What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[warty goblin]

Watch out for anyone wielding Dragon Lances, or mages with hourglass pupils

That's a brilliant idea, next game I'm absolutely going to set my leader up as Raistlin. Honestly Laurana would work pretty well too, but I haven't gone up the Dark tree in a while.

[ArmyOfOptimists]

So basically, Solasta turned Calm Emotions into a better version of Hypnotic Pattern. Probably not a great call on their part, but I guess it's something to keep in mind.

I don't see it as a misread of the 5E text. Calm Emotions does specify that it can cause all targets to become indifferent to hostile creatures as one of the effects. The main difference in the book text is that Calm Emotions is restricted to Bard, Cleric (a bit weird that a mass control spell is available to Clerics earlier than Wizards) and when any of the affected targets is attacked, it breaks for the whole group. Hypnotic Pattern is Bard, Wizard, Warlock, Sorcerer and each target is affected individually, so you can pick them off one-by-one.

Haven't booted up Solasta yet, but it seems like they implemented it faithfully reading the book text versus the game text.

[Beelzebub1111]

Hypnotic Pattern has a larger radius and makes them unable to take any actions at all. Calm Emotions still allows for non-hostile actions and movement. In practice of the game, however most enemies with low will saves don't have actions that aren't hostile so they will just meander about for their turns.

[Form]

I've picked up One step from Eden and whilst the gameplay is entirely different from what I've played before (I'm not used to frantically dancing around on a 4x4 grid whilst desperately shooting/casting away at the enemy), I've been able to jump right into it and have fun. I'm starting to get a better feel for the various cards and bosses, but the later bosses are both too tough and too fast for me to clear. I've gotten to the final boss only once so far. Usually I get killed one or two bosses before that.

I will make it to Eden eventually. Though I may have to lower the difficulty via Angel Mode to do so.

[warty goblin]

Wrapped up my dragon lizard velociraptor AoW 4 game with a Magic victory. The two remaining AI empires actually put up a credible fight at the end, throwing absolute buckets of reasonably powerful armies at what amounted to my own personal continent. Sadly they were immediately absolutely smashed by my seven fully pimped stacks of doom. Six actually, I held one in reserve just in case.

So ended the reign of the dragon, with an ascent to the stars. He started out a young and confused firebreather, just searching for answers. Then he entered his hippy phase, started glowing green, and healing people (well, lizards) with his breath. Tree hugging however did not supply the answers he needed, so inevitably he found God. And by God I mean himself. Yes, it was his destiny to lead his people (well, lizards, ratmen and a batch of elves who declared war on the wrong reptile and got absorbed) into legend as a big scaly angel who is also God Emperor.

Various heretic foreigners (mostly dwarves) failed to get with the program and kept invading. They all got enlightened, by which I mean vaporized by the holy vapors of the dragon god to be's breath. Or torn apart by undead dragons, because for some reason I ended up with gobs of undead dragons. Look, the Church of The Big Dragon embraces all, being dead is no obstacle to a righteous life.

[WritersBlock]

I just noticed recently that Daggerfall Unity does not have an option to exit to the main menu, just to exit to desktop, I wish they would do something about that.

That minor nitpick aside Dream combined with Weeb Overhaul makes the game look absolutely amazing. In some ways I prefer this to Skyrim actually and I DEFINITELY prefer this to Oblivion. (Morrowind I like about the same but in different ways)

[Zevox]

Okay, wrapped up the main campaign of Solasta. For the most part, opinion of the game didn't change much throughout - it does the combat of D&D well, the rest of it fairly meh to weak, and isn't exactly my personal type of D&D in tone or style. I will say I did not much like the final battle; it was a huge difficulty jump compared to the rest of the campaign, simply because the bosses did so much damage (on their turns and as legendary actions) and were accompanied by so many other allies, some of which were pretty durable, and practically everyone gets 3 attacks per turn.

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And that random Gold Dragon that joined me as an ally helped way less than it feels like it should've. Hell, I had to restart a couple of times just because it was AI-controlled and dumb enough to use its breath weapon on my party, killing 3/4 of it, twice. Outside of that, pretty much every enemy resisted its attacks, it kept rotating who it attacked rather than focusing on any one target, and it started with half of its health already gone, so even as a meat shield it wasn't that great. It did not survive wave 1, despite me having Zelda cast Heal on it to try and save it.

Blessedly I'd picked Improved Invisibility as one of Midna's spells, so casting a twinspell version of that wound up being my answer. With Midna and Zelda permanently invisible and these enemies seemingly having no way to see invisible things, they were safe to do whatever they wanted throughout the fight, while Link's AC and Sheik's mobility made them tough to kill (although boy did they both come close).

Also, screw them for including Shikkaths in wave 2. Why on earth would you be dropping one enemy with 160+ hp, legendary actions, and legendary resistance every turn during the survival portion of the fight?

So, overall, not bad, but not that great either. I'm hesitating on whether I want to pick up with the Palace of Ice right now, or move on to something else.

Oh, and here's a weird one: remember I mentioned being on a Yu-Gi-Oh nostalgia kick? Well, that included rewatching the original show, and when I got to the end of the first season, I was reminded of an old GBA game for a Yu-Gi-Oh spin-off: Dungeon Dice Monsters. And wouldn't you know, digging through my old games, there it was, and the oldest system I still own just so happens to be a GBA SP. So I've actually played a little bit of that recently. It's honestly a decently fun little spin-off game, but it can be frustrating because everything is so RNG-dependent - even moving and attacking with your monsters requires a resource you get only by rolling specific "crests" on your dice, so some games can go by with one side basically unable to do anything because they just don't roll any attack crests or movement crests. So not any kind of hidden gem or anything, just a strange thing I happened to still have when the mood hit to play a little bit of it again.

I don't see it as a misread of the 5E text. Calm Emotions does specify that it can cause all targets to become indifferent to hostile creatures as one of the effects. The main difference in the book text is that Calm Emotions is restricted to Bard, Cleric (a bit weird that a mass control spell is available to Clerics earlier than Wizards) and when any of the affected targets is attacked, it breaks for the whole group. Hypnotic Pattern is Bard, Wizard, Warlock, Sorcerer and each target is affected individually, so you can pick them off one-by-one.

Haven't booted up Solasta yet, but it seems like they implemented it faithfully reading the book text versus the game text.

Hypnotic Pattern has a larger radius and makes them unable to take any actions at all. Calm Emotions still allows for non-hostile actions and movement. In practice of the game, however most enemies with low will saves don't have actions that aren't hostile so they will just meander about for their turns.

The fact that attacking any of the targets breaks the effect on everyone is a notable disadvantage relative to Hypnotic Pattern for it I'll grant. I do feel it's a misread of the spell though. Altering the enemies' attitude towards you would only sometimes help, and even then only if you also stop acting hostile in turn. The spell doesn't change what the enemies know about the situation at all after all: they know that you were fighting and why, so depending on that "why," their attitude may not matter. The spell could stop someone who was only fighting you because you made them angry for something like that I feel, but a bandit who wants to kill you and take your money? An assassin who was paid to kill you? More monstrous humanoids who see you as attacking their homes, or even as dinner? Not so much.

[Cygnia]

Since it's free on Steam until the 27th, I checked out the puzzle game Machinika Museum last night. Pretty intriguing. Reminds me a little of Myst in tone.

[Beelzebub1111]

Since it's free on Steam until the 27th, I checked out the puzzle game Machinika Museum last night. Pretty intriguing. Reminds me a little of Myst in tone.

In a way, but the examining of strange artifacts to try and figure out what purpose they serve seems more like Rama to me.

[LibraryOgre]

So, Kingmaker: If you're playing an Alchemist who doesn't have the Infusion discovery, how does casting communal spells (eg "Stoneskin, Communal") work? Does it still work on everyone?

I now have an answer to this: It affects everyone, but can only target you.

If Octavia casts Haste, she picks a person as the centerpoint; the AoE is based on who she picks.

If my character casts Haste, I am the centerpoint, but it affects everyone around me.

And I would very much love a "Communal spell" metamagic... one that changes the range to zero and the AoE to a 10' radius.

[warty goblin]

The Age of Age of Wonders continues.

I'm doing Mystic Elves again. This is a very natural combination, as elves get default bonuses to accuracy with magic and ranged attacks, and Mystic is all about turning spellcasters into doom machines.

There are two tricky parts. Firstly, the obvious play is Mystic culture, load up on Astral cultural ablities, and then beeline through Astral tomes for a maximum magic playthrough. This tends to leave you economically weak, as all the good "make more stuff" abilities are Nature or Materium, and if you don't have an economy you don't have an army until decent summoning gets online. So I compromised and took Materium and Nature perks.

The second problem is that the Mystic combat style is pretty distinct and micro intensive. Your line infantry sucks, their only job is to not die long enough for the backline of battle mage units to roast everything. This means your typical battle plan is to shuffle your casters around a bit, move the blocking units a couple hexes forwards, hope you got the magical ranged BBQ dude to meatshield dude ratio correct, then unleash hell on everything that moves into range. If it works, by the time the survivors reach your line, they are electrocuted, on fire, and also somehow frozen, and it's genuinely quite cool.

The combat AI isn't great at this, which causes unnecessary losses. This is doubly bad, as your economy is pretty weak early on. So expect to manually fight a lot of battles.

But I pushed through the pain point, made unusuallybad by a couple really nasty infestations plundering most if the townlands around,my capital, and am now at the point in the game where I can smash the AI who have been bullying me up until now. Highlights include a marvelous joint operation where I simultaneously took one city while a second army group relieved thr siege of one of my vassels.

[Anonymouswizard]

I now have an answer to this: It affects everyone, but can only target you.

If Octavia casts Haste, she picks a person as the centerpoint; the AoE is based on who she picks.

If my character casts Haste, I am the centerpoint, but it affects everyone around me.

And I would very much love a "Communal spell" metamagic... one that changes the range to zero and the AoE to a 10' radius.

Now I'm getting the urge to restart Kingmaker or WotR as an Alchemist.

If only I was allowed to wear my lens at the moment...

[LibraryOgre]

Now I'm getting the urge to restart Kingmaker or WotR as an Alchemist.

If only I was allowed to wear my lens at the moment...

The Grenadier scratches a lot of my itches, but not quite all of them.

Playing through these always makes me itch for classless games, though.

[Anonymouswizard]

The Grenadier scratches a lot of my itches, but not quite all of them.

Playing through these always makes me itch for classless games, though.

Honestly not sure what to go for, a lot of them seem like decent picks. Except for the healing one, but I've got an itch to do a Sarenrae Chigureon in WotR. Honestly Grenadier's actually the one I'm least intrigued by, I might just go straight.

...not in terms of the romance options, obviously. There's too many sexy devil ladies for that.

[LibraryOgre]

Honestly not sure what to go for, a lot of them seem like decent picks. Except for the healing one, but I've got an itch to do a Sarenrae Chigureon in WotR. Honestly Grenadier's actually the one I'm least intrigued by, I might just go straight.

...not in terms of the romance options, obviously. There's too many sexy devil ladies for that.

The only reason I play a straight character is Tali Zorah vas Normandy is fine with humans, but only if they're dudes.

For the grenadier, I would up switching to a halfling... I originally wanted to be melee, so was half-orc, but went to a ranged halfling, instead.

[Anonymouswizard]

The only reason I play a straight character is Tali Zorah vas Normandy is fine with humans, but only if they're dudes.

For the grenadier, I would up switching to a halfling... I originally wanted to be melee, so was half-orc, but went to a ranged halfling, instead.

I have so much trouble not going human for the extra skill point, despite the mechanics of Owlcat games making skillmonkies less of a necessity. Although halfling is tempting, while not as bad as BG3 the Pathfinder games are generally short on Small party members...

Ah, **** it, who needs strength? All hail Marie, Golarion's most chaotic genius under three feet tall!

(Yes I dumped Strength down to 5, I needed those two points to get 18 INT.)

[Zevox]

I'm now going between a few. Back to doing duels in Yu-Gi-Oh: Legacy of the Duelist here and there, going through the single-player story campaigns and doing the special duels you unlock from them with my own decks, of which I've thrown together a few more for kicks. I'm now through the fourth story campaign, Zexal, so only two to go. That one introduced "Xyz" summoning, to which my first thought is "that's seriously the name they gave it? The hell?" Besides that, eh, it's a less interesting variation on Synchro summoning, just requiring 2-3 monsters of the same level instead of monsters whose level adds up to a specific number. Also feels more power-creepy than Synchro summoning did, by quite a bit. Not as much of a fan of that as I was of Synchro summoning as a result.

Besides that, I also started back on Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, since a new DLC character I'd like to try is coming out soon. Started out just playing my main, good old Belial, and it did not take long to get back into the swing of things, so I already switched to one of those characters I was surprised I liked: Eustace, a special agent gunman type who is a weird hybrid zoner/pressure character. Definitely harder on me , but I am having fun trying to figure him out and get better with him. I've got about a week until that DLC character hits, should be plenty of time to get a good feel for him.

Outside of dabbling in Yu-Gi-Oh and returning to my multiplayer genre of choice though, I've opted to dust off my PS3 and go back to one of the greats that I haven't played in way too long: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Goddamn, this is what I wish Stellar Blade had been. It's still one of the best action games of all time, easy. Even visually, it holds up pretty well - doesn't quite look as good as modern games obviously, but we'd clearly hit the point of diminishing returns on graphics enhancements by the late PS3/360 era, because it looks quite a bit closer in quality to modern games than when I replayed Batman: Arkham Asylum on my 360 last year. And everything else about it, from the crazy story, to the fantastic combat, to the great music with perfect timing on when to have it kick in during boss fights, to the (to my knowledge) still unparalleled physics on cutting up enemies and objects, is just so wonderful and satisfying. I need to replay it more often, frankly. I look forward to kicking a US Senator's ass in the final boss fight once more.