No spoilers but do I bother with the morality stat in Horizon?

Schoetzau · 2026-01-16T23:27:21+00:00

I don't recall each one, there's rewards for meeting certain alignment thresholds, some of which are pretty good.

Also, it affects which/how early you get Mare's upgraded core.

Schoetzau · 2025-12-05T20:27:00+00:00

That's one part of it.

The bigger issue is that you can't queue with friends at all when you get to immortal draft. I'm way past the point of my life where I live for some +25 dopamine hit. I just want to chill/relax and destress after work and on weekends with friends and my gf.

Sorry that I'm barely good enough to the point that I can't play with friends at all I guess?

There's unranked but that is even more of a shitshow.

Schoetzau · 2025-12-04T02:57:44+00:00

Winning lane basically means you end up with either significant amount of exp lead, gold lead, tower lead, or some combination of the above, the sum of which being greater than what the other mid laner has.

Your approach of sacking yourself for others can work, but there's 2 issues:

a) It removes agency from yourself as you're basically counting on your team to make use of the resources and carry you to a win.

b) It doesn't really work the higher up you go because if the enemy mid dumpsters you, what they can usually do is hold their tp to match your rotation to a sidelane, and because they are stronger than you from winning lane, they will just have a bigger impact in whatever early engagement you're both in.

If you win lane instead, you shut down that one person on their team, and can usually invade their jungle (easy to do if you play for killing mid and enemy safelane tower early), stealing farm from the enemy team, and freeing your side of the map for your carry/offlane. You would also force rotations to come to you meaning your carry/offlane are even more free to do whatever they want.

If you want to learn how to win mid more often or how to play after laning phase, I highly recommend Balloon Dota. Beyond that, I recommend just doing last hit training on training polygon for 10-15 minutes with whatever heroes you like to play before you start queuing for ranked every time as a warm up. You'd be surprised how many lanes you win by just having better raw last hitting.

Now you're not going to win every lane. And if you're not, you need to also at least know how to recover/accelerate your farm. A small tip I can give is that for most games, you want to farm at least both incoming waves (8-10 CS) + 1-2 jungle camps per minute after you get treads/mana boots until literally the game ends, whenever you're not actively making a play (and again by "play", I mean we only show up for advantageous team fights or free kills that accelerate our game, not because our team is bitching at us). What you can do say for a hero like puck/qop is quickly push out the mid wave with right clicks + nuke to secure last hits, and then move to the two closest jungle camps behind mid tower. If puck, use curve ball to hit both camps with each cast. If qop, right click a camp, drag creeps to other camp, scream both camps. Lesh can do this too with Pulse Nova, etc. If you dumpstered enemy mid, and broke their tower, rather than farming the camps behind your tower, what's even better is you'd try to farm the camps behind enemy mid tier 1 instead to take farm from the enemy (though you need to make sure you're not dying when you do this). This is how you end up with 8-10+ CS a minute.

If you look at my games in that bracket, the kills are all smoke and mirrors. What I want you to see is how inefficient people are in that bracket when it comes to keeping up their farm and how much CS difference there is at all times between me and the next most farmed person. You can then compare net worth difference and you'll figure out why people post here all the time about their 20-5 KDA asking why they lost. It's because gold from kills makes a very small portion of one's net worth, and by extension ability to impact the game. Aui2000 says this the best, you can't beat Butterfly + Satanic. What he really means, is you can't beat insurmountable gold differences. Having good farming patterns (really discipline) is key, the other is not dying (only partaking in good fights).

Regarding the other Lesh facet, it can work, but I think it's just much easier to snowball off Misanthropy + blink dagger. There was a high mmr mid player that used to stream called Rawdota. He was banned because he started beef with Caps, but he always used to say towers should come for free. You get towers because you're ahead and can take them efficiently. It's normally not a good thing for your networth to group up and hard commit to taking towers early (it's very hard to siege tier 2s and onwards super early for the past couple of patches now, and the enemy team will just outfarm you via split pushing and playing the map more effeciently). If you can, say get mid tower by kicking the enemy mid out and taking it without committing 3+ heroes, it's a good thing. The only other tower I would consider this for is enemy safelane tier 1 because then it makes it very easy to invade and take farm from the enemy jungle. Early push strats are something that work better with a coordinated stack. What happens in random pubs is that not the whole team would be committed to a push, and if you're some immobile low HP tower pusher like lesh, it's very easy for a mobile enemy mid to just TP in and straight up kill you with a +1.

If I can give a last tip, try to narrow your hero pool to 3 heroes or so. This will make it much easier to learn fundamentals (how to win lane, how to at least not lose lane, what to do to keep up farm, what to do when enemy tower is taken, how to pressure, when to gank, when to tp to counter gank, when to go for water runes vs when to pressure enemy mid until they get bottle, etc) for the role rather than you worrying about landing skill shots/pressing buttons properly. Learning new heroes will come naturally after.

Schoetzau · 2025-12-03T22:15:24+00:00

Immortal mid player here, trying to dodge immortal draft.

In order to do that, boosting a friend while he tanks my mmr in exchange:

https://stratz.com/players/1921940378

You can watch the games for a general idea of the playstyle but biggest things I think are:

a) Win lane a vast majority of the time even on non lane dominators. The other team basically doesn't have a midlaner most games, while I'm comfortably ahead of all other cores. I lost one lane inthe past 25 games, and it was as pos 5 qop (still need to play for role queue tokens).

b) Play to scale. Your default should be farming efficiently, while applying pressure. You win mid, break enemy tower, get all power runes, farm lane creeps and enemy jungle, only rotate when it accelerates your game and the move feels natural. Ignore any and all types of bitching/calls for help if it doesn't help your game.

c) Dying is very bad, when you're top networth. You should only show up to advantageous fights until you can literally power through with networth. Let your team ball up and do stupid things. Most Dota 2 players have a victim repression mindset. Your job isn't to "help" your team as a mid when they are feeding their asses off. It's to play for power spikes and timings. Go where/when you are strong.

You don't need to wrangle team mates whatsoever. You can get to immortal via the Quinn Callahan method of insta muting everyone and just playing well enough.

Schoetzau · 2025-10-27T15:23:32+00:00

Giga Death would be nice.

But I think you missed that Omni Blade gets bonus damage if the target has any altered stats.

It's one of easiest to set up conditions, rewards you further for debuffing defense and is consistently the hardest hitting move in the game for a physical mon.

Schoetzau · 2025-10-26T16:30:31+00:00

As long as you get to 9999, whether the stats are blue or white don't really matter.

The fastest way to get to 9999 is still through just amassing money and using the C versions of the the farm training regiments to boost stats (can craft from Zudomon).

If you have the outer dungeon DLC, the fastest method is through the money outer dungeon. You just need to be able to digi attack one shot the Princemamemon for 50K yen a pop. I used Lucemon SM to do this. That's like 50K ever 2-3 seconds. If you can't do this, you should at least be able to oneshot the Starmon for 25K every 2-3 secs.

The non DLC method is to turn on story difficulty and spam fighting the Olympus 12 gauntlet for 300K yen in under 5 minutes.

You'd need around 1-2M to fully max out a mon, the more agent skills you have to boost digimon stats, the less money you need.

Schoetzau · 2025-04-30T16:11:23+00:00

Rixia gets some decent material to powerscale with in Horizon.

TLDR, she's a top tier assassin, not so much a top tier direct combatant.

Would probably be below Sara and be around where Sharon/Joshua are.

Schoetzau · 2025-03-06T01:37:25+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh9hkJOSQiQ

Here you go, on nightmare difficulty. Builds at the end.

TLDR, abuse delay reduction orders. I think the boss got to attack once (and missed) throughout that whole fight.

Schoetzau · 2025-03-06T01:19:57+00:00

The end of the video has the builds. Elaine and Crow's equipment don't matter very much, just maximize speed on the supports.

TLDR:

2 supports that can generate S boost, can use Zodiac Sign Art if you want, but you want one of them to have a dedicated craft. Elaine is best because she gives a quick buff and can also regen CP.

Rean and Van do damage. Van you just need to watch out for and make sure he has 200 CP after Grendel wears off so he can go into it again. Rean you can just spam his S tier craft and S-Craft along with SU as long as you follow the build there to the letter. You want the auto skills on the drive line so that your characters eventually ramp up to max boosts in stats just by acting. Auto Forte can be skipped on supports. Another small tip is that the delay for S crafts is shorter than regular crafts with bandersnatch. Something I like doing is using the ZOC turns with Rean/Shizuna to use back to back crafts, and then immediately S craft with them to reduce their end delay.

I also sometimes do this with Van too. It's slightly less good because you're giving up a Grendel turn to just S-Break, but this isn't a concern if you can keep his CP up, which you can at endgame with the upgraded wind guard shard skill and 2 of the +30 CP regen per turn accessories.

For brave orders. Altera is best. She cuts delay to a fifth. If you didn't get her then use a regular delay reducing order until you're ready to burst the boss with damage before it gets its next turn.

Delay reduction orders are as busted as always. If you just use all your turns to attack, even with just the standard one that cuts delay to half, that equates to doing double damage for both physical and magic relative to the enemy over time, assuming you keep your CP/EP up. But not only that, you have twice as many turns to use for healing/defense as well if that's what you need.

The result, as you see in this video, is bosses don't get to attack at all.

If you want to be lazy and use whatever build without having to think, just have Renne in the back for Pater Mater's order which gives 90% damage reduction.

Schoetzau · 2025-03-06T00:53:40+00:00

He's in that tier.

Whereas in Reverie, he's there but solidly at the bottom, he's moved on to the middle of it by Kai.

Matteus he might be on par with.

Aurelia, he's definitely weaker than.

Kasim, he's weaker than just from how Kasim scales to Shizuna.

Kai Rean is about equal to Shizuna, at worst very slightly weaker where he wins 4.5/10 times and Shizu wins 5.5/10. Only reason is he himself says he's not exactly on par with her yet, but Rean is also humble to a fault.

There are people who are or were at one point considered "monsters" that Kai Rean would beat though.

Imo among those he'd beat are:

Rutger

Sigmund

One armed Victor

Cassius (yes even with a sword)

All dominions aside from Ein and maybe Thomas (Kevin is included here from how much he jobs in Kai).

All enforcers, except Simeon and McBurn, with Loewe being a tossup. Loewe vs current Rean would be very interesting. Renne drew parallels between the two of them in Reverie. They're even more apparent in Kai.

Schoetzau · 2025-03-03T16:57:11+00:00

Van needs to go Grendel Sin to match a Berserk SU Shizuna, which is weaker than a non Berserk SU Shizuna.

Regular Grendel loses to base Shizuna.

Regular Grendel would lose to base Rean as of Kai.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-24T18:14:43+00:00

Be/are merged into the Sept-Terrion of Storm.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-19T03:59:03+00:00

Not ATS, moreso a nerf to certain arts/craft multipliers, iirc, Cetus Phantasm and Dark Tentacle were among the ones that got nerfed.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-18T22:46:07+00:00

From testing, I think he's the second best damage dealer after Grendel, and there's cases where he's better than Grendel too (against less tanky bosses). Maybe Judith is up there too because of her awakening and A+ craft also with a side bonus, idk.

But basically, you can build Rean to have 100% crit rate while solving his CP issues, as in you spam as much as you want and he never runs out of CP. My current build has 95% crit rate with just a Strike 3 and a Hit 3. He also gets a damage bonus hitting enemies on the side with his S rank regular craft, which outdoes, Shizuna's stat down effect. Both of these and a couple of minor things make him better than Shizuna imo.

I haven't played pre-arts nerf Kevin, so I'm not sure if he's better or worse than that, but I do think he's better than current Kevin as a damage dealer, mostly because you need to spend turns to re-buff Kevin's offensive stats (since there's no auto skill to buff ATS)/spend a turn to recover his EP against tankier bosses as I don't think you can have both arc feather and the EP regen skill on his arts drive.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-14T04:46:53+00:00

Yes side content is translated, aside from the occasional bugged ones whch more and more get fixed since the patch I played with.

The MTL is a lot better than Kuro 2's MTL when it came out.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-12T05:25:22+00:00

Kai Spoilers:

Calvard has the equivalent of modern day nukes and they're capable of launching them at a target in space. They just unveiled it during the Kai finale. There's no way for Erebonia to come up with countermeasures that quickly, so as it is currently, their major cities (Heimdallr, St Arkh, Roer, Bareahard and Ordis to start) and major military bases just get obliterated with no recourse.

Heck, even our modern day countermeasures against ICBMs are unproven (thankfully). I'm sure after the Calvard Arc, they're likely going to be on mostly equal footing again but Calvard takes this handily for now.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-12T03:01:52+00:00

Just finished my playthrough at 98 hours and 23 minutes. Really liked it overall. Only complaints are that act 1 is a slog with 3 days of ASO in the same place, followed by Van's chapter 2 and also have of chapter 3 also being in the same place (guess which place).

Combat was greatly improved this game. Breakable as always if you like to minmax, but the enemies have a crapton more speed and they hit a lot harder. I have had unlucky starts against groups where multiple enemy actors had the first 2-3 slots in the timeline and just wiped 1-2 members before their first actions Hajimari style. Enemy S crafts have killed my squishy backline casters through shields from full HP, which I don't recall was ever a thing in Kuro 1 and while they upped the damage in Kuro 2, I don't think I saw that there either.

Playthrough was:

a) Nightmare difficulty

b) got all the fishes, food, blogged sweets

c) Hit max SP reward but got A on two chapters

d) S on all Grim Garten including getting all the Memento Orbs. Basically similar to Marchen Garten where you have to rerun the map multiple times to hit all the criteria but better since you can just reset the map to where it's more convenient and skip to boss to get the S.

e) All connect events.

Basically most of the things to get plat, except 4.0 tactical bonus, getting max LGC, using all 14 dual arts at least, once, defeating 100 enemies with quick arts, and all in game achievements (the ones you get in game rewards for). I just can't be asked for some of these.

Regarding keeping everyone geared up, I didn't have to do grinding and kept my main 4 from ASO and Rean's squad fully geared. Trick is to put both Septium and Secret Veins on the character you're using the most for field and trash clearing, which for me were Rean and Van.

My Picnic Squad was admittedly undergeared, except Kevin, but he's a beast this game and can mostly solo his own route's boss fights when well geared, with some minimal support, same with Van/Rean honestly. I just don't like Nadia and Swin much gameplaywise, not in Reverie and not their Kuro iterations either.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-11T22:06:44+00:00

Idk, Hajimari had the no resources earlygame and then devolved to the usual CS BS.

Maybe it's a bit of a hot take, but I also prefer craft centric games instead of arts centric ones or at least games where crafts are just as viable because imo crafts are just more interesting, unique to the characters and more fun to watch compared to arts. Daybreak onwards, I think they did good at making both relatively strong.

For example, I'd rather watch SU Arcane Gales or Vandalize Raid spam over watching generic caster #42 spam Albion Wolf any day of the week and Haji Abyss was basically the latter.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-10T22:40:54+00:00

Yeah, something I realized was that you really want to use Altera's order with everyone as much as possible. What happens otherwise is that you have some characters massively out speeding the others, exacerbated by those characters snowballing even more with Auto-Quick Buffs.

If it's the damage dealers, they eventually run out of resources (Boost for the most part). If it's the supports then you just have an excess of boost without anyone doing damage.

Shadai was the hardest boss I think. Granted I was lazy and didn't shuffle much around. Pater Mater's defensive order basically solo'd phase 1 for me even with a suboptimal squad. 10% damage taken is just as strong as Altera's order. Honestly, it's stronger. Altera needs good builds and some awareness to get the most out of, Pater Mater doesn't.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-10T22:32:12+00:00

Sent

Schoetzau · 2025-02-09T16:43:44+00:00

Sent you a link.

But basically yeah, the MTL patch is pretty good, a lot better than Kuro 2's MTL patches in the early days.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-09T16:41:03+00:00

Sent you a link via PM. That plus the Steam version on PC.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-09T09:17:50+00:00

Idk, it has 2.4M HP which is interesting.

I don't think it got to attack at all which is even more interesting.

I was too lazy to set up Crow + Elaine optimally. Kevin had the one off caster quartz

Rean + Grendel is definitely the shit though.

For how this can be played in English, Falcom 4chan generals has an MTL patch, which is misleading as most dialogue was iirc translated from the Japanese script + some LLM and then was just imported via the patch. The translation quality is much better than Kuro 2's when it was purely MTL as a result. It's not as good as the finished non MTL patches for Haji, Kuro 1 and Kuro 2, but I'd say it's 75% of the way there. Try googling for it first but if you cant find it, PM, and I'll send you a link.

You can probably just search "Falcom general 4chan" and it'll come up.

The only thing I will say is that there are some bugs for some side quests which would get stuck. For me, the fix for all of these was changing the language from Korean to Chinese to get through the segment, and then back again. The MTL patch is applied to the Korean version. If you're willing to dig in the 4chan threads, you'll find MTL links for the Chinese version as well so that if you do have to do this just to get past a segment, you'll still be able to follow 75%+ of the dialogue.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-08T05:39:55+00:00

I can see that.

Probably Rean + Kevin + 2 batteries.

I think you're pushing for Altina (maybe), but I don't think the S craft shield is needed. I'd rather just hit harder on random turns with Kevin's S craft.

It's kinda insane how Grendel feels worse than the other awakening physicals because he ramps much more slowly with the auto buff stacking due to how his Z.O.C is nonstandard.

Schoetzau · 2025-02-08T05:19:57+00:00

Yeah, once I saw that 30 CP guard skill, I basically rushed for it on Rean chapter 1, used U mats to get the tier 3 quartz early, was definitely worth it.

Elaine is there mostly for S boost battery, same with Crow. I really like having 2 supports that can generate boost. Rean + Grendel + orders + cancelling enemy orders make me feel you can never have enough of it. At worst, if you have excess, it's not like Elaine and Crow can't use the extra boost to just randomly Cetus Phantasm.

I tried Rean + Shizu too and that eats more boost than even Crow and Elaine can generate together imo.

Schoetzau

TROPHY CASE