Lurker > MariaTaylor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn9us3WeFgI

Kotone covering an english song, with the assist from Reine

I think it sounds really good

voltch posted...

and privated because of it.

I just read up on this quickly. Seems like a firestorm of misguided intentions and edgy humor gone wrong. I doubt many people are actually offended by the MV, and I actually don't think that's what this is really about. Management specifically said "don't speculate" and the most common explanation right now is that the challenger shuttle explosion (which happened like 40 years ago) is somehow recent enough to be offensive, and people are accepting that. Which is probably the best case scenario for Cover.

Unfortunately I think Kanauru's idea to replace the swatstika on the hindenburg with the KFP logo was extremely misguided. Presumably the notion was 'I need to remove this offensive symbol, so I'll put something funny/hololive related here instead.' But this really intersects at three points that end up looking pretty terrible; Early on Kiara had to go out of her way to stop people from drawing her character with nazi imagery probably because of her accent. Mumei recently had ANOTHER censorship incident where a runic symbol she used in her mechandise was also used by, you guessed it, alt-right and neo nazi groups. And lastly, replacing an offensive symbol of one of the most villainous groups in history and slapping a hololive-affiliated logo in its place is just a bad look.

I would just avoid reading that if you want to keep your purity intact, but it wouldn't surprise me if that's what this is really about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOpsZOqAVWs

this was my favorite ever obscure reference, where Coco spits out a line from Akira and then Marine recognizes it and immediately gives the appropriate response

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOCmDcgPtYw

UltimaterializerX posted...

Its completely and totally random. If you pull up a graph of all 50 states and their covid case/death numbers, youd never be able to spot where each one put the masks in place.

which is why the statement 'explain all the states that had cases go up after mask mandates were put in place' is totally meaningless. you're admitting that the data doesn't prove or disprove your stance, and yet you're treating it as if it proves your stance.

UltimaterializerX posted...

Explain all of the states that had cases go up after mask mandates were put in place.

on a sociological and political level there are probably hundreds of factors that could cause the number of COVID cases to go up or down in any given state. even if states that had mask mandates had the number of cases go up, this means virtually nothing. what if I'm wearing a red shirt every time I find a 100 dollar bill randomly laying on the ground. does this mean that wearing a red shirt causes 100 dollar bills to spawn?

I'd also be interested to see if you have any data that actually shows that states with mask mandates actually have increased cases to a significant degree, or if it's just a case where there's no correlation between mask mandates and COVID cases and you're simply selecting states that have mask mandates and have increased COVID cases and drawing some kind connection without examining the data set as a whole.

also the 'number of cases' isn't a particularly relevant statistic. you'd be more interested in the number of cases proportional to the population of a given area. for example, a place with 100 people getting 70 COVID cases is indicative of worse policy than a place with 50,000 people getting 1,000 COVID cases. you can't just say there were 1,000 cases after mask mandates were introduced and call it a day. there is relevant information that gives context to data.

I hope that answers your questions.

it hides my ugly face, so yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=salHcu0dYJ4

oh
sorry
i can't speak japanese

I was watching the Koyori POV (actually from before you even posted ther link but that's proably not too surprising)

https://youtu.be/9JD7SfE4e5o

also here's the new kotone cover she promised to release today...

clearly they are driven by a love of mahjong

catching up on some recent archives

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb3rclQNh-M

this was a good one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFNe635SBu0

I liked this episode a lot more. The first one was good, but I'm absolutely fascinated to see where the story goes from here.

Robin was like the perfect mix of being completely transparent but also beyond comprehension.
The Night Owl guy was great, I hope he continues to show up. I'd love to hear more of his theories about the people able to communicate with sasquatch.

I went to visit one of my friends about a decade ago and he was on the quidditch team at his university. I actually went to one of their practices and observed it. it was... odd.

Shredder has defeated Batman.

Enough said.

I loved when the first trivia question was asked and it gradually starts playing flashbacks of all the times nathan had been feeding him the answers before. and I thought it was going to completely go off the rails like he realizes that nathan helped him cheat and then it turns into a whole scene... but instead he just didn't know the answer to the question. even though nathan told it to him. and he somehow never realized that nathan helped him cheat.

I haven't heard about this. I need to check it out ASAP. Also consider Nathan For You to be one of my favorite shows.

looks incredibly unfocused but not completely terrible. I'll probably start watching it and see where things go from there. chances of seeing fingolfin, glorfindel, or even gildor are probably close to absolute zero.

Took them long enough!

WazzupGenius00 posted...

From her video and the wording of the Cover announcement it sounds like they probably wanted more from her than she was willing to give after her other duties and her injury. I'm guessing they decided to not renew the contract after year 1 ended

She did recently open a youtube channel for her art persona and uploaded a few gaming videos to it including a Genshin stream, so she might continue using that from time to time

yeah it's been a long time since she was able to stream as often as they are supposed to. the application process seems to indicate they want people who are able to stream at least twice a week. some of the veteran JP members, especially Ayame, seem to be exempt from this rule but otherwise I can't imagine they were happy about Sana streaming less than once a month. even if there was a good reason for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sfPiqpE2BQ

hachi spent around 4 hours today singing more than 40 songs

It's mostly the same game with some balance changes, a few new quests, and a new sort-of-postgame-but-you-can-go-there-basically-whenever dungeon

if there's anything else different, I don't know about it.

heh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27HDCjvkj_0

this isn't really a quality of life thing but maybe it was intended to be one. I hate how in most of the newer etrian odyssey games they lock the progression of your skills beyond arbitrary caps. like you need to defeat the second stratum boss or reach level 30 before you can unlock certain skills beyond a certain point on the skill tree. really incredibly dumb.

in the original games you could invest as far as you wanted into whatever path of development you wanted. would this allow you to make OP builds early on? yes, that's the point. the entire game is about making builds. players should be rewarded for making strong builds, not prevented from making them. could it also cause players to overly invest in skills that didn't give much return if they weren't careful? also, yes.

funny thing is that EO1 and EO2 were incredibly punishing when it came to fixing your builds. with the newer games I actually have no problems with the fact that they make it easier to reset your skill points. I think that's a great feature that makes your build diversity in the game even better and allows you to test out different options without being penalized. what I hate is the fact that I can't invest in the skills I want until the game tells me that I'm allowed to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qgwxdF51vs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftOrxVzkQcE

Switching to Assassin will increase your strength (damage) growth while sacrificing a bit of health and defense for some Stamina (which is needed to spam your special attacks). You do get to keep access to your shield as the assassin. You don't need to equip a bow, which is nice. The basic fighter class really is actually a very solid defensive choice you can stick with for the entire game, while the assassin lets you kill stuff faster at the expense of losing some of your defensive safety net.

The 2-handed warrior.... just kinda sucks. Stat gains aren't anything more useful than just specializing as a sword/shield fighter or DPS assassin. All of its skills are locked into its own 2-handed weapons which don't carry over to any other class. It does has some useful augments but you have to grind a bit to unlock those so it's hard to say if it's worth it. The one thing the Warrior does well is knocking enemies, even large enemies, onto the ground quickly. Which will let your pawns take advantage of the 2x damage bonus and just the general safety of large enemies not trampling over them.

I will say that the Fighter has good augments as well, and the assassin augments are kinda boring, and they also got nerfed in Dark Arisen. Might be worth it to stick with Fighter until you can purchase the good Augments. Then later on decide if switching to Assassin for better damage and stamina gains or sticking with fighter is more appealing. Alternately you can switch to assassin and gain a lot of strength early on, and then switch back to your fighter later on.

Bow access is kind of a wash. Personally I don't find the bow very useful but this is because I suck at aiming. I prefer to just recruit a pawn archer and let the AI do the aiming and shooting. As bad as the pawns can be at aiming and attacking enemies, it's usually fine as long as you're playing the melee focused character and keeping enemies locked down.

What I learned is that it's best to only equip the skills you want them to use.

This can mean always having your favorite skills equipped on them; this is better for melee focused classes where the pawns should only be using specific skills. I don't like them to have skills that require charging up before attacking, or attacking with specific timing. The truth is pawns just simply have bad timing and a total inability to land attacks reliably. Giving them rapid fire attacking skills or wide AoE skills makes them a lot more useful in combat.

For magic using pawns it's usually better to change their equipped skills based on what you are going to do. Limit them to only Anodyne, Your preferred Elemental Buff, and one or maybe two attacking spells. Pawns are too stupid to correctly choose what to do. You need to limit their options as much as possible. If their only offensive spell is Ingle then they will keep chucking fireballs. If their only elemental buff is Ice, then they will always buff you with Ice. That's the idea, anyway.

I don't remember all of the spell names anymore but the one that summons a wall of fire is usually a good offensive spell to have equipped if you know there's no flying enemies. This can massively clear out packs of monsters, especially if you are good at drawing aggression and grouping all of the monsters in one place before your mage pawn sets them all on fire.

The spell which summons lightning bolts is bizarrely effective against cyclops. Whenever I have a good mage pawn with lightning in my party, they usually shock the cyclops face and will almost always break its tusks and knock it to the ground right away, dealing massive damage and opening them up for further attacks.

Forgot to mention they are also vulnerable to drenching which doesn't sound too amazing but if you have reliable ice damage then it can actually be fairly useful to throw water on them and then hit them with an ice attack. Lightning gets a bonus too but I would guess since ogres can be frozen and they don't get shocked easily that maybe water -> ice would be the way to go.

I would guess your damage is still a bit too low, yeah. Try gaining a few levels if you can. Not only will your damage increase but you'll be able to hire Pawns that have better gear and stats to accompany you. It really makes a difference at low levels. Even a few levels can make fights much easier. If you're below level 20 then I would say you can rapidly gain a bunch of attack and defense if you go and do other things before trying to fight Ogres.

The Ogre has 210 Defense and this is a bit of a simplification of how damage works but you want to have above 210 Attack in order to do any kind of damage to the Ogre. And like, having just barely over 210 attack means you're doing barely any damage. Since he has 20,000 health, you really want to be doing a lot more than chip damage or it will take forever. Hitting him directly in the face deals the most damage but this is hard to do. Hitting him anywhere else will cause your damage to be reduced even further. So yeah. Having at least 300+ attack is probably useful in helping to bring him down.

That being said, there are also ways to boost your own damage with multipliers. The reason it's important to get good damage first is that multiplying 50 damage by 2x is still only 100 damage. But multiplying 300 damage by 2x is 600 damage. Should be obvious which of these is preferable when slashing through a 20,000 HP health bar.

Tactics that work:

Put him to sleep if you have a method to do so

Bring along a mage who can enchant your weapons with fire or ice. He can be frozen.

Jump on the Ogre's back and grab him. He will jump in the air and slam on his back, trying to crush you. If you are prepared for this, you can simply jump off of him when he jumps and then land on him with a plunging attack. Additionally, while he's on the ground, he takes 2x damage. Baiting him into knocking himself on the ground is highly effective.

If you're dealing enough damage he'll pretty frequently stop attacking and actually curl up into a ball to block his face with his arms. You can attack his arms and if you break his guard, this will allow you to keep attacking his face for even more damage. But you need to be doing enough DPS to get him to guard, and doing enough DPS to break his guard. This is why having the damage is the most important step BEFORE you start thinking about damage multipliers and which tactics work. Tactics don't matter if you don't have the damage to support it.

When he goes berserk he'll normally focus on YOU as a target, and you can use this to your advantage. Make sure to be aware of your own positioning. Get him to charge at you and away from your allies. This will have the triple benefit of; your allies can attack him from behind, your allies won't be trampled on by a charging ogre, all of the ogres damage will be aimed at a character that is fully under your control and you can rely on your own skills to block or dodge his attacks or simply open your menu and quickly heal yourself if things get too dicey

Lastly, an ogre will sometimes stop to eat corpses. I didn't personally find this to be too useful but I think the idea is that if you know an ogre is up ahead, you drag some corpses with you. Then if the fight starts to go badly you run toward the corpses and call your allies to follow you. The ogre will chase your group but he gets distracted by the corpses and stops to eat them. This will give you time to heal and you can even run back and ambush him while he's eating. He literally forgets that he's in the middle of a fight. Must be some delicious corpses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_Yb0uOw6wA

voltch posted...

Her handwritten autograph set sold out in seconds looks like.

the limit was ten per customers, they all went to scalpers

Are you recruiting pawns that you meet in the world? You should be using the rift stones at the pawn guild and several other locations. When you go inside you can search for pawns by level, and a bunch of pawns of your exact level will appear randomly as well if you don't enjoy searching.

PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

In any case, I swapped out my two pawns for a giant ass archer and then this fighter with a really squeaky voice and I hate it so much. I chased after Quinoa and I fought entirely too many wolves like wtf give me something new to fight at least. I thought I'd run into bandits on the way there because a couple rocks rolled down but nope. Just all wolves all the time. They wouldn't suck if they weren't pretty boring to fight though.

funny enough that section can be difficult to clear normally because there are very strong groups of bandits blocking the way. at least relatively to a fresh character. if you go at night, all of the bandits are replaced by wolves, which makes it much easier. sounds like you used this method by coincidence rather than intentionally.

PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

I upgraded my guy with a lot of stuff and now I'm trying to understand something. My main Pawn, Tron, will gain experience. But the other two I have won't gain anything, and essentially I just need to upgrade to a better one eventually, right? Also, I figured out that the people in the weird rift stone world are characters from my friend's list. Cool stuff actually.

Yeah normally I would go back and recruit new pawns pretty frequently. If they are even a few levels behind your character it will be pretty easy to notice. Also if you use the stone you can 'search' for companions. It's usually a good idea to filter by the class you want (like search for mages) and check the box for characters with "good defense". After that I'd pick the five with the abilities that seemed useful, and the game summons them all into the space where you can examine them and decide who to recruit.

You can also search for pawns that are ABOVE your own level, but it costs rift crystals to summon them and you probably don't have very many of those yet. There is a little bit of 'insurance' that you get by doing this. If you recruit a higher level pawn, they'll be useful to keep around for a bit longer without needing to replace them. And they'll be stronger in the short term.

With that being said, it's very easy to simply go back and replace your low level pawns. Especially at the start of the game when all of the quests are near the city or encampment. I do remember recruiting higher level pawns sometimes before heading off on what I knew was going to be a long journey.

Pawns will also have their own level of knowledge regarding enemy types, specific quests, etc. They gain experience by actually going on quests and fighting monsters, and you can check this information on their sheet before recruiting them. I always thought it was more useful to get a mage with healing, a weapon buff, and an offensive spell. You'd be surprised at how many don't have all three of those things. I'd put a priority on that before recruiting someone with quest knowledge. A lot of the striders and rangers look the same and have almost the exact same stats and builds, so normally I'd just summon whichever one had the coolest name or appearance.

Waluigi1 posted...

Weird, I've never seen anyone think the enemies are too spongey.

I think it's because it's an Action RPG which means that if your technical skills are good enough you can effectively fight any enemy for as long as you want. Like I might not have enough damage to kill a chimera in less than 10 minutes. So I just keep dodging its attacks and waiting for it to die. That's more or less how I remember my first experience with the game going. The second time I tried to play it, I focused on upgrading my weapons and increasing my damage which is why I gave the same advice in this topic. I know it sounds like common sense, but making sure your damage is as high as possible will make the fights go MUCH faster. It's very important to be aware of that in this game compared to say, Bloodborne, where the gap between the weakest damage and the highest damage is much more narrow.

I remember enemies taking a fuck ton of damage to kill, which made the game very boring. Especially because it takes so long to walk from one place to another, and your ability to fast travel is quite limited. Save often. Save pretty much immediately as soon as you can any time you accomplish something of value. You don't want to forget to save and then have to redo a long, boring boss fight over again.

Maintaining and upgrading your gear will help a lot with making the fights go faster, but enemies are still way too effective at sponging damage. If the game balance was adjusted it would probably be a bit more fun, but... yeah. I mostly agree with Zazi, although I would use "half baked" instead of "under baked" if I was going to describe it. The class system especially feels kinda worthless. You can unlock most of the abilities in a class fairly quickly and then you either just stay in the class forever gaining class EXP which does nothing, or keep switching classes and master every ability in the game. It takes away my sense that my character has an identity when they can just cycle between every job and master every skill, although I guess there are some people who prefer that kind of system. Here it just feels like 'okay I did it, now what?' and the answer is 'nothing, there's nothing else to do with the classes.'

Exploring the dungeons is more satisfying than it should be, despite all of the mentioned issues, but it also doesn't feel like exploring dungeons is a big focus of the main game. The Dark Arisen expansion adds a huge dungeon that is separate from the main game and I remember that being my favorite aspect of the game.

Lastly, flying enemies are really annoying, but this is a problem with most if not all action RPGs.

Koyori 3D tomorrow...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geEGzouutR4

kimera chloe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVSiiJXZw1s

Very academic

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/1/0/AAZU_LAADUy6.jpg

Watching Kazama Iroha's stream, I can see why they wanted to get her into 3D as soon as possible. Even more than just the fact that she's been very popular and shown high growth. She has good live singing and dancing skills, and those are basically wasted without any 3D rigging. Also on her 3rd song right now which feels more than usual? I could be remembering wrong but I feel like most 3D Debuts I watched have only had like 1 song at the end. This is more like a mini concert than a 3D Debut.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GUNZlhdaQWE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-2nAu8EycQ

on a stage of energetic blondes, polka feels the most energetic and the most blonde

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PN_xbRCxjk

votes crest of the stars

wow, actually looks a lot nicer. I basically hate her default year 1 outfit but I like her core design. interesting.

Alanna82 posted...

25 F isn't even that cold.

charmander6000 posted...

After doing the calculations to Celsius, 25 F isn't too bad compared to 95 F

A better comparison would either be 0 F vs 95 F or 25 F vs 85 F

this and this. I thought it was going to be a landslide in favor of 25 F. 95 F is freaking miserable. 25 F is like... kinda cold, I guess.

does nami change clothes after you marry her

Kiara still hasn't released a collab cover with the mystery senpai yet, although she did say "maybe" in May so I guess we landed on the "maybe not" side of the maybe coin this time. I'm rolling over my prediction to June and still thinking that it will be AZKi.

In related news, she also just released a cover with Koyori:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8NiwUykf8U