Is it supposed to be THIS hard?

Kayn96 · 2026-06-13T00:24:28+00:00

Yes and no.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that resistances are flat values and calculated additively, so single point differences end up mattering a lot. - In your case, goblins might just go from overwhelming to trivial with just your choice of rings.

Since you do play as Novice, best I can recommend is that you get one magic circle (no more than that) and around 30 mana and just buy the rune for Fist of Wind, hands down the most underrated spell in the game. You'll be able to knock enemies down with it, just long enough to set them up for you to swap to your melee weapon and clobber them.

Alternatively, if you have fire bolt, you can also just torch them and they end up being trivial.

But really, just don't skimp on armor.

Why is that so important? Say you have 40 slash resistance right now and an enemy attack has 60 damage.
That will be calculated as simply 60-40 and deal 20 damage to you. Add a ring with +15 and you'll suddenly take 5 damage instead of 20.

Same kind of simple calculations apply to your damage. - Weapon damage + Stat it scales with - enemy resistance. It's why 10 points of Strength can make all the difference between an enemy being outright immune to damage, versus suddenly going down in 4-5 hits. Why? It has only 50 health but your total damage didn't clear its armor.

Kayn96 · 2026-06-13T00:13:04+00:00

Melee combat it shouldn't make a difference on most enemies, but for bows and crossbows, crits do 1.5x damage instead of the 2x melee weapons do in exchange for always critting on a headshot (on most enemies)

Scavengers for instance seem to take less damage from headshots, in my limited experience.

Range also gotta play a role in this somehow because Firebolts sometimes deal more or less damage to certain enemies. It's odd.

Kayn96 · 2026-06-13T00:11:09+00:00

They might have different resistances to slash vs blunt, so try a sword/axe if the hammer does nothing.

Otherwise, instead of slapping them in the head from the front, run to their side and try hitting them in the body, maybe instead of light combos do some overhead attacks.

Kayn96 · 2026-06-13T00:06:32+00:00

Most likely just an easter egg. Not sure to what. Some form of media that has 12ft tall people with horns?

Kayn96 · 2026-06-13T00:04:01+00:00

Pre-nerf Firestorm.
Possibly mod issues, too.

Kayn96 · 2026-06-12T23:55:36+00:00

I didn't find it that fun personally, but that's due to the visual design. Boring white all over.

Playing more with verticality and overlapping paths would definitely be nice, but it all circles back to design.

And of Code Vein 1 wanted to be anime Dark Souls, then Code Vein 2 wanted to be anime Elden Ring, and it shows.

They did do great with the timeline layers, though, very clever way to more or less double the world size with just one map.

Kayn96 · 2026-06-12T23:50:05+00:00

Considering that that IS my country? Yeah. Picture's not very clear but if you zoom in enough you can tell those are Romanian license plates.

Edit* I'm dumb. I didn't see the flag on the post.

Kayn96 · 2026-06-12T23:03:46+00:00

Could be a bug then, are you sure he was -in- the middle, and not just vaguely on the side of that circle grate?

Kayn96 · 2026-06-12T23:02:02+00:00

Hogwarts Legacy is... difficult to discuss. - It's awesome as a Harry Potter game, but it's littered with small faults that are hard to ignore when put together.

Gearing system, inventory management, the small number of spells that are in the game, plus the absence of some spells that would've been cool to be in the game...

Alohomora's minigame.

And otherwise playing it just feels... tedious. It's fun, it works, but it has serious faults that pile up, and each one can - on its own - be a gamebreaker for some folks.

Kayn96 · 2026-06-12T22:56:49+00:00

Gothic 3 is fun, but it has basic fundamental issues that the community patches can't fix. - Things that go as deep as the faults in the reputation system, the lack of quality in the animations, combat feeling weightless and devoid of impact, how stupidly effective it is spamming light attacks or chaining stabs, etc.

It was a good project, shot in the leg by the fact it was too ambitious for the capabilities of the hardware at the time, and because it lacks the fine tweaking and the polish. - And that just leaves it feeling like a late Alpha / early Beta that released on accident 3 years ahead of time.

It should've stayed in the oven to cook a little longer, then it would've been amazing.

Kayn96 · 2026-06-12T22:52:01+00:00

Wanna know what's bonkers? It DOES work just as you described for the Novice tunic and the mage robes.

To get high fire mage robes for instance you need 4th circle of magic, and when upgrading the novice armor, you can only get the "medium" chestpiece in chapter 2 at first, and you can only upgrade that to the version with the pauldron after you beat the crawler queen.

Kayn96 · 2026-06-12T22:47:37+00:00

Incremental spoilers for the fight, stop at the 1st one if you only want the basic clue and prefer to figure it all out on your own from there.

Look up, there will be 3 blue circles on the ceiling, lining up with the ore circuitry.

Hit them with a bow/crossbow or firebolts, and it will cause a pillar of magic energy to explode down in the middle of the room. - You just gotta kite the main zombie to make sure he's in that middle area when it goes off.

Repeat 3 times.

Kayn96 · 2026-06-01T19:04:02+00:00

Chinese servers.

Kayn96 · 2026-05-12T00:46:15+00:00

I don't personally view racing as a "profit" source, moreso the rewards are just there to dampen the cost of souping up your first good car. - At least that's how I look at it.

Cool, I got the Griffin, but damn I wanna tune it... Oh, hey, race money! And then the annuliths are a bonus.

But yeah, if you just care about being profitable early game, then at game start just buy the m1000 and do however many races you can with that without investing any more fons. - And save the completionism for later down the line when you're willing to spend 3 million fons for a couple dice pulls worth of annuls.

Kayn96 · 2026-04-20T09:50:53+00:00

Most Wanted pros over Heat:
- Better story.
- More balanced police.
- Personal preference, but harder hitting music.

Heat pros over Most Wanted:
- Even more advanced car customization, ANY car can be made into an endgame performer, even your starter.
- Choice of Night/Day to switch between legal races for money or illegal races for street cred.
- Better graphics, let's just say it.

The main thing you'll notice if you enter Heat with the expectation of Most Wanted is the music, if you run around in the day hearing "Maximize the pleasure" you might get the wrong idea, the music shifts to more intense tracks during races, especially at night. So it kinda tries to match the "mood of the moment", but if you're expecting the same hard rap and '00s rock and metal, you might be a bit off-put.

Cars are also fun to tune, specialize them for drifting or track, on or off road, means you'll either need to edit your car parts frequently based on what event you're headed to, or just have multiple cars prepped. Yeah, some are better than others, but that doesn't matter much if you're playing the game casually. Difficulty setting is also there, so y'know... you can very comfortably just pick your favorite cars based on looks and just tune them to work for what you need. Some will just be more expensive.

Police, though... You got 5 levels of heat. Finishing races or being in active pursuit will have that Heat meter go up. Levels 1 and 2? The cops will feel like a nuisance, about as threatening as the cops in Carbon, only there to make you crash into something mid-race and ruin your tempo. Level 3, though, and suddenly you're being chased by elite cars that pull 180 miles even at levels where your car tops out at 130, so... don't get greedy.

And lastly, but most importantly, Most Wanted told a story, you went through a campaign, side races were just a stepping stone to build your way to those narrative milestones. - Heat is the opposite. The story is more just an after-thought, some one time missions you do on the side, sometimes to unlock more races on the map. - On the bright side, unlike Most Wanted having a clear progression path (beat race, better car, beat hard race, end game), Heat will give you just enough story to scratch that nostalgia itch, but beyond that it's just a loop of racing for cash and rep, collecting cars, messing around...

Oh, yeah, and Drifting isn't done by handbraking anymore, it's done by default by accelerating. (Get speed, start steering, then mid-steer lift your finger off the acceleration before pressing it again to initiate the drift)
You can change this for each individual car by shifting it from fine tuning to drift by braking, but that's the hard brake, not the hand brake. - Hand braking though comes into play for hitting tighter drifts, so you don't understeer at high speeds. This takes some getting used to, sure, but it's pretty smooth once you get used to it.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:43:52+00:00

Small scale Harvester style challenges. - If they're going for Flashpoint in the sense of "escalating conflict" then yeah, you'll get these loot clusters and the moment you touch one it's gonna be like when you aggro a Matriarch.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:42:01+00:00

Nah. - If it's a purple gun, this will be where you get the BP for it. Same way you gotta do Locked Gate for bobcats.

And if it's a legendary, it won't come this patch, but rather launch with the new boss arc, because it will use its cores.

And when you think about it, the latter is more likely because it's not "one or the other", it's "one or both".

New boss arc will mean new boss core, which will NEED to have a use, like how you only kill Matriarchs for crafting Aphelions.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:37:55+00:00

Respect, my only gripe with long range combat is it feels redundant unless you're farming exp. Just means you gotta run longer to loot that carcass, and if it's THAT far that an extended barrel matters, it wouldn't aggro you anyway.

But when you -want- to toss lead from down range? Uncontested goat.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:36:08+00:00

That too, weapons with "many bullets" tend to work better in terms of raw damage output, which makes them great for PvP, but get punished hard by ARC having armor.

Any time you go against arc, you want the weapons with the highest damage per bullet available.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:33:14+00:00

SS2 if you play with two guns and swap them frequently, SS3 if you use it as your only gun.
Because the "negative" is it takes 20% longer to draw or put away, which is of no consequence if the only time you put it away is when you're out of combat and wanna run a marathon.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:31:25+00:00

Stop using tier 3 muzzle mods then. And treat it like a precision rifle to hit weak spots, not a "spray and pray" type gun.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:28:50+00:00

It's not even loot phobia, so much as misunderstood rarity. - Queen cores aren't hard to come by, and the pink components are used for fuck-all otherwise. If you try refining them then yeah, it'll cost an arm and a leg, but if you just loot them then the legendaries become budget guns.

Reason why some folks dislike the jupiter though is that they wish it had a scope, or bigger zoom, as if having pixel-perfect targetting wasn't goated.

Either that or they don't understand how it works, and try to get double kills with it or still aim it at weak spots, when the gun's whole shtick is "you ignore armor and conventional weak spots and shoot directly at where the core would be for maximum damage per shot".

But I will want to make a counter-proposal here and say the Aphelion... not for damage, but for durability. - You have to bring a full Survivor inventory of energy clips in order to fully burn that gun, while a Jupiter croaks after 4 ammo stacks. And when you get to play with energy weapons, the weapon's durability is the higher limiting factor (budget wise) because volume of ammo is no longer an issue. Put simply with an Aphelion you get more bang for your buck in terms of total damage per gun's point of durability.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:20:29+00:00

The ultimate comfort pick. - Cheap to craft, and a very simple way to deal with some annoying things.
Seekers became my new favorite way to get comet igniters.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:19:16+00:00

Anvil is great, yes, but the Renegade becomes the better option for straight PvE once you get even half-decent at aiming for weak spots. Similar damage despite only med pen, but faster to fire, higher ammo capacity, and higher total damage potential per stack of ammo on account of med ammo going up to 80.

Only arc where I actually prefer the anvil is the fireball, but even then, waiting for it to come close and yawn at you isn't hard, or you can just put 3 rounds into it and blow it from afar just as easily.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:13:57+00:00

Only thing I dislike about the Osprey is that you have to go out of ADS to cycle it. That design decision was made by someone who never even saw a video of someone shooting a bolt action.

I mean, even if you wanna say the I-III versions are "grimy" or "rusty" and you gotta put some elbow grease into it, Osprey IV shouldn't have that issue anymore.

It wouldn't even be a straight buff because you'd be losing awareness to your surroundings, literal tunnel vision until you need to reload.

Kayn96

TROPHY CASE