Playin' any games today, Flying Nun? (WGAYP - 2011 Edition)

[Grefter]

I think there is mods to expand the shared stash on the PC, at least there is ones to add extra regular ones so as long as it isn't hardcore you can just swap bits and pieces in and out. 

General rule of thumb though is to plan your next character and store stuff for them or just stash the good bits of your old gear so you have items to work with on hardcore if you are going to do the same character type after being killed.

Also not sure if it has been patched out or not, but when I was playing the most threatening enemies in the game were the poison shooting enemies Fen, they were quite capable of one shotting characters even on easier difficulties when I was playing (think they were kind of bugged in a similar way to Blinks were in Diablo 2 for the longest time, individual animations hitting more times than intended or something).

POKEMANS - I got to the big city.  I have bitched in chat about Patrats/Watchogs, but this bears repeating, whoever decided to make Rattata series even more dickishly threatening needs to have their face kicked in.  Fast Dark type attacks pretty much completely kills anything Psychic or Ghost.  For everythign else there is Superfang just to ruin your day.  Seriously a 60 power 100% accuracy move at level 6 is good.  Dark typing is ridiculous early game because it is pretty much unresistable.  10 levels later you give it another 20 power and make it have a chance to drop defense.  Looking at the rest of the skill set it is probably the best straight attack skill it gets (Super Fang is Super Fang).  It is better than both Hyper Fang and Slam, the last two attack moves it gets.  I also note that it gets Confuse Ray later on just to make fighting them even more annoying.

This is complete and total bullshit.

Lillipup on the other hand is also pretty amazingly brutal, but one I can actually respect.  Yeah it gets Bite/Crunch issues as well, but 2/6 levels later which goes a decent way to make it less frustrating.  Lillipup is just a legitimately threatening and solid Normal type though with nice stats to work with not terrible stats and a bullshit skillset designed just to grief the player.  Respect for early Takedown, not a great move, can miss, but keeps you on your toes.

So you have those two and then throw in Purrloin.  WHAT UP PSYCHIC?  I HEARD YOU LIEKD TO BE USEFUL lol not this tiem.

[hinode]

PokeWhite: Finished the aftergame a while back. Finally got unlazy enough to write about it.

The Elite 4/endgame sequence was actually kinda neat this time around. On the other hand, the huge jump in levels in the aftergame is really stupid. Going from L52->64 with nothing in between? What the hell, Gamefreak. It can provide a challenge I guess, but of a really stupid kind. There's really nothing interesting in this particular aftergame until you get to the superbosses at the very end, who are competent in a balanced way.

Pokemon-wise, Scraggy picks up Hi Jump Kick at L31, which is game-changing. 130 power/90 acc is just insane, and with STAB it's like having a super-effective hit against anything that doesn't resist it, and between (STAB) Crunch and Rock Slide it can hit most of those super-effectively too. Dark/Fighting was an amazing typing before that, with favorable matchups against almost half the type chart (including 3/4 of the Elite Four), so with HJK Scraggy easily became my best Pokemon up until Zekrom, and it was still a pretty respectable #2 after that. Probably overall MVP across the entire game.

Litwick is... objectively not worth it until the aftergame. Being stuck on stage 1 of a 3-part evo line until L41 really sucks, even with Eviolite patch up the defenses a bit, especially for something you don't get until past the fifth gym. At least you can feed it a Dusk Stone to basically skip the second stage, plus you can feed the ice gym to it later on. On the upside, 145(!) base Special Attack helped it get OHKOs on rematch Caitlin's Metagross and Bronzong where lesser Fire-types would fall short, plus Ghost/Fire is a really good typing against Alder's team. That, and it's a freaking ghost chandelier Pokemon.

Rufflet/Braviary manages to be even more ridiculous, coming in right before the eigth gym (and you need to do some minor sequence breaking to get it even that "early") and not evolving until level 54. What a joke. Still, there was no way I was going to pass up a red white and blue eagle Pokemon that fights for its friends and pierces the heavens while carrying a car, so I sucked it up, exp share'd it until Victory Road, and then fed it every Rare Candy I had saved up. At least it has good stats and moves, plus it was my only Pokemon that could hit the Fighting E4 guy's Pokemon for super-effective damage.

Zekrom is boring but effective. 680 BST, dual STAB that's nearly unresisted, an ability that barely matters in-game, and a bunch of second-tier coverage moves all add up to a legendary that's really good at slugging but doesn't do anything particularly interesting.

Working on 50 traded Pokemon to get the second master ball right now, since that doesn't take much time, just check in every day to see if my trade's gone through. That and trying to get a Nidoran F from the Dream World, which is as dumb as advertised.

[Pyro]

Portal 2: Played and beaten. Was generally pretty good for puzzles and I got a kick out of GLADOS and The Idiot. Not worth the high price tag but a fun romp nonetheless.

Trails: Beaten. This game was a fun romp that developed it's cast well. I've mentioned before that this is pretty cookie-cutter in substance but makes up for that by cranking up style and execution to 11. This remains true right up to the major plot of the game, where a lingering question gets answered and all the character and emotional buildup throughout the game is cashed in for magnificent effect. The only down side is that now we have to wait more than a year for future installations.

[superaielman]

Portal 2: Yeah, what Pyro said. he did most of the playing, but yeah. I actually thought the ending was fantastic (Marked improvement from portal 1 there).

[Captain K.]

Last Remnant:  Disc 2.  Fuck Gates of Hell.  Nuff said.

[Niu]

You want to prepare like at least two revival only squad for that fight.

Forget healing, let them get kill and quickly revive is actually a way to go.

[Monkeyfinger]

You want to prepare like at least two revival only squad for that fight.

Forget healing, let them get kill and quickly revive is actually a way to go.

It takes forever to kill the gates of hell that way though. What that means is there's plenty of time for luck to screw you over. Your retarded union AI will eventually position itself just wrong, resulting in every union you have eating a crit hellfire or something and your entire party wiping - or close to it, anyway, and if you're down to 1 union or something you won't claw your way back, since the boss attacks 3 times per turn.

[Bardiche]

Still on Yu Gi Oh, Reverse of Arcadia. After graduating from an Exodia deck, I now employ an Airknight Parshath deck. It's... actually quite fun to use, despite my aversion to Fairy-types. It has a definite weakness in the lack of destroy effects, so if the enemy brings out strong monsters to the field, my options to deal with it are limited and few. That's actually worrisome.

I kind of want to try and get a fun Spellcaster deck going, given spellcounter racking should be prrrrrrretty easy and Tempest Magician can really dish out some pain. The only problem is this booster pack format refusing to give me Spell Power Grasp cards.

[Captain K.]

I had been running three squads of five:  combat-oriented (Baulson), magic-oriented (Rush), and hexes (Loki).  I ended up dropping the hexes group for a healing-oriented one.  I just kept all three squads with enough AP available for Kiss of Life at all times and did fine.  He still managed to kill Rush's group once despite the +4 flame def accessories I had on Rush, but I was able to recover before it got out of hand.

BR 76 going into disc 2.  That's probably high, but I loves me some chainin'.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Legend of Dragoon - Fin~ Pretty fun game overall, I think Dart is pretty shitty for a main and I wish I could have tossed him from my party. Oh well, PS1 game. I like the Disc 3 plot stuff and the beginning of Disc 4 developing the Wingly culture. I think the game does a pretty good job of breaking cliches until the end where you have ZIEG and Melbu who are kind of walking cliches. Still has some fun plot twists. I really liked the Albert backstory with Doel and Carlo in the final dungeon, you see a very different point of view from what you've been presented the entire game. The biggest problem I have with the game is that it tries too hard to compensate for people being crappy at additions and as a result has pretty terribad bosses toward the end. The last Virage is a bit of an embarrassment, as is the three person boss in the Law place. I like the law changing thing in the law place, it's very cute (if tedious). I didn't like fighting all the bosses with my really shitty PCs, it was very long and slow. Another thing I liked about the game was that... even though Rose's identity was obvious for a long time, it still blind-sided me because I was expecting something cheesier and less dark.

In conclusion: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH ALBERT MARRIED A GIRL!

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

=)

[Grefter]

Pokemon - Seriously, stop have a 100% hit rate with 85% base accuracy moves after you have been hit with 6 accuracy stat downs.

Edit - Also for the Ciatos the term you are looking for is "Grew a Beard"

[Niu]

You want to prepare like at least two revival only squad for that fight.

Forget healing, let them get kill and quickly revive is actually a way to go.

It takes forever to kill the gates of hell that way though. What that means is there's plenty of time for luck to screw you over. Your retarded union AI will eventually position itself just wrong, resulting in every union you have eating a crit hellfire or something and your entire party wiping - or close to it, anyway, and if you're down to 1 union or something you won't claw your way back, since the boss attacks 3 times per turn.

True, a lot more set up for proper zoning is need for this tactic to be applicable. Ranged healing+decoy+arranging turn order on who comes to heal first and who attack next and what not....
Though, damage shouldn't be hard to come by. Having enough morale boosting item in stock and stay in critical state consistent enough should allow the commands for big moves to be frequent enough.

[Cmdr_King]

Super Mario RPG- So when I originally played this back in 2001 or so, I go to a point where I felt like I couldn't make jumps and shelved it, and ultimately lost that save file somewhere down the line.  I think it was in Barrel Volcano.

For whatever reason I replayed it, and thusly actually finished this time.

The difference between then and now, aside from having a controller, is two key points; I read FAQs and thus know what timed blocking is, and the DL exists and I know what Geno's skillset does.  I've totally been underrating him, because the game isn't even scaled for Geno Boost honestly.  This is true on both ends, the game both is low damage to start with so doubled defense laughs things off and doubled offense largely removes the only thing originally holding your offense in check (the relatively small shared FP pool) from consideration, meaning enemy durability is approximately that of cheap toilet paper.
The chapter bosses try to be tricksy enough to deal with this, but with doubled defenses you can really grind out the nasty one and the rest you just have entirely too much time to figure them out.  Smithy is weird in this regard, 8000 HP should actually be respectable even with Geno Boost, but his suicidally unbalanced defenses lead to about the highest damage figures seen in the game.  Ah well.

[Grefter]

Pokemans - Okay so the big building that was being a bitch gave me Exp Share.  I guess that was worth it.

Also I love how the NPC in the city that you can talk to asks what Monkey you have so that they can give you the evolution stone tells you to think carefully before using the stone because it will slow down the rate at which the pokemon will learn new skills.  This is generally pretty good advice (first thing in game I can think of where it gives you a nod that things learn skills earlier if you squat levels!).  It is also pretty awesome that it tells you this for Pokemon that stop learning skills after you evolve them.  This seems to be the MO for this generation.  It fixes many things, clues you in on all sorts of stuff.  Half of it is great but it is all veiled behind blatant lies and falsehood.

[Fenrir]

Torchlight: Died during the endgame. I don't even know how, my HPs just immediately went from full to 0. I had so much defense and resistance to every element it was ridiculous. The electric and poison attacks from those dangerous Medea looking monsters weren't even close to OHKOing before.
In short: BS!!!!!

Oh well. Don't know what I'll try next playing this game. Maybe a destroyer, as they have more HPs, or an alchemist with Hardcore turned off.

[Random Consonant]

Pokemon - Seriously, stop have a 100% hit rate with 85% base accuracy moves after you have been hit with 6 accuracy stat downs.

Edit - Also for the Ciatos the term you are looking for is "Grew a Beard"

LoD The After Years.  Whatsherface and Shana bitching that they're big gay beards and Albert and Dart resolving their TRUE FEELINGS.  Then they pull the mask off of Melbu and reveal that he was in fact Zeromus all along or something and generally proceed according to fanfic written by 12-year olds but hey at least Albert and Dart will finally be together.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Don't forget Lavitz reviving for love triangle tension.

[Captain K.]

Torchlight: Died during the endgame. I don't even know how, my HPs just immediately went from full to 0. I had so much defense and resistance to every element it was ridiculous. The electric and poison attacks from those dangerous Medea looking monsters weren't even close to OHKOing before.
In short: BS!!!!!

Oh well. Don't know what I'll try next playing this game. Maybe a destroyer, as they have more HPs, or an alchemist with Hardcore turned off.

Those particular enemies do ridiculous damage that is not in scale with the rest of the game.  They have mods specifically for them.  Also watch out for the last boss, he's fairly difficult compared with the previous bosses as well.

[Clear Tranquil]

Edit - Also for the Ciatos the term you are looking for is "Grew a Beard"

* Clear Tranquil likes this!

Dissidia Duodecim- Finally cleared 000 story mode. I used Yuna, Prishe, Shantotto, Lightning and Terra to defeat the end boss there. Yuna, Prishe and Terra were L100, Shantotto L88 and Lightning L90 or so. Yuna, Prishe and Terra all also had Lufenian equips. Yuna was my starter and Terra was my anchor, Yuna/Prishe and Shantotto/Terra for OTPs, Lightning failed horribly >.> She did have horrible equips though (then again so did Shantotto) <.< Yuna managed to take off half of the opponent's HP by herself, Prishe and Shantotto removed a decent chunk each, Lightning a tiny morsel which left 28'000~ HP for Terra to finish off and land The Final Blow!

(oh and Ultimecia was the assist chosen by the game to help me in the fight, she helped a lot with Prishe)

I also did a bit more of the Labyrinth afterwards. I now have 27% complete there and uhh ... I'm not sure what I want to do next. I've been using Yuna/Prishe as my mains in the Labyrinth with Terra/Lightning filling in when required~

[Yoshiken]

Talking to my sister, she pretty much forced me to get back to playing Advance Wars: Dark Conflict. Got through a few more missions - I can see why she was hyping the story/characters now! - before going back to my trusty old Pokemon Black.
Stopped breeding for perfect IVs since I'm going to legal-hack everything I need to do it a lot quicker (I want legit Pokes for the tournament, but I don't care how I get them, so legal-hacks for parents seems to be the best approach.) Went and blitzed the E4 with a Lv 100 Scizor - surprisingly harder than I was expecting, probably due to my lack of Choice Band - before going back to the Battle Haxway to grind for more BP so I can get that CBZor that'll make things go so much quicker.
tl;dr: GRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIND ;_;

[Shale]

SRWZ2: Stage 31 now. Still perfect on SR points, but this level is a bitch. I'm supposed to clear the stage in five turns but it takes four of those five just to reach the boss with one character, and another turn to get two more people there. That's not enough offense to take down 40,000 HP. Back to the drawing board, I guess. My reinforcements show up after Godmars kills a bunch of enemies, and there's got to be somewhere I can park him where he'll kill enough to get them there earlier.

[Tide]

TOPSP: Almost done! Only Hanging Gardens left. Stupid 20 floor dungeon.

[Scar]

Did you already beat Hell's Gate?

I still need to venture into the Hanging Gardens myself, but FF4:PSP just came out...and yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah... I think I will mess around with that since that 100 floor dungeon has beunrt me out in TO:PSP.

I'm somewhere around the 30th floor or something. I needed a break.

[Excal]

Dissidia, managed to beat the 13th Cycle.  Was generally impressed with the 12th cycle and all of the new characters introduced in it.  And the 13th cycle is pretty much the same as before, except the new Party mechanic actually lets you have multiple people at the same time, which is awesome.

After this I went to try out the Laberynth, which...  is apparently a great way to get some items, but the Exp gains are crap, and the Calender bonuses don't apply.  Really?  Does this game honestly need more grind?  Man, with the Duel Colloseum I could, with the bonus, level a couple of characters thirty levels in an afternoon if I wanted to just push them, and get a wide variety of opponents at the same time without having to set anything, or sit through story.  Oh, and get some items too, just cause.  Here it feels like in that same amount of time I'd get one character about ten levels, if that.  So...  I'm probably just going to use Squall and the starting section of 000 Story Mode in order to get everyone up to where they actually have move options because having to fight dozens of battles to get to Level 4 is idiotic when I can just have four characters sit around and do squat and get there in three battles.