Posts by Jetsetlemming

Still getting used to my new mouse. Dropped my in-game sensitivity from 7 to 4.5 and made my McCree accuracy jump from 30% to 50% across the course of one Oasis match

I'm not saying McCree isn't good in a vacuum. He's just not good right now, because there's all these barriers in between him and heads. He actually still excels at taking down Pharmercy more than Soldier 76, because of the burst damage, but nobody seems to remember that either

Quote from grapen

1 hour ago, grapen said: Well, McCree can do 280 damage in one second when you double headshot and am within falloff. That kills most heroes and is relatively easy to pull off since he's hitscan. A double headshot from Zenyatta would be 184, but doing that against players who know what's best for them and don't strafe in a single direction won't be consistent.

My headshots with Zenyatta are a lot more consistent than with McCree due to the lack of recoil, plus the hitbox advantage on projectile weapons. At 120 damage per headshot (assuming Discord orb), that's enough to double tap most heroes. Again, while healing 30 points per second while doing it. And 3/4 of my HP pool regens. And with all that, Zenyatta still isn't considered "meta" right now because nearly everybody is behind a D.Va field, Reinhardt shield, and Zarya bubble so it doesn't really matter anyway, except to shut down flankers and further reduce their utility.

Instead, a more useful comparison might be to stretch out their damage over time, to look at consistency: Zenyatta has 20 shots per reload, takes eight seconds to shoot them all out (at 2.5 balls per second). With discord, that's 1200 damage. Without (this is mostly for hitting Reinhardt shields), 960. Reload time is two seconds, so the full time for that damage is ten seconds. Range isn't a factor, which means Zenyatta can stay safely behind all those layers of shields and away from Roadhog's hook.

McCree, if he's within 22 meters of his target does 70 damage per shot, or 420 per reload. Takes him three seconds to unload, another 1.5 to reload. 420 damage per 4.5 seconds means ~930 damage over ten seconds. For Fan the Hammer, the range is reduced to 18 meters, and the damage per shot is reduced to 45, so 270 damage per unload, over 2/3 of a second, taking 1.5 seconds to reload. That's 1244 damage per ten seconds, which just beats Zenyatta's damage with discord but at the cost of increased risk, both because of the range and because of the enormous downtime between bursts of damage creating easy opportunities for the enemy to respond (which is why I didn't factor in the combat roll: Its cooldown is eight seconds so it isn't a huge increase anyway, but more importantly you'll need it for emergencies). Soldier 76 does slightly more damage (1272) over the ten seconds, but also has his heal ability and can stand up to 30 meters back while doing so.

It's really striking how similar these totals are over time, imo. Going up against a team of high HP and survivability, you need high HP and survivability to match, or you need overwhelming force to counter that. Since there isn't really any dedicated "overwhelming force" in Overwatch that can massively out-punch the other hero types (the point I was trying to make with the comparison), you need to be bringing the high HP and/or survivability to the table to really contribute well to your team. Blizzard could solve this by massive nerfs to most of the game's cast, but that would be bullshit and horrifically un-fun compared to buffing the weak heroes, especially by giving them more utility and usefulness in different situations like they did Symmetra.

PS: Over that same ten second timespan Roadhog and D.Va can both do about 1600 damage in close range (ten meters for D.Va, at least nine for Roadhog if he's using his right click), which is why they're both so good at taking down Reinhardt's shields. Too bad most people playing those heroes don't realize they have that utility, though.

Quote from AlexM

15 hours ago, AlexM said: Yeah sombras ult really requires the team to be well coordinated. When it works though it's awesome.

Totally agree. It's the only really effective counter to Reinhardt + D.Va that doesn't require the entire team to be coordinated in their shooting... except it requires your team to know what you're doing and be ready to take advantage of it.

Picked up Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse on the 3DS, and I'm loving it. SMT is better at being Pokemon than Pokemon

There's a whole lot of people complaining about the "Three tank meta" and "Ana's too good", which is insane IMO. Ana's exactly as good as she should be, Zenyatta should be slightly better. The problem is that people have embraced this bizarre "DPS/Tank/Support" framing that treats Overwatch like an MMO instead of a shooter. EVERY hero is DPS, and the dedicated "DPS" heroes just aren't nearly good enough at killing to be worth the lost utility that tanks, supports, Mei and Soldier 76 have. McCree, for example, has 160 dps. Zenyatta has 150 dps, and can heal 30 hp/s while doing it. Ana has 96 dps, but can sleep dart, which is much more useful than McCree's flashbang. Hanzo can get a bullshit instakill with his scatter arrow, but Roadhog can do nearly the same thing more often and more reliably with his hook, while also standing on the fucking point instead of hiding off in the shadows. Pharah's in a middle ground, because she's really useful as a mobile flight point for Mercy, while also ironically making all the flanker heroes redundant.

Nerfs are a terrible idea to solve this problem. Bliz has already had to redesign multiple heroes, and I see a lot more of that in the future to fix the root problems with the Attack/Defense class heroes. Sombra was an interesting start, but she's mostly ineffective, not so much because she's weak in a vacuum but because teams aren't really playing in a style that works with her.

I picked up Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, but I'm incredibly disappointed by it. This game should be right in my wheelhouse: I like roleplaying as an anti-capitalist terrorist, I like exploration, I'm pretty resistance to motion sickness. But the sum of the parts here ends up super frustrating because of how they were put together. I can't really "explore" because the world's designed in pretty restrictive ways that makes me feel like I'm always running along a track, rather than in an open space. There are branches, but very hard to notice without stopping and looking around, but the game has multiple systems in place to discourage you from doing that. So you've got to rely on the "Runner's Vision" thing, except that it's completely broken compared to the first game, because there are very few of the highlighted red objects this time, and instead you're mostly relying on this shitty red sprite that flies through the air occasionally but is easy to miss in tight spaces, meaning sometimes I'm forced to just stand there and spin like an idiot waiting for the shit sprite to pop out of me again so I can see which corridor I'm supposed to be running down.

The story so far seems interesting, and I want to know more about the backstory they've set up, but the game just makes my blood boil to actually play, so I guess I'll just remain forever in the dark on it. It's really sad. I'm used to seeing games be bad because of technical failings or shortcomings from being rushed, things like that, but here it feels like they loyally implemented just really bad ideas, successfully making the game bad compared to its predecessor.

Had somebody today yelling at me... for playing a second medic. He was playing Genji.

My favorite map, as far as details/visuals go, is Dorado. There's a fish near the map start, laying on a table, that flops if you shoot it.

Just watched the noclip Youtube documentary on the making of Doom, so I'm bumping that up to my number 2 slot, over Picross 3d. The details on the creative process, especially for the writing and music, is the best I've ever heard from game developers as far as thought out, intelligent designs.

Overwatch, no contest. Put tons of time into it, had a lot of fun. Haven't played CSGO since it came out, which is a good thing.

Second place: Picross 3D: Round 2 on 3DS.

Dark Souls 3 actually really disappointed me. It's hard to articulate, but it just wasn't nearly as satisfying to explore and learn the world as Dark Souls 1 was, and to a much lesser extent Dark Souls 2. I don't know why they abandoned the interlocking "puzzle box" level design of DS1, but I sorely missed it. The game was alright for what it was, but it was missing that spark.

The Zenyatta nutcracker skin is amazing and I MUST have it. Good thing this event is mostly happening over winter break. So far I've only been able to play a little, but I did get the McCree Scrooge skin, which is great. "GAMF" on his belt and a dollar sign on the back of his robot hand

Oh no, I'm not trying to counter Genji, I'm trying to deal with shit ass genjis on my team throwing the game.

I've tried Oasis, and my first reaction is that it feels way too spread out. The scale feels weird, like the setting is designed for people who are twelve feet tall.

Quote from (HP)

2 hours ago, (HP) said: Playing against or with Golds is extremly annoying lol. They're either trolls, or they think they know better and ask you to swap to mercy cos their hanzo is the shit. There's a lot of Pharah-Mains and Genji-Mains too in gold and even plat. I got to Diamond and the experience is night and day, people communicate, people swap heroes, people ask if it's ok if they risk a Symmetra or some non-meta hero, etc. I'm enjoying it a lot, so I think i'm going to try to get to Master, it'll be pretty hard but I'm enjoying competitive so much I figure I set some sort of goal.

I get so many fucking people asking me to switch from Ana to Mercy when we only have one healer, it's INFURIATING WHY AREN'T YOU ASKING THE HANZO OR GENJI TO SWITCH, FUCK.

Also I played two rounds in QP as Genji this morning, and while it went well, technically (gold elims etc), I hated it because he's just not fun to play by my standards. The shurikens aren't a fun weapon, imo. Guess I'll have to find another solution to the pro genjis

Sent you a friend request, and considering learning and mastering Genji just so I can pick him to stop other people from picking him

Quote from Beck

1 hour ago, Beck said: Meanwhile I'm stuck in gold with people who only pick Hanzo or Genji. Or there's the Soldier 72's and McRee's who refuse to shoot down Phara's and people who choose Bastion or Widowmaker on attack. All the while they're screaming at me that I'm not healing them enough because that Phara keeps focusing me and I can't do nothing to get rid of her.

Same. I was at 2980 last season. This season I'm floundering at ~2300 because team comps just aren't remotely reliable enough to build forward momentum.

COD1 and 2 had multiple protagonists from different countries, including great Soviet campaigns, and intentionally focused on how no one man is an army. Black Ops 1 and 2 had decent stories that were pretty cynical about American imperialism (since, you know, they were about Black Ops, lol). Infinite Warfare returns to the dismally low lows of World at War, though, and it's just really goddamn gross about it, especially since this time lots of people in the press are praising it for a cast full of tokens who just talk about how much they want to kill all the people who "hate our freedom".

I played a few hours of this game this morning, and good lord is it fucked up. The story design basically feels like Harvester, if Harvester was designed to turn you into a jingoistic war criminal instead of a serial killer cult member (but truly, what's the difference?), coupled with a writer furious at Starship Troopers' lampooning of militarism and Red Faction's celebration of collectivist uprisings against oppressive Capitalism. The antagonists, Martian colonists, literally say "freedom is bad", and the protagonists are literally "defending our way of life". After the intro mission the PC and his commander bemoan how terrible it is that politicians don't want war all the time like they do, and of course, in this story, they're right for wanting war. The principal antagonist is designed to look like Che Guevara, and in his introductory cutscene literally shoots one of his lackeys to prove how bad he is. The game goes out of its way to tell you all these missions and all this killing across the solar system is taking place in a single day. When you first do a FTL jump, there are people visible outside the window of the bridge, working on your ship. After the jump, they're not there. You just blasted those engineers into the void, apparently, despite not even being in a hurry (this same scene lets you sit and read a computer for notes about how it's good to be a cog in a machine and things like that).

Sure, technically it's a competent shooter. But even mechanically it's not as fun as at least half a dozen other games this year I could list, including Homefront: The Revolution, which is also less stupid and jingoistic, despite the shared themes.

Quote from Sprony

8 hours ago, Sprony said: 8 New Reasons The Electoral College Shouldn’t Vote For Trump

It's never going to happen, but still, a very scary summary of all that he has done so far.

Trump is bad, but also that quote is literally the exact opposite of the truth. The Electoral College (brainchild of newly minted liberal icon Alexander Hamilton, who also made the first Bank of the United States to fund Native genocides) was designed to let slaveowners vote extra on behalf of the people they owned as property, at 3/5ths of a vote per slave.

I'd imagine so was Death Stranding, since they made the multi-platform claim early on.