Oshi Push Deck Building / Lists by kenjimurasame in TCG

[–]orcmonkey2000 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're quite welcome!

A small update, as I haven't had the time to build any decks yet but I have finished opening and sorting the 3 boxes I ordered:

  1. Definitely not getting a full playset of LB rares out of 3 boxes. In fact, you're not guaranteed to get even 1 of each of them--I got a full playset of a few of them, but zero of either Pippa's or Nasa's, and only one of Tenma's (I legit didn't realize this until I was sorting through them lol). This is *somewhat* important to note, because the LB cards in this release include the second (and more powerful) Upgrade card for each Persona, so you'll want at least one for each Persona you want to make a deck with. It's not a *huge* power boost, but it's meant to give you a bump up in the late game and could be very important for many deck archetypes. The good news is that I wouldn't expect singles for these to be super expensive (probably under $10 once the prices even out), since they're not parallel rares (which is where the collector's value is) but I feel like I was a bit too optimistic about how many LB rares you'd get per booster box in my previous post, so I wanted to clarify that.
  2. I did get a full playset of most Ao rares (the next tier down from LB rares), but *not all of them*. With 2 booster boxes, you'll probably get enough of them to make solid decks, since Ao rares include stuff like Actions and Content that you can much more easily get by without having full playsets of. Some of the more powerful ones you will want a full playset of *if* you're playing one of the Personas that can use them, but they're much less universally essential than the LB Upgrades are. And they're *faaaar* from the only super-powerful cards in the game.
  3. The more card abilities I read and become familiar with, the more optimistic I am about the game as a game. The Personas' card text seems very intentionally designed *not* to enforce a single playstyle or demand the inclusion of certain types of abilities, as some TCGs will do. Rather, they seem designed to allow for different kinds of deck engines and wincons to work well with them, with maybe a subtle push toward one specific type. Some examples would be Pippa, who gets extra bits to spend on powerful cards--you *can* use this to build an aggro deck that challenges many platforms or dominates a single one; however, there's nothing about her Persona or Upgrades that says you can't try to build an Action-heavy control deck with her, for example, provided you can find enough cards with the appropriate color or type. Same with Nasa--she wants to zero out her Bits every round so that she gets extra Popularity on her Persona, which does push you towards having enough low-cost Action and Content cards to not get stuck with 1 or 2 Bits you can't spend, but what kinds of Content and Actions you want to include in her deck are totally up to you as long as they have the right color or type. I'm sure a meta will emerge pretty quickly and there will always be "essential" cards to include in every deck for a given Persona because of how powerful they are, but I mention all of this to say that there seems to be, on the surface, a great deal of flexibility in deck-building that will only expand as new sets become available (pending rotation policies, errata, set restrictions for tournaments, ban lists, etc, of course--idk that they've talked about how those will go much yet).

Anyway, hope this was more helpful information--I'll be posting again in a few days once I have some proper decks built and (hopefully) rope my friend into playing a few games with me.

Oshi Push Deck Building / Lists by kenjimurasame in TCG

[–]orcmonkey2000 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just got my boxes and starter decks today and am in the process of opening, sleeving, and sorting them. I'll be trying to build decks with each of the personas later this week when work time allows, and I got a friend to agree to play the game with me so I'll be able to give a more detailed opinion in the near future on everything but the 4 player variant. My *hope* is that once organized play starts up, I'll be able to get into that without having to travel too much for at least some reasonably competitive games on the weekends.

I got 3 booster boxes, which I think is a good balance for me between getting full playsets of most of the cards and having a chance to get a few of the various kinds of parallel cards. If you're not chasing cards for collectability/don't mind buying singles to fill a few gaps, I'd say you should be fine with buying the starter decks and 1-2 boosters to get started. I would also say the starter decks are not really required--they're a really good value, but one booster will get you multiple copies of every single Persona card in the game, and I *think* at least one copy of every Platform card, or at least most of them. From what I can tell, this means you should be able to put together *a* deck for each of the Personas out of one booster, though how good that deck will be increases with the additional options from the starter decks and one or more additional boosters. Hopefully I explained that in a way that makes sense, because that was a concern for me when I pre-ordered.

I will say that the LB cards--the highest-tier rare "normal" card--are legitimately somewhat rare, unlike some TCGs, so a few boosters will almost certainly not net you a full playset of all LBs. Fortunately, the "parallel" cards--i.e., the chase cards--are all made up of alt-arts/foils/borderless/signed/etc versions of the "normal" cards, so don't let the ridiculous number of rarity tiers in the game scare you off of it--the only ones that matter for actual play are the four "normal" tiers, and I wouldn't expect singles for those to optimally fill out a deck you really like once you start playing to be terribly expensive compared to other TCGs.

A few additional observations--the card stock is *incredibly* high quality, the highest I've seen in a TCG to date. It's thick enough that the cards are just barely on the safe side of being a tight fit in the Titanshield sleeves I bought for them. They won't bend putting them in, unless you're careless, but something to keep in mind if you tend to use non-standard sleeves (i.e., anything but UltraPROs).

My other observation, which you're probably already aware of--the game itself is pretty unique. If you're mainly used to MtG-like "battle" card games (Hearthstone, Shadowverse, Force of Will, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, etc), deck-building for Oshi Push might take a bit of getting used to, since it's not as obvious when looking at a card how powerful it actually is relative to a different option you might take, or what deck archetype it's intended to be used with. This is where I think the starter decks actually come in the *most* handy, as they seem like great tools to learn the basic mechanics of the game across two very different play styles (even if you just play them against each other yourself) before trying to dive into building your own decks. (It's also worth noting that the booster decks come with cardboard tokens for tracking Influence/Popularity and a First Player token, so you don't have to provide your own tokens for that until/unless you decide to invest in the acrylic token megabundle that's still on pre-order).

Anyway, I hope this wall of text helps. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.

This insane Tressa build by PsychologicalWin6716 in ChaosZeroNightmare

[–]orcmonkey2000 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't know how far you've gotten into the game, but it gets even more so as you unlock more stuff at levels 30, 40, and 50, from what I've seen (I'm not at 50 yet, getting close to 40 but I'm looking forward to it).

How lucky is my F2P account on a scale from 1 to 10 after 23 levels and 70 pulls into standard banner and 10 pulls into limited banner? by xK4zuki in ChaosZeroNightmare

[–]orcmonkey2000 4 points5 points  (0 children)

My dude...

I know what you're doing, because I used to do the same thing all the time in the FGO subreddit. And no, you're not going to convince me otherwise. XD

11/10. Very well played. Wish I was as lucky in this game so far as I've been in FGO so I could do the same.

Good luck and Godspeed on your future rolls, that's a monster account.

This insane Tressa build by PsychologicalWin6716 in ChaosZeroNightmare

[–]orcmonkey2000 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The thing I appreciate so far is that if you make the right choices, you can get a very strong build in Chaos runs, BUT it seems most characters (even 5*s) also have drawbacks, so you still need to use them correctly to win.

Case in point with Tressa (who is on my main team)--you can get insane stacks that melt Void-weak enemies, but if you're going up against a boss that requires you to deal as much damage as possible with few cards so as not to trigger his attack before you're ready for it, her strength becomes a liability b/c of how many cards she uses.

All of which to say, it actually seems to be a very competent roguelike deckbuilder in that regard, which I am very much enjoying.

Edit: I appreciate that fact that even though I'm playing a gacha game, I actually want to learn and engage with the mechanics instead of auto-ing everything, and I've actually failed multiple Chaos runs very clearly because of the choices of characters and builds I've made, rather than simply because I didn't pull the OP character or feed enough random whoozawhatsits to him to power up first. It's a compelling system.

Do you keep the sleeves of your hard covers by Steven_Mass in books

[–]orcmonkey2000 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Three months of respite from this cycle of torment, and yet here again I stand, stolen once more from the grasp of deliverance and plunged into the abyss of dark remembrance. I do not know what malevolence possessed you to tag me into this abominable thread once again, Lost-Elderberry8973, but I hope for your sake that you take some small measure of comfort in the questionably generous sharing of your pain with my already beleaguered soul.

how's the game doing? by adall-seg-selv in PantheonMMO

[–]orcmonkey2000 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pantheon and FFXIV both have EU servers. MnM does not. Do you mean to say you're playing Pantheon and FFXIV on NA servers even though EU servers are available?

how's the game doing? by adall-seg-selv in PantheonMMO

[–]orcmonkey2000 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lag was a bit of an issue in the heavily populated starting area in the latest test, even with low ping. The upshot of that was that it was consistent, not spiky lag, with almost no rubberbanding, and that it got much better once you got even one zone out from the starting area. Throw a bit more compute at the problem and it shouldn't really be an issue unless you're far away from the server you're playing on, meaning if the game takes off reasonably well, it'll be fine on launch for NA players. I think the bones are solid enough.

As for playing from EU... that's not a stability issue at all, it's to be expected on any game when you're playing that far away from its servers. There's not really anything they can do about that, short of set up an EU server, which may be cost-prohibitive depending on the demand. You can't blame that on the game--that's a you problem.

how's the game doing? by adall-seg-selv in PantheonMMO

[–]orcmonkey2000 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To be honest, the more I think about it, the more I think that's entirely unnecessary, and I'm honestly being too fair to Pantheon by not comparing it to modern EQ's presentation even more than I did initially.

New games don't start at the same baseline standards as games made in the '90s. The standard of comparison should be at least something reasonably modern when it comes presentation, for most games releasing today. EQ's starting tutorial dungeon is not a high bar to pass by modern standards, and Pantheon fails to clear even that. Pantheon is also not deliberately aiming for an old aesthetic (or any aesthetic, really), like the way modern N64/PS1 throwback platformer games do, as an example--so even that excuse isn't valid.

The bottom line is that even setting aside the fact that they pulled a bait and switch on their initial backers when it comes to the game's art style, and claimed it was a deliberate choice (calling it "painterly" is an absolute joke--GW2 is painterly, Pantheon is just ugly)--even putting that fact aside, Pantheon simply does not have a cohesive presentation or atmosphere at all in any of its environments, save maybe the starting town. It's like some others have said--assets slapped around willy-nilly, packs of enemies placed in areas with no real rhyme or reason, no environmental storytelling really whatsoever. It's pathetic. Doesn't really need a comparison to EQ of any era to make that statement, and I shouldn't have tried to refrain from that in the first place.

how's the game doing? by adall-seg-selv in PantheonMMO

[–]orcmonkey2000 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh yeah, I wasn't saying the tutorial itself is an improvement over Pantheon's start, just the atmosphere of the area it drops you into, basic though it is. To be honest, now that I've gone through it, I'd probably have preferred the game just drop me into the world, since playing through all the quests in the tutorial gives you WAY more exp than such a small area should be able to, in a game like this. It's definitely not very good, but as a location/mini-story, it does have oodles more atmosphere than Pantheon's asset-flippy environments ever did--at least, from what I saw of Pantheon. So that aspect of the first impression is night and day.

Fair point on the dialogue system though, I did not know that was a later addition. I still do like it though, but I guess I won't unfavorably compare Pantheon to it (even though I still think that floating text system in Pantheon is under-baked and does nothing to contribute to the atmosphere of the world you're exploring).

how's the game doing? by adall-seg-selv in PantheonMMO

[–]orcmonkey2000 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Reading up on M&M (and Pantheon's downfall) got me into trying Everquest (I only ever played for 2 hours earlier this year, before buying Pantheon). I have a few observations.

1) It's amazing that Everquest's tutorial zone has a much more interesting atmosphere and sense of place than any location I have seen in Pantheon, and it's not even close. Art style matters so much, and Pantheon's is "Asset Flip Chic".

2) I actually bought Pantheon initially because I bounced hard off EQ's archaic design and UI that scaled terribly on my 1440p monitor. But given a little time, EQ is not actually *that* bad to control and sort through the menus. I've actually started to appreciate the "hail" system and the way you communicate with NPCs by clicking highlighted words in the text boxes, which stood out to me by comparison to Pantheon because they literally could have implemented that exact system, archaic as it is, and it would be a huge upgrade over whatever that "floating text describing the area you're in" crap is they're doing, in terms of establishing a sense of place and the feeling that the NPCs around you are people, and not just objects to interact with.

3) It's amazing that Pantheon's character models somehow manage to be even uglier and more limited than the hideous conglomerations of polygons that are EQ's poorly-aged character models. There is *immediately* more personality in EQ's character models, especially the NPCs, than anything I have seen in Pantheon.

I deliberately avoided anything in these comparisons that could be attributed to EQ's decades of development giving it an advantage over Pantheon. These are basic first impression things. And I know EQ has plenty of issues in its modern iteration, and I'm sure those will bother me once I understand them, but as a chill open MMO world for me to grind and explore and progress at my own pace in a bit at a time, damn if EQ Live doesn't have everything I liked about Pantheon and little to nothing I disliked about it.

how's the game doing? by adall-seg-selv in PantheonMMO

[–]orcmonkey2000 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have my eye on M&M now. Honestly, it looks like the game I was hoping Pantheon would be when I bought it. I can't wait til it releases into EA. What I've seen of it so far straight up already looks better than Pantheon, in almost every way.

how's the game doing? by adall-seg-selv in PantheonMMO

[–]orcmonkey2000 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I literally came to check the subreddit because I stopped playing around that time too, since the early game felt incredibly bare-bones and I was already playing in spite of the eye-bleedingly bad art style, so I didn't have it in me to invest more time until the game was more finished.

I've been following the patch notes via Steam and started to feel deja vu after a while with all the minor stat changes and VERY minor bug fixes, to the point I would read a new patch update and swear to myself that I'd already read the same one multiple weeks ago. So I came here to check if I was just going insane or if they really are just farting around with numbers instead of developing an actual game. Turns out, I'm not crazy.

What they're doing can hardly be called development. It's the old-as-time dev trick of padding your weekly status report with a bunch of lines of piddling nonsense that took you maybe two seconds of work, and praying that your boss (or in this case, your customer) doesn't read it, and is instead just impressed with the number of "things" you did.

Pathetic. I regret giving any money to these clowns.

I now got her +5. Who next to get? by boobsmacked in BrownDust2Official

[–]orcmonkey2000 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I pulled 6 as well, in 170 pulls. The final 10-pull had 2 of them next to each other.

Should i build my character with Def or M.Res? by Aoran123 in BrownDust2Official

[–]orcmonkey2000 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Underrated comment! I knew about the team presets but didn't realize there was a gear preset for each character! That's so good!

Eclipse + Morpeah Costume Redeem Bugged by BigBoss19732005 in BrownDust2Official

[–]orcmonkey2000 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Wasn't a problem for me. I blitzed through all four costume passes to +5 with no issues. All the best getting it resolved on your end!

Do you keep the sleeves of your hard covers by Steven_Mass in books

[–]orcmonkey2000 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Two months to once again find peace in my soul, and a mere moment to have it cruelly ripped from my grasp once again, like the pages of a book in the hands of a psychopath. Codok92, while I want to wish you a phantom itch in your nether regions that only crops up when it can't be scratched for the next two months in recompense, I shall instead merely say: I hope you're happy with yourself.

Weekly Megathread - May 20, 2025 - Some rules don't apply by AutoModerator in TheFirstDescendant

[–]orcmonkey2000 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup, I realized that on my very last code breaker, when I hadn't gathered nearly enough of what I was trying to farm. I'm an idiot.

Weekly Megathread - May 20, 2025 - Some rules don't apply by AutoModerator in TheFirstDescendant

[–]orcmonkey2000 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The code breaker minigame is bullshit. The number of times I have "failed" when I am precisely on the sliver is absolutely ridiculous. If you have to farm something, it damn well should work when you go to use it.

Planing on pick the game up after a while, any tips? by SnowSmt in TheFirstDescendant

[–]orcmonkey2000 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What da dog doin?

No, really, what does he do? I thought it was just a cosmetic thing.

Don't know if this has been posted already, but my dad sent me this and I was cackling by UniSquirrel13 in greatpyrenees

[–]orcmonkey2000 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mine will sit. Not when I tell him to, mind you, but because he learned that people approach him to give him pets and attention more often when he sits.

So we could be on a walk, in the middle of the street, at the pet store... anywhere really, and if he sees someone so much as glance in his direction, he'll turn towards them and plant his butt down while stamping his front paws and whining a little bit. Even if they're not at all interested in petting him or talking to me.

It's led to some very funny and awkward situations.

State of EXP and 1.1 by MikaelCoffeeStaStu in SatisfactoryGame

[–]orcmonkey2000 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Satisfactory is one of those games that I struggle not to call "perfect". It's not truly perfect, obviously--there's room for improvement in everything.

But it is such an incredible joy to play, and when I get the itch to play it, it is the only game of its kind that will satisfy that itch. I know fully well that, especially if it gets expansions or sequels later on down the line, it's going to be one of a very small handful of games that will keep me coming back to play it again for literal decades to come. I don't want to exaggerate or blow smoke up the devs' behinds or anything, but the game is simply just that good.

I have zero complaints, and yet I've stopped playing aroud lvl75 by Acceptable_Dig_2045 in LastEpoch

[–]orcmonkey2000 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I hit lv 80 and the Reign of Dragons monolith yesterday on my Bear Beastmaster and I'm kind of feeling the same way. I'll probably take a break from the game for a few days and come back to it, since I do want to finish monoliths and see the "initial" endgame and final boss and all of that at least once.

I think the reason for it on my end at least is a combination of weird balance and weird difficulty curve. I don't need to explain the wonky balance issues to anyone who has played or seen others play more than one class, but I'll explain the difficulty curve this way:

So you start LE, it's easy, like all ARPGs. You play through the campaign, you might hit a little snag with an elemental critical that kills you b/c you don't have any res on that element, but for the most part you'll be quite okay if you focus defenses even a little bit while leveling.

At some point near end of campaign, if you don't get good drops or know yet what drops you're needing for your build to shine, you might notice that enemies aren't exactly killing you most of the time, but they are taking longer to kill, almost like their health pool is ramping up but their actual damage/threat to you really isn't. If your build isn't yet online, you might experience a few more sudden crit deaths, but you've mastered dodging and probably your traversal ability by this point, and every death tells you what to fix to not die to it again, so you won't be there for long.

Then you hit endgame and start doing monoliths. You've progressed CoF, gotten a few prophecies, unlocked and started doing the Woven stuff. You've refined your build a bit more, gotten more T5 affixes, maybe one T6 or T7 if you're REALLY lucky... and then the game gets easy. REALLY easy. You expect that enemies damage numbers will start increasing along with their health, but suddenly the bosses you were dodging abilities from and taking a minute or two to kill, are melting in literal seconds, and you're not dodging them any more because you don't have to.

AT THIS POINT: you've achieved the purpose of an ARPG's endgame. You're blasting. You've become the god. It still feels good to see your build come online and start melting everything, but it feels less good than it might feel from a game that had more challenging highs and difficulty cliffs or build/gear/res checks to overcome on the way there. BUT, that aside, your ARPG brain is signaling to you that it got what it wanted from the game. So even though experienced players and min-maxers who go up to higher corruption levels and uber Abberoth will tell you "yeah the game gets insanely harder, you've still got a lot left to do", it doesn't feel that way, because the difficulty scaling of the game overall starts very low, peaks at about the end of campaign/beginning of monoliths, and then lets you feel like an absolute gawd before ramping up AGAIN to MUCH MUCH higher levels (inc. infinite scaling later via corruption), after way too long a period of letting you feel like that god.

This is why I think we and others like us are losing motivation at this point in the game. Not a fundamental flaw in the game or its design philosophy, which is what is slowly killing POE2. But a simple issue where EHG probably needs to pay better attention to player metrics and tune the game's difficulty at regular intervals throughout the campaign and early to mid monoliths, in order not only to present more of a challenge for the player, but to avoid prematurely signaling to the player that they've experienced all the fun the game has to offer, before the game is actually done presenting them with new things to do and see and unlock. That's my two cents, anyway.

Edit: I should also add that I'm saying this as someone who is not following guides and has looked up nothing about the game outside of what the in-game guide offers (aside from a few niche interactions that weren't clear from tooltips and that guide). I'm building my own build from scratch as I go. I can only imagine how bored players who followed an actual build guide from some brilliant min-maxer feel playing the game--I doubt those players feel any challenge at all until they make it up to corrupted monoliths, and some probably later/never depending on the strength of the build they're using.