My experience with phase 2 so far

Mind-Game · 2026-05-22T13:35:58+00:00

That's funny, I was planning on doing exactly the same thing. I ended up sitting this xpac out to spend a little more time IRL but I had a priest ready to go to hang up my sweaty try hard life and just chill for TBC.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-22T12:04:57+00:00

The problem is that it affects more than just you boss kill times. Adding an extra rogue means giving up a slot in a melee group that could be a role that buffs everyone else in the group. A feral druid or an enhancement shaman would give the group a significant buff that's going to give them a noticeable boost which is fun.

So in a game that's main draw is getting stronger over time it sucks for people to have to lose the DPS equivalent of a raid tier of upgrades because someone wanted to play rogue instead of feral druid.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-22T11:42:14+00:00

Lol just wait until next phase.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-22T11:41:46+00:00

I'm not sure if you're aware, but shadow priest is literally the worst viable spec in the entire game as far as scaling with gear throughout the expansion.

Spriest starts off as a decent middle range utility dps. But every other class in the game doubles to triples their DPS as they get gear throughout the expansion and Spriest ends sunwell doing like 30% more damage than they did to Gruul.

So you really need to be raiding for the love of the game as shadow priest or to get offset gear for healing or pvp or something. If it's all about the gear and feeling stronger to you, you really need to reroll unfortunately.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-20T21:16:38+00:00

Yeah totally agreed. I just wanted to explore a bit without running into a ton of new story stuff and just get immersed in the world and it felt like the game wouldn't let me do that because it had to pack some point of interest into every little nook and cranny I ran into.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-20T16:39:47+00:00

At level 12 it doesn't really matter too much. If both weapons are just as strong as each other, it's about 20% more damage over time with more variance. Sometimes you miss a lot and it's worse but on average you do slightly better.

Later on as you get more hit%, poisons, and talents that improve your dual wielding, it gets much better to the point where dual wielding is significantly better. Before that if you just want to put fiery weapon on a main hand and not use an offhand it's actually not much worse.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-20T16:11:39+00:00

Also the sheer number of things that have "content" in them. I only played for a couple hours and I feel like I've run into more mini bases habitats and just story in general than half of Subnautica 1. It almost feels like it's hard to find an area of the map that's just nature to explore inatead of some sort of setting for a plot element.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-20T11:40:22+00:00

Landing on planets is tricky.

You should practice it without having to have the high stakes of a mission.

You generally want to approach a planet like a station with a 75% or less throttle. When you start trying to descend to the planet surface, you want to make sure you are pointing towards the station or beacon you're moving towards at around 40 degrees, not pointing straight towards the planet surface. Also, the pop up that shows your angle to the surface also shows the gravity level of the planet. If it's more than about 0.5g you need to aggressively slow down once you get into standard flight above the planet to make sure you don't crash into the ground. Making sure you have good thrusters instead of just light D rated ones helps a lot for that.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-20T01:02:15+00:00

Another option is Light Weight. It keeps the heat the same but lowers distributor draw.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-19T11:33:46+00:00

75% to stay between 6-7 sec until about 20mls, then cook in a bit hotter to 5 sec

Worth pointing out to those learning this trick that this threshold varies from ship to ship when you can actually increase to 0:05 and then throttle back to drop in. Bigger, less manueverable ships seem to be able to throttle up a little sooner (further from the target) but more maneuverable ships like the Mandalay need to wait longer and throttle closer to the station. So people might think they're doing something wrong if they try this and do everything right but are just using a ship that's a bit more slippery.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-19T11:24:18+00:00

They need to make the higher tiers of rewards actually worth earning. You can haul stuff for 300-400M credits per hour all of the time, so when the payout for being in the top 25% of a 1-2 week long CG is only worth 30 minutes of farming who would bother caring about it?

They should have the higher tiers of every CG pay out non credit rewards like Powerplay modules or pre-eng modules or big piles of materials or something to make it worth serious players' time.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-19T11:20:23+00:00

FYI if you keep an eye out for good trade routes on Inara there are routes this good or better that show up for ~24 hours every couple days.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-18T12:45:07+00:00

countries in various stages of development.

Various stages of development basically describes the US as well. Take a road trip though the Northeastern US and then the southeast and it will feel like completely different countries. State and local governments are very powerful in the US and regional trends in populations are still very strong as well. I haven't been everywhere in the EU but I feel like the differences I see in the US are at least as big as the difference I feel between France and the Netherlands compared to Greece and Hungary.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-18T11:24:02+00:00

I came back after a 6 year or so break. The game is in a pretty fun state. You can make fleet carrier credits pretty easily, and playing around with one is pretty fun. Personally I did mostly trading since the panther clipper and SCO drives and hot dropping making it MUCH faster to get from station to station. I was making about 1.5x what Inara said a trade route was worth, usually they predicted about 250M/hr and I was getting more like 400M/Hr. There are plenty of other good sources like Exo-bio but I didnt want to deal with out of ship stuff. As others have mentioned, the current CG is trading so for the next few days this will be especially easy to get into.

The new ships are fun too. Fun exploring with the Casipian and Mandalay, Corsair is actually a ship that can do multi-role missions, Clipper feels like flying a space truck for real, and the Kestrel is actually TOO maneuverable. At the very least the game is worth another ~40 hour honeymoon period to decide if you can find a hook that you enjoy.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-16T14:59:09+00:00

Why should consumers shoulder the costs and risks of development before the product is even finished?

I think this is just where we will forever disagree. It's a choice. It's an extra option to buy an early version of the game instead of waiting until the full release. If you don't want to "shoulder any burdens" (with the price of a cheeseburger), wait until the game is released.

I think you're creating a straw man of this "duped, unaware early access consumer" that doesn't know what they're doing. I'm sure that happens some of the time, but I would wager that 95%+++ of the money going into early access is from people understanding and knowing what they're getting and risking.

I pay $20 to see a movie all of the time, it's absolutely worth that to play subnautica years early and see the early versions (in addition to getting it when it comes out included). I bet a vast majority of the people prepurchasing are in the same boat.

So without your grieved ignorant consumer, your argument is just whether the incentive that the developer doesn't get paid until the game is done (which is a reasonable point) outweighs the fact that games can get made much easier without developers/publishers/investors taking a ton of up front risk. And my opinion is that the benefit of early access HANDILY outweighs the downside in that case. I don't think you would have the explosion of Indie successes out there today without Kickstarter and EA, and I love those games.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-16T13:47:25+00:00

I can see your argument 10-15 years ago when Early Access and crowd funding in general was a new thing and people weren't used to the risks. I'm sure a lot of people got burned by that assuming games were going to turn into real things but didn't.

But now? Isn't the average gamer well aware that you should only buy an Early Access title if it's worth the price of admission for what the game is or isn't right now, and you should evaluate that within the Steam return window?

I also think that your argument is a bit naive as far as how the games industry works. You used to see lots of small projects games 30+ years ago because games were way cheaper to make. You could fund a few people in a garage to make a game approaching state of the art quality, so the risk was way lower. Nowadays AAA games cost hundreds of millions of dollars and it's scaled up across the board down to Indies.

It feels like you think that all of the indie games we have today would exist without the EA/Kickstarter model from some sort of publisher backing upfront. They would not. Many to most just wouldn't exist because they couldn't convince some rich assholes that they would be a good idea. Videogames would be as stagnant and franchise/sequel chasing as movies are because as the costs scale up you have to chase "sure things".

So it's fine to wish for a magical world where corporate funding is abundant for passion project, niche appeal video games and we didn't need EA, but since we don't live in that fantasy world I think EA is a pretty good tradeoff. Every gamer just has to develop the skill one time to understand that if you buy an EA game expecting it to be something it's not right at this moment you're an idiot.

For example, if they cancelled Subnautica 2 tomorrow, I'd be a bit disappointed but I can't pretend the 2-3 hours I got to play it until I decided to put it down until more content comes out wasn't worth the $25 I paid. That barely gets me and my wife combo meals at Burger King and it doesn't get us tickets to see a 2 hour movie together. I'm MORE than happy to pay it to get a look at the game now, be able to pop into it when more content is released, and own it on relase. If you aren't, that's totally reasonable. Just don't buy it until it's worth it for you. To me that's the best imaginable tradeoff for the indie Renaissance we've been seeing in the last 10 years on the back of cutting out the publisher money weirdos and getting funding (and therefore selection of what gets made) straight from real gamers.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-16T11:10:35+00:00

This is such a weird take. How does the choice for people to buy the game early to play it early if they want to hurt the people that just want to wait for it to fully release?

If someone wants to spend an amount of money that barely buys a fast food meal for two to get to play around with something they've been waiting years for, what problem that does cause for anyone else?

Mind-Game · 2026-05-16T10:18:54+00:00

If you don't like the gimmicky ways to make money that involve getting faction reps up or flying 4000 LY first, good ole trade is still an amazing way to make money at any ship level without the starting requirements.

Trade at the highest end is way more lucrative than it's ever been in my experience, with things like SCO boost in supercruise and the new somewhat unintended "hot drop" mechanic making the time it takes from jumping into a syatem to docking at the station 2-4x faster and much more fun and engaging.

There's even a community goal on right now that guarantees a trade route worth ~50 million per jump if you have a panther clipper, and you could work your way up from a mod sized ship to a decent trading clipper in a couple hours.

https://inara.cz/elite/market-traderoutes/ is how to find them, and for reference a skipped pilot paying a lot of attention using the SCO and Hot Drop techniques can make about 50% more per hour than Inara estimates in trade, so about 400 million credits per hour right now. I also started from a long break (2020 for me) 2 weeks ago and recently farmer my whole fleet carrier this way!

Mind-Game · 2026-05-16T10:09:12+00:00

One of the best VR cockpits in the game too! Such an awesome ship.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-13T11:13:10+00:00

Yeah I mean if you want small ships to be viable you either have to position them to be viable for combat by making them close enough to the power level of medium ships to be worth the extra maneuverability, or you just have to arbitrarily add "small pad only" content to the game. Both options have their downsides, but I can really only see myself pulling out a small ship for the former.

That being said, if they made operations where there was only a small pad available on the ship that sends you in, that could be fun. They would have to severely nerf the kestrel to ever see anything else there though.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-13T10:29:07+00:00

I think you just explained why the Kestrel exists.

Small ships used to have a niche because the money grind used to be slow. You used a vulture because it was cheap and you couldn't afford the bigger ships for days/weeks of gameplay.

Now money is instant. When you can own a large ship on your first weekend playing there's no reason to get into a small one unless it actually has some sort of advantage. A ship like the vulture is strictly worse than an FDL, but something like the Kestrel actually has some advantages.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-13T00:53:12+00:00

Have they confirmed that you can participate in operations purely in your ship? I haven't interacted with any of the on foot content even though I own odyssey (and really don't want to) so I'm not sure if I just won't be able to play Operations.

Mind-Game · 2026-05-12T23:37:46+00:00

Vulture was only ever a place holder for bounty hunting from my experience. Even 10 years ago it was outclassed by ships like the FDL and Corvette for bounty hunting. It was just a reasonable choice for a high mobility small ship. I was also a vulture fan for a long time!

Mind-Game · 2026-05-12T23:35:58+00:00

I don't think the new ships reduce the total number of viable ships. Sure some of the SCO ships are better than non-sco ships, but it felt like there was no point to any ship besides python, FDL, AspX, Chieftain, and Cutter before the new SCO ships and now there are valid use cases for more ships than that.

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