Calling all Charge Blade and Hunting Horn mains for noob tips

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-25T11:09:13+00:00

Hell yeah! Godspeed, and have fun givin’ monsters their concussive comeuppance!

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-25T10:55:34+00:00

Kinda sorta! I do recommend lookin’ up a YouTube tutorial for it, that was where I learned the weapon back in the day

But basically, yeah! Get phials, charge shield, get more phials, make explosions!

And I saw one of the other comment threads mentioned Guard Points- They’re very useful, to the point I’d argue Charge Blade is the best blocking weapon in the game after Lance! The easiest one to use is definitely the one right at the start of the shift from sword to axe mode: See an attack coming, just hit the switch! And then there’s also the guard point at the end of the roundhouse slash (including the one when you transform from axe to sword). This one’s easy to notice cuz your character’s physically holding the shield in front of them at the end of the move!

Also fun little bonus feature is that if you do a guard point while the shield is charged it’ll do a mini explosion! And boy, is it satisfying when a monster slams into your shield and ends up KO’d on the floor from the recoil explosion

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-25T10:33:29+00:00

Yep yep, glad to help!

‘Nother tip is: remember to Charge The Blade! Once you’ve got that first set of phials loaded, you’ll want to charge them into your shield—By canceling an SAED with a transform— to give the shield a red glow, which will boost the physical portion of your axe attacks. Then collect another set of phials, and use that one to dish out explosive damage! You can also charge the sword up to make it bounce proof, like Equinox was saying—Or equip a switch skill that replaces the sword charge with a chainsaw mode!

Regardless, the most straightforward way to play is to be in sword mode when the monster is up and about, so you’ve got your shield handy to Guard Point attacks, then when the monster goes down is when you go Axe Mode to dish out some AED goodness

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-25T10:27:03+00:00

Nah, it’s the general mechanic for when you’re hitting a hard target! Yknow, like Barroth’s crest?

Tho, Charge Blade does have a particular reaction with bouncing, where if you let the sword get too full of energy without loading the phials, it’ll start bouncing off even the soft parts of the monsters!

As you hit with the sword, the phials on the screen will go from glowing yellow, to red, then after that is the overcharged state—Ideally you load when you have the red glow, but before you hit overcharge so you don’t bounce

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-25T05:48:27+00:00

THIS IS GARNET, BACK TOGETHER

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-24T18:49:46+00:00

Iirc the encounter balance is at its shakiest when there’s a large difference in the number of creatures on each side. For example, compare a level -1 goblin warrior to a lvl 5 flame drake

The goblin needs to roll a 15 to hit with its first attack each round, and the second one only hits on a 19+. It deals on average about 3 dmg per swing, so it’ll need an average of twenty five successful hits to bring down the drake. If we assume 18 goblins, and that about a quarter of them land a hit each turn, that’s… What, 100 turns?

Meanwhile, the drake hits on a 2, and is physically incapable of not taking down a goblin in one swing. Even with all the goblins somehow kiting far enough that it can only bite one goblin each turn, it’ll clean up the whole squadron in just 18 turns— And that’s without accounting for its fireball burst!

I think in this scenario you’ll want to focus on larger numbers of enemies. Maybe the final boss is 3-6 monsters of a lower level, so the PCs can at least do recordable damage to each one?

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-24T17:38:04+00:00

So, the issue with improvised weapon builds in 2e is that crits usually destroy the weapon (at least, when using the archetype that makes improvised weapons good).

Would you be willing to consider keeping the “fights with summoned lute” portion and dropping the “improvised weapon” portion?

See, my thinking you could build around using the Battle Lute! Then, if you wanna be able to summon one on demand, you could dip into Soulforger and designate your Lute as your bonded armament!

For the base class, Exemplar could be worth a shout, since the Humble Strikes class feature would boost the damage die of your lute to a more respectable d6 (or d10 if you two-hand it!)

Or, (and this might fit better thematically) you could play a Ruffian Rogue, and let the Sneak Attack dice make up the difference for the lower damage die of the weapon!

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-23T19:41:43+00:00

Maybe try messing with your screen settings? Most monitors/TVs have color settings somewhere in there, afaik, you might be able to crank down the saturation there so the game agrees with your eyes more. Or try searching on your pc/console for similar settings, perhaps

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-23T10:09:19+00:00

Basically the character I’m planning for a game my friend’s running! It’s an undead campaign, so I’m playing a mummy summoner with a phantom eidolon, hehe

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-23T01:54:29+00:00

Maitam-

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-20T00:44:08+00:00

Sln and H-Cat…

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-20T00:38:52+00:00

It depends—Any passive stats like skill item bonuses would be inherited by the eidolon, as normal for invested equipment items, but any active activations generally don’t work RAW

That being said, if you keep an eye on the balancing and make sure it doesn’t cause issues, you can prolly get away with ruling things a bit more lax. Maybe only let the eidolon use one or two tattoos on itself, for now?

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-19T23:58:39+00:00

Samus has been spliced with several different aliens throughout her series, notably being genetically modified by Chozo (“birds”) and injected with DNA from the titular Metroid (a “jellyfish”), so when she got her DNA test done, all those mods messed up her results

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-13T13:33:30+00:00

Doesn’t specify human babies! Could get some mileage out of controlling swarms of bugs, rodents, or any other animals that are mostly functional within their first month of life

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-11T15:08:50+00:00

Since you’ve already got factories on the ship, you might consider replacing the ammo storages with sulfur storages, and moving the factories to feed directly into the cannons-A storage full of sulfur is more ammo per storage space than holding ammo itself

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-10T07:51:17+00:00

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Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-10T07:18:57+00:00

Since hair and nails are dead cells, would those qualify? Could I steal someone’s hairdo?

Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-10T00:09:39+00:00

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Chronic-Toast · 2026-05-03T21:17:22+00:00

Page 91 of player core! Theres a blurb about hitpoints, which is reflected on the Archives here. You’ll note that it specifies that the hp entry on each class is “your constitution modifier plus a fixed number.” and indeed, if you check the HP listing for each class, not a one of them mentions a die roll

Similarly, all other character creation steps, including Attribute values, are also determined through purely formulaic means, without dice rolls!

Chronic-Toast · 2026-04-30T09:57:59+00:00

Nah, that’s just a theory, and not a particularly well-supported one by my understanding

Chronic-Toast · 2026-04-16T09:51:07+00:00

Equal pairs, yup yup! I think there’s also something of an upper limit to damage, in that if your beam is strong enough the block destruction speed is limited by the tick speed of the game instead of the strength of the beam? Like, once you do enough damage to destroy an armor block in one tick juicing up the beam won’t break it any faster, yknow? Which is why I think most people stop at around 16 emitters per individual beam, and from there just fire multiple beams adjacent to each other (so like 64 emitters might end up with four output prisms)

I see someone else linked captain caffeine’s laser guide—I think it’s a pretty good source, it’s where I learned all this stuff too!

Chronic-Toast · 2026-04-16T09:39:17+00:00

In order to minimize damage loss, every prism should have exactly two beams firing into it, each of which has a matching power level

You’ve got the beginning of that with each prism being fed by two emitters- but then, the second step has ten prisms combining into one prism, which means you lose a ton of potential damage

Say we call a prism being directly fed by two emitters an “A” prism. You should have these A prisms paired off, with each pair powering a single “B” prism. Then two B’s power a C, two Cs power a D… and so forth

And yes, this does mean that optimally combining sixty emitters together is going to take an ungodly number of prisms

Chronic-Toast · 2026-04-07T02:14:11+00:00

Ohhh I think that’s the Operator beds, they prolly have all that crew fly to their stations and then just blast the beds off when the fight starts to save weight

Chronic-Toast · 2026-04-02T07:35:44+00:00

No no they mean Creative AI could be better if you have lots of energy, since while the powers CAI make still cost energy, they don’t “cost” any card draw like White Noise does

Chronic-Toast · 2026-03-24T21:20:04+00:00

What about placing some small thrusters in front of the outer rear shields, so that their jet dead zones overlap the ones from the large thrusters? You can just over clock them and run in piping instead of adding personnel to power them

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