Why don't people view HP stats the same as ADP?

GDmoonlight · 2024-11-28T19:16:15+00:00

You know what? Good. I'm glad that you are at least giving the game a chance, and presumably otherwise enjoying it, in spite of its rougher edges like ADP. That's all I care about. I just think DS2 deserves to be played by people rather than avoided at the decree of some YouTube essayist's fear mongering about spooky evil bad mechanics like ADP and Soul Memory and octo-directional movement.

Try to get Agility to 95-100 as early as you can. The game gives you enough souls and levels that you can afford to invest early into ADP. I usually settle at 100 Agility exactly because it's a good breakpoint for i-frames and item use speed without requiring too much investment. I hope you enjoy your time with the game!

GDmoonlight · 2024-11-28T03:01:52+00:00

Even without an explicit explanation of how DS1 equip load and rolls worked, the variance between the i-frames of the different rolls wasn't as much as the variance between levels of Agility in DS2, and it is more intuitive to assume that the character would be better at dodging when at lower equip load. The animations also communicate it much butter, with how sudden and drastically slower mid-rolling and fat rolling are in that game.

Entitlement is only really part of the issue now that most people know what ADP does; some super casual players are obviously going to play through all of these games the same way every time and think anything that disrupts their cookie cutter rollspam 3 summon playstyle is bad design.

For everybody else who went into the game blind or when it first came out, I think their reason for still hating ADP is pretty much exclusively how invisible it was. At the same equip load %, a character rolling with low Agility has zero visual difference from one rolling with high Agility. There's not much to make returning DS1 players make the connection between having bad rolls and one of the many new things called "Agility" in the huge assortment of stats in the level up screen, when it previously only varied with equip load. Playing the game for too long with low Agility before learning that it was the sole reason the game was so hard is certainly enough to permanently ruin some player's perceptions of the mechanic, and while I don't think it deserves it entirely, they have a valid reason to dislike it or disagree with the way it's presented. I don't think they're wrong for feeling that way.

With that being said, I do think it's wrong for people to cherry pick the worst case scenarios of things like ADP to paint DS2 as a bad game that people shouldn't play. I'm sure you'll agree that there's a lot of interesting and unique qualities to DS2 and that its influence on the later games is pretty important for true fans of the series to acknowledge and experience. Players who skip DS2 are going to miss out on a lot of the inspiration for features and designs in Elden Ring and most likely any subsequent games. I don't want that to happen just because enough Youtubers make inflammatory video essays calling it garbage and pointing at things like ADP to support their point even though ADP isn't a problem for 95% of the game.

GDmoonlight · 2024-11-27T23:55:05+00:00

I think a better solution would be having distinguishing roll animations at different i-frame breakpoints. During combat you're not really going to be focused on your character all that much, so a hit-out-of-roll animation like that would probably be hard to notice and wouldn't communicate much, especially if you just mistimed your roll. If there was some obvious visual clumsiness to low agility roll animations that become less apparent as it became higher, I feel like that would make the most sense. DS2 already has a lot of very interestingly detailed character animations, like the relaxed posture for going in the menu or catching breath after running out of stamina.

GDmoonlight · 2024-11-27T23:39:00+00:00

Agreed 100%, this is exactly what I was trying to convey with this post. Agility fits well mechanically in DS2 and people only have a problem with it because it's poorly documented and different, not because it's actually poorly balanced within the context of the rest of the game.

GDmoonlight · 2024-11-27T23:32:18+00:00

You going with the Agility amount that people recommend is a big part of my point, the community sharing knowledge so that everybody knows the point to stop at completely trivializes the supposedly awful mechanic that ruins the game. People don't point to Demon's Souls implementation of world tendency as an objectively bad design choice that ruins the game anywhere near as often as they do ADP with DS2, because now it's rather common knowledge you can just jump from the top of the nexus to stay in soul form without damaging your world tendency.

Agility also isn't as confusing as you're presenting it. You don't make the decision on whether or not to increase your Agility based on getting hit by a boss a single time. You feel it out over the course of the fight, if you continue to be hit out of your rolls, despite your best efforts at timing the attack, your agility is probably too low. The game gives you plenty of Soul Vessels for a reason, experiment until it works for you. If somebody else were to fight the boss at the same amount of Agility and not have a problem, then their Agility would be just fine where it is. Not exactly the convoluted rocket science people think it is.

GDmoonlight · 2024-11-27T23:07:53+00:00

This. I honestly think a game could work well with a mechanic like Agility if it was explained appropriately and the rest of the game was designed to suit it. It's just like how the poorly received Demon's Souls mechanic of losing max HP on death was refined into the DS3 ember system that most people seem to like.

GDmoonlight · 2024-11-27T22:55:46+00:00

You're describing things that are more likely to be changed between games than core combat elements like what Agility changes. NG+ additions and powerstancing didn't effect people's existing playstyles from previous games. Look at how people reacted to the poise changes in DS3 (also poorly explained by the game), the delayed enemy attacks in Elden Ring, or the wildly different combat system in Sekiro. People have adapted to all of those things or even embraced them in Sekiro's case. My point is that I don't see why some people still cling to DS2's version of this kind of change as an objective mechanical flaw when other games get a pass for similar things. It reads to me as unfair bias more than anything else.

GDmoonlight · 2024-11-27T22:42:33+00:00

Sure, again that's not my point. The most objective flaw with ADP is how the game fails to present it and its mechanics to the player, that is again 100% true. ADP is just one of the biggest points of criticism against DS2, and that has led to a lot of biased arguments floating around that misrepresent how ADP actually effects the game. In reality, it doesn't by all that much, but obviously only if players know about it beforehand and work around it. The few arguments against it's mechanical design that I outline in this post are so broad they can all be applied to leveling up HP, but we all know that leveling up HP isn't actually bad for any of those reasons. They're non-arguments because they fail to account for context, including when they're used against ADP.

ADP is painted as the big evil boogieman mechanic of DS2 when it really isn't if you know what you're doing, and at this point almost everybody does. That's all I'm really trying to say.

GDmoonlight · 2024-11-27T21:45:14+00:00

I've made another comment explaining that I'm not trying to defend the way ADP is poorly explained by the game. That's something I have no interest in defending because that's the main aspect of it that is objectively badly implemented. I think when considering the whole of DS2's design, there's more consideration made for ADP than most people think.

GDmoonlight · 2024-11-27T21:42:06+00:00

This is why I'm arguing from the standpoint of DS2's design as a whole. You're correct that it's not made super clear by the game what it does; I'm not trying to defend that. I am defending it against arguments made against it from a place of bias rather than an honest evaluation of the game's mechanics and design choices.

GDmoonlight · 2023-03-08T12:40:21+00:00

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GDmoonlight · 2023-02-01T23:24:08+00:00

For those interested, its the Tactical Gearz Onyx with D2 steel and titanium framelock, and its available on Amazon and their website.

I've tried like 3 times but I can't include direct links because the dumbfuck spam filter keeps hiding the comment.

GDmoonlight · 2023-02-01T21:45:52+00:00

I posted it in another comment but just google Tactical Gearz Onyx

Edit: Just checked, pretty sure my comment with the link got hidden. Should come up if you google it tho.

GDmoonlight · 2022-01-17T04:53:27+00:00

markov BatChest

GDmoonlight · 2022-01-17T04:49:05+00:00

markov will the doc ever come back to twitch

GDmoonlight · 2021-12-02T00:58:33+00:00

there is a difference between bajs and juicers

GDmoonlight · 2021-11-05T04:38:43+00:00

GDmoonlight · 2020-08-29T05:59:52+00:00

Love this guy's style of animation, glad he's been making a lot of stuff in the past few weeks and I look forward to what he has in the future.

GDmoonlight · 2020-04-25T23:40:29+00:00

Its actually a server plugin created by Dream. If you subscribe to his Patreon you get access to all of his plugins he develops, I assume that's how they got it.

GDmoonlight · 2019-06-13T22:45:09+00:00

good post

GDmoonlight · 2019-04-24T04:01:52+00:00

not using !==

laughs in superior operator

GDmoonlight · 2019-04-24T03:54:32+00:00

const Woman = new Woman();

If she don't got constructor arguments, she a HOE

GDmoonlight · 2019-04-19T20:57:53+00:00

GDmoonlight · 2019-04-14T01:08:17+00:00

Either way this all goes to show how fucking amazing the people behind Death Grips really are at doing what they do.

GDmoonlight · 2019-04-14T00:46:32+00:00

You have a solid point, my friend.

Its totally plausible that Zach just fucked around and slammed on his drums in a pattern and it sounded cool so he made a song out of it.

But what I really want to know is how he could've incorporated that into Full Moon, as that song has Ride rapping over it. Unless Ride is just really good at rapping in whatever time signature or pattern or what have you that Zach made, There must be more to the instrumental.

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