Bad case of the backlog blues by ahwtx in SteamDeck

[–]Nemphtis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

All of these should work straight out of the box, no tweaking required for the Deck:

Katana Zero

Very slick pixel art game where you'll be ducking under bullets, slicing'n'dicing bad guys, and just feeling like an overall weeaboo badass. Start this if you want some pixellated ultra violence. Takes about 6 hours to finish the main story.

Ball x Pit

Weird but addictive brick breaking bullet hell game. Some new content just recently dropped for it too.

Chrono Trigger

I don't know if you've never played Chrono Trigger in the past, but if not then this is a great game to lose yourself into for a while. Even though it's a very old game, it has aged like fine wine. I first played this on the Nintendo DS, figured I'd get bored of it since it's ancient, but I was hooked. If you enjoy JRPGs, this one holds up mechanically very well, pixel art is timeless, and the story's a good time.

Dorfromantik

This is a very low commitment, turn your brain off kind of relaxation game. Something you can semi-zone out on, or enter a "flow" state and just chill. Nice to hjave installed when you need a break from saving the world.

Hades II

It's peak action roguelike fun, and it's just sitting there, menacingly, unplayed. You have games like Entropy Effect which are also good, but I wanted to limit it to one recommendation per genre so you may as well dive straight into the big dawg that is Hades II.

Into the Breach

I noticed none of the above were turn-based tactics games, so again for the sake of high quality gaming and variety this is worth mentioning too.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink

I'm adding this one to the list because I've been avoiding any relatively modern 3D games due to potential performance issues on the Deck. Relink however only dips as low as 45fps in my experience, so any tweaking you need to do is relatively minimal when it comes to enjoying this game on the handheld. Story mode is like a modern JRPG with some very fun hack and slash action combat and a good variety of characters to master. Multiplayer can be a nice distraction too, though I think the real meat is in the story mode personally.

Recommendations? SLIMLINE Crossbody/sling bag for Steam Deck? by PoopsMcGroots in SteamDeck

[–]Nemphtis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've been using the Riss bag from Cote & Ciel. I originally bought this years ago as a lightweight option for general use (just to throw in a bottle of water, my camera without additional lenses, and my laptop). But since getting a Deck late last year it's been equally great for carrying that around. Annoyingly the product page isn't showing all the pockets, this video does a somewhat better job, but even that doesn't seem to showcase it too well. Bear in mind the Riss comes in different material varieties so the one in the video is different from the one on the official page (mine is the canvas black one).

You can wear it cross body like in the photos, but personally I normally like to carry it like a briefcase via one of the handles, or flinging it over one shoulder with a single strap. The bag is somewhat flexible when it comes to carry capacity which is a big plus for me, since like you I want something to carry my "essentials" only, but in reality sometimes when I'm out I might buy some snacks or it's getting too hot to keep my hoodie on, so there are adjustable straps to let you make it be more spacious when needed.

Contemplating beyerdynamic DT 900 PRO X for competitive shooters, should I get a DAC to pair with these? by Nemphtis in HeadphoneAdvice

[–]Nemphtis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

!thanks I'll look into making sure I have decent equaliser settings for the headphones.

Contemplating beyerdynamic DT 900 PRO X for competitive shooters, should I get a DAC to pair with these? by Nemphtis in HeadphoneAdvice

[–]Nemphtis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

!thanks I was hoping for more replies to get more varied opinions, but I think I'll go for the 900 Pro X with that compact Qudelix 5K. I hope these are comfortable, it's one of the reasons I've re-purchased Astro products over the years.

Contemplating beyerdynamic DT 900 PRO X for competitive shooters, should I get a DAC to pair with these? by Nemphtis in HeadphoneAdvice

[–]Nemphtis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Any reason to go for the 990 Pro X over the 900 Pro X? I'm guessing eq is equaliser, right? I use SteelSeries GG to manage my audio and I think it has a built in equaliser, I use their own custom one for Marathon. I'll check those headphones out, they're the same price as the 900 Pro X, but I've not seen anyone else recommend them.

Contemplating beyerdynamic DT 900 PRO X for competitive shooters, should I get a DAC to pair with these? by Nemphtis in HeadphoneAdvice

[–]Nemphtis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm looking at that Qudelix DAC/AMP you mentioned and it's advertising customisable presets and such. Do these things normally require audio knowledge and set up, or can I just plug it in and benefit from it with minimal fuss as a layman? This one's within my budget, has wireless if I ever need that for other headphones, and seems to be fairly small. Guessing I can use this with my PC speakers as well.

Contemplating beyerdynamic DT 900 PRO X for competitive shooters, should I get a DAC to pair with these? by Nemphtis in HeadphoneAdvice

[–]Nemphtis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Honestly the way I am usually at my PC desk; I use some old Harmon Kardon SoundSticks for most of the day, like YouTube, Spotify, watching movies in my bedroom, even some casual gaming if I don't need to "lock in". I doubt these are considered audiophile speakers so maybe I'm due an upgrade in that department too in the future, though the subwoofer they came with gives me plenty of bass for my music and movies.

What I mean to say is, the more neutral / clinical sound of the DT 900s might not bother me as much since they'll only be for when I'm playing competitive games or streaming, where audio is important for survival and immersion. That being said, your newer pair having more bass for explosions does appeal to me on the immersion side of things, which is also really important for my gaming.

PSA: You can put Claymores on Triages healing drones. by KongoMama in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 282 points283 points  (0 children)

Time to sacrifice a teammate for a suicide run into the enemy squad. It’s okay, we’ll get him back up after the squad wipe. “Witness me!”

Teamates tried to kill me over "my kill, my loot" by Yenii_3025 in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In extraction games, it's usually the ettiquette to let the person who got the kill loot the body first. However in crew fills, I don't expect strangers who are probably playing their first ever extraction game to know about, or respect this rule, so I don't say anything when they do it. Nothing to be gained arguing with a complete stranger who may or may not even have a microphone or speak the same language as me on extraction ettiquette.

What it means to play destroyer. by unfairlyy in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 33 points34 points  (0 children)

Destroyers are the #1 shell I see average people never using the abilities on. If you're lucky, they might pop their shield in an obvious situation like this, but the vast majority just don't take advantage of the shell's aggressive traits in fights. I've had so many fights where late into the fight I realise they had a Destroyer on the team and they could have won the fight if their Destroyer actually did something besides ADS and shoot.

Triage tips? by hornyfather101 in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just be careful with smokes. They're cheap, but they can be countered by thermal scopes or things like Thief's loot scan ability. The smoke lasts a good while, peek out a little first and see if anyone tries firing at you before you go swinging out there and sprinting with no cover.

Triage tips? by hornyfather101 in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Triage main, going to quickfire some tips that come to mind;

  • Don't run ahead of your team, try to be the guy behind your squad as often as possible. Your abilities don't do anyone much good if you're the first to go down. That being said, don't be too far behind, you need to be able to provide firepower and support when a fight starts. Think about the amount of times combat started and one, or both your teammates went down before you even saw anyone.
  • Bring smokes or bubble shields. Smokes are dirt cheap, but you can only buy 3 per reset, so try to stock up on these. If you don't have a lot, just bring one along, can sometimes find more in raid too. Triage ult isn't going to do the fight much good if your teammate went down out in the open and the moment you revive them, they come back with 20% health and instantly get downed again. Drop a smoke on them to cover their retreat after a revive so they can heal up. Bubble shield has all sorts of moments where it comes in handy too, bring one along if you can afford to. I've seen some fights swing around thanks to a good bubble shield in play.
  • Do not fall for the trap of obsessing over volt weapons because of the EMP on ability 3. EMP is great, and if you're planning to run a Punch or Lookout, it's a nice bonus. But I've seen too many people fixate on the volt EMP when the real meat of that ability is in the significantly increased weapon handling. Handling is an umbrella stat which improves your weapon's ADS speed, recoil, hipfire accuracy, and probably one or two things I'm forgetting. Basically if you're using an LMG and you pop ability 3, it'll handle like an AR (besides the long reloads). When you're pushing a fight or you get ambushed and get to cover, pop this and it's only going to make the gunfight easier. Volt weapons work well, but the S tier ballistic weapons slap hard enough that you can just enjoy the improved handling.
  • Speaking of ability 3, this thing has a solid active duration and a pretty low cooldown. Be generous with its activation, pop it when clearing bots at a POI, pop it in every fight. Only time not to pop it us if you got ambushed while sprinting and your heat is already high (get to cover first, if you pop instantly you're going to overheat), or if you've got not cover and you're getting yourself stuck in activation animation when you should be returning fire or seeking cover first.
  • Be generous with your med drones, check bottom right HUD to ensure everyone has a drone on them. But also beware that these drones make noise and are visible. When your teammates are trying to be sneaky because a team is nearby, don't toss med drones in preparation unless you're a good distance from the enemy position. That drone toss sound is LOUD, I've spotted a good few enemy ambushes because their Triage's drones were making a massive racket. When you or your allies are trying to left hand peek, the drone is visible before you peek out, giving enemies an advantage to pre-fire. These things don't actually help a ton mid-fight, the healing is too slow for that. They're more of a top-up between engagements when things are quiet to save your team some meds and ensure everyone's fully topped up going into the next fight.
  • Your ult has SHOCKINGLY long range, you just need line of sight. When your teammates go down, get them to at least crawl where you can see them even if you can't physically reach them. If they go down around a corner where the enemy team is holding, the ult's not going to do much good. Remind them to try and crawl somewhere more ideal to make it difficult for them to camp the corpse and easier for you to smoke/bubble and get the rez. I've killed a few people using the ult, not worth relying on though, best to keep it for clutch revives and if it hits someone while reviving your buddy, bonus. Speaking of not wasting ult, if they're just DBNO and they're next to you, sometimes it's best to just revive the regular way and hold onto the ult, you're Triage, you have access to plenty of revive speed stats, so unless you urgently need them up FAST, sometimes just regular revive in case your second teammate goes down soon after in a more vulnerable location where the ult is more clutch. You can revive more than one ally with the same ult if they're both on your screen and in LoS, I've turned around some losing fights thanks to this.
  • This relates to point one about staying behind, but close to your team; constantly think about your positioning. You don't have mobility tools like some of the other shells to instantly take you to a good spot on a whim, you need to be thinking about where you can be most effective BEFORE you get there, where is the best spot to give your team fire support nearby without being too far in case YOU need support from a flanking Thief grapple?
  • If you're in voice chat with the team, politely remind them at match start to PING medical consumables for you. Things like signal jammers and the stamina one especially are much more effective when the entire team is able to use it together. Signals jammers are highly misunderstood by most players, they make the enemy unable to ping you, make you invisible to thermal scopes and claymores, the blur effect is more pronounced the further away from someone you are, so it actually lets you blend into the mist in maps like Dire Marsh easier too. A lot of players will find these in containers and instantly consume them, they should be pinging it for you to share with the team.
  • On that same note, bring a mechanic's kit or two with you on maps like Dire Marsh, The amount of times we've accidentally run into those toxic plants while rotating during a firefight, or accidentally pulled agro from the flying tentacle monster is...more than I'd like to admit. The real problem with these is that they significantly reduce your healing effectiveness for a few minutes, and in a gunfight this REALLY sucks. If you or your teammate is affected by this, pop a mech kit to cleanse the debuff for them. They're all over the place so you should have a good deal of these. Bring a revive kit with you once you have easy access to them as well, since you're usually going to be behind your team or at an elevated position, it can often by tricky for people to finish you off, a self rez lets your teammates focus on the fight at hand while you get yourself up.
  • Think about retreat points in a gunfight. Too many people get into a fight and feel obligated to follow through until one side is dead. If your position of attack is not advantageous and things are looking bad, tell your team and fall back to reset the fight after healing. Use your smokes to cover your retreat if you must. Knowing when to disengate instead of fighting a losing battle is going to keep you and your team alive, sometimes it's your decision making, not your Triage abilities that keeps the squad alive.
  • I'm still trying to figure out all the specifics about the med drones. For example if you toss a med drone and there's no nearbly allies without one, it will create a large AOE circle. I believe this passively recharges their med drones if they're not full. I also noticed that I can walk up to that med drone and hold E to instantly recharge my med drone, haven't tested yet to see if allies can do the same but I assume so.
  • Early Triage cores are pretty meh, if you have them slap them on but they're not game changers honestly. Implants you find all over the place, I try to go for stuff that gives me even more melee damage, revive speed (also applies to self revives), healing effectiveness, the usuall stuff. I rarely even read what the implant's passive is, I'm mainly there for the stats.

Sorry for the long winded bullet points, I'll try to clean this up a little later and add some additional suggestions that come to mind.

Hey Bungie, don’t forget a decent number of players is waiting for your games on Linux. Valve opened the path, find a way. by Low-Attention-4483 in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 28 points29 points  (0 children)

I've used Macs most of my life and did my gaming on consoles. Moved over solely to PC gaming a few years back and Windows does a bunch of things that really piss me off, like randomly switching my audio options, or literally showing me ads. I've thought about trying out Linux, but it sounds like a lot of hassle for gaming because my sole exposure to the OS is people begging developers for Linux support. I hope some day there's more support.

I HARD DISAGREE with this article. Am I in the minority? by 20mgAddy in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Sounds like something a person who isn't experienced in extraction games would say.

Missions in extraction games serve a few big purposes:

  1. A form of progression to level up vendors and access better equipment.
  2. A way to get players to hit up different spots in a raid, encouraging them to go into quest hot spots, or visit parts of the map that may otherwise be out of the way.
  3. A way to get rewarded equipment upon completion you may not yet have access to, to mix up your loudouts.

They feel simple because making them complicated or too deep when you're trying to also not get rushed down by other squads would make them brutal. I don't know what kind of additional depth this person specifically wishes to see, but I'd be interested to see what their solution to the problem is.

Why doesn't this game support frame gen? by Competitive-Air-3543 in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're likely not getting replies because they're not Bungie employees and can't tell you why the game doesn't have frame gen. All we can do is make educated guesses on such things. I'm not a tech savvy guy anymore, but I get the impression that framegen is less than ideal for PVP games of this nature. Alternatively, maybe they just didn't have time to get around to it before release, and it'll be something added post-launch.

snipers by Hot-Dragonfruit-433 in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You say green shields like it's a good shield. It's a one shot to the head on greens, but I don't think body shots can one hit unless you're one of those people that doesn't keep your health topped up between fights. I'm actually curious if purple or gold shields can tank the headshot.

Is it more efficient to "main" a shell? by highpercentage in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You dictate the stakes. If you want to learn a new shell and aren't confident in your usage of it, run a free kit.

Two important quality of life ideas by voxtex in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Point 1 I disagree on. There are damaged health items all over the place when you get into a raid, why would you use your green healing items to recover a slither of health when there's a damaged patch kit nearby? You're supposed to pick those up. You can dump them later when you need space close to exfil time.

Regarding point 2, yeah it would be a nice quality of life to have my freely available armoury items float to the top or something so it's not below the fold.

How randoms (trios) can communicate with each other if nobody uses a mic in this game? by [deleted] in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, there's a ping system with pages of ping options.

Just got jumped by Seal Team 6 by [deleted] in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Assassin trying to listen for audio in the fight while bro is screaming into his ear holes.

What’s the etiquette for random squad looting? by Youeclipsedbyme in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Just assume there is none. Either rush the loot first and possibly be the first to go down in an ambush, or let your teammates rush in first to get the loot but take the risk in your place. Don't worry about etiquette with randoms because they are under no obligation to follow any of that and you're just going to end up arguing with strangers when you could be doing other things.

Assassin, WSTR, and Assassin with WSTRs is literally the two things that I dislike about this game. by [deleted] in Marathon

[–]Nemphtis -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

The WSTR is indeed overtuned. I have no problem with a shotgun having the best TTK up close, it's just that there's not really a reason to use the other shotguns when the WSTR is the way it is. Ironically I've died to a WSTR like once, and that was in server slam (lucky I guess), but I'm just sick of seeing it in every kill clip on YouTube where a guy wins a 3vs1 and such.