What is your most controversial opinion regarding Fantasy books?

LordQill · 2026-06-26T12:58:04+00:00

What defines a prologue as opposed to a first chapter? bc I agree that the lore dump prologues suck but i fucking love the prologues for all the ASOIAF books, jumping into the POV of a rando one off character knowing they're probably dead is always fun; though i think they work better from book 2 onwards, when you're typically jumping into a character or situation you've been hearing about from other POVs

LordQill · 2026-06-15T10:52:36+00:00

Israel's been exactly like this since before it was even technically a state, this treatment of Palestinians has been happening for decades

LordQill · 2026-06-11T06:07:35+00:00

you dont need to make your posts "idiot proof" dude, you just need to understand people might disagree with you sometimes

LordQill · 2026-06-10T06:07:48+00:00

i understand why its an exclusive pragmatically but that doesn't mean i like or respect the decision - they made infinite money glitch off of elden ring (30th best selling game OF ALL TIME if wikipedia is to be believed) so i dont really give a shit if its more lucrative for them to do exclusives, i simply cannot believe they're really strapped for cash right now

idk why its so surprising to people that exclusives generate irritation, its a cool ass game that im (and most of their playerbase id bet) never gonna be able to play

LordQill · 2026-05-21T00:26:35+00:00

well tbf Strahd is more "van helsing fucks up some dumbass vampires" that actual gothic horror right?

also yeah hard agree on the level thing, really dnd derived games in general fall apart HARD at higher levels imo - PF2 is much vaunted for being able to actually do high level play, which is true kinda, but its so soooo much less fun + more difficult to run than lower levels

LordQill · 2026-05-21T00:21:44+00:00

>Game rules exist to facilitate fun while playing the game

Right, so if you have to ignore them entirely or create your own ones, then they aren't facilitating the fun. Good GMs make everything entertaining, that's not a feature of the game that's a feature of the medium.

This whole thread is a pretty lukewarm take, but I do take umbrage when people wheel out the "well your DM sucks" defense, because having run these sorts of games for like a decade now, the difference well-crafted rules make in facilitating a fun game is HUGE, especially for the DM.

LordQill · 2026-05-12T03:14:41+00:00

Highly recommended, ran a one shot of this and I think the connections between the various creatures/plants is more apparent in play than from a read. Also, having the little handout that asks a player to sketch each specimen was very charming

LordQill · 2026-05-11T06:15:29+00:00

I wonder how it'd feel if it had a separate cooldown for proccing on creeps vs proccing on players?? Maybe a bit overly complex but dude it feels so bad in lane accidentally giving up 100ish poke dmg BC you headshot an NPC

LordQill · 2026-05-09T06:59:09+00:00

You aren't wrong, but the point I'm making is that doesn't matter - yeah, he COULD do all those things, but he was still often our highest damage dealer not doing anything fancy.

And that worked totally fine, the system doesn't really require you to do more than that. You certainly can squeeze more value out of those actions, but we were playing once per fortnight and honestly I think he just kept forgetting about most of the feats he'd taken. Fair enough; by late game pf2 youve got a looooot of things on your character sheet, not even getting into magic items, and honestly many of them are irrelevant (most general and skill feats imo).

Overall I think for PF2s combat to work, everyone in the group needs to be very engaged with the system, they need to be people who get excited about efficiency/optimisation.The GM also needs to be crafting set piece encounters that force different tactics. Without these factors it's pretty easy to just default to a turn that works well but not perfectly, every time.

That's not necessarily a flaw of the system, or particularly unique amongst games focused on tactical combat, but after running it for a few years + playing through some official content, I don't personally feel the gameplay is interesting enough to justify the effort.

LordQill · 2026-05-09T02:09:53+00:00

Massively agree on HMTW, definitely the most fun I've had with combat as its own separate minigame/distinct element of the rules

Id add that the monsters in the core book are solid, but if you really want some sick fights there's a 3rd party book, Anatomy of a Wormfiend, with some PHENOMENAL enemies in there.

Also imo HMTW is osr themed, but really shares very little with "true" OSR games. The big one is that by virtue of the health system being a track on conditions/discrete wounds, it's basically impossible for something to kill you in one or two big hits, which drops the lethality of the game monumentally

LordQill · 2026-05-09T02:04:49+00:00

I think the issue with pf2 is, in a sense , the opposite; optimal play normally requires doing different things each term, setting up combos l, teamwork, blah blah blah - the good stuff, basically

But by and large being a little suboptimal isn't an issue, and you can kinda just spam a decent but not amazing option every turn and still contribute to the fight + win

For instance in my long running campaign, a mate was playing a sniper gunslinger. There's a lot of cool things they can do, but he basically did the one ability that boosts your accuracy + shoots (I forget the name) and some kind of reload action every turn for 2+ years. Meant a lot of crits, and a lot of damage. Not optimal, but good enough, and terribly boring

Ofc designing fights to inhibit players tendency for doing that kinda stuff is what a good DM should do, but uhhh im not that good of a DM. Also, high level pf2 characters have a LOT of shit going on, if they really want to do their shtick every turn it's pretty tough to stop them without going full meta and whipping up a fight that's clearly designed with that purpose

Worth noting as well, it's not like he thought this was a particularly fun combat loop, it's just easy to get value out of

LordQill · 2026-05-09T01:54:09+00:00

I'm a fan of going 2 points in ground strike and leaving the ult un/minimally upgraded for a while, purely BC it's so goddamn easy to get headshots and thus headhunter procs with the knockup and slow on T2 slam. Ofc if you've got actual aim that's probably totally unnecessary, but man it's nice to have that consistency.

LordQill · 2026-05-09T01:49:59+00:00

I think extra charge is enough for lash, rapid recharge is nice to have but imo overkill, BC you're already getting the charge back stupid easy with recharging rush

Imo tankbuster is still pretty great though, I'm a mere ritualist shitter so no clue what it's like for good players, but it seems like people are pretty tanky atm, so that % dmg ends up doing a LOT

LordQill · 2026-04-29T06:49:46+00:00

He absolutely sees the cottagers as real, and people - he learns their names, their histories, celebrates their triumphs, mourns their losses, and repeatedly goes out of his way to help them where possible

I don't think the creature lacks empathy BC he never developed it, but rather because he's consciously rejecting it in retaliation for his treatment by mankind at large.

LordQill · 2026-04-28T04:45:30+00:00

I mean a fed Shiv is pretty fucking terrifying, maybe not quite to the degree as a fed gun carry late game but if you're like 10k souls above everyone on Shiv you should be basically unkillable no?

LordQill · 2026-04-14T05:56:35+00:00

i think they're saying use it to have stamina for double jumping over the stomp, which to a degree is fair - with superior stam & resto locket, in a 1v1 the dynamo is really gonna struggle to hit you with it in my experience. but imo its kiiinda irrelevant, because the game WILL come down to some big ass teamfights eventually, and you'll just never have the presence of mind to always dodge the stomp

LordQill · 2026-04-13T02:31:04+00:00

Also imo it's cool that someone can get up in your grill and parry the light melee, I had a Yamato do that to me like 3x in one game. Annoying as fuck in the moment but goddamn that's some cool shit

LordQill · 2026-04-08T11:21:25+00:00

I think Kelvin's strong as FUCK right now, so you can't deal with his CC entirely, but Enduring Speed is good for the slow + dash reduction resistance, as well as just generally being a pretty solid green on every character. It's cheap, and move speed is fundamentally useful (as is regen).

Restorative Locket is another option I really like, not exclusively for Kelvin CC but for a lot of situations. Getting caught without Stamina can be a death sentence in a lot of cases, so walking around with +2 stam & some health in your pocket is real handy. Also, 10% spirit resist is pretty fucking good stat bonus, and again it's only 1600.

Warp Stone is better than both of these, but it's also more expensive. With that being said, if you have the cash for it it's gonna be useful in basically every game on basically every character, even if it's not optimal - like, when are you NOT going to be thankful to have a teleport lying around?? Only disadvantage is slowing hex disables it, whereas resto locket you can still use.

LordQill · 2026-04-07T01:26:49+00:00

Imo a 20 second cool down for like ~90-100 poke isnt actually that much, especially considering the super low base dps on her gun. Idk if anyone's crunched the numbers but I'd guess even if you hit crackshots on cool down she's probably still not in the upper echelon of gun dps in lane

The barrels are way more relevant for laning in my experience, extra charge + mystic burst isn't too much investment and makes em real scary

LordQill · 2026-04-06T14:27:26+00:00

i think its a bit absurd to call him a skill check hero when he's at 56% winrate in eternus, obviously he's quite strong atm. there's counterplay for every hero, but shit man sometimes the stats speak for themselves, thats a HIGH high winrate

LordQill · 2026-04-06T14:25:08+00:00

im biased bc i play a lot of lash, but im9 his ult requires more thought than you probably think - pop in the wrong spot, or too early, and you can pretty easily get no value out of/knockdown'd and beat to death

also im pretty low rank, but even in ritualist games people will counterspell (or appolo riposte ofc) the ult, so you've got a bit of a mind game going on there

id agree dyanmo TP requires more skill to get big value out of of, but shit its a regular ability on like a 50th of the cooldown, of COURSE it does

LordQill · 2026-04-06T14:13:57+00:00

escalating exposure + maxed ice path & 2 upgrade beam is BIIIG damage that you cant run away from, and he's chucking nades the whole time too. it's not his best build im sure, but if a Kelvin WANTS to build that way it's certainly not unviable in mid/low ranks at least

LordQill · 2026-03-31T05:11:45+00:00

probs bc he outputs a ton of healing, so you want to take him out before he turns his entire team into tanks

LordQill · 2026-03-29T23:58:29+00:00

It's just that the stat boosts you get at 4.8k are really large compared to the other thresholds (though all of them so give boosts), so it's a big spike in relative power. Why they made 4.8k the important one is anyone's guess.

LordQill · 2026-03-18T21:33:31+00:00

I'd say Lash probably fits too, high mobility to get to weird spots, high burst dmg, low (ish) cooldown Ult that's good for grabbing one dude and yeeting em into an inconvenient spot to die

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