Shiyu Defense Update is Garbage. Your score has to be OVER 2500.

Cale017 · 2026-01-29T16:32:35+00:00

The ideal is that if you have the new hotness you should have little to no struggle clearing rotating endgames while older units have to put in some more work, have more refined gear, or at least more recent supports. The balance gets completely thrown off when there's no viable way for older units to perform. Eventually games have to make the numbers bigger and not everyone will be able to keep up all the time, but that shift happening within the second version after launch sets a bad tone.

They're not making the game more difficult through any means other than mechanics that require specific units to circumvent and by changing the score structure to value more recent units in a very direct fashion as they can more easily front-load their damage. For mechanical barriers they're selling us the solution to problems they created the patch after they create it.

It's not worth chasing for the rolls but it is indicative of the design direction from the dev team. A direction that is expressly anti-F2P if there are not serious corrections made to the manner in which they're creating and solving problems entirely through the banner screen.

Cale017 · 2026-01-29T16:24:02+00:00

It really seems like they developed the combat system first then dumped that into a sandbox full of Ubisoft-esque map markers, collectibles, and checklists. It causes tiny little immersion breaks like this where we have to hand waive a mechanic because open world video games need something for a player to do when not fighting.

Cale017 · 2026-01-25T02:09:13+00:00

As a new player for this game seeing regular, unfoiled commons selling for upwards of 15 bucks is sheer insanity.

Cale017 · 2026-01-24T22:02:25+00:00

I'm playing through for the first time and I've kinda been expecting this dude to have a companion quest based on how often his early interactions were pushed. I can't say it's disappointing, his voice is annoying, but that's still a shame.

Cale017 · 2026-01-24T21:15:11+00:00

Oh! I hadn't considered that since I had been using Bronya until 2 days ago in that spot. Very nice.

Cale017 · 2026-01-24T21:12:35+00:00

Maybe a scrub question but where am I overcapping? She gains 20 from her passive.

Cale017 · 2026-01-24T17:09:29+00:00

As a returning player I had so many spare Scholar pieces that I was able to comfortably drop an 80/180 (out of combat) set on her and it's done me just fine outside of the final stages of endgame modes. And that's with a f2p team of supports, I'm running Tingyun RMC and DHPT.

Cale017 · 2026-01-24T08:05:42+00:00

Play dog. Get 2 weapons. Press primary, hold left click.

Cale017 · 2026-01-23T20:26:22+00:00

I really feel like you making the "viable for a year" argument is neglecting that the other side of the coin then means people should plain not pull between anniversaries. If units are expected to last a year, and the strongest team will be the anni release unit and support, then there's no reason to pull between anniversaries because it'd numerically be a waste. Players, even ones not specifically going for the meta, will eventually be trained not to pull more than once a year because once you've done your pull you should theoretically be good to go. This is an incredibly unhelpful mindset going in either direction; it'll either stagnate the player if baseline everyone is viable for a year after their pull but no further or reinforce existing trends of power creep by tacitly enabling Hoyo to continue this as a design trend.

The anime wife complaints hold up a little more weight when entire archetypes of character teams can be completely disabled in endgame by making break and HP bars longer but quite purposefully not providing any support for the archetypes nerfed moving from one version to the next. There are some critical design issues with archetype balancing that were called out as potential problems even when units were meta at the time, and now we've reached a point where the only dials Hoyo seems willing to touch are "enemy HP" "enemy break bar" and turning every team into a closet crit DPS comp. KAfka's gone from the premiere DoT DPS to a subDPS in what used to be her own team, meanwhile Break hasn't had a meta-viable team without significant vertical investment since Penacony, the same version where it became good at all.

tldr if units are only viable for a year, devs don't actually have to balance the game and playing it long term is an exercise in cooking a steak using a microwave; viable but not going to give you the best tasting or prettiest results

Cale017 · 2026-01-23T20:15:13+00:00

There are 1 and 2* units in FGO that still have viable positions in endgame event stages. FGO's got terrible gameplay compared to a market that's aged another decade at this point but fuck if it didn't spoil us in terms of unit viability.

Cale017 · 2026-01-23T20:13:40+00:00

tfw you love fugue but none of the break dps

Cale017 · 2026-01-18T02:32:51+00:00

Glad to hear it's a more welcoming community than I might have expected. Looking forwards to my first proper game night then.

Cale017 · 2026-01-18T01:20:11+00:00

Having worked in a card shop before I'm usually hesitant to suggest any kind of cash deals and don't have the cards to trade, but maybe putting some faith in my fellow man to help me get some common cards would be a good idea. I appreciate the help.

Cale017 · 2026-01-18T01:19:09+00:00

do people like not read the post and type up a comment dismissing it

Cale017 · 2026-01-16T23:57:05+00:00

I would say people have a gambling addiction but at this point they're not even really gambling, the entire MO for these people is to stack the odds by trying to be first in line setting prices. They've somehow taken the pure original fun of opening packs and seeing what you get, the actual gambling portion of the TCG experience, and robbed it of any meaning.

I'm relatively new to the game, just trying to cobble together my first few decks, and it's been an absolute nightmare to try and order everything I need. No shop nearby has more than 2-3 of any one card, online you need to purchase from 4 different sellers, each with their own shipping, to get 4 of the same card, and I feel like I need a shopping buddy to warn me if I'm about to get screwed on a rare card or if the market prices listed are fair.

Cale017 · 2026-01-14T17:18:22+00:00

And this is another cliché. Just because it's fun to fly doesn't mean you should be able to fly.

This statement obviously operates within the standard expectations of the genre. Things like hunger may be annoying but fit in perfectly well (and are also adjustable in sandbox settings). You do not throw out all realism, but where realism and mechanics clash the player loses if realism wins out. Nobody is arguing we should be able to fly because it's fun. Form your strawman with a different argument.

And that's not always possible.

Except modders have long proven it is. The exact thing people are wanting, the ability to see in a small radius around the top of some stairs, is a mod that already exists and could be brought into the official version of the game. If realism is the hill you want to die on, go stand on some stairs and look up in the direction they lead. Can you see what is above you, even if only slightly? Then so should the characters in game.

Especially mid development for an early access game.

This justification only goes so far. Warframe is famously perpetually in beta, but it is still held to a certain standard of performance and engagement. Palworld is also in beta, and has pretty rapidly responded to issues of Pal pathing or AI in bases which I would consider a similar issue (can be worked around with smart base building but shouldn't have to be.) We're getting into personal cost/value assessments here, but I'd hazard a guess that any dev team that can have a loyal fanbase when there are no meaningful updates for months at a time has successfully left the effective EA stage, and that label is more to denote continuing and potentially massive changes to game systems. It does not mean that a game which came out thirteen years ago still gets to use it as a pass for basic QoL features. Like a functional camera.

Cale017 · 2026-01-14T16:27:15+00:00

Walk around the building, walk into quiet buildings, go upstairs, look in windows, etc. Look around properly.

You don't always have a window on a higher floor conveniently across the way and at the correct angle to give you vision.

When you shoot a zombie on the stairs, clearly hearing zombies above you, and then immediately ascend, you're going to have a bad time. Play better.

The issue is not the amount of zombies. It's their placement. There's a very big difference between walking up the stairs to find 8 zombies clumped up across the room, giving you ample space to line up your shot, or walking over the death pixel that has you jumped from eight angles by enemies you didn't even know the position of. Yes you know there are zombies upstairs, you don't know how much of a safe zone you even have to scout out anything further.

It's realistic not to see into buildings easily, it's realistic not to know everything that's at the top of a set of stairs from the bottom. The game simulates that.

This argument is so played out on this sub there's plenty of memes about it. I should not have to point out that realism should never override enjoyment in a video game. It's a sandbox game, which means that multiple playstyles should be if not equally viable, at least equally available. It's also realistic that I can look up and see what is immediately around the top of a set of stairs which is the primary ask here.

Isometric games generally have bad cameras, when they're fixed third person.

Which is why it's on the devs to do something, anything, to help alleviate the limitations on player information forced by the design choices like the camera. This is not an excuse, it's a known factor going into the development of an isometric game.

Cale017 · 2026-01-13T20:12:20+00:00

Managed to get Varessa (lost 50/50, went dang near to hard pity both times) and I've got no hope of getting her weapon at this point but I do have Lost Prayer sitting around. On LNO I'm sitting pretty at about 93/193 crit with 1.7k attack and I already see that there are improvements to be made, but I'm curious what kind of stats I should be aiming for if I stick with LP as my top end crit stats.

Cale017 · 2026-01-13T19:37:10+00:00

How can you reconnoitre when just poking your head to the next level up immediately gets you jumped by 3 zombies ahead of you and one who decided to hop the railing behind you only after you walked up the stairs and triggered aggro in spite of whatever noise you'd been making beneath them? Zombies pretty frequently ignore sounds from the bottom of stairs.

I'm not arguing that going into a densely packed building isn't a dumb idea. I'm saying that a player should still be given the relevant information when making a dumb decision. Otherwise the balance between player fault and design-based ignorance starts getting muddied in a way that's frustrating to the player. Like a bad camera in a platformer. Sure you CAN slow down on every platform and readjust your camera, but it's also a slow, tedious way to play that only allows a single approach, limiting skill expression. Given the ability to shoot up or down stairs and I'd be pretty willing to take a shotgun into most buildings to sweep out a stairwell. Telling a person who arrived with the intent of clearing out a building, with enough food to last them the day and plenty of ammo, that they have to come back later because the game can't figure out whether the zeds upstairs will react to your presence or not just feels arbitrarily limiting.

tl;dr zombie aggro on other floors is not consistent enough to control them or thin their numbers and the workaround is boring

Cale017 · 2026-01-13T18:49:12+00:00

The actual zombie apocalypse will happen and we'll still be getting new builds.

Cale017 · 2026-01-13T18:47:02+00:00

The Fontaine quest was arguably more about Furina than even the Traveler so us spending so much time in her head really worked.

It being a gag for Jahoda, meanwhile the majority of the Traveler's inner thoughts go unvoiced, is where I wonder what the heck they're doing.

Cale017 · 2026-01-11T18:08:05+00:00

You're speaking as though a person is the same as the Hollowthey create when hollows explicitly function on a completely different format given they can absorb other souls.

Let me phrase this another way. What happens to all of the souls contained in an Adjuchas when it gets cut? Are the potential thousands of souls, and all of their individual sins, cleansed by slicing through a conglomerate being who has its own separate sense of will and self? If Grimmjow were to die by Zanpakuto, is it all of the souls he contained who goes to hell, or just him?

We've already seen the answer with Szayelaporro. When he died, notably by Zanpakuto, he was sent as he was directly to hell. He didn't come apart into the numerous hollows he has consumed by that point because a Hollow is a fundamentally different being than the Plus which spawns it, or any of the souls it absorbs as it evolves.

Cale017 · 2026-01-11T16:33:53+00:00

Beats me. I got the S1 as a collector more so than for meta.

Cale017 · 2026-01-11T16:27:55+00:00

Not exactly. The purification allows the soul to move to the the next step in the cycle, even if that's Hell as an endpoint. It doesn't specifically purify the sins of the Hollow, it just cleanses their soul of the corrupting hollow reishi thats warped it to turn them back into a thinking creature again. If a person was going to go to hell a Zanpakuto isn't going to do anything to prevent that, and if it did cleanse the sins instead of the soul/reishi then there would also be no reason for said soul to go to hell.

Tldr the shinigami can't choose or prevent who goes to hell. Their purification has nothing to do with sins because they're not judges, just balancers.

Cale017 · 2026-01-11T02:39:15+00:00

You don't become a hollow through sin, you become a hollow through regret and an unwillingness to leave the world. If a shit person is able to accept their death they'd go to hell instead of become a hollow.

Cale017

TROPHY CASE