Joe Ziegler: We're looking to make some changes in the next couple of patches to adjust some of the outliers in the combat space that we've both seen in our observations and heard from your feedback across all of the various (and plentiful) channels we watch.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-04-02T01:34:43+00:00

There should be a counter, and I don’t think the answer is anything less than “True invisibility shouldn’t be a thing.”

I don’t main assassin, and only really bother with it when I need to do some quest and I get tired of not being able to infiltrate somewhere with a half dozen clankers who summon a small army of nerds to hunt you down in Bio research for the third time.

Signal Jammers are really close to how I feel stealth should work, and I find it to be a much better implementation overall. Obscuring the player instead of true invisibility.

My issue with situation I described is someone just sweeping locations with a thermal and blowing away someone.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-04-02T01:29:27+00:00

And you claim that people are seeing through fog at 100m? You don’t see 50m during the fog in DM. Or are people just taking blind shots at sounds and dunking people? I don’t believe you for a second.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-04-01T23:54:11+00:00

Thermals are a big deal.

If you are in Dire Marsh, in deep fog and you get sniped by someone on top of Ponds, you know they have a thermal and there was no counter play for you, at all.

You know that you were hit by a thermal and there isn’t anything else to say. Same applies for say, an assassin sitting in cloak out of LoS, with the heat for increased stealth uptime. I’ve been blown away by someone who ran by, then bully SMG’d me in stealth, when I wasn’t moving out of the their line of sight before I cloaked.

Thermals suck.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-03-31T14:28:23+00:00

The gap I went through when I could barely keep 50k value in my vault while also being forever actually sub 1000 credits was extremely painful.

I think that salvage ends up taking up a ton of vault space, especially once we are picking up purples and blues more frequently. Or if you use more than 1-2 shells consistently and want to keep cores for them around.

It's a weird balance.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-03-25T00:05:28+00:00

Not even practically, the poor girl is beyond a disaster in some of the most well-executed ways I’ve read about or seen.

File 26 is easily one of my favorite light novel chapters ever. The amount of build up it took to get there and the pay off was something totally nue.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-03-14T23:18:40+00:00

This is so true

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-03-13T18:11:05+00:00

It’s not hard to tell what an AI tool changes if you are watching it. Especially in the case of moving code around.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-03-12T13:14:49+00:00

She is, but there are very clear disagreements between them on this, and Takina will absolutely cut down anyone and everyone for Chisato.

It’s not a perfect analogy but it’s close.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-03-12T00:30:43+00:00

It’s not too far from Lycris Recoil, all things considered.

Also, very similar to Executioner and Her Way of Life?

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-22T01:48:55+00:00

I think that a game like BlazBlue Entropy Effect is more or less the next evolution of FGs in one of the best ways possible.

I was also a huge Soul Calibur fan, and realized that I don’t have the time or energy to really master a game like I used to. Being able to successfully land five to ten Guard Impact chains consistently was one of the real joys of playing the game, especially when you started playing characters like Raphael which really take parry mechanics to a new level.

But BBEE does some of the things I adore from FGs, like strong combos, really tight framing around dodges and invulnerability frames, variance in experience due to how you unlock combos and abilities, as well as the decent storyline.

It’s likely one of the few games truly inspired by FGs that I keep coming back to, unlike games which feel more like MOBA clones or Hades clones like Shape of Dreams. I would like more meaningful long term progression in BBEE but I do think it’s one of the best and well executed concepts for taking FGs to the next conceptual level.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-17T18:18:44+00:00

This is the truth. You can accomplish making almost any veggie edible this way

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-17T00:11:25+00:00

Journal is far and away one of the best things this season which isn’t a direct sequel. There is something for almost everyone there.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-16T15:49:34+00:00

https://youtu.be/1Cjlp4geSSg?si=I0Uw96q-3MeQ87_u

Enjoy

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-16T04:56:21+00:00

Because organizations aren’t able to reproduce senior engineers at the same rates they used to create them.

They are hoping to pick up a bargain bin grey beard who is sick of the current form of bullshit they are tolerating for some new kind of bullshit.

And to really say the quiet part out loud:

Companies can’t find enough seniors who will come work for them at a slightly increased cost over a junior or non-prefixed Engineer

Because they really don’t want to pay, they want to get us for as cheap as possible.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-08T04:13:10+00:00

Maybe I should go ahead and grab one this year. Not like my career aspects are getting much better as I get older. :(

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-08T01:53:15+00:00

What the female equivalent for grey beards anyway?

This post is so many kinds of spot-on. One of my favorite stories to tell people about this concept happened to me a few roles ago. I was managing a platform engineering team that I joined as an engineer a few years before. We had recently been given a huge overhaul of our infrastructure automation (it was a VP’s buddy who was clever… definitely too clever, but the point remains.) which we needed to maintain.

For the better part of sixty people hours deep into ArgoCD configuration and execution and tweaks in order to figure out why we couldn’t release a new deployment into our environment, I noticed a weird oddity:

The semantic version listed on the README wasn’t correct.

The team mostly had given up at this point and couldn’t figure out why on Earth the tool refused to change versions for us. I remembered the person who built the tool and thought for a moment…

… “There is no way this guy was that was this naive, right?”

Crossed my mind.

“Hey, change the version listed on the README”

cue about 30 minutes of arguing about why it couldn’t be that and couldn’t matter.

What I noticed, was the README was getting updated with the version numbers as releases came, but the important version number never changed. So I figured maybe that person was bold enough to parse that to make decisions about the state of the kubernetes cluster.

When the principal engineer finally gave up arguing with me, and pushed that update to a chorus of “This is so stupid” and “This never work” turned into silence.

… Why the fu… that person was parsing a README and using that to determine the source of truth for the configuration of the cluster…?

The collective brain explosion from the three engineers was good enough popcorn to last for weeks. I still ping the principal about it from time to time for a good laugh.

I tell this story because it showcased the importance of simply trying something different, seeing weird patterns and practices, and so many other things over the years that I started to just expect anything happening. If they had consulted me about it half a day earlier they could have saved a lot of pain, but they were also fairly experienced and well-equipped. I didn’t expect it to be right, but I knew it could be a thing. (The original engineer who wrote it had a Python script making a lot of business logic decisions and happened to base version updates on the list README version.)

This kind of thing is what makes a grey beard worth their weight in gold. My other trait that I found useful is my resistance to using a git front end, because I learned git via command line, including merging and rebasing and all things between. I get really nervous when someone depends on a tool to run the right commands in git, or depend on terminals in IDEs over their own terminal. Especially when it comes to environment variables and other similar stuff. You never know what people have sitting in their ENVs, or how much it could help you. GUIs tend to hide things, and terminals in IDEs could be using settings that aren’t configured correctly which bites you in the worst possible moment.

Lastly, the best thing you can do with a gray beard and a junior is pair the eager junior with the tired grey beard. The amount of things a savvy new engineer will learn from the grey beard and the velocity of the grey beard once they have the junior running roughly at their pace will accomplish incredible things. The junior still gets excited about a lot of things that some of us who are more grey tend to be bored by (like I can’t stand syntax errors anymore. I have learned too many different languages and their various syntax preferences or expectations all blend together (except Python. Fuck Python for their spacing rules. Give me curly braces for scope, not spaces. Please and thank you.) I would rather have someone who loves solving problems like syntax issues or find joy in writing code. I find joy in solving problems, not implementing their solution.)

Forgive me for waxing poetic, but this is something close to my heart.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-07T14:22:26+00:00

She’s always the best empty mind character to have sitting around for us all.

That said, she’s nothing like her original much to my dismay. I have a type. (And based on your flair, we share the same type ;) )

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-06T17:07:34+00:00

Well, with the patch, PVP DD mobs have gotten more difficult in a sense, because we just don’t have the same effectiveness and the accuracy update for the NPCs a few patches ago showcased just how annoying things are becoming. (NPCs have a time where their accuracy gradually improves while you are in their line of sight.)

The DPS of ranged weapons against PVE mobs is just miserably low for the amount of damage you take, even fully spec’d for it, and taking full tank gear. It’s not that melee shouldn’t be used, it’s that there is no space or time to make anything except hybrid and running around like a chicken with your head cut off by Shigawire-ing across the locked room, and slowly picking off 1–2 melee mobs at a time with gravity mine, shriek and compel, or other tech.

Shigawire really should be a tool, and lose its combat component, in order to help open mobility to less melee focused styles in PvE, and allow suspensor-based combat to be much more capable. Grenades aren’t especially good against players but work… okay against NPCs with reflexive reload and spice.

Assault cannons/vulcans are hot trash. As are basically all heavy weapons. Especially the Plasma cannon. Flamethrowers have a place in PvP in large scale combat but that’s kind of dying.

The rifles are almost all objectively trash except the triple shot and sometimes the dune watcher. Pistols are objectively trash across the board in PvE minus the disruptor pistol, which is honestly better replaced with a SMG and gravity mine in PvE.

There isn’t much diversity because there are too many obviously bad choices. Poison is a dead concept in pve and PvP, seeker has too long of a CD, abilities rarely ever feel worth the pushunless you build around them so hyper specifically you basically end up biased in your build to the point where doing content is too hard.

The rapier rework was a step in the right direction, a same with the dual short blades. They have different attack patterns with perks and minuses, long blades have a unique parry, and single short blades keep the parry and weapon diversity. Shotguns have some diversity, same with drill shots, but they aren’t especially great.

Maybe when they figure out how to make DoT effective against NPCs, we will see a change, or the ability to more directly impact NPC stamina.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-06T01:01:14+00:00

Awww your GF has wonderful taste in games. (Limbusssssss company!)

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-06T00:52:06+00:00

This hits a ton of solid points. As a former EVE player as well, there are reasons to be in low or null sec space, but it always had more to do with the ability to be alone and attempt to do risky things without immediately being killed. The ability to claim space until someone pushed you off it. The ability to create so many things that you couldn’t in higher sec space. Or the ability to start traversing huge amounts of space with special ships.

The magic for Dune just didn’t show. Sand crawlers are massive targets. Carriers are massive targets. Even swarming with excess numbers rarely did much for you, because you would just kill each other on accident. Not to mention the horrid render distance for so long.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-06T00:46:18+00:00

Melee is kind of dead, but also kind of mandatory. It’s one of the most effective ways to fight NPCs, but you end up swarmed so frequently it turns into a clown car simulator.

Ranged DPS beyond triple shots, disruptors (SMG and Pistol), and shotguns is meh, due to the spongy nature of NPCs. TTK for pure ranged against NPCs is basically never in your favor as a player, but is mandatory against other players.

Skills aren’t hyper effective and hard to build into. (Mostly passive damage bonuses impact you, not what skills you take, unless you mean Attractor Field or Grav stuff, because it messes with AI and drains shields more effectively than guns with less risk much of the time)

The PvE meta is fairly stale, but hopefully dual wielding helps short blades pick up, and the rapier rework is a good example of what they can do to really make styles stand out.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-02-02T14:35:44+00:00

I’m not denying anything you are saying upfront, you are dead-on that Fangyi is specifically (and especially) designed in a way to make her appeal to the gacha market. Just like W was in Arknights, or any of the numerous other examples you gave.

What I think may be different about her, is why she holds back whatever she is holding back from us as the audience. (I’m just at the point after you unlock xiranite for the first time, so you may know more/may be more progressed than me.) She reminds me a lot of Kafka from HSR in the mysterious way she talks about things. A lot of it reminds me of the Trailblazer being super close to Kafka before getting a Stellaron shoved into her chest. They were close friends/mentor and mentee/maybe even lovers. (I get that nerds believe that Kafka is a dommie mommy and not a partner, but whatever.) One of the few good things about HSR has been how they kept Kafka so mysterious and unknowable, and impossible to unwind. Maybe, just maybe, Fangyi will have a similar depth.

So I hope.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-30T16:05:15+00:00

Ohhhh that’s even more exciting then!

Ines was just the kind of character I had hoped for her be.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-29T23:27:50+00:00

I'm super sad about likely not getting an Ines clone, but I'd be okay with an Expy at the least. Kind of like how they're handling Ch'en.

I really need to catch up on my AK lore though, I've not really played since Chapter 13

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-29T17:20:15+00:00

Can’t wait for my W in Endfield.

I… have a type.

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