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Post by mln59 on Apr 30, 2021 20:25:46 GMT -5
i decided to do neither and quit for the evening
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Post by bbg95 on May 3, 2021 17:44:40 GMT -5
I started playing Yakuza: Like a Dragon again. I'm just mopping up the last few side quests that are available before I continue with the main quest. I think there are only a few chapters left, and I would like to complete the game before the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is released on May 12.
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Post by mln59 on May 5, 2021 20:44:33 GMT -5
i'm getting close to where i was last time in dark souls before i quit. don't really remember what to do anymore
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Post by bbg95 on May 8, 2021 21:40:31 GMT -5
Yakuza: Like a Dragon has an interesting class system, and you literally go to a temp agency to change your class (or job as it's called). There are general levels for the characters, and you get small stat boosts by leveling up. And then there's job class levels, which provide larger boosts, but they only apply as long as you're using that job. So if you switch to a brand new job, you're back to level one, but it's not hard to level fairly quickly with a new job. There are also job experience boosting accessories that can increase the amount of experience by 50% or even 100% with two equipped (not every job has two available). The jobs all have different strengths, though some are clearly better than others. Jobs also have a couple of abilities that are retained after they are learned, even after switching to another job. Some of these abilities are really useful, such as reviving allies or providing elemental damage.
One such ability is for the fortune teller job, as it does lightning area-of-effect damage, and shock damage in this game is very useful because few enemies are resistant to it, and it has the ability to potentially paralyze enemies for multiple turns. This ability is acquired at level 18, which is a bit of a grind to get to, so I had only trained my characters up to level five to get the other permanent ability, which allows them to revive a fallen ally. I then did a small quest in which an enemy I fought provided nearly half a million (!) job experience (almost a million with the boosters). I wondered if I could use this one fight to level all my characters to 18 in the fortune teller class so they all learn the lightning ability in one fell swoop (fortunately, I can buy unlimited extra experience boosters for this particular class). I reloaded, got set up, and did the fight again. Sure enough, everyone was at level 20 after the fight was over. That works.
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Post by mln59 on May 11, 2021 20:53:18 GMT -5
beat the great grey wolf sif boss tonight in dark souls. took about 3 hours total over 2 days of attempts
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Post by mikegarrison on May 11, 2021 23:55:31 GMT -5
I have been playing Gloomhaven again. It's still early access, and they still don't have the original board game campaign available. Instead, they have an alternate sort of campaign mode that they call "guildmaster". You can mix and match mercenaries as you like (which I think is not how the original campaign worked). You have some "story missions" that mostly function to unlock perks for boosting your mercs. You have "relic missions" that you can do to gain certain valuable usable items. You have "travel missions" that unlock places on the map (which you need to unlock to get access to the story and relic missions). And you have "job" missions that are a bunch of repeatable scenarios you can play just for a change or to farm experience.
What has reinvigorated my interest is that they have added a bunch of the "locked" merc characters, and they are all way more interesting than the starting characters.
You can play up to four mercs in a scenario. But sometimes it's advantageous to play with fewer, because the number of enemies scales with your party size.
You start with:
the brute (your basic tanky melee fighter), the spellweaver (a ranged magic user that focuses on doing massive damage but has to be managed for how quickly you use her up), the tinker (a support character with a lot of healing abilities and some damage-dealing potential), the mindthief (a glass cannon melee character that does a lot of damage but can't take a lot of damage), the cragheart (a kind of tanky, kind of supporty, mostly ranged character whose most interesting quirk is that it does a lot of splash damage, which can easily include friendly fire), the scoundrel (a "rogue" character who gets a lot of damage potential from carefully positioning herself to get back-stabby, flanking sorts of flashy big attacks).
Then there are a bunch of hidden, "locked" classes that in the board game version are only revealed once you achieve certain milestones with the starting characters.
the elementalist (a magic user that does really low damage unless "elements" are in play on the board, but if you can manage that, he can do some pretty big attacks), the summoner (who has some attack and defense of her own but relies on the use of summoned allies to get more attacks in), the soothsinger (a bard support character whose main focus is buffing your party and debuffing the enemies), the beast tyrant (another summoner, but who specializes in summoning a giant bear, and can give up his own moves and attacks in order to buff the bear or direct the bear into extra moves or attacks), the berserker (a melee character who literally trades her own health for extra damage to the enemies and plays a delicate balancing act between taking damage and dealing damage), the nightshroud (who specializes in using the "dark" element and can spend much of the scenario invisible), the quartermaster (a tanky support character who specializes in replentishing the used up items and potions of other characters).
There are a few more that I haven't unlocked yet, including some they haven't ported to the video game version yet.
Most of those locked classes are harder to play than the basic classes, because they are a lot more quirky and specialized. But that also makes them more fun. Some of them I haven't quite figured out how to play yet. The quartermaster is supposed to be super OP if you play him right, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do it yet. The summoner is generally considered the weakest merc, because summons are generally cannon fodder in Gloomhaven that often function only as one-hit meat shields, but I found that she had great synergy with the soothsinger. The soothsinger's songs buff all her allies (but not herself!), and that includes the summons. So if the soothsinger can keep the summoner's summoned allies alive, all of a sudden they become a really big force multiplier.
I also played a scenario where I used just the tinker and the berserker. The berserker did almost all the damage by trading her own health for big moves and attacks, and the tinker used all his healing to keep topping up her fuel tank. It's kind of a twist on the standard tank/healer combination. Normally the tank draws the damage away from other characters, the healer heals the tank, and that leaves the damage dealers free to do the damage. But in this case the berserker isn't a tank. She does the damage to herself rather than trying to pull aggro from the monsters! But that lets her avoid taking too many bad hits because she can use those boosts to hit hard and move fast.
They have also been releasing more enemies to video game too, with different strengths and weaknesses.
So while I got tired of playing it a while ago, all the new content has really made it interesting again.
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Post by bbg95 on May 13, 2021 10:46:29 GMT -5
I've made some more progress in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, but I don't think I'll finish it before Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is released tonight. The reviews of that are very good (91% on Open Critic), which isn't terribly surprising. All three games are classics, and it seems like they have made some gameplay improvements to the first game, which is a bit dated (though still playable) at this point. I rarely pre-order, but I figured this was basically a can't-miss, and I got a 10% discount from when I had a month of EA Play. After seeing the review scores, I started my pre-load. To quote the great Bart Scott, "Can't wait."
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Post by mln59 on May 13, 2021 20:10:34 GMT -5
beat the chaos witch quelaag tonight in dark souls. trickiest part was watching my feet. had to train myself to disengage the camera lock and scan around quickly
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Post by XAsstCoach on May 14, 2021 3:56:39 GMT -5
Got started on another one of the games on my smartphone...Age of Z Origin. This one really forces you to join an alliance to advance on getting some goodies. And I held off for as long as I could, but finally joined an alliance today. Read there are rules for the alliance, which was why I held off. Seems like the one I joined has no rules, do as you please, etc...an alliance of convenience for the sole purpose of advancing in the game. After I joined, I collected gifts for all the accomplishments I've achieved the past week or so.
Three days after I started someone attacked my city overnight, but I didn't lose much. Just some food and oil. Was able to continue without being too pissed off.
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Post by bbg95 on May 14, 2021 8:23:56 GMT -5
I got started on Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, kind of. I'm planning on playing through all three games on Insanity (hardest difficulty) on my first go, and I'm planning on playing as a soldier in the first two games before switching to an adept in the third game. This is the way I beat the games on Insanity the first time. While the soldier is a great class in the first game, it helps to have an extra biotic (basically magic) ability for certain situations, and the best of these abilities is one that lifts enemies into the air for up to 12 seconds when maxed out. I had forgotten that in order to do this, you have to actually cast lift 25 times with a character that has that ability. So I started a new game as an adept (basically like a mage in this universe), and then I discovered that I needed to level up a couple times to actually unlock the ability. After about 90 minutes (skipping through dialogue), I finally got the ability unlocked.
This is kind of annoying, since they made some quality-of-life changes to benefit other classes. In the original, adepts and some other classes are restricted to using pistols only, but there's an assault rifle achievement (or sniper or shotgun) that unlocks with the soldier, enabling some more weapon variety. In the Legendary Edition, all weapons are unlocked from the start. I don't know why they wouldn't just unlock all the bonus powers (you can only pick one when creating a new character, so it wouldn't be unbalanced--it would just save about 90 minutes of mindless grinding). Oh well. I had forgotten this, but it used to be 75 casts to unlock lift. And there is a way to spam it on an inanimate object. Use, reload (way faster than waiting for the cooldown), repeat.
Now that I've taken care of that, I will start a new female (the disparity in quality between the male voice actor and the female voice actor is the greatest I have encountered--Mark Meer sounds like an emotionless robot, while Jennifer Hale sounds like an Oscar-winner) soldier with the lift bonus ability. I'm currently trying to find my old character code on my laptop, as that will save some time in character creation. And then I can finally get into it.
Edit: I did find the code buried in a 278-page document of old notes. I had to make a few tweaks because the import wasn't quite perfect, but it was close enough that it saved me a lot of time from having to rebuild the character from scratch, which originally took a couple hours as I recall.
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Post by bbg95 on May 15, 2021 13:09:26 GMT -5
I've played a few hours of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, and I'm very happy overall with what they've done to ME1. The gameplay seems to be a lot more polished, and it feels a lot more like ME2 and 3, which is a good thing, as both are very good cover-based third-person shooters. I was a bit surprised when I breezed through the first mission on the hardest difficulty level, insanity. Everything was dying to one shot of my base sniper rifle. It also helps that the sniper rifle actually functions the way I would expect in a modern shooter, rather than having so much sway that the weapon is effectively unusable, as it was in the original. As I have progressed, the enemies have gotten more difficult in large part because of shields or other protection, but it's been manageable, as I have a lot of experience playing the other games on insanity. In the original, the enemies were just bullet sponges for the most part on insanity.
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Post by mikegarrison on May 15, 2021 13:33:39 GMT -5
I have never played Mass Effect. I only know that it was widely regarded for its story. It was also commended for its dialog interface wheel (this was patented so nobody else could copy it, which is why nobody else uses it).
And of course it was kind of notorious for Commander Shepard being able to romance and have sex with all sorts of NPCs, including one that will straight out "game over" you if you do, because having sex with her is fatal.
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Post by mikegarrison on May 15, 2021 13:38:28 GMT -5
I am really enjoying Gloomhaven again. All these new character classes are way more interesting to play than the base character classes. Since I last posted about this I have unlocked a paladin of light type of character (sort of a support/tank hybrid) and a plague-themed character who basically poisons and curses the enemy (but also is one of the only character types that also can inflict friendly fire -- the theming is that it sees disease as "the gift" and is willing to share it with both friend and foe).
Because of the way the board game works, some of these more specialized character types are not really meant to be played as level one characters, but they still mostly work out. (In the board game as you progress through the campaign you unlock "prosperity levels". This allows you to start new characters partially pre-leveled.)
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Post by bbg95 on May 15, 2021 14:39:41 GMT -5
I have never played Mass Effect. I only know that it was widely regarded for its story. It was also commended for its dialog interface wheel (this was patented so nobody else could copy it, which is why nobody else uses it). And of course it was kind of notorious for Commander Shepard being able to romance and have sex with all sorts of NPCs, including one that will straight out "game over" you if you do, because having sex with her is fatal.Haha, yeah, I know which one you're talking about. I never actually recruited this character because she's a serial killer, and there's another character that you recruit who is trying to track her down in the name of justice. There's no way to have both characters at the same time because during the mission in which you meet her, one of them will always die. The other character is one of my favorites in the series, so this was a very easy decision.
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Post by mln59 on May 15, 2021 21:08:18 GMT -5
beat the iron golem boss in dark souls tonight. one of the easiest bosses i've played in any dark souls game
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