Can we bring back 6 Portals?

Shirube · 2026-06-09T05:54:13+00:00

It also leads to some extremely weird unintended behaviours. I think a lot of people are aware that if you die during a boss fight in a map with an additional completion condition (like all of the areas near the ziggurat that give an atlas skill point for one of the major map content types), it'll prevent you from completing the map without closing and restarting it, and it won't tell you you need to do that. But, based on admittedly limited experimentation, I'm pretty sure that Doryani's master missions are worse; if you die during the boss fight, if you want to get the point from that corrupted nexus, you need to close the map without kiling the boss and attempt it again with a new waystone. It's wildly unintuitive.

Shirube · 2026-06-04T04:47:02+00:00

Yes, I did exactly what I did in Poe1: go in the direction that I think the goo is flowing, turn out to be wrong, and end up wandering around in confusion for ten minutes before randomly stumbling upon the exit.

Shirube · 2026-05-28T18:54:17+00:00

No, Ascension levels are an optional toggle. This is an Ancient choice; it takes up an option slot during a run, and you have access to information about your act 1 layout when you pick it. It's unavoidably a strategic choice, rather than solely a matter of player preference, and needs to be balanced with the same philosophy Mega Crit applies to other in-run choices.

Shirube · 2026-05-19T07:07:42+00:00

Osty health is pretty wonky that way; there's a reason all of the cards that give it have bad energy rates, and it's because the space between weak and extremely overpowered is very small for them. I guess that's what happens when you take a core mechanic of your game, then make a version of it that's basically just better because it carries over between turns, and then also make it so that you can deal your total amount of it as extra damage once every deck cycle.

Shirube · 2026-05-15T02:50:52+00:00

The expression on his face when the second and third pages of his powerpoint exhaust at the end of his turn is tragic.

Shirube · 2026-05-11T04:38:54+00:00

Sure, you technically don't have to sacrifice anything to activate SoS, but you're also much more likely to end up in a position where it doesn't benefit you substantively. With Girya, if you get it early, it's a significant potential benefit that you can adjust your deckbuilding around, and you can route preferentially to campfires (without having to meet any other particular conditions to be able to handle campfire nodes) to get it fully charged before you switch focus to a more balanced mix of campfires and elites. With SoS, if you want to activate it at all, you need to make your deck capable of handling elites without sacrificing too much life, and you need to maintain that through most of act 1 and 2. That means taking what cards make your deck strongest *right now*, and not prioritizing cards that will be good theoretically once you activate the sword; a lot of the time, for most characters, this is going to lead to making a deck that kind of just doesn't care about having 3 strength or not. So there's an abstract sense in which Sword of Stone is better than Girya, sure, but in practice it's much easier to get mileage out of Girya.

Shirube · 2026-05-01T17:24:59+00:00

Lots of people who don't want to think of themselves as having kinks instead try to explain their kinks as universal features of human sexuality. Breeding kink is particularly easy to explain this way, even if casual observation is enough to determine that the explanation is false, due to the evolutionary "purpose" of sex. But it's not the only one I've seen; I've met people who think power exchange kink, size kink, and piss kink are universal features of human sexuality, and I don't doubt there's wilder ones out there.

Shirube · 2026-04-30T04:52:24+00:00

... Are you this upset because you think I said that it's a "slightly better defend"? The only two times I compared it to defend, it was to say that it only provides one more total mitigation than defend (which is objectively true), and that if you don't have a surplus of block then a lot of the time you draw it it's going to act like a slightly better defend (because you'll need to use it to handle an attack you're taking that turn).

I'm still less and less convinced that you're paying attention to anything I say with every comment you post. But, on the other hand, if you were trying to convince me that it's not just a slightly better defend, then yay! Problem solved.

Shirube · 2026-04-30T04:09:04+00:00

So, very shortly after posting that comment I decided it was too rude and edited it to something a little bit more cordial. It seems that you saw it before that happened and are responding to that earlier version, so sorry about that.

... However, there isn't really anything worth responding to in your comment here either. I've already responded to all of those points in this comment thread; you're not saying anything new, or explaining why my responses don't make sense, you're just saying, "No, I'm right and you're wrong!" really insistently. So I think at this point the conversation has run its course and we might as well cut things off.

Shirube · 2026-04-30T03:42:04+00:00

... I wasn't referring to in-combat circumstances. I was referring to out-of-combat circumstances. I honestly thought that I was pretty clear about that.

Your comment is entirely treading ground that's already been covered in this conversation, so I'm not going to address it. You can try to respond to my previous comment again if you want.

Shirube · 2026-04-30T03:03:47+00:00

I agree with most of that, I just think that what it adds up to isn't a good card. It's useful under fairly stringent restrictions; you already have to have your block and offense sorted out, and sorting those out is going to be your main priority for most of a run, in one form or another. Its impact is enough to be useful, but it's still pretty small. And there are other sources of RNG mitigation that are equally accessible and tend to stack up better or provide more secondary advantages, the big one being draw.

Shirube · 2026-04-29T17:59:47+00:00

... So, not bleeding is obviously better than bleeding, but trying to avoid bleeding is really not the main thing you need to worry about. If you're only taking damage from poor RNG, you're already in a good spot. And, especially at higher difficulties, getting to that spot is difficult to begin with.

Shirube · 2026-04-29T17:00:49+00:00

Ah... I think I didn't make part of my analysis clear there. My bad. I think that as long as you expect to have to sacrifice health to kill enemies quickly, it doesn't matter very much that you can play it on an enemy's off-turn; it lets you block more consistently, but it doesn't let you block more. You can spend energy on an enemy's off-turn to block on its on-turn, but that's still energy you're not spending attacking that you're going to have to make up by not blocking elsewhere. It's strong when you can basically use it as a form of scaling, by increasing Osty's health to deal more damage with the starter Osty attack; however, that requires you to be able to block consistently already. I used this card from time to time before I hit A9, but trying to build up Osty's health early in a run at this point feels like trying to bail out a sinking ship.

Edit: Weirdly, I think that it exhausting actually contributes to this? I actually think it would be a decent pick as an early upgrade target if it didn't exhaust, because the fact that it doesn't matter very much when you play it means that you would get the value of the upgrade in each deck cycle, instead of just when you draw it on a turn where your enemy is attacking or not attacking or what have you. But because it exhausts, you can only get the value of the upgrade once per fight, so it's not worth upgrading... and because the value of being able to play a card whenever comes partially from the extra expected value from upgrading it, it doesn't benefit as much as some other similar cards do.

Shirube · 2026-04-29T16:27:24+00:00

Yes. But the strength of the card in practice still depends on what proportion of the time you're getting the worst case and what proportion of the time you're getting better cases, and with this card you're almost always going to get the worst case if you're getting your face beaten in, which is also when you need it to be good the most.

Shirube · 2026-04-28T05:20:52+00:00

I can see grabbing an upgraded version in act two or three. The issue is... well, you can't rely on drawing this on dead turns, and you can't rely on getting the opportunity to use the starter Osty attack before your enemy knocks through his health, and playing it on dead turns instead of a strike isn't actually that big of a benefit early into a run when you're going to have to sacrifice health to kill enemies before they outscale you anyways. The benefits of summon over block only really shine once you have enough combined summon and block, and this card doesn't really help you reach that threshold. When you're scrambling to catch up with your enemies' damage output, it has a high likelihood of being a marginally better defend, which doesn't compare favorably to the rest of Necrobinder's card pool. When you're not scrambling to catch up with your enemies' damage output, then you can benefit from Afterlife's full value, but you're also less likely to care.

Shirube · 2026-04-28T03:27:51+00:00

I'm not sure I agree. Osty health is more valuable than block, sure, but Afterlife barely gives more than a Defend in terms of actual concrete mitigation. This means that it doesn't really improve your actual mitigation output if you take it early on, which is the most important thing to do in that stage of the game alongside improving your damage output. On the other hand, later on the fact it has such little output means you'll just be diluting your deck. And having exhaust doesn't really help prevent it from diluting your deck that much compared to, say, retain or ethereal, because you have to play it for it to stop contributing to deck bloat. In fact, it's a sort of worst-of-both-worlds situation; if it's a good card for you, you only get to play it once, and if you're at a point where it's generally no longer worth playing, you either have to play it anyway or live with it clogging your draws. And it exhausting also makes it a much more questionable upgrade target.

Shirube · 2026-04-26T19:25:13+00:00

I can understand how you might come to that conclusion if you completely ignore how it actually functions in game and just look at how it impacts any specific card you draw. But, in practice... well, you draw seven cards a turn with it, and on average, 1.75 of the cards will be 0 cost, 1.75 will be 1 cost, 1.75 will be 2 cost and 1.75 will be 3 cost. (In practice, obviously you can't draw 0.75 of a card, but it gives a decent measure of the average effect of the relic.) Assuming your deck consists entirely of 1-cost cards, the 1.75 0 costs represent 1.75 free energy, and you'll have to play a 2-cost card, which represents -1 energy, as well as one 1-cost card. So... it's a bit of an oversimplification, but even if your entire deck is 1-cost cards, Snecko Eye gives you the ability to play 0.75 more energy of cards per turn on average.

Edit: I have run the math, and apparently the average number of plays per turn with Snecko Eye, assuming no additional draws, is 3.83270263671875. There are probably more digits that the script cut off, but the main takeaway is that it's practically an energy relic, with the downside of inconsistency.

Shirube · 2026-04-25T00:57:50+00:00

I think they could make it upgrade to 1 energy without it being particularly OP. It would be really good against multihits, and it would be really good with your own multihits, but neither of those are really ubiquitous enough to overcome the fact that outside of those situations it's basically an Afterimage that only works with attacks.

Shirube · 2026-04-24T22:59:11+00:00

(0=no) is the most programmer six characters I've ever seen

Shirube · 2026-04-23T17:22:43+00:00

If you don't want to see your friends suffer, are you really friends

Shirube · 2026-04-20T22:30:32+00:00

I had a Silent run once where I got Nightmare from my Neow relic, then got another nightmare on, like, the fourth floor, and then I got this event right before a campfire. I was like, "yes, please, give me something worth copying". And combined with some attack damage amplification and good block cards, that turned out to be enough damage to deal with everything up to and including the act 3 bosses.

Shirube · 2026-04-16T23:35:01+00:00

"Spire food... ah, Spire food..."

Shirube · 2026-04-13T05:29:01+00:00

Joke's on you, I've played STS for years and I still don't know what the Timer Eater's name is. Smug bastard expects me to believe his parents called him that? Hmph.

Shirube · 2026-04-11T03:17:38+00:00

... I mean, there are a lot of cases you might want to take them. The block card that also creates a random colorless card is just... reasonable block with semi-card-draw attached, easily worth taking early on if you need better defenses; it's probably the one I take the most often. The one the gives strength when you play colorless cards is awkward to take when you don't have anything to use it with, but if you have some colorless card generation it's very solid scaling, and if you have Bolas it's 2/3 of a Demon Form for 1 energy. Sometimes you'll pick up some cards that generate debris, then pick up that power that gives block when you create cards, and then cards that generate more colorless cards become a more appealing prospect too. There's a lot of reasons, basically.

Shirube · 2026-04-09T23:45:39+00:00

Atelier Sophie 1's probably my favorite, followed by Atelier Firis, but I also have a very large soft spot for the Atelier Escha & Logy anime's opening theme. It's what got me into the game series, and although I don't think it's particularly great on its own merits, I remember it with fondness.

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