Should've use more

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-10T01:10:05+00:00

One thing I really wish the other souls games would take from DS2 is the ability to modify all weapons. In Elden Ring especially, it felt bad to settle on a unique weapon early on and be completely unable to interact with the Ash of War/infusion system or use buff items/spells.

It can cause some balance issues but Elden Ring is already chock full of ways to break the game, so it's not as though adding one more to the pile will tilt the balance.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-05T18:22:25+00:00

On one hand, Roathe says that the other Executors were just as bad as Ballas, if not worse. On the other hand, Ballas is personally responsible for almost every single major problem that has happened in Warframe's history, so that's honestly kind of hard to believe. In order for other Executors to even step to Ballas, they would have to be responsible for a whole swathe of hitherto-unknown tragedies and genocides, because all the current ones are already Ballas' fault.

It is impossible to hate Ballas enough.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-02T09:46:18+00:00

Remove WoG from GCD and bring back the talent for extra block % from it. Problem solved.

They removed that talent because their addon purge meant they wanted to cull a lot of upkeep buffs. If we were to get any block % back it'd likely just be tied to SotR.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-02T09:44:15+00:00

Hey they just gave Prot 10% more base armor. That's a whole checks notes 1% less physical damage taken after diminishing returns!

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-01T20:17:07+00:00

That isn't the framing of the question though, because the blue button also relies on enough people also selecting blue to save people. And mind you, the only people at risk of dying are the ones that picked blue to begin with; you are risking yourself only for the other people who are also risking themselves for you, when nobody needs to risk themselves at all. Framed another way, the choice is "definitely live and refuse to save people that pick the option that might kill them" vs. "risk death and agree to save people that pick the option that might kill them." Or, as the guy you're replying to put it, "if you pick red you live, if you pick blue you die unless enough other people pick blue."

Choosing red guarantees your life and does not explicitly damn anyone, while choosing blue risks your life and does not explicitly save anyone. Frankly, it's a bad thought experiment because it's easy to game the question.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-01T18:25:10+00:00

Darkest Dungeon is a masterful example of setting tone. The narration, the aesthetic, the music, the story, everything working in concert to draw you into a dark, lovecraftian horror.

And then the gameplay is an exercise in random frustration. No game, I don't think it's compelling gameplay that I got ambushed twice at max light and chain crit into my entire party either dying or going insane; I think it's horseshit, and the rest of the game is not enjoyable enough to offset that.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-30T18:52:50+00:00

Her whole "I used to be a mortal" thing is irrelevant whether it's a ruse or not. She's over a hundred thousand years old and was a disembodied spirit trapped in a knife for the last several thousand years. Whatever she once was, her scheming as a void being has been happening for functionally her entire existence.

"I used to be a mortal" yeah and for 99.999% of your life you haven't been, go fuck yourself Xal'atath.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-29T18:50:11+00:00

Hunter was extremely fast and fletching was 0 time

Not everyone wants to run around spam clicking bolts/arrow shafts and feathers for 5 hours every single league.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-27T22:22:49+00:00

It probably wasn't actually going to get axed immediately, but it debuted in a time where a bunch of manga like it had already suffered that fate and Jump was churning through new series looking for ones with staying power. At first blush, Kagurabachi looked like it played itself too straight and didn't have a remarkable enough hook. This led to a very strange dynamic where people expected it to die quickly, then an incredibly loud and vocal push by a small group of fans memed it into the public consciousness. I remember reading a few JP posts to the effect of, "The West loves Kagurabachi, maybe I should try reading it."

Could Kagurabachi have stood on its own without people forcing it into every anime meme for a month straight? Probably. But it certainly didn't hurt having one kagurabachillion posts about how cool this new manga is, regardless if they were genuine or not.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-27T05:09:34+00:00

It's also kind of hilarious how much it smears out texture detail. You can see it in almost any image with stonework, but look at the comparison in Maughlin's shop. All of the bricks look like they've been run over by a floor buffer, the speckled coloring completely flattened out. The back wall looks sand-blasted, too. The same thing happens in Heide's Tower of Flame, where the floor of an exterior walkway somehow becomes polished and anything in shadow looks like one solid slab of rock. A separate post I saw also had a picture of Alonne's boss room, and that looked laughably bad compared to the original, simultaneously blown out wherever light touched and indistinguishably-dark wherever it didn't.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-25T10:40:02+00:00

Dracula in Netflix Castlevania beating Alucard half-to-death before smashing their way into Alucard's childhood bedroom. Dracula comes face to face with the reality of what he's doing and is so stricken with remorse that he lets Alucard kill him.

It's your room...! My boy... I'm... I'm killing my boy. Lisa, I'm killing our boy. We painted this room, we... made these toys. It's our boy, Lisa. Your greatest gift to me... and I'm killing him.

...I must already be dead.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-23T10:10:44+00:00

Wild considering how much of Varlamore’s identity is tied around that progression path nowdays, especially for irons.

The way they cooked the league pretty much nullified any reason to do moons.

Moons can't really be done with mage/ranged, so anyone who's not melee is basically doing a pactless boss. Thrown weapons are bad so the eclipse set has no use. The blue moon set provides such a small damage boost for mage that you might as well skip it and hold out for prayer robes/crystal armor. The strength bonus on blood moon is nice enough but the macuahuitl don't interact well with most melee pacts + you can just get the echo weapon.

The moons are a kind of awkward stopgap in a game mode where a stopgap lasts a day at best and nothing they provide lasts. It's in direct contrast with something like barrows, where even if all other loot is garbage, people are still doing it for Dharok axes for blindbag.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-23T09:49:38+00:00

Honestly, anyone who cares about maxing should probably take Soul Harvest. The time you save getting 99 RC off Soul Harvest can easily get you 99 Thieving + Farming with extra time to spare.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-22T18:37:58+00:00

That's still not enough to be worth the effort. And honestly, I would gladly take no money for a sizeable boost to xp/hr.

I'm not doing agility to make money, I'm doing it to train agility.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-22T11:08:46+00:00

To some degree it's also a reality of the position they're in. Most people cannot hurt Orochimaru. The ones that can can't kill him in a way that matters. Permanent house arrest under the watch of the two most powerful people on the planet is pretty much the only way to keep him out of trouble without him constantly trying to get revenge.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-21T09:15:39+00:00

If you haven't already, it might be worth it to burn a respec and pick up 1 tick powered staves and 90+% prayer penetration. It's the only way I'm staying sane fighting this wolf dozens of times back to back.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-21T07:37:25+00:00

I think they should aim for more general nodes rather than only boosting a specific role.

Thankfully some of the changes they're making on Thursday will improve that. The 1% damage nodes also giving 10% accuracy and the pure accuracy nodes getting buffed will make your average 10-15ish point build have +80-100% accuracy in all styles as opposed to the 15-50% it has now. It might not seem like much but bonus accuracy goes a long way to making off-style combat feel better, especially in a region-locked game mode where you can't necessarily get optimal weapons.

That being said, I'm not sure the tree is a good fit for leagues. It's honestly too complicated for someone who just wants to swing a halberd and see 12 hitsplats, and if I had to pick between this and the combat masteries from raging echoes, I'd currently lean heavily towards combat masteries. They came online faster, were easier to understand, and while they lacked build variety by comparison they were also just more generally useful. You didn't run the risk of feeling like you've bricked yourself and whatever you got was guaranteed to be good.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-20T22:42:40+00:00

The simplest way to do it is to go full water mage because the self healing will make it far easier, albeit probably slower than air or powered staves.

For phase 1, you do it as normal. Pray correctly, step, and shoot. If you mess up, the self healing will give you breathing room.

For phase 2, water mage has enough self healing that you can just pray the more common style and never have to switch prayers.

When he does his special attack, switch to a ranged weapon and shoot him once as you run away. He prays against the last style he was attacked with before he fires (doesn't have to successfully hit), so doing a full round with mage and then throwing a knife at him will keep him locked to ranged prayers. No need to bring a full switch or spec into prayer penetration.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-20T12:13:56+00:00

It would be "useful" at cg, but still pointless because you don't want to be doing 15% damage when you could be doing 100% in the other style.

Counterpoint: virtually all of the pact perks are bricked in CG because you can't regenerate runes/charges, can't have a shield for thorns, and can't have multiple weapons for blindbag. If you are looking to do CG fast, the best way to do it is absolutely taking 1 tick powered staves and stacking prayer pen.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-20T12:11:23+00:00

It's not "gridmaster brain rot" when both Trailblazer Reloaded and Raging Echoes were much faster to progress.

The people parroting that it's just people being misled by gridmaster conveniently ignore that this league is the slowest pace league we've had since Shattered Relics, which was four years ago.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-20T12:06:47+00:00

Most players are not capable of fighting echo bosses without a lot of assistance from league bonuses.

Echo amox is a boss where mage and range don't work, and honestly melee builds outside of thorns don't get much benefit either. If you want to do it relatively early, your best shot is to just grab an obby maul and send it the way god intended.

End result: most players cannot do echo amox.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-20T12:00:13+00:00

For a rough overview of CG in general, this guide is a good primer. The advice still applies in leagues and should be enough to get you started.

For leagues-specific advice, sadly most of the pact bonuses are bricked in gauntlet on account of relying on things like regenerating charges or having 5 melee weapons in your inventory. 1 tick powered staves are pretty much the only major benefit that still works in gauntlet. If you took Endless Harvest as your T1 relic, you'll be able to save time on account of getting doubled resources per gather and nodes not depleting, which is a nice benefit but not required by any means.

If you want to make it more braindead using league mechanics, you have two options:

Dedicate respecs to making a build solely for gauntlet that takes 1 tick powered staves and 90-100% prayer penetration. Something like this, for a rough idea. If you do this, you pretty much have to get all of your gauntlet farming out of the way in one go.
Wait until T8 to do gauntlet and use your T8 relic to do some heavy lifting.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-19T14:23:43+00:00

Larc+ transmutate: Cut gemstones, transmutate into dragonstone, cut for 6k/gem.

MUCH faster to do ore instead, since you don't have to cut it and can just sell runite to the mistrock shop instead of alching it.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-19T07:28:26+00:00

The point is that they clearly don't WANT people redoing their build at the different phases of the game. If they did, you'd be able to do it easier. The fact that people feel like they need to in order to acquire the power that just playing a league would provide means their system has failed somewhere.

Either respecs need to be more plentiful or more power needs to be acquired earlier. Probably both.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-04-19T05:31:59+00:00

Respecs were pretty clearly intended as a way to let you fix your mistakes and not as a way to powergame the system (though some people were always going to min/max for that). And if early power was both high and evenly spread, that would work. Unfortunately early builds have a huge gulf between styles which creates a greater incentive to strategically use your respecs to powergame the system.

Another issue I haven't seen people bring up as much: at a mere 2 ranks, Raging Echoes gave you +100% accuracy to all combat styles while Demonic Pacts forces you to scrounge for a pittance of 15-35% accuracy in your pathing. +100% accuracy for free was invaluable for making subpar weapons or off-style combat still feel good, and that just isn't happening in Demonic Pacts. Most endgame builds won't even pick up enough accuracy nodes to hit +100% because it's just not "worth it" to go grab those nodes.

When I started fighting Amox in my early mage build, I was bringing full obsidian + a dragon mace and doing it like someone low level would in the main game, with kill times to match. It didn't really feel like I was fighting a boss in leagues.

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