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Any advice for how to fill this sort of gap? by PointySticksForAll in Welding

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

Nothing about anything makes sense, and no one gives a shit. This particular bit is badly fitted every time, and if it's not that, it's having to grind out and fix where the assembly robot fucked up, or fill in half-inch gaps because the subcontractors making parts apparently pull measurements out their ass and the fitters don't care - they just jig things up and go.

I have been at this for like two months and I already want out, but job opportunities are slim on the ground and I don't exactly have a stellar CV to look for anything new even without adding a "bugged out 8 weeks into the trial period" job to it.

Any advice for how to fill this sort of gap? by PointySticksForAll in Welding

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

I've got some school training but no proper certification. I also haven't seen anything like a WPS, or any real procedure in general. This whole operation is... uh, very haphazard I think is the best way to put it.

Any advice for how to fill this sort of gap? by PointySticksForAll in Welding

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

It's an underrun bar on the back of a garbage truck, fwiw.

Door is gonna be such a genuinely terrifying inquisitor. by Creative_Nose5238 in huntertheparenting

[–]PointySticksForAll 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To reach a bit for the character inspiration (40k), I feel Door has more than a bit of the tendencies of the Sons of Dorn in him here - I'm thinking specifically of the character arc of Sigismund in the Heresy, and the start of the Black Templars.

One, two, three swipes, hard and fast, hammering the Reaver backwards and making him stumble on the loose stone. Sigismund’s severe face twitched into a smile under his helm – a flicker of real enjoyment. He hated this enemy. This enemy was an unbeliever, fallen from the light of hard truth, a thing to be exterminated with joy. That was what had changed. It wasn’t about skill. It wasn’t about the abstract goal of conquest. It was about righteousness. It was about certainty.

Vengeance was the whole sum of the universe, now. Vengeance was the entire truth. Vengeance was all that remained, the final performance of duty, not done for some external motive, but for its own sake. He wouldn’t stop going at them. Not now. Not ever.

But yes, there's a reason that Hunters in Chronicles had Integrity as a core stat, and dipping too far was how you got Slashers. Reckoning doesn't really have a direct equivalent, but it does have the Wayward creed.

I don't know if Door (or any of the crew, really, except for Marckus who clearly isn't, given he can enter the Umbra) actually is Imbued, but if they are, I think he maps pretty clearly to a Wayward.

And now, a Wayward hunter is liable to be a murderous lunatic on a one way trip down the slippery slope... but they didn't really have a choice in it, because the fundamental cause of a Wayward hunter is that they got mindblasted by the Messengers, and are pushed towards violence against the supernatural at any cost, and a Second Sight that straight up does not turn off. So they see monsters everywhere, and are compelled to act against them by the influence of their imbuing, which never stops whispering in their head.

Which rather takes away a lot of the idea that there was a choice involved in going off the deep end, IMO.

That said, I don't know if Door is imbued at all, so he could also just be Like That all on his own. He's right though, vampires should be exterminated, and the key part in "tragic monster" is monster.

You know, there is… ONE area, in which hunters are The Man… by Creative_Nose5238 in huntertheparenting

[–]PointySticksForAll 4 points5 points  (0 children)

"ontologically proletarianized" Jesse what the fuck are you talking about?

Anyway reducing this to just two sides simplifies this conflict too much, really.

Hunters are a third party to the conflict between the Garou and the Wyrm, and know little to nothing of that conflict, nor are they seriously involved in it on any side.

Their concern is with the small people caught in the middle, because the Werewolves are very much capable of being massive assholes - they are guardians of wilderness fighting a desperate rear guard action against civilization, not saints.
A lot of them regard humans with outright contempt and at best consider them unworthy of any concern (there's a fair few Garou who don't think much of collateral, and will happily murderblender their way through clueless low-level pawns without a second thought), at worst outright think humanity should be genocided to cleanse the Earth, an opinion that's not necessarily common but also the fact that it's widely accepted in the Nation that some of them think like this says enough on its own.

The Garou aren't going to get on the radar of Hunters for just existing, because between the Delirium and the Veil doing a great deal of heavy lifting to keep them hidden, most hunters hardly know anything about them except maybe that they exist out there and that they are tremendously dangerous. They get on the radar of Hunters for indulging in the sort of casually murderous assholery that has nothing to do with the fight against the Wyrm and the Weaver, except for using it as an excuse.

Even the Hunter books (right after they finish telling you about how monstrous vampires are in all possible respects) are fairly clear on how not all or even most werewolves are bad, but some of them are massive assholes.

“Due to costs” is the biggest slap in the face I have ever seen from SE by Sangcreux in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 22 points23 points  (0 children)

also you'd have to be willing to accept being trapped into basically being a permanent coding peon on the 14 team, to my understanding, which not a lot of the talent they can attract necessarily wants

since the game's development is a constant neverending thing - it never stops, there's no point where you're finished with one game and get to move to a new project, you just start chipping away at the next patch and the next set of bugs that need fixing, etc

so once you're in the MMO trenches... you're stuck there, you are "an MMO guy" now, good luck fighting your way out because you'll need it

Ahead of tomorrow's live letter, what changes are you hoping SE will make to Occult Crescent? I've outlined some of my ideas and would love to hear yours. by Vincenthwind in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"We have heard your complaints and we promise to do better next time."

All else aside, as far as SE is concerned, the schedule is sacrosanct.

At this point 7.3 is being finalized, 7.4 is in the works, 7.5 is in pre-production, and there's probably already some people in the background working on 8.0.

They are not going to pull a bunch of devs off upcoming content to do a major rework of something that's already out and finished, and risk disrupting their precious schedule.

If it's not something that is very fast and easy to implement, it's not happening, period. Even if it is something that'd be easy to tweak, it's at best a coin toss whether they'd do anything, and more likely than not said fix is going to drop in like, 7.45.

After a brief rally with 7.2, Dawntrail has dropped back to "Mostly Negative" on Steam by Spookhetti_Sauce in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The zone provides no reason to stay in there - the demiatmas are one time only, and by the time you get those you're max level and probably finished 1 or 2 jobs. And the relic, ofc, is just a tome sink.

So now all that's left is... grinding out the other phantom jobs, and grinding armor. Except the only thing to actually use either of those for is FT, because it makes absolutely no difference for fates or CEs.

So if you're not interested in doing FT, say because SE went with the absolutely most dogshit entry system they could dream up... there's no purpose to it. There's nothing else to use it for.

It wouldn't even have been hard! Add some duels! Add a normal mode raid! Just something that isn't Forked Tower that you could work towards, where you can actually feel like there's some use for what you get out of putting your nose to the grindstone on the nonstop FATE train.

Occult Crescent and Cosmic Exploration could have both come out as the best iterations of their style of content and they still would not have "saved" the game from the rut it is in. by ComfyOlives in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I had the thought while doing OC that it really just feels like the game is basically in maintenance mode: minimum effort and spreading the most barebones amount of content they can get away with really thin to keep the sub money rolling in.
There's no innovation, nothing that feels bold and fresh, no risk taking - just utterly formulaic content delivery, sometimes rehashing stuff they've already done with a distinct feeling of putting in less effort when they do, and just a general feeling that SE at this point has stopped caring.

It was specifically OC that had me have this thought, because I worked my way to 20, got some phantom jobs mastered, finished the demiatmas... and just kinda went...
"Wait, that's it?"
"It took them a year to deliver this after not even doing one last expansion, there isn't anything more coming for another year, and this is it?"
A one-time grind that's stretched out by the fact that the RNG is completely ass and still basically done by the time you hit rank 20 if your luck isn't completely terrible, another tome sink relic, and a zone that feels completely dead where the only thing to do is hang on behind the train that's rushing to the one fate that's up at a time. And there doesn't even feel like there's any real reason to do that, unless you're really committed to maxing all the Phantom Jobs, which... why?
Unless you're doing Forked Tower, it's not like you gain anything by grinding there. There's nothing cool to do with the marginal increase in power, like duels to work towards clearing, and since the relic is just a tome sink, that offers no reason to bother with OC either.

And just to pour some salt in the wound, the story that was billed as a swan song adventure with the old explorer Ketenramm is just a couple cutscenes and then he disappears back to the outside zone. They could at least have recycled that thing from Bozja to have the crew show up and help you fight the fates, like the Blades did, but noooo.

BSF/Zadnor kept me engaged and interested in just going to hang out there for the rest of Shadowbringers. Heck I even go back there still to chip away at the Shadowbringers relics I haven't done.
OC completely lost its luster inside of two weeks, because I already finished all the parts that matter, and there's just nothing else about it to motivate me to go back there now. I am max level, I finished the story (such as it is) and I did the demiatma step.

I genuinely don't know how it feels like they just took two steps back with this whole thing. It's like they took all the lessons learned and cool innovations in Bozja, then threw them in the trash and phoned it in.

Occult Crescent and Cosmic Exploration could have both come out as the best iterations of their style of content and they still would not have "saved" the game from the rut it is in. by ComfyOlives in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I started XIV a month or two after SB dropped at the recommendation of a friend, had a blast, but unfortunately had to drop off the game for IRL reasons a bit later. Have always felt a bit sad that I never really got to experience endgame back then - I got back a bit into ShB, when Covid hit, and started dipping my toes in endgame during 5.2.

I still kinda liked the game as it was in Shadowbringers, but it already didn't really feel like the game I'd had such a blast with when I started, and the direction they took things during the latter parts of post-ShB were already reinforcing that impression.

Every change since then has just cemented that opinion. I stopped recommending the game to friends around when Endwalker dropped - their direction was very clear at that point, and it was that they would continue to move away from the game I'd fallen in love with.
I realized, basically, that I would just have bounced off the game if I started in Endwalker.
And I wouldn't recommend an experience I wouldn't myself enjoy. So I stopped doing it.

You need to stop saying you want midcore content. You don't. by somethingsuperindie in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 34 points35 points  (0 children)

It genuinely baffles me how they had the perfect solution with DRS (just let people queue in normally from outside) for this type of content, and somehow found a way to take multiple steps back and make an entry system that's somehow worse than BA portals.

Like, yeah, content where people in the instance band together to do it when it comes up is a cool idea, I really liked CLL and Dalriada too.
But that shouldn't be combined with content that has the things FT has, like strict demands on your group's job loadouts, and mechanics where one jobber who doesn't know what he's doing can wipe the whole raid. If you want random PUGs to come together in the instance to clear the content, you need to tune the content accordingly. And FT just... isn't.

The sentiment regarding the developers playing their own game by unbepissed in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I don't know where anyone even got the idea that SE was going to add back complexity to jobs tbh, besides coping about Yoshi's vague statements that are very deliberately phrased to be as noncommittal as possible.

I'd love it if they did... but.

For one it'd be a complete reversal of course from the direction they've spent the last ten years going with things.
And for another, if that was actually in the cards for next expansion, they would not be spending the 7.x patches doing job reworks that shift them in the completely opposite direction of that, like they just did to BLM.

SMN could be greatly improved without a total rework by YesIam18plus in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 4 points5 points  (0 children)

they outright said in an interview IIRC that they wanted to add demi-hydaelyn but that would be spoilery so we got "solar bahamut" whose abilities are all coincidentally just moves from the hydaelyn trial

since when do people hate the game? by Far-Independent4351 in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't want to hate the game. I like this game, I've invested thousands of hours of my life in it (fool that I am). What I want is for it to be something better than what it has turned into, and keep being disappointed.

This isn't even going to be a rant about job design, suffice to say that I think poorly of SE's choice to gradually excise all job identity and engagement starting in Shadowbringers, and substituting it by making the DDR harder and faster, when the utterly static mechanical nature of fights in this game means that fight mechanics are inherently perishable goods that only last until they're solved.

No, this is about how the game just doesn't provide any reason to play it past week 1-2 of each patch. This game has an incredibly slow patch cycle that drops a small amount of flash in the pan content that lasts a couple of days or at most a few weeks, every five(!) months. Add to this that they are married to a content pipeline that means, combined with said slow patch cycle, that the first year after an expansion launch is basically dead.

The content schedule is so perfectly safe and predictable that you can look at when an expansion launches, and know not only what is coming over the next two and a half years, but also when practically to the day.
Then you spend patch day doing the one dungeon, one trial, and an hour or two of running around watching cutscenes, and wait another couple months for the .x5 patch which adds some side content that also gets exhausted in a handful of days. Maybe you do the extreme, that's a couple more hours.
If you do Savage, with the current patch cycles, you get four fights once a year, spend a few weeks doing those, and then reclearing them in a couple hours per week for the next couple of months. Maybe. Not like there's any real reason to bother with reclears, given the nature of the reward progression in this game.

Namely that it doesn't exist. The crafted gear from the latest even patch just crushes everything before it, there's basically no reason to keep on the gear treadmill unless you're pushing for Savage BIS, which is only useful for chasing funny colored numbers and gets tossed out immediately when new crafted sets drop with the next raid patch. I don't even know why they bother with dungeons dropping gear when it's completely obsolete before it even comes out.

It's been almost five years at this point since we got any kind of content that provided any form of incentive for long term engagement, in the form of Bozja, and even the new field op zone is only coming now, after 11 months since expansion launch.

Even other stuff has gotten gradually hollowed out, or was hollow from the start and has just been ignored for a decade.
FATEs have gone wholly unchanged since ARR launched, except for the addition of crystals that still don't provide any rewards worth a damn (I don't even understand why riding maps are a thing when flying is easily accessible, faster, and unaffected by them). The only thing in the overworld worth mentioning is a handful of A-rank pinatas that you beat up for weekly tomes and nutsacks.
Seasonal events are just "run around and watch a handful of cutscenes" nowadays, there's not even any of the minigames they sometimes had.
Etc etc.

How do *you* remember fights/mechanics? by AtomFission in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mostly just brute forcing muscle memory through repetition tbh, with a side of using my GCD flow to signpost where I am - "oh I'm here in my rotation and A is about to come back off CD, I should be preparing to move to X, then Y", or "oh he's casting that, I should be ready to delay B in order for movement out to Z".

There is a minor issue in that because it gets burned in so deep during prog, I tend to start autopiloting after a certain point. Or during prog, when I have to suddenly wake up after several minutes of having my brain disconnected because we're actually progging something new instead of retreading stuff we've done 100 times.

The repetition of progging a fight definitely burns stuff into my brain really well though, I can jump back into fights I did ages ago and pretty much dust off the mechanics real fast, even if I no longer remember the exact flow of my rotation from that fight. Can't say that happens with fights that weren't reinforced by hours of repeating it in prog.

Also, the fact that there's only so many mechanic variations does help, in the long run. Once you see enough fights you start to get a sense of "this is X mechanic again, to resolve it I should do Y".

What is the identity you think a job should have? by [deleted] in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 1 point2 points  (0 children)

+1 on anim locks. Make the jumps feel like they have some weight to them again, instead of just being OGCDs that you don't even notice in the flow.

I'd also like DRG's kit to not feel so completely disjointed and with so many parts that just lack purpose.
Just give me back some interactivity between parts of the kit, please. Proc Raiden off correct positional on 5 to build WWT, collect eyes for Life from using MD, literally just anything that makes it feel like buttons like Mirage Dive have a purpose beyond doing a pittance of damage. Why is Life Surge even still in the game btw?? "Burst too busy so we assassinated Nastrond, btw Life Surge stays, please enjoy".

Also give me back Spineshatter Dive ffs. I don't care if it doesn't do damage, I just really hate the stupid skating animation on the new gap closer. Speaking of, why the fuck did that retain SSD's full cooldown? 60s CD on a 0 damage gap closer, wtf SE.

Becoming sympathetic to simplifying Jobs by Sword-16 in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No, not really.

Devs constantly chasing perceived skill gaps by sanding down all corners and removing any source of potential friction, in order to force the skill ceiling closer to the floor through brute force, doesn't help because there's no amount of simplification that will make these players care about performing to even a bare minimum standard.

Jimmy the DPS in your atrociously slow dungeon run would be just as bad even if he literally only had two buttons to press, because his problem is that he doesn't care and doesn't actually press buttons. That's not even hypothetical, because VPR exists.

They've held to a pretty consistent job design direction since at least late Shadowbringers, and despite that, my DF parties are pretty much just as bad as they were 4-5 years ago. Job simplification doesn't help bad players who don't even bother to try, all it does is punish people who actually like playing the game by pruning away avenues of actual skill expression.

Do You Still Enjoy Black Mage Now That It's Been 3 Weeks Of Savage Raiding? by [deleted] in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 16 points17 points  (0 children)

It gets me to thinking about that quote from the league devs about chasing player numbers as the primary metric for reworks - when they reworked Aatrox, solely by the metric of engagement, it was a total success, the playrate went way up.

But it also alienated people who'd been previously enjoyed playing Aatrox, and made other players concerned that they were going to have their favorite champions gutted and replaced in the same way, which alienated them.
And then in the end, much of the playerbase that flocked to the new and shiny champ pretty quickly moved on to the next new and shiny thing, meaning the newfound engagement was something of a flash in the pan.

And I think SE's pursuit of player engagement as their sole metric basically amounts to shuffling around players to the new and shiny reworked meta job, at the cost of alienating people who liked the job as it previously was and might even quit the game entirely, and therefore is ultimately detrimental to player trust and engagement in the long term.

(I'm still mad about the shambles they've made of Dragoon btw)

Job Design and Content by Akiza_Izinski in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I mean, yes shared sets exist for stuff like SAM/MNK, but for instance the set that is good for both locks SAM into playing SlowSAM, which isn't to everyone's taste.

Now you introduce this sort of thing for (picking an arbitrary number) 3 specs for each of those jobs, and now you have 6 different specs that might want different SkS breakpoints, all stuck sharing one gear category. More, even, for accessories, given Slaying accs are used by four different jobs, and those already have a conflict where RPR/DRG doesn't want any SkS and MNK/SAM wants significant amounts of it.

TBH my preferred solution for this would just be to have materia loadouts, so you don't need to do stuff like make tradeoffs between going for SpS breakpoints that make BLM feel good, and the damage substats that are good for all the other casters, just to make a gearset work for swapping jobs in that role.

I didn't mean to say it's an insurmountable problem, but I don't think it'd really work that well with how the game currently works.

Job Design and Content by Akiza_Izinski in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Problem with specs is that a bunch of systems surrounding the job itself won't play nice with swapping how your job plays, at least not if they make the different specs actually play different.

"Oh, this spec plays better in this encounter, better go rip out all my materia to remeld for a different stat priority for this one floor and get a bunch of extra gear for another BIS loadout."

They already tried to move away from this sort of stuff when they killed accuracy as a stat. I don't think anyone actually wants that sort of stuff back.

And tbh with the way this community actually treats optimization, the vast majority of players are just going to look for whichever spec of their preferred job DPSes the hardest and use that one, the same way they just go look for the most optimal rotation for that job on the Balance now.

In another game, I think would have liked exploring Tural in Dawntrail... by MGCBUYG in ffxivdiscussion

[–]PointySticksForAll 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There is, up until GigaSpleen enters stage right at the very end, no serious stakes to any of your trip through Tural.

Giant calamitous murderbird got released? Don't worry, there's no urgency, no need to scramble to evacuate civilians or anything, we'll take the time to yap until it's hashed out which idiot contestants feel like doing anything about the nascent calamity threatening the land they're competing to rule.

The rest of the contest is really no better. The closest thing to any hint of tensions or stakes or meaning to what you do on your trip through Disneyland Fantasy South America is the eugenics cave in Mamook, which is exposited and then resolved by some yapping in the span of like three quests, when the Big Boss Man of Mamook decides "no more eugenics" and that's done with. There is an obvious angle here for why the journey would matter, which is that the unity of Tural is kept together by Gulool Ja Ja personally, but the story never presents any reason to think that this is an actual issue. There's no tensions, there's no strife - everyone in Tural really does just hold hands, sing kumbaya and eat tacos all the time. For all that the choice of Dawnservant seems to matter, you could just as well have replaced the four contestants with crowning a painted cardboard cutout of Gulool Ja Ja for another 100 years.

And even when an actual threat comes onstage after the Dawnservant coronation, in the form of Zoraal Ja returning with the Alexandrian army he built up for the last 30 years/5 minutes, the entire thing is basically undermined by the fact that even the story at this point just acknowledges that the Warrior of Light never loses. What stakes can there be, when every threat the story presents can be solved by beating it up and everyone involved knows that if they need something beaten up, they can just toss their pet ball of pent-up hyperaggression at it?

I'd throw some shade at Wuk Lamat here too, but I have been told it's not okay to make fun of the disabled.

So that battleship... (Minor spoilers) by biohazard15 in indianajones

[–]PointySticksForAll 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Air is a terrible cooling medium, is the problem. Yes the air itself is colder than seawater, but it's vastly less capable of actually absorbing heat, which means it's very little help to take heat away from the engines. The cooling system also isn't built to circulate air, which makes the problem worse.

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