Ever since Persona5 came out, I've been on a massive JRPG hunt and, well, I haven't come up with much. Lacrimosa of Dana did it for me for a while, I suppose; although the translations were pretty hideous (I think they might have put out an update or something to fix them) but the fun and ease of the game play made up for it. Next up is Ni No Kuni 2, which looks pretty fucking amazing from my point of view -- it hits on all aesthetically pleasing JRPG notes with some pretty varied looking game play and hopefully some plot in the story. I really wanted to go back and play Kuni 1 but lack of PS3 means I'm waiting for the 23rd to get my first taste.

- Short Review

 

Have you checked out Trails of Cold Steel?

Its solid. Not as good as Persona 5, but the storyline really pulled me in.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/538680/The_Legend_of_Heroes_Trails_of_Cold_Steel/

Great worldbuilding.

 

Ni no Kuni was incredible until a certain point in the game - where I thought it should have ended - and it just jumped the shark. The combat was annoying, but everything else was beautiful - I hear the combat is better in NnK2, which I'm excited about.

 

I really wanted to love Grim Dawn, but no matter how many times I pick it back up again (I've had it since closed beta), it just doesn't do it for me, and I'm not really sure why. I agree with most things you said about it - the zone length, the ridiculous amount of stats, the "what am I supposed to do now" factor... the one thing I'll add is that for the vast majority of endgame-type builds, there is an absolute gear requirement to pull them off. In PoE, for instance, I can do the majority of endgame content with gear that is focused towards my chosen abilities, but it doesn't have to absolutely be just one specific piece (my main criticism of D3, as well) unless I want to absolutely min-max to the extreme. Grim dawn, at the higher difficulties, is nearly impossible without a lot of specific uniques for most class combos. It's still better than D3 I think, and it's different enough from PoE, but it just can't keep my attention for some reason.

It's kind of weird that I enjoy playing Titan Quest more than this too, seeing it's made by mostly the same people but is twelve years old at this point.

 

@Anarchy I don't recall if you play many multiplayer games, but if so, hit me up sometime and perhaps we could play Grim Dawn together. I've developed quite a bit of patience due to playing games over the years with another particular friend, so replaying low level stuff and/or playing a bit slower, won't really bother me.

re: gear/stat requirements for late game Grim Dawn, I have a few thoughts on that. As reference, I do have multiple(two, but multiple sounds more impressive) level 100 characters, and a bit more than a handful ranging from level 8 to level 70 or so. I've made a bunch of character concepts, that have been played to varying degrees, and are also serving as concept-themed equipment mules, as I have not used the grimstash mod.

While there are certainly some unique gear drops that will essentially be 'best-in-slot' for a given build, the simple fact that even with a specific pairing of classes, there is still a fairly broad set of builds available, tends to muddy the waters a bit. Also, most end game characters will still end up wearing at least one or more rare items(likely monster-infrequents for the innate mods before pre/suf-fixes), to fill out resistances, or simply because there isn't a particular unique for a given gear slot that ends up being worth using for their build.
I know that I've got a rare shoulder piece on one of my 100's, and rare pants and shoulders on the other. A particular monster-infrequent rare(which I suppose isn't that far off of a unique, practically speaking, as you would be looking for specific mods and affixes) can often be the best option for a weapon, as well. If one doesn't seek specific +skills, or skill-modifying mods from the expansion uniques, than a well rolled monster infrequent can be just right for lots of gear slots.

It's mostly the helmet, belt, medal and trinket slots that I see being definitely relegated to unique items, simply due to the relative value(sometimes) of +skills compared to other stuff those slots could provide, in particular Helmet/Belt/Amulet for +1 to all skills of a class, or of both/multiple classes in the case of some helmets and amulets.

For example, this is especially the case for a Nightblade utilizing the auto-attack line, as they benefit immensely from +1 increases to all Nightblade skills, due to benefiting to varying degrees from extra ranks in... 13~18+ skills. The fact that their auto-attack triggers, and several of their skills and modifiers on the lower half suffer from distinct diminishing returns after max base-rank, means that bonus skill ranks can easily mean respeccing them for extra skill points to redistribute into favored skills(if they were not already maxed), or into your second class.

...I've gone on a tangent here, but one of my two level 100's is a dual-wield pierce-damage melee Nightblade/Soldier, and it took a fair while for me to graduate out of wielding a pair of Willie's Razors simple due to their +1 to Nightblade skills mod.



As a caveat, I will allow that due to certain uniques having very specific modifiers, such as converting some or all of a damage type into another, or wildly changing how a certain skill might work, they can obviously be mandatory for a specific intended build, eventually. Some builds are not supported all that greatly via items, though, such as Vitality-transmutor Storm Totem, making it an interesting choice between items that boost storm totem, which greatly scales off of levels beyond base-max rank, but will likely also be boosting Lightning damage, which is wasted, or focusing more on Vitality damage items, to also benefit the other skills you presumably took. I was going for the former on my Shaman/Occultist Vitality caster, but one way or another, I've ended up picking up a lot of Vitality/Chaos damage items, including a +10 total to my Doom Bolt, so it's a level 22 skill. I still use max rank Storm and Wendigo totems for aoe, and cast Insect Swarm for the resistance debuff, but have definitely changed the play patterns from what I started with.

-----

As for actual stat requirements. Dump into Physique. I kid. Kind of.

Admittedly it used to be almost a meme if one were to browse the Grim Dawn forums, to essentially dump all accrued stat points into Physique, aside from allocating a few into Spirit for trinket-wearing stat requirements, as Cunning requirements for gear could generally easily be met simply by investing into your class(it's rare for a build to not have at least one of their classes at rank 50, if even simply for the raw health/energy and stats). After that, Physique would be dumped into simply to gain more hit points.

Practically speaking, that is likely still mostly optimal for end-game content, as the damage bonuses for adding to Cunning or Spirit, even for an elemental users, is likely to be dwarfed by the bonuses from your equipment... and for some reason doesn't reflect on your Page 2 stat sheet in any way, but I digress.
That being said, now that the expansion added stat respec potions, one could go full ham into offensive stats for the first while, while they actually account for a noticeable portion of power, only adding Physique if they needed it for wearing armor, then later respec if so desired.

It is actually fairly easy to meet gear stat requirements, though, in my opinion. Cunning, as mentioned, is almost a gimme, in most cases, and even Spirit likely won't be that difficult with minimal investment. It's only the Physique requirement for late game heavy armors that will explicitly require noteworthy investment, from my experience.

 

I'm almost level 40 right now (had a snow day yesterday) and most of my minor complaints are gone. I'm not really hung up on the stat thing anymore just simply because so many damn items drop. It feels like I'm having to empty my inventory every 10 minutes. Perhaps that's an indicator that I should stop picking up every item. Like, in Diablo 2 there's a point where you stop picking up every magic item. The chances of actually getting a magic upgrade in that game was just super low and is pretty much just relegated to items like charms, or JMOD type items.

Anyways, I digress. The only thing with the stats that really bothers me is all the ones that buff the different damage types (and it seems like there's a million different types), and I've been trying to focus on just 1 (lightning).

I'm mostly not bothered by the meandering nature of zone now as well. I just wish it was slightly clearer when you're supposed to go to certain zones. For example, there's this blocked zone on the right side of the map called the East Marshes. I don't know if there's quests for there or if it'z just a random zone, but when I decided to check it out, it was still like 5 levels higher than me. It's kind of the same thing with Tyrants hold. But right now, I'm just following the quests.

Other than that, I wish the devotion screen was a bit better to navigate. It seems like the only way to actually be able to do anything with it is to pull up the wiki page which has a nice list of what everything does. Not a big deal.

So right now, I actually like the game better than I did when I originally posted, and I liked it a lot then as well.

 

Well, that's neat.

Yeah, it can be tough gearing up for a specific damage type, and a lot of mine has been relatively incidental by playing multiple characters that accumulate items for other characters during play. Devotions, which I'll expand more on in a moment, are one of the more direct ways to get guaranteed boosts to a damage type.

East Marshes has some relevance, but there is no harm, aside from personal danger, to visiting it early:

Spoiler

Later game faction quest, and it also has a Devotion Shrine that yields a point, in all difficulties. Also, a particular 'hidden' side quest chain finishes in the East Marshes.

The devotion screen can be a bit of a pain if you don't know what does what yet, I admit. Especially now that it's even larger with the expansion. I usually end up using grimtools and plotting it out on there, to be fair. I use both, but the downloaded version has less potential browser memory leak issues and lets you save the builds.

 

So..started a Baldur's Gate runthrough using the Big World Setup (adds a ton of mods and merges all the campaigns into one game) and I happened to install the Sandrah mod.

Firstly, the mod is really well done. Integrated with no issues. Quests are interesting for the most part and initially thought it was going to be a great addition to the game...until I realized...

Sandrah is a Mary Sue to the core.

Daughter of Elminster.
High Priestess of Mystra.
Everyone wants to sleep with her.
Find out Mystra is essentially her grandmother.
Jaheira makes a comment about how she can "fight without getting gore on her"

What's amazing is that this mod adds over 50 hours of gameplay and quests...but its all about how awesome Sandrah is.

I never thought I would encounter a mod that took so much work...and yet possessed such a glaring error.

TLDR: I uninstalled the sandrah mod.

 

Paradox has started their Easter sale

CK2 is at 75% off
Cities: Skyline at 75% off
Stellaris at 60% off
HoI4 at 60% off
EU4 at 75% off

Smaller discounts on DLC than on the core games, but might still be some worth picking up.

And I bought Monks&Mystics yesterday for ~15% off on humble.

 

Which DLC's are most useful for CK2? I've got Way of Life and Old Gods and I think the Sword of Islam... I've heard the Legacy of Rome and Conclave would be the next two most impactful ones, true? (Impactful so long as I don't care overly much about playing further east than say, France.)

 

Legacy of Rome gets you retinues, which are standing armies you don't have to pay for. They make a pretty big difference (I've currently got a retinue of ~9000, personal levies of ~2000, and vassal levies of ~25000 as Emperor of Scandanavia, Brittania, and the kingdoms of Firisia and Pomerania).

Charlemagne gets you an earlier start date, and custom kingdoms/empires, although they cost loads. There's also a bunch of story events for Charlemagne, and his brother, and you'll learn how to remove Karling. It also allows you to use Viceroyalties, which is handing out a kingdom title (as a vassal) under the holder dies, at which point it returns to you. If you get your laws right, you can also grant duchy viceroyalties, meaning nobody has any power but that you like.

Ruler customiser allows you to create a character to play as (but you can't use in Ironman), and allows you to make changes to names, titles, haircuts, and dynasty flags, which is all pretty nice. Especially as it's something like £1.50

Conclave makes your council important, and so far has just annoyed me. It also completely changes childhood education, which I was just on top of. It allows you to stop powerful/hateful vassals being in factions, which is nice, but it also means powerful vassals get more pissed off if they can't be on the council, which is bad. It also introduces favours, which are a way of paying characters to do basically whatever you want, which is nice.

Reaper's due adds plagues, and some mystical events. It also revamps the 'illness' system, and so far I've quite enjoyed it. Only problem is my court physicians keep thinking goat farts will solve everything.

Monks and Mystics allows you to banish people to monastries, so you can remove them from the line of succession. It also adds in more artefacts, which can give nice bonuses over time. It also adds societies - evil cult, assassins, alchemists, and monks - all of which can be quite useful if you have access to them

But I'm gonna be honest, I bought all of them.

Even Sunset Invasion.

 

People who play HOI4 - what DLCs are necessary?

 

I've been seeing Slay the Spire get quite a bit of talk, mostly on various twitch streams, so I decided to give it a go. It's fun, with good ambient music, but it's a bit slow. I won't proclaim myself to be a rogue-like aficionado, but I don't really see anything here yet that would set it apart from other rogue-likes, though it's still in early access. The card system is kind of clunky, but you can get some pretty ridiculous combos off. I just wish there was a bit more incremental value to be gained upon progressing. Like, the unlocks I got for the iron-clad all seemed kind of underwhelming, and when you get build-around cards like Juggernaught, it's a bit too variance based. If you go all in too early, you get crushed by the boss, but if you slowly build it up, it's too ineffective to matter.

Same thing for whatever the second class is called (huntress I think). Very fun, can kill very fast, but it has the same problem. Every time I played it, I got either all the pay off cards, or all the enablers, and no in betweens. And there's a bunch of different payoffs as well, which further splits your focus. The only way I actually got anywhere was sticking to the basics and just getting as many free spells and draw cards as I could and hope the one payoff card I manage to get shows up on time.

Regardless, I think the game could benefit from some sort of reset system, like the ability to reset your progress when you know you can't kill the next level and keep a relic or something. Or perhaps there needs to be a better healing mechanic or maybe I just need to get good and put more time in. But right now the game is just a bit too slow for me, with no real sense of progress other than behavioral conditioning on the hopes that maybe next time I'll be able to get the right set of end bosses to spawn.

 

EDIT: Wrong thread, clicked on the wrong one to reply after coming back from another tab...

 

That really depends on how much time you plan to spend with the game and your financial situation. In many ways I would say that of all the Paradox games the DLC have the smallest impact in HOI 4 and if all you want to do is simply play a few campaigns as one of the major nations you can do so without having any of the DLC. They may add some functions and divergences I wouldn't describe them as essential.

They only really come into play if you intent to play as one of the DLC nations (or want to have a slightly more chaotic world) or really want play with all the features (though as I said I don't really think that for example the ability to pick general traits is that influential). I wouldn't call them a waste of money, especially not if you have to money to spare, since they do in fact provide some variation but on the other hand I have no problem with waiting till they get a serious discount before buying.

 

This is the first, most important one you'll need.

You can probably figure the rest out from there.

 

Yeah you don't really need any of the DLC since most of the good shit was included for free, but if happen to enjoy playing one of the countries that has a focus tree in one of the DLC's then it's totally worth it. Some of them unlock some really cool shit that can totally change how the game plays and alloy for some really interesting alt-history playthroughs.

 

God of War is sitting on 94 Metacritic (74 reviews) and 95 on Open Critic (54)...

Goddamn. I've never played one, but if I was unsure before, I'm gonna have to get it now. Throwing around that axe like Mjolnir looks...satisfying...

 

Vampyr. Looks interesting. It’s made by the same people who did life is strange.

Gameplay is probably gonna be B grade, but I’m more interested in story with this sort of thing.

Life is strange supposedly had an amazing story. Let’s see how this turns out.

 

Not exactly.

I suppose this game has a chance to be good, but I'd be surprised.