Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh hey Vector!

I mostly lurk nowadays, and have pretty much always mostly lurked, but it's weirdly good to see a familiar (metaphorical) face doing well nonetheless

In the early game it's not too bad, you can buy starter weapons of each class or make them pretty easily you start with the weakest of each weapon class, so you can give them all a shot, but it can be a significant investment to get a weapon from there to being endgame level. Personally I'd recommend watching a run through or two of the weapons to try and get a feel for what you might like and then tutorials on those from there. The game does have a training area which is handy for practising trickier moves without the threat of being eaten, but it's not the best for learning from scratch IMO.

More generally, there are the 14 weapon classes, each with completely different movesets and playstyles. They've all got a good amount of depth, so just taking one out blindly can be pretty rough, so most players will have a few classes they actually use and keep upgraded.
Within each class, the weapons have various branching upgrade trees. These usually all function similarly but have different stats, elements etc. Some of the more technical weapons have deeper changes between trees, but most don't.

Tier wise, the game is divided into low and high rank - HR has the same monsters again, but stronger, and with some new monsters thrown in (vaguely like some ARPGs repeat content again but harder). Armour shares these tiers, with low rank armour being basically obsoleted by its high rank variants, hence the previous advice on not grinding too much for LR armour. Weapons have a softer tier progression, with stronger weapon upgrades requiring materials from HR monsters.

I run similar to DH. Anyone can make perception checks, any time, but I rarely use more minor traps, instead preferring bigger more obvious one, and perception checks giving hints as to the nature (so for example an isolated plinth with a reward on top, or a mangled corpse in a hallway, perception check might reveal the slight depression of a pressure plate). Essentially I'll drop something in that might prompt a perception check. Though mangled corpses may equally be from monsters, and a perception check might reveal bite marks instead, so they never know quite what to expect.

Passive perception is a thing in some systems, though it always feels a bit odd to me using it in home game content as I already know who can and can't detect each trap.

Okay, so managed to make it in yesterday after a long time in the queue (don't know how long exactly as afking). No longer getting stuck in loading screens, which is nice.

Are attack combos direction-locked and lengthy like Monster Hunter?

For hammer at least, not absolutely direction locked, but you can't just spin freely either that I've noticed. Combos tend to be chains of maybe 5, but I believe both sword and chainblades have a combo with a sustained attack in, and for hammer I've not come across many openings where I could squeeze more than 1 hammer combo.

First (early) impressions are that it's a somewhat more simplified/accessible monster hunter. There're only a handful of predefined combos for each weapon (though at least for hammer I've found myself using them all, and it's no less varied than what I've actually ended up using in MH in the past) and monsters seem a touch bland (though early game, and no worse than early MH monsters, so probably too early to judge). That said, it's still pretty enjoyable to me at least.

My main concern currently is that all the fight areas seem pretty similar. Whilst the behemoths move between them during the hunt, they don't actually seem to make much difference, and just seem to tax you some time if you don't know the island layout well. Also, the islands are all premade, but still manage to be somewhat bland (I seem to remember procedural generation being mentioned as an eventual goal, but can't find where).

Server issues are still present, albeit reduced. Queues are very slow and sometimes you get stuck on an island after a public hunt and have to wait ~30min for it to default back to main menu to avoid requeueing (haven't seen that in solo). Supposedly as of this morning they've tweaked the queues to be a bit faster but it now doesn't appear to be moving at all, so my recommendation is to intersperse with some netflix Hopefully they'll crack the issues soon, but we shall see.

Framerate wise, I've encountered no issues on i5 w/ GTX760 so likely not hardware based.

TLDR: It feels like the start of an open beta, but there's some potential. Early game is a bit bland, but at least I'm not spending an hour collecting mushrooms. Server issues currently very painful.

FAKEDIT: Queue started moving just after saying that it wasn't, tho still very slow. Though had an internet stutter and it remembered where in the queue I was, so that was nice.

Whilst a literal rope is a terrible idea, line laying is standard I believe.

That said, cave and wreck diving has far greater hazards than just getting lost. Primarily equipment malfunction/snagging and getting physically stuck. Likewise for wrecks.

Basically, cave divers are typically insane to some degree regardless

((Could I get a scroll for now.

Unrelatedly, how much xp would it be to upgrade my shadow blink to a move action? ))

"My thanksss."

Skia takes her drink and goes to sit quietly elsewhere, preferably near any group that seem more equipped than the average. She listens in for any likely sounding conversations.