• GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I feel a lot better when u just get handed a new sword and the game's just like "it's better!" without explaining how or why, and I just need to figure it out.

  • Eris235 [undecided]
    ·
    1 year ago

    One of the biggest fun-killers out there for me in gaming. I hate 'diablo loot', where there's a ton of random bullshit arms and armor, with random stats and rarity and little "+5% damage to undead" nonsense. Its petty, but it stresses me out to have to sort through 50 tons of useless bullshit just to make sure I'm keeping up with the difficulty treadmill.

    Quite a few games I've dropped or avoided just because of this shit.

    • TheCaconym [any]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      It's not petty, generic randomized loot sucks, period. Beyond the hassle, it removes a lot from the atmosphere.

      I prefer the Baldur's Gate formula: basic weapons (declined in several metals), magical +1/+2/+x weapons, and the rest being rarer but unique artefacts with a cool small RP story attached to them in the description.

      • Eris235 [undecided]
        ·
        1 year ago

        I guess it feels petty to me sometimes to feel like a single sub-system ruins a whole game to me.

        Big example is probably Nioh 1+2; I'd love the games if they just gutted to the loot system out of it.

        Smaller indie example of a game I dropped is Gordian Quest, a 'slay the spire' like where you have a team of people. And the gear is dumb diablo bullshit, gems sockets included. And just, I love everything else about the game, but the gear is just fun-killing to me.

    • john_browns_beard [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      If the gear isn't legendary or whatever the highest rarity tier is, it shouldn't have more than two stat modifiers. I played a lot of Diablo back in the day and it was out of control.

      The absolute worst it should get:

      Normal = no stat modifiers
      Rare = one modifier
      Epic = two modifiers
      Legendary = three or (maybe) four modifiers

      If you need more tiers than that, you've fucked up.

      Legendary loot shouldn't be randomly generated and it should actually be difficult to find, you shouldn't get 10 random legendary drops from killing a boss. God of War actually does decent job of it (I can't speak on Ragnarok because I haven't played it yet) except for the fact that a couple of the sets are much better than the others and nobody uses most of them.

      • Eris235 [undecided]
        ·
        1 year ago

        I mean, this is just my tastes, but I don't like any of that. I don't want random loot. I want items made intentionally by people. Even games that do random loot 'right', I still hate the system.

        Like, Skyrim and Elden Ring are are think good examples for what I like in a 'loot system'. Its What You See Is What You Get for the most part. Neither are my favorite games overall (and also, Elden Ring still has more 'shitty items' than are probably necessary). But I like that the items are what they are. If you want to 'enchant them' to give them extra effects, you do so intentionally. You don't have to 'grind levels' hoping to get 'the right drop', or re-do bosses just because that legendary didn't drop with the modifier you wanted.

        • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          GoW loot isn't random fwiw. It can be difficult to find sometimes, but the armor sets are themed around builds and also are usually in locations that make sense lore-wise.

      • Retrosound [none/use name]
        ·
        1 year ago

        It's like Dungeons and Dragons: nobody actually keeps loot dropped by monsters. They take it to town and sell it, and use the cash to craft magic items that they really want.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          I don't like magic walmart stores or magic crafting for that reason. You're supposed to go adventure and do daring deeds to find cool stuff, not sit around knitting your own chainmaille +2. Like I'll talk with players about their builds to make sure they get items they need to make the build work, but what's the point of going on adventures if you know exactly what's going to happen?

          Idk, i really don't like min-maxing. For one it almost always makes it a pain in the ass for the gm to create interesting encounters bc the totally mathematically optimized barbarian/wizard will ohk everything while the flavorful bard will struggle to stay alive and do anything. For another it's just like bro, are you here to have an adventure and save the kingdom from the king, or to do calculus homework? Like I don't mind when my players spend half an hour playing accountants and actuaries to divvy up the loot at the end of the session and pick out curtains and new furniture for the bar they run between adventures, but something about making your own bespoke magic items irks me.

          I think it comes down to a distinction that maybe isn't real, but i feel like some players want characters who are special because of what they do, while other players want characters that are special because of what they are. I always start as a boring soldier or callow youth or minor temple functionary or whatever bc i want to watch the character grow and become a hero. People who start out with a totally min-maxxed purple eye'd half elf half dragon princess have always perplexed me.

          • ssjmarx [he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            sit around knitting your own chainmaille +2

            :I-was-saying:

            I like the idea that your characters' adventures are exceptional moments of their lives, and they spend most of their time doing normal stuff in the place they live. I remember the Lord of the Rings RPG made a big deal out of this, characters could spend months or even years in between things happening so you had a real good idea of how they lived during that time.

      • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        (I can’t speak on Ragnarok because I haven’t played it yet)

        Ragnarok is very good as well. There's a ton more armor sets, and upgrading one can cost a lot, but they each seem to have a distinct playstyle, which is good. Also, it's basically always suboptimal not to have the full set, which again I think is good design esp for an action game.

    • Aryuproudomenowdaddy [comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I was playing Torchlight 2 recently with some overhaul mod that added a lot to the game, also turned up the loot drops to the point there's like 20~ items on the ground after every large group. Even with the familiar that let's you auto vendor while you're still fighting I had to go back to town frequently to store items I might actually want. Really harshed the vibe to the point I rapidly lost interest in playing it.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I am so sick of "progression" systems. Oh, the gun i start with sucks ass and i have to play this competitive multiplayer game at a mechanical disadvantage for forty hours to unlock a rifle scope that doesn't suck ass? Essential tools and equipment that I need to not be a liability to my team are locked unless I grind this class?

    I hate it. They just keep adding more and more skinner box bullshit to manipulate people with fake meta motivations. Games can't just be fun on their merits anymore, they need compulsion loops to maximize engagement.

    A big part of the reason I hate it is. That it works on me up until I realize I'm chasing numbers and not having fun, and they I just feel disgusted with myself and disgusted that this is what entertainment has come to. You can't even play a single player game anymore without being manipulated to try to get you to spend more money.

    • pastalicious [he/him, undecided]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Wonder if capitalists will add game industry exploitation to fixed entertainment like movies. Thinking of 21st century Clue. Film many different endings and you pay for a die roll to get the better ones

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Lol. Some guy was telling me this is the problem with Warframe's PvP. He's not strictly speaking wrong, there are some weapon mods that you need, but they drop as rewards from matches and you'll get most of them pretty quickly, and aside from taht it's mostly learning where the health, mana, and ammo items are in each map and then getting really good at aiming at a dude flying across the room at 43 miles per hour while unloading machine pistols at you.

        Like, idfk. I wanted to play battlefield because CoD is such ruthlessly abusive monetized bullshit and you might as well be playing single player against over-tune bots because there is no teamwork or team cooperation at all most of the time. It's like co-play in toddlers where they play next to each other but they don't play with each other, and every year it's becoming more strictly mechanically enforced - No more privately run servers, so no more communities centered on those servers. Everything is match-made, so no playing with your friends unless they're in the same bracket as you. Squads can only have 3-4 people now so if you have more than 2-3 friends then fuck you. And there are no server browsers anymore, you have to join via match making, so you can't even have all your friends join the same server. Fuck you. Play with randoms who don't communicate and don't care about teamwork. idfk it's gotten so much worse, and I hate it all. We used to make our own fucking skins and maps and game modes. We didn't need to wait a year for an update or pay for a fucking battlepass so we could run around on a fucking hamster wheel until the psychologists int he marketing department figured we'd reached the optimal point for the next dopamine drip. We used to own shit. You could dig in to the files and do whatever the fuck you want. Now everything is locked down in iron shackles. You play the way the company says, or fuck you.

        I just want to play my fucking games. It's the only way I can get out of my head and out of my house anymore, but anything new, anything I haven't played to death for millions of hours, it's all stuffed full of all this manipulating skinner box loot box gambling bullshit and fucking unlock systems and just abusive shit so much fucking abusive shit. Arbitrary time gates, fomo, arbitrary restrictions. Fucking activision claims that their matchmaking isn't programmed to put you in matches where you'll dominate followed by matches where you'll get fed to someone else so they dominate, alternated at the proper interval to garauntee that you're just the right amount of angry and pissed off that you get maximum catharsis from beating the absolute shit out of players who aren't as good as you, but it sure does subjectively feel like that to the player, and they sure do HAVE A FUCKING PATENT FOR THAT.

        i just want to live my miserable stupid fucking lonely broken disabled life but every fucking way I have to get out is just psychological manipulation and conditioning and marketing and lies and bullshit and trickery and deceit nad I fucking hate it. I hate it I hate it I hate it so fucking much. I remember when it started. I remember when Battlefield 2 had guns you had to unlock with playtime, and no one knew what to make of it and most people didn't bother because it was a stupid idea and just got in the way of playing the game. I've watched the whole fucking thing happen. I remember playing Diablo II and what a neat idea it was to have tons of random loot so you could pick the stuff you liked best, and then I watched that go from a novel game mechanic to a carefully honed weapon for seizing control of the human brain and manipulating it's reward mechanisms to keep people glued to a compulsion loop in a game that fed them nothing but anger and tension, a game they hadn't enjoyed in tens or hundreds of hours, because they were totally fixated on that little dopamine hit from getting the piece of gear they were anticipating. And it's so fucking finely honed now, and most people don't even see it, or worse, they do, they fucking do. They see it and they know why it's there and they LIKE IT. It's a fucking lotus eater machine and they're totally cool with it. What the fuck? What the entire fuck? What the fuck happened? The world wasn't supposed to be like this? We were warned, we knew all this shit was coming twenty or thirty years ago, we knew how it was going to work, we knew what it was going to do to people, and we didn't prevent any of it. We never even tried. I mean, I'm fucking broken, I'm such a fucking wreck I can't even clean my fucking room, it wasn't my responsibility. I couldn't stop anything. I saw it all happening and i couldn't do anything and they people who could *DIDN'T> They just let it happen and I had to go fight and i got so borken every time while they told me to vote and vote and did fucking nothing and it was so obvious and they just believed all the fucking lies and let it happen and it just keeps happeing and even now they won't realize or admit they fucked up and that their leaders are fucking man eating monsters who despise them. We've achieved nothing and learned nothing and it's so much worse now. what the fuck? What hte fuck happened? How the fuck did, like... I saw fucking star wars. I got the message. Empire bad rebels good. Shoot hte fucking bad guys and blow up there stuff. It wasn't ambiguous. How the fuck did people look at that and all they got it was lighsaber go swish? It was fucking moral instruction, it was a gameplan, it was how you're supposed to live your fucking life; If you're confronted by evil destroy it. Not with some fucking meaningless march to the office of some senator who doesn't give a shit. WITH A FUCKING SWORD. how the fuck did this happen? How the fuck are americans so relentlessly ignorant and cowardly and complicit in their own misery and subjugation? What hte fuck? Fuckl.

        Thi sis my union mandated quartery big messy breakdown. What the fuck? How did we lose the 20th so fucking bad? Like it was all there, a roadmap to the whole future, the sci-fi guys figured it all out 20, 30, 40 years before the technology and the psychology and the information warfare capabilities were able to implement it and it'd didn't matter at all. It didn't stop anything. people are totally, utterly, helplessly domesticated and of the tiny fraction that realize it so many of them like it. God there were so many action movies in teh 90s about corrupt fucking news anchors lying to stoke peoples fears and manipulate them. Arnold fucking schwarzenegger was in a movie called running man and the thing that set up the plot was he was an attack helicopter pilot and refused to open fire on a food riot in bakersfield so his co-pilot beat him up and carried out the massacre and then they edited the footage to make it look like he'd done the massacer without orders to shift the blame from the government to him. Just this stupid fucking schwarzenegger movie and it's about how the fucking news networks manipualte stories to make the good guys look like badguys and re-direct people's anger and hatred. A fucking schwarzenegger movie about dudes with big muscles killing each other so they could show off the special effects. Just dumber than paint, but the message is still there and no one got it and it didn't matter. Robocop, Starship troopers, dozens of others. Every bad th ing happening with "AI' now. Global fucking warming! We knew. We all knew. Everyone fucking knew. It wasn't mysterious and it wasn't fucking poorly understood. We knew thirty fucking years ago, and the environmentalists knew before that, and fucking Exxon knew first, in the 70s, they did the math and they knew everything, adn they lied and covered it up and lied and distracted peiopleqan and it fucking worked and now the fucking planet is dyiing and it's so bad you can see it every fucking day and there's o way to ignore it any more. How did we fuck up this bad? The FBI hunted down all the militant environmentalists in the 90s because they knew they were more dangerous than the Islamic terrorists. The terrorists blow up a building so fucking what some people die build a new building everyone gets rich. But if people realized the environmentalists were right, that the world was iun existential danger, things might change and that can't be allowed. Fuck. FUck. I'm so fucking tired. I've been marching and fucking weriting and trying to convince people for TWENTY FUCKING YEARS and i'm not even good at it and I've been sick for som uch of that time and none of it mattered at all and it's just gotten worse and worse.l Fuck. I'm gonna stop now fuck I am so tired.

  • macabrett
    ·
    1 year ago

    I love my brother but playing Diablo 4 with him is so annoying because he treats the game like a spreadsheet

    I just wanna vibe and hang out while killing demons while minimally engaging in the stats until I'm at the end of the game and then I figure it all out once

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Optimizing your gear before max level seems silly in any arpg or mmorpg anyway. I think your philosophy is correct here.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        They could legit just not have levels the way arpgs work now. Just make the end game loot chase the whole game instead of padding it with 20 hours of levelling up that is just a waste of time before you get to play the real game.

        • ProxyTheAwesome [comrade/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Agreed. If they make it so the difficulty scales to your level, leveling up is more like treading water and you don't gain any effective power (in fact, you likely lose it unless you get a major talent or skill). Why even have levels at that point, if you've removed their entire purpose of relative power?

          • bluealienblob [it/its]
            ·
            1 year ago

            This is why Skyrim, one of the most loved games ever, doesn't make sense. It's possible to be doing okay, level up, then be doing worse due to how the enemy scaling works.

        • FunkyStuff [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          My favorite part of progression in PoE is the moment late in the acts/early in maps where I get to equip some unique item, or I allocate some keystone, that makes the build click together. I'd be very sad if that was taken away.

      • FourteenEyes [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        It's literally a waste of time, usually. By the time you find the piece of gear you wanted, you've leveled out of it being useful.

  • 4zi [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I love that shit. I would kill for an added 8% poison resistance on my diablo 4 character

  • FourteenEyes [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    RPG elements are meaningless if they don't change anything about how you play. If you're just getting an axe that does more damage to kill the enemies that have a higher armor rating but you're still doing the same actions, it's just a flat action game with some bookkeeping added on. It's very fancy, shiny bookkeeping that looks cool but it's still managing inventory and doing math.

    Leave the fucking RPG elements in RPGs, where they are the most important part of the actual game mechanics. Where the way you build a character or unit significantly affects how things play out. Otherwise it's just fucking busywork.

  • Retrosound [none/use name]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I hate that too. These little % modifiers are so mechanical and dull. Ooh, look, now I have +38% instead of +34%! Awesome! Totally worth spending two hours in that cave furiously clicking!

    But whaddaya gonna do? An entire generation of gamers has been taught that this is the correct way to play. The old-fashioned way, with leveling, where you will perhaps level seven times throughout the game, is rejected as insufficiently rewarding. They want constant reinforcement and cheering, all the way. It's why they play the games in the first place.

    • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      This makes me think of paper Mario where you get the ultra hammer. It does 1 more damage and you can break rocks that are 1 tier higher and it gave me giga dopamine when I knew it was coming up. You get 2 hammer upgrades and 2 boot upgrades and you miiiight find 2 attack up badges which also increase your attack by 1. When you level up you choose between 5 hp, 5 for, or 3 badge points.

      The function of increased % attack is for comparison and slow progression. Over time your damage goes from 72 per hit to 1049 per hit to critting 50% of the time and your gear goes from patchwork grays and missing slots to full blues that are decorated with straps to purples that have animations on them.

      • Eris235 [undecided]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Its a matter of degrees to me.

        I do like 'stat upgrades', but I prefer it to be in the realm of 'starting sword does 2, next sword does 3, final sword does 5'. I like it when getting a new weapon, or a level up, or a perk, noticeably changes game-play. A noticeable, and ideally significant, change in gameplay. 50% damage up, a double-jump or a second dash. 50% bigger attack area.

        I feel like, in most cases of 'diablo loot', getting that next tier of rarity, or a better weapon mod, you're going from like, 385% damage, to 390% damage. Technically, it does measurably change things, but killing the boss in 39 hits instead of 40 doesn't really 'noticably' change things.

        And yeah, going from a 'full set of piecemeal greys' to 'full purples with perfect mods' will give you, like, 1000%+ damage overall, but that progression is mostly made of tiny steps over 100+ hours, and involves sorting through vast piles of randomly generated garbage. Like, I know 'low rarity' items aren't useful at all later on, but why are you still giving them to me if its trash? I don't want to need to pull up a spreadsheet to see if an item is better, or to spend 2 minutes after every run comparing items to see if I got a new +2% damage.

        • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Dead Cells does this well, every weapon is bespoke with unique attack animations and fixed stats, item level upgrades those stats but it's tied 1:1 with progress through the game and basically just exists to discourage getting attached to your build (it's a roguelite after all). And then it rolls a couple random modifiers, but it's bigger and often build-defining effects like "+40% damage to burning enemies," "+100% damage dealt and taken," "splash burning oil when you take damage." You know pretty easily whether you want the weapon's playstyle and/or mods, which is perfect because again, it's a roguelite and you're supposed to keep moving and not get too attached to your items.

          • Eris235 [undecided]
            ·
            1 year ago

            I don't love Dead Cells's item system (I still prefer my roguelikes to be more like Gungeon, e.g. no level and random mods, minimal stats, 90% skill based.), but I feel like on the spectrum of 'random loot systems' its very tolerable to me.

            As you say, there's not too many item level, the 'random modifiers' are weighty and build-defining, and its a roguelike, so there's no such thing as 'grinding a boss over and over to get "the perfect item"'.

            • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              I do love Gungeon but a run often starts to feel stale by floor 5, I think I just like having the extra push to change my gear over time.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          It's really egregious in games with really strict break points. Like in Darktide the numbers don't matter unless they hit a specific breakpoint - being able to kill trash zombies in one hit instead of two, killing a special in three hits instead of four. If you do 150 more damage than you need to to hit the breakpoint those numbers are useless.

          But people still obsess about getting perfect stats. The game's crafting system wasn't fully implemented at launch and people lost their goddamn minds that they couldn't play slots for an extra 10 or 20 points of damage that literally will not change the game in any way.

          Fortunately the weapons have perks that do dramatically change gameplay and how you use them, but they could easily drop the base stats and keep the perks and very little would change.

        • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          I agree with you. But I think to my good friend who has a natural inclination to minmaxing. I've found a lot of peace in my life from letting small things go and finding a certain cessation of anxiety for just embracing things I think are cool. He has found himself an adult who has been in therapy who still has a reflex for opening up the spreadsheet. He loves to look at leaderboards and see if he can eek out 2% more damage.

          This is not to apologize for poor game design. I think it was the WoW expansion after Legion where you had the pirate humans. You had to get lucky thrice to get best-in-slot gear. Once for the drop, once for item level, and once for perfect modifiers. They had no anti-luck where you accumulated enough tokens to go to a vendor to fix the gear you found to your liking. It was literally just a casino with bosses who ceased to be a challenge.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            I'm enough of an old grognard to have played Ultima Online when it first came out and there was none of this and I miss it so much. There was random loot, and even random magic weapons, but almost no one used them bc of the five tiers of magic weapon damage the gear made by grandmaster blacksmith players did equivalent damage to tier 3 magic weapons. If if you found a cool magic weapon you could use it until it broke, but there was none of this stat maxxing bs. There were three meta armor load outs based on whether you were tanking, kiting, or casting. And it was all player made gear. There were no levels - your skills went up when you used them and your skills were capped at a total of like 600pts or something. There were "perks" but instead of picking them off a list it was stuff like being able to rez dead players with bandages if you got your healing skill to 70, or being able to reliably cast Gate from scolls with 70 magecraft so you could move groups of players across the continent rapidly. The classes were defined by what players found best for different roles but since it was all skill based you could go off meta however you wanted.

            And there's nothing like it these days because god forbid your motive for exploring and adventuring is fighting challenging monsters in chaotic dungeons that aren't restricted by levels or any other arbitrary means. Brand new players could join in the hardest content in the game bc the difference between a new players hp and maxxed hp was like 45hp compared to 100hp, and even if a newbie sucked at everything they could still let another player tank while they whacked at monsters ineffectually. Even if you sucked at healing the extra healing you would apply when you succeeded was helpful.

            Did i mention dungeons weren't instanced and the part system let you have an arbitrary number of party members so sometimes you'd go in alone or with a few buddies, but other times you'd roll in 60 deep and absolutely wreck the dungeon? I guess that's not strictly true bc i think their might have been some kind of queue system limiting the number of players in a dungeon at once, but i don't remember. But it wasn't arbitrarily limited to three or four or six players. You'd be battling skeletons in a relatively safe part of the dungeon when a party of dead and dying adventurers run past you screaming with the most godawful op monster in the dungeon hot on their heels, and suddenly everything erupts in to chaos as people scramble to form a fighting line and take down the monster, only for the line to collapse when it starts dropping people and everyone feels for their life in terror.

            I miss it so much. You played the game because it was fun.

          • Eris235 [undecided]
            ·
            1 year ago

            I get the impulse for min-maxing. I like min-maxing in a lot of ways. When I played League of Legends, one of the main appeals to me was knowing the math and figuring out optimal item choices on the fly (not that league is a overall a good game). Similarly, I love TTRPGs, and have a tendency to at least theory-craft min-maxing. Or even card games, I like mathing out the cost-benefit analysis of swapping two similar cards.

            But, something about the change from "Here's a list of discrete choices you can choose between, with different costs and benefits, individually designed by people", vs. "Here's a pile of randomly generated stats to dig through, 95% of which are garbage", is just soul-crushing boring to me, especially knowing that I have to make that choice again after every level, whereas in other games, I can actually plan out specifically what I want to be buying and speccing into.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I have gotten in to it with friends who explicitly play games to optimize numbers and sneer at me when I imply that the game itself might actually be fun if you weren't minmaxing so goddamn hard. It's very frustrating. Like go play with a calculator if all you want is to see number go up. I've no interest in diablof for that exact reason. I don't want to spend dozens of hours in front of a slot machine looking for +3% to your sex magick resistance or whatever.

      • Retrosound [none/use name]
        ·
        1 year ago

        We used to call these "spreadsheet gamers". Their favorite game is not what they're playing, their favorite game is Microsoft Excel. They'll open it up, populate a spreadsheet with all the modifiers, and analyze the numbers for optimal results.

        They find this way of playing games very satisfying and will never stop. Nerds ruin everything.

  • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    yeah, RPGs were better at doing their thing before rpg elements got in everywhere and those other kinds of games were better when they didn't work like that at all. Give me a bowcaster not a +1 blastech e-11 and let me get good at pressing all the dang number keys to switch between all ten of my space gats, and the cooldown changes from mass effect to mass effect 2 suck shit.

      • AernaLingus [any]
        ·
        1 year ago

        This is one of the reasons I enjoy the Resident Evil series...it's dead simple. Pistol for moderate damage with easy-to-acquire ammo. Shotgun for bursting heads at close range. Magnum for tough enemies. That's about it, go kill some zombies! I don't want to have to break out a calculator to figure out what weapon I should be using.

        • ssjmarx [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          You forgot Grenade Launcher to do boss fights on easy mode.

    • Anxious_Anarchist [they/them, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I've been replaying the mass effect series and 2 is such a slog without modding out those cooldown changes.

      Tbh it's still a slog, me2 is easily the worst in the series.

      • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        a long time i saw some analytics that in the first game most people played soldier and used the assault rifle, which is the most boring fucking way to play the space wizard RPG. and then they added ammo abilities that put your space magic on cooldown.

        • ssjmarx [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          I played soldier in all three, idk why but it just feels like the Shepard character should be a "badass normal" and leave the space wizardry to the supporting cast.

          • Anxious_Anarchist [they/them, any]
            ·
            1 year ago

            At least in me3 there are enough weapons to make a soldier playthrough more interesting, having to use the same guns for 90% of me2 was mind numbing.

            Thank god there are mods to add more.

    • NoYouLogOff [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Was weight-based cooldowns a thing in 2? I remember it being a really cool part of build making in the ME3 multiplayer and to a lesser extent in singleplayer. I don't remember the biotic/tech explosions being in 2 though, so it probably isn't as relevant.

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      As other people say in this thread it's all about them being mechanically meaningful. I love playing Path of Exile because my build feels completely different when I'm on day 2 gear vs when I've been playing for a few weeks and I have very good items. Because it actually feels straight up better: having more projectiles, being able to tank huge hits that killed me when I was weaker, killing tough bosses in a few seconds; actual stuff I can see with my eyes. Getting a small DPS upgrade that is really just keeping up with enemy HP inflation is completely useless, it just makes numbers bigger without changing anything about how you play. Even worse, games where the DPS upgrades don't match how much higher the enemy HP gets will force you to stop your progression and go grind rare upgrades/straight up pay for better stats like Gacha games just to keep going through the game at a smooth pace.

  • Alaskaball [comrade/them]A
    ·
    1 year ago

    This is why I prefer playing Arma over borderlands. I don't want to be standing there dumping high-caliber rounds that can dismember limbs into the fleshy meatbag that is called a human and have them laugh in my face and one-shot me with a steel pipe because of some fake-ass shit called "RPG elements" if I apply a piece of lead the size of your femur that's moving faster than the speed of sound to the chest cavity of a cackling bandit, I expect said bandits chest cavity to turn into bacon bits.

    • prismaTK
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      deleted by creator

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, i played both, and while they're not comparable i never really clicked with borderlands because it's whole thing is having zany fun guns, but in practice they mostly all function the same against enemies with way too much hp bloat.

  • keepcarrot [she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I like the little numbers, but to each their own. I'm back to fiddling around with PID controllers in stormworks creating military drones that I hope no one IRL creates. Also stoichiometric thingies? idk what they are, but apparently they help with fuel efficiency.

    If I'm playing, like, paradox games, +4% fire rate or damage is absolutely a thing to take when you're organising a fleet or army or whatever.

    • prismaTK
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      deleted by creator

      • keepcarrot [she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        It convinced me to start skills training in some new areas. Gives me some direction other than being long term unemployed

  • Deadend [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I like when the numbers are big enough that I want to change my playstyle for the numbers.

    When the numbers are small and “balanced” they are boring.

    Give me that Diablo 3 set that gives my throwing knife +6000% damage.

  • FlakesBongler [they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    GIVE ME THE VEX MYTHOCLAST AND NOBODY GETS HURT

    OKAY, ONLY ATHEON, TIME'S CONFLUX GETS HURT

    • holygon [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Lmao I don't know what happened, but your comment didn't load for me when I was scrolling through the comments, and then it suddenly loaded in the middle of 2 other commeths out of nowhere, and for a second I really thought I was getting robbed through a comment section. Funniest "bug" I've seen in a while

  • GorbinOutOverHere [comrade/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Not giving items modifiers is shitty like I literally can't play star wars fallen order because what is the fucking point if every new lightsaber I find is just some cosmetic bullshit