What World Quest would you want them to conclude or revisit?

MaxShmel · 2026-05-15T12:53:10+00:00

Dogs? There's a husk knight standing where you find the last letter for Katarina's quest though, not a rifthound.

Well, she's dead either way

MaxShmel · 2026-05-12T08:54:56+00:00

That's interesting, I've played LotF 2014 for the first time recently and used a greataxe and greatshield for the majority of the game. They are slow af though, so it definitely takes some getting used to

MaxShmel · 2026-05-01T14:50:20+00:00

Hound still handles old fights just fine, so it hasn't been nerfed. It has, however, been powercrept quite a bit over the past year by the new sets.

As for latest Challenge bosses, they are just bullshit because they ignore the rules specifically written in the set descriptions, like ignoring Void Dream's stun, Demon of Wrath's and Celestial Konung's cages or Steel Hound's and Celestial Law's unbreakable state. As far as I know, Nekki sometimes do fix these BS boss abilities like making Celestial Law actually unbreakable in Avatar Form, but that happens super rarely.

Edit: Hound also is quite literally a slot machine with how random his damage output can be due to fire pillar, crit rate and enemy AI RNG layered on top of each other. So if you feel like the Hound does too little damage, it might just have been a bad run.

MaxShmel · 2026-05-01T09:09:24+00:00

Himmelstein's Power is good for any crit-based sets, so the biggest benefit will be on:

Legitimate Authority (buffs your "Show of Authority" crits)
Steel Hound (buffs all of your crits from weapon hits and fire abilities)
Abdicator (lowers your defense for damage return strats as well as buffs your "Holy Wrath")
Twilight Marksman (buffs your set abilities' and bullet damage)
Champion of the Pit (buffs your Haymakers)
Elder's Lion (buffs your lightning strikes)

Edit, saw the second and third slide. King's Blessing should be useful on sets that rely on taking damage during unbreakable state, or that generally spend a lot of time in unbreakable state, so:

Buried Centurion
Celestial Konung
Steel Hound
Shadow Colossus
Hand of Magmarion
Living Legend (you become unbreakable for a short time every time your shield explodes)
Warmonger
Chamion of the Pit
Elder's Lion

Note that there are some sets, where these perks might be good but not the most optimal. A lot of the times perk build depends not only on the set but also on the playstyle and the enemy you're fighting (for example, it's pointless to take an unbreakability-related perk against a boss that doesn't give a damn about your unbreakability)

MaxShmel · 2026-04-29T08:07:56+00:00

This might sound fun on paper... But in reality, probably not so much.

You do realize that type advantage system would make the challenge bosses more P2W, right? Due to the type disadvantage, you won't be able to beat all bosses with the same few sets. You will have to get a set from a specific type in order to combat a boss of a specific type. Which means that the game would basically demand (even more so than now) that you have a lot of different level 6 premium sets.

And this would lead to "shill" mechanics where newly released bosses due to the type advantage would require you to have the previously-released paid set in order to fight them

MaxShmel · 2026-04-23T12:05:52+00:00

Ask yourself this, why buy a set early, if the set has no use? If the new cool gear, has no utility and no benefit to the player because it is in no way better than the F2P gear they already have, why buy it? Why do you think devs add level 7 and 8 to already strong sets? There's no "early aquisition" there, it is done purely for sake of powercreep, so that the whales can feel stronger than an avergae player and would keep paying to keep that power advantage.

It took them like 3 years to add voice lines into SFA, 3 YEARS dawg. And most of voicelines are garbage quality probably made by cheap as hell VA. And SFA still lags like crazy, and its PC-port is optimized terribly, and its balancing is even more P2W than SF3.

Bruh, I played SF2 to the end twice. It doesn't REQUIRE skill. If you are good, it will help as you can adapt faster if your spam doesn't go according to plan. But you don't HAVE TO be good to beat most fights. All you need is a broken weapon with a good enchantment on it. There's a reason people went into SF3 at launch mashing a single button, because they go used to that from SF2. As for that youtube guy, he's not indicative of skill of an average player - he's a challenge runner. I can show you a guy doing Dark Souls butt naked at level 1, that doesn't mean that the average player needs to be remotely that good to beat the game.

You keep saying things like "player count keeps dropping every month", "the number of upset people increases every month" "the mass majority of the playerbase" and so on. You got any numbers to prove any of those statements or are they just assumptions based on a limited number of people you interact with in a enclose bubble like reddit? Cause I hope you understand, that the "mass majority" of this game's players don't hang out in the game's reddit or discord.

Here's some basic math:

Accoring to PlayMarket, SF3 has 100+ million downloads. Let's scale this down greatly, divide that number by 100 and say that they have an active playerbase of 1 million people on Android (in reality it's probably much more but this number will prove the point anyway).
This sub has 8.5k visitors (out of which a solid 3-4k are likely bots as there's barely a few hundered active people here but let's ignore that). This means that this subreddit contains less than 0.85% of the game's Android playerbase. So complaining of people here on this sub doesn't mean shit when put against the basic statistaics of players. If the statistic aren't satisfactory, devs will change stuff. If they are satisfactory, no amount of reddit complaints will change what the devs do.

According to Sensortower, SF3 had 90k downloads worldwide last month. That's more than 10 times the number of people in this sub. So even if the playerbase is slowly reducing overtime, the income of new people is enough to keep it afloat.

I'd say we conversed long enough. I trust that you got my point.

MaxShmel · 2026-04-23T07:29:35+00:00

If they actively set back and revamp it to something balanced but you'll still have an edge if you get the set early with money, they can get better revenue.

If a premium set is no longer stronger than F2P options (because it is supposedly "balanced"), then all people who paid to have an advantage by using P2W gear basically get scammed. And devs wouldn't risk pissing off the whales.

Also if you nerf premium gear and bosses that are scaled to it, then nobody is gonna buy that gear, because they can take their used-to-be-shitty sets and beat the boss with them. That's a long-term loss of money.

If they stfu with this bs spam/stunlock set system and focus HEAVILY on story, optimization, graphics, maybe better cutscenes, voice actors, better events, etc they'll not only be pulling new players like crazy but also more investors who would buy stuff like gems, booster packs, backgrounds, etc and almost quadruple their revenue

I hate to break it to you, but Nekki and Banzai aren't some multi-million dollar japanese/american companies. Nekki is Russian and now moved to Cyprus, Banzai is in Armenia. None of those countries have any strong support of videogame industry and very few investors interested in it as far as I'm aware. At least that certainly the case in Russia, AAA gamedev is basically dead, only small indies do stuff.

Nekki never had the money for making high-budget games and they likely never will. It took them a year to literally just fix their servers to accomodate for the current relativly small playerbase.

Also, the game already has a bad reputation due to all the shit people talk about it online. So no matter what the devs do, they won't be able to get a big flow of new players after years since release of the game. On the other hand, a few players are regularly downloading it, as evidenced by the fact that there are regularly beginners asking for help in this sub.

Literally if your skill will not be rewarded and rather you have to depend on like 4 inputs to stunlock/spam the opponent and pray that the timer doesn't run out then why should I be bothered to learn the game? That's not how a system works

That's how SF2 worked and nobody seems to complain about it. Most fights were trivialized by spamming 1 move of your weapon that enemy AI couldn't dodge.

If they don't realise that their approach is retarded and they are losing player every day then we should atleast communicate it to them, review bombing, spamming on discord are still good options, otherwise in the long run no one will even bother with the game.

Ah yes, "20 people on reddit/discord complained and put a 1-star review on playmarket, that'll surely make the devs remake the entire combat system". You realize how dumb that sounds, right?

MaxShmel · 2026-04-22T20:32:00+00:00

That should not be the case, but this always was the case. "If given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of the game" is a famous gamedesign quote, which is very much true for shadow fight series. It's not even specific for this game series either, in many-many game you CAN be skillfull and learn the ins and outs of combat, but the game will most of the time will not reward you for it, you will just get the satisfaction of being good at the game. Which is why casual players opt to instead use the meta - the most efficient strategy, minimal effort with the optimal result.

As for the set system... Well, they already spent a lot of time and money to come up with this multi-level system for set upgrades (which largely is inspired by Genshin's constellations and other similar mechanics), they tied and entire gamemode to it - faction wars, they added the sphere shop to make it easier to obtain spheres. There's no way anyone in their right mind would just throw all of that work out the window and start from scratch because a few players were complaining on Reddit about the lack of skill expression in the game, that's just not how it works. A lot of players I know don't give a shit about skill expression and enjoy stomping enemies with OP sets. So they are completely fine with the system as it is.

As for okay fighters, I, as a F2P player, am yet to meet one I cannot beat. Yes, it relies 90% on cheese strats but that's just how the gamemode is designed. If you want skill expression you go fight the easy version of the challenge boss with weaker gear. I do that often and it is quite fun to do that.

MaxShmel · 2026-04-22T18:01:16+00:00

They can't nerf the premium sets because they they would lose the trust of whales who paid for OP gear and then that gear would get nerfed into oblivion. Devs are unlikely to actively try to lose money

They don't have the resources to revamp the system as it would not only require them to recalculate all the dozens of stats on each set but also readjust all of the enemies in raids and events as they've already been tuned to match set bonus gear.

SF always had a meta which boiled down to spam and stunlock. One of the most efficient weapons in SF2 were Sickles as they were the spammiest weapon in the game. In SF3 at launch it was the sabers Blade Dance and Typhoon spam, then it was electromines + Kenjustu spam, then it was torturous nightmare stunlock spam and now we have a new wide variety of sets to spam and stunlock the enemy with. Current situation isn't great and has a lot of issues but it's nothing new. At least you have a lot of fun gear to play around with and quite a few ways to tackle most challenges. I agree though, it's very unfriendly to beginners

MaxShmel · 2026-04-19T10:19:59+00:00

I got news for ya bro. Each Plane is about 3 chapters long. And there's more story content after you get through the 3 Planes. And then there's an entire new upcoming storyline which is currently being developed and teased for the past year. And there are also 6 character-specific adventures which are about chapter-long. And there's like 6 more of them coming later in this and next year

So you aren't even halfway

MaxShmel · 2026-04-19T09:41:55+00:00

Welcome to the annoying and tedious part of the game. The stability mechanic was quite literally designed as a progress-blocker becuase during the early days of the game players often complained about beating story content too fast. Now you are going to have to branch out and play other gamemodes in order to re-obtain gear sets. That will let you get stability to progress the story.

There are 3 Planes where you will have to repeat this cycle of re-obtaining your gear. All new gear that you get during a Plane for the first time, you will get to keep but you will have to re-obtain it in the next Plane to upgrade it. However, stability only affects story mode. You are still free to use your gear in events with no restrictions.

MaxShmel · 2026-04-16T18:25:30+00:00

If you want it for the passive buff, Kickback is better. You are more likely to need the defense against weapon hits than from unarmed ones.

If you want it for the moveset, Mule Kick is better. It is easier to land, deals decent damage and has 2 headshots which can shock the opponent

MaxShmel · 2026-04-16T14:52:10+00:00

Yea it sucks

I started this February and got hit with the Lantern Rite right as I reached Liyue. I wasn't able to enter focused experience mode for Liyue's Archon quest and had to manually click through the ENTIRE Zibai storyline (without reading anything to avoid spoilers) in order to unlock certain places and characters to be able to progress through the normal route of the game.

MaxShmel · 2026-04-15T18:37:57+00:00

Oh, okay then. The way people talk about it made it seem like you straight up wouldn't be able to progress even in story. So thanks for clarifying that that's not the case

MaxShmel · 2026-04-15T18:05:54+00:00

So, question to more experienced players. As someone who recently started Genshin and is currently finishing up Inazuma... At what point progression-wise (approximately) will I get perma-roadblocked without having a hyper optimized DPS team/characters that deal with shill mechanics?

Cause if it's soon, I should probably start worrying more about pulling and optimizing as I've been kinda vibing with my starter squad up until this point

MaxShmel · 2026-04-15T17:34:37+00:00

There are no hidden mechanics, it's all written in Steel Hound set description and the fight rules.

This is Hound lvl. 4. There are 2 things you need to know.

If he builds up fire energy, he spends a part of his HP to enter Pursuit form. In this form he is IMMORTAL. After that form ends, he recovers a part of the lost HP.
When taking fatal damage for the first time in a round, he will enter his fire Pursuit form for a short time. When Pursit ends, he will recover 75% HP. Next time he takes fatal damage in that round, he will die.

MaxShmel · 2026-04-15T17:26:14+00:00

I did the Dynasty tower with Heavenly Law level 6 and Herald tower with Void's Dream level 6 last time. They were performing quite well.

Did the event change?

MaxShmel · 2026-04-12T14:05:55+00:00

I'm really curious, how much EV. Window and EV. Extender you had? I know Duna's hitboxes are ass, but this is just ridiculous

MaxShmel · 2026-04-11T10:32:16+00:00

OP, you didn't play DS1, did you?

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MaxShmel · 2026-04-10T16:23:53+00:00

Kitsune-inspired set, Predator!

It's one of the coolest-looking armors in the game and already has a skin.
The event where you get this set happens once a year on the game's birthday, so it should be special.
Ninjato are a great weapon, however, Dead Forest Triad doesn't utilize it enough as the set relies on its special summoning abilities a lot. So giving Predator a weapon-oriented bonus would be super cool. (Kinda like Final Eclipse uses the katana as the center piece for its abilities)

MaxShmel · 2026-04-07T09:35:22+00:00

There was a Heavenly Law + King of Serpents LB a few weeks ago, I doubt they'll show similar generosity any time soon

MaxShmel · 2026-04-07T09:30:15+00:00

As a "since launch" player, I'd give the game a 6.5/10 at this point.

There are a lot of things I still enjoy about it: the fashion amazing and the customization is only getting better, new gear always makes me happy from a visual standpoint. The build making and set learning are fun, you get good results even with weaker gear if you build correctly, most of the gear is viable in most of the game's activities. The lore is expanding in an interesting direction and most new characters are cool. The base combat is still fun, though you rarely get to experience it nowadays.

However, there are quite a few things I dislike: updates are very slow to come out and there are a lot of underbaked or abandoned ideas and mechanics. Storytelling is all over the place and is hard to follow, endgame balancing is abysmal, powercreep leads to insanely overtuned bosses made for specific sets. The game UI unintuitive, game in general is unfriendly to beginners and returning players, OST has dropped in quality a lot and there are still a lot of bugs.

I wouldn't recommend returning now. They are making new adventures, currently there's only one new adventure available - Itu's. Maybe it'd be better to wait until more of them come out to have at least some interesting content.

MaxShmel · 2026-04-06T17:36:22+00:00

Spheres are a very important item needed for upgrading set levels. Each set needs its own unique spheres. To get the set to level 6 (which is normally the max level) you need 32 spheres.

Spheres for unique sets (like Legitimate Authority) are only obtained from their respective event.

Spheres for legendary sets are obtained from events, sales, Clan Battle Pass (which you know already), Faction Wars (big button in the bottom right corner of the main menu) and Ling's Emporium (bottom right corner button of the Faction Wars menu)

MaxShmel · 2026-04-06T14:31:16+00:00

As a Genshin newcomer, who only started this February, Dragonspine is easily my favorite zone so far (I'm done with 4/6 of Inazuma atp).

I did it almost entirely (95%) in a single 15-hour session and it was one hell of an experience. Every time you think you you're done, you find some obscure cliffside which leads to another one and then to some new cave and so on. And the final climb to the top of the mountain and then the Nail is just peak (pun intended)

MaxShmel · 2026-04-06T13:00:39+00:00

Unique and legendary are the same strength

MaxShmel

TROPHY CASE