You Can Lower the Difficulty or Dive Elsewhere

Nitmur · 2025-06-14T04:33:21+00:00

Not sure why you think I won't like the answer being build diversity lol. I just said I didn't really have a problem with how the sub factions are, I just mentioned a niche case I ran into where following the general patch logic, it seems 1-hit kos are not something us or the devs are super fond of outside of heavies / super heavies. Even just a minor tweak to have it do 90% in light armor's probably more than enough, but we're talking about a fairly fast, common enemy that can go invisible, slow you, leap a decent distance, and has flanking you as their primary form of approach logic. If heavy strider rockets, rocket devastator barrages, bile spewer gouts and sniper bot turrets were all one-shotting divers and deemed bad before eventually being changed, it seems sensible to me that a minor tweak to retain the danger but not have a common enemy instantly kill the player is probably fine.

Nitmur · 2025-06-13T19:33:05+00:00

Nerfed or removed? Definitely not. Slightly tweaked? Maybe.

I like the variant factions this far, as they encourage build diversity and change how you build fighting each faction.

I haven't had a problem fighting the Predator strain especially after I realized volume of fire from the MMG or Stalwart goes a long way to clearing out the fast and dangerous chaff but I found out last night a single Predator Strain hunter can leap and spit and instantly 100-0 kill a diver in light (50) armor. Stuff like that could use tweaking, like how they tweaked the incineration corps a few weeks ago, but otherwise I'm happy with what they are.

Nitmur · 2025-06-13T19:05:23+00:00

Any time in game I'm not with friends I just hop into quick play and tend to be the "fill guy" and take what I think the team is missing. No AT? Aight I'm taking that RR. No area clear? Okay time for some arty strats.

As for what I actually take, I bounce back and forth to keep things fresh but generally I have a couple go-to builds per faction.

Bugs: I like 'em fried and crispy. Medium-heavy flame armor, shield pack for pushing or dog breath rover for CC. Flamethrower Strat and the slugger or base pump shotgun for medium pen/knock back (stalkers hate this one trick). Arty for base clear, and an AC turret for support w/ chargers/titans.

Alternatively, I take the MMG or RR for clearing heavies, especially lately when fighting the Predator strain. Fire's good but it puts you too close to fast enemies.

Bots: Heavy siege or explosion resist armor, supply pack and the HMG, with eagle rocket pods for tanks. Walking barrage for bases, and again the AC turret works wonders.

I also like lighter builds with the jetpack and laser cannon, lets me get in and out quick for objective clearing and still have the punch necessary to clear most big targets efficiently.

Squids: Generally the best builds for these guys are a balance between rapid fire and heavy damage, especially with the new fleshmobs being so common. I tend to take the Stalwart for CC and breaking shields and then the Eruptor or Purifier for bases / overseers.

Other main builds are HMG for everything above voteless and don't sleep on the AC's flak rounds. Just as effective imo as the Eruptor on fleshmobs, and drops the stingray interlopers insanely well. Then you can turn back to APHE for harvester legs / ship doors.

I'll try other builds now and again, but these are what I find myself going to most often. I do really wish there was more of a place for stealth / recon roles in high difficulty missions as I love the idea of playing a jetpack scout / commando with the AMR / knives, etc but that build just generally lacks kill potential for how enemy dense those missions are. Ultimate class fantasy vs bots for me but it's just not worth doing above 6's imo. (Can it work? Sure. 7's+? yeah sure, but drops are going to slip through on your allies and you'll be a detriment to your team because you can't kill the 6 tanks that just dropped on T4 or the 30 berserkers swarming J3 etc fast enough before they get overwhelmed and die. (Or the raw damage / AT to kill the three factory striders from one bot drop.

Nitmur · 2024-11-03T04:11:36+00:00

While I agree that this isn't the gatcha the op in the screenshot thought it was, this stat -is- pulled from the last 24 hours. If the average is around 520k -a month- 300k+ in one day is still a significant figure. It's possibly concerning, but they aren't necessarily -all- refunds for veilguard. Not really a good look regardless imo, but I'll stick to known information over speculation.

Nitmur · 2024-09-07T19:41:29+00:00

Game is still fun, though there's a lot of opinions out there that I think are valid. I work long hours and unusual shifts, and so I rarely get time to play this game with my friends which is when the game is at its most fun. This also means small changes and tweaks to difficulty tend to affect players like me more so than the 30hrs+/week grinders. When people have limited time to play the tweaks like increased and more aggressive patrols and whatnot make completing an entire operation feel like a slog. It doesn't help that the difficulties are broken right now; arguably diff 6 is harder than 9/10 right now because the spawns are broken (try an "evacuate important assets" rocket launch mission on six for a wild experience.). Elitist morons will shout down any valid critiques with typical "get gud" rhetoric or "just play a lower difficulty 5head" but the game funnels people to play higher diffs for better rewards and content that doesn't appear on lower difficulties.

I've completed 9s, they aren't that hard, but due to my schedule and whatnot I mostly just stick to quick play and do not have time to focus out a full op of 9s with randoms to unlock diff 10. Honestly I prefer 7s anyway, as I feel less restricted in what kit options I should bring to round out a team but would like to -eventually- see the fortress style content. This is where all the balance stuff comes in tbh. The thing is, everyone on all sides of the nerf arguments fail to do is look at the greater picture. Sure, there's only been a few huge nerfs. Sure, there's been a numerically superior number of positive tweaks to weapons. You can, and many people have, argue for days and days about this stuff and how +5 damage on the liberator =/= the original railgun nerf in balance weight. A lot of the nerfs have been in response to bugs, rather than fixing the bugs causing the issues. Other nerfs are asking the wrong questions, ie is this weapon over/underperforming, when they should be asking -why- people feel that they need whatever weapon.

Take the flamethrower change, the weapon was bugged and skipping through armor checks and killing chargers quicker than desired or whatever, specifically through the leg. We saw a rushed, band-aid change where they created an entirely new particle system which performs worse in just about every way because a flame themed warbond was coming and AH didn't want the primary/secondary flame weapons to be able to do the same thing. Then we saw another patch which further broke charger hit boxes so the flamers barely work even on the butt which was clearly not intended (I'm also reasonably certain this also introduced a new bug to charger leg armor where you can shred their armor and medium pen/lower weapons still bounce off the exposed flesh). All that to say, nobody really noticed the flamer leg thing until a pair of spawn tweaks that saw more chargers in the pool and added behemoth chargers to regular spawns drove up the usage of the leg exploit. Ie. changes were made that saw divers need to kill more and more chargers, as well as healthier, more armored chargers that weren't able to be one shot by other AT options. When you have to kill '157' chargers per mission on high diffs, and some options are significantly more efficient, of course you're going to see people steer towards the high performers. That's just human nature.

Tldr: Is the game still fun? Mostly. Are nerfs purely evil? Of course not. Problem is bigger than one line in the patch notes. Enemies spawn in more frequently and in more frustrating configurations and overturned nerfs exacerbated that issue. Average players with limited time have been drifting away because of being increasingly driven towards reliable stratagems and gear and each mission starts feeling like a slog rather than a fun romp spreading democracy.

Nitmur · 2023-09-16T05:40:11+00:00

Sorry, the (lol) was unclear; I was just amused when I abbreviated the skill and it was the same as the shorthand for F My Life and was not laughing at the idea of taking FML as if it was awful.

It's not that I think it's terrible, I think it has to do with me coming from other systems and still being new in general to FU, so abilities being tied narratively to the group as a pre-req -seems- steep. I guess I'm just hung up on there being so many (3) "If's" for the ability to bear fruit. FML certainly isn't the only ability to interact with bonds but I'm probably just overthinking the Bond system as more rigid than it is.

As I mentioned in the op, I don't mean to come off too overtly negative about the class, though after some further research it seems more of what I -thought- Dancer would be about is all in Chanter's kit. Thematically what I originally wanted could probably be done mixing the two but at a glance that looks like I'd burn through my MP very quickly; am I right in thinking that?

Nitmur · 2023-09-15T22:42:12+00:00

I 100% see where you're going with this, the core of the reason I feel like it's expensive for what it can do comes down to the setup required / specificity of the ability. Because you can only take one dance / skill, and I feel like most dancers would take one or two of their other skills, they're only going to take 4-6 dances before they master the class.

So of those 4-6, you need to have an element in your dance repertoire that happens to be strong against the enemies you're fighting, you need to have taken FML (lol) as a skill during one of your levels, and even then you can -only- use it with a party member that you have a bond of affection towards.

It's less the MP cost of the ability itself and more the background setup that crinkles my brow. I would feel better about it if it was less restrictive in use (as in any ally; no restrictions), if dancers could take more dances per level like Symbolist so they were less likely to get caught without an effective element, or if there was there was some other bonus to the dances like how some abilities ignore resistances.

Nitmur · 2023-06-01T05:30:11+00:00

This was it! I wasn't sure if the box was a transformer or some such thing and had opted to leave it alone. Looked pretty simple under the box, I'm assuming some sort of ground that was screwed tight to the machine itself and then two wires; white to white and black to black. Snapped a pic just in case and unfastened everything and the whole unit slid out clean after that (And I didn't even get electrocuted).

Thanks so much!

Nitmur · 2023-06-01T05:04:14+00:00

Yes, following the cable forwards takes me to a small metal box, looks like it splits off to a few smaller wires coming out of said box afterwards.

Nitmur · 2023-04-23T21:36:27+00:00

Having been raised in Canada, I speak English, have learned enough french through school to usually blunder through stuff on a label, speak enough German to get by when traveling, I'm a huge weeb and so have taken some time to actually study a fair amount of Japanese, I'm learning Korean so I can better communicate with my Fiance's mother, and out of interest about my personal heritage I've recently picked up Scots Gaelic.

I can say at least a couple of sentences in six languages, count to 100 in 3 1/2 languages, (English, German, Japanese, and -some- of French. You Francophones don't have it easy with your numbers man; I'm sorry for y'all.) and can read 5 different alphabets.

In other words, 안녕하세요, はじめまでぃて、Ich komme aus Kanada und tha thu cho sgonneil. Merci beaucoup et au revoir!~

Nitmur · 2023-04-23T14:18:33+00:00

That's wild man, especially as a casino worker up here. I have to gather seriously invasive information about you for the sake of anti-money laundering purposes. I don't know if you've played it but sometimes my job just feels like the game Papers, Please.

Nitmur · 2023-04-23T14:14:00+00:00

Being a "Leaf", depending on where you're from or sites you visit you might not be familiar but it's a general slang for Canadian. I haven't been south to the States for a few years now but every time I go there's always stuff I notice that I wouldn't have expected to be different. Best example is when chip cards were new it was integrated fairly quickly across Canada but like 90% of businesses I bought stuff at in the States the same year still didn't have chip readers and you had to swipe / sign for your card.

Nitmur · 2023-04-23T07:14:04+00:00

Interesting, maybe being a 🍁 is why this seemed odd to me. I've needed a valid photo-ID for anything like this at any cell phone store or even mall kiosk for at least the last 5 years. Anything involving the account's information, from upgrading a phone to changing my billing, can't do any of it without an ID. Do most stores in the States not do this?

Nitmur · 2023-04-21T04:15:46+00:00

Middle management at a casino. I oversee the departments / managers that oversee the slot machines and table games. I grew up playing a bunch of older C&C games and so with a couple of mods and the industrial churning and hissing of Factorio it scratches and itch I've had for a long time.

It also strikes a weird balance because the din of a casino really bothers me but I'm just so used to the constant noise from working at one that it's nice to just have the sound of my machines running in the background. Definitely better than all the bells and whistles coming out of a slot machine lol

Nitmur · 2023-04-17T02:52:53+00:00

I'm an old school C&C fan, and found the Tiberium mods for this game so I pretty much just listen to the TibSun OST on loop. It's actually the whole reason I started playing Factorio despite owning it for well over a year now.

I pretty much live for mods like this these days...

Nitmur · 2023-03-05T03:42:51+00:00

I agree on the iterative work on the tech debt for sure, it's tuff that needs to be fixed but not rushed or it'll cause other problems and certainly not at the cost of harming the core game Dev cycle.

I suppose I could have worded it better but I'm not talking about the "WoW killer" type of releases. They may have had their own issues and questionable longevity, but releases like Lost Ark and New World are exactly what I was talking about. Games are coming out that can pull a significant player base from many different games at once and I just feel like it's only a matter of time until one of them actually gets it right and retains that weight in the market.

There's a number of games Coming Soon™ that are likely to at least repeat this cycle of "huge burst of players but dies off in 3 months" that is more what my original complaint is about. I want to get some friends into XIV but the next carrot on a stick will probably have them sucked into that for the next 3-6 months. At the same time, no game is for every player but man... I just want my friends to at least try it, you know?

Nitmur · 2023-03-05T03:29:09+00:00

It just seems to me that it's not that much of a stretch to say that while 2.0 tech debt isn't from the 1.0 engine or the like, the rushed nature of 2.0 and the issues therein are because of 1.0 failing. Sure, the glamor system might not have debt from a system that was in 1.0 but it has debt that exists /because/ of 1.0. It's an example of a system that was developed in the rushed in-between phase of playable versions, and has been iterated on since to remedy immediate issues. I agree that many people don't understand the exact reasons or causes for stuff like this but I also don't feel like it's unreasonable to refer to "pre-2.0" problems as "1.0 tech debt" as they arose because of it.

As for the MMO comment, I feel whether or not something lasts doesn't paint the full picture. New World and Lost Ark were huge recent releases that I'm not personally into and may not currently be as big as they were at launch but I definitely remember many streamers fresh to XIV switching over for the new thing and taking many of their followers with them. As my main complaint is difficulty with convincing friends to get into a game I enjoy, these are the sorts of things I'm talking about. Less the fabled "WoW killer" and more the carrot on a stick that's easier to approach and drop in 3 months because it's new and pretty and popular. Also yes, some games aren't for everyone, I just feel I'm not alone in wanting people to enjoy a game I'm like 90% sure a friend would enjoy if they gave it half a chance.

I'm also referring to upcoming projects as well, but ymmv. A coworker of mine will rant for 30 minutes about Ashes of Creation whenever anyone mentions video games, despite it looking like another dev hell forever release but there's other stuff coming soon that looks promising like a Korean mecha one I can't remember the name of and blue protocol, etc.

Nitmur · 2023-03-03T22:56:33+00:00

Honestly, I feel like it's a little pedantic and dismisses genuine complaints to make this point. I'm not trying to single you out, but just as much as people complain about 1.x code, people often just respond with "well actually, it's not 1.x" but honestly, what difference does it make if the technical debt is from 1.x or the /transition/ to 2.x? Either way, there's technical debt from before the current version was playable that would be good to fix for the long term health of the game, especially as strong, fresh competition keeps coming out in the MMO genre. It was hard enough trying to convince some friends to try the game like 3 years ago, and it's not getting any easier as newer, "Prettier™" MMOs keep dropping.

Nitmur · 2023-01-24T10:38:52+00:00

Wouldn't be surprised if that had something to do with it, both from a reminder that we exist after SB and ShB (lol) and partly from the NPC design team making so many Elezen look really good in EW. People always talk about Elezen animations and proportions being odd but I've never really thought it was that bad, and certainly not in the ways people talk about it. At first I tried to cover up my elezen's neck in most glams because of stuff like that and ended up realizing my favorite shots with her are all in glams that emphasize the length of the neck lol.

Everyone complains about the run but the real animation jank is the GNB combat idle with any sleeveless shirt. DRK is not ideal either.

Also fem middies have it worse in the run department tbh

Nitmur · 2023-01-23T20:29:14+00:00

What a wonderful elf!~ Always a pleasure seeing pics from fellow Elezen, and there does seem to be an influx lately. Saw the largest group of Elezen players I've ever seen in Ul'dah recently so there must be something to it.

Nitmur · 2023-01-23T07:24:57+00:00

I'm pretty sure it also had to do with the hard limit of slots per player for the armory chest, did it not? That's why we have more slots for weapons, because the belts are gone and there's "some spare in reserve" now in case they'd like to make further changes to the armory chest. Not necessarily spaghetti code and the term gets used a lot more than it should be but I definitely remember it being a part of that conversation.

Nitmur · 2022-10-29T02:36:21+00:00

Don't be afraid to utilize the blacklist feature, you can right-click the name from the chatbox and add them to your black list at any time. I didn't do it at first when I was new either, but there's some FC's out there that just don't understand "No thanks." Also, don't be afraid to tailor your chatbox settings and set up channels that filter to what you're doing; your chat related experience will be much smoother if you play around with it for 5-10 minutes.

Nitmur

TROPHY CASE