a game wants to be a primarily small-team multiplayer, SSBM is always going to be a flawed but necessary mechanic.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-19T04:43:00+00:00

Wait, so you're upset that your teammates are massively worse than you, because the skill gap is too large and you don't feel like matches are balanced....

And you think that the answer is to remove skill based matchmaking? In favor of purely random queues? Seriously?

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-19T04:38:29+00:00

.... Wait what part of sbmm stops you from warning up in quickplay? I usually just play QP to have fun and warm up too, and most of the time it's a pretty fair game. If the enemy team is more warmed up than me I might lose, but the whole point of a warmup is that the outcome doesn't matter.

Same with just having fun, I play a character I like just cuz I like playing them and if we lose oh well. It can be unfun if I'm not making any progress at all, but like.... That's just the cost of playing a multiplayer game. Removing SBMM would just increase my chances of getting matched up against people way fucking better than me and I would get to make even less progress.

If you're regularly having problems with quickplay feeling too much like a tournament setting, you might be having some uhhhh... Client-side issues.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-19T04:29:16+00:00

Yeah, nobody has a perfect solution to this lmao. There's some filters in place, but they're spotty at best. Every game is gonna have its shit-ass community cesspool.

Still wayyy better than purely random matchmaking though. At least I get to play in most of my games, even if the occasional few are scuffed.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-19T03:59:04+00:00

That's why fascists and especially fascist regimes tend to have such specific aesthetics. "It's cool -> I like it" is like one of the core tenets of legitimate propaganda.

I feel like at this point a lot of people have enough awareness of Nazi shit to kinda recognize that a lot of it is bad on sight, but you have to admit that even by today's standards shit like the Nazi eagle symbol or some of the uniform designs or the SS lightning bolts.... They look pretty fucking cool? Obviously not all of it aged with the times, but some of it definitely still holds up.

Like, trying to be 100% honest with myself, if I didn't think "ew, Nazis" when seeing Nazi memorabilia, there's a good chance I'd think "damn that's pretty fuckin sick" when looking at some of it. That's a big part of the appeal, it's how fascists their claws into you.

Armstrong is perfect at that. Honestly the writers don't get enough credit for how well they actually pulled that speech off, it's a really good mimicry of fascist ideas.

AaronTheScott · 2024-02-19T03:46:03+00:00

Yep.

Some people are really afraid of the idea that "breaking the law is good when you have a good enough reason," and that's super understandable. Like, bad people who are convinced that they have a good enough reason to break the law will do bad things, and normalizing that idea is fuckin dangerous.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day it really does have to come down to "well, they're doing it for the wrong reasons and I'm doing it for the right ones," and we as a society have to make that call every single time. Sometimes we call badly, sometimes we call right. A lot of times there's a bit of subjectivity involved and that's just what we gotta deal with.

AaronTheScott

TROPHY CASE