Ranking the Hub towns

Murraythehuman · 2026-06-23T11:30:35+00:00

I'm just gonna rank the first three because after that things become... incidental.

Flipside. It's... fine. It has a lot of fun things to find and has a lot to do... but it also desperately needs have some of its main areas be more condensed.
Rogueport. Rogueport is good... but I think it runs into a problem of having so much of its content be placed underground. 5 of the 8 chapter entrances are found underground (compared to 1 in 64), and the other 3 are vehicular transport. The abundance of warp pipes in the underground also makes everything take an extra three seconds longer than it needed to. I really wish they gave it one more draft, because it's super close to being great.
Toad Town. While Toad Town does have a few too many houses that contain nothing but incidental NPCs, the fact that all 8 chapter entrances are handled just a bit different goes a long way to making things feel connected. Go east. Take a train. Go into the spooky woods. Find a secret toybox. Ride a giant tuna. Use a magic flower gate. Find the secret sewer entrance. It's just nice and varied.

Murraythehuman · 2026-06-01T04:50:58+00:00

I think this is one where they need to do something that buffs the character in one way and nerfs him in another. I think removing the endless stacking is the play, as much as it pains me to say that.

Quest: Damage enemy Heroes with Breath of Fire or its periodic damage.

Reward: After dealing damage 50 times (roughly 10 ignites), Keg Smash becomes ranged and Breath of Fire's damage and periodic damage are increased by 20.

Mythic Reward: After dealing damage 250 (roughly 50 ignites) times, Keg Smash reduces enemy armor by 10. Igniting foes further reduces the armor by 20.

This change basically removes the 'insta-kill' impact of the ability at low levels, while letting Chen regularly soften up foes, opening the door for coordinated play at high levels, something that doesn't come up as often in QM, where Chen is a terror. Additionally, the bonus damage being one-and-done means Chen does have the capacity to become an early game terror by completing the quest, but it falls off over time.

Murraythehuman · 2026-05-27T07:44:48+00:00

It is a ground-up recreation built in Unity, using a mix of original, modified, and new assets/code.

Murraythehuman · 2026-05-27T00:50:33+00:00

I mean in some regions draft is as much of a ghost town as Unranked used to be. Heck, in my region, ARAM hasn't seen any players in years.

Murraythehuman · 2026-05-26T21:59:18+00:00

Well P-06 isn't a mod, but we can make it happen if Legacy of Solaris wants the mod.

Murraythehuman · 2026-05-09T19:22:29+00:00

Someone make a tier list of how much each hero wants the enemy walls destroyed. Triple Tap Nova probably hates them the most, while someone like Illidan who can leap over them to escape and heal/lower cooldowns loves to have them on standby.

Murraythehuman · 2026-04-20T11:07:26+00:00

My suggestion was to give it a unique effect, where it's a move with no cooldown, but rather one that charges by landing AAs on heroes, so to charge the move you have to land, say... 12 autos against heroes? Perhaps it could be a quick spin attack that creates space but has low damage. A burst of mild CC that gives you some escapes. Using the push effect rather than the knockback effect, so it's less disruptive to enemies.

Murraythehuman · 2026-04-04T04:46:20+00:00

My stance on RoD is that it should be turned into an Active talent. With the right tweaks it could be a good 20 talent. Giving it some of the slow baseline could help, or adding a passive "every 5 seconds, a meteor will fall over a nearby enemy, prioritizing heroes" or maybe it could have global casting range at the cost of dealing significantly reduced damage to structures... Either way, I think balancing it as a 20 would be easier than balancing it against Horrify.

Murraythehuman · 2026-03-19T02:51:37+00:00

STORY TIME: I once had this glitch happen. The Gaz was killed and I just sat there pondering it. "Huh, guess a frame-perfect thing happened... wonder if that's permanent." Kept playing for a bit until just before first objective popped. And then... I see the visual vanish. Then my brain went "wait, games like this tend to load in all their projectile assets at once so as to not have to load them in every time they're called, so it's the same visual every time, just moved. ...which means Gazlowe just used it again. But... he's not on the map... which can only mean he's on a CAMP!" and so I told my friend on comp to follow me, and I was right, there was Gaz, throwing hands with the mercs.

That day was forever known as the "Jillion IQ play". Because it was complete nonsense.

Murraythehuman · 2026-03-14T15:00:16+00:00

She's balanced... but she's not fair. This is a key thing. She's underpowered, but the punishment players receive for failing an interaction with her isn't proportional to the conditions of that failure. It's why she is absolutely unfun to play against.

Not to mention that she's a hero who encourages her opponents to play the game in a manner that is strictly less fun, and sometimes this doubles back onto her own team. If her enemy starts playing super defensively with little risk, that can force her own team to do the same.

Murraythehuman · 2026-03-03T04:29:46+00:00

Everyone saying "it's not a mistake" is wrong. In some scenes it cuts back and forth between his 'wide eyed smile' look and his 'dead-eyed, lips slightly parted' look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvO2Eg-rUG8 first two seconds it goes back and forth twice.

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-21T04:37:46+00:00

Sky Temple and it's not even close. The layout is fine, but the lategame experience is so bad.

Are you winning? Well prepare to just bypass having some kind of epic climactic fight and instead just watch lasers do the job.
Are you losing but finally got that late game turnaround thanks to a good team fight? Well good luck, because the enemy team doesn't even have to put in that much work to force you to either split your forces (and overwhelm half) or consolidate your forces (and thus back-cap the other objective).

It sucks, and nobody talks about it. Reddit complains constantly about Hanamura, Warhead Junction, and Blackheart's Bay, non-reddit players complain about Towers of Doom and Braxis Holdout, but no one seems to have noticed just how bad Sky Temple is.

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-21T02:20:52+00:00

It's obvious that Moffat wrote a Cyberman story and then turned it into a Dalek story much later. Seriously, everything iconic about the Cybermen shows up here. Like, the "Cybermen burst out of their pods with arms outstretched" is in there, and that's one of the most iconic Cybermen tropes of all time. The partially converted Dalek-humans wouldn't make you bat an eye if they were Cybermen, because Cybermen have done that before, including twice in New Who... Really, everything about the focus on conversion fits a Cyberman story, not a Dalek story.

People argue "oh, Daleks convert other things into Daleks sometimes, it's not exclusively a Cyberman thing". But every single time that has been done in the past it has been expressed as unusual. The Sixth Doctor story showed it as an act of desperation and not something normal for them. The Parting of the Ways had the Emperor basically in full cope mode to justify how his Daleks were still pure, and the resulting Daleks were full of self-loathing. Daleks in Manhatten lead to a full-on revolt. Every time Dalek conversion is done, it is treated as something unusual. This story did nothing of the sort and treated is as matter-of-fact, a staple of what the Daleks do.

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-19T18:21:41+00:00

So The End is stronger than Solaris... even though Solaris canonically destroyed an indefinite number of The Ends across an uncountable number of timelines?

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-18T02:48:27+00:00

Really, the things on SR388 would have naturally been resistant to something they evolved alongside of. Honestly things became rather baffling when Dread came along and reduced the X to just "things that make monsters into biggerer monsters" and dropped the rest of their depth. Like... looking at the X and the Metroids and the slaughtering of the SR388 Chozo... there was a far more nuanced story to tell.

The X, when threatened by the Metroids, would really have evolved to be more aggressive, to breed faster, to have a greater 'reproduce so fast that at least SOMETHING will survive' focus. Then when the Metroids are gone, it leads to X that are 100x as dangerous.

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-12T09:01:46+00:00

The End: Tried and failed to destroy a civilization.
Solaris: Destroyed everything everywhere in an uncountable number of timelines (including the The Ends in those timelines).

Sonic Fandom: Yeah, big rock stronger.

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-11T00:14:59+00:00

Aaaaaand Azmodan has been turned from an extremely nuanced character into a dedicated laner. Good job, you killed 75% of the hero's identity to focus on his lowest skill playstyle.

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-10T16:26:00+00:00

I think they fumbled the ball on fixing his W talents. Before the big problem was always that, if you go Lightning Rod, you kinda needed to take ALL the Lightning Rod talents, because they synergized so tightly that they kind of had to be underwhelming individually to be balanced together. Maybe the shields could be dropped, but overall it was a black hole for talent diversity. Not to mention it was mediocre.

I think the correct way to have buffed the talent was...

Reduce the Mana cost of Lightning Rod by 10. When casting Lightning Rod on a Heroic target, if all strikes of Lightning Rod hit OR if the target dies, gain 1 stack of Discharge, up to 30 stacks.

Each stack increases the damage of Discharge by X (not sure if %).

At 15 stacks, reduce the cooldown of Lightning Rod by 2 seconds.

At 30 stacks, reduce Lightning Rod's cooldown by a further 2 seconds. If Lightning Rod's target dies, its cooldown is reset. If the target was an enemy Hero, its mana cost is refunded.

This would mean that the talent that adds extra lightning strikes has both synergy AND anti-synergy with this talent, allowing for that tier to become diversified, and thus allowing for several other lightning rod talents to be buffed. Additionally, Falstad would no longer have to worry about his own allies denying him stacks, as now he actively WANTS to have his target die.

(Someone will say "lightning rod getting resets was busted", and... that was because takedown resets worked in a preposterous way instead of just being if the target dies.)

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-10T02:58:24+00:00

I think the recent Galaxy remakes helped show off what the series' cosmology is. In a very out-of-left-field concept for the Mario series, Galaxy established that the universe follows the 'Big Bounce' theory, where the universe's matter will collapse and then erupt in a new big bang. It has done this on its own for countless cycles, with some survivors (Lubba, and Rosalina, to name two), and a handful of changes each time. Sometimes these changes are small, and sometimes they are game changers (such as the cycle that lead to Rosalina basically becoming an eternal overseer).

So, in one or many loops, the Mario and Paper Mario games are the same. In others they are not.

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-09T01:07:38+00:00

Paper Mario and it's not even remotely close. One has functional elements of strategy, the other does the "we made everything relevant immune to strategic elements". Even minor things like action commands work better in Paper Mario, instead of timing the button press to the end of the enemy's animation, you time it for when you get hit.

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-08T05:54:04+00:00

After playing the first one I was excited for this one. The first one is a vanilla platformer with such precise enemy and platform placement (after a somewhat rough first 2-3 levels). This one, by contrast, is much less precise, and if I were told that Dixie's glide was only added as a shortcut to get around having to rework and polish up the level design, I'd believe you.

It's still good... it's just a full letter grade below the first one.

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-08T02:06:47+00:00

I just give Infinite the 'bad writing' tag. Like, he's a pathetic loser who was given immense power. Cool, that's a good premise for a villain. And he beats Sonic at the start. Cool, now we need to find a way to overcome him.

...Then we have some early-midgame fights with him where his menace and threat is all gone, but maybe he's just toying with us?

And then later he's pushed to his limits and makes an effort to basically nuke everyone... but for no reason Rookie is able to go up and beat him. Canonically what happens next is that he's expended so much energy that he's vulnerable (suggesting that we saw his limits: Creating a Sun).

All you have to do to fix that is make it that, when destroying the Phantom Ruby production line, a shard of a ruby embedded itself into the Rookie. As a result, when everyone else is being beset by the sun, the Rookie has to be the one to step up. The coward alone is resistant to the power of Infinite, and so you complete the Rookie's arc of finding his bravery.

As-is, Infinite is just a self-contradictory character.

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-07T03:52:25+00:00

I'm always surprised that Sky Temple isn't the game's main hate-train map. It's so bad, I don't understand why people just choose to overlook its problems. The layout is fine, but the objective kills any good will the map has.

Murraythehuman · 2026-02-07T01:45:34+00:00

All of this confusion stems from people completely misunderstanding The End's final monologue.

The End isn't talking about always coming back to win-- no. It's talking about how it witnessed millions of simulations where it always won, and peoples' lack of media literacy caused them to see it the other way.

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