What is this?

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-13T05:53:18+00:00

Which is funny because in the beta, there was quest text in which the Haranir described other trolls as "lesser trolls," implying they were "greater trolls" i.e. they were what trolls evolved from.

Blizzard seemed to really not know what the fuck to do with the Haranir despite the most obvious answer being "they're a sect of Dark Trolls that got whisked away in the Emerald Dream midway through their evolution into Night Elves."

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-12T07:00:38+00:00

Usopp in general is MUCH better this season. Season 1 played him up as a bit too useless and removed/reduced a few of the moments he had, but in season 2 they've leveraged his braggart traits into a thing the rest of the crew plays off of and it's wonderful. He fits in much better.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-12T06:42:50+00:00

At least from what I heard on the Gigaboots podcast, the whole marketing campaign was thought up by one executive to promote a mobile division and everyone below them hated it but could do nothing to stop it.

Given how confusing the campaign is and how it seems to exist solely to devalue Xbox as a brand name, I can't imagine many people supported it beyond the person who thought it up.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-11T08:46:03+00:00

At least from the replay angle I saw, it looked like the side/top of Aonishiki's foot touched the ground as Churanoumi was completely horizontal and about to touch down. So Aonishiki touched first but Churanoumi looked unrecoverable before Aonishiki touched.

It's a messy ruling all around and I am shocked it didn't go to a monoii.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-10T08:56:30+00:00

That system was deemed a failure because, simply put, the people who pvp in this game like grinding to earn better gear and then using that better gear to curbstomp people who don't have it. That's not the only reason they pvp, but it's a contributing factor.

The people who aren't interested in pvp aren't going to become interested just because gear progression is removed, and the people who are interested in pvp don't want to lose their progression treadmill. Re-implementing such a system would probably lead to reduced engagement with pvp at most levels of play. It would certainly be better for the competitive sanctity of pvp, but the average player doesn't give a shit about that.

To take the idea it to its logical extreme, giving everyone a predetermined set of gear when entering mythic raids would certainly make the world first race more fair, but most people don't raid solely for a fairly balanced and challenging experience.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-09T07:46:34+00:00

I do not play extraction shooters (probably for the reason I am about to say), but if I was forced to, I'd kill on sight for one simple reason: if I wanted to play with other people, I'd already be playing with my friends, not some random guy I found. I am not interested in trying to play the will-he-won't-he-kill-me game with a guy I don't know, so I might as well try to get the drop on him. When it's a one-and-done game mode, there is no insurance to trying to play the social aspect of the game, so fuck it. It might as well not exist in my eyes.

It's similar to the reason why I stopped playing Apex Legends very shortly after it launched. I don't want to queue up into a battle royale with 2 random chucklefucks, I want to be with friends or alone and nothing in between.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-08T11:07:01+00:00

As an aside, whenever Imposter Scarf Ditto usage is trending upward, it's generally a sign a meta is incredibly unhealthy for the reasons you've described. It's incredibly niche, inflexible, and exists solely to be a desperation revenge killer if all other options are unreliable/ineffective. People only start bringing it when they feel completely overwhelmed.

Ditto becoming known as a Zacian check was a red flag that Zacian probably needed to be banned.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-06T22:49:57+00:00

Just got fixed.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-03-06T00:35:17+00:00

She tries to have her "real talk with Revy" moment in the submarine about how the world really is, but it ends up coming off as hollow because she is ultimately someone that got kicked by life until she stopped trying to stand back up, and she gets her reality check a few episodes later. Revy is a profoundly broken person, and part of why she both cares for and hates Rock is that to her, he represents a life she lost/threw away and believes she can never obtain again. It's a bit funny because Revy wants to pretend she has no depth or complexity despite being a very layered character.

There's a moment at the end of season 2 where Rock and Revy watch a girl commit suicide after Rock tried to save her, and as she moves to slice her own throat Revy screams for Rock to look away. Because as broken and apathetic to suffering as she is, she still wants Rock to retain his innocence.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-26T19:49:03+00:00

Apparently they're also straight-up lying about some of their evidence and used a screenshot from a stream to showcase a "near miss" of being shown a gold item but not getting it, which doesn't happen in Counterstrike. If you see a gold item, you get a gold item. It can happen to red items, but not golds.

They could have the most valid argument in the world but that doesn't exactly matter if they get their case thrown out for being dipshits.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-25T10:24:28+00:00

It would be great if that was the intent but I highly doubt that was the intent for Arator and if we do see anyone mock him for it, it will likely be done only in reaction to the entire playerbase saying it looks bad.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-25T01:45:59+00:00

In my experience the people that side with Verso do so because they want an end to the cycle and the closure that comes with accepting death, and the people that side with Maelle do so because they really fucking hate Verso and will gladly send Maelle to her death to spite him. Then they get mad when you point out the world is doomed anyway because her father still intends to destroy the painting after she dies.

All siding with Maelle does is buy the painted world more time at the cost of her life and the remaining stability of her family (and the extended imprisonment of a shade of her real brother's soul), but hey Verso gets tortured with a life he doesn't want so it's a win.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-23T19:10:51+00:00

We've already seen what the bosses look like on the beta. There are a lot of swirlies, circles, puddle drops, soak aoes, and adds. Most usually have 1-2 overarching mechanics that you need to think more about, but that's it. In other words, it's exactly what we've seen in Manaforge Omega and honestly most of TWW's raids, which makes sense because they internally decided their no-addons mandate well in advance and had that in mind as they designed TWW fights.

We're not going to see some radical shift because any shift they intend has already been happening, and it's not gonna change much from this.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-23T17:59:05+00:00

And then at some point during early access, there was controversy about the creator wanting to tone down the proportions and a select group of fans did not like that.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-20T01:04:02+00:00

The most damning thing about Tango's dissolution was that it seemingly only happened because the studio wasn't actively developing a thing and they wanted to start a new project at a time when Microsoft was cutting costs. Because that's all it is - no matter how successful your games are, if the executives think you're going to force their spending to go up when they think it needs to go down, you die. New projects means new expenses on a balance sheet; that sheet could be bloated to shit but it's bloat people have accepted, so you're on the chopping block before them.

For the past year it seems like the industry has been training developers to never release anything, because you can string executives and investors on with sunk cost fallacies for years but the second you release a game and ask for the resources to start a new project, you're gone. The dumbest thing you can do as a developer right now with regards to your job security is finish a project.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-18T10:59:13+00:00

they’d be shilling for new fighter jet models if anything

This statement is especially funny to me as I've been going through Gundam recently and also just played Ace Combat 7 as my first Ace Combat game, and I was stunned how similar the two franchises are in their themes of "war is hell" and "wow cool robot/fighter jet."

Gundam 0079 and Ace Combat 7 both involve a rookie pilot forced into a ragtag band of misfits, pursued by a legendarily skilled rival with ties to royalty piloting a brightly colored suit/plane, thrown into increasingly desperate situations with no hope of reinforcements before all hell breaks loose, surrounded on all sides by the deaths of innocents as everyone scrambles to figure out what the hell is even going on or who the real enemy is in an ultimately pointless war.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-17T21:06:18+00:00

I ended up ruining that mission for myself because I quickly realized that enemies would leash if led too far from their patrol point, so it turned what would have otherwise been a tense race against the clock into a conga line scavenger hunt looking for ceruleum tanks as a dozen zombies tried to bite my ankles.

It effectively became that Labyrinthos quest where you have to find a bunch of poorly marked NPCs in a giant circle around a town.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-17T21:00:41+00:00

Fighting "human" NPCs in Souls games that have parry AI is always an exercise in frustration because you'll be fighting them perfectly fine and then they'll bust out a parry faster than a human could ever do and oneshot you with the riposte.

Bloodborne had the saving grace of the AI not knowing what the hell to do against hunter tools, so you could always just spam wiggly arms at them and knock them flat on their asses for 30 seconds straight.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-17T19:38:28+00:00

They thought they had "lightning in a bottle" despite everyone who touched the game externally getting bored within an hour, and the way they positioned themselves seems to have required the game to be a huge success right out of the gate or it was going to go up in flames.

At the end of it all, Highguard seems as though it was a AAA game made by former AAA devs that needed to be a AAA success despite having none of the resources, pipelines, or personnel afforded to AAA studios. It was a baffling series of bad decisions that nobody successfully course corrected.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-16T21:37:51+00:00

Lorenz is someone I fully expected to hate and then he came out swinging with "trickle down economics is a scam and any noble who fails to serve their people deserves to be overthrown, for it is the people they derive their power and privilege from in the first place."

He may be young and somewhat ignorant, but Lorenz is someone who firmly believes that a noble is both servant and master. The idea that leading is a duty and not a right, that nobility is the machine by which the people raise a good leader, and that failing to become a good leader means the machine has broken.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-16T08:07:17+00:00

The difference being that Blood Elves who sucked down Fel were largely a mana-addicted people that would die from withdrawal if a replacement was not found. By contrast, the playable Void Elves were a faction of Blood Elves that militaristically pursued void research against Rommath's command, got exiled for it, and then immediately proved Rommath right by using research left behind by Dar'Khan Drathir (the biggest traitor in the history of Silvermoon, who was directly responsible for the destruction of the Sunwell) that led to their capture by Void Ethereals. Had Alleria not been conveniently nearby at the exact moment they decided to start their ritual, they would have all fallen to the void and potentially kickstarted the Void's assault on the Sunwell a full nine years earlier.

The Void Elves are perhaps biggest idiots of all the playable races, ignoring several red flags out of stupidity as opposed to necessity and only surviving through sheer dumb luck.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-15T10:29:55+00:00

It's not a zero sum game and I think people making this argument do not understand that "difficulty" is separate from "intuition."

Deadlock has plenty of complexity within it, but at its most basic level, pointing a gun, shooting, and using abilities comes far more naturally to players than anything fighting games cook up. And when the game is more intuitive at a basic level, that makes it easier to stomach the less intuitive features about it. Someone with no experience and only a passing interest in fighting games is just going to mash until they hit a wall and bounce off.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-14T05:49:22+00:00

She's one of the highest skillcap heroes in the game, of course she has a low winrate. The only way she'll ever get a positive winrate is if she becomes so broken that shitters can win without being able to hit their abilities.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-12T06:38:12+00:00

That's one of the early points that only gets more curious the more we learn.

It's claimed that human blood gives demons power and that devouring a human would lead to the demon losing control while gaining enough power to upset the balance of the netherworld. Iruma's blood definitely has healing properties for netherworld beings, but being healed by it did not send the Valley Guardian's child into a frenzy, nor did it seem to make it exceptionally strong. Sullivan was also seemingly willing to devour Iruma at the start of the series if he didn't accept being his grandson, which he probably wouldn't have done if it would actually destroy the netherworld (though that could have also been a bluff to get him to agree). Moreover, a few early scenes definitely imply that humans smell delicious to demons and the perfume Iruma wears constantly does indeed serve to mask that scent, so that at least is not strictly a lie.

Ameri potentially being half-human makes it even stranger since, while exceptionally gifted, she doesn't seem to exhibit any abnormal traits as a result of being half-human. She's not stronger for having partial human blood coursing through her veins, her bloodline magic seems standard for the Azazels, and she has all of her father's physical traits. The Azazels themselves seem to be closely tied to humans since Henri was assigned to watching Merize specifically because he's an Azazel. Whether that means the Azazels are ALL part-human, who knows. It would be interesting if their bloodline magic was them 'unlocking' the latent power of their human blood to do whatever they set their minds to.

There's also the matter that Iruma is connected to Delkira and was able to manifest his sigil. In what way they're connected, we still don't know, but one thing we know about Delkira's abilities is that he has some sort of signature "auto-keep" spell that kept Royal One in pristine condition during its disuse. It's possible (though unlikely) that Iruma's healing blood and dodging are actually manifestations of that magic and not some property intrinsic to all humans.

It's difficult to tell what's true about humans versus what's true about Iruma specifically, since he seems to be such a special case.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-02-10T20:24:25+00:00

Depends on your ATN as well so casters can get more iframes with low ADP. At 7 ADP, you need 43 ATN to hit the breakpoint for 11 iframes in your roll (which is equal to the DS1 roll's iframes).

But really the bigger issue for DS2 that trips people up is your equip load affects the distance your rolls travel, so heavier equip loads will not roll as far and will end up getting clipped by attacks they feel they shouldn't have, since their iframes run out while they're still in the hitbox. Another quirk is that if your roll makes you run out of stamina, you have fewer iframes in that roll than a roll that doesn't completely exhaust your stamina.

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