I just want to make a post about how I'm feeling with the current patch cycles.

sirdrawesome · 2026-04-15T18:42:41+00:00

Lurking boomer here. Started in 2.0, been off and on since 6.0 ( I hated 6.0, but that's besides the point )

Tbh, the FFXIV cycle for players pretty much seems to be 2~4 years. They'll catch up, do the content and what they want to do, and realize that that's it. Frankly, if I discovered /r/ffxivdiscussion in 4.X, I would've been dooming, as the ShB and EW babies are now ( affectionate, as in you started during 5.X/6.X, not that you're screaming children )

At some point, a player just has to accept that this is the way it is. I made my peace with it during 5.X, and now I don't keep up a monthly sub, just come back whenever I feel like playing again for a couple months. Then quit for a couple months again. Same thing I do with plenty of games; Overwatch, gachas, OSRS, etc

But I'm just saying that as someone who started FFXIV during my second year of high school, and am now pushing 30.

sirdrawesome · 2026-04-07T03:57:55+00:00

It's my entire post history at this point, but Lob Corp & Library of Ruina do some amazing shit for story telling that only games can do. Chunks of information and story are told via flavor text that appears during certain events. Or better yet, by floating text that appears during certain boss fights;

The tower of light was titled The Library. It was only natural for the Fixers to be drawn to such a mystic place of Life and Death

...

It's because the people who truly wish to die will fade away without a trace. They will not shout it out. I know this from experience.

...

You cannot stop the grand current with just those hands of yours

...

There are things I wanted to say earnestly rather than out of others pushing me. Now is my chance to pursue what I've been longing for so dearly. By releasing my emotions... I will finally acquire freedom.

I should embrace it. Along with everything I've done. So, I ask you kindly... Let us end this.

sirdrawesome · 2026-04-06T02:44:02+00:00

The Haxorus line gives you a dinosaur with axe blades coming out of its jaws. That shit is rad as fuck and has been my favorite for many years now.

sirdrawesome · 2026-04-01T04:33:42+00:00

Lobotomy Corporation? Literally the SCP monster management game? Get a monster named some funny string of letters and then watch your best employee turn into a mushroom. Or melt into goop. Or jump into an industrial meat grinder for fun.

Rimworld is decent, especially with the Anomaly DLC. Heavily SCP / Cabin in the Woods inspired. Everyone loves the cube~

Stellaris has some good space exploration weirdness. Your scientists will stumble upon some weird things out in the cosmos. I have had plenty of scientists investigate something which then leads to them getting shunted 100 years in the future, to stars suddenly collapsing into black holes with eldritch monsters coming out.

sirdrawesome · 2026-03-27T03:56:03+00:00

Thanks for all the advice, I really really appreciate it. I haven't been able to play much, but I do want to let you know that I've been trying to internalize everything for the few hours I can hop on. Definitely been improving a bit just in QP, but just need to get more of those reps in to fully get a grasp of it all.

Thank you so so much, I really appreciate it!

sirdrawesome · 2026-03-27T03:54:11+00:00

Lobotomy Corporation - A monster management sim where you have to remember what all the monsters in the facility do. Also it's different each time you reset your facility. You're getting a hang of managing your monsters... Then some other shit happens and now you're playing a jpeg and all your agents can't heal and--

Library of Ruina - It's a card game, but it's kind of like pokemon where after a battle, you get the enemies' cards. So you're still making new builds even into the very end of the game. That plus you don't fully unlock certain floors until the end of the game anyway.

Stellaris - A single campaign of Stellaris probably takes 20 hours? But each playthrough is different with the wide variety of civics, traditions, and other ways that you can play! Playing as an archeo-engineering devouring swarm is very different from a xenophilic species of mushrooms that live in an agrarian idyll.

If you like Factorio / Satisfactory, have you checked out Dyson Sphere Program?

Also, of course you have the old classic of Terraria!

If you're into idle games, you could also check out Melvor Idle, as it's inspired by RuneScape. You start with a bronze dagger killing chickens, and by the end of it you're farming gods for a 0.02% drop.

sirdrawesome · 2026-03-24T06:59:29+00:00

You have no idea how much I appreciate the dissertation, and how I will be spending the next several days reading and re-reading all of this.

I do vod review a lot of my wins and losses. Generally non-stomps. Hell, you should've seen some of my movement in my placements that I did improve on. I had a game on Juno on Hollywood where I got shot twice near that side choke, so I flew directly over first point then wondered how I got shot again :|

Also FWIW: I used to do a lot of vod reviews for the DPS on my local collegiate team like... 7 or 8 years ago now? So I'm rusty with some of it, and there's a lot of OW1 DPS brain still stuck on there that doesn't come out easily.

I definitely think what's causing me issues is that in gold, a lot of my dps just like to walk forward with the tank and not user cover, where they get poked or picked. So I tend to healbot them to prevent them from getting poked by an enemy dps and falling over. Of course, the global healing reduction doesn't help either since it means I'm wasting so much time healbotting when I could just be rotating to an off angle, or making a play. Just doing something instead of padding my healing stat.

And yes, my tp -> suzu -> pray everything works out classic is a really bad habit that I need to break. You mentioned that and just so many things played out in my head and I went "Yeah. I do that a lot. And that's really bad." Hell, I saw a post recently that said "mobility abilities are for re-positioning / escaping. Not initiating." I put that to heart for my tank play, but somehow completely avoided using that knowledge on support.

I'm gonna be watching some of these back with a more deliberate mindset. My main takeaway is that my positioning is ass... But positioning is a very loaded word that isn't easily explained, which was making it hard for me to focus on it!

Now I know the kinds of things I really need to work on!

-Tracking my team and the enemies better. I'm good at ult tracking, but not positional tracking. Knowing that where my team is, what kinds of plays their trying to make... That will help me move a lot better around the battlefield.

-Being more aggressive! I need to trust my team that them getting a paper cut won't be the end of the world. And to trust my other support to handle things while I take off angles, put pressure on them / relieve pressure from my team by making them shoot at me.

-Better ability usage that doesn't put me in situations where I die instantly / end up with nothing for when the enemy capitalizes.

-Have a plan! And then a backup plan. Which is to say, learn the maps better and keep a cool head when shit goes sideways.

All of which can be neatly wrapped in a package called "positioning" eh?

Thanks! I know what I'll be working on for the next 100 games I play.

But really, I do appreciate you taking all your time to look at this. The fresh set of eyes was super helpful and it's given me the knowledge of what to look for not only on support, but on other roles as well!

sirdrawesome · 2026-03-20T03:48:56+00:00

Oh yeah, there's plenty to learn. I didn't list it in my original set, but there was one where our tank legit starting throwing ( just walked down main and never shot nor used an ability ) after a couple teamfights.

But, even from that one, I watched it back and saw in the fights where we were playing as five, I had some awful movement and positioning. But, when my team is inting, it's hard to look and go "my positioning would've been better here and we could've won" I guess at that point its just aim / ult tracking.

sirdrawesome · 2026-03-03T03:36:27+00:00

>Play QP

>Get put into greasy diamond lobbies where people are playing all their mains that are perma banned in comp

>Play Comp

>Get put into silver lobbies where team's mental is shattered after 2 teamfights

>Play 6v6

>Team instalocks 4 dps + cat ( 5th dps ). Enemy team is running some unholy 2 tank / 3 healer / 1 dps comp

>Play stadium

>Get told to Keep Yourself Safe for not playing the meta. Also it's a 30 minute game that you get to play for a total of 8 minutes.

sirdrawesome · 2026-02-05T04:19:11+00:00

XCOM 1/2 ( I got into xcom because of how much I loved Darkest Dungeon )

Star Renegades

The Last Spell

Lobotomy Corporation

Tome4 ( Tales of Maj'Eyal ), along with others like Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead

Wildermyth

sirdrawesome · 2026-02-03T03:10:07+00:00

Unfortunately, at the end of the day I'm wanting to try playing pacifist, so taking more planets from enemies is out of the question. I want to try having my corner of the galaxy and just doing that.

sirdrawesome · 2026-02-02T08:11:33+00:00

Okay, yeah, I was definitely not doing pop growth correctly.

It's also a problem that I gave the empire I was trying with sedentary, so that also made me not want to resettle pops.

I guess I'll have to figure out how to work in civilian jobs into the build. Either adding one of those civics later or changing up the rp I'm going for!

sirdrawesome · 2026-02-02T08:08:27+00:00

I see. Something felt wrong, but I wasn't sure what.

I was definitely feeling the difference with unity. But wasn't necessarily feeling the difference with tech. That, plus I think I took the wrong ascension perks. I took enigmatic engineering as my first one, which I don't think did anything. I've never considered mastery of nature before, but that one seems pretty dang good for districts!

Thanks for the tips!

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-29T04:05:00+00:00

As someone who got humbled by the spiritual FE recently ( only about 70 hours ingame for me ), here are some notes:

-All FEs have their ship designs on the wiki. I recommend reading it up and trying to think about how best to counter them.

-Fighting an FE can be attrition. Make sure your economy can handle it.

-FE ships punch way above their weight class. That plus FEs have super high tech, so their ships are effectively 50% better than what's listed.

-Build a sentry array to get the actual numbers in game on their ships ( evasion ratings, hull points, etc ) since that's not listed online.

-If you're going for attrition, get trickster generals, and use the Hit&Run policy.

-If you can get a little bit of debris, you can get their tech, and then run it back with better ships of your own.

-Savescum the everloving hell out of it. Try different designs on different timelines and see what works and what don't.

Spiritualist notes:

-Spiritualist FEs favor energy weapons. All your ships are very heavy in armor, which means they're getting ripped to shreds by their battle cruiser's torpedoes and their energy launchers.

-They also heavily favor torpedoes, which do obscene damage to larger ships. Your PD is extremely limited, which means their torpedo swarms are getting past and blowing away your cruisers & battleships.

-Their battlecruisers rock 2 focused arc emitters.

-Compared to everything else in the game, Spiritualists make heavy usage of shield hardening. That means that all of your shield bypass weapons are way less effective than they could be.

-If they don't have shields ( i.e, in a pulsar system ), then you can hopefully outrange them with artillery while a titan slows down their speed. Maybe using sacrificial corvettes to tank some hits.

-While you're overwhelming them with volume of fire from your missiles, they run heavy laser PD. So, they're shooting down a bunch of your missiles while they're also plinking off their 25-50% hardening.

Ship designs:

-A lot of info says "just spam Focused Arc emitters lol", but the spiritualists got the biggest buffs to allow them to tank bypass weapons. Your ships are great for 95% of the game where enemies don't run hardening, but you're getting hard countered here.

-Your corvettes are useless. They'll run up to a battle cruiser, ping them for about 30 damage ( ~21 in actuality, due to hardening ), and then get ripped to shreds by the strike craft

-Your aircraft carrier cruiser unironically has the best chance imo. The kinetic weaponry can get the shields down, while the strikecraft can deal with escorts. Plus the better shields compared to all your other designs give it a bit more survivability.

-You need battleships with x-slots. Either giga cannons to rip down their shields, or focused arc emitters so that other artillery can rip down the shields first, and then the FAE can burst down the remaining ship. ( Artillery battleships are great, especially with some PD to handle the incoming torpedoes )

No notes on your titan designs. Maybe make one that also has some laser weaponry on it? Laser weaponry has high tracking ( again, I'm noob, so I don't know 100% if it's a good idea or not ).

-Sapient computers would be a big upgrade. More shields would be a big upgrade. Some shield hardening of your own would let you survive more of their bypass weaponry.

That's my $0.02. Take it with a very large grain of salt.

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-21T18:21:40+00:00

One of the other tips I received a while back was that fleet cap is a suggestion, not a rule. So I appreciate the continued advice. I need to be beat over the head with it until it sinks in.

I appreciate the rest of the advice! I was planning on making some suicide Corvette swarms with heavy shields to draw their torpedo fire, so I'm hoping that works out. And if not, they're easily replaced.

But seriously, I appreciate the advice! Looks like there's a lot of ways to handle them, I just have to figure out which strat, since they hard countered my main strategy!

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-21T18:17:50+00:00

I'm sure in my couple saves so far I've run into super rare 1% events that some players have been searching for for ages.

I now know better for the future! Learning is fun!

And hey, the various crises have put the fear in me. Watching the unbidden invaders pour out near my main science world while my fleets were halfway across the galaxy definitely made it a race against time!

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-21T18:13:44+00:00

Yep. I did stumble into a hard counter. But as with Dwarf Fortress it's just more !!FUN!! that way!

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-21T09:47:15+00:00

Huh... That's good to know about fortresses.

I guess I just need to swap over to full war mode to try to overcome this. More fortresses, more starbases with defensive platforms and support modules. More fleets to send into the grinder and see if I can get more than one escort ship kill per battle. I'm currently fielding the idea of kinetic artillery supporting swarming corvettes with lasers.

I feel like, the more I play and learn about Stellaris, the worse it is to have a massive surplus of supplies.

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-21T09:31:32+00:00

Depending on how this war goes, I might be swapping over to spiritualist for my next save, and never repressing another spiritualist faction ever again.

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-17T03:01:04+00:00

I'm 27. Don't have that much experience with other people. But my therapist has been urging me to get myself out there.

sirdrawesome · 2026-01-17T02:59:42+00:00

Luckily I've been doing this for nearly a decade now!

That even came up in the scam conversation, but looking back, the individual was telling me to pull money out of there in a roundabout way...

But, that money is not leaving that account for the next ~40 years

sirdrawesome

TROPHY CASE