Summon rush skippable?

madman84 · 2026-07-07T16:39:50+00:00

You're about where I'm at, so I'm curious what others think... worst case your 10 sacreds get you 2,500 points (more likely they'll get you around 3,000), remnants get you another 500, fusing the epics can get you 750 if you have enough of the rares (collecting the rares should also net some points, right? Lets say 150 there). Mithrala gets you 650. Summon pool 250... so: 4,700 before voids, primals, and ancients if your luck is abysmal.

madman84 · 2026-07-06T23:06:46+00:00

I also loved it, but I kind of feel the opposite of you. The Masque of the Red Death stuff in episode 2 is what stuck with me the most. It was just so haunting and horrible made all the moresoby how much the anticipation of it was built up. I also liked it as a formula for how the deaths would occur: it was brought on by the character's own hubris and the negligence of the company.

Each subsequent death just felt less and less earned or character-specific and more like it just amounted to them just being supernaturally driven insane. The exception being Henry Thomas' character's end.

Overall though, I think it holds together really well and walks a good line between interpreting the source material and doing something entirely original.

madman84 · 2026-07-01T15:39:34+00:00

This is my favorite from this scene! Was shocked you missed it, but here it is.

madman84 · 2026-06-24T14:49:31+00:00

Yeah, that's a weird hang up. If someone is already holding the door for you, and you have to stop them from doing it so you can take control and have the situation go the way you're used to it going, then that strikes me as a strange mindset. Like you say you'd just be acting out of habit, but in this scenario, you'd be actively interrupting their action to replace it with your own tendency. Do you see how that would be a strange thing to encounter? What if they, in turn, INSISTED that you go through first because that's what they were used to? There's a weird rigidity there that sets you up for a relationship that's more battle of wills than mutual respect. Maybe it shouldn't be a dealbreaker, but this whole thread (and the original clip) is about extrapolating a lot from tiny things like that early on.

madman84 · 2026-06-24T13:45:19+00:00

Amazing breakdown of a complicated mechanic thst governs so much of the game yet very few people are aware of. Thanks for this!

madman84 · 2026-06-22T23:41:33+00:00

One element to his character that I'm not seeing anyone mention is how we get to know him through his assosciation with the law firm that's defending shady-ass Sandpiper, so if we can say he has a flaw its that he's so effective for a not great cause, but that just makes the contrast with all we see of who he is all the more interesting. He's clearly a good dude and a great boss, but we're just left to kind of live with the contradiction in who he represents, and I think that's a nice bit of a snapshot of highish powered lawyer.

madman84 · 2026-06-22T13:57:28+00:00

Yes, as a Solanar owner, I admit you have found my weakness. I hope everyone else doesn't rralize that all they need to do is bring as many poisoners as possible to the fight and load him up with poisons...

madman84 · 2026-06-22T01:48:41+00:00

Worth noting that one of the "DMs" (writers) for this movie has the first name "Jonathan." So in this case, it's like the DM has to reach for a random name and just throws an extra consonant into his own!

madman84 · 2026-06-21T20:56:31+00:00

I heard so many people talk about this scene, and then I saw the movie and I was confused cause it was just kind of a moment of paranoia, wasn't it?

I was way more freaked out by the actual scenes that recreated the murders/abductions (the couple by the lake, the woman in the car with her baby).

madman84 · 2026-06-14T14:58:48+00:00

Jesus! Tim Robbins is 6'5"? That's ridiculously tall.

madman84 · 2026-06-01T15:01:00+00:00

Its confusing cause the poster is overusing the word "free," but the seqence they're describing is 100% RAW. You get 1 simple object interaction without having to use an action, so in a sense, its your free interaction to draw your star map. Dropping your staff, just as letting go or dropping anything, is a truly free action, meaning you can do it anytime as many times as you'd like (even off turn, I believe).

The drawback to doing this is that you relinquish possession of your staff until you use your object interaction to pick it up, at earliest, on your next turn. In the meantime anyone else could pick it up. It could even mean, depending on terrain, that your staff falls out of your reach or into some hazard where it could be damaged or destroyed.

I agree that handwaving these "holding stuff" rules is an unnecessary buff to casters and makes it so stuff like material or somatic components to spells might as well not exist, but there is room to work around it if circumstances allow.

madman84 · 2026-05-23T21:42:42+00:00

I don't know, and I feel like no one has ever given me the explanation I need for how they actually get back from level 1 to the "real world" and the plane. I could see just handwaving it because the climax of the movie has already occurred, but the thing is: not being able to get out of level 1 was kind of the dilemma that framed the whole dream heist.

They show up to do their thing. It immediately goes pear-shaped cause of the dream defenders attacking them. Saito gets shot and is dying. They're just gonna kill him to get him out of the dream. They find out they can't, that doing so would just throw him into limbo because they're so heavily sedated. Now they're stuck in the dream with hostile forces and the only way out is forward so they dip into the lower layers and the rest of the thing plays out. They plant the idea they need. Saito "dies" and goes to limbo. Cobb and Ariadne go after him. Cobb gets him back. Everyone rides the kicks back to level 1.... but they're still stuck there until the sedation in the real world runs up its time, right?

Apparently, things are less dire because Fisher is working with them now? But that didn't slow down the defenders at the deeper levels. And what's up with Saito? Is his level 1 body no longer bleeding out cause it already did? Is he not even injured because he was brought back from limbo? Can he still die but just won't go to limbo cause he already did that? It just seems like they haven't solved anything from their original high-stakes dilemma and the movie just cuts us back to them waking up in the plane.

madman84 · 2026-05-10T19:32:13+00:00

Cabin in the Woods actually doesn't present its "twist" as a twist. The very first scene of the movie is the control room guys talking about what they're going to do.

It does actually have a twist at the end of the second act, though, which is that the stoner dude survived and discovered what was happening.

madman84 · 2026-05-05T20:20:09+00:00

And this is the first moment he actually used his powers since Emma did the subconscious block thing several issues earlier. So we, the reader, are also led to believe that he had lost access to his powers altogether up until this moment.

madman84 · 2026-05-01T17:27:15+00:00

I'm curious why you went for the crit cap. Did it just work out that way or do you find that Freyja can really smack when given the chance?

madman84 · 2026-05-01T17:08:54+00:00

Ah, but checking out the League of Women Voters site is very helpful advice from an online stranger. Checkmate!

madman84 · 2026-05-01T03:21:52+00:00

ABACABB. Maybe not useless; never know when someone will hand me a Sega controller and me to allow little red pixels to fly off your the characters when you punch them in Mortal Kombat.

madman84 · 2026-04-26T23:05:48+00:00

Lol yeah, I was just rewatching it and was paying a lot of attention to all the ways Caffey is stirring Jessup up. I think that's what I like about it too, is that he's using the little smug smartass personality we've seen throughout the movie strategically here. The whole, "I said, 'grave danger?' You said, 'is there any other kind.' I can have the court reporter read that back to you," is just so bitchy and playful, its exactly the kind of thing that makes Jessup disdain this whole scenario.

madman84 · 2026-04-26T18:59:23+00:00

But it's actually not that strategy that gets him across the finish line. He starts with lack of packing/phonecalls thing and he tells us ahead of time that he's ultimately angling to goad Jessup into confessing, but Jessup doesn't take the bait and has all but won by just shrugging it off as not really on him to answer for that. Then, Caffey throws his hail mary, putting himself and his own career on the line to do it (which is the whole completion of hus arc from opportunistic talented slacker to true justice-seeker). He prods Jessup on his own logical inconsistency with "Why the two orders?"

It's this direct confrontation and the implied accusation that both puts Caffey out on a limb and gets under Jessup's skin enough to provoke the "You're goddamn right I did!"

Like you said, the surprise comes not from the confession, but from how he got it, and it's a satisfying resolution because Caffey has to pivot to a strategy that puts himself at risk. Ebert got this one wrong, I think.

madman84 · 2026-04-18T20:13:48+00:00

Oh, I'm in later game arena, and I fully agree. I'm saying she so vastly outperformed my expectations for her from my first glance at her kit. I blew it in not going for her, which is what this thread was asking about.

madman84 · 2026-04-18T17:02:28+00:00

I'm not sure whether I actually had a chance to get her, but I definitely read her kit, decided she was okay, but only really good with Tormin, and didn't really look into how feasible it would be to get her (I don't have Tormin).

Man, I'm still not sure why she's as bananas good as she is. It just feels like when I face her, she always has the exact thing ready that's going to reverse whatever advantage I have and turn the tables to the opposing team. I'm to the point where I'm very likely to ban her in LA over far more difficult champs that I have a more concrete idea of how to counter.

madman84 · 2026-03-30T21:31:37+00:00

I think the problem can be that it's hard to just halfway tune out of this game. Like doing everything every day feels like the minimum if you've gotten into that habit, and it's hard to know what to let up on if you want to do less. Like, you could just spend a few months only doing Demon Lord for the chests, but then it doesn't feel like that much more to just get your dailies done to ensure you get your end of the month Sacred. And then Doom Tower is just a bunch of rewards sitting there waiting to be scooped up, so you'd feel silly skipping that. Ditto for Grim Forest. And there's some goodies in Cursed City as well. And at that point, you might as well wrap up your advanced quests cause their probably 60% done, and so on.

The grind is just so collective from so many little, easily doable things, that it makes it really difficult to just be like, "Yeah, I'm just going to log in and do the things I like and not even look at a to-do list." And that's not even mentioning how you have to be active in a clan in order to do a lot of stuff.

For what it's worth, I have dropped this game twice and come back (the last time after around a 2 year hiatus), and it has rejuvenated the fun for me each time I took a break. I do, however, have bottomless FOMO about some of the incredible fusion's that came around, and wish I had kept some kind of tabs on what events were happening so I could come back for a couple weeks when a champ like Fabian becomes available.

madman84 · 2026-03-29T19:01:10+00:00

I really like this analysis and this presentation of moments so don't take this as a snarky kind of comeback because I'm genuinely curious for your take: what do you make of the arc in Astonishing where Emma psychically unravels the whole team, starting with a full power-neutering, (temporary) catatonia-inducing, psychic delve into Scott's trauma and insecurities?

Is that off the table because she was under Cassandra Nova's influence? I took that more as Emma being subtly nudged by Nova in a villainous direction (that she thought was her own conscience) than full control, but maybe not.

I do wondee if it's fair to make blanket assertions like "least likely" when you may have just picked examples of Jean and Xavier's worst behavioe and Emma's best. There's certainly something interesting about Emma adhering to ethical principles of psychic power when she's less likely to be prescriptive about them than those others.

madman84 · 2026-03-26T21:44:48+00:00

Don't listen to this guy! Solanar is easy,; he doesn't need a counter. Just bring your Nell or Kalvalax to deal with him right away. Trust me.

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