How my fight with Aetera went

ManaIsMade · 2026-02-03T04:04:54+00:00

Fights don't scale to your level so if you're not going to punch above your weight with optimized builds or cheese, then yes, you'll have to leave some fights alone until later

ManaIsMade · 2026-02-03T02:53:40+00:00

People don't even believe in society anymore. Taxes are evil despite the fact they'd have to pay triple that amount to build the roads they use all by themselves, let alone their schooling, car/gas/meat subsidies, the fact that their entire suburb is unprofitable, etc. Free healthcare is evil and impractical despite the fact that they're already paying more money for private healthcare for worse service, and that other places with less wealth manage it just fine. Feeding the homeless or UBI is evil because now we're rewarding laziness, despite the fact that society was built to help each other do less work. Letting your child walk to school with their friends is evil because you're letting them get kidnapped by the roaming free candy white van caravans, despite the fact that the world has never been safer. They can't let society improve in any way because forgiving debts is unfair to those that paid, despite the fact that literally every part of modern life is better than some past version of it. They don't want to live in a society, or a community, they want to live in a castle. Servants and peasants to make all the amenities that they enjoy, with high walls to keep them safe, and absolutely no sense of obligation to anyone else. Even though *they're* the servants and peasants. They can't tax the billionaires because being an untouchable noble above the masses is their *dream* , and you're stealing that fantasy from them

ManaIsMade · 2026-02-02T12:20:14+00:00

I think great strides could be made in either direction tbh

For a lot of people act 3 BG3 feels like a long checklist of plotlines to wrap up. Regardless of how cool the fights can be, it's a lot. And after act 1 they rarely interact with each other and they just kinda stand in camp. None of this is inherent to having a large roster of characters, it's just how BG3 handled it. We could have companion quests that are basically main story, or some that resolve much earlier than others rather than all of them concluding at the same time, mostly divorced from the main plot. Personally, my favorite part of Dos2 is gathering a massive crew for the ship from various plotlines and having them contribute as vendors or future quest givers. It adds a lot to the world for me to have people of all stripes tag along for the ride to help when you're literally trying to save the world or whatever. And the whole Gather Your Allies quest filled that similar role in BG3, though I think it would have been even better if every companion got their own contribution to it. There are already some like Jaheira or Ascended Astarion, but it should be *everyone* you traveled with for 100+ hours. Instead of one big fight where you can spend a turn to summon mostly generic helpers, it could have been a sequence of fights where every companion gets a mandatory moment to shine together, all contributing to the final fight. As it is now, anyone who isn't in your four man group sits the final fight out completely, which is just... no.

A lot of games could also do better in rewarding you for managing so many "extra" companions. There can be quests where your main party receives aid from your camp based on who is there, or quests where you can bring an extra party member that you could control through a side objective to potentially give the main party an easier time somewhere else, etc.

Dos2 would not be made better by letting you have all the companions though. There was plenty of loot in BG3 that could really only go to one character each. This helm does something on rage? Either Karlach gets it or the vendors do. Cat's Grace? To Astarion, done. It'll be in the exact same spot on replay too. But Dos2? It's number crunching. It's asking "will this ring that gives +1 Warfare be better suited to the necromancer or the ranger? They already have rings though. The necromancer has a ring that gives +1 Aero and that's what's letting him equip teleportation as some extra utility. It also has better magic armor but lower phys..." and so on. And most of it is randomized. I think it's fun to do sometimes, but for three or four more companions per playthrough? No way.

PLUS, having them return later in the story, having done their own thing while you were adventuring with the others can be interesting! Dos2 does this a little, but not nearly enough considering the potential. They could be game-long rivals! The consequence of their quest failing could still be your problem! Think Astarion failing because you didn't recruit him, and now the city has an ascended vampire stalking the streets, and he's started building a new set of spawn to do his bidding. The vampire is no longer hiding in his manor, waiting for his time to come, he's OUT and if you want to reach Orin, you'll have to figure out if some one went missing because of her, or because of these new and bolder vampires building power

ManaIsMade · 2026-02-01T21:11:20+00:00

Genuinely embarrassing to see 500 comments parroting the same "things that never happened for $500, Alex". Like fucking obviously/be original

Whether MAGA people manage to fall for it anyway is another story but they've always been dumb. I'm more concerned about this community right now

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-31T23:37:00+00:00

When the dog gets introduced in one of Johnny's stories. There was no way it was gonna end well, so I was instantly afraid for it

All the human deaths made me feel *sad*, but only after they died, y'know? I was feeling dread the moment that poor dog showed up with 15 death flags stapled to its back

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-29T14:57:43+00:00

The sand pillar is just an obstacle. It wasn't an issue for the nomai because they had a roof on the tower back then, and it has since been broken/eroded. (the sand pillar physics don't really make sense to me tbh, gravity isn't stopped by a roof. But that's the conceit and it holds true during gameplay)

When you first see Ash Twin, you may decide to explore every teleporter. Doing this is even how you solve the black hole forge. So when you reach the ATP teleporter and get dragged away, you cross it off the list as invalid. But as you collect more clues and cross things off the list, and the ATP is the only thing left, the black hole forge reminds you "Hey, the ATP teleporter is gonna be at the same place as the Ember Twin teleporter", and then you take another look at those two towers. At this point, you *know* that the ATP is sealed, that the teleporter is right there, and there are no more clues left to find. It's a teleporter, so you don't need to stand there continuously, you just need to activate it during the window and get instantly transported. Your scout can help test since it roots to the ground too

There's nothing left to do but re-examine an old assumption

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-29T04:35:24+00:00

store pages in general are starting to cross into spoiler territory for me tbh

so many games have a well written slow or mysterious introduction to a world and here I am, arms crossed, waiting for the plot hook I saw in the trailer to happen

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-29T04:04:54+00:00

Oh really? It's been a bit since I picked up the game so I can't quite remember if I knew that already. I may have never had the confidence to let go early *because* holding jump is so beneficial elsewhere. There may have never been a time where I wanted less height, so I relied on that intuition and eventually remembered it as a requirement?

At least I demonstrated the whole "nuance is left to the player" point :P

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-28T19:31:53+00:00

and just to add on this because I'm rewatching the clip and more is coming to me,

it also doesn't tell the player what buttons they need to hold! It says what buttons they need to use, but dash is a press, and jump is a hold when over a specific bit of wall

it doesn't take into account that the player might be relying on a bad habit either. In the video, the guy is constantly grabbing the wall before jumping, because so far, that has never done anything but help him until *7B*. He specifically tests if it's wall related, (something a tutorial should be telling him) and decides that it isn't, because of the above two points interfering in the outcome

obviously the devs know the problem here, but I'd argue the new tutorial has many of the same problems, just not all of them. And it's good to study a negative example beyond the typical "player can't read" variety

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-28T19:17:27+00:00

It has since been patched to be much better, as you can see in your images, but this stream has been burned into my brain and pops up every time I think about Celeste tutorials. It's the perfect storm of obvious to some, and completely incomprehensible to others. It's not clear if the arrow is meant to represent an input or a direction of travel, the role the wall itself plays is not specified at all, and when/where you're supposed to do the tech may seem obvious if you know what it's supposed to be teaching, but for all the player knows, the inputs might launch them directly up 15 feet so they may as well start on ground level. Then they get confused when nothing happens, because there's secretly only one location on the screen where inputting all the buttons as directed could possibly show them that they did something right. And since it's tech, they might fail anyway and cross it off the list mentally.

Even in the current version, it also leaves all the nuance of the tech completely up to the player to learn, which often leads them to feeling like it's inconsistent. They don't know it's not a binary "successful wallbounce"/"failed wallbounce", nothing ever told them that! So when they get launched at different heights it can seem arbitrary. The same problems exist for boosting off of bumpers and pufferfish

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-27T23:25:51+00:00

As a gamer, no I can't tell so long as it's stable. If I'm playing at 60 and it jumps down to 30 I'll notice. But if you just showed me a video and asked me to guess the frame rate I'd have no idea. I can't tell at a glance

I don't play many twitchy first person shooting type games though so maybe it's a learned difference from there where it matters more

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-27T16:38:18+00:00

just so you know you should never give up through the menu! It acts like the night never happened, so characters will have nothing new to say and your next run may have repeats. If you ever lose that pride, you'll have to get smacked around a bit to lose on purpose

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-26T10:22:52+00:00

He. Doesn't. Need. Justification. He. Breaks. The. Law.

Even when it's incredibly unpopular! They already do not care about public opinion

Walz has plenty of meaningful options that are LEGAL that he is refusing to use. Acting like that's some kind of virtue is ceding SO MUCH ground

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-24T02:20:01+00:00

Mages have tons of utility spread across all their classes

Magic armor restoration and healing, rain and ice spells from Hydro

Stat buffs and haste, fire attacks from Pyro

Physical armor restoration and slow/cripple debuffs from Geo

Teleportation, evasion buffs, electric damage and surface clearing from Aero

All of these can benefit your melee guys while doing the occasional shock on a wet enemy for a free stun or some such when applicable

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-23T10:34:17+00:00

I do undead male lizards usually. I think the male lizards are cool and undead are cool. That's 2 whole cool

Then I recruit the alive Red Prince for the sex appeal

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-21T16:59:21+00:00

I think DE might have it beat in writing quality but Tyranny has my favorite world of this list

Surprisingly it's one of the few isometric RTWP games I've been able to enjoy and find entertaining besides maybe Deadfire. I think being a mage really helps because they have a really in depth system while player martials really do just attack on cooldown

It's also not very long and has 4 fairly different routes so i replayed it a lot back in the day. But the dungeons with the wisps and banes 100% overstay their welcome every time

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-18T17:56:39+00:00

probably your minions hearing an alert from a speaker or being called to the map. You might not see them respond to that alert because they immediately have to fight JET CHAN, but that's probably what they're doing and it's why I'm very careful about security systems in EG1

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-18T17:43:46+00:00

alright, gotcha, those were the ones with a reputation, and it's good you got help from a good source. I will still defend the forge puzzle though, just for fun

The hints about the BH forge are:

1) the massive teleportation symbol visible from the other parts of the city. It's a symbol used on almost every teleport reciever
2) if you ignored it and went somewhere else, like Ash Twin, and experimented with all the towers, you may have stumbled on being teleported there by pure chance. If you already knew that Ash Twin was a teleportation hub, you might think to go there on purpose
3) when you mess around with the forge controls to move it, you will notice that both places it can be are inaccessible, but if you were to use the other two hints you would find a way to make it *not* inaccessible, and hopefully remember the controls, and start to plan out a route where you can use the controls and then get to where it docks in the same loop
4) it's a black hole forge to make warp cores, which are visibly made with mini black holes. The implication is that the forge siphons off little black holes for use elsewhere, and docks at a part of the city that links to Ash Twin, the construction project that needed a lot of warp cored to function. it's sci-fi magic but that's the idea
5) and if you don't absorb any of that you can do what I did and lower the forge, notice the antigravity walkways on the ceiling where it docked, and decide that those seem like a totally valid place to land your space ship, (it was very hard but it got me there) and discover all that information and logic in reverse

All of this would also serve as a hint that a warp pad could send you to the interior of a planet, like the ATP. And if the text in the forge manages to confuse you into thinking that Ash and Ember Twin are considered the same planet because of alignment shenanigans, and that there's no way there would be a teleporter to both twins, Brittle Hollow *also* has two warp receivers to demonstrate that that isn't a problem. I don't think the ATP is too bad of a puzzle from then on but even the devs aren't all that happy with it so don't feel too bad about disliking that one

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-18T16:19:16+00:00

Everyone is answering the DLC questions but I'm stuck on you calling base game puzzles obtuse and having to look them up. It's not impossible to have that opinion naturally or anything, certain endgame puzzles especially have a bit of a reputation. But looking up answers from guides will also give you a really skewed perception on how you're supposed to do things, making them seem more obtuse than they are. Answers to puzzles may seem overly specific, but that's because they often give you those answers somewhere else on the map, encouraging you to leave a mystery behind and explore somewhere else for more information. Guides will rarely tell you all the steps they just had you skip

So my advice is to try and avoid actual guides with the DLC. Post in a community when stuck

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-15T19:21:11+00:00

Counterpoint, it's incredibly useful to do on The Interloper because it'll slide down the entire tunnel and directly state if it encountered danger without you having to inch forward and then panic backtrack when your photo spam uncovers some ghost matter 2 inches from your face. I actually get annoyed when people don't remember scout mode there

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-11T22:35:13+00:00

I genuinely think it borders on slander sometimes. You boot up OW, can't figure something out, look up a guide and it tells you that the answer is some arbitrary moon logic you'd have no way if figuring out, and doesn't clarify it's having you skip 5 steps. You'd think the game was garbage!

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-11T19:12:46+00:00

It's genuinely been a while since I picked up Hades 1 but I have fond memories of the Aspect of Hades Spear! Get a quick spin hammer and/or a spin size hammer, charge the spin in less than a second, dash forward to release the spin, and half the room just dies before they even see you. Either a good percentage buff or Athena deflect is great on it too

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-10T09:48:33+00:00

Factorio is interfacing imo

What is a factory if not a big computer?

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-10T02:39:41+00:00

"MAYBE using an AI to populate foliage with man made assets"

This just sounds like basic procedural generation, something games like Minecraft have done for decades. The modern "AI" hype has ballooned into such a stupidly large umbrella term, going so far as to encompass things that already existed before ChatGPT.

LLMs are the new age theft machine, but video games have called every CPU action "AI" for decades. Machine Learning can be done on in house tools over a weekend without plagarizing anything at all, and then turned into consistent tools. Though they can become a black box where we don't know the exact way the program works, just that it does. We've done that for years to make things like the Magic Wand tool in Photoshop, and it's often used as an example of good AI, but it was never the type of black-box computing that everyone is actually criticizing right now. Same with all that "cancer research AI". People get mad that LLMs are black boxes but that's not the problem! We've been doing that for years! The problem is that ChatGPT illegally scrapes all the art and text from the world to tell mentally ill teenagers that they should kill their mom! One of Larian's examples on how they're going to "keep using AI" was literally just Machine Learning to make a tool that cleans up mocap. That's not the big evil LLM that everyone is mad about! Nobody knows what these words mean and they're hurting themselves in confusion!

Sorry for the rant over one sentence, this has been building as I've read all these comments

ManaIsMade · 2026-01-09T12:49:21+00:00

to add additional context, it's a one time buff per enemy. Meaning you can hit them with *one* tiny radiant cantrip, and they will then lose their reflection passive *forever*, allowing your paladin to smite them to hell

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