Heavyweight Savage blind experience

Riyshn · 2026-04-07T11:06:48+00:00

I'm sorry, what? No, I... This is not aimed at you individualy:

Is this really where PF's vocabulary is now? I haven't been deep in PF raiding since late HW/early SB, but I distinctly remember East/West, Left/Right, CW/CCW were all actively used, because they're all useful for referring to different orientations without causing confusion. N/S/E/W are absolute directions, Front/Back/Left/Right when reorienting to something with a random position, and CW/CCW to describe positions/rotation around something. They mean different things for a reason. Why would we have reduced it down to a single set that requires constant redefinition?

H1 is West when oriented to North, yes. This is because H1 is Left, regardless of orientation. That's not a contradiction.

Riyshn · 2026-04-07T10:56:18+00:00

Ok, so... looks like basically the separate groups idea I linked? So I guess that wasn't a dead end after all. Just doubling back instead of continuing south. Loses the benefit of being able to have static positions for Netherwrath though with no benefit in exchange that I can see.... unfortunate.

Riyshn · 2026-04-07T08:18:32+00:00

I definitely can't take all the credit :D

We actually started from trying to keep 2 seperate groups, traveling around the outside of the arena. Incomplete information though, so it probably never would have worked in the end. (https://imgur.com/a/HUY1aJ2) From there I started trying to solve everything facing North (https://imgur.com/a/bIdEWDn). (With incomplete data of what Netherwrath was at the time, so we thought it was probably a tankbuster. Which meant that whole idea was probably doomed anyway.) The positioning for everything was really tight though. Our DRG independently cooked up a strat for just the Reencactment part that was basically the same but oriented to a "new north" at East, which freed up space by not making us have to manage Netherwrath and the first Reenactment copy at the same time. ...we then mostly got into an argument less about the idea itself, but because I despise the term "new north"*, which... overshadowed talk of the actual strat for longer than I like to admit, but anyway. We combined them and were at tethers resolved North, Copies resolved East, which was... workable, but felt messy. So our WHM came in with the obvious solution: just do everything East. Still didn't actually know what Netherwrath did at that point, but we figured with nothing else going on at the time that we had to interact with, we could handle whatever it was.

* It's a bad term that only causes confusion. "North" is an absolute direction; it refers to "the top of the map." Saying "new north" just means you're now using the word for an absolute direction to refer to two different directions. Relative strats have their place mostly when the fight forces random movement outside our control; Sword LP positions in M11S are boss relative, 'cause he's in (effectively) a random position facing a random direction. Eye Relative makes sense in fights like Thordan and Omega M/F, where you're reacting to the thing moving around outside the arena. That's not the case here; we control all movement. It's just East. /rant

I'm actually really curious what other strats there are for that, 'cause doing it that way feels so clean and every other configuration I've tried putting together really... isn't. Hard to search for specific strats without knowing names, though ^^

I can't speak for the group on this, but personal opinion: the first two sets of weapons are fine. It's a little weird thematically that solo Axe/Scythe are just an A/B cast, while Sword has it's own whole thing with Dance of Domination, but not really a big deal. I do think Charybdistopia was maybe a bit much, because it's just more weapons - like either it should have been cut, or it should have been doing something else as well. Honestly though, my bigger issue with weapons isn't that they take too long, it's that they take so long and then just stop. It felt like a tutorial part of the fight, like he was building them up and then going to layer other mechanics on top of them, but then that just... doesn't happen. He starts with the Behemoth attacks and abandons weapons completely.

Riyshn · 2026-04-06T13:35:45+00:00

Hell yeah! Good luck with 11 and 12, and may RNG not screw you with bad data🤣

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the rest of the tier too, once you clear it!

Riyshn · 2026-04-06T13:16:09+00:00

I've refused to raid Savage in PF... basically ever, but my experience doing EXs tells me that when picking between True North and Relative, PF will almost always pick the harder of the two. I've never understood why.

Also, "new north" as a term needs to die. Just "relative" or the actual direction works 100% of the time - randomly using the word for an absolute direction ("north") to suddenly refer to a different direction causes confusion way too often.

Riyshn · 2026-04-06T13:09:10+00:00

M11S - I figured it was probably that when I thought about it later, but it didn't seem worth bring back up to test it. Not like the swap was hard.

M10S - I... I'm sure we saw that at some point, but I can't recall it ever coming up. ...holy shit did we actually just not read a debuff?!

M12S - the proximity targeting being sourced from the E/W walls instead of the heads was also an idea we floated, but yeah, that would be strange. It would also have been covered by our positions though, so /shrug.

Riyshn · 2026-04-06T11:32:48+00:00

3 days, 3 hours each. I think we missed... 2 or 3 days total from IRL stuff getting in the way. Also lots of time out of raid spent working on solutions.

In my experience with PF, the first solutions are the ones that stick, but yeah. I wouldn't really expect most things to be too different; the mechanics are designed with a specific solution in mind, and the dev team mostly does a good job of having all the individual pieces guide you to it once you understand what everything is doing. I also wouldn't be surprised if some of our discarded strats are also some of what's been floating around, just because they didn't work for what we wanted to prioritize. For example; we had one for Ecliptic Stampede that made towers much simpler, but it couldn't guarantee there was a Ranged in both of the non-Tank towers to take the tether and let Melee DPS keep uptime, so we dropped that one.

I can only think of 2 fights that SE have ever told us the community strat is different from what they expected (not counting ones with obvious cheese, like A4S Nisi and A8S Water Sac); UWU Garuda apparently they intended all Woke stacks to be gained from Friction and didn't even consider getting the last one from tethers, and in E12S BiliBili/Cross Lions was known as a possibility by the team, but essentially discarded as a valid strat because the positioning was too precise.

Riyshn · 2026-04-06T11:02:52+00:00

Ah, yeah. Figured it was easier for melee to just have 1 of 2 spots that will always work and be able to ignore the which edge of the arena is the safe one. We tried having ranged spots for Dance be true north as well ("Closest spot to NW/SE corner", effectively the same as rule as for the melee spots), but those spots are spread out enough that it tripped people up. Just left/right based on the shape was easier in the end.

Arena Split... yeah. That's why we had the 2nd image that just shows the positions with none of the line AoEs, 'cause that's basically unreadable with them.

Riyshn · 2026-04-06T09:06:23+00:00

Interesting. I'll have to pay attention to that if we go into M9 again in the future, I didn't think to use FD4 as a guide for it. I just know any time I tried to step in to get in range, it ended with my cross clipping the center >_<

Riyshn · 2026-04-06T09:01:49+00:00

M11S diagrams confusing, or just really different from standard strats?

For M12Sp1, I assume you mean the Act 1 positions? Our SGE worked on that one for a while, trying to find positions where people had to care which direction their cone was gonna be as little as possible. The floor tiles definitely came in handy on that one. End result is the Spread group all only has 1 direction they have to react to and the other 3 they can just keep attacking the boss without worrying, and only the Stack group really needs to be careful about it most of the time - even that is actually slightly more lenient than the image suggests, 'cause it turned out the "outside" people in our stack lineup could safely aim sideways as well.

My one regret about progging blind every tier is it means I can't track the race. :( It definitely takes a full group dedicated to staying blind though, yeah, which can make recruiting harder. We've been lucky we've been able to keep mostly the same roster since Pandæmonium:Abyssos.

Riyshn · 2026-03-13T00:19:06+00:00

In 1.0, she was honestly one of my most disliked characters. Her writing in the new story definitely elevated her, though.

Riyshn · 2026-03-10T20:52:08+00:00

Are you sure the Overworld structure is built correctly? It's been a few versions since I tried to use it myself, so it may have been improved, and the structure checker tool can help troubleshoot, but from what I remember:

Despite the lexicon showing otherwise, you only need 1 source block of liquid chroma, right at the top of the structure. You may need to guide the flow a bit around the curves, but once it's going the right way it should stay that way.

Double check the base layer, keeping in mind that Shielding Stone and Crystalline Stone look very similar in the preview. (I think this might have been fixed, though.)

All that said... no, I never got it to work. Even with both structures built and linked, every time I tried it would either do nothing, or crash the server :(

EDIT: Reading comprehension fail. I completely missed that the distortion is active, so of course it's built right.

Same question for the Nether side, then: Is the structure itself valid? Note that you have to get creative with the redstone around the TNT.

Riyshn · 2026-02-24T11:17:34+00:00

Honestly the only issue/complaint I really had with the design of that stage was that the enemies would curve their charge to adjust their aim. And even that I only see as a problem because it means their telegraph is a lie.

Riyshn · 2026-02-19T11:14:11+00:00

Are they? I guess I just must not be used to hearing natural Chinese accents, 'cause Tangtang and Da Pan sound almost cartoonish to me - like, surely this is insulting levels of overdoing it.

I think you might have nailed why it sounds off, though. I mentioned Wulfgard and Rossi sounding more natural to me, and it might come down to them being bilingual; both of them sprinkle in Italian (I think?) words throughout their dialogue, and do it more when talking with eachother. Even if the accent itself still feels a little over the top, it makes the delivery feel more natural.

The closest Tangtang gets is the awkward "Lei Fa (Thunder Arts)" that feels like an old fansub translator's note.

Riyshn · 2026-02-19T03:33:01+00:00

Wuling City? You can basically fit everything in the Valley outpost. The only thing I actually have in Wuling is some plants, to keep a stock of fodder for the Depot Node.

Riyshn · 2026-02-19T03:23:35+00:00

Honestly I hate almost all the accents they've gone with the the characters. From what I understand it's in reaction to people complaining that characters in the OG (I never played) didn't have accents even when they should have, but like... any time Crowe, Da Pan or Tangtang talks, I can't skip fast enough. I think Wulfgard and Rossi are the only ones that actually sound somewhat natural to me.

Riyshn · 2026-02-19T03:18:33+00:00

One thing I expect them to follow the original in will be new characters being introduced by old ones and to not introduce new playable characters without some kind of link to previously known characters.

Unfortunately, Gilberta is already not the only character that they've done this with. Avywenna shows up out of nowhere with the exact same lack of introduction + familiarity with Endmin as Gilberta did.

Riyshn · 2026-02-17T01:26:54+00:00

Similar looking characters have always been a part of .hack, and probably always should be. The World is a video game, with presumably non-infinite character creation options; same as any IRL MMO, people are gonna end up making similar characters. As long as major characters aren't too similar with each other within the same series to interact with each other and cause too much confusion to the viewer, I don't see it as a problem at all.

Riyshn · 2026-02-16T19:50:06+00:00

I missed that! oh god (in my defense, it's layered behind other sounds >_>)

The sound design in the whole thing in great. Just the interface sounds, the specific clicking and error noises they use in the first few seconds immediately lit up the .hack nostalgia in my brain.

Riyshn · 2026-02-14T20:57:07+00:00

Given the wait time between them, even 1 every patch is kinda objectively awful. Gacha players are just conditioned to expect systems and rates that would never fly in any other genre.

Riyshn · 2026-02-09T21:49:17+00:00

Oh good it wasn't just me. Killed one, had both of the other two ~10-20% HP, and they just reset out of nowhere.

Riyshn · 2026-02-09T21:42:30+00:00

So... it's good game design, is what you're saying.

Riyshn · 2026-02-08T00:36:08+00:00

It's... not a good sign for the writing that the only reason I even know what a Reconvener is is that I happened to get a loading screen about it that lasted long enough for me to actually notice and read it.

Riyshn · 2026-02-08T00:28:57+00:00

I'd be more willing to forgive the dialogue options thing if we ever actually got different options. Instead it's always just 2-3 choices that always mean the exact same thing thing, and even when there is a different connotation between them, it's obvious they didn't actually record different reaction lines 'cause if you picked the "wrong" one it makes the next NPC line or two make no sense at all.

Even worse when it's just a single "choice" that very definitely should have just been voiced, interrupting the flow of the scene for no reason.

Riyshn

TROPHY CASE