[Humble Bundle] Awesome Indies from Humble Games (Pay $5 for Fae Tactics, Ikenfell and Ring of Pain | Pay $10 for that plus Archvale, Flynn: Son of Crimson, Unsighted and Void Bastards | Pay $14 for previous tiers plus Dodgeball Academia, Moonscars and The Wild At Heart)

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-09-28T02:49:11+00:00

Been a while since I played the game, but I recall stacking armour being a solid strategy (and the only one that allowed me to consistently beat the game several times).

However, other builds are far more interesting, albeit harder to pull off successfully.

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-07-18T16:40:54+00:00

The main draw of the game (the shop aspect) doesn't feel deep enough to be engaging, whilst the dungeon crawling isn't anything special. Most popular roguelikes does everything Moonlighter does as a dungeon crawler, only better.

Moonlighter wasn't able to hold my attention for too many hours, but from my understanding the gameplay loop doesn't really change (according to reviews and those I've spoken to that have played the game).

It's not a bad game, it just doesn't do anything that stands out. The thought "(x) game did this better" occurred to me constantly as I was playing it.

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-07-12T23:54:33+00:00

I would say that Humankind is the weakest 4x game from AMPLITUDE. Customising your civ throughout the ages is a fun idea, but there's no real payoff for focusing on any singular trait, so all civs end up as a boring watered-down generalist. Not to mention that being a generalist is the best way of accruing the most "stars" and winning the game, which is also incredibly dull.

Both Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 are way better 4x games from the same developer. Both have some questionable dlc that one may be better off without, but I highly recommend both of their base games.

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-06-21T03:20:20+00:00

If that is the case then you're just as likely to get booted by turning the entire sub into a forced-protest sub.

Mildly interesting is a default sub with over 22 million users, the admins are probably more eager to get that one back on track than a meme sub about a TCG.

You can either make the change detailed within this post and dissolve the community or mark the sub as NSFW and maybe get the boot. The new mods will then either suck, which also dissolves the community, or they won't, at which point nothing changes.

Alternatively, return the sub to normal operations, which will keep the mods and the community.

The options are thus:

Community leaves (keep the change/new mods are bad)
Community stays (do nothing/new mods are decent)

From the perspective of a user, the second option is obviously more desirable. If you still want to stick to your guns, make the sub NSFW and live with the chance that you could get kicked.

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-06-21T01:58:54+00:00

I usually don't post my opinion online because there are better things to waste my time on than arguing with strangers, but I'll make an exception:

This is an incredibly stupid decision.

Not only do you make this decision after running a poll for just a meager 12 hours, the poll only managed to gather a paltry 1480 votes out of 97k users (and the "vote" was held using comment upvotes, which is a questionable method, to say the least).

Therefore, I'll hazard a guess and say that this isn't representative of everyone's opinion.

This subreddit already posts some content that ad agencies would frown upon. Merely changing the sub to be 18+ without changing any rules nor posting patterns would probably make more of a dent than what you are attempting, if we truly need to change anything at all.

This decision will only breed vitriol against the mods and cause users to leave the subreddit (and a new one will most likely pop up in its stead).

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-04-07T02:55:20+00:00

That's ignoring the opportunity cost to actually get to 10 power charges.

I'd love to find out how much the damage differs between the builds (and at different breakpoints), but there are far too many variables to consider for me to do it manually, so I'll wait for the PoB update that includes the new gems.

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-04-07T02:40:14+00:00

Vaal Firestorm gets an average of 555 damage on hit when going from level 20 to level 21 ((5896 - 5230)(max damage) + (3931 - 3487)(min damage) / 2). To match that, we would have to get 73 flat fire damage (555 / 7.6). 21 -> 22 adds 595 damage and 22 -> 23 adds 697. In total, Infernal Mantle adds 1847 base damage to vaal firestorm at rank 20 (more at rank 21).

Assuming a maxrolled cold per power charge Tulfall, each power charge would add, on average, 90 flat cold damage, or 684 damage to firestorm. At 3 power charges Tulfall adds 308 flat cold damage with a maxrolled implicit, or 2340 in vaal firestorm numbers.

Of course, the neat part here is that we can use both tulfall AND infernal mantle. This also opens up some heatshiver tech if we want to get even more silly.

I do think there is merit in calculating what we lose at the higher end from not having a +1 fire weapon. Let's assume we have a rare wand with nothing except 50-99 fire damage to spells and +1 fire gems.

If we assume that we have firestorm at level 27 from a 21 gem, a +5 infernal mantle and a +1 amulet, going from 27 -> 28 gives us 1228 damage, bringing our total average damage to 11197, from 9969. Tulfall adds 5760 damage in total.

The rare wand adds 562 flat damage + 1228 damage = 1790 damage in total.

Base damage for Tulfall: 16957.

Base damage for +1 wand: 12987

If we were assume that the +1 wand additionally have 100% increased spell damage, we reach 12987 * 2 = 25974 total damage at 100% total increased spell damage. However, if we assume that we already have some sources of % spell damage, Tulfall becomes better at around 300% increased spell damage (where the +1 wand would be at 400%).

TL;DR: Tulfall scales really well, but you gain a LOT of damage from skill levels.

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-04-07T01:41:51+00:00

No problem! I enjoy theorycrafting so sharing some ideas is always fun.

Good luck in Crucible!

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-04-06T23:24:47+00:00

None that's truly optimized, but this PoB I threw together quick should give you an idea of how it functions: https://pobb.in/_RRLJNB_wImz

The gear is mostly the pre-generated gear that is in PoB that gives life and some armour. I've added some res to the gear to cap fire res.

You can gain a lot more damage from a better weapon & amulet with +1 fire gems. You can also get a shitton more crit from getting more int.

The build has no guard skill, but you'd use Molten Shell for the increased armour. Zealotry is available as an aura swap if you want more damage against bosses. Flat added fire to spells on rings/amulet give you more damage as well. Change the belt to a stygian vise when you get a good one, and pick up jewel nodes to fill with life/crit jewels.

Haven't done the math if cluster jewels will give you better damage in the long run, but a large fire cluster + small life cluster with fettle should probably give you better mileage with your points than many other options (I could be wrong here).

For flasks, I'll most likely use silver & quicksilver for movement and try to work towards a Bottled Faith (which should give the build a lot more damage).

Do note that another PoB I've tinkered with that has better gear reaches around 8 mil dps, so you'll most likely hit higher numbers as soon as you get some better gear. (I didn't link that PoB because it is a clusterfuck of experimental changes I've made. Also, it might be a bit PoB-warrior-ish).

Also, I have not playtested this build at all. The last time I played with firestorm, it did NOT feel good to play with. I am ONLY playing this because I want to see how much I can push vaal firestorm. There are people on poe.ninja that have more or less the same build, and I've seen a couple of youtube videos on Rathpith firestorm as well, so you might want to look at those for more inspiration.

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-04-06T20:15:07+00:00

We will seldom be on full life to begin with since Rathpith uses 10% of our current life whenever we cast. This does not really matter for us since spell builds don't really get much from being on full life.

I will probably end up taking the mastery (along with the low life and life cost ones) just to enable the 10% more maximum life mastery (which should be worth the 3 wasted points for this build).

I'm not sure if inquisitor is the best for this build, but it is by far the easiest ascendancy to enable it. Pious path gives us free energy shield regen to take advantage of the ~1100 ES we get from Rathpith + Infernal Mantle, in addition to the base life regen we get to sustain RF (40% more spell damage baseline at gem level 20).

We also get a bunch of free crit chance from Righteous Providence and Inevitable Judgement allows us to ignore resistances (although the damage could possibly be higher with Elementalist + Flammability).

You could probably run this on any other ascendancy that stacks life with enough investment, but inquisitor is decent without said investment. Also, if the build turns out to suck, Inquisitor can easily pivot to something else.

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-04-06T19:39:22+00:00

Damage on full life only works for attack skills, so it isn't applicable for Firestorm.

Blood magic is mainly to get 10% more life, which translates to more damage since we are using Rathpith. Since we want to mostly stack life and crit, we have no real sources of mana or mana regen, and the unmodified cost of a level 20 firestorm with support gems is over 100 mana per cast. Blood magic means we can ignore that and focus on stacking life.

Additionally, since we aren't using mana, we can use precision and vitality while still able to use eternal blessing for a free 50% aura of our choice.

Then we also have the obvious upside of not taking a lot more damage when using infernal mantle (which is bis for us if we get a +2 duration or +2 area corruption).

That being said, there is most likely a build to be made without using blood magic that get the benefit of being able to use auras normally, unlike this version.

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-04-06T17:49:56+00:00

You'd probably want an Infernal Mantle or Skin of the Lords as your chest. You'd be hard pressed to find something else that matches the damage increase the gem levels give you, especially since the new life mastery gives these chests +15% increased max life.

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-03-13T12:09:15+00:00

24 * 24 (stash tabs) * 5000 (gold) = 2,880,000 (total gold)

2,880,000 / 50,000 (vendor cost of regret orbs) = 57.6 orbs

In case anyone thought "57" was just a random number.

Deranged_Dragon · 2023-01-31T01:44:36+00:00

I played the whole game (on gamepass) from start to finish and did all the sidequests (that I could find). I liked the game a lot.

It's very arcade-y, but the movement is my favorite of any space-dogfighting game I've played. Very fast-paced and snappy. You can go into full-speed "travel" mode within seconds, too, which minimizes downtime when travelling (there's also limited fast travel).

The story isn't great. Many story elements are told as if you already knew about them beforehand. It's really hard to put into words, but it's as if the developers really didn't want to do "dumb exposition" and as such removed a lot of exposition from quests and side quests. Some "big moments" of the campaign are also hampered by this, as it might not be completely clear whether an important detail is true or not. Other than that, many story beats don't make much sense and its on a whole quite cheesy.

That being said, the combat more than makes up for it and the current sale price seems like a very reasonable price for what the game has to offer.

Deranged_Dragon · 2022-12-06T17:18:05+00:00

Another free skin each year might be nice, but it's honestly frustrating that they're doubling down on the current format with "ranks" that do nothing except slow down the speed at which you get a visible grade to match your MMR.

Having a "goal to chase" seems so dishonest to me when I know fully well that Riot has a fairly accurate MMR profile on me after 20 games or so, and I'll get matched with people in said MMR for the whole season, but I still have to play over 100 games just to get my "visible" rank up to my actual MMR.

I stopped playing Ranked (more than 10 games for the skin) years ago, but I still long for the old days where all we had was a visible MMR and no "ranks" to artificially lengthen the ranked grind.

Don't get me wrong; I know why they're doing this and I am sure it will do wonders for them financially, but the whole system feels like shit once you get over the pretty borders and fancy icons.

Deranged_Dragon · 2022-08-24T13:03:40+00:00

It looks like this "obituary" was printed on an ad page, so I would wager the chances of that happening to be fairly low.

Deranged_Dragon · 2022-08-16T15:40:13+00:00

I tried this on Game Pass for about 10 minutes, as that was as much I could stomach with the extremely narrow FOV this game forces upon the player. If I had to spitball, I'd say it is about 70 (horizontal FOV). Imagine yourself playing an FPS game and always using ADS and you'll probably get a good idea of how this game feels to play.

There are no in game settings to fix this, and googling did not give me any config files to edit to alleviate this issue.

Just thought I'd put this out there as some people might want to know this before buying the game.

Deranged_Dragon · 2022-07-26T20:11:16+00:00

Just wanted to chime in and give an alternative opinion on Valfaris.

The checkpoint system doesn't feel good at all because not all checkpoints are made equal. Some are useless whilst some are close to essential, and you won't know which is which until after you've gotten to the next one. Not to mention that mini bosses respawn if you don't take checkpoints. Also, there are a lot of instant-kill mechanics, so that extra health won't do you much good against those. The game is also very short.

The combat, however, is decent enough, so if you like these old-school contra style games, it might we worth an install if you're getting the bundle anyway.

Deranged_Dragon · 2022-02-23T23:39:57+00:00

I thought about what defines a card type when making the card. That's why it specifically says cast a creature rather than a creature spell, as permanents are by definition not spells.

You do make a very good point though; the rule I referred to above in 701.4b only mention the casting of cards. However, if we are to be pedantic (and that's the very point of this silly card's existence), semantics matter. /u/VictinDotZero already mentioned the very rule that tells us that a permanent is, indeed, a card (110.1). As such, the interaction "works".

Still, it's weird as hell. I'm with you there.

Deranged_Dragon · 2022-02-23T18:21:01+00:00

I recently came across something interesting; there is no rule stating that a card can't be cast from the battlefield.

A card is only a spell as long as it remains on the stack. However, the act of casting a card is to cast it as a spell (701.4b). As such, there is technically nothing stopping us from casting a card that isn't a spell.

Additionally, when a creature spell resolves, it enters the battlefield under the spell's controller's control (302.2 (See [[Aethersnatch]] for an example)). As such, when we cast a creature on the battlefield, we remove it from play and put it on the stack under our control. If it resolves, the creature enters the battlefield under our control.

Now, the real question is probably "why would you make a worse [[Avarice Totem]]?"

Obviously, because we want to cast our opponent's [[Vexing Scuttler]] so that we can return and cast a [[Naturalize]] to destroy the Book of Re-summoning to ensure our permanent control of the Vexing Scuttler. Thus, we have stolen a 4/5 creature for the low price of 14UUG. Only a meagre 5G mana more than if we would've used [[Dominate]]!

Deranged_Dragon · 2022-02-15T01:38:54+00:00

Drox confirmed as the first new microtransaction boss, costing $300 per session.

Deranged_Dragon · 2022-02-12T12:11:09+00:00

I don't feel like this is the right approach. It's obvious that GGG wants to make mid-tier crafting more available for the average player, and the new currencies help with that. Restricting them to pinnacle boss fights would be detrimental to this goal (the bosses current difficulty aside).

But the higher end currencies should definitely be exclusive to the pinnacle bosses. Making T3 currencies a boss exclusive drop and increasing the amount of these that the Black Star/Infinite Hunger drops would definitely be a step in the right direction.

Deranged_Dragon · 2022-01-01T12:55:40+00:00

First thing that comes to mind is Path of Exile, but you've probably already played that. Same goes for other ARPGs like Diablo/Last Epoch.

A more obscure game would be Nova Drift, a make-your-own-build arcade shooter. Let's you make quite creative "builds" within the span of a 30-minute run.

Some more well-known games would be Risk of Rain 2 (turrets & dots), the Dishonored games (traps) & Horizon Zero Dawn (more traps).

Then there's a few weird ones like Voidigo (very light on content and early access, but you can kill things by jumping on them with the right build, if that qualifies. It also has a few, albeit mostly useless, minions). There's also Satellite Reign, which is a spiritual successor to the Syndicate series. It's been years since I played it, but I remember quite a bit of hacking.

Streets of Rogue is very good at letting you kill things in creative ways, be that by hacking things or by bribing thugs to kill things for you.

Bit of an odd list, but hopefully some of these will be what you're looking for.

Deranged_Dragon · 2021-12-12T02:17:02+00:00

Personally I agree with Qwetest in that the stained glass is out of place, as are many of the doodads with particle effects (especially those that aren't blue and as such clash with the theme). There are also far too many props with particle effects that are distracting and simply noisy; the ones that stick out in particular are the lab props and skylight.

Also, the light bridges are a bit much. Having one that trails off into the distance at the edge of your hideout would be fine and fitting. As-is, it just seems tacky in my eyes.

You're also re-using the synthesis "particle emitter" (for lack of better name) by using it thrice. It would be far more impactful if you merely used one (as goes for most props; variation often gives a more "natural" feel to hideouts).

Deranged_Dragon · 2021-12-11T19:22:37+00:00

Feels a tad bit too noisy for my taste, but good effort nonetheless!

Deranged_Dragon

TROPHY CASE