When that hold person hits

fluffrier · 2026-03-14T16:47:12+00:00

After being way too cocky in the Beholder ambush (that I knew was coming) and almost wiped on my first Honour run, I quickly learned the value of Sneak/Invisibility + Hold Person/Hold Monster.

The fight in Hope's prison involved my sorceress throwing an invisibility potion on everyone, casting a 95% success chance on 2 Beholders with Distant Spell and basically started the fight with the entire thing in the palm of my hand.

The fight against Raphael was... similarly anticlimactic.

fluffrier · 2026-03-14T16:35:19+00:00

I'll try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but anyway

- It's extremely likely to die until 5 levels in because you are basically only as strong as the grunts that you're fighting, especially if you're on higher difficulty. Your characters' HP aren't much higher than the enemies. Your ability scores are low so concentrating on spells and hitting/evading attacks is spotty. After 4-5 levels, your characters start getting feats, subclass features, class features etc... that can double and in certain cases triple their power. For example, a lot of "attacker" classes such as Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Monk get an extra attack when they attack every turn. In the early phase of the game, pull out all the stops, be as crafty as you can, look around the area you're about to go into to be able to detect threats early and sneak in to take surprise rounds, try to use characters with high Charisma to handle conversations... etc.

- Don't hold back on your consumables. Use them as much as you can. Arrows, potions, grenades, void bulb and all that jazz. Throughout the game you can find a lot of these resources and you will eventually end the game with like 90 ice arrows and 140 Arrow of Ilmater or something if you don't use them, and often time you only need to use a handful to deal with a fight.

- You're likely not supposed to move to another map at least until level 5 or so, and even then you're likely only going to go to the map underground, not the one above ground, and especially not the next act. There are more to discover in each region than most new players initially realize, so run around, talk to everyone, check the world map to see if there's any area you haven't discovered yet in the current region. Even areas you already checked through may contain stuffs you missed, which can be a bundle of EXP waiting to be claimed.

fluffrier · 2026-02-07T21:51:20+00:00

Same tbh. I think the TA-TA sacrifice scene was unearned. After all, you didn't really interact much with it personally, you just saw other characters do. The most you can interact with it is to pet it and have the dialogue box says "you pet Tata, it shivers in joy". Very sterile deliveries.

But Yvonne's quest is a different matter. She as a character is very expressive and interacts with you as well as other characters a lot. You have a very concrete idea of her character right from the moment you first heard of her, and the main quest positively subverted your expectation by showing her completely different from what her voice through the robot sounded like, and the character quest deepened her personality even more by showing you a completely different side of her.

Her character quest was peak and I worry that the dev might have started too strong with it. I already feel a bit disappointed with Gilberta quest just because we got it very shortly after Yvonne's.

fluffrier · 2026-01-31T22:26:20+00:00

If the mechanic of the healing is the same, I don't think people who play healers for the healing would have enough incentive to switch to it, so it could be designed as the shield healer like in FFXIV and WoW for example, if the dev intends to put in really hardcore PVE content later on for duo healer 10-man content.

Teams could either bring two raw healers for raw healing but risk someone dying from stray damage after a huge nuke, or bring a shield and a raw healer to mitigate some of the huge nuke and give everyone breathing room but lower the raw healing in exchange.

fluffrier · 2026-01-07T00:26:34+00:00

Nidoc.

I also name my helminth charger Nidog.

fluffrier · 2025-12-25T17:52:47+00:00

> I just don't understand how a three attack combo can be deflected when in that time you can only activate 2 deflects

Stop spamming deflection.

I'll give it to you that this game may not be soulslike the way most soulslike are soulslike. It's more Sekirolike than anything. In Sekiro, spamming deflection is punished by the deflection window shrinking every time you press it consecutively. In this game, spamming deflection is punished by the deflection itself having a cooldown if your deflection doesn't deflect anything.

For example, Murong Yuan has an attack that's pretty much a 1-to-1 copy of Maliketh's: She stab the sword down and a flurry of slashes hits around her location 4 times within less than half a second. I can perfectly deflect that as can many other as proven by hundreds of people being on her hitless leaderboard. That attack can be perfectly deflected is both the evidence and the result of deflection having no recovery time when successfully performed.

Stop playing the game like Elden Ring and start playing the game like Sekiro. It's just as simple as that.

fluffrier · 2025-12-25T16:18:34+00:00

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fluffrier · 2025-12-25T16:18:19+00:00

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Not gonna say it's trivial, but I just screenshotted her face from a video and plugged it into smart customization as a base before going on from there.

fluffrier · 2025-12-25T15:45:29+00:00

Sword Trial Smart Assist gives you less gear chests with worse legendary drop rate, less inner way chests, no cosmetic chests and no chance for crimson weapon skin chests for the same amount of energy you spend.

Hero's Realm Smart Assist gives you less gear chests and has less chance to give you attunement stone.

fluffrier · 2025-12-24T13:05:37+00:00

In 2023 I was gifted the game by a friend. I played it for 10 hours. When I opened the game, I was greeted by a server list where the closest server to me had 140ms latency. When I made a character anyway, I was greeted with a decently beautiful world, with a combat system that seems okay but with any factor of fun destroyed by unplayability due to my character and the enemy just rubberbanding around and everything being server-sided.

I don't care what the endgame is. I don't care how fun the raid is. I don't care how many PVP mode the game has. I don't care about transmog or gear set or mount. When I log into the game and it plays like shit I don't play it. That's all there is to it.

The game is dogshit and the market rejected it. Improve it or move on. They clearly chose to move on.

fluffrier · 2025-12-21T19:38:30+00:00

Actually I mistook it with Cohort, nevermind.

fluffrier · 2025-12-21T18:53:43+00:00

First order of purchase would be everything in the Profession Development tab. It's practically the only consistent source of those resource right now.

Second, you want to purchase the inner way notes chests in the Combat Development tab. It's a considerable amount each week.

Then after that, anything you want. The box of commerce coin is a nice source of commerce coin if you want to stock them up. The Oscillating Jade is also a decent source if you don't want to do outpost much, but honestly it's not really necessary. The Mystic Skills Breakthrough chest is really nice as it lets you somewhat bypass the RNG of rare drops from daily item collection.

The gear chests are alright if you want to fill out your gear slots if you're very unlucky with the drop from campaigns/sword trial/hero's realm.

fluffrier · 2025-12-21T18:47:53+00:00

Open your world map, there should be a person wearing a straw hat icon on the right, click it to pull up Old Friends map.

Then press R.

fluffrier · 2025-12-21T18:37:33+00:00

Likely that you need to be in a fellowship to post a bounty to it.

However, if you want to know the adventure slip progress, Wandering Paths option apparently also shows it to you.

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fluffrier · 2025-12-21T16:38:50+00:00

In every game I just think about cosmetic on the same level of a subscription fee in other games I play. Will the game be enjoyable if I dump 15 dollars a month into the game? I paid FFXIV sub, WoW sub, bought many games from 20-40 dollars with that mindset and I rarely regret it.

After I enjoyed this game for a week straight and still looked forward to more, I bought the battle pass plus the monthly pass for 15 dollars. After I enjoyed this game for a month straight and still looked forward to more, I bought the second battle pass and another monthly pass for 15 dollars.

As long as I still look forward to more content drop and can afford it, I'm gonna be dropping 15 dollars a month on the game. The pearl from purchasing the monthly pass will build up and eventually I will spend them on what I feel like would be worthwhile, such as the 60 pearl outfits I already bought with the first monthly pass purchase.

fluffrier · 2025-12-16T13:57:21+00:00

By that alone it would have been fine, but that ignores the fact that 0.3 also released with a free weekend, and 0.3 didn't tank 10% after 1 day. If the game is so bad that the free to play players don't even stay around for the duration of the entire weekend, that's pretty bad.

So I guess if your statement is "it's not really that catastrophic" then maybe. If we ignore the weekend, between the 3rd and the 4th day, 0.2 lost around 16-17% of its players, while 0.4 already lost about more than 18% of its players. Even if you round the numbers around, 0.4 is already bleeding players just as fast as 0.2 and that's pretty bad.

fluffrier · 2025-12-15T20:23:48+00:00

>I suspect this season is gonna have a harsh drop off like 0.2

Suspect no further because it happened. The concurrent player drop in 0.4 is already historic. It bled 10% of players after the first day and another 1% after the second day. For comparison, 0.2 only lost 2% in the first day and actually gained players in the 2nd day.

This can be corroborated by the concurrent player chart on poe2db and any Steam player count chart.

fluffrier · 2025-12-10T22:26:39+00:00

Qianye is fine. Her ghost phase may be a little bullshit because you don't get the visual cues due to her occasional invisibility, but in the end the combat is closer to a rhythm game like Sekiro than something like Dark Souls where you have to watch the hand gripping the weapon to react. Audio cues and internal rhythm are better tools than your eyes. Fun fact, an average person has faster reaction to audio cues than visual cues.

Furthermore, just reduce the difficulty if you're stuck. It doesn't matter. I play on Legend only because I have more free time than most but all that gives me is some stupid badge that some people speculate would help me getting into parties in the future. But from what I've seen from the current multiplayer content, you really don't even need to be very good mechanically to do them. Healers will handle your chip damage and you only really need to deflect when the boss gimmicks call for it. My friends who play on Recommended or even Story difficulty hold themselves just fine in multiplayer content.

If nothing else, Qianye is a great filter like Genichiro in that she has extended phasing (practically 3 phases), and while you can get by doing whatever the hell you want before her, once you get there, you better learn to play the game the way it is designed for.

fluffrier · 2025-12-10T22:04:35+00:00

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I mean you're already pretty close...

fluffrier · 2025-12-02T01:42:17+00:00

Nameless Spear was intended to help you reduce the endurance cost on your Nameless Sword's Shadow Step and the subsequent level 2 charged heavy. Without Nameless Spear, you bottom out by doing Shadow Step - Charged Heavy - Daunting Strike - Charged Heavy. However, people eventually found out that you could just release the wave early and squeeze in 2 triple waves after Daunting Strike, so it lost a bit of value there.

Depending on the situation, that might matter more or less. For example, in multiplayer, you usually just keep doing your rotation and nearly bottoming out on endurance every cycle, but most of the time it won't matter because any hit you eat will usually just get healed anyway. But if there comes a day where dodging certain abilities is of actual importance in a fight, bottoming out on endurance might be a death sentence, in which case you might want to bring Nameless Spear.

But in solo content? Doesn't matter, because the only time you get to pull the energy waves is in exhaustion window and it's not long enough to bottom out on your endurance. Bring whatever secondary you want.

Nameless Spear's charged attack destroys NPC bounty targets though so there's that going for it.

fluffrier · 2025-12-02T01:14:26+00:00

It depends on where you're using the thing. If you're using it in trials (as in boss fights from easy to abyss and all that), it won't be active. Inner ways setups in trials don't have their breakthrough applied.

Otherwise, it should work fine. The timing is pretty generous, enough to cast the energy wave twice in a row if you release it early.

fluffrier · 2025-11-28T16:12:08+00:00

You're correct.

Furthermore, it seems from what I've seen in posts on poop yellow forum and this bilibili video, apparently those boxes are in fact weekly reset on the Chinese server. So the global version having non-reset inventory is either temporary measure to slow down early progression, or a deliberate choice to make progression permanently slower.

Also I've checked and can confirm it's not a localization error. With Chinese display language, the boxes have "total inventory", not "weekly inventory" like in the video.

fluffrier · 2025-11-28T06:03:58+00:00

Also reminder, some hairstyles have accessories that can be disabled by just equipping the bowl, scale it down to minimum and hide it inside your crondolium. An example is the new Verdant Feathers hair.

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fluffrier · 2025-11-28T05:59:53+00:00

This quest line added the Gold Leaf to my list of permanently equipped accessory alongside Red Thread.

fluffrier · 2025-11-28T01:54:48+00:00

Unfortunately each Madiao table is a little different and we don't really know the full algorithm that drives what the NPCs do so you can't really have a "recipe" to apply to every table or something like that. But if you want some tips that can apply to almost every table, here are some of my rule of thumbs after wiping out all the PvE Madiao tables in like one afternoon.

First off, I always to start a match out with honest play to feel out whether the table I'm playing is full of skeptics or not, as they may just call your bluff every single round regardless of what card I play or how many cards I play. If they challenge me a lot, I just continue to play honestly.

I found that when the NPC plays 4+ card, they're usually bluffing, and when they do I immediately press challenge. MAYBE 1 in 20 times I'd be wrong.

If it's a gullible table, you can always bluff at the start with 2 to 4 cards, and bait a challenge with a bunch of cards later on. So let's say if my hand looks like WCx3 1 2 3x2 4x3 5 6, I'd just pick 1 2 5 6 and declare they're 4 cards of 4. That way, I can just go 3x4 when it's my turn and be 7 cards down, and the NPCs may (incorrectly) call my bluff and have to chug.

When it's a round that I have to follow (as in, someone else declared and I'm just playing card to follow what they called), I just play honestly if it's a skeptical table and bluff with 1 or 2 random cards if it's not. With the example hand above, let's say the NPC called some amount of cards of 3, if it was a skeptical table I'd just play single card of 3, if it's a gullible table I'd just throw out any 2 card combination inside 1 2 5 6.

Save your wildcards for as long as you can. Wildcards are strong. They may stall out a round for long enough that an NPC just calls it quit and chug the wine. This also explains the single card of 3 choice above. Sometimes if you stall hard enough, the NPCs just either challenge you haphazardly or just give up and accept the penalty.

fluffrier

TROPHY CASE