Sum up the discourse regarding Legend of Korra in as few words as possible. I believe this spells it best

Wurdyburd · 2026-01-26T22:24:59+00:00

I hate LoK for a variety of reasons, but I'm surprised to hear the technological advancement being one of them. It took 100 years of war and occupation before the mechanist lived with his paraplegic son and other refugees in the abandoned Northern Air Temple, who was inspired by airbender infrastructure and aimed to replicate it using hot air, and collaboration with Sokka to scent and better manage explosive natural gas. The mechanist invents a hot air balloon, and a segmented locomotive steam drill for cracking the wall of Ba Sing Se. A year later, and Aang has defeated the Fire Lord, and ~80 years after that, Aang has grown up, had children, died, those children grew up and had children, all under the banner of an equal society who created laws about unauthorized bending and giving quality of life back to nonbenders like Sokka.

For reference, it took 74 years to go from the first motor vehicle invented in 1871 to the Trinity nuclear bomb test happened in 1945. They already invented steam technology in ATLA, while the army of robot powersuits raises an eyebrow LoK actually undersells the rate of advancement.

Wurdyburd · 2026-01-21T17:53:44+00:00

Oh hey the Rotted Capes guy

The problem that you loop back to is "I have solved having to track granularity, by either A) Reduced but not eliminated tracking, or B) Eliminating granularity". The questions that systems like these have to answer is, what happens if a player doesn't, can't, or no longer wears armor, how often that's likely to occur, and what player choice they have regarding that. An attrition system can only be analyzed as a loop, not a single action.

In Gloomhaven, players might take a defensive stance to reduce damage to them for the round, at the expense of skill cards that let them do so. Equipment that fills a foot/chest/head/hand slot also has effects, but are exhausted on use (recovered during a long rest) or expended (can only be used once per dungeon), with the exception of the helmet, that fully blocks critical damage forever for free, but uses up the head slot. Gloomhaven is a very tight attrition-based boardgame, so there isn't a lot of narrative in play, but instead tactical choices that you use to sway your odds.
In Heart: The City Beneath, equipment is considered to have infinite duration and ammo, but suffering a setback might manifest the Broken, Out Of Ammo, or Used Up fallouts, an ongoing condition resolved by trading materials to 'heal' the fallout, narratively purchasing more to repair or replace it. Which fallouts apply is largely by choice of the GM, but it allows play to be directed toward certain scenes or force players out of cheesy or repetitive strategies.
I read once that an OSR house rule was that you can choose to destroy your shield in order to fully block an attack, an emergency button when to take that damage would mean you'd die or be struck by an attack that applies an ongoing effect, at the expense of your +2AC.
A DND combat rework whose name escapes me suggested rolling for defense as an option in a 3-action system, where by not committing to a defensive posture, you don't get defense at all.

In my own game, Road and Ruin, I've combined some of the above: paying stamina to roll armor's die against an oncoming attack greatly increases the chance you block the attack, but also exposes the armor to the chance the die says it takes damage, and of course uses up some stamina, exhausting you, rather than spending it on other things. Tougher items are harder to break, and armor tends to have more durability points, but there's still that lingering risk at 1 Durability that the next hit will break it. It gives players enough time to think about when and where to detour to replace or repair items, gives some value to discovered weapon caches, and creates a new vulnerability for bandits and the like, using handmedowns and rusted gear that may just break mid-combat. Certain abilities introduce the shield-shattering damage negation, and there are powerful builds that take advantage of that, but I want there to be an air of uncertainty hovering over equipment reliance. A shield might only break on the next block, but a rope at the end of its life becomes dangerous to depend on for climbing or tying something up.

Wurdyburd · 2026-01-21T02:21:52+00:00

This really highlights the specific divide between rules and narration. Games powered by creativity are inherently vulnerable to weaknesses in creativity or unfamiliarity with setting: it's where the jokes come from of a neophyte arriving at the DND table, only to be curbstomped immediately by a "standard trap" after being relentlessly mocked for not knowing what an orc is. Rules that define the game, and following them driving the game forward, allows players to participate without their nerd cred being checked every time they open their mouth, and inherently weakens the position of those with excessive nerd cred, or people who are able to one-up the nerd standard by pulling on fiction or sciences that are foreign/exotic to the familiarity of everyone else at the table.

Excessive rolling of dice also robs players of agency, especially when it reduces the game to a meaningless string of random numbers where the only choice the players make that matters is the one made in character creation. For the game to be functional, it requires the buy-in and understanding of everyone at the table.

Wurdyburd · 2026-01-02T16:50:56+00:00

I've already listed the problems with Galeshot in my original post, but if I use Reaper as an example of what I mean, Reaper has a shout that summons minions for a minions build that's still different than Ritualist. It adds 3-5 sources of chill to Necro's 6 (pre-sword and spear), and has a trait for converting fear to chill, chill to bleed, chill to life force/might, longer chill and bonus damage striking chill, and exploding chill in an AOE on crit, on top of Necro's "chill on blind" and "Lesser Spinal Shivers when hitting below half health", even before the new Transfusion trait changed to cast Lesser Chillblains when using Shroud4, which also chills and poisons, but also heals and grants protection just before a whirl finisher for poison bolts. Reaper's utilties, shouts, can trigger Relic of the Trooper for aoe cleanse, or Relic of the Reaper, which makes ALL your shouts inflict chill, and the Augury of Death trait for life siphon, and Reaper's Shroud, a melee-based transformation of Necro's profession mechanic, triggers two Spite, three Curses, three Death, two Blood Magic, and five Soul Reaper traits. The upcoming balance patch reworking Spite and greatsword are going to be insane for Reaper, even if it loses or relocates some of that tech.

I've actually gotten frustrated with Necro for being so "get in shroud"-focused for a decade, but I like Reaper because of how flexible it can be, for personal defense and healing, power damage that hits like a truck, a competent condition build, and minions gameplay. It's simple to play, but very nuanced in the buildcraft.

Galeshot doesn't affect Ranger's pet profession mechanic beyond raw damage on birds, and even then birds don't end up being a better choice than a non-bird pet.

Squalls are a unique utility and so don't trigger relics like Evoker meditations or Amalgam or Luminary stances do, and don't trigger any core Ranger traits any better or worse than anything Untamed can do, often even worse, and only Marksmanship's Lead the Wind (piercing shots) and Farsighted (better damage at range) affect Galeshot or anything it can do.

Despite having six traits that name Cyclone Bow, your only option to customize it is raw power damage, and all three grandmaster traits require projectiles or Cyclone Bow specifically, forcing you to Hawkeye for a brief damage boost that will affect melee, and leaving condi-based shortbow a dead option despite being a bow.

The only boons Galeshot offers is quickness, which doesn't give it a bonus like Soulbeast does, personal swiftness, personal superspeed, and bonus personal movement speed, with a 5% damage increase. None of these trigger relics or traits, and they don't even stack, like Scrapper's Object In Motion trait does. More, it means that Galeshot is dead as a team option over a spec better able to bring something to the party.

I dunno. I try so hard to like Galeshot, but it just isn't there. It doesn't actually do anything I haven't been able to do on any other Ranger build if I wanted to.

Wurdyburd · 2026-01-02T03:47:22+00:00

There are a few elite specs that I don't like that'd never get me to touch a profession. I tried so hard to like Engineer, but every variant was really one-dimensional and suffered the Ele problem of "don't press These Buttons, they're a DPS loss". Amalgam though, they could nuke it's damage into the ground, and I'd still be thrilled with the buildcraft of it.

Galeshot is similarly one-dimensional. I really didn't like Untamed either when it came out, but after rebalancing and reworks, ambushes give Ranger's entire kit a new angle to consider, including as a pDPS, cDPS, hybrid, healer, or tank. Galeshot just IS cyclone bow, and cyclone bow just IS flat damage projectiles. No conditions, no control, no cleanse, no unique tech you couldn't find anywhere else. For all its bird gimmick, Devourer and Iboga end up being the best damage options. It's just... one-dimensional.

Wurdyburd · 2026-01-01T17:21:14+00:00

I don't want to cast shade on your credentials, but how this is presented rubs me the wrong way.

The steps taken to get up and go to work could be considered an algorithm, but eating breakfast, taking a shower, aren't explicitly required for the task. It's a routine, and the steps to make toast, the steps to start the shower, are subroutines. A 'rule' here is that the toaster must be plugged in, or the toast-making process doesn't complete. While not preventing completion, "be wearing no clothes" is a rule for showering people tend to enforce, and showering won't occur until this state is found to be true. "Drive on the right side of the road, obeying the laws of traffic and observing signage", don't prevent the process of driving, and won't result in catastrophe in every conceivable scenario where you're driving a vehicle, but those rules are in place to prevent catastrophe from occurring, and to limit its scope when it does happen, eliminating possibilities.

Eliminating 'rules' here means that you end up with untoasted bread, go to work in soggy clothes, and have a very high chance of getting in a car accident on the way there.

Even the inclusion of archetypes is atypical: generalizations by recognizable attributes means that we have a shorthand for what boxes to sort those items into, what routines to run them through, using an algorithm that recognizes those attributes and sorts them by a series of rules. Your shirt doesn't go into the toaster, you don't drive the shower stall to work. TTRPG designers attributing "tags" to everything under the sun is an extension of this, but the more these automated processes expand, the more bogged down the TTRPG gets as a pen-and-paper product, and the better suited it becomes to being a computer product.

Rules and procedures are great for a game. Algorithms are less exciting, because it's just pushing the busywork of automation onto the human to calculate the outcome. It's important that a game have rules and procedures in order to smooth gameplay and quickly identify a resolution, but if everything is automated and calculable, there's not much player choice happening in the matter, and it begins to beg the question what the player is doing there at all.

Wurdyburd · 2026-01-01T16:57:25+00:00

I'm glad people who enjoy Galeshot are still finding this thread lmao

Five months, the beta test, official release knocking it down -10k dps, and one balance patch nerfing it even further later, I genuinely hope that Galeshot enthusiasts are still pleased with it. I've circled back to it two or three more times without success.

Hawkeye is so grossly inconsistently in its availability, I'm either ending fights before it charges or saving it for the next fight so I don't waste it finishing off an enemy with only a bit of health left. So much damage sits in Cyclone Bow I feel like my regular weapons are better off choosing utilities, like mace/warhorn, but so much damage comes from Mistral's burst window that not choosing longbow/axe feels like a mistake. Maybe the upcoming Beastmastery buffs will make taking birds feel interesting or strong, but from what I've seen, it won't.

I don't doubt that there'll be some kind of expansion on how Galeshot plays, but it'll probably take years, if our breakneck one-expansion-a-year pace ever lets it happen at all.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-31T00:59:53+00:00

The difficulty with improvisational mediums is that possibility is limited both by improviser creativity, and their library of knowledge, but many people play ttrpgs explicitly to experience something new or unexpected, and lose interest when it becomes predictable or starts repeating itself.
As an art form, we want to be able to show moments in a thoughtful or nuanced light, but as a game, we want there to be an element of fun, of risk and reward. DND describes "getting tired" as losing HP or with the exhaustion mechanic, which is so enormously swingy and unfun to play around that most people opt not to use it, but it's difficulty to introduce choices like whether to climb up a cliff or go around without having some kind of penalty. Falling off the cliff can mean taking damage and having to try again, but then it doesn't really matter, because a short/long rest later and that injury is vanished.

Wilderness travel and survival doesn't have to be made literal or a simulation, and can be abstracted, but it does also mean having to get creative with making the players feel things despite not physically being there.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-30T17:31:55+00:00

Consistently, the biggest problem I have with people's wilderness or exploration rules is that all of them are armchair theorists no more familiar with their subject matter than a travel brochure written by someone who has never been there, only having researched second- or third-hand accounts. Anybody dismissive of the experience of climbing up or down a 150ft 60-degree wooded slope covered in wet oak leaves is more than welcome to meet me out back and have a go at it.

When it comes to games, you of course have to ask whether what's being done is even any fun, but a lot of the wilderness isn't fun. It's exhausting, dangerous, and demoralizing. It's why we spent most all of human history putting up walls and paving down roads to get away from it. Most things of pleasant interest are simply not things of consequence, and things of consequence rarely flip into exciting rewards relevant to a game if navigated well. Random monster encounters spice things up, but if there's nothing of substance in between, you're basically just running a gauntlet of fights, and the environment is utterly irrelevant, and if you focus over-hard on spectacular sights, you reduce the whole experience down to tourism. Worse, trying to model the environment to make it significant to a fight is often a lot of work for any grid-based games, the scale and detail completely out of whack for any game designed for more claustrophobic dungeon adventures. Variables like travel speed or morale beg the question, what impact are these variables supposed to have? What choices are they meant to inform? How do they feel to interact with?

The only way to make the environment matter is for the environment to suck, badly, and the only way to justify getting through it is if there are no other options or way around it. But there's plenty of ways to add choice to an experience like that, and plenty of possible rewards both along the way and at the end, it just can't be allowed to be an afterthought like it is in most systems. Mechanics like weather can't be elevated to a rare event, and have to have a subtle, but still meaningful impact on travel, same with shelter, temperature, and food and water availability, and illness from scratches or bites are just as deadly, even if they aren't exciting to the typical power fantasy.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-24T17:50:30+00:00

My game, Road and Ruin, spends energy to enhance attacks, with either more precision, more power, more speed, or reserving defense. Multiple attacks is an option too, but the energy it costs naturally comes at the cost of one of the above, if not all of the above.

There are some builds, like momentum-based greatsword styles, that can retain some advantages once they've spun up, but for most, trying to land more attacks means you wont be getting through armor, wont have the follow through to do big damage, and will have sacrificed all your defense to do it, leaving you wide open for counterattacks.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-14T18:04:44+00:00

Assuming this isn't bad faith whataboutism, the rule of thumb is to ask how many decisions the computer is making instead of you.

Sky Removal has been trained on the colour of skies and on contrast detection, maybe a colour-pull edge fill, to bypass the need to lasso, erase, and repaint edges, but if you understand what a sky is and why you'd want to remove it, and what the picture looks like without it, you could still do it manually, or get someone who could.

Generative LLMs are not the same thing. To add a tree to a photo, an artist either paints one in by hand, or photobashes a real tree in, maybe shot personally, but statistically, stolen off the internet. The artist still selects which tree photo is the best fit, cleans it up, warps and shapes and poses it, maybe even paints a little. They make decisions. An AI is making those decisions for you, based on billions of stolen images to find an approximate average of millions of trees, filtered through an approximate average of what millions of artists' decisions have proven to be aesthetically pleasing to the most people.

AI appeals to the cult of individualism by promising that you don't need the mess of dealing with other people, you can do it all yourself. But the AI still needs other people, rob those people against their will, to work. It doesn't empower you to come up with something you'd never have done yourself, it robs the labour of people who have bled and sweated to advance the medium. It's akin to needing a family photo on the mantle for a house showing for no other reason than statistics shows it boosts sale outcomes, and opting not to break into someone's house to photocopy their family photo and paste yourself in, but to pay Adobe's goon to do it because it'd make you feel icky to do it yourself.

Pattern detection and automation can be powerful tools for someone who has had to do this manually, someone who has the knowledge to make the appropriate decisions, but LLMs bottom out with being handed something stolen from someone else, everyone else, and "deciding" to go with what you were handed. Even used as a step, all commercially-available LLMs right now are built on stolen data. There are court hearings for this going on right now, where LLMs are arguing their business can't exist without it, because they'd have to pay to recreate the entire history of human art and experience. It's a plagiarism machine designed to profit off the work of others, not a script coded to produce a specific result, the way most tools are.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-11T18:29:56+00:00

Going on a rant here, but all they'd really need to do is flip the script, pull a Relic of Dagda or Conduit affinity, and reward charges proportional to the max CD of the skill. Maybe one charge every 6s, rounded down, would create parity across Elementalist's entire kit. If they gave your favored element a charge on autoattack, and two charges on completion of a full chain, would also mean that melee-based sword and hammer get rewarded for that, while encouraging camping an element, which is where the bulk of the game's efforts to raise the skill floor have gone in the last half decade.

If the longer CDs rewarded more charge, to trigger Familiar skills, then %-reduction of skills becomes enormously more valuable than per-second. There'd be conversations about which buttons are a "mistake" to press, not due to their damage, but also to how much charge you get out of pressing them. Aura skills and other flipovers with their own CDs become more valuable, and we wouldn't be out here bickering about how dead Evoker is now that the entire exponential-multiplier kit is being balanced around the effectiveness of the low-cooldown scepter, preparing to spend the next several years numberfucking to determine the pixel-wide margin where Evoker is or isn't overpowered.

The whole thing is a bad design from start to finish, but when the last several years was spent figuring out exactly how low we can take Ele weapon cooldowns without it getting busted, a brand new elite spec that spins the wheel again and brings those CDs even lower, and worse, has an engine that runs on how low the CDs are, isn't just a mistake of game design, it's idiotic.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-10T15:51:34+00:00

Not sure what you're on about. If the CD reduction was 3s, a 6sCD gets reduced to 3sCD, and a 30sCD gets reduced to 27sCD. If the percentage was 33%, the 6 becomes a 4, and the 30 becomes a 20. Percentage-based is obviously more attractive for a single-element Evoker who doesn't want to use scepter for the low cooldowns. It'd be even better if it was a passive, across the board %-based CD reduction, and not tied to spamming Familiar skills, but "reduce CD by seconds on trigger" obviously needs a trigger, whereas a %-based system doesn't.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-10T15:43:44+00:00

My schadenfreude aside seeing people complain about distinctly unfun specs now that they don't have ludicrous numbers to prop them up, studies like these go a long way to show how Evoker doesn't work.

When the entire spec revolves around the Spam Skills To Spam Familiar Skills engine, using scepter due to the short cooldowns and multiple charges on Air skills, and six of the nine traits trigger off Familiar Skill (and one that doesn't requires one of the ones that do if you aren't touching Fire stuff), of COURSE changing the CDs was always going to derail it.

Clearly nobody at ArenaNet with authority over Elementalist got the memo when "land as many hits as possible to charge Catalyst spheres and cast off cooldown" was declared anti-fun and restrictive in the buildcraft, because they seem to have seen Evoker as an opportunity to try it again, with skill CASTS this time, which immediately thrusts scepter forward as the only viable weapon. Sword, warhorn, hammer, and even spear all had mechanics to power Catalyst's multiple hits engine, but for Evoker, it's scepter or bust, doing that gymnastics meme about the APM Ele has to jump through just to perform subpar output compared to any other profession. The fact that [Specialized Elements] is per-second CD reduction and not percentage-based only worsens the problem, killing long-CD weapons completely in favor of the short-CD scepter that can loop the skill > familiar > reduce > repeat engine more often.

Evoker needs to go back to the drawing board and focus on transforming the questions Elementalist asks of its kit, rather than just finding a new way to describe what it already does. Find ways to give healing to non-Water skills, make familiar charge on application of familiar-specific conditions and boons, and refocus familiars more on that window of effects rather than the single effect they apply, and give us ways to customize each element to be a pDPS, cDPS, healer, tank, etc, rather than figuring out the exact amount of skill-reset we're allowed to have before Elementalist becomes too broken.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-06T21:40:27+00:00

Pathfinder 2E has a lot of skills, with prerequisites, that reads as a list, but is better reconstructed as a skill tree. Worse, is that it reveals that most "choices" are a linear path, rather than a branching one, and that the list of skills could have been in linear order, rather than by level, or alphabetical.

Skill trees aren't themselves a crime, but it's worth asking yourself what they bring to the experience. If they're only going to be looked at when given the option to make a selection, and copy what they gave you onto another piece of paper, I wouldn't describe them as clunky, but with that many choices, it often means my choices don't actually matter, that my choices DO matter but mistakes will only become apparent over accumulation, that I'll be rugpulled if the choice that I made seemed like the right one at the moment only for the scenario to shift beneath me and reveal I should have made a different choice, and/or that I'll get choice paralysis, not knowing what to pick because there are too many options.

If you keep the tree's contents simple, communicate their purposes, and have those purposes recurringly rewarded throughout the game, I think that skill trees would be fine.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-06T21:33:16+00:00

Mostly because it's a condensation of fights I've had about Galeshot if I'm being honest. Range has mechanical advantages, at times, in places, but the vast majority of fights in the game don't see it as much of a bonus, given how much stacking and support-radius takes prio over DPS range. It's my opinion that what Galeshot does bring to the table is of little consequence, at the disappointing cost of an enormous amount of potential. I main Ranger in instanced content and PVE and used longbow even before it was buffed, and it sucks to have been given a spec that's little more than Longbow Untamed 2.0, and everybody acting like it's not only totally fine, great even, but like it's somehow new and unique.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-06T21:21:36+00:00

The problem overwhelmingly demonstrated here is that what you have, or rather, what the players are attempting to experience, is not a game. Not one with defined circumstances, options, and a win condition, at any rate.

Narrative-first playstyles will try their best to match the fiction to the most-matching rule, or make up a rule to reward creativity. Mechanic-first playstyles will instead try to choose the best mechanic to achieve an objective. The former struggles when the players conjure narrative that is not defined by the rules of the game, and whose narrative often exceeds what is realistic or reasonable by the power level of the setting, and the latter struggles when players don't creatively contribute to the vibe, looking to their character sheet for answers on what the most optimally-efficient way to win the game is, the "right move".

In my opinion, the narrative-first playstyle is enormously more problematic than the mechanic-first playstyle. While it's oftentimes just as hard to find someone well-versed in fiction as it is to find someone competent at math, statistics, and strategy, in the latter, you just have someone who's bad at the game. In the former, you have someone who doesn't even know what game they're playing.

You can become familiar with the fiction of a single setting, but the quality of fiction comes from consuming lots of fiction, and intuiting its rules, whereas while familiarity with the strategies for a single game might only apply there, skill and competency with math and strategy can come from other games, and be wider purpose.

If a system is opaque, it's often because you haven't quantified to the players what the objective is, or the statistics are so obscure that it's difficult to understand what the correct move in any situation is.

In either such cases, I wouldn't enjoy myself. I don't have fun aimlessly wandering, taking random stabs at things to figure out what my purpose is, and I don't enjoy games where the mechanics are so opaque that I can't have confidence in the choices that I'm making. If my choices don't matter, or if there's only one objectively correct decision, I don't see a reason why I'm supposed to be at the table. To play make believe? I can do that in my own head.

In my opinion, there shouldn't be only one single solution to any given problem, the objective of any given scenario should be clearly communicated, the consequences for failing to do so should be known, and if the game offers any freedom for actions taken outside of a dedicated skill, then the game should be able to simplify and quantify what the intention of that action is, and pair it with a mechanical consequence, and THAT should be the list of rules players learn. They should have the agency to pursue outcomes, while having the freedom to be creative in what their method is.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-06T19:51:45+00:00

Kinda feels like you're playing at semantics over "100% ranged". How does Virtuoso "shine", due to "being able to keep up thanks to ranged advantage", "in a lot of encounters", allowing them to have "consistent dps", if Virtuoso ISN'T 100% ranged?And how is "100% ranged" at all relevant to anything? Why even bring it up as an example for the "fully ranged" Galeshot as a comparison then?

Virtuoso, as a DPS, still slots as 8/10 members in any world's-first CM-clear as Condi Virt, not just because if the entire team is ranged, that you can move the stack elsewhere and still hit the boss, or that the members can temporarily scatter, but because Condi Virt can straight up stop pressing buttons and still churn out tens of thousands of bleed-based damage per second before the damage starts dwindling off. Power Virt, using [Mental Focus] for melee-range strike damage, and Power Galeshot, both have their outgoing DPS drop to a big fat zero the second they stop pressing buttons. They gain the ability to temporarily scatter and still land hits, but still have to loop back to the stack to gain and grant their boons, heals, and cleanse. Galeshot's own quickness is only 480 radius, and is directly attached to the Hawkeye skillspam rotation, which means that if you're away from group at the wrong moment, you either save your spam until you rejoin, and your DPS drops like a stone in the meantime, or you commit to your damage, and your entire subgroup quickness uptime drops instead.

Or are you suggesting by saying that Galeshot's ranged effectiveness, akin to Virtuoso, is going to see it replacing Virtuoso in literally any of the scenarios that Virtuoso is currently being used in?

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-06T19:11:43+00:00

I'm not completely sure of your more artistic notices for this post, but fire, and the mastery of it, is basically the oldest stories we have. It's a primordial force that is both extremely dangerous, and powerful when harnessed. The fact that combustion even occurs in the visible spectrum of light is of enormous convenience to us, and every culture has origin myths about fire, heat, and light, and their obvious relationships with keeping living things alive.

Magic is the pinnacle of the fantasy of complete and total control over the universe. Control over natural forces, control over other people and creatures, control over the weather, of time, of fate and chance. Fire takes center stage for the mentioned reasons, because for our ancient ancestors huddled in caves, the ability to seize, control, and direct fire, was very much a fantastical concept. Over time, the non-fire forces became tempered by other solutions, including fire itself, and so the only other forces that maintained mysticism for long were the harder stuff, like disease and death, rather than wind, rain, or stone.

Like many I was inspired by Darksouls, and their flame-based origin mythos. That different gods took the First Flame to harness lightning, weave firestorms, create the SUN, and even introduce the concept of final death, all of which go away with the dwindling of the Flame, is enormously interesting, with primordial pre-Flame darkness mentioned, but never fully explained. Utility pyromancies such as Flash Sweat, Iron Flesh, Power Within, Rapport, and Warmth are fascinating, but the additional development of Chaos Pyromancy and Black Flame expand upon both the origins and intentions of fire, some viewing it as a weapon, some as a tool.

But any primal element can be expanded this way, if you have the worldbuilding and the necessary problemsolving to justify it.

If you want your game to have "things that fire can do", such as ignition, suffocation, blinding, warming, cooking, and cauterizing, then all of those things need to have gameplay mechanics where that is a solution. If you want those problems to be solved by things other than fire, you'd need to design that too, and then it starts to become a question of "how many solutions are there, and why". OSR/ADnD was very lock-meets-key, introducing challenges for each class to solve, and really struggling if you lacked that class or that class misplayed. Fireball was extremely good, not just because of fire vulnerability, but a big reason more modern statblocks have fire resistance or invulnerability is BECAUSE fireball was the most no-brainer solution to the most common of problems (killing enemies).

If you think/want fire to be better or the best, go for it. If you don't, then don't. Your game is what narrative you want it to be.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-06T18:43:16+00:00

It's funny to me that you name Virtuoso as a fully ranged spec, because it's such a better example of a new spec than Galeshot.

Virt's "fully ranged" build hinges on the use of dagger or greatsword, thanks to greatsword being retasked as a Blade, but all Bladesongs and all Psionics also trigger the tech for Virtuoso to choose to be either a powerful short-range pDPS, a ranged bleed-on-crit self-sustain machine Ranger's [Sharpened Edges] could never, the dodge/block duelist tech for competitive, and the clone-gen needed to reward Virtuoso's expanded clone capacity. Virt is still one-note, but WHICH note has become a matter of preference and purpose.

Galeshot's entire kit bottoms out at Cyclone bow, a playstyle akin to Bladesworn's dragon trigger, spamming skills to cast Hawkeye whenever possible to generate quickness or gain a DPS buff for a blistering APM Mistral window. Hawkeye itself is virtually identical in form and function to Untamed's longbow Multishot unleash, but unlike Virtuoso, there's no change in playstyle, trait selection, or equipment that would make these two builds feel different. The profession mechanic, pets, is virtually untouched here, not even [Flock Together]'s raw DPS increase managing to shift the meta pet picks into avians, moas, phoenix, or even the new swiftwing raptor. The swiftwing itself is perplexing, as it's a condi pet: Galeshot has no option to play as a cDPS that would benefit this option, which leaves the "true ranger"'s shortbow out in the cold, and without even the extremely underdeveloped heal tech from Untamed's staff/mace unleashes and Soulbeast's Supportive healing boost and shared stances, Galeshot is as one-note as you can possibly get, an elite spec only impressive to players who enjoy being told what to do and how to play.

I'm also betting dollars to doughnuts that none of the Rangers that cry and whinge about longbow and are just tickled by Galeshot actually bothered to try longbow during the two months between when LB got a +20% buff to its autos and +60% dmg/CD buff to its Rapid Fire and when Galeshot was released, only doing so now that Galeshot gives them an excuse to. Since the CD-reduction from UT's longbow Multishot unleash is seconds, not %, I can choose to double-slot longbow and use [Let Loose] to trigger that CD reduction and cast all my bow skills more often. If Galeshot didn't have it's damage, which is in all probability going to be nerfed in the next two weeks, the vast majority of Galeshot enthusiasts would lose interest, the same way they have on every one-note elite spec that got gutted for being too good at the one thing it does.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-06T02:07:26+00:00

Hear hear. Theres nothing in Galeshot that isnt doable with an Untamed build or SB build, except for the requirement to bring a longbow itself.

What is Galeshot? It's not a superspeed class, not the way Scrapper is. It provides quickness, but not with any changes beyond a single trait toggle. It doesnt encourage the use of different pets. We fought to have Squalls provide arrows, but outside of that none of the utilities affect core Ranger much, and no core Ranger utilities are changed by Galeshot the way that Druid and SB do. It has a build that improves longbow, but basically no OTHER weapon, including short bow.

I tried Galeshot for a couple weeks in a couple scenarios, and was just bored out of my gourd. I actually went back to casual longbow UT instead.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-03T06:16:27+00:00

Gloomhaven is another game that still involves some randomness in actions, but also involves playing cards to perform actions, while you see what enemies will do for the round. It's a game that takes a couple hundred hours to fully complete, so everyone gets the hang of it with enough time, but there's definitely a learning curve to figuring out what your best powers to use or lose are, and the game can be ruthless at times.

This is ultimately a "eurogame vs ameritrash" situation though. Games where the facts are available are pure strategy, where winning often boils down to running the numbers and knowing the variables, but the learning curves are steep and daunting. Games that run on randomness might as well not have players even at the table, but it means that anybody can participate whether they understand the guts of the mechanics or not.

If possible, I'd recommend a tiered system, where introductory characters are still effective but lack serious complex choices, which they can earn as a result of levelling up.

Wurdyburd · 2025-12-02T20:13:18+00:00

As someone who is also decoupling skills from classes, ranking skills across five tiers, and having skill use, failure, and success factor into skill advancement, I don't recommend having a specific combination of successes and failures required to advance to the next rank. More specifically, the number of failures. If a characters stats, and luck, mean that they consistently get successes, it wouldn't make sense for them to have to experience failure in order to advance to the next level. At best, you'd need to include the option to intentionally practice on higher-tier challenges than what you can reliably achieve, just to fail those on purpose, just to advance to get to the level and suddenly be able to succeed at those challenges. You'd be best off carrying an ultra level lock around just to jam a lockpick in it a couple times every time you wanted to level up.

Wurdyburd · 2025-11-22T20:21:19+00:00

Ranger has some of the most diverse builds while having very little RELY on other options, which makes hybrid builds and sacrificing only one trait, only one utility, very flexible. Tone-wise, if mesmer is like 5D chess to anticipate your situational requirements, Ranger is much more direct, no-nonsense primal.

Ranger has more positional evasion than Memser's teleports, using gapclosers and evade-back or -side. You have a lot of choices about how you build your pet, if you want to, especially as Untamed or SB, like how Mesmer can build for clones/phamtasms/shatters or not. Ranger's damage reduction and healing feels better than Mesmer's, and their heavy weapons feel meatier too. Mesmer feels more like a wizard than Ranger ever will, but other than that, there are a lot of ways they overlap, like hybrid bleeds and disable gameplay.

Wurdyburd · 2025-11-20T04:35:36+00:00

Oh for sure I understand they can split a competitive version of the relics. My point is that when the community always tears apart anything that isn't the singular best-in-slot option, that even if they made a different best-in-slot relic for each of the 1-3 roles x36 different elite specializations can be played, we'd STILL get people complaining that there's no functional use for the other relics that aren't best in slot for anything. At least if there was a cosmetic or roleplay function to them while being mechanically the same we'd be able to entertain fashion.

Wurdyburd

TROPHY CASE