I remembered a good brainfart of mine and wondered if anyone else had one to share.
Mine is this: I couldn’t figure out how to parry attacks in MGR: Revengence all the way up to Monsoon. I just jumped around a lot and played ultra aggressively and it worked! …Kind of! I just had to make sure I NEVER used heavy attacks. Blade Wolf was a nightmare but I was able to muscle through, but Monsoon? No way in hell.
I still blame the combat tutorial though. “To parry, push the control stick toward the enemy and press the light attack button!” I interpreted that as “just make sure you’re facing the enemy and time the button press right.” when they meant “Push the stick in the direction of the enemy and press attack AT THE SAME TIME.”
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Episode 1 racer. I finished the game multiple times before realising that there was a turbo you could activate
Damn, you accidentally did a challenge run!
You can WHAT? How?
Angle the your nose down on a straightaway and you’ll see the speed indicator on the right get a red bar that’ll go up to a green light. When that light goes yellow, you can hit the boost key to go turbo.
(On keyboard, the defaults are the up arrow to angle down and shift to activate boost)
Folding two socks together so they stay together. Oh was it supposed to be about video games?..
So, a long time ago I got Little Big Adventure 2 a.k.a. Twinsen’s Odyssey.
This game has a “behaviour” feature that lets you switch between 4 modes : normal, stealthy, athletic and agressive. This has an impact on how the main character Twinsen moves and acts : normal walks and interacts, stealthy sneaks around, athletic runs and jumps, aggressive lets you punch stuff.
Note that all of those except athletic are unbearably slow, and the game requires quite a bit of jumping, so I quickly considered athletic the default one, only switching for something else briefly when I needed to do something specific.
In this game you get your second and last weapon, a sword, quite far into the game. It does a lot of damage, and it’s required to beat some enemies. But every time I’d try to use it, Twinsen would do a ridiculous backflip first, then do a jumping attack forward. It was very hard to hit a moving enemy that way, it required a lot of space and since I could barely control that move (tank controls by the way), there was a huge risk I’d get hit in the process.
I lost many times against a huge boss that was only vulnerable to the sword, eventually beat him with great difficulty and after that went through the rest of the game still trying to get the most out of that ridiculous weapon.
It took me another playthrough to understand that the way Twinsen used the sword depended on his behaviour. Only athletic did that double jump first, agressive in particular just let you hack stuff up immediately.
Heroes of the Storm: Alexstrasza in dragon form actually isn’t any tankier at all (even if she looks it) and wins fights by aggressively backlining no matter what
DnD (yeah the tabletop): The game really gets broken by Spellcasters once you understand that even if their damage is better than martial characters, the most powerful spells are generally AoE crowd control (Entangle, Web and Hypnotic Pattern) or story-warping RP spells. Also of note: the martial builds for Bard and Warlock are full casters that can still do almost everything a regular martial can do. An important part of mastering the game is realising how horrendously imbalanced it is
Dwarf Fortress: This is literally the core gameplay loop for the first 200 hours
Welcome to DnD, where the martial/caster disparity is a feature, not a bug.
We’re actually really, really bad about balancing our content, please buy our overpriced rulebooks that offer very little guidance on how to actually use them.Tbh I didn’t truly realize how deeply fucked the class balance was until I started making a really really big homebrew that required me to build and balance eight classes (operating on the personal principle that since it’s a team game, all the classes should have roughly equal impact).
This philosophy right here is the fucking devil when it comes to designing co-op games
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards
(I can link you my big homebrew if you like to play DnD 5e, by the way)
Yeah, I’m just convinced that the designers actively hate the martials classes. Even in the playtest for the new edition, after 10 years of people pointing out the martial/caster disparity, it took them over a year to write a somewhat decent skill set for martials.
(Link away! I’m always interested in homebrews for DnD. You should also consider posting it in the c/dndhomebrew community if you want more visibility. I still don’t know how to link Lemmy communities to users from different instances, but you should be able to access it from my post history.)
Shoutout to Brutal Critical being the worst feature in the entire game for having minimal mechanical impact (sure it hits hard when you crit, but you have no way to boost crit rate outside Reckless Attack and the chances are still dreadful) and taking up no less than THREE levels on the core barbarian template.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eFc2qQTY9P3ym9fyMNYHC_mIogpt9kNrOdm5n_yj1cs/edit
Anyway, try this on for size! It’s a pretty big homebrew, but so long as you take it one step at a time it should all be balanced and make good sense
Martials are “balanced” its just that they’re balanced around like 8 encounters a day with multiple short rests so that casters actually have to conserve their slots. Which is of course a stupid goddamn way to balance the game because no ones going to play it that way.
From personal experience, by the time casters have depleted all their spell slots, martials are low on health as well, making the balance finicky at best even if you’re having multiple encounters per long rest. The game is balanced in a way that makes it impossible for martials to shine: you either play with few combat encounters, thus allowing the casters to shotgun their infinite spell slots at the enemy, or play with multiple combat encounters per long rest, which has martials on death’s door because their HP drop faster than the casters’ slots.
It’s also difficult, from a narrative perspective, to fit so many combat encounters in a single day, to the point that I honestly don’t think it’s possible unless you subscribe to some form of gritty realism ruleset (7-day long rests, long rests in safe zones, long rests at the end of a narrative arc, etc…).
This is a 3rd party upgraded version of the that a lot of folks recommend. They put a lot of effort into balancing out different classes for the reasons mentioned above.
Heroes of the Storm: Alexstrasza in dragon form actually isn’t any tankier at all
I mean, you’re just wrong here. The ability grants a flat +500 health. That’s more tankier than not having 500 health. She also gains lifesteal from her melee attacks, adding even more health while attacking. And she gains reduced slow/root/stun duration, which also indirectly makes you more tanky by preventing damage you might otherwise have taken.
Sure, she doesn’t become a frontliner, but saying “she isn’t any tankier” is categorically false.
Slight exagguration, true, but I wouldn’t want to overexplain things to random guys without being invited. (Also the lifesteal on her attacks is only if you took both the Inner Fire and Ancient Flame talents at their respective levels)
Honestly, it was just odd to see an old game and hero I used to play pop up here. Wasn’t expecting that.
Is is still active?
Surprisingly, yeah. It even gets a once-year balance and bugfix patch. Mostly play Brightwing, Dehaka, Deathwing myself, although Kael’thas is fun too
It may not be the biggest game out there these days, but it’s got a good enough playerbase for matchmaking to work consistently, and it’s still fun to play
Deathwing
That one is new to me, so I must have quit before 2020.
I have a lvl 15 Brightwing myself (it probably isn’t the cap anymore). definitly my favourite healer along Uther.
Back in the day a couple of buddies from StarCraft an other games were trying to get into competitive after the HotS beta and it was a lot of fun for a while. But over time it just felt like Blizzard really pivoted to balancing the game around low elo QM games, which left more and more heros unviable for competitive play. It just took the fun out of it. And of course the entire lootbox shit, I hate it.
But maybe I’ll spin up over the weekend.
Yeah, he was one of the last heroes to get added. The devs knew the writing was on the wall so they focused on adding fan-favourites before the game went into ‘maintenance mode’ and wouldn’t get new content, so we have Deathwing and Hogger (and they’re both great)
Also yeah there’s no level cap on heroes anymore, I have Brightwing over level 200, she’s absolutely great
Ironically I found the game had the opposite balance issues before going Maintenance Mode- too much focus on high level competitive play which was getting super ultra hard stomped by Genji and Tracer plus a support. The day our competitive leagues were officially canned, then we got what I vividly recall was the best balance patch ever that made QM and draft league games so much more open-ended and fun to play.
Yeah, I remember Genji and Tracer. I suspect they were left a bit overpowered to push players to overwatch at the time. But they are both high micro, high mobility heroes, so I get they are hard to balance.
I think my biggest pet peeve was when they effectivly removed stealth by changing the effect from the decades old, proven StarCraft kind … to basically a milky outline. And at the time stealth heroes were already terrible in competitive play.
But I should probably stop being salty about it and try it out again. It’s actually still installed, lol
Took me a couple hundred hours in Baldur’s Gate 3 to realize this. Crowd control is so stupidly over powered. Twin spelled hold person gives me free crits? Don’t mind if I do.
I’m surprised the issues with D&D arent more commonly known. It’s a fine beginning system but, me and my friends literally couldn’t wait to move on to new systems once balance fell apart past level 10. Now we just play Savage Worlds, Pathfinder 2e and Call of Cthulhu.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & that goddamn barrel…
If you know, you know.
Carnival night zone act 2.
God help you if you weren’t super Sonic by that point
Or just use up and down on the d-pad to move the barrel
Oh, THAT’S how I do that.
So many hours wasted trying to jump at the right cadence.
Oh hell. How did I forget the barrel. That might be the biggest moment of this of all time. That barrel tortured me for weeks
TIME OVER
Funnily enough, I figured it out really fast, like I GET IT, it was a very strange and wonky mechanic to suddenly hit players with, but i was immediately wiggling around the moment I got on it, trying to figure out what they wanted and noticed that I was bouncing a little more when I moved up and down. So kind of… like pure chance I got out alive lol
I played the remastered Spyro trilogy recently (great games) and it took me about half of the first game to work out how the gem chests work. You hit them and the gem shoots out the top, which you then have to grab before it returns in order to unlock the chest. For a while I thought you just had to ground pound the chest at the right angle to get it to open and I couldn’t work out why it didn’t always work.
After realising the correct way I felt pretty dumb lol.
I got a free fighting game on epic. Dnf Duels or something. One of the tutorials had a combination to block or counterattack, can’t remember, and I tried every which way I could think of yet nothing worked.
So finally, I got out of the game and uninstalled it.The big moment was figuring out it’s not my job to find a way of fixing some company’s dumbass decisions. That it’s ok to say “this shit ain’t worth the hassle”.
For a while I just couldn’t play souls-likes. The enemy attacks were blatantly undodgeable. Like, even if you move at the maximum possible speed, in any direction, at the very start of an animation, you can’t get out of the way. Then I realized you’re not really supposed to get out of the way, you’re supposed to abuse the immunity frames from the roll to “dodge” straight through the attacks. Basically the opposite of what I had been doing.
Not me but a friend
We were playing a mil sim game sniping from 1.5km into the objective. I was spotting for my group and while discussing targets and ranging we found out that our best sniper had no idea how to range or use mildots… the guy who was hitting moving targets at 1.5 kilometers would scope the target then aim upwards and look at the trees then fire… And connect… We told him how to adjust the scope after.
I read “mil sim” as “millionaire simulator” initially and this read very differently.
wouldn’t surprise me that much tbh
Tried to get into fighting games on a keyboard, could not perform any motion input after an hour of trying, not even a quartercircle. Finally looked it up online and realized you’re supposed to drag your finger across the keys, not tap them. Really embarassing
Put like 20hrs into Borderlands 2, really wanted to like the game but I kept getting my teeth smashed in even though I watched guides, used a meta build, tried different characters etc. Then I tried multiplayer with some friends & observed one of them stop progressing to farm some unremarkable zone. After a while she got a specific legendary weapon and proceeded to instantly destroy everything for the next hour+. Finally realized I was approaching the game like it was a narrative FPS when in reality it’s an ARPG.
If you just do the side quests before progressing the main quests you should have no problem progressing in any borderlands game. You should never have to go farm unremarkable areas that don’t have side quests.
Get that double penetrating unkempt harold
Nah man BL2 just has the worst scaling ever. Weapon damage scales logarithmically with level (more or less) so you level up once and all your gear is immediately behind. The other games in the series are way less harsh with it.
Don’t even start me on MGR parrying. I beat the entire game without once learning to parry. I did it by accident like once or twice but couldn’t replicate it.
The second Monsoon fight took hours.
SO IT WASN’T JUST MY DUMBASS. Thank you, you have no idea how much better that makes me feel XD
I am addicted to this feeling of revelation. There is nothing like it. Now I collect old networking equipment and try to get it to work in ways I never thought it could to get my fix.
how do you deal with frustration before the revelation?
I wear it out. Screaming, kicking, blasting “we’re in this together now” by NIN cranked up to 11. Physical exhaustion will bring with it its own form of revelation.
A good workout helps.
Parrying in Arkham Origins. It took me SIX. MONTHS before I finally understood how to beat Deathstroke 😬
It wasnt until the shinra tower in FF7 that I figured out how to slot materia.
Eeeh… I mean…
Kung Fu on NES, the magician. The arcade version was normal sized and you just had to kick his ass. The NES edition he was tiny, and you could only hurt him with a crouch and punch. When you have to take turns with your brother, and it takes several tries to make it that far, it seemed like the greatest victory to finally figure it out.
