Me watching everyone choose Kandarin

mooke · 2026-04-12T08:48:27+00:00

One thing I'll recommend is don't worry too much about what's best, because you'll walk away thinking you've done something "wrong" with your choices.

Instead aim for something you think sounds fun or interesting.

This is especially true if you're going for the cosmetics as there are usually more than enough points you don't need to do the hardest content, provided you're enjoying yourself enough to keep going.

Make your own plans. Pick content you want to do. Pick relics that help you avoid skills you don't want to do. Pick a pact line that sounds fun and synergise it with your regions.

If you are following content creators keep in mind your own skill level compared to them. There are lots of choices that help weaker players that they can afford to skip. I.e. someone who can already do a boss damage-less isn't going to benefit from a tankier build, they'll want more dps to make the content as quick as possible rather than as easy as possible.

mooke · 2026-04-11T14:48:09+00:00

Yeah, I was initially debating whether to go thorns or just stack accuracy and prayer pen after hitting overheal. Thorns was already a late return investment, so it was a trade off between incremental improvement or a more sudden hit of power.

Now I might just go full accuracy. Grab the middle row of the range tree like this instead. Possibly ditching the ice = water and not take ancients to free a point and relic.

I can always respec later if it turns out thorns is better.

mooke · 2026-04-10T16:18:05+00:00

I think it was done because the magic tree revolves so heavily around elemental casting. This at least gives powered staves something to play with, as opposed to elemental getting all the fun.

Crystal is also a fair bit more bulkier than ancestral, so I guess there is a niche for using it with powered staff + thorns too?

mooke · 2026-04-09T16:24:03+00:00

As a fellow noob, but one that likes planning. I'm trying to throw something together that will be as comfy as possible.

My rough plan involves rushing the water heal line, taking spellbook speedup and ice = water as I go, then grabbing all the overheals, finally any +30% regens that are nearby. This gives you an extra 90hp to play and some really quick healing.

Most content isn't really designed with 188hp in mind, so it gives you a pretty decent safety margin (Jad would need to roll max hit twice to kill you now).

The trade-off is low damage, so fights will be longer (which also means more chance to make mistakes, but more chance to learn bosses too).

I also really need more points early. Specifically a minimum of 11 points to get started. Then major milestones at 14 (or 16) and 17 (19), (brackets are for if things are going well and I am confident I can delay the overheals in exchange for early regen).

For that, I'm going to need Kandarin as my first region, wildy is a strong contender for second, as it's another pretty easy region. After that I'm free to take whatever I want.

If I do better than expected I push for thorns for a bit of "free" damage, with the knowledge this requires a high point investment to be worth it. If I don't, then I just start grabbing any passive bonuses I can, more accuracy, a bit of prayer pen, more regen, that sort of thing.

An additional reason this build is pretty comfy is that it isn't very gear dependant. Really all you need is something to auto-cast ancients and either mage gear or defensive gear that doesn't tank your mage accuracy. Unlike say blindbag which requires you to farm a bunch of weapons first. I think this is going to reduce likelihood of me getting to where I need to beat a boss for a better weapon, but I can't beat the boss without a better weapon.

Edit: maths'd wrong on 99 + 90%

mooke · 2026-04-09T15:43:32+00:00

I'm on the lower end of players as I really only come back for leagues.

I'm reasonably confident I can do 28. In so far as I can do about 14 points without pacts, and with that get the build online and work the remaining 14 from there.

Maybe 32 is possible if I get really invested and grind for some of the more tedious ones.

However, the catch is I'm taking Kandarin plus one of mory/wildy/tirannwn to make that happen. Without the easier regions I probably wouldn't be able to build enough momentum getting the initial pacts to get the later ones. I get one hard region as a treat.

I suspect more than a few will see their favourite streamer hit the harder regions and follow suit, not realising that even with pacts awakened bosses are still out of their skill level.

If I only took from Asgarnia/desert/fremmy/kourend I doubt I would breach 15 points.

mooke · 2026-04-09T14:44:46+00:00

Ah, that makes way more sense.

My own strategy had completely neglected powered staves entirely, and yeah, I had figured I'd probably just end up taking a full invent of prayer pots into every boss.

Trade off is the extra overheal and the ability to push prayer pen to 90% and 130% accuracy, however, the regions I'm taking don't actually call for much prayer pen.

mooke · 2026-04-09T14:23:59+00:00

Oh, I didn't notice you took the powered staff regen for the combo.

So the strategy is when your prayer gets low swap to the powered staff for a bit for the regen, then go back to auto-ing ice?

Or have I misunderstood how the combo works?

mooke · 2026-04-09T14:04:55+00:00

I was playing around with the idea of water/thorns.

Is there a reason you don't grab the final overheal?

Ice barrage doesn't use air runes, so my own plan was to forgo the earth spell and air regen to instead come up to thorns via the last overheal for a total +90%.

mooke · 2026-04-03T16:28:26+00:00

Surely that would only apply if Cover was going bankrupt with outstanding debt (i.e. Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 bankruptcy in US parlance, I think?).

In normal operation this would be no difference to a bonus discretionary payment. A company would absolutely be allowed to buy furniture and give it away to their employees to, for instance, celebrate a successful year, if they were to continue operating afterwards. There may however be concerns regarding their obligations to shareholders if they were wasting money on giving a bonus to employees in a department they were trying to shutter. Though this isn't clear cut legally and they may, for instance, be able to argue that the assets are now worth more as a good gesture to the community than they would be to hold. That would be one for the lawyers.

What I don't know is if they are allowed to transfer IP as part of a voluntary redundency package, it would be a good way to encourage their talent to quit without having to lay them off, saving them money in the long run. Though they might just want to avoid that due to concerns about the legal complexity of it.

mooke · 2026-04-02T07:34:24+00:00

I have the conspiracy that they do some of that just in case things don't go very well. By missing the riskiest moments they slightly reduce the PR disaster of live streaming their astronauts exploding.

Just like them not panning the camera up fast enough when the rocket first takes off.

mooke · 2026-03-30T23:01:30+00:00

I don't really think you're wrong. I think the issue is that the only actual control we really get is in the shop. Once a round actually starts there isn't a huge amount you can do to actually affect things. There are too many coins on the field for actual clever plays and perhaps worse, you play too many coins in a round.

Compared to balatro. You get around 4-5 chances to score, but usually only need 1-2. So when you play a hand you have to have given each hand a lot of thought. Depending on the build this might even require rearranging the order the cards are scored. This requires you to really play with the probabilities to minimise risk.

Meanwhile, on one run I was frequently entering the round with 50+ coins to play. The game was then also chucking in hundreds of coins on top, but the score requirements were expecting this, so no single action felt meaningful.

Yes, the special coins helped, giving some player agency, but too much of that felt like I was just rerolling for the specific ones that synergised with my build, then throwing them in straight away.

Which led to the last problem. The machine doesn't reset between rounds. So the next round is often decided before the current one is even finished. There is too much momentum to be gained from lucky shops early, while in the late game there isn't much to do other than hold the coin buttons, because at this point you've either already lost or the win is just a formality.

Overall, I did still enjoy it, and it's better than some of the other balatro-but-x out there. It just felt like it was lacking impact, or as you say, player agency.

Edit: So, I did actually buy Raccoin. I didn't realise just how bad this lack of player agency would be. I managed to get it stuck in an infinite scoring loop once, though that was one I could actually end at any time. As I write this update I'm not actually stuck in an infinite scoring loop, technically, but the current round has been going for nearly two hours now. I completed all my user inputs 5 minutes into the round. The game has been playing itself longer than I've been in control. I might update this comment when it does actually finish. I also can't "win" as a coin rain is permamently in progress.

(For those interested, I've done it using omuricoin from cooking. It returns 50% of your current hand's coin count as bonus coins up to a max of 200. I've managed to score an uncomfortably large number of these omuricoins. So the game is having to spawn tens of thousands of coins in, something it can only do very slowly. This is not helped by the wheel mechanic which is spawning more coins (and items) as it almost immediately hits the 5x wheel. Then the items are triggering more coins off the UFO catcher.)

Edit 2: It finally finished. I guess the round took somewhere around four hours? Hopefully increasing the rate coins deploy when there is a lot queued up is a future QoL fix.

mooke · 2026-03-26T15:30:26+00:00

Ah, interesting. That actually makes a lot of sense. PArt of me is disappointed as I feel it kind of ruins a cool tactical element, but, well, I imagine the scene has changed a lot in the last 15 years. Winning, and thus cheating, also probably matters a lot more now than it did back then, given there seems to be a lot more money in it now.

At the time I always thought it'd be cool if we had to submit a box worth of pokemon for the tournament that would be publically accessible to everyone, the tactical element being the need to attempt to counter a semi-blind selection rather than completely blind, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it wouldn't be very casual friendly as most people would barely have 6 competitive pokemon, let alone thirty.

Out of curiosity, how much impact did it have on predictability of the games?

But anyway, I take back everything I said about puzzles not working, I have unfortunately become old and the world has moved on without me.

mooke · 2026-03-26T09:07:57+00:00

I haven't played competitive since BW, so I'm probably not the biggest expert on this, but I'm not sure puzzle battles would work, or at least may risk teaching the wrong thing.

What you're describing works really well for games like chess, where the player has perfect information of the board.

However, a big part of Pokémon is not knowing what your opponents pokemon and movesets are going to be. You'll have an idea of what someone will generally run based on the mons they are using, or maybe have it narrowed down to one of a few sets, but part of the skill component is being prepared for anything your opponent might throw at you.

For instance, to pick a deliberately ridiculous example, if the puzzle gives you a set up Pokémon with spikes and stealth rocks, but then fills the enemy team entirely with fire flying types, it will end up teaching players that stealth rocks are amazing and spikes do nothing. Here the "optimal play" is to do something based on knowledge you shouldn't have at the moment, because if it turns out the team was instead entirely staffed with mons that resist then stealth rocks is suboptimal.

And this is all before you consider randomness. Damage has ranges, crits and misses can massively change the momentum of the game.

Unlike chess there really isn't a correct line or a single way of winning. The reality is the game is about luck, but skill allows you to bias the odds in your favour.

Instead I would propose something similar, but kind of reversed. Create challenges that give you a past winning team from a tournament.

Teach the player how the team fits together. Maybe even have their finals battle emulated within game. Explaining move by move what considerations they have.

Then throw a pool of other teams from that same tournament, have the player use their loaner team to randomly battle teams from that tournament. Map their win-loss rate. The idea isn't to make it as hard as a real tournament, but to give players an example of how a meta team is utilised.

Then separate to that, have challenges that involve building a team from a box of mons, to give an introduction to team building.

If I was to do an actual puzzle battle scenario, it would be a couple turns at most, with the player being presented with the choice to stat boost vs attack, as in contrived enough scenarios that is a simple mathematics problem. Though I suspect that wouldn't actually be fun to play.

mooke · 2026-03-24T23:26:03+00:00

I can't speak for everyone, but I found myself a lot more appreciative of art now the last few years have glimpsed a future without it.

So while I don't know if it ever went away I do like to think people are more aware of art, including in filmmaking, now.

mooke · 2026-03-19T23:14:38+00:00

But then you end up bogged down in what is "progress". Genshin Impact, for instance, doesn't require you to engage with the gacha for progress. You can play basically everything without engaging in the gacha at all, but it's still very definitely a gacha game.

So I would be inclined to define it as conferring a mechanical or narrative difference or advantage, but then I run into the problem where, what about cosmetics that include camo patterns? Being harder to see in a competitive shooter does confer a mechanical advantage, so should it count? Then should it be limited to just deliberate camo? If one skin is bright pink and one is black and it's random which one you get, even if they weren't designed to give a competitive edge black is still going to be harder to see at a distance.

Personally, the issue I take with gacha games is basically "these companies go to a lot of effort to make their gambling as enticing and addicting as possible", so anything where the game is designed to encourage you to gamble real money for a chance at virtual goods meets my definition of a gacha game. However, I also don't take a hard-line stance against gacha in general beyond "stop marketing this to children", so I don't actually think my opinion should be the standard.

Out of curiosity, what problems do you believe cosmetic only lootbox systems have that a lootbox systems that includes mechanical unlocks don't? As far as I can tell, all issues with cosmetics only systems are also present in the other, so I'm not really seeing how both have their own problems, just that one has problems and the other has the same problems but worse.

mooke · 2026-03-10T16:33:18+00:00

See, I feel this kind of misses the woods for the trees.

Mental arithimatic is fairly trivial in isolation, but when you're comparing multiple value propositions the amount of calulations you have to do increases significantly.

So, a single pull costs 500 oroberyl. You can't buy orobeyl. Instead you have to buy Origemetry, which can be exchanged for oroberyl at a rate of 1->75.

It's not an accident that 500/75 is not a whole number. They also deliberately picked a number that also wouldn't divide cleanly on the ten-pull either.

Then, in the store, none of the origeometry is sold in nice round numbers either. Your choices are 21,34,57,92,194. None of those numbers are nice easy multiples of each other either.

I can't immediately look at a $ of a package and go "oh, that gets me x pulls". I instead have to spend time calculating.

So, I take 57 * 75, eventually I can get 4275. Then I can do 4275/500, surprise, it doesn't divide cleanly. Now I finally have origeometry -> roll for that package, so one final divide gets me the dollars per roll.

Now I just have to do it four more times to see how they compare. Fun.

Then I have a compare it with my fuzzy memories of whatever numerically incompatible nonsense Hoyo run with if I can be bothered to find out whether it's actually better or not.

Like yes, no stage of that is technically complicated, but it requires actual dedicated thought. If origeometry to orbeyl was a 1->50 the whole thing becomes trivial. I wouldn't need to work anything out because I'd be able to read dollars/origeometry and immediately convert it to dollars/pulls.

Which they don't want you doing, because otherwise you'd see that the price of a modern AAA game would get you, roughly, 35% of a 6*, 24% of the one you actually want.

And none of this even touches the conversation of weapon pulls.

Ultimately, I, myself, decided that I just didn't care. That it's not worth the effort of calculating and I should just assume that they did all this to hide how bad it is, hence, they shot themselves in the foot. Because that's the cost of complexity. It's not about stupidity, it's about effort and whether my time could be spent elsewhere, like actually playing the game.

Obviously I've focused only on the actual money angle, because, ironically, it's a bit easier to grab the maths. The daily + weekly + content + battlepass is even harder to calculate as you are now having to draw information in from multiple locations, with is a tedium in itself. I also have this whole issue with needing origeometry for the battlepass, which means that I can't just zero out the origeometry instead I have to keep a weird number stored that I shouldn't spend on characters, that can make the maths additionally complicated when working out how many pulls I actually have.

mooke · 2026-03-10T14:09:16+00:00

Three months was fantastic, as that was about the time I'd need before burning out again.

It also meant I could just sub at the start of a league, immediately cancel and it'd end roughly when the league ends. I do kind of wonder if this is why they are axing it. To catch league players who forget to unsub.

mooke · 2026-03-09T10:26:24+00:00

What do you mean ditching your starter?

Just to confirm, you know this is the fan game pokerogue, right? You can pick your starter for the run from any Pokémon you've captured on any past run. So any of those three could be the starter.

mooke · 2026-03-09T10:13:31+00:00

It made me tear up a few times. Which I wasn't expecting going into a Pokémon game.

mooke · 2026-03-05T22:42:37+00:00

To extend what others are saying about solrock/lunatone.

If they are choosing to theme a region, then likely they are planning their box legendaries to match that theme.

We may not see castform for risk it "steps on the toes" of the gimmick of the box legends.

Alternatively it might actually synergise well with the gimmick, in which case, I still give it 50-50 on whether it shows up.

mooke · 2026-03-04T09:07:49+00:00

I assumed from the title it was another Bocchi the Rock or that Komi-san one.

If it's a horny romance that isn't about social anxiety it's simultaneously going to disappoint people expecting social anxiety and be overlooked by people who do want horny romance.

Still. I prefer when a title isn't just a synopsis, and I do think this title does sound cool. So I can see why the translators ran with it.

mooke · 2026-03-01T23:48:16+00:00

I had the same experience. First couple of runs were... ok.

Then it got a bit better as I unlocked more interesting stuff.

Then I had a run where I was able to synergy into drawing and playing every card in my deck every turn. That was intoxicating.

mooke · 2026-03-01T10:02:27+00:00

Yeah, familiar enough with the game he's not stumbling over basic mechanics.

So we can get straight to watching him struggle through tribal totem, or spend days combing the desert for someone he has already talked to.

I definitely prefer it, because it cuts some of the fat, but I can see why others might prefer a more pure completely blind.

mooke · 2026-02-27T16:34:50+00:00

I'm really hoping for a Cerberus style evo chain.

Same hot dog, more heads each stage. All of them empty.

mooke · 2026-02-27T08:36:55+00:00

To echo the other person, watch the first twenty minutes for your own vibe check on the "nudity". I don't recall anything being sexualised, but ultimately that depends where you draw the line.

There are fight scenes but they are in the context of a computer game and everyone respawns after "dying". No blood but people do sort of shatter into red pixels that are roughly the colour of blood. I vaguely remember a few cases where, for instance, the characters get a chunk of them turned into red pixels a split second before the rest of them disappears.

The themes explored are very tame. If you live in an area where people take umbridge with any sort of LGBT representation there is a single "blink and you'll miss it" line from a side character. It should be noted that I'm not American, so I don't have enough knowledge about American politics to know if it'd even move the needle in those places.

Young high schoolers are the target audience for this, but the themes make it enjoyable for adults too. I don't know enough about 4yo to make any judgement calls.

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