majestic

There's a pretty wide range between viable and meta builds, yes, but with the entire endgame of Diablo IV consisting of timed challenges with waves upon waves of enemies, killing them efficiently is the difference between playing an okay ARPG and having a miserable time. At least, well, for me it is. I'm not playing to have fun, but to quickly get through whatever gauntled Blizzard has cooked up so I can get back to playing other games.

There's really no point in playing anything but Spiritborn and Necromancer right now. Well, maybe Sorcerer if you like very specific playstyles.

I am done with the season journey in Diablo IV. There are some tasks open (salvaging 100 ancestral items is more of a grind than I thought it would be) for the feat of strength, but otherwise, yeah, well, that was underwhelming in every way. Except maybe that completely busted Evade Eagle build of the new class. My thumb hurts from hitting spacebar over and over again.

If a ship of apprentices all become journeymen, is it still an apprenticeship? Asking for Theseus.

Professor Tomoe was looking for the three talismans to turn Hotaru into MISTRESS 9 in order to bring PHARAO 90 into our dimension. It is no wonder you guys cannot remember any of that, this is the closest the anime ever got to actually implementing most of the hare-brained plot of the manga, where the difference is mostly in that it is Sailor Saturn who destroys PHARAO 90 by bringing about the apocalypse in PHARAO 90's dimension, while in the anime it's just Sailor Moon who goes to PHARAO 90 and beats him (?) up off-screen just to drive home how ridiculous it all really is. Things the anime chose to drop in favor of not sucking is Haruka kissing a flabbergasted Usagi without consent and Hotaru's butt-plug shaped crystal thing, and a number of other little things like Setsuna's orbital ion cannon. Black Lady wanted her father, and you know, the manga implies she got him in every way she wanted. At the very least she got his tongue in her mouth. In front of Usagi. Because that's just really good and wholesome entertainment and all. It's funny how the two filler arcs in Sailor Moon ended up being some of the best storytelling it had. The Doom Tree plot was simple but genuinely heartfelt, and the reuse of Nehelennia in Stars was actually fairly decent, if a bit weird at times since it references things that never happened in the anime (like Minako being the leader of the team). After reading half the manga and watching Crystal, I have realized one thing: the writers did the best job they could with the anime, and all of its flaws are remnants of being an adaptation of something so bad that I have no idea why it was so successful. Except Super S. That had to be on purpose. I'm pretty sure Ikuhara made the season as a giant middle finger to Toei. The next time I'm rewatching the 90ies anime I'll probably appreciate the story episodes much more than I used to. In the same way I no longer hate Janeway's stupid writing in Voyager after subjecting myself to nuTrek. It is still bad, yes, and she's still a basket case and should be in psychiatric care for bipolar disorder and not running a starship, but it could be worse. Oh so much worse.

Guys, with all that talk of the apocalypse and all, do you guys remember the entire reason we're active in this thread? We watched the only universally beloved anime in the thread (well, except for the season with the pedophile alicorn) and we're all still here, so... uh. I don't think @PK htiw klaw eriF's dislike of the end of season five makes such a difference. Kinda... dunno. I mean, I'm all for ending the world, but, you know. It ain't gonna happen because it ain't happened already?

Time to check if the jeweler area in Kurast Bazaar still crashes after a couple of seconds standing in there. Got stuck there yesterday because it kept crashing the moment it loaded the game, until I got far enough away to get out of the crash zone. Man, you know, back in the day, Blizzard made games where half the mechanics wouldn't work or don't do whatever they were supposed to (one of the funniest was the Earthliving Weapon glyph in Wrath of the Lich King, which read it increases Earthliving Weapon's procc chance by 5%, which it did - raised it from 20% to 21%, a proper 5% increase ), but at least the game ran well. Nowadays half the mechanics and half the game don't work... edit: Well, no crash in Kurast yet. Looks like they fixed it. Good job, now, can I have my quest reward back that dropped on the ground moments before the game crashed on me the last time I was there?

That is certainly one way to read it, if you want to troll. I should probably have skipped the part about it probably being the least played content. The actual dungeon is fine, it was just impossible to complete with random mouth breathers, which sadly is the usual way to play 5-man content in the game. The entire game is designed for each part of its content to be completed multiple times anyway, what with it being an MMORPG, so giving the inevitable repeats a breath of fresh air is good. The point still stands though, the achievement system was a nice addon with an incentive to do things differently. I have done some of that myself, like playing a full tactics modded Baldur's Gate 2 solo on insane run*. My inability to liberally use limited resources in games makes many of the games I play technically challenge runs right from the start (I had 99 human effigies in Dark Souls 2 halfway through the game and only then started to use them because they would have otherwise gone to waste). Well, actually, yeah, I get it. It's similar to the problem I had with Baldur's Gate 3's timed quests where I immediately looked up time sensitive quest lists before even reaching the druid grove, just to make sure I don't miss any content. I probably despise that sort of game design in the same way you dislike achievements, but the point is that I can still see how and why they're included, and that they can make for good game design. They're just not for me, and I will always hate them. *Lie by omission, I have only done that because it was a challenge on the forums. Without external impetus, I am so not doing any challenge runs outside of my OCD when it comes to limited resources in games. More like the opposite, I will go out of my way to break the game in every way possible. I did not like using the rapier, but it had several advantages that were too good to pass up. Next to the ridiculous damage output it also was good to use for the NPC and PVP invasions (since Dark Souls 2 requires external shenanigans to put into offline mode, I often did not bother doing it) because it could stunlock enemies until your stamina runs out. The Dark Souls 2 PVP meta seems to revolve around doing the silly rapier dance. You whip out your ice rapier, buff it with your buff of choice depending on your character build and then try to connect just once to stunlock them until you are out of stamina. Rinse and repeat until one side is dead. Arguably the best weapon in the game, and one you can Fast-Havel with due to its low weight. Not so keen on the poise damage though. Great weapon to use on bosses though. I tend to, what was it that Tolkien used to describe his dislike for allegory, cordially dislike PVP in games were anything but skill influences outcomes too much, and in the case of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 game, their backstab vector placement and net code are just way too janky to make for fun combat. That is before factoring in that one might just play a build that is not too good in PVP and since there are not a whole lot of players left playing the games these days you might get invaded by the same player over and over again without having a real chance to fight back against their meta build, and you end up with one very unfun experience. Maybe Dark Souls 3's PVP is better, but somehow I doubt it, and I am not going to find out. It is just not fun for me, and the same was or is true for PVP in plenty of hot key based MMORPGs with global cooldowns and incredibly gear dependent PVP. Really enjoyed the arcade space shooter component of SWTOR though. I might have played a couple thousand matches. I don't get it, Solaire is clearly undead, and if he was Gwyn's firstborn and human, he would have been dead at least twenty times over. Frampt implies that it has been at least a thousand years since Gwyn linked the first flame, and his disavowal of his first born must have happened before that. If you help him fail his quest for the sun he loses faith ("Was it all a lie?" - why yes Solaire, that is the nature of religion, it is always a lie), which is why he can be summoned against Gwyn, whom he worshipped, and you need 25 faith to join the Warriors of Sunlight without jolly cooperation, so he's part of a rather faithful group, yes? I'd argue it is also the reason why he can (almost) solo Gwyn even on NG+. 's laughable, out of all the things in the game, the one with a rather clear intent by the designers is the one the fandom argues over being something completely else? Yeah, I understand that, it is the same for me. See, for instance, when you read A Game of Thrones, it becomes pretty clear that the mystery of who Jon's actual parents are was intentionally put in the novel. The novel also contains enough clues to answer it conclusively, or at least I thought so. The fandom did not agree, and they argued back and forth, at least until the TV show proved that the original theories were correct. The mimic with the occult club in the secret room in Anor Londo? That's an occult club. In a mimic. A mimic that most likely just hides amongst other treasure to eat whoever tries to open it. That's what mimics do. Eh. I repeat myself. Yeah, maybe. That's what I once called a younger gamer a "stupid uninformed neophyte" over, on a different forum, after saying they loved Halo so much because it was the first multiplayer shooter*, so clearly we have found something where I am the irrational hater more so than you are. Yay? *Historically obviously wrong on every account, but it was arguably the first instance of a very popular shooter that you could play online over a console at a time when the availability of fast and reliable internet connections skyrocketed, and very likely a gaming generation's first foray into multiplayer shooters. So, in a sense, well, I guess it is understandable. If one squints enough and accepts that in the same way that I can "accept" that people like time sensitive quests because immersion, or like looking for NPC because they have schedules and it is a full moon in the second month now, and they are on their yearly pilgrimage because immersion or people who think Bethesda makes good games because... ok no idea why, but clearly, they exist.

Huh, Diablo IV needed stability improvements? You don't say. In the past few days the game servers have crashed several times for me, especially while loading into new zones (i.e. getting endless loading screens without timeouts). Well, maybe that got better, it is pretty tiresome to lose your seething opal buffs because the servers keep dropping games.

AMD: Here's Zen (notquite)5%! Intel: Hold my beer! Granted, if even half of the claimed power savings are correct that'll be interesting, but unless Intel can't into 1st party benchmarks, the incentive to upgrade to Arrow Lake just went away. Unless the 265K is proportionally better in comparison than the 285K, which I am not really interested in anyway, the only upside would be going back to air cooling's much better idle noise. Not gonna lie, that pump is annoying as f.... when it is quiet in the room.

I have a hunch that we are fairly safe, because if either @majestic or @Bartimaeus would enjoy Dandadan then the end times are upon us anyway. Besides, I am not sure if we wouldn't need IC for that, being one of the originals.

High definition textures, something Cyberpunk 2077 or more recently, Black Myth: Wukong, for all their visual glory, do not really have.

Well, to be fair, a full installation* of Diablo IV is like 150GB, so it's more like a quarter reinstall. *A third of that is the optional Diablo IV high res texture pack.

Huh, what, how and why does Bruce suddenly have a problem with young people born into corporate slavery dying when trying to escape from their lot? It is their lot for a reason, and they should all properly slave away for because shareholders expect proper returns on their investment.

Quest designer: "How long should the Spiritborn class quest be in Diablo IV?" Design Lead: "Yes." For crying out loud, seriously, stop wasting my time game. What the hell.

I edited the post to make it a little clearer, I sometimes forget that I am no longer as active in these discussions as I used to be. No, I am not serious, The Tangerine in Chief is a serious challenge to my humanist and pacifist outlook, to the point where my first reaction to the assassination attempt at his rally was not "damn, did we reach the next level of escalation?" but rather "why'd he miss?"...

Well, if we're going that low, I went to the theater for Battle: Los Angeles. Aaaaaaand in case anyone wants to make a comback, I paid extra to watch the 48fps version of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

I think they all just suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

How's that? FPÖ, ÖVP and NEOS have the same economic cow manure policies, they just differ on their sociopolitical axis. The NEOS are very liberal while the FPÖ is highly authoritarian, with the ÖVP being more traditional conservatives, i.e. the highly corrupt rules for thee and not for me types who would walk back social policies to the 50ies if only they could. Affordable housing, equal chances for everyone, good education for anyone who wants it, universal healthcare (well, we do have all that, but it could be better). The party was wildly successful in the 70ies and 80ies and with that paved the way for their own downfall in the 90ies and early 2000s. The former working class (more or less) moved towards being the middle class with non-citizens ("guest workers", as the used to be called) taking over much of the former jobs of the working class. Except, well, they cannot vote, not being citizens, and even if they could, they would be more conservatively inclined, basically the same phenomenon that you have in the US where naturalized immigrant communities overwhelmingly vote Republican at times. Nowadays they really struggle with finding a popular party line on migration issues, and in spite of being only a part of a few recent governments, they're still seen as part of the nebulous and unnamed elites that the Freedom Party is apparently against, even though their current party leader is as much of a career politician as everyone else. Hasn't earned a lick of non-taxpayer money in his life, but rages against the elites living off the state. Also, because it once again is relevant to the thread. The video has English subs, at a runtime of under two minutes that should work for everyone on the forum, even those whose brains are nigh overwhelmed with just keeping their vegatative functions going.

Yeah, don't do that, your fists do the same amount of damage, attack faster and cost less stamina...

Eh, I went to the Matrix IMAX double feature for Revolutions even though I hated Reloaded. I mean you couldn't have known that both these films were terrible, I went there knowing I'd have a bad time - and to make matters worse, Reloaded ended up being the better film of the two. :picardfacepalm:

Well, took an extended nap today so I can't sleep. Yay. Dark Souls 3 is progressing nicely so far, though I don't really have any idea where I am going, but the game certainly improved the storytelling aspect. The NPCs gather at Firelink Shrine as usual and their questlines are about as confusing and arcane as always. I have an example from World of Warcraft to back up that claim. Back in the heyday of the game when I still played extensively, Blizzard build what is probably still the least played dungeon of all time, and in many a player's opinion the worst. The Oculus made extensive use of their newly introduced vehicle combat mechanics, which in this case means that the five players in the dungeon eventually need to mount vehicles. Drakes, in the case of the Oculus dungeon. As if the average MMORPG player would not already be overwhelmed with navigating a pseudo-3D dungeon while still playing their class at least passably, the drakes could of course fly and added a true third dimension to navigation. A disaster in the making, but not the point, I digress a bit. The final boss in the dungeon needed to be fought on, uh, drakeback, replacing the player's usual abilities with their drake's. There were three types, ruby, emerald and amber, being the tank, healer and damage dealer respectively. The standard setup would be one tank, one healer and three damage dealers, but the boss had three achievements to its name: one for defeating it without using ruby drakes, one for defeating it without emerald drakes and one for defeating it without amber drakes. Each of them, assuming they were done within the appropriate gear and level range, forced the players to approach the fight in entirely distinct ways, adding a unique twist, changing the tactics and coordination needed to deal with the boss. Well, except for Amber Void, which just meant four tanks and a healer, and the fight would just take longer. Could always argue that such challenge runs could always be played without an achievement as well, and while that is true, it still rewards players for challenges taken on. The dungeon achievements were parts of a larger meta achievement that rewarded a special mount to show off. I have a Violet Proto-Drake that I got during Wrath of the Lich King in World of Warcraft. That was only obtainable by grinding out rare drops and doing rather specific PVP activities in time limited events and took at least nine months complete. It takes that long for all the events to show up. Miss one or didn't get part of your achievement? Woops, better luck next year. The point, uh, yeah, farming a sub 1% drop chance item for an achievement? Child's play. Don't look at me like that, getting the Violet Proto-Drake was the only way to achieve 310% flight mount speed in the game at the time, next to ending a pvp season within the top 0.5% of arena players. I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the things that we have complained about with the Dark Souls 2 controls were specifically added or changed to address grievances with the Dark Souls pvp (i.e. backstab stunlocks or the inability to change the direction of heavy attacks with large weapons). There's a reason why Dark Souls 2 is particularily regarded as having the best controls, mostly by players who enjoy engaging in pvp in these games. Which, for the life of me, I cannot fathom, but hey, what do I know. Speaking of chaining attacks, much of my Dark Souls 2 experience was light attacking with a 2-handed rapier. Because it does ridiculous damage, is quick and makes the combat in the game (against bosses in particular, but not limited to them) feel more bearable. Like I said earlier, it was not just the controls that add to the detrimental experience that I had in Dark Souls 2. It was the combination of these recovery times with the encounter design that made it all the worse: you can get more than one hit in even with a slow weapon in Dark Souls, while that was almost impossible to do in Dark Souls 2. Like I said, I barely played anything but WoW at the time (later Star Wars: The Old Republic). Dark Souls is a good game, even with all the jank, the unfinished second half and when played well after it seems to have struck a chord at the perfect time. I still would like to know what they got out of it. It is also not that I generally do not want to engage in that kind of storytelling (and while it is a TV show, Utena was full of the same sort of clues). In Dragon Age: Inqusition, of all games, the best time I had was going through ancient elven ruins that added only tangentially to the plot of the game, but mostly to the lore. That interested me in a way that Dark Souls never did. Take Anor Londo for example, where you can find the trashed room of Gywn's firstborn next to the pristine room of Gwynevere, all the firstborn's statues are missing and you can gather from the item descriptions that he was considered a god of war who fell from grace and had his name and likeness stricken from the annals. That's all fine but... I just don't care? Nor is it actually relevant to the plot of Dark Souls, so that sort of storytelling is perhaps there, but it does not pertain to the story. I actually watched a couple of Dark Souls theory videos, and they're downright bizarre. People believe that every line of dialogue and every item placement in the world mean something. In a game that was clearly unfinished and rusehd to release, no less. The video game equivalent of coming up with conspiracy theories. Well, riddle me this, how is anything in this world in its current state relevant to age old lore when Frampt so clearly states that it has been at least one thousand years since Gwyn linked the first flame and became the first Lord of Cinder? You guys honestly believe that one bow in the Darkroot area was someone meant to cover Havel's escape from confinement some two hundred years prior? Really? How's that bow still there? Magic wood? Anyone ever thought that the reason why the Havel that actually is in the game doesn't drop his armor when you kill him is because the game designers did not want you to run around in Havel's gear during the half of the game they had time to design and make fun, and not because "that is clearly not the real Havel, just someone who traded places with him during his daring escape after his failed rebellion that he incited because Seath abducted his secret girlfriend for experiments"? I guess it beats Makoto x Ami shippers, but not by much. That became a bizarre rant. Woops. No, you're right. Dark Souls' approach is better than having a terrible story forced down your throat. My point is, more than anything else, that Dark Souls' reputation for having such a rich and subtle storyline and amazing lore is merely the result of players imagining much more than that there really was. That was intentional by Miyazaki, who is apparently on record stating that he wanted his game to be like the experience he had while reading English books about mythology as a kid, i.e. only understanding a miniscule amount and filling up the gaps with your imagination. I read that on a wiki somewhere and have no source to link to, but it does make a lot of sense. I am sorry, but... at least in my opinion, the lore of Dark Souls is not all that interesting, and the story the game tells has a dark fantasy trapping, but is still a really basic "you are the chosen one and decide the fate of the world" story, and it is not very well told to boot. I suppose I am salty about this because word of mouth taught me to expect the most amazing game experience ever, featuring hard, unforgiving but still fair bosses, a well designed world and fantastic storytelling and lore. What I got was Dark Souls, a game that is more often janky than not, has more than enough moments that are objectively unfair (and no amount of copium huffing will ever convince me that the Capra Demon boss fight is fair - it is easily dealt with once you know what's coming, yes, but fair? Nah.) and that falls apart in its second half - and it wasn't even that hard, just to add insult to the injury. I realize that is my fault for buying into the hype by the fandumb. It is amazing that I still enjoyed playing the game, and a testament to how strong the things in the game are that it did right. You know, in spite of the Titanite Demon having the jankiest hitboxes of any game ever.

Followed by Mortal Kombat: Conquest.