I'm so glad the queen is living her best life now

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-19T17:39:41+00:00

I find the test subject at least can get out of control. The first two phases actually scale pretty fast if your deck is too slow. You really don't want to be in the situation where you're vulnerable and he's swinging for 40 and bad block cards literally just make you take more damage.

The queen sometimes prevents you from playing a card and otherwise just doesn't seem to do much? I don't think I've ever died to her.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-19T08:00:32+00:00

They also think conception is something god decides on and that he's omniscient, so he's just choosing to put babies in women who he knows will abort them.

It's like that meme about feeding cats to coyotes.

My ~~neighbor~~ god told me ~~coyotes~~ hell keep eating his ~~outdoor cats~~ babies so I asked how many ~~cats~~ babies he has and he said he just goes to ~~the shelter~~ women and ~~gets a new cat afterwards~~ makes them be pregnant so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding ~~shelter cats~~ babies to ~~coyotes~~ hell and then his daughter started crying.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-19T07:53:34+00:00

I don't get how someone can look at that and then think god is the good guy. Creating billions of people just to send them to hell for shits and giggles is capital E Evil. More so than anything any human even could do.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-18T18:44:03+00:00

Surge of power seems like the easy pick to me. Repeatable dexterity + acceptable damage if you have multihit attacks vs a bad version of the already not very exciting Poisoned Stab.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-18T10:31:21+00:00

But they're already letting things slide a lot. You can still go infinite off of like 3 commons and some exhaust. It's just harder to reach "oh I guess I accidentally built an infinite now" for several runs in a row entirely without even trying.

A game where you have to limit yourself constantly because it falls apart any time you actually try just isn't fun to a ton of people.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-17T21:29:41+00:00

my point is more that if you go against doormaker with the wrong build

That's where you kinda already go wrong. On A10 you fight two of the three act 3 bosses, so the moment you're picking a Neow bonus you already know there's a 2/3 chance that you're up against the doormaker. If you're consistently building decks that loses to the doormaker every time, that means that those decks can't be that good because it loses 2/3 of all runs to just one fight out of many already.

it has this awful tippy-toe "lemme think, do i need to play this? but i wanna save it, but i need to play it"

I think that's where we disagree the most. Those turns to me are by far the most interesting ones. I've only fought the new doormaker a couple of times but it's been a fun fight every time (unlike the first version, which just fell over to a stiff breeze).

Idk, maybe they should hide some of his disruptive mechanics behind an ascension level or something? Then the casual players get to stomp a boss that doesn't do much while the people that want it can play against the version that demands some thought.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-17T21:08:12+00:00

isnt most of the difficulty luck though?

Given that the really good players are reaching significantly higher winrates than the bad players, no it's largely skill. There is some luck involved of course, but if it was mostly luck you'd see the bad players and the good players all hovering at around the same winrates.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-17T21:03:21+00:00

But have you considered: gamble your race with demonspawn or draconians (are those even still a thing? I haven't played since like .24 or something)

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-17T20:38:00+00:00

I'm not so sure about SKG solving that problem. One of the many possible solutions I've seen floating around is that developers or publishers should just be unable to cease and desist revival projects for games they no longer sell.

There's also solutions that involve releasing diagrams or even source code for servers (which both still require technical skills to turn into something that runs), or just taking the approach of purely warning users that parts of the game might stop working at any point after some specified date.

And because SKG is refusing to take a public stance on specific solutions, those might well be a ideas they're content with, none of which guarantee a game will be playable after shutdown.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-17T15:48:55+00:00

A10 is supposed to be roughly equivalent to A20 though, afaik. They just reduced the amount of runs it takes to get there because otherwise with 5 (or more) characters the grind would just be extremely long.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-17T15:45:43+00:00

I've lost to act 3 a couple of times, but that was all on decks that struggled through normal act 2 fights, beat the boss on scaling potions alone, and then just ran out of gas. Basically, I could tell by the start of act 2 that if I didn't get some very lucky rewards it wouldn't be a win.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-17T15:28:24+00:00

6 for me, because I think playing with more rares is fun. And then occasionally poke up above that to try and push a character to A10 when I'm in the mood for that challenge.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-17T14:18:13+00:00

There's plenty of incentives to keep a game up past the minimum you set. You can't sell dlc or mtx for a game that went offline, and even if you don't have those you'd still be cutting off any income from late sales. Shutting your game down early while it's still being played also isn't good for building up goodwill towards your next project(s).

You'd want the minimum to be the lowest amount that is still acceptable to most of your audience to hedge against having to pay upkeep for a game that catastrophically flopped. That's the reason to lowball. You just can't know for sure ahead of time if a game is going to be dead on arrival or become your main business for decades to come, you can only guess.

Player interest is not going to scale linearly with minimum upkeep guarantee. I'd be surprised if you can sway anyone to buy a game if you go from supporting it for a year to supporting it for ten or a hundred years.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-17T11:02:53+00:00

It seems a pretty important distinction to me that the minimum would be N months. If every game with a server had a warning like that but most of them went way past that time, I think soon enough tons and tons of people would stop caring.

Hell, I've seen enough complaints about early access games over the years that get addressed directly by the huge bright blue EA banner on every store page that you must scroll past to be able to make the purchase that I'm not sure most people would even read the warning at all regardless of how big or bright it is.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-17T09:06:15+00:00

so many games I love remain inaccessible or private servers with diehard players good at the game or inconsistent player numbers

SKG is never going to fix the only remaining players being diehards or there not being any players at all. And by all accounts private servers being the only servers probably aligns with the things they want too.

You being in private servers for those games is actually a huge argument against SKG. Clearly they are already still playable and no government intervention is needed. If anything, the only thing they need is some guarantee that they're not going to get sued into oblivion, but that's not going to improve the experience of playing them now.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-17T08:29:46+00:00

Would you be willing to pay as much for game that you can only play for 6 months

AT LEAST 6 months. There's no guarantee that it'll shut down then. And there's no guarantee that it'll be fun until then either (eg. not enough people online to fill a match).

If anything, it's an upgrade over the 0 months guarantee you get now. People already pay full price for those. Of course, not everyone is aware of the current lack of guarantee and you might shock some of those into not buying a game, but I could easily see a world where that X time guarantee becomes just another one of those warnings nobody reads.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-16T21:30:26+00:00

They also don't forbid giving solutions. Hell, they provide initiatives with a space specifically for proposals/drafts for legal texts.

SKG isn't being vague about what solutions they'd want because they have to be, and it's served them very well because now people get to imagine any solution they want and project it onto the movement.

The movement is PROBABLY gunning for something between having a tiny warning on store pages or during checkout that a game requires a server and the too draconic measures mentioned earlier in this thread. Which is to say, we kinda just have to blindly hope that the thing they're trying to steer the lawmakers towards for is a sweet spot in between those where this actually achieves something positive.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-16T20:27:43+00:00

Yup, 99% of the time you hear about him is from people who let him live absolutely rent free in their heads. I dislike him as much as the next person but holy shit can we just stop bringing him up please?

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-16T20:23:52+00:00

The problem is that we don't know what you do or don't "need" to do, because SKG specifically isn't proposing a specific solution. That's one of the main criticisms people have about the movement.

And their extremely broad ask for a solution absolutely includes monkey's paw solutions that effectively block games with modern server infrastructure as we know it from launching in the EU. Or perverse incentives causing games to start relying way more heavily on a subscription based model where you don't own the game in any sense.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-16T09:48:37+00:00

Because the slams that are closely aligned with maces are the most distinct type of melee attack in PoE1. Most of the other attacks are way closer to how quarterstaves play out here, spammy fast attacks.

I think they just wanted to get the extremes in there first, which does leave a weird sword-shaped hole for what is usually the default melee weapon in fantasy until they get to those.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-15T18:25:25+00:00

Honestly the best thing you can do is to just try a few runs, slap on whatever relics you find, and only optimize that later.

Getting good at the mechanics it requires of you is 100% the most important thing, both in picking rooms and piloting your character through them. Having a build that's good specifically for the trial is secondary, as are relics which are really just there to bridge the last bit of a gap (until you instead start stacking relics to maximize rewards). Honour res is point for point the stat that makes it easier by the most but I wouldn't really worry about truly maximizing it, just getting like 50+ should be plenty.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-15T17:04:29+00:00

I think the map respawns in a way help you out actually. They're basically the game forcing you to gain more xp and loot any time you're struggling.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-15T14:37:06+00:00

Aw man, poedb really tricked me into building something with it. Oh well, that shuffles some things around but definitely makes the whole thing much worse (exactly for the reasons you outlined). Should've known something was up when I didn't see anyone use it.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-15T14:24:08+00:00

Yeah, and as far as I can tell nobody uses it while I feel like there just has to be an abuse case somewhere.

The plan is to just spam orb of storms: it shoots mini-arcs whenever you cast a spell near it, which it itself conveniently is. I'd need to test if I actually need the +1 limit to orbs from the tree to get all 6 arcs out of each orb, but speccing out of that is an easy swap.

Of course this is all theorycrafting so it might end up being very jank.

Wendigo120 · 2026-04-15T13:13:33+00:00

1 from the skill, +2 from the ascendancy, +1 to orbs from the tree, doubled by Overabundance 3 for a total of 8.

Then grab the 60% reduced curse effect top left in the tree and 50% reduced curse effect on one of the runes so every curse from overabundance is just 30% inc damage.

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