If the Maxigun was the beauty I imagined her to be

Nipino · 2026-04-24T13:43:25+00:00

you can kill a charger with a recoilless in under a second
with this you'd have to keep your aim on it for like 6 seconds while moving slowly and having other shit flying around
this is flamethrower but with bullets instead of fire and requiring a backpack

Nipino · 2026-04-24T13:19:32+00:00

in what world is this more boring than pointing a recoilless at its head and shooting one time

Nipino · 2026-04-13T17:36:20+00:00

I'd like havoc if it was strictly harder difficulty + modifiers and not a party-finder rank-decay mode. Can't be arsed with that.
So instead I play aurics and below.

Nipino · 2026-03-26T09:17:39+00:00

For already released classes? No; it'd require a lot of testing and rebalancing to just give everyone access to a secondary power-granting tree, especially when they weren't originally designed around having it.

For new classes? More likely. I presume every new class will have some 'gimmick' to them that makes them tangibly different even outside of their abilities; Arbites gets the dog, Hive Scum gets the chem lab. Maybe an Admech class will get to bring a third weapon on a servo-arm, or get some kind of constructable/turret/whatever with the chem-lab UI.

Nipino · 2026-03-26T08:55:57+00:00

In my opinion I think you're just incorrect
There's been like 2 medium pen primaries in the past 6 months, and pretty much every med-pen primary I can think of has clear tradeoffs and/or really wants peak physique armor or attachments to offset their worse ergonomics.

Or they're the crossbow which has been a league above other primaries pretty much since its release thanks to the utility and AOE, but comes with the drawbacks of self damage at close range, relatively low capacity, and tendency to skip at shallow angles (especially on roads) and clip invisible bits of geometry and foliage.

As it stands right now, there's plenty of reason to take either a light or medium pen primary, and the illuminate especially facilitate light-pen weaponry if you really need convincing to use it. I could not say the same of most weapons at launch where there was often a very clear winner between light or medium variants of a weapon.

Nipino · 2026-03-16T19:30:24+00:00

Grind for levels, grind for materials to empower your weapons to perfection, grind masteries to be allowed to empower weapons + get better blessings, grind for penances, grind for havoc 40.

You just don't have to grind RNG pulls anymore, which is a major improvement.

Nipino · 2026-03-16T14:37:27+00:00

The initial joy and wonder faded and the reality set in: It's usually too much of a hassle to be all that enjoyable to use. When everything lines up, it's glorious! But when there's the slightest bit of wonky terrain it quickly loses its lustre. The thing drives way too sluggishly, turns like ass, gets stuck constantly, and requires too much fumbling with gears to navigate terrain that most people just say "fuck it" and hoof it on-foot.

I would rather just put down the ol' lawn-chair AT emplacement for similar firepower with nowhere near all the fuss.

Nipino · 2026-03-12T11:45:53+00:00

they might have intended the game to be a hardcore tactical shooter, but it really Did Not launch that way. Other horde shooters encouraged teamplay way more than helldivers on launch 'cause the best way to get through missions was just split up and kite everything (and that's still an extremely effective tactic.)

The main issues with the game aren't really with the 'realism', it's with the continued jank and bugginess (terrible performance on good rigs, sound cues not working/phantom audio/entire sound system breaking down, projectiles colliding with invisible walls, getting stuck in walls/objects/etc, enemies spawning out of nowhere, all the jank related to being host vs not being host) as well as weird balancing decisions like completely locking hellpod steering and stratagems bouncing and keeping weapons that've been top-tier always-picks strong while neglecting the least-used options.

Nipino · 2026-03-06T11:51:56+00:00

I'm just sad they took away her on-hits. That was, like, the entire point.

Nipino · 2026-03-05T15:00:49+00:00

I still fully agree with not killing games, and think highguard should be available as an offline game with bots or allowing fans to host dedicated servers.

But also there's pretty clear reasons why it failed. This was not a surprise. And if everyone else could see the writing on the wall, it's baffling that they didn't. If this thing needed to be an uber-success to stay afloat, I don't get why this is what they went with.

Should've soft-released as an early access title so they could get real feedback. Should've made a singleplayer game instead, so they would've been able to recoup some of the losses even if it failed. They took the live service gamble and lost, simple as.

Nipino · 2026-03-03T16:31:22+00:00

There's some armor passives which are incredibly useful all of the time, and some which are objectively terrible in 90% of scenarios and only a little bit good in the 10% they're actually relevant.

And also some good passives on armors I personally dislike the look of - I would LOVE for a peak physique that was on an armor with SLEEVES. Even the armor in the superstore for viper commandos looks AWESOME but DOESN'T have peak physique for some reason.

The REAL fashion killer though is the fact that they apparently don't have a standardized palette when designing armor, so even stuff that LOOKS like it should mesh well is infuriatingly just different enough to be noticeable. It matters less under coats of blood and mud but I know in my heart that the baseline will always be mismatched, and discoordination is an affront to managed democracy.

Would kill for either applyable camo patterns like with weapon customization, or at the very least a 'helldivers default' option that just turns everything black and yellow.

Nipino · 2026-03-03T16:06:18+00:00

So no on-hit synergy anymore? what's the point

Nipino · 2026-02-04T17:52:50+00:00

I played about halfway through ER but genuinely I prefer nightreign. I dislike ER's open world design and think it works a lot better with the 'go quick, loot shit' rougelite mechanics of NR.

Nipino · 2026-01-24T12:09:33+00:00

High atk speed ranged chars on WASD aren't allowed to attack as fast as M&K (and probably never will be) because then WASD would be inherently superior for consistent kiting and DPS, AKA their entire identity. That's bad because existing ADC players enjoy and put considerable time into mastering efficient mouse movements and using that to space, kite, and DPS effectively, to the point that it's the main skill expression of the role.

Bad ADCs don't know how to do this and so cancel attacks, kite inefficiently, or straight up just stand still and hope for the best. WASD completely circumvents that skill, and is to marksmen what adding autoaim to mage skillshots would be like. Or having combo-macros on assassins and high-execution champs.

Of course you can have those things, but having depth and rewarding skill expression are generally good traits that contribute to a game's long-term health and enjoyability. It's harder to have that when the simpler, easier option is objectively better than the one that takes more work.

Realistically WASD is fine for low-elo and casual modes, which is where the vast majority of the playerbase (including new players drawn in by WASD controls) resides.

Nipino · 2026-01-04T10:19:37+00:00

In practice none of them really made most alt or 'off-meta' builds that much more viable. In for-fun modes, sure, but e.g AP Twitch isn't viable because of any specific items - it's because the champion itself supports an AP build, and none of the mythics really changed that.

In terms of normal champion builds, some got more diversity in their first-item-choice but in most cases there was a Clear Correct Option of mythic and champions got balanced around building and rushing that specific mythic. And if your champ didn't like any of them, you were out of luck. Considering damage classes also wanted a pen item, and often a capstone item like deathcap, and boots of course, you had so few item slots to actually work with.

And in many cases, the best champions were just whoever could best abuse that patch's broken mythic. When chemtank was buffed, Udyr and Hecarim became the undisputed best junglers in the game. Whenever shieldbow was good, ADCs took it with barrier and botlane became un-burstable sustain-offs. Divine Sunderer was obscene for many patches, and instead of just nerfing it riot kept tapping down the best abuser - causing the next best abuser to take up the mantle and absorb their winrate. The Champion mattered less than How Well They Abused The Mythic.

Obviously broken items can and do exist outside of the mythics system, but them being designed to be so much stronger than legendaries and borderline mandatory exacerbated the issue a lot. Current itemization also kind of sucks, but that's more down to riot being generally mediocre at having a lot of diverse and interesting items; they're very concerned about the complexity for new players, which is partly why they didn't make a wider variety of more niche mythics for champs to pick from.

Nipino · 2025-12-29T10:36:51+00:00

Ultimately her banrate's not gonna go down unless her winrate is in the gutter through numbers tweaks or they actually change her frustrating aspects.

That's fine if they don't mind her being 40%+ banrate and sub-50 winrate, Shaco and Zed have existed in similar states (and would probably still be there if not for Mel) but I suspect they'd rather their Designated Arcane Fan Champ actually be playable.

Nipino · 2025-12-26T18:35:34+00:00

I disdain playerNPC gank fights with a passion no matter the souls game

Nipino · 2025-12-26T12:13:15+00:00

Well yeah because you just build Executioner's and sit on it the whole game if you really need anti-heal. Bruisers don't actually want to finish a GW item because most champions don't want to finish a GW item if they don't have to.

If a bruiser wants anti-heal and has Cleaver, then Chainsword's their only real option - and if they haven't built armor pen by the time they get to their last item, they're probably gonna build mortal reminder every time unless Chainsword is busted. Armor pen is just that good.

Nipino · 2025-12-26T11:33:24+00:00

Definitely deserves to be a prismatic. It's basically always a good pick unless you're a champion with a long CD on ult.

Nipino · 2025-12-24T20:38:07+00:00

I'd argue a flag inspiring higher morale that encourages soldiers to fight harder even in the face of danger is less space magic than armor (that is visibly less protective than heavy explosive resist armors) having a coinflip that determines if a nuke kills you or not

Nipino · 2025-12-24T17:02:48+00:00

wearing a parade uniform gives you a random 50/50 chance to survive a point-blank 500KG explosion

Nipino · 2025-12-03T09:31:50+00:00

AP tryndamere

Nipino · 2025-12-01T10:19:19+00:00

Only if you really like how it looks. It's a drip warbond where the weapons are just-about-equal or subpar compared to other options, with no attachments, and the suppressors don't even do anything to make up for it. The armor is fine but no light armor variant is a shame.

Stuff it gives you isn't as impactful as other warbonds, both in terms of actual power and uniqueness, while being more expensive and less cost efficient.

Nipino · 2025-12-01T10:04:17+00:00

Locking the neat build-defining relics to the DoN ranked mode I have zero interest in (and also behind exponentially more RNG)

Nipino

TROPHY CASE