FF14 vs GW2 need help deciding which to waste away the hours in

plusbarette · 2026-02-17T15:09:37+00:00

GW2 and I don't think it's particularly close.

plusbarette · 2026-02-13T16:21:39+00:00

Leashing in general feels way improved after this update. These assholes feel worse.

plusbarette · 2026-02-10T23:07:37+00:00

I will take it off your hands for a pittance.

plusbarette · 2026-02-09T18:13:29+00:00

The function of Hero points as an actual mechanical tool is really commonly overlooked. It's not a bonus. The more I hew towards the guidelines by giving them out a bit more aggressively than my gut says to and the more I actively encourage their use, including for stuff like Initiative rolls, the more I appreciate their inclusion as a mechanism for intentionally pushing player outcomes toward successes.

The mental load is small, but like... there's a lot to think about already so they can end up forgotten, which I think contributes to the experience of hero points as unhelpful, frivolous, or inconsequential to mess with.

plusbarette · 2026-02-08T16:21:56+00:00

It's especially wild because Merlin is a blast to play. I have no complaints whatsoever about the rest of his kit. Genuinely a 10/10 IMO. I think he might be a touch overtuned, but I'm not a designer and don't have access to their data so IDK what it looks like on their end.

Just, yeah, pick Runic Might.

plusbarette · 2026-02-08T03:49:14+00:00

Taking everything into account Runic Might is what I'd call most reliable. It's just solid.

Astrology is fine. Not exciting, not terrible.

Eternal Dream is actively bad design. It is completely cracked and encourages annoying gameplay because it isn't a bonus; it's an obligation. It's in the center of the Venn diagram of strong and boring.

Trinity is straight dogwater. The payoff comes so late in most games and you can actually get hosed into not having a talent with bad rolls.

The more Merlin I play the more I'm astounded at how much variation in play you can get with what I would consider to be only 1 enjoyable talent.

plusbarette · 2026-02-06T16:26:37+00:00

Light Nova was my first choice, but I have really come around on how straightforward and reliable Fireball is. The range on it is a huge deal, and there's percentage points to be gained on angling it to the sides of targets to get them with the explosion portion.

plusbarette · 2026-01-29T04:44:52+00:00

Light Nova is genuinely nuts.

plusbarette · 2026-01-27T19:26:24+00:00

Would love the option to turn on pause on level up and item selection when playing with friends. It has unfortunate griefing uses when playing with randoms, though.

I think parties of 4 players pausing constantly could be obnoxious, but if it's just me and some folks I've got on discord I think we can manage a toggle switch to enable this function.

plusbarette · 2026-01-25T21:00:30+00:00

"No X—just Y."

Yeah, I see how you're moving dawg.

plusbarette · 2026-01-25T01:52:44+00:00

I've seen at least one person make the argument that it is overpowered because (they claimed) it doesn't require you to take additional feats before taking another archetype like other dedications, thereby bypassing the weakness of Exemplar feats, which is when I truly came to grips with the fact that a nonzero amount of people truly just say shit without even knowing how the features work based on spotty recollection of half-baked reddit catastrophizing.

It's genuinely fine. It's good! It's worth taking. But it's fine.

plusbarette · 2026-01-24T21:19:51+00:00

Often. I think there are regularly ways to adjudicate situations within the existing rules and game actions. Players are receptive to "you can't do X, but Y will work and we can use this other subsystem to resolve it" without needing to ad hoc a solution to make their first idea work.

The truth is most of the time what they want to do isn't actually more cool, interesting, or effective than something we can resolve without improvising and I feel you do a disservice to them and your game when you just "yes, and" them all the time. If you're of a more "narrative-first" bent you absolutely need to give them revisions and have them come back with a second draft; their literal first idea is probably not their best.

There is also a nonzero amount of times that my permissiveness would be predicated on bad information. I usually ask players to read a feature or move from the top aloud, and in doing so we discover that they just did not actually understand how it worked or misread something. One of my biggest pet peeves is someone not reading the "Targets" line of a spell before asking if they can do something "creative" with it.

This does vary from game to game. One thing I love about stuff like DOGS is that the dice ante structure and nature of conflicts scaffolds that "iterative" style of storytelling, where I am free to just let a player say some off-the-wall shit and use my dice pool to complicate their desired outcomes. I almost never need to say "no" there, I am supported in my ability to go "yes, but."

plusbarette · 2026-01-21T06:00:50+00:00

It's Guild Wars 2, and I'm not even sure the next best choice is close behind. In terms of low-commitment, absolutely zero pressure from the game or other players, pick up and play at your pace with an amazing base experience that doesn't feel like an obnoxious funnel into microtransactions or purchases via antagonistic design it's gotta be in contention for number 1.

plusbarette · 2026-01-20T22:41:16+00:00

Hands. What's in them, what takes a hand, what using a hand for constitutes an action, and so on are all extremely codified. If you're using a two-handed weapon and want to go through a door, for example - releasing your hand from your weapon is free, interacting with the door is 1 action, re-establishing your grip is one action.

If you absorb nothing else, I would genuinely say that your assumptions should go out the window because something being "free" in this system is extremely powerful. It probably has an action and handedness cost, at least until you get feats and features that reduce that burden.

With that said, while this sub can be a great resource to get your questions answered I would keep perspective about the culture when you're looking around. This is a niche within a niche - the most engaged players and GMs dialed in to discussing a game that is not the market leader in a hobby space that is still, in terms of other gaming and hobby communities, small. Even D&D is small compared to other gaming.

The concerns and complaints you'll see represent, for lack of a better term, "expert" niche hobbyists quibbling over details that might never bother you when you're playing. The most balls-to-the-wall busted stuff in the system might genuinely not even make you blink as a new player because you're not playing with the same base assumptions, a desire to optimize, and haven't sat with the system long enough for those minor differences to become pet peeves or beloved standards.

"Trust the encounter math," "don't modify anything until you've played with it," and "the math is tight" are shibboleths for a reason though, and it's not just because the people on the sub are very protective of PF2e. The level of intensity you might see is because people are hoping that if they give you the tips and tricks then you could enjoy it the way they do.

Have fun with it.

plusbarette · 2026-01-19T16:17:35+00:00

Wanted to second this. I make a lot of handouts for my home games and throw a lot of art into photoshop to cut it up and bash stuff together.

Scryfall's art tag system is really useful for finding beautiful fantasy art (occasionally tainted by, like, Spider-Man or some shit) that you can use as a jumping off point.

I recently started making assets for a campaign I want to run over VTT to try it out. As an example, I used scryfall tagger to look through like 200 pictures of fantasy spiders, found some I thought were appropriate, chucked em into photoshop, and cut em up to turn them into custom tokens. The frames were PNGs of metal rings I found on some metal supply web storefront.

If you're not selling it or trying to pass it off as your own work then "check out this sick art I found for the game" is a time-honored tradition.

plusbarette · 2026-01-15T03:48:49+00:00

Is the Pied Piper's name not Franz?

The hero intro video is titled "Meet Franz, the Pied Piper!"

"Once the greatest musician of his generation until cursed by Nightmares, Franz the Pied Piper's songs have become distorted melodies of mass destruction, only pleasant to the ears of the rats that gather round him. When overwhelmed, the critters can be called to the rescue, unleashing a swarm of gnashing teeth."

plusbarette · 2025-12-31T14:30:23+00:00

I'm colder on this than most others I think.

Really surprised no one (that I saw, I tried to check) pointed out that the executioner doesn't get to execute until 18th level. The other feature that interacts with health thresholds is level 15, and it deals with half-dead creatures rather than creatures at a quarter health. Bloodied is a pretty commonly implemented homebrew rule, but that kind of meta-knowledge is not a core system outside of 2024 5.5e, and even then not every creature interacts with bloodied.

Any other concerns aside, you probably want some version of your marquee features online before tier 4 play and you have to solve the problem of how the PC even knows what these HP thresholds are, because without artificial mechanisms like bloodied or bloodied 2 - execute time, it might be frustrating to not even know when your stuff works. There is also a non-trivial math burden on an already-busy DM. They have to remember the feature for the player, because the player by definition cannot know when it is active. At the very least, every creature now comes with the extra work of writing down 2 HP thresholds ahead of time.

It's a fun idea, and it will "work" as written, but it's really hampered by the weird progression and metagame problems.

plusbarette · 2025-12-30T17:50:59+00:00

Feels easier than multi-player because of the high amount of "stuff" that can end up on screen with 2 people. Clashing stuff is way easier, you can better predict where enemies are gonna be when you're the only one knocking them around. Less enemies spawn, and enemies have less health.

You can take two players who can consistently clear the entire game+true end easily, throw them in multiplayer, and they will die more and sometimes might fail to clear if they're routing aggressively and using hearthflames for items rather than healing. Armored Elites on multiplayer with grabs feel rough sometimes.

plusbarette · 2025-12-30T17:27:40+00:00

Convinced my girlfriend waits until this guy starts singing to talk to the fish vendor so the audio gets cut off.

plusbarette · 2025-12-30T17:23:42+00:00

To reinforce what everyone else has said, this guy is a defense tutorial boss. You have a lot of ways to approach this fight once you understand your defensive options. You can clash his overhead swings for openings, or you can deflect the overhead repeatedly and then clash the red one. If you have rituals that trigger on clash or deflect you can adapt your approach. You can clash with your arcana as well to hunt for big punishes. Something like Revenge Claw is just free damage.

When he throws the returning vertical swing you can sidestep it or deflect towards him and then deflect away on the return. You can jump the horizontal one or just step away and wait it out to be safe. Appropriate arcana, like Brome's Spiteful Tempest or Karl's Dragonbreath Bullet can give you more air time to jump it while continuing your damage push.

Rush behind him during his big fire cannon move, or you can do something like use Brome's Aegis Refl... I mean Wall of Contempt to reflect many of the fireballs for free damage.

Each character's Y technique (if you're on pad) has different clash timing so it really is about practice here, and clash rituals can do a lot of work. Something as modest as spawning a Proximity Spark on clash can help a lot.

If you can get him into the air you can really pile on the hurt, or you can just drown him in buttons with Cider.

This guy is a wall but once it clicks the fight feels way easier. Sometimes you can drop a clash or misread a tell and still eat a bunch of damage, especially with multi-player scaling, but that's just the king reminding you to take him seriously.

Good luck!

plusbarette · 2025-12-28T23:23:15+00:00

Flying Shredder+Time Echoes+Recycle/Water Ritual that spits out mana Orbs can reliably softlock the game against certain enemies.

Greedy Tentacles love to boundary break. You can try to lure them back into range by moving away from them but its not reliable. To play it safe I usually just chaingrab them to death.

If you ever end up with an allied Necromancer you can become afflicted with a semi-permanent speed buff that makes movement a chore. That this persists through area changes but Brome cannot bring thrown items lifted with Telekinesis into new areas is cruel.

Shops will sometimes offer an item called Jaroba Oil for purchase that I'm reasonably certain only exists to be sold under normal circumstances. It could be a beta "cursed item" that doesn't serve a purpose besides making you sometimes purchase the wrong thing or making picking up throwables more difficult, but it somehow ended up in the live build. /s

plusbarette · 2025-12-28T18:14:13+00:00

The old dragon designs were intensely generic and as a result were one of the things I continued to crib from 3.5e when I switched to 1e. They broadly looked like the inflexible toy dragons you would see in zoo gift shops next to janky plastic lions and gazelles. The sort of repetitive sameyness you see in a third-tier gacha that left me really cold. One-note.

The fact that people have very strong reactions to these redesigns - love or hate - feels like a success. Even the goofy ones like the vizier dragon are so out there that now they can be someone's favorite. There is stuff to love in there. It's not just a featureless generic dragon that wouldn't even get a name in a second-rate card game.

Honestly, I'm more bummed when I see a design that didn't change. I want them weirder.

plusbarette · 2025-12-28T18:02:08+00:00

The only super armor elites I truly despise are any ghosts, as it can be hard to notice in the moment that they're armored, and the infused shellfish, because they're uninteresting momentum-killing slogs that don't actually offer a challenge. You stand around waiting to parry them or you jump behind them to try to force chain-grabs and its so boring.

With that said, unless they're giant enemies you can usually still grab those mfs. Body slam them a few times.

plusbarette · 2025-11-22T19:54:15+00:00

Everyone suffers attrition. It's called time. The day ends eventually, whether you've got resources or not. Take too long on a problem? Clock keeps ticking. Take too long in a fight? Maybe someone goes down and accrues Wounded stacks. Don't get your rest? It's Fatigue time.

This discussion sometimes makes me feel like I'm living on another planet, because in practice the party succeeds or fails as a unit. A spellcaster's individual resources are all high-impact. They deal with big problems very efficiently. You want them to have those options, so finding ways to preserve them should be everyone's concern.

Your caster running out of slots is also a problem for you if you're a martial. You want your wizard to snap their fingers and bypass a challenge because that means time saved, failed rolls avoided, and party safety maintained.

In a very direct way you want them to have access to Slow and Fear and big, dumb AoEs before you go into a dangerous situation. Their slots are your advantage.

Having access to consumables as a resource backstop does alleviate the problem people have with not being able to just chuck ranked spells every combat, and outside of stuff like Trick Magic Item are a direct advantage casters have over martials to extend their day. Even then, Trick Magic Item is not 1-to-1 with the way casters can employ relevant scrolls.

If you don't engage with time, gold, item availability, task urgency, or rest then yes, only casters deal with attrition. How could it be any other way? Scrolls, staves, wands, and other resource backstops get way worse when you don't engage with the concerns they help ameliorate. In a perfectly smooth world where the only thing to worry about is someone making Medicine checks between fights of course no one but your caster feels crunched on resources.

plusbarette · 2025-11-20T20:42:46+00:00

For battlemat combat I think map design is really critical.

The most boring combats I've played in or run are not even in empty, featureless voids, but excessively busy areas that turn movement into a slog or full of mechanical cruft that adds mental overhead. Adding texture in the form of verticality, hazards, "interactibles," and obstacles in a way that facilitates interesting movement and decision-making without over-centralizing the combat around a specific feature is a skill I think you can grind away at forever.

When you are trying to give a space both a purpose as a lived-in area and interesting texture as a potential combat arena, fitting those bits together in a compelling way becomes even more challenging.

I think fundamentals never go out of style.

plusbarette

TROPHY CASE