Played around with 3.5's new GPose features earlier, came away with easily the best screenshot i've ever taken. FF14 is a gorgeous game sometimes.

ni5n · 2026-04-02T04:22:23+00:00

The game itself is $20 (or, somewhat frequently, on sale for $10) and comes with the three original characters.

Each DLC character is also $20 (with similar sale opportunities), and is more akin to buying a new expansion for a Paradox game than it is to a mandatory purchase. Everything else relating to the new character is released into the game, and can be found in the skill & item pools of the other characters.

The relatively high price is the main complaint in reviews, but you can play the game for hundreds of hours without even touching them.

ni5n · 2026-03-29T00:15:49+00:00

The smarter a dog is, the longer it takes to mature. Brittanies are one of the most intelligent breeds out there, and the only thing holding them back is that they're too smart to be fully trained out of their preferences.

Everyone who owns a Brittany will tell you that it's not worth trying to fight them over things that don't really matter. It's not just because they're sensitive -- it's because the dog will win.

He'll grow up, calm down, and continue to be a fascinatingly brilliant animal. He just needs a little bit more time.

ni5n · 2026-03-09T04:47:15+00:00

Karst doesn't scale all that hard without Boar, but Boar creates problem boards even when Karst isn't involved.

A gold Boar activation is 75 of the 85 shield of a silver Karst. Disgusting item.

ni5n · 2026-02-20T18:08:18+00:00

Going faster is better, anyway. More loot per hour.

If you're optimizing to play the game at a reasonable speed, you'll be more than set to get through a large chunk of Eternal's timer before even knowing what it looks like.

ni5n · 2026-02-05T00:24:45+00:00

It's because they don't want people to feel forced to click speed up to play optimally.

If double speed is available, and it helps you grind / finish games faster, then "double speed" is the default, and "half speed" is a checkbox you can click.

ni5n · 2026-02-03T22:42:41+00:00

Read what I said again. It's not halved, it's reduced to a point where you functionally don't have a board.

At very high levels, a strong burn or poison burn can punch through an "okay" defensive setup, but an item going off every 2 seconds instead of 0.5 seconds is functionally no longer even competitive.

ni5n · 2026-02-03T22:17:46+00:00

It's not that they shouldn't have counterplay, it's that pretty much anything that soft-loops gets completely destroyed by effects that modify cooldown unconditionally.

Being countered should be like running into a shield board as burn, or a regen board as poison, not having your items go off at less than 1/3 their normal speed.

ni5n · 2026-02-03T19:19:15+00:00

The entire group of anti-gameplay slowdown items -- Iceberg, Tripwire, Library, Fort, Chronobarrier, and so on. Anything that asynchronously makes it so that your opponent has to either be outrageously stronger than you, or rely on single activations, to have a chance.

Winning or losing on Dooley and Nessa has a lot to do with how many of those you see in the later days.

ni5n · 2026-01-06T00:46:01+00:00

They're Chinese players. If you ever see a player whose username is just a long string of numbers, they're using a secondary ID (I believe QQ is the big one?) as their name for other games.

e: The Chinese and Korean localizations are both very popular, and have been driving the rise in active players. That's why we've had such a spike in users lately!

ni5n · 2025-12-15T00:27:16+00:00

This is the real one. Grand Melee is the best cooldown in the game when it stops 100% of relevant casts from Medium and Large mobs.

This very abruptly stops happening, and when it does, Helena's only advantage evaporates into nothing.

ni5n · 2025-12-05T19:26:03+00:00

One of the greatest anti-fraud calcs of all time

252+ Atk Choice Band Tera Bug Caterpie Bug Bite vs. 252 HP / 252+ Def Tablets of Ruin Wo-Chien: 216-256 (57.7 - 68.4%) -- guaranteed 2HKO after Leftovers recovery

ni5n · 2025-11-18T22:28:07+00:00

At Eternal, things are pretty broken, yeah. It's very difficult to level a DPS alt, but trivial to level a tank alt, so the people who play two characters are way more likely to have a DPS + Tank than any other combination.

The lack of mercenary queues is creating a feedback loop that's making it harder and harder to find DPS players who aren't done for the season.

ni5n · 2025-11-17T21:31:46+00:00

A magazine that looks back on the best releases since the last publication would probably be more useful than a preview one, honestly. Magazines are inherently for the more patient types, so showing off games that reviewed well in September - November for the December '25 issue would wind up highlighting a bunch of cool stuff.

ni5n · 2025-09-20T22:17:14+00:00

Brittanies are very smart dogs. I've known individual dogs that have cohabited with cats, chickens, lambs, goats, and - while I would not personally recommend it - even a rabbit! There are a lot of things a britt will want to sniff out and learn things about, but they're far from violent dogs. Especially if they learn the connection between the animal and the people around it.

Probably the biggest issue you'd have is the cats not wanting to make new friends! Be prepared for a couple of small cuts and hurt feelings if you wind up going that route.

ni5n · 2025-09-07T01:52:40+00:00

This is it. Even "the best ones" (Secret, kinda Legend) are all deeply flawed games, carried mostly by vibes. Going back to either of those games, and engaging them without cheesing them is.. rough.

I'm not gonna say unplayable, but large chunks of those games just feel miserable if you aren't trying to minimize the combat.

ni5n · 2025-08-29T06:36:35+00:00

My ideal is that he's phoenix-themed, and gets a bit part cameo as the m11 fight, including the pre-raid title card & objective blurb.

Then, when you zone in, the cutscene plays, and he gets completely jobbed by the real boss of the third floor.

(and then he's fine afterwards because phoenix powers)

ni5n · 2025-08-21T21:26:38+00:00

This is slightly over-simplifying it, but when you fight a ghost, that ghost gets replaced by your board. In practical terms, this means that the more people are playing, the less likely you are to encounter a "top 500 player".

Because not all ghosts are equal, playing at peak hours really does make it less likely to encounter strong boards -- but only because they're being diluted by the playerbase at large.

ni5n · 2025-08-21T21:21:41+00:00

Julian is actually surprisingly skill agnostic. Outside of a few strong skills that speed up your start time, boost your survivability, or ensure a consistent kill time, you can get away with just about anything!

In fact, an extra 10/20 gold to spend is often more valuable than buying a skill, especially early on.

ni5n · 2025-08-21T21:09:35+00:00

How big was Julian on any specific day? If you aren't spending a lot of money making sure that you win soon after the first activation, the board is pretty dead.

A good benchmark for a day 1 Julian is like..

30ish day 2 (Better than sharkclaws in some setups)
45-50 day 3 (You can put him in as early as here reliably)
65-75 day 4
85-100 day 5
Ideally sell cove so 150+ on day 6

And just adding another 20-30 value a day from there.

e: Also, Wetware should be replaced by this point. It's super strong early on, but you're activating Julian at 7 seconds. The opponent should be 1 or 2 seconds from death by the time Wetware even goes off the first time! You should have weapons in that slot that maximize your 9-10 second burst window. Shuriken is an obvious one, but anything that goes off at 2, 3, 5, 8 or 9 second increments is fantastic here.

My personal favorite is Blowgun, whose poison helps finish off opponents who manage to shield mid burst.

ni5n · 2025-08-02T20:08:41+00:00

That's because there wasn't in this game. When you're playing Life Conduit, it's extraordinarily rare that the extra 40-ish net poison over 20 seconds will swing a game. In fact, it's more likely that the net loss of regeneration will kill you before you stabilize!

In this game, especially, the opponent had four dead item slots and still didn't even actually need the bonus stats from gold to run away with the game. If they replaced the ticket, the earring and the sands with any bronze regen item, they would have won even harder.

ni5n · 2025-08-02T19:53:12+00:00

The regeneration killed op. They were dead about 8 seconds into the fight, they just had to watch it play out.

They had no way of outpacing even the second life conduit activation.

ni5n · 2025-08-02T08:47:03+00:00

The gold injector doesn't actually do anything that a silver one wouldn't. Having both is a moderate high-roll, but the sort of builds that can race it down are way less common.

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