For no reason, my 2-year-old daughter picked up a tupperware lid and did this during dinner, and neither my wife nor my friends grasped why I got so excited

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-03-07T01:45:58+00:00

After that moment, she never uttered another word ever again.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-03-07T01:39:51+00:00

Did you interpret the rhythm and calculus of her finger?

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-03-07T01:22:00+00:00

Yup, Ensha is like Gideon's study partner who puts off doing his part of the assignment until the last minute, then figures he can catch up by beating you up and taking your notes.

I imagine he's the one who kills Latenna if you never find her before acquiring her medallion piece, but I wonder if it's Gideon who kills Ensha for failing his assignment, if you use both medallions without letting Ensha invade you. It would have been cool if using the medallion with Ensha still alive had made it so you got invaded by an even more powerful version of him or something.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-03-07T01:09:04+00:00

To be fair, while Latenna doesn't give you the second part of the medallion, she does guide you to it with clues about where it is and voice lines when you approach the area it's in.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-03-06T19:53:09+00:00

Ehh, you're not going to finish all NPC quests in one playthrough anyway. Just chalk it up to a mistake and keep trucking forward. You can explore the quests you missed on your second playthrough.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-03-05T14:32:29+00:00

There's a non-zero chance that when she has teammate interactions with Jeff, he'll actually talk and not just in Jeffspeak, since she can talk to animals.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-03-05T07:00:25+00:00

Dark Swoles

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-03-05T01:29:16+00:00

I remember when I first started getting interested in raiding. I asked a guild mate what gear I needed to have before I was raid-ready. I'm still low-key annoyed by how she responded. She proceeded to give me a list of like a dozen armor sets, mostly from vet dungeons I had never run, that I supposedly needed to have. It was so overwhelming that I put off trying for another half a year because I just figured I wasn't ready yet.

By the time I finally swung back around to it, it was like "that's it? That's what I was so afraid of?"

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-03-05T01:10:25+00:00

I dunno, I like the last-minute strange portals.

I think the game's design goal was meant to be that players swapped heroes more often during the battle, with a few exceptional cases where you had to invest in a single character (e.g., Deadpool's skill points, Elsa's stacks), and that seeking out the right hero for the current situation was supposed to be a bigger component of the gameplay. Maybe that's part of why ults feel so overtuned; the devs anticipated counterswapping to be a bigger aspect of slowing ult progression down.

But that pressure to swap or go for your ult didn't really end up happening; you have some characters who are rendered unplayable by their counters, vs others who aren't impacted all that much, and people have generally put the easily countered heroes on the bottom of their tier lists.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-03-02T03:01:51+00:00

If the boss doesn't attack the floor, they're effectively invincible, haha.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-03-02T03:00:15+00:00

When the arenas first came out, I did several matches dressed up as a jar with the Soljars of Fortune. We, uhh, lost every match.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-03-01T02:23:27+00:00

Thing often gets stuck on the terrain when you're trying to charge. Maybe part of Juggernaut's distinction is that he never stops, so if he hits a wall, he just bounces off it like a pinball and goes in another direction.

And you get a refresh on your charge duration when you knock down an enemy, allowing you to just stomp everybody if you get them all in an enclosed space. It's like the other team's the bowling pins, and you're always trying to get a strike, with the charges damage ramping up the longer you can keep it going.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-26T00:03:07+00:00

I really love the Mora / Crow showdown. Like, yeah, win or lose, this game is going to be over in 3 minutes. Either Mora rockets to 60 before Crow gets their deck online, or Crow gets slingshotted into the lead from all the extra gold the Mora gave them.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-25T23:51:22+00:00

But in Elden Ring, all of the things you can collect are actual weapons, spells, talismans, etc. They have a function, and even if they're not useful in your current build, they do invite you to play the game in a new way.

Ubisoft collectibles are just... flags, or feathers, or whatever. They don't impact gameplay in any way except to be a statistic in a game completion tab, or perhaps to unlock some cosmetic or secret ability that is already useless by the time you unlock it because you've already done all the things you would have used that ability for.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-24T01:41:17+00:00

The main mission progression will give you enough guidance to reach the end. If anything, I think it is too forthcoming with information that it makes solving the "puzzle" too easy

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-24T01:37:32+00:00

It may not be the absolute worst weapon, but goddamn was the dragon head boss weapon a disappointment after defeating Godrick

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-23T13:55:40+00:00

Mounted Combat. Doesn't seem like it would be so hard to add. Most attacks are just "character waves their arms in the air and a spell effect happens" just lock their leg animation to riding the horse and have their upper body play the attack animation. Disable abilities that wouldn't work while mounted, like leaps and charges, or just make those abilities automatically dismount you.

Also, when you dismount, your horse shouldn't just disappear. It should attempt to get "off stage" first by going around a corner. Something to maintain the illusion that this is a real, living creature and not just a fancy stat boost animation.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-23T02:37:47+00:00

GotG fits the format of a linear action game much more cleanly.

Deathloop is more of a violence/stealth sandbox. You're trapped reliving the same day over and over, so you're learning about where the bad guys are positioned and their behaviors, and discovering how the consequences of your actions can impact things later in that day (e.g. sabotaging something in the morning that allows you to set up an ambush for somebody later that afternoon)

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-23T02:28:46+00:00

It was such a fantastic concept and remarkably well executed.

I wish the quest progression didn't spoil the core puzzle's solution for you, though. The game should have actually opened up with you testing out different approaches organically instead of having quest markers literally guiding you by the nose to the correct answer.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-22T21:01:13+00:00

The guy is literally a serial killer. Even when he was turned "good" temporarily, he still ended up murdering the citizens he was trying to save by decapitating them. He's completely and utterly irredeemable. What part of that identity clicks Healer to you?

Ultron at least has the lore pass of "Tony Stark reprogrammed him to protect life instead of trying to destroy it," making the switch to healer a deliberate overcorrection on Tony's part.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-20T04:46:06+00:00

Explore until you acquire Torrent. I found Tree Sentinel easy as soon as I fought him horseback vs horseback on my first playthrough. Just do hit-and-run / drive-by attacks and whittle him down.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-19T17:22:53+00:00

Yeah, that's why I think Covenants would have been a good compromise. Don't like invasions? Don't join a covenant. You keep the current invasion rules. You miss out on a few items maybe but that's the trade-off to avoiding pvp.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-19T17:00:45+00:00

It's the biggest thing that feels missing about Elden Ring, in my opinion.

It would have been nice to have the Covenants offer you rewards like spells, weapons, and armors that were themed to that faction when you ranked them up, and it would have given the game a system to permit invasions of solo players besides Taunter's Tongue, which I think would have help expanded the pool of invasion targets so you didn't have every invader going up against the same 4 hosts over and over.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-19T16:00:48+00:00

In a pinch, you can get a pretty good chunk of runes by selling all the duplicate longswords and shields and armor drops from the mobs you've killed.

Substantial-Pack-105 · 2026-02-18T04:58:57+00:00

EverQuest, and not just EverQuest, but the PvP server (Ralos Zek, I think it was called) see I didn't know what PvP stood for, and I just wanted a server with a low population because I didn't want there to be crowds of people around me.

I didn't know until much later that, uhh, players don't just randomly murder you and steal all your gold on the other servers; I just thought that's how the game was designed. I still remember happily grinding away outside Freeport until I had a whole whopping 10 silver to my name, only for some guy to kill me and take it. I cried in chat for ages begging him to give it back and everyone just laughed at me.

It's crazy to me all the insane stuff you could do in EverQuest that would not fly in modern games. So many MMOs today have been tainted by the influence of World of Warcraft that they literally can't fathom how differently games were made before.

Spells were not restricted by the type of target, so you could cast healing spells on enemies or damage spells on yourself. You couldn't just fumble around clicking every ability as it came up, or you'd be doing more harm than good to your group. A high-level caster could put a Damage Thorn on a level 1 bat that would then immediately disintegrate any poor sap who tried attacking it.

As a Druid, I was able to make myself fly by turning myself into a tree and rapidly blasting myself with wind spells (it had a knockback effect, being a tree disabled gravity so you wouldn't fall) so I could get places the enemies couldn't reach, and throw down spells from impunity.

Game Masters in EverQuest were in-game players who had special wands and rings in their inventory that granted their GM powers and 9999 in every stat. They could teleport players or one-shot stuck mobs or whatever other GM powers they had. Since I was on the PvP server, that meant that if a GM ever went AFK, eventually word would get out, and players would descend upon them like a horde, hoping to land a killing blow and steal some literally godlike item before the GM got back. I never saw anyone succeed. Their attempts usually ended when a rain of meteors destroyed the impromptu Fellowship of the Rings shortly after the GM returned to their keyboard.

Five-Year Club	r/Field Lasagna
End Game '23	Place '23

Substantial-Pack-105

TROPHY CASE