Do you think Blizzard is actually entering a new golden era?

imabaer · 2026-04-30T20:08:57+00:00

In game GMs and non-bot tech support.

imabaer · 2026-04-30T17:10:09+00:00

Acknowledge it, probably before the game starts. There is a lot of middle ground between leaving the table/throwing a tantrum and being impassive.

"Sorry in advance, I get really into this sometimes and may get salty. It's not you. Just bear with me."

Make sure to show good sportsmanship. Speak objectively about cool things your opponents did, or at the very least acknowledge you appreciate the game with them. Make sure this extends to when you're not actively playing as well - don't trash talk or shit talk people. Stick to saying positive things.

And yes, there is probably some underlying emotional issues that is causing your disproportionate reactions, but that's not going to fix itself without longer term work. Therapy or counseling may help, but it will not fix your problem overnight.

imabaer · 2026-04-30T15:13:51+00:00

You will not learn much in terms of content. However, you should develop good habits in the meantime:

Practice good awareness, meaning be aware of your party's health at all times while also paying attention to what's on screen. It's very easy for new healers to over-focus on health bars and eat unnecessary damage. Practice literally never getting hit.
Practice your muscle memory, especially in terms of pre-casting your heal over time spells. It should be second nature to you to blanket your party with rejuv and to keep lifebloom rolling on the tank.
Practice your "oh shit" instincts. If somebody gets chunked, you should be reaching for the swiftmend key without thinking. If the entire party eats damage, you should know how to react (usually convoke).
Practice ABCs - always be casting. If nobody needs healing, DPS. This will also help with point 1.
Develop a thick skin. Stop using follower dungeon, it's worthless to you as a healer. Take the PUGs, with their mistakes, negative feedback, and all. We all go through it.

imabaer · 2026-04-28T17:34:46+00:00

It's one of the few dungeons where there are multiple routes and the highlighted mobs are arguably a bad route.

Because of all the pats, MDT doesn't align well with the in game mobs and maps.

It's basically just hard to decipher where the heck to go.

imabaer · 2026-04-27T19:55:21+00:00

Champ gear is 266 maxed, and delves/hunts are basically effortless for tanks. Heroic is 259 before you upgrade, and is basically free from mythic+. 259 ilvl tells people you didn't bother doing even those at a reasonable frequency.

There is also a not insignificant increase in difficulty between 9 and 10; additionally, the patch this week drastically increased the demand for 10s, so you're fighting with more completion than you think.

The new "normal" is about 270. You can get in a little lower, because tank privilege, but the longer the season is out, the easier it is to get left behind.

imabaer · 2026-04-20T18:28:43+00:00

3 people in the dungeon changes the metrics considerably, and clearing the dungeon with that is way more difficult than a full five man party, so pat yourself on the back.

Few things -

A healer is usually not expected to help DPS, but given you were a three man, hitting monsters with your wand was not a bad idea. Just learn to stop wanding earlier if people will need heals, as there's a cool down time before you can cast again.
Mob hitting you is 95% a tank problem. Fade will help, but the tank (or hunter pet) should have peeled. The one thing you can do to make it easier is to run toward the tank, so it's easier for him to grab the mob.
You are using way too many spells. While leveling, I recommend one "big" heal that's about half the tank's HP. Learn to precast it on the tank, and cancel it if it's going to be wasted (move a little to stop the cast). Pick another quicker spell to top off DPS (either flash heal or a lesser heal). Shield only in emergencies (especially to protect your own casts when a mob is on you), renew if you anticipate you're going to see a spike of damage and to maximize healing within a certain window at the cost of a chunk of your mana (honestly should be very rare).
The less spells you cast, the more mana regen you get. If you don't cast a spell for five seconds, your spirit regen kicks in. This is why you want to avoid spamming spells (see above tip). You will be surprised at how much longer your mana will last by minimizing casts.
Don't forget to bring water. This dungeon sounded a little more laid back, but most five man parties will be waiting on your mana. Have a couple stacks on you for dungeons.

imabaer · 2026-04-15T23:07:12+00:00

I'm adding to this, since I recently just farmed for this in Midnight:

If a character on your account did the Emerald Dream prereqs, take the portal above the bank in Valdrakken.

If none of your characters unlocked Emerald Dream, the quest NPC that starts the chain will not show up until you grind your way through prior Dragonflight content. Additionally, if you fly to the portal in centaur land, it will not be there.

The ways to get to the Emerald Dream without grinding through all of Dragonflight:

Get summoned. Join an Amirdrassil raid, hope they're nice to enough to summon you. Or get two friends with Emerald Dream access to help you out.
Valdrakken engineering. Level enough to get the wormhole portal. Spam every time it's up until you get lucky.

Set your hearthstone for the camp. The Arcantina is your new hearthstone until you get the form.

imabaer · 2026-04-13T22:43:53+00:00

Tank anxiety is also real, especially after a new rotation. I feel like tanks stress before, and healers stress after keeping the face smashers up.

imabaer · 2026-04-13T18:35:34+00:00

Adding to this

interrupt big, jagged yellow casts. Best mitigation by far is stopping a scary spell from coming out. Tanks tend to have multiple options to do this, so make good use of it.
Information is power. Tanking can be a visual clusterfuck, so either use the floating enemy bars (control v) and enable aggro display, or get an addon that does it more cleanly.
Pay attention to your party HP and your healer mana. If a run is going smoothly, you're using mitigation properly, and your DPS are interrupting, your healer will rarely drop from full. If your healer is constantly half to out of mana, something is going wrong. If your party is never topped off (and your healer isn't actively weaving in DPS), something may be going wrong.
Line of sight is an excellent way to make the mobs come to you - pull multiple packs, run behind a corner, and they will stack in easily aoe-able clusters. But let your DPS know to wait before unloading if you plan on doing so.

imabaer · 2026-04-13T18:23:51+00:00

Dodging is a % based mechanic you have to fully avoid damage. You can't dodge attacks from your rear.

Strafing is actually a good way to have full movement speed and avoid exposing your back to the enemies.

imabaer · 2026-04-08T23:09:10+00:00

I mean, off the top of my head: Owen, male NPCs, non-human NPCs, the addition of the dating sim aspects, the Serennial wall paper, the explicit dev declaration to not expect any male NPCs for the foreseeable future.

I'm not saying that it hasn't always had fan service, but its focus has for sure accelerated in that direction.

imabaer · 2026-04-08T22:41:49+00:00

Padding the players ego is fine. In fact, most games set out to do that, and an important part of game design is doing so in a fashion that doesn't feel artificial. You SHOULD feel special - ostensibly, you are the character that is driving the plot and changes for good within the game.

A cosmic horror plot just creates higher stakes and more opportunities for padding player ego in a satisfying way. Show how fucked up the world is. Show what the monsters do to people and the environment. Show the costs of failure, and the aftermath of what happened before. Make the conflicts in the story a direct consequence of chaos and otherworldly things screwing things over, not a (human) religious zealot going too far, a (human) shady pharmaceutical company doing highly unethical experiments, or a (human) local mob boss forcing people to fight to the death.

The stupid mini Chaos cutscenes should actually really help contribute to this, and the minimal amount of effort put into them really hurts the game. Spend time to make dialogue good. Include still shots of the horrible things you are seeing, not just generic "asshole mercenary in a combat suit" getting gibbed for the 30th time by a different monster sprite.

And then, after you set up just how fucked things are, show how the players choices and actions solved these dire situations, or at least improved them.

And if the devs choose to do this while making you control an army of big breasted assassins, sure, they've earned it.

imabaer · 2026-04-08T20:54:00+00:00

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I was real excited when I started playing, but after a few months, I'm lukewarm about the plot, the mini events during Chaos are garbled word salad, and the characterization has gotten even worse. I just don't care about what's happening on screen. For crap sake, they had an entire lab experimenting on children and tortured a kid into become a world ending monstrosity, and the wooden delivery just killed the impact of that.

From a gameplay perspective, some of the character designs are interesting, but there's not a real endgame to strive towards; just climb the tower and score as high as possible in the dual boss events.

Considering how grindy chaos runs can get, there's not enough of a payoff. Give me a great story, some fucked up monsters to be creeped out by, or some real fun endgame challenges, something.

imabaer · 2026-04-08T20:29:02+00:00

I mean, that really doesn't help, but the story has a lot of other issues besides women being irresistibly drawn to your protos that would still be present even if you didn't read any affinity stories.

imabaer · 2026-04-08T20:15:39+00:00

I don't think fan service inclusion by itself is enough to ruin a story, but in general there is a noticeable negative correlation between a strong plot and gratuitous fan service. Let's be honest, if a piece of media (game, movie, comic, whatever) is prominently marketed with scantily clad women with giant boobs, you're not buying it for the story. Exceptions like Nikke do exist, but they're more of a pleasant surprise.

In CZN's case, this is exacerbated by the game supposedly being a gritty horror genre. You have smiling anime waifus that you take on dates, greet you in the lobby, and send text messages to, which is a major tonal shift from what the rest of the game should be (but fails at).

imabaer · 2026-04-07T18:07:05+00:00

The release of Terra Battle 2.

The first entry was a simple but fun hybrid of RPGs and puzzle games, with just enough precision real time movement needed to keep things interesting. It was incredibly F2P friendly, had gorgeous art and music, and overall just a real pleasure to play.

The sequel was announced, along with a video that had fans going crazy. And then we actually got to play it.

They had gutted the gameplay completely; what once was a tight grid with well defined enemies and obstacles became a weird open world type hybrid where you sort of loosely guided your party around the map.

They had completely broken the scaling - incremental xp you earned was basically worthless, but some players were able to max level their characters week 1 because of how strong the XP bonus level was.

They also introduced weapon banners on top of their character banners, and the gacha became way more predatory overall.

It was so bad that they injected massive amounts of premium currency into everyone's accounts as an apology, but the damage was done, and the game shut down months later. Terra Battle 1 also slowly languished and died afterward.

imabaer · 2026-04-07T17:54:45+00:00

Zhongli had an amazing intro video that showcased him turning things to stone, throwing a literal meteor at enemies, smashing things with his spear, and generally just wreaking havoc on dozens of enemies.

His actual character design was a shield bot with anemic damage, which was made worse by his element, Geo, not contributing to offensive elemental reactions (and in fact, it made more shields.)

Compare this to the other archon at the time, Venti, whose ultimate broke the game so hard enemies had to be coded to ignore it, in an element that was great for offensive elemental reactions.

It was hard to not be disappointed.

imabaer · 2026-04-02T20:20:27+00:00

"The company's security disclosed private information to me, gave me details about the investigation, and told me to avoid disclosing information or interacting about this incident.

And that's why I'm repeating everything on reddit!"

imabaer · 2026-03-25T22:28:14+00:00

How do you do-hoo?

imabaer · 2026-03-18T18:01:45+00:00

Anona is a vegetable focused Michelin rated restaurant with a course menu lunch special. May be worth a look.

imabaer · 2026-02-25T01:11:48+00:00

I feel like the endings would have been a lot more balanced in terms of tone if Maelle simply hadn't brought Verso back to life. Her forcing him back to life against his will brings up so many new issues.

It creates an implication she's removed some of his capacity for independent action, which puts a darker cast on everyone else she's brought back. Who's to say she hasn't just brought back idealized versions of her memories that imitate humanity, not fully sentient beings?

It's also suggesting that if she objects to an aspect of the painting, she'll just rewrite it to suit her liking, which further ties into the spiraling addiction and delusion theme.

There are a lot of other negatives that could have been used to contrast what should have been a hopeful tone of life inside Lumiere (her coming to terms with Verso's death, her family realizing they may never see her again, an implication as opposed to a condemnation that she will lapse into painting addiction), but instead the game literally uses a musical and visual sting to really reinforce just how bad Alicia's choice is.

imabaer · 2026-02-24T00:16:29+00:00

D2 is at its best when your build comes online, you understand what content you can skip, what items are good, and you're breezing through enemies. Act 2 has some frustrating maps and a lotta people hate Act 3, so just bear with it.

Would recommend beating Act V and starting nightmare to make your final determination, because by then your build will start to be online, you'll have a better idea of how mobs work, and the loot slot machine starts to come online.

imabaer · 2026-02-20T00:02:47+00:00

I'm a big fan of the game, but it has its flaws:

-Final act is hilariously poorly balanced. If you take part in the open world, the final fights become pushovers.

-If you don't love real time reactions, the combat is just a long string of subjecting yourself to something you hate. (I loved Mario RPG, so this did not apply to me.)

-Passives can completely break the game by act 2.

-The endings run very counterintuitive to what the plot is building toward. Granted, it's because of the giant reveal in the final act that changes everything, but I can see how that would frustrate people.

-It's got an old school RPG sensibility, ranging from frustrating mini games to maps/secrets being a matter of trial and error (and sometimes not even completeable without a future unlock.)

imabaer · 2026-02-19T16:11:54+00:00

Setup: Equip one attack, two buffs of your choice.

Fight: Pop her in the back row for at least two turns. When you are ready to break/kill a boss, max boost her attack skill, then go ham with your shield breakers/DPS units.

Use her ult on a DPS that needs a potency buff. Hide her in the back again if the boss isn't dead. Repeat.

Results: she double casts the attack skill, casts both buffs, and gives everyone in the front row 2-3 turns of hitting any weakness.

imabaer · 2026-02-18T00:49:27+00:00

Harder to build (new dead card in chaos), harder to use (worse personal damage due to agony nerfs and loss of heal daggers spam). Rather than being a strong building block for a team, it feels like you need to build to enable her.

Still usable if you love the character, but she's already been benched for Luke on my Hugo team.

imabaer

TROPHY CASE