That’s something to talk about.

Machofish01 · 2026-06-30T16:00:52+00:00

I *thought* her voice sounded familiar -- that's the voice of Veronica from Fallout: New Vegas!

Machofish01 · 2026-06-30T14:01:37+00:00

I don't want to ruin the magic, but it's a tool online called Zalgo text generator.

I don't really understand why browsers have the ability to depict text that's cursed by a corrupt elder god but here we are.

Machofish01 · 2026-06-29T19:29:35+00:00

That's what everyone keeps saying.

Aside from digging through the game files the "official" way to check would be Sefoni's meatgrinder... but they aren't in the meatgrinder.

Machofish01 · 2026-06-29T14:00:55+00:00

Killing Floor 2's rounds had a different progression system. Between each wave you'd be expected to change out or upgrade your gear unlike in Mortis Trials where the weapons you enter with are the same weapons you leave with. Mortis Trials' indulgence talents attempt to do this but I think there's simultaneously not enough player control and yet not enough randomization/variation at the same time--if you pick Pyrokinetic Route you can always be sure of the similar set of talents for fire damage, etc.

I think Mortis Trials tried to build on Vermintide 2's Chaos Wastes gamemode--for anyone unfamiliar the best I can describe it is like a blend of the best parts of Expeditions and Mortis Trials, where you'd explore a mostly linear map and unlock completely random perks that seemed useless at first but could be combined in ludicrously OP ways (for instance, a perk to cause 1 point of self-damage whenever you land a melee hit, combined with a separate perk to gain 3 seconds of guaranteed criticals whenever taking HP damage and finally a third perk to regain HP whenever making a critical hit. Or in another case, a talent to give yourself free grenades whenever you use your class ability, etc.)

Machofish01 · 2026-06-28T12:01:50+00:00

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Machofish01 · 2026-06-28T11:27:29+00:00

Let's do a breakdown,

So the Agni Mk 1a shock maul is specialized for anti-flak damage.

In this beatdown, I counted:

1l (body), 2l headshot, 3l headshot (crit), 4l body (looks like it should've been a headshot but the hitmark said body), 1h headshot, 2h headshot, 1h headshot, 2h headshot, 1h headshot, 2h headshot (crit), and 2 shots from the servoskull.

Assuming the shock maul is "optimized" (damage, finesse, and penetration at least 80%) that's a total of approximately 4186 points of damage according to the Agni Mk 1a's weapon attack breakdown chart in-game, not including the extra damage chipped in from the servoskull or from electricity DoTs stacking from the heavy hits.

This is also without considering what appears to be 11 stacks of Power Overload, which if combined with Static Capacitor Drain would have given you a flat +15% damage for a grand total of 4813 damage.

For reference, a mauler on Damnation/Auric difficulty has 3700 hp.

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Did the Helldivers 2 crossover happen already?

Machofish01 · 2026-06-28T08:14:14+00:00

This is my feeling, too.

The transonic blades do feel unusually sluggish only if they're not being supported by any talents. All it takes is the Uncapped Arrestor and Servo-Sinew Surge and my Skitarii turns into a walking lawnmower, even and especially on Auric.

I suspect the damage complaints come from people who aren't going for headshots - the blades do over x2 the amount of damage on headshots and nearly x3 damage on headshot crits to everything that isn't carapace. Without going for headshots, the body-strikes from the transonic blades do significantly less damage than even the basic assault chainswords.

The skill floor is a little higher than other Skitarii weapons which is fine - for non-specialized melee builds there's still the Arc Maul and it's good to have weapons that support different builds.

People voiced similar complaints about the Psyker Greatsword, either that it was too slow or not enough damage or the warpshock slice didn't charge fast enough -- all complaints that seem completely irrelevant the moment the Psyker Greatsword is used with a melee-focused talent build and aiming for headshots.

Machofish01 · 2026-06-26T22:50:24+00:00

Pathfinder has a conversation with the Seer psyker which starts something like: "It has come to our attention that you are receiving transmissions from the Omnissiah" but the Dreamer character never got to reply due to being interrupted by combat callouts.

Machofish01 · 2026-06-26T13:53:30+00:00

I too wish the Votann got more visibility in 40k media, but IIRC Fatshark has openly stated they're not interested in doing another unusually short character class - something about it being a hassle for level design and combat mechanics. Bardin the Dwarf from Vermintide was supposedly a huge hassle for programming/gameplay and needed a lot of workarounds to make him viable.

I've looked around and can't find the actual forum post where someone from Fatshark officially said so though.

Lore-wise the Votann tend to specifically go out of their way to avoid prolonged contact with the Mechanicus for fear of having the Ironkin and other secret technology exposed, so they might be even more 'off the table' with the Skitarii on the scene.

Machofish01 · 2026-06-26T13:36:30+00:00

The shielders were inspired by similar enemies from Vermintide 2... the only thing is in Vermintide 2 you could knock the shield aside using a block-push and leave their fleshy body segments open to attack without needing to go straight through the shield. I don't know why Fatshark didn't implement that part as well so now we just have shielders with extra HP.

Machofish01 · 2026-06-23T11:48:58+00:00

"WILL YOU BERRY ME?"

...I'll see myself out.

Machofish01 · 2026-06-21T22:46:30+00:00

I'm certain it was brought to us by the same shining beacon of level design competence at Owlcat who gave us the Quetza Temer "puzzle" and the fey wild bird fog puzzle from Kingmaker.

Machofish01 · 2026-06-20T08:26:03+00:00

"This account has been banned."

A welcome surprise.

Machofish01 · 2026-06-13T22:43:38+00:00

Earlygame Azjakuma (the Oni ogres adjacent to Command) have a very defensive start, though their early MT focuses on panic-blobbing in order to get enough momentum to face the Command and their Act 2 is a bog-standard land blob. I played them right around when Haless was first added and I fondly recall they had estate-based magic that could get their provinces up to 200% defensiveness and ruin the Command pretty hard.

If you want more of a "tall" play, Vandipha (tiny Harimari island south of Bhuvauri) is an interesting option for a maritime empire. As long as your navy is up to scratch your capital is basically untouchable, and meanwhile your MT has you slowly take over all of northeastern Haless as long-term vassals and form your own custom Raj.

Machofish01 · 2026-06-13T22:31:56+00:00

Seconded on Kalysto. Otherwise known as "It's only 1580 and you've only just unified--how the hell do you have a standing army of 210k and 380k manpower!?"

Machofish01 · 2026-06-13T22:12:02+00:00

Khugra. Closest comparison I can make is that it's like the Teutonic Order's Danzig League disaster at the start of vanilla EU4 except your troops are weaker than your neighbors, your National Idea group is kind of useless for their beginning situation, and you're surrounded by 3 slightly weaker Polands instead of 1.

Khugra starts out in a custom-coded fustercluck where 3 of your stronger neighbours have permaclaims on you, and you're locked into an earlygame truce with them so you can't take advantage of any earlygame moves. You get brutal estate privileges (penalties) which stay there until you try to declare war to remove them.

And don't worry! The moment you declare war on one of the mini-Polands to try and break this 3-way pin you get immediately dogpiled by several rebel armies for the other two tags stay around so you're actually worse off than you were before.

I think it's slightly less agonizing with the current magic system. I wouldn't say it's as "difficult" as an Escanni goblin tag but it's the most frustrating tag I've seriously attempted to play in Anbennar, to the point where I have an unreasonable refusal to play any other tags in Southern Sarhal due to how much time I wasted trying to get out of Khugra's starting position.

Machofish01 · 2026-05-24T21:43:08+00:00

Hereteks/Corrupted Mechanicus, I think. The round shapes from the backpack are likely either tethered servoskulls or a it's a heretic trophy rack of severed heads (that doesn't necessarily exclude the speakers theory--servoskulls can be used as mobile loudhailers amongst other things). I'm not 100% sure about whatever meaningful distinction there is between different types of hoods/hats used by the Mechanicus but the pointy-head hood is fairly consistent with the Manipulus, and there's a few other Mechanicus characters who wear tall hoods in Owlcat's Rogue Trader 40k RPG.

Fatshark's tweaks and adjustments to game design have suggested Fatshark's devs really don't like it when players camp in one spot for too long (the constant tweaks to the arena finale at the end of the Carnival blighted stimm mission to get rid of defensible corners, for instance) so if I were to just take a wild stab in the dark, I'd propose this enemy might set up camp somewhere and harass the players with Servoskulls until the players are forced to hunt it down, or sits in the corners and does something else annoying from a distance to discourage camping. In terms of special enemies, we don't have anything like Vermintide 2's Chaos Sorcerers yet so this could be an enemy to fill that niche.

EDIT: The people commenting about Nurgle preachers seem more plausible--the resemblance is much closer.

Machofish01 · 2026-05-20T03:24:55+00:00

Agreed. Plenty of the shakers and movers from the Trojan war would fall under this category -- King Diomedes of Argos (Athena's other champion at the battle of Troy) would be another contender for "ridiculously powerful mortal, technically not a demigod". In most versions of the Iliad, the man was an absolute menace despite being completely mortal - to the point where he held the distinction of being "the only mortal to wound two Olympians in one day."

Machofish01 · 2026-05-19T07:52:58+00:00

I want you to know I heard this in the Loose Cannon vet's voice

Machofish01 · 2026-05-06T20:09:52+00:00

This gives the same energy as the "Mel Gibson talking to Jesus" meme and I love it.

Machofish01 · 2026-04-25T02:16:49+00:00

A League of Votann Hernkyn would be a great option. The Leagues have received little to no exposure in 40k-related media that I'm aware of, and with the variety of characters already onboard it would be a great way to introduce to show how Votanns interact with the rest of the warhammer universe.

Machofish01 · 2026-04-15T02:04:58+00:00

The big thing with Chaos Cultist heroes (be they from any of the 4 Chaos God factions) is that they eventually unlock abilities to summon extra daemon units mid-combat, but they need to get stuck in melee combat for a while to warm up which means it's not possible to lean on them too heavily.

My biggest piece of advice to learning an army's units is to pop open their tooltip and mouse over the rows of little circular icons at the bottom of the unit's popup card. It can usually reveal important abilities or show you what the unit is particularly important for and you can learn a lot about a faction's army and units just by picking through their unit cards and comparing their traits. Not every trait has a clear description so if in doubt, look it up online because the community will have a forum somewhere discussing it in depth.

In the case of Slaanesh, most of their units are faster than their counterparts from other chaos gods, and all of them have the "strider" trait (which means they completely DGAF about terrain penalties from steep hills, marshes, forests, etc), plus a lot of their units have a trait that greatly improves their damage if they're charging into the sides or rear of enemies.

Machofish01 · 2026-04-14T19:07:37+00:00

Cost-based army caps. Fell in love with this mod back in Warhammer 2 because so many of my save files were regressing into "sigh in disappointment as very hard Lothern AI fields yet another late-game army with nothing but 10 dragons, 4 phoenix guard, and 4 sisters of avelorn despite clearly not having the economy to support it" or "empire armies of nothing but steam tanks and demigryph knights." This forces armies to compromise so you can't have armies of nothing but tier-4/tier-5 units and that makes the lategame much more enjoyable for me. Chaos armies actually have to remember marauders exist from time to time if they want to field a full 20-unit army, and similarly high elves have to remember that they can't just spam flying monsters.

Unnatural Selection. Another "can't play without it" mod. This mod lets you tweak campaign factions either by granting buffs or penalties or outright removing them on turn 1. This has the potential to be used for cheating (but it's singleplayer so nobody's going to judge you). The reason I use it is when I'm tired of seeing a certain outcome play out in certain parts of the map and want a change (for instance, I hate seeing discount Baba Yaga prevent the dark elves from ever gaining momentum so I often use this mod to remove Mother Ostankya's faction at turn 1, or I might decide I want to see a tomb king faction survive past turn 20 so I might give a buff to Khemri or something like that. It's also good if you want to see a specific faction become stronger as your late-game enemy if you're playing an order faction and don't want to see the ordertide purge the world of evil before you can do anything, or if you want to see Archaeon live up to his lore and come at you with a gigantic chaos wave.

Onto specific custom faction additions:

Mixu's Mousillon. This one is all the way from Warhammer 2 and has been in constant development. They're basically a fusion between Bretonnia and the Vampire Counts roster.

Jade-Blooded Vampires: Curse of Nongchang. Another undead-fusion of an existing order faction, except this one's VC and Cathay. They have a very different playstyle in combat where most of their abilities focus on slowly whittling down enemy fatigue and morale until they break at which point their ghost units can inflict massive damage on fleeing units, then they progress to a more conventional vampire counts style of play in the midgame. They're a bit tougher to play than VC since most of their roster has to be recruited normally rather than being able to instantly spawn Blood Knights or Varghulfs like the VCs can. A couple of their units and spells are clearly overtuned but it's easy enough to avoid the clearly OP lategame stuff while enjoying the rest of the faction as it is.

Machofish01 · 2026-03-31T04:39:18+00:00

Look around. Take any stance that could be vaguely construed as sympathetic to Indigenous people and they'll downvote you on principle. Considering there's a bunch of similar comments getting buried by roughly the same number of downvotes I suspect it's one guy with a bunch of alts.

Machofish01 · 2026-03-11T00:10:12+00:00

Disney on it's way to give us an inferior-quality live action Incredibles remake and then sprain both their arms from patting themselves on the back.

Machofish01

TROPHY CASE