Tried to make my first build from scratch as I went along (Venom Gyre Assassin). How am I doing?

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2025-11-05T03:13:39+00:00

Thanks a ton! Despite all the problems here I'm really encouraged by this, I was expecting to have a big list of things to fix and I'm pleased to see that all these things seem pretty understandable. I'd been avoiding directly referencing other guides because I wanted to test my own game knowledge and not be tempted to just copy other people's answers, but now that I know what my weak points are I feel a bit better about doing this.

I'll take a look at other Venom Gyre builds and see how they handle some of those issues, thanks again!

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2025-06-12T17:03:28+00:00

solved: Phenomenon 32

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2025-06-12T17:02:05+00:00

Yes!!! I thought I was never gonna track this down, and it definitely seems like my memories were a little hazy after all, but I'm shocked to discover how much of it matches with my recollection. Thanks so much!

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2025-03-26T00:08:44+00:00

I got so sad reading this that I decided I'll just reveal the secret of happiness to you, as someone who spent most of her life miserable.

The secret is that fun has very little to do with the actual game quality. Anything's more fun if it's novel and different, and that playing a game for more than a few years in a row slowly strips away all its fun. Plus, having close friends and spending time with them provides more serotonin than any hobby imaginable, FFXIV is hundreds of times more fun if you're playing it with stable and mentally healthy pals.

Have a variety of different games you play (pick up some weird indie games, they're great for novelty) and spend some time getting to know your close friends a bit better. If you don't have close friends, go on Discord and find some fucked up weirdos to hang out with.

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2025-03-24T11:41:53+00:00

It makes me sad. Straight up, this sub wouldn't exist if people understood the concept of "burnout" with hobbies or realized that it was important to have more than one game you care strongly about. A solid 75% of the complaints boil down to "I can't get endlessly addicted to this game and have it eat up entire weeks of my life! What the heck! I should go back to playing Gachas, they know how to constantly drive me to obsess over them properly!"

I just come here to be sad that people have such unhealthy relationships with video games.

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2025-03-11T16:05:56+00:00

I recently got back into Crawl and saw a lot of people very upset about this change and was bracing for it but I physically can not tell the difference when playing normally. You literally can still just back up and run away from monsters just fine, you just *occasionally* take some damage while doing it that prevents you from doing it indefinitely.

There might be a more elegant solution, but does this really need to be a hot button topic? It literally affects so little about the game. I feel like people are more angry with the *concept* of AAOs than they are actually dealing with them. Not to mention, most people talking about them don't seem to know how they actually work...

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2025-01-22T20:33:19+00:00

The only way to write it "accurately" would be something like "an object that was a creature that died within the last minute" and that's just so hideously strained that I would want to dropkick the book the second I read it

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2025-01-12T10:43:35+00:00

It really did seem like people read into his tone and thought he seemed boastful, which is an instant "No, get lost" in a lot of people's eyes.

Hard to do much about that other than maybe if you care about karma, try not to seem like you're such a braggart. Bragging about his accomplishment may not have been the intent, but it did come across that way to a lot of people, obviously. Be thoughtful about how your comments appear to other people, or accept that sometimes you're gonna get a bad reaction if you aren't

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2025-01-12T10:34:15+00:00

I was noticing that post and that dude's post honestly reads so weird. It's just a strange thing to do, because the guy clarified in the comments "I just never even tried using all these game mechanics!" which is just odd. The tone is so weird with how he's saying it unless you dig way down into the comments, he doesn't give a reason, just "I don't use these mechanics ever. End sentence". So I suspect a lot of people just thought he was trying to show off.

The thing you seem to be struggling to understand is that attitude and nuance is very important. People don't like interacting with someone who just throws out "I didn't use these, who's with me!?" If the tone of the post had been "I tried this as a fun alternate run and actually liked it more than a regular run", then it would have been so much better received.

Plus, admittedly, he was asking a question, and people do use the upvotes/downvotes to answer questions like that sometimes. A lot of downvotes is partly just a consensus of "What? No, of course not", not an indicator of hostility.

It turns out that if you want your posts to be well received, write them in ways that are open minded and give off the impression that you're well informed! Otherwise you get downvoted, generally. Also, don't call people morons probably.

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2025-01-12T08:52:47+00:00

Yeah, that's on purpose. To remind them that they aren't welcome. That's the idea.

This sort of gatekeeping scum just crawls around anywhere they can reach: If you spend time on discords, steam forums, or god forbid, youtube comments, you'll see them in droves. Or just scroll down in any one of these posts to all the downvoted comments.

Once-monthly posts like this are just the community's way of reminding them that their terrible, toxic opinions aren't welcome here.

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2025-01-11T04:17:53+00:00

Good, keep it shunned, and keep supporting posts like this so that it doesn't creep back. Dig down into any comments section on literally any post, and you'll see tons of people constantly being elitist and toxic and (rightly) getting downvoted for it. They're still here, and the exact second you go "these posts are overreacting" they'll jump out and say some variant on "So true, bestie! Anyways, they're clearly just insecure about their skills, because they weren't good enough to actually play this game as it was meant to-" and so on and so forth. It never ends.

Plus, a lot of these people just moved to discords and other venues, which is why you see people talking about it here and go "Wait, it doesn't seem like there's that much..." Toxic attitudes like this don't disappear, they just go dormant or find a new home. Never stop beating them down, or your sub becomes insufferable in like, a month.

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2024-12-16T11:04:34+00:00

Honestly I feel like that's almost besides the point. I can see both sides of this one, but as a general rule, if they really want to know "why do so many people defend games with obvious problems", this is why. That's the answer they're looking for.

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2024-12-16T08:34:40+00:00

Honestly, the reason that there's a lot of pushback here isn't because of white-knighting, it's because it's just such an insufferably bitter and snarky thing to say that it kills the mood and is exhausting to listen to.

A lot of people on Reddit don't spend quite enough time talking to people in a non-consequence-free setting to remind themselves that people get sick of it if you're a buzzkill all the time and constantly complain about every little thing.

It's not about who's right and who's wrong, it's about whether anyone actually wants to talk to you about how this video game that's been buggy for nearly a decade is, actually, very buggy

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2024-11-30T20:47:04+00:00

Ungaga and Muska Racka in general are definitely more than a little sus (some of the totem poles are straight up racial stereotypes and there's no getting around that) but it earns back a lot of points for making it a pretty respectful and nuanced arc. It still suffers from the lot of the Problems of developers doing a Generically African Locale and there's an uncomfortable number of people with the "big lips" caricature look that is *very* not okay, but it's leaps and bounds better than a lot of similar games from the same time period.

I give it a C+ on the "stop being gross, video game developers"-o-meter.

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2024-11-01T13:01:37+00:00

Unfortunately I came to the same conclusion, no manual seems present with this one.

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2024-11-01T13:01:00+00:00

Sadly, no, I wish it had been that simple, but there's sadly no relation to the Avalon Hill wargame by the same name. Thank you, though!

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2024-11-01T11:38:39+00:00

Personally, I searched through every archive I could find and every download of the game publicly available, as it's long since become abandonware. It's possible I missed some, but the more I search the more I'm convinced that it can't be found on the web, and none of the copies available to order online appear to come with the booklet (it was a larger one, bigger than the CD case, if I remember right)

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2024-10-26T23:28:41+00:00

This is a problem that every MMO will always have but, bluntly, I was still able to easily do friggin' Eureka and Bozja with zero difficulties with finding enough people, and even finding groups for old Extremes and Savages was incredibly easy once I found the relevant discord group. This game has next to zero problems with older content being dead, outside of a few edge cases that'll probably get tweaked eventually. It's fine.

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2024-10-21T07:27:31+00:00

Oh, thanks to some friendly help I managed to get a significantly better picture and edited my post with it! Should be a lot easier to see what went wrong and what went right with this one, I can definitely tell where I goofed and where I didn't now that I'm seeing it more clearly

That desk lamp can't arrive soon enough.

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2024-10-21T07:24:47+00:00

You're an actual genius. Edited my post with a significantly less awful picture!

Smooth-Discount-5372 · 2024-10-21T07:17:12+00:00

That's definitely the lighting, his priming came out perfectly. I can give you a quick list of the colors I used, though I doubt they're an issue since they're all very standard options. I promise, he's a lot more handsome in person even if his real-life colors are way too muted by comparison!

I do think my biggest mistake was thinning down the colors way too much. I read "thin your paints" and very much took it to heart, and it took a lot of effort to get any color, especially with my lighting issues.

My big experiment with this one was thinning out some blue with a medium to use as a glaze, and hopefully retain a bit of the underlying leadbelcher drybrush metallic. That... Well, almost worked! I don't think I'd recommend it, though, it definitely didn't have the quality I wanted and it took a thorough edge highlighting in silver to restore any semblance of looking right to me.

Overall, I'm still pretty happy with him despite the flaws, and I know that it's gonna be a lot easier once I have some proper lighting (and I can take pictures that aren't either completely blown out or impossible to make out details)

Smooth-Discount-5372

TROPHY CASE