Video game lessons learned the hard way

Star Wars: Battlefront II: I'm writing this one because I finally managed to unlock every single playable hero. Took me only 28 hours to accomplish that feat, according to my account, and I wasn't even trying to grind precisely for them. So much for those ridiculous calculations given by Reddit and other players, though I'll concede that EA and DICE have been giving out a bunch of rewards both for Christmas and the release of The Last Jedi.

Anyways, I decided to impart some advice to you guys in order to see what I've been doing to unlock the heroes so quickly. Unless you have a history of being proficient at the Battlefield games, you're probably gonna find grinding through the Galactic Assault and Blast modes a pain in the ass, thanks to the hordes of players out there with insanely good aiming skills. So my suggestion? Go play Starfighter Assault.

It's much more generous with rewarding exp and credits, even if you're only playing half-decently; those dumb AI starfighters make for easy targets, and the hero ships don't cost too many points to purchase each match (whereas the heroes in Galactic Assault can cost a TON of points to activate). But if you want to further optimize the amount of points earned:

• Focusing on the objectives does give good exp payouts. But if you want to get the juicier gains, go after targets that have turrets or very low HP. You want to get the killing blow, because the rewards for doing so range from 500 to 1500 points, sometimes higher in a couple of cases. Add that in with the trickle of points you get just for attacking the objective, and you can easily get 2000+ exp, which is enough to use one of the cheaper heroes in a round.
• And to further add upon that, you really want to be like flies on crap if the target is a Corvette or frigate. They have turrets, and those reward 300 points upon being destroyed, AND give the "playing the objective" bonus merely for attacking them. Also, those targets are easy kills, and if you're a bomber, it's not hard to quickly obliterate the last few bits of HP and destroy the ship itself within a few seconds.
• The AI starfighters are dumb, easy targets, yes, but they usually only give 150 points upon destruction, maybe more if you saved somebody from being blasted by them. But a human player who is running on a killstreak, has been marked for Avenging, and has been harassing your teammates? Easy 500+ points right there. Yeah, you'll need some decent dogfighting skills, but in many cases Starfighter Assault seems to cause a ton of "target tunnel-vision", meaning it's not that hard to hunt down a beefy enemy target within a couple of minutes and get a quick ambush kill.
• The above tactic is a bit harder to implement against hero units, mostly due to the far higher HP and defenses given to hero ships, making a single strafing run insufficient to kill a target.
• HOWEVER... The Millennium Falcon is an odd exception to this. It's a big, fat target with tons of health, meaning you'll get a bunch of points just for shooting the damned thing. And if you happen to get the killing shot, great for you, it'll reward a bunch of points for eliminating a hero ship, plus any sort of damages the player incurred while flying Han's rust bucket.

• Tragically, there aren't many players on at certain times... bad news for a supposed AAA title that's only a couple of months old. It's led to a couple of days when I log on resulting in me not finding enough players for some of the modes to function. Makes me wonder how the game is faring on the consoles, population-wise.

Baldur's Gate:

READ the class descriptions. Do that shit. Especially if you're going to play a specialty Mage because the school of spells that you pick will lock you off from the school that opposes it. For example if you choose to be an Enchanter, you won't be able to throw fireballs as that spell belongs in the Evocation school. It's also important to remember to read Class Kits to see what the differences are between the base class and the kitted version. For example, while Inquisitors have powerful anti-magic abilities (Which makes Keldorn damn good), they also cannot use the signature Paladin ability Lay On Hands which let Paladins heal their allies while in the thick of it.

Bows are really good. In BG 1, longbows are better. In BG 2, short-bows are better.

Playing a magic user in BG 1 is generally ill-advised because it involves way too much micro management.

Getting the Tweaks mod is awesome because you can essentially mod several things in like Druids having better spells selection and they get more spells then in the base game.

Multi-classing is the epitome of Magikarp Power so wait till BG 2. Fighter/Clerics and Cleric/Mage are the best.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

• Area of Effect attacks (i.e. Tora's Spinning Cutter) can also hit enemies through walls. Mind this in case you accidentally draw a Unique into the mix with your attack...
• Speaking of drawing Uniques into the mix, try to mind certain enemy species (notably the birds in Uraya) that can call any nearby monsters into the fight when they're low on health.
• "Off a cliff" is not a viable escape route when running from high-level enemies. Splat!

Splatoon 2

• For Salmon Run, don't use Specials willy-nilly, since you only get 2 for the entire match.

Mount And Blade Warband: Brytenwalda mod:

The best way to use cavalry is to order them to follow you, and then do what you need them to do. Keep in mind that a big cav formation needs room to maneuver, and that they will do their damnedest to head directly for you. You need to make wide, slow loops to avoid hangups and warriors taking shortcuts right into the enemy. Of course, the best way to use them against a formation is to head right at the corner of the formation and charge full tilt through it. Hit what you can on the way, but don't get stuck.

Re; Salmon Fun

Don't also hang onto your specials for the entire shift. Nothing more infuriating than seeing someone with both charges unused in the results screen after a crew wipe. You do not get any benefit for saving them.

Sometimes I don't even get to use it before I die. But when I don't, I would sometimes jetpack/splashdown a stinger on wave 1/2.

I just think:

• if I don't complete this wave, I won't see the potential reward in the next wave; or
• for the survival of our species!

Final Fantasy VII

• Always have lots of healing potions

• Have a good strategy beyond attacking.

• Defend yourself from enemies

• Use only the best spells

The Sims 4 (Parenthood expansion)

• Make sure to have your parents actually talk to their kids about their phases, mood swings, etc. It makes them much easier to deal with in the short run, almost to the point that they're not such a big deal at all if taken care of quickly.

Divinity Original Sin 2 on any difficulty above the easiest one:

• Plan your battles whenever possible. You've just encountered a case of Suspicious Video-Game Generosity while dungeon crawling and the next room is large, structured and arena-like? The next battle will be tough. Send your damagers ahead (in sneak mode or by teleporting). Make sure you use the advantages the battlefield terrain gives you (elevations, bottlenecks, etc) and, in turn, don't let the AI use them. The first few rounds of the battle are the crucial ones.
• If you've been caught with your pants down by the AI and didn't use the terrain pragmatically, start praying.
• There are three types of enemies:
  1. Glass Cannon|s with low physical armor and/or high magical armor;
  2. Tanks with high physical armor and low magical;
  3. Bosses with high amounts of armor of both types.
• Make sure your damagers target the enemies that are the most vulnerable to their kind of damage.
• Have a healer in your party. Potions often would just not cut it.

Stardew Valley:

• Bring food to Skull Cavern. More food than that. No, still not enough. Bring ALL THE FOODS. Especially Spicy Eel and Pepper Poppers, since they increase your speed.

It's not going to help when the weather turns cloudy and every serpent and it's brother homes in on you.

Or when you've managed to fill out your inventory before you even get to the Iridium.

• Pokémon
  • If an RPG has multiple attack and defense stats, figure out what they're for and take advantage.
  • Leppa Berries and Lum Berries. You'll never need to backtrack to a Pokemon Center ever again.
  • Black's Elite Four. Go to Route 10, wait for the grass to shake, and throw on a podcast because you're gonna be doing this for a while.
  • Teach something False Swipe. Especially in ORAS, where not killing the thing you're trying to catch is a thousand times harder than any of the actual battles.
  • Bring a damn good fire-type and end the fight immediately or enjoy Solar Blade forever.

• Ecco the Dolphin
  • OXYGEN!

• Sonic the Hedgehog
  • I don't care what the meme says, slow the hell down and watch where you're going. Speed can be the enemy.
  • The default answer to life's problems is not always an anger-induced Super Sonic rampage.

Divinity Original Sin 2 on any difficulty above the easiest one:

• Level grind. In any available way. As far as it is tempting to just finish the current main plotline in the area and move on to the next, make sure you finish every sidequest, kill every enemy that's not being nailed down and steal everything that moves. You'll need those levels and gear in the future. It's not like the sidequests are not interesting on their own merit.

DiRT Rally

• Gotten comfortable with the modestly-powered, FWD Mini for the 1960s class? Don't just jump straight to the mid-engined, RWD Lancia Stratos for the 1970s class without doing some research! Driving a mid/rear-engine car like a front-engine one WILL make you lose control!
  • Specifically, don't brake during the turn. Brake before the turn and accelerate through it to keep the weight on the rear wheels and avoid lift-off oversteer. Oversteer in general is NASTY on mid/rear-engine cars.
  • Also, don't bother with the handbrake. It helps with hairpins on front-engine cars, but the Stratos has so much damn oversteer that you can attain similar effects by applying the throttle appropriately.
• Unlike Richard Burns Rally, there is no Rally School to teach you proper driving techniques, and with the mix of FWD, RWD, mid-engine RWD and AWD cars, you'd better be keen on learning each car's quirks the hard way during an event. Best to start with custom one-off events for this and not expect a podium finish.
• Rallysport in general is Difficult, but Awesome even by overall motorsports standards.

Puyo Puyo Tetris

• Don't ever expect to consistently get the exact Puyo colors you need for your chain setup. The tutorial videos make chaining look easy, but they have everything set up like a Fever to begin with! It's all about improvising while trying not to get junked on mid-setup!
• Tetris clears are good in theory, but they won't win you a Versus match by themselves. What you really want to do for consistent offense is line clear combos, roughly the closest you can get to Puyo chaining.
• When going through the Adventure mode and most other solo modes, Tetris defaults to insta-drop (press up) enabled. Puyo does not, so you have to hold down.
• Spend some time to figure out how the heck the Super Rotation System and T-Spins work. Nothing is going to ruin an opponent's day quite like two Triple T-Spins Back-to-Back of the sort a high-level player can set up and pull off reliably.
• DON'T use a GameCube pad with the Wii U adapter to play this when docked. Just don't. Analog sticks aren't precise enough for games of this nature, and the D-Pad is too damn small.

Bows aren't just really good: they're almost as overpowered as crowd control because the devs decided bows in the BG series should have an innate 2 attacks per round. The only thing holding them back compared to crowd control spells is that even a 19 Dex marksman at level 1 is going to have terrible THAC0. Still beats trying to go into melee with super awful Fighters that maybe get 3/2 and still get two-shot by stuff at level 1. To illustrated, my own lesson learned way back in the day: I was in exploring the first area outside of Candlekeep for the first time with my Paladin leading and I happened upon a Black Bear that immediately ran up and one-shot him with a crit.

Mages are actually highly advised, though don't run too many of them: without crowd control, the party is depending on everyone's garbage THAC0 somehow working out before the enemy's. For reference, even the Nashkel kobolds can easily wreck a group of Fighters if the battle goes on more than a couple rounds.

Fighter/Mage is generally better than Cleric/Mage, though Cleric/Fighter can kinda match it. Either way, Cleric or Mage buffs with Fighter attacks per round gets really dumb once the character gets their THAC0 out of the toilet.

WH End Times - Vermintide

• The random generator for mobs and whatnot on the stages is strictly inferior to the Left 4 Dead one. While L4D would still sometimes place Tanks in the middle of events, it will generally avoid spawning hordes during it (though it will still spawn other specials) to make the fight more skill-based. And even when it did, there's Pipe Bombs and Bile Bombs with their taunt mechanics to enable significant counter-play. Vermintide is only too happy to spawn a Rat Ogre, 3 specials, a pack rush and a squad of Stormvermin, all virtually on top of the players and at the same time. Unfortunately, grenades aren't as good in this game, so good luck surviving that on anything above Easy.
• The AI is bad. Like, makes L4D bot AI's bots look like super geniuses. Or perhaps it's a problem with the game being so melee oriented. L4D's AI can be dragged into a corner and they'll largely stay put and shoot. Since Vermintide is 80% stabbing/slashing/bludgeoning stuff to death, the AI will happily give up their superior position to fight stuff right in the middle of the room. They also love to get super distracted by anything behind them such that getting grabbed by a Packmaster or Gutter Runner will result in a large amount of health loss while the AI is slow to react—if they do at all (they will also do this to each other—not just the player). Vermintide is a little less stingy on the health restoration, but it's generally not enough to make up for the AI being ninnies.
• The AI is afraid of short ledges/forgets it has a jump button. Something with some of these places in the maps confuses the crap out of them. If a player goes up over a short ledge, there's a 50/50 chance they won't follow and will try to go the long way to catch up, aggroing everything along the way. What's perhaps even worse is that certain ladders are really good at breaking them. I've had the entire team get stuck infinitely climbing up and down the top of one ladder on Smuggler's Run. It got me killed the first time. The next times, I had to physically shove some of them off to get them unbroken.
• The AI uses the gear of the host. Since I don't really care for the random loot drops, I mostly don't bother equipping better gear. This really doesn't make much of a difference for players, as white gear can still very easily perform on Nightmare (not that the game's graced me with a better war hammer than the starting one, anyway). And while it's neat to be able to say I did Horn of Magnus on Hard with everyone equipped in white gear, it's just better to throw whatever upgrades pop up at the bots because they absolutely need it.
• Kruber's starting blunderbuss is terrible because it's super short-range when he really needs a way to save allies from specials at longer distances or neutralize incoming Stormvermin (especially if he gets stuck running sword and board). Thankfully, the game seems to have a white rifle in the level-up system for him.
• Kerillian should have a weapon that can headshot. There's these cool bows that can inflict poison, but cannot headshot. This is a detriment for the bots because if there's one thing they do have going for them, it's aim hacks (whereas the poison cloud is useful for players who go for body shots).

edited 8th Jan '18 10:55:32 AM by KuroiTsubasaTenshi

Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past:

Apparently, if you fight Mothula with the tempered sword, it is immune to spin attacks. I died several times trying to hit the thing before using slash attacks.

Somewhere I found a forum post explaining the bug. Mothula is immune to tempered sword spins and butter sword because being thrown into spikes deals butter sword damage, and Mothula was explicitly made immune to spikes.

Butter Sword?

A Fan Nickname for the Golden Sword. I first heard it in the comments of the ALTTP Randomizer Tournament Fall 2017.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

• When fighting monsters drudged up through salvaging, if the player controller character gets thrown off the cliff by either knockback or Blow Down and you get kill reset (due to the cloud sea level being low), you will end up losing any salvaged chests when you are reset.
  • This can also happen to monsters. It's not so bad when you just want to go after chests, but if you are farming for a monster drop, it can be a pain.

Silent Hill 1

• The camera fucking sucks so you have to readjust it in order to see enemies

• Make sure to conserve our ammo and health rations or you won't survive long.

• Run away from enemies if you have no ammo or health rations. Better to be safe than sorry.

• Always save your progress or you'll die and end up having to redo certain actions all over again.

edited 9th Jan '18 4:58:19 PM by pointless233

Star Wars: Battlefront 2:

There's no way to speed up the victory or defeat screens in the arcade mode. This means that a couple of the maps with the One Life Only or One-Hit Kills conditions are going to be a pain to play, because they'll take forever to reload each time you lose.

Splatoon 2

• Ink Armor is not a panic Special! Click it before you get into an engagement, lest you keep WTFing at its apparent ineffectiveness!
• The Splattershot Jr. has some seriously disappointing range, but it's still enough to make Roller wielders wary, not to mention that Ink Armor used properly can turn around entire engagements.
• Speaking of Rollers, either I end up steamrolling the enemy team with it, or becoming The Load all of a sudden the very next match. There is no middle ground.
• Unstable Equilibrium is in full effect with the maps, particularly that one map with the transparent-until-inked floors. Whichever team manages to push past the middle and toward the enemy's spawn generally ends up holding the whole thing. No prizes for guessing which side I ended up on 70% of the time.
• Motion aiming is great, right up until someone practically circlestrafes you and you deal with the equivalent of running off the mouse pad without being able to recenter easily. I may have to reconsider playing in portable mode on a swivel chair instead of docked mode for this exact reason.
• For the love of god, don't decide to suddenly start playing multiplayer for the first time in the middle of a Splatfest!

And with all that, excuse me while I take home these measly seven upgrade shells while on the losing end of said Splatfest by 1% in both battle categories. You'll just find me under that Mt. Everest-sized mountain of salt.

edited 14th Jan '18 7:32:59 PM by NamelessFragger

Oh god, I can only imagine. Even when I'm level 25, played only the multiplayer since i got it for Christmas,, Splatfest gave me loads of trouble. After Splatfest, my 50 battles before resulted in a 15:35 victory/loss ratio. It's a wonder my team won at all.