What are you playing RIGHT NOW?

[Malcador]

Trying to finish Battletech's campaign but finding it tedious to do so.  Forgot how awesome the missions design fighting twice your number with endless LRM spam was.

[Tale]

Bouncing between three games. Still doing Diablo 3, I basically just try to hit one of the remaining season items a day.

Detroit Become Human, I hear so much good stuff about it despite not liking Quantic Dream's stuff that I decided to give it a chance. It's really good so far, but that tends to be the way Cage does thing. Really good then something really dumb happens.

Lastly is Doom 2016. I rented it at release as an old Doom fan and wasn't thoroughly impressed. Playing it again now I remember why. The platforming is garbage. Accidentally slipping a jump to die really does nothing to add to the experience. And scouring every corner of the map for the hidden path to a collectible certainly isn't contributing to exciting demon shooting.

[Malcador]

52 minutes ago, Tale said:

Lastly is Doom 2016. I rented it at release as an old Doom fan and wasn't thoroughly impressed. Playing it again now I remember why. The platforming is garbage. Accidentally slipping a jump to die really does nothing to add to the experience. And scouring every corner of the map for the hidden path to a collectible certainly isn't contributing to exciting demon shooting.

And the soundtrack sucks as well. 

[Keyrock]

So I went deep into the volcano in Conan Exiles. I wore Lemurian Warrior armor, which provides some heat resistance, and made sure to bring plenty of water and ice to cool down...

It was not enough. I died of heatstroke. 

After a bit of research I found out that

 

Silent Legion armor, along with being the strongest armor in the game, has the highest heat resistance of any armor out there, so I'm going to need that to get the trapezohedron. I'm lev 56 right now and that's a lev 60 feat that I need to kill another boss to get, so I have some work to do.

Edited June 14, 2019 by Keyrock

[Hawke64]

Neverwinter Nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate
I'm quite sure that I'm getting near the ending (reached the second hideout of the Night Masks and got stuck at the altar). Though, so far there was little information on the item that started the story, the cursed domino mask.

[marelooke]

On 6/13/2019 at 2:40 PM, Keyrock said:

^ Some T4s have set locations, most are random, but not anywhere random. What I mean is that they have a chance to spawn in 6 or 7 different camps, not just anywhere.

Skeletons are the worst enemies. Not only are they immune to poison and bleeding (possibly all status effects), but they also don't stagger when you hit them with attacks. I hate them so much.  Also on the list of enemies I despise is a variety of sand reaper that spits a steady stream of poison and if that hits you it applies an insta-10 stack of poison. Even if you're quick with the Set antidote, it still deals a metric ****ton of damage. 

It depends on the spawnpoint, but if multiple tiers of NPCs spawn there the likelihood of a named being able to spawn there as well is rather high, at least in my experience. Of course, there's a big difference between a spawnpoint that can spawn "any craftsman" vs one that can spawn "any armorer", though in practice I tend to just murder any camp I come across and just nab the T4s when I see them

Lemurians are nice in that regard as there's only a very very small area where they appear so anything that's not a Purge-only NPC will spawn there. So I just set up a few Wheels of Pain outside there and raid those camps whenever I feel like it. There being gold in them shipwrecks there is a nice bonus.

Btw, can I add Rhinos to the list of enemies that are horrible to fight? I tend to get "stuck" in them (can only dodge backwards, but not sidewards, which due to their charge is...not ideal)

16 hours ago, Keyrock said:

So I went deep into the volcano in Conan Exiles. I wore Lemurian Warrior armor, which provides some heat resistance, and made sure to bring plenty of water and ice to cool down...

It was not enough. I died of heatstroke. 

After a bit of research I found out that

  Reveal hidden contents

Silent Legion armor, along with being the strongest armor in the game, has the highest heat resistance of any armor out there, so I'm going to need that to get the trapezohedron. I'm lev 56 right now and that's a lev 60 feat that I need to kill another boss to get, so I have some work to do.

From what I've read that armor did get toned down quite a bit (aka. nerfed). It's probably still very good, and might still be the best in the game, but it's no longer as good as older posts would lead you to believe. I'm still not entirely sure how the heat resistance thing works, do the bars on your "Stats" page count? Or do you have to look at the individual armor pieces? In the first case some Flawless Epic versions of other armors should be suitable as well (eg. the normal Light set or Darfari.)

So yeah, did some more resource gathering around my base, found a cave filled with crystal pretty much underneath my base that I've managed to miss all this time. That was rather...errr...embarassing...

My crafting terrace is getting close to a finished state, so it might be worthy of some screenshots soon. Wonder if I can pull the amount of foundations I've used in this project from the savegame, I'm betting on it being very close to a 1000 T3 foundations (note: it's 1122 according to the magic I worked on my savefile). My smelters have been busy, hehe.

That's also where a 2nd character comes in handy, while I'm playing that one, in the same save, time keeps running, so crafting still progresses for my "main" character, it's been especially great to address my Ichor shortage, since traps etc. only progress while your game is running I never had a lot of fish in my fish traps. Now I have loads upon loads. It's great!

What was less great is that I ran into the infamous "disappearing shrine" bug. I upgraded my Shrine on my second character (from T1 to T2) only to have it vanish (along with everything that was on it). That was...nasty. Apparently it's common when you build Shrines inside so I guess I better prepare for the upgrade to T3 to go badly as well. Since I wasn't really feeling like tearing down half the building for a bug I just admin spawned a new one. Still lost everything that was on it though, annoying.

Edited June 15, 2019 by marelooke

[Keyrock]

Apropos armor, you get diminishing returns at the extreme high end. A full set of Silent Legion armor translates to something along the lines of 900ish armor, whereas a full set of Epic Flawless Stygian Soldier armor, for example, might be in the 750 range, which sounds like a decently large difference, but actually translates to Silent Legion armor set giving 78% damage resistance while Epic Flawless Stygian set gives 75% damage resistance, which is fairly negligible.

Those numbers might not be completely correct, I'm pulling them out of thin air, but that's the general idea. Hopefully the heat resistance on the Silent Legion armor didn't get nerfed, because I'm going to need it inside that volcano. You overheat SUPER fast in there.

[Mamoulian War]

Still playing Hyperdimension Neptunia V II. Having more fun than in the previous game, mostly due to lower number of cutscenes  I have now started the last third of the game and unlocked Coliseum.

[Hawke64]

The Surge
Started the game. It is a Souls-like in a more dystopian setting (not a bad thing). The only issue so far is that I can't tell if an enemy is going to attack me or not yet when I enter its aggro range.
The intro movie had very detailed animations and was slightly off-putting.

[wolfrider100]

I just started a playthrough of Shadowrun Dragonfall - Director's Cut, I'm using a Street Samurai build (I picked ranged combat, rifles, throwing for grenades and lastly charisma). I'm also going to play Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Extended Edition next but that's after I finish up Dragonfall. Grabbed both games from the Steam sale today.

Edited June 18, 2019 by wolfrider100

[213374U]

SWTOR.

I got talked into tanking for a NiM prog raiding team...

[LittleArmadillo0]

Fallout 4. Like an abusive relationship I try to leave and but I end up coming back.

[majestic]

5 hours ago, 213374U said:

SWTOR.

I got talked into tanking for a NiM prog raiding team...

Not sure if I should be envious or consoling here. So what are you playing?

[213374U]

5 hours ago, majestic said:

Not sure if I should be envious or consoling here. So what are you playing?

A bit of both, I'd imagine, if you've been in my place. Thankfully it's mostly drama-free so far, so there's that.

Jugg or sin depending on who the offtank is -- but mostly jugg. Just started gearing up a PT too.

[Gorth]

5 years of tanking on a PT and never got to do a nim ops with him. Shadow (thats the pub version of assassin) tanking almost feels like cheating

[213374U]

I mean, I've been playing this game on and off since 2013 and only stepped in a nim instance last month. It's a good time to be a noob because we are a full two gear tiers above content tuning.

And yeah, Shadow/Sin is downright unfair with its "**** mechanics LOL" button and spammable 60% DR. But it's kinda made of paper otherwise. If I screwed up DCD management or slip with Dark Ward, I was getting hit for 110k+ on Kephess. From hero to zero with this simple trick / healers HATE him, etc.

Mostly I'm curious to see what they are going to do with the expansion because everything they've been saying sounds too good to believe. I've been hurt before and all that.

[Zoraptor]

Finished Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Liked it a lot overall, plenty of minor bugs still which I didn't really care about and I thought the save game system and combat was fine. Performance was OK too, certainly when compared to AC: Odyssey (CPU limited at 3440x1440 on a Vega64? oh the glories of multiple overlapping DRM schemes) which had a lot more money behind it. There were some pretty obvious engine limitations towards the end where they clearly couldn't do stuff quite as they wanted. Mentioned it before but it does stand repeating, I thought the A Woman's Lot DLC was excellent (the rest certainly wasn't worth ten bucks a piece though, quality wise it was fine but nowhere near enough content).

Gone back to ATOM RPG now, as it has been 'finished'. The 30 hours or so I put into it before stopping last time pretty much convinced me it was the best of the turn based Fallout1/2 successors even with its jankiness and somewhat stilted UI.

[bugarup]

Tanking sucks, it is always tank's fault when sh†t goes wrong but nobody notices their work when it goes right. Healing's much better, you can at least be sure that if you die it's because of your own incompetence. 'sides, if too drunk to play something involving cranial activity you can always troll in PvP. 

Granted, I never do operations. They look too much like a job, and I don't play games to have more job.

[marelooke]

46 minutes ago, bugarup said:

Tanking sucks, it is always tank's fault when sh†t goes wrong but nobody notices their work when it goes right. Healing's much better, you can at least be sure that if you die it's because of your own incompetence. 'sides, if too drunk to play something involving cranial activity you can always troll in PvP. 

Granted, I never do operations. They look too much like a job, and I don't play games to have more job.

That's only really been a problem since games made it more convenient to level as tank by upping their damage, and adding multispec. That and communities getting bigger, or rather, there not really being much of one anymore on a per server basis.

Basically in the pre-multispec WoW days you wouldn't blame the tank unless they were actually really, really bad (and then you'd likely try to get them to get better instead of raging at them). Getting on the blacklist of your servers' active tanks was a bad deal if you wanted to get into dungeon groups on a regular basis.

Respeccing was costly and doing questing etc. as tank was horrendous , so tanks were relatively rare (source: leveled a paladin as tank during TBC. Basically ended up living inside of dungeons to do that. I was every leveling person's best friend for some reason, must've been my fabulous personality ;)) and many of the good or well geared ones didn't really deal with PUGs, so finding one of those and staying on their good side was kind of important.

Tbh I feel in general people we just more patient/nicer "in those days". I think smaller communities tended to help against toxicity as you were bound to run into the same people over and over again, so being a jerk tended to backfire more often than not (I heard of people moving servers because nobody wanted to deal with them anymore)

As to raids/operations being a job, it's more like playing cards with your friends every Thursday. Or playing football, or whatever. There's clans/guilds that make it feel like a job, those are the bad ones. Of course, as with all things in life, finding a guild with a good attitude is hard. As is maintaining such a guild, so they tend to be rather rare.

Edited June 20, 2019 by marelooke

[majestic]

4 hours ago, 213374U said:

I mean, I've been playing this game on and off since 2013 and only stepped in a nim instance last month. It's a good time to be a noob because we are a full two gear tiers above content tuning.

And yeah, Shadow/Sin is downright unfair with its "**** mechanics LOL" button and spammable 60% DR. But it's kinda made of paper otherwise. If I screwed up DCD management or slip with Dark Ward, I was getting hit for 110k+ on Kephess. From hero to zero with this simple trick / healers HATE him, etc.

Mostly I'm curious to see what they are going to do with the expansion because everything they've been saying sounds too good to believe. I've been hurt before and all that.

I played an Operative healer from launch to Shadows of Revan. After the first server merges I've been involved in every nightmare and nightmare speedrun first clear on our server (missed our first Styrak kill though). Shortly after SoR was released major guild drama pushed me into reducing my time with the game first and into quitting after scoring a major contract at work. I stopped wanting to babysit colleagues, customers AND the guys* in the game.

It was fun for a while, and being one of a handful of people with the fancy titles and mounts that came with being able to clear nightmare operations at the time sure felt good, but being in a guild where everyone hates each other's guts that is only glued together by success is taxing. Especially once you hit a bump in the road like we did at the end of Rise.

We used to run a Twin-Sin setup during 1.x and switched to Sin/Jug for 2.x. Never felt the need for a PT tank, but I stopped following the game after BioWare did a Blizzard and cut the talent trees in favor of "meaningful" choices, obviously I have no idea what the meta is right now, but a Sin's ability to cancel game mechanics through cooldowns is so powerful that I doubt anyone can possibly justify not taking at least one if they're serious** about raiding.

*At the risk of sounding full of myself, the other healer we had (one of the best players I've ever had the genuine pleasure of playing with) and I pretty much carried our DPS by healing through a lot of mechanics and doing non-trivial dps ourselves while healing.

**Serious meaning making optimal choices, obviously, not GhostCrawler's ridiculous notion that Shaman healers sucking during Cataclysm is all right because most guilds don't go for progress and they're good enough to have fun with. Sure dude, but if the top guilds don't take them because they're so inferior that there's no justification for including them even in farm raids - and we're talking about the best players of the game here - why would a group of people who aren't nearly as skilled or dedicated would want to make their life even harder than it already is?

[Mamoulian War]

Just few minutes ago, after having it pretty long time on my backlog, I've finished Hyperdimension Neptunia VII. My first playthrough ended with the most common Ascension Ending. The game is IMO much better than all previous installments. Cut-scenes are shorter, gameplay is more refined, sending out scouts is more user friendly. Can't wait for the release of Super Neptunia RPG in few days. I can only recommend, if you are into that kind of jRPGs

[kanisatha]

Took a break from Witcher 3 to fire up Civ 5 for a bit. Now back to Witcher 3 and still loving it. I feel very strongly that a non-party-based RPG cannot ever be enjoyable for me, but Witcher 3 appears to be a unique exception to the rule. I guess in a way it feels quasi-party-based, what with characters like Ciri and Yennefer and others constantly involved directly within gameplay. An interesting way to approach a solo-play game.

[Malcador]

Found my notes on an old Civ 4 save (that I made for some reason...) where I managed to depopulate the Middle East and Northern Egypt with constant warfare - cities' shrunk from 23 pop to 1 with constant changing of hands, drafting, etc. - so tempted to pick that back up as d3 is causing me wrist pain. 

 

[213374U]

 

9 hours ago, majestic said:

I played an Operative healer from launch to Shadows of Revan.

Nice. You have way more experience than me then, both in the content and in the "politics". Personally, I just enjoy learning the ins-and-outs, checking combat logs, identifying mistakes, and training to execute a strategy. I'm the weirdo without any titles on and only ever using "activate random mount". Most people I've come across are all about "cheevos", though. As I said, there's no drama to speak of, but I can definitely see the potential for the mood to go sour. That'd be my cue to bail.

There is no current "mandatory" tanks currently among other things because of overgearing. PT gets a bad rap, but people have cleared all content with those, so everything is "viable" at the moment. Maybe not the best choice for cheesing Brontes orbs, but the team can readjust -- and if they can't, well, maybe they need to work on that. Having an AoE hard stun, grapple, and ranged abilities is nice on Tyth, for instance.

I don't know about healers being able to heal through mechanics anymore, though. Our DDs get thorough grillings for standing in stupid and their DTPS is almost as closely monitored as their DPS. But it's possible you were simply... better?

 

12 hours ago, bugarup said:

Tanking sucks, it is always tank's fault when **** goes wrong but nobody notices their work when it goes right. Healing's much better, you can at least be sure that if you die it's because of your own incompetence.

Actually, in my experience if the healer bites it, it's usually the tank's fault (barring occurrences of standing in stupid).

Edited June 20, 2019 by 213374U
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[majestic]

1 hour ago, 213374U said:

Nice. You have way more experience than me then, both in the content and in the "politics". Personally, I just enjoy learning the ins-and-outs, checking combat logs, identifying mistakes, and training to execute a strategy. I'm the weirdo without any titles on and only ever using "activate random mount". Most people I've come across are all about "cheevos", though. As I said, there's no drama to speak of, but I can definitely see the potential for the mood to go sour. That'd be my cue to bail.

There is no current "mandatory" tanks currently among other things because of overgearing. PT gets a bad rap, but people have cleared all content with those, so everything is "viable" at the moment. Maybe not the best choice for cheesing Brontes orbs, but the team can readjust -- and if they can't, well, maybe they need to work on that. Having an AoE hard stun, grapple, and ranged abilities is nice on Tyth, for instance.

I don't know about healers being able to heal through mechanics anymore, though. Our DDs get thorough grillings for standing in stupid and their DTPS is almost as closely monitored as their DPS. But it's possible you were simply... better?

DPS was our raid's weak point, as such we always had to get creative to meet the more stringent damage checks. These were little things like healing through normally unnecessary damage from adds so that DDs don't have to target switch immediately to standing in some of the fires on purpose (or not running far enough with Mini-Kephess' jumps during Brontes on them), DDs not cleansing themselves on Nefra and my favorite one, our team setup during Operator IX which had us solo healing through the yellow and orange phases because otherwise these cores wouldn't go down properly.

Sometimes one of us would run with a hybrid damage spec to get bosses down, like Draxus initially. Two of our ranged DPS had issues with keeping their damage up while target switching, so that boss was much more of an issue that it should have been. The most epic moment was during our Brontes attempts where our Mara learned to respec in five seconds in order to get some more burst damage going on the droid phase.

It wasn't all bad though, at least we were busy during the fights. Oh, and we spent the entirety of our runs undergeared because as healing "wasn't an issue" all the loot would go to DPS and Tanks first.