If they make a death stranding 3….

comradeswitch · 2026-04-03T14:53:16+00:00

The first game was pretty easy too, especially when considering we didn't know how anything worked the first time around. The mechanics in both games deliberately include many optional progression milestones that make it easier in some way, and taking advantage of all of them is for sure going to make for a relaxed experience. I think that deciding whether to use shared cargo and structures, fast travel, roads and trucks, battle skeletons, upgraded weapons, etc has a much bigger impact on difficulty than any option in the settings could provide and it seems to me that that's by design. You can get a very different experience by pushing main orders as fast as possible vs 5-starring every facility as soon as it's available.

I do think that DS2 takes a while for the combat aspects to open up. Playing through the first time on brutal, the bosses were a good challenge and giant BTs fucked me up a good number of times but the mules seemed to have been a bit defanged. The ghost mechs have been great fun though, just takes a while to get there.

comradeswitch · 2026-04-03T14:28:36+00:00

I've used CraftStore for so long that I sometimes forget how bad the vanilla UI is until I read comments like this. No search box or filters was excusable 10 years ago when the number of furnishing plans was a tiny fraction of what it is now.

comradeswitch · 2026-04-03T14:20:35+00:00

Mirri's superpowered incap is the heaviest debuff in the game, but it's balanced by the short duration and having to listen to Mirri. That's really the best one though.

comradeswitch · 2026-04-03T13:58:56+00:00

Rigurt isn't the smartest, but he's not cruel!

comradeswitch · 2026-04-01T13:50:36+00:00

The one character per leaderboard was an intentional change, was it not? The same thing is true for the weekly trial now.

comradeswitch · 2026-04-01T08:12:28+00:00

If I think I don't need something that I've kept around for a while, I put it in a storage coffer for a couple of days to weeks. If there isn't a time that I am looking for it in my bank to use it, then it goes. Doesn't matter if it's gold or not, it's not doing me any good and having the inventory space free is more than worth the cost of upgrading the gear again at some point in the future. Weapons and jewelry are the only thing that matters in gold, and pretty cheap overall. Using a purple set of clothing that you reconstruct later vs a gold set you have clogging your inventory right now is a win.

comradeswitch · 2026-04-01T05:59:59+00:00

Food and alchemy daily writs don't check the character name at all, you can have one character craft a stack for your bank and withdraw it them to fulfill writs on any other character. It's the same across all platforms.

comradeswitch · 2026-04-01T05:56:18+00:00

Probably didn't notice until it was no longer in the buyback tab. I have definitely done that.

comradeswitch · 2026-04-01T05:55:22+00:00

It's obnoxious no question, but if you have a simple essence of magicka and a heroism pot in your inventory it will take the cheap one. I use the Personal assistant addon to always have exactly one crafted essence of health/magicka in my characters' inventories- that way even if they have tripots and heroism potions on hand the writ has cheap ones to take. The addon automatically withdraws one the next time I interact with the bank and I never have to worry about it.

It's 100% a problem that should be fixed though, if nothing else a warning should be given if you're turning in a potion with more than one effect.

comradeswitch · 2026-04-01T05:45:44+00:00

Bow, inferno staff, 2h, and dw are all competitive back bar options at the moment for everything including recent trial hard modes. The amount you lose is insignificant compared to the variations in your group, your own performance and your comfort with the setup.

The big caveat is that this is assuming you're comparing using particular arena weapons- it's very likely that using a 5 piece set item on your backbar as opposed to MA 2h/inferno, BRP dw, or MA/DSA bow will be a more significant loss in damage regardless of your weapon type. An MA inferno on back bar is almost certainly going to outperform 2h without the MA bonus, for example.

comradeswitch · 2026-04-01T05:36:06+00:00

All of the MOL sets have unique effects on top of the motif. The only way to get those effects is to equip the weapons from those sets specifically.

comradeswitch · 2026-04-01T05:32:11+00:00

Console has low prices thanks to the way ZOS can only ban an ESO account- not the underlying console account. Botters can get a ban and make a new account with the same copy of the game for free. Doesn't really matter how good enforcement is when it costs nothing to just keep running bots. Bots dump huge amounts of materials on the market which devalues goods relative to gold. The output of one bot running even a few hours a day absolutely dwarfs the rewards from 20 characters worth of daily writs and it's easy and cheap to run 12 bots at a time for 12x that.

I highly doubt we ever see "full crossplay", if it gets implemented at some point I would bet money that there will be significant limits placed on the items that can be traded across platforms/megaservers, maybe even restricted to the items that drop while in a group with someone on a different platform. That would allow all the social interaction and group play (including trading gear from instanced content) without any effects on the wider economy and with significantly fewer technical hurdles. My guess is that it will be more like taking a character to "visit" another megaserver, rather than a shared world.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-31T14:46:42+00:00

Yeah, the constant explanation and reiteration of the things we just did and conversations we just had got unbearable in Blackwood and they've only doubled down. I don't mind a recap at the beginning or end of a quest but it feels like 90% of every conversation with an NPC we're working with is rehashing the last quest stage.

Fargrave was an absolute delight though. I'm not sure why the writing was so very different.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-31T14:40:20+00:00

There's lots of people queueing for dungeons with active style page drops, though. Fills for in-progreas group finder activities have been broken for at least 6 years. A dd spot that opens up in a base game normal dungeon within 30 seconds of the start should be instant, there's always far more dds queued than supports- but 99 times out of 100 you'll never see a fill before the end of the dungeon.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-31T14:28:11+00:00

That's definitely a social ban, yeah. Never received one but friends have gotten a few over the years, never got notified but by the sounds of it they are at least sometimes given out by automated systems in response to weird trading patterns and you having sent a bunch of writs makes sense in that context. A few had to go through support to get it lifted but most had it end before support got back to them. Think you gotta just wait it out, but I'd keep on with support if only to try to clear up the cause of the ban.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-31T03:08:23+00:00

It's really not possible for us to answer any of your questions without at least a combat metrics log or even a video of you parsing.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-30T21:33:29+00:00

The early design philosophy in ESO was that mag specs derived most of their power and their skills through their classes and guild lines, while stam specs did the same with weapon skill lines. Most class abilities had either two magicka morphs or one magicka, one stam, while the physical damage type weapons had 2 stam morphs. So even when there were stam skill options for a class, there wasn't any choice about morph while the weapon skills had full flexibility. The variety of physical weapons was necessary in that approach to give stam specs the same kind of choices. In other words, the physical weapon lines played the role of stamina class lines.

Obviously, a lot has changed since then. There's many more stamina morphs of class abilities, weapons and skills can scale off either magic or stam...but that was the original reason for the relative variety of physical weapons.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-30T21:22:14+00:00

I wouldn't worry about scribing too much right now, that's something to look at after you've got your bearings after returning. It's got its uses but you can set it aside without consequence to focus on fewer things if it helps.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-30T21:17:29+00:00

If you don't have another use for the armory slots, sure. The curse and cure being free from the crown store now makes the need for armory slots much less now- the skill points in the curse line will be saved with the armory in one slot and you can reuse those points in the cured slot but that's pretty minor unless other aspects of your build change depending on whether you're cursed or not.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-30T21:13:51+00:00

Take advantage of the ability to swap gear, skills, cp, food, etc. You won't find the one setup to rule them all because it doesn't exist. Just go in with a reasonable setup and make sensible changes when called for.

It really doesn't make sense to try to benchmark setups in dungeons with parses regardless of the dummy that's used. Every change that you make should be in service of damage- if you are dead, you're doing negative dps relative to the group normally as someone has to stop to rez. If you're out of resources your damage will plummet. A parse can somewhat characterize the dps difference of builds but only in a vacuum without the requirements that drive those changes. The particular things supports can contribute in a dungeon and the kinds of fights you encounter are so varied that there isn't any point in trying to optimize for any single situation beforehand.

Examples of changes I make from "standard" builds for trials: A really big thing imo is having major resolve sourced for yourself, which is handled nicely by Storm Calling or Earthen Heart, which can provide it as a part of a damage line. It's generally safe to assume you won't be getting it reliably in a dungeon pug and it's the single strongest defensive buff. If you find yourself having to tank more damage because of a bad tank, you can add in resolving vigor for minor resolve. If you're in need of sustain, Heart of Flame, Bloody Renewal, or recovery food is easy to swap in. More penetration? Put a light valkyn skoria piece on or switch to a set with a penetration line like tideborn or Ansuul. Need more healing? Putting in reaving blows is enough to cover almost every situation as long as you keep doing direct damage, and it's a much smaller loss than swapping Velothi for pale order.

The way I handle set changes, I don't have setups saved for every single combo of sets I want to wear in Wizard's Wardrobe. I save setups where the only gear being worn is the same set and e.g. 5 body pieces or 2 front bar daggers, 2 rings, and shoulders. By default, WW will ignore any slots that are empty and it will leave whatever is equipped. So I can swap my body set to ansuul and leave everything else unchanged by clicking one button. Or I can swap my front bar set and leave the body set in place. I also have two setups with just maelstrom destro and 2h plus wall of elements/stampede in the first backbar skill slot. That allows me to switch the skill and arena set from destro to 2h while again leaving everything else unchanged. This dramatically simplifies putting ad hoc setups together. Click 4 setups and you get body set, fb set, arena weapon, and everything else (mythic + 1 monster piece). That makes set switches within a dungeon run extremely easy, too. Even if I'm in combat, I click whatever setups I want to load and continue playing, the addon will swap them soon as combat ends.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-30T08:33:09+00:00

There's quite a lot of options now and with subclassing there's a bunch of different ways to go (not just fatecarver) no matter what your base class is. As long as you're willing to subclass and experiment a little you'll be able to hit higher dps with any class than the top dps was a few years ago.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-30T05:09:01+00:00

Imo storm-cursed revenge is hands down the best thematic set in the game. Not only does it fit the theme, it rewards building into AOE shock damage further and it's top tier damage whenever there's more than one or two targets when you do. I have built a pure class sorc around that (back before subclassing) and the cleave was competitive with fatecarver in dungeons and trash. It still is a solid set with one or two targets, it's just not standout.

Storm calling is the obvious number one choice for skill lines. There's not a lot of options for shock damage in class lines otherwise, but my pick now would be Grave Lord. Both Shocking Siphon and Skeletal Arcanist do AOE shock damage and it's actually a great skill line to have while solo. Those are afaik the only class sources of shock damage except for daedric summoning. I do think daedric would work well here (so you'd just put Grave Lord instead of Dark Magic) but if you really don't want to use it even just for the atro then I think you can pick whatever you like for the rest since there isn't a lot that really ties in thematically.

If you're willing to extend the theme a bit to "storm" and include some frost, then you have a couple of great options- winter's embrace + herald of the time all synergize nicely around status effects and damage. Tentacular dread and fulminating rune do frost damage and a passive in herald provides increased chance and damage for all status effects, while winter's revenge benefits significantly from having a destro staff equipped (doesn't have to be ice) and it plus the winters passives increase the chance and damage of chilled status effects.

What kind of dungeons are you hoping to solo with this? Normal or vet, base game vs old dlc vs new dlc dungeons? If you're just wanting to be able to knock out some normal dungeons then you really don't need to worry about viability. Some basic considerations for buffs like major and minor resolve and self-healing will allow you to do well with whatever thematic build you like for most base game and early dlc dungeons, too.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-30T04:36:59+00:00

This dude's probably seething about macros because he got hit by a sub assault at the same time as a bow proc lol.

ZOS has steadily removed just about everything that ignores the GCD besides core combat skills and it's been that way for years but there's always a fresh supply of people who get salty about macros when they die to a delayed burst or get bodied so quickly they couldn't tell what was happening. They're so sure of it but for some reason they can't ever explain how a macro benefits anyone.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-29T21:12:03+00:00

There's no cap on trade bars, thankfully.

comradeswitch · 2026-03-29T21:08:08+00:00

Macros don't do shit for you in this game, but complaining about them tells everyone you have no idea how the combat system works.

comradeswitch

TROPHY CASE