#;;I mean the games reached me and I found the armour mod too

[lothrilzul]

The Grey Wardens of Ferelden in 9:30 - 9:31 Dragon

Duncan : Alistair : Emmie / Anders : Oghren : Nathaniel / Justice : Sigrun : Velanna

[nishaapologist]

Proved You Right (Fallout 4, Sarah Lyons/NB!LW - First Sentinel AU)

a small note: this mentions having a basement in Home Plate, but that’s actually because i have a mod that lets me stick basements down to have a bit more space to breathe. for the sake of I Did It In My Game So It Counts, there’s also a basement in this au too! so yeah. anyway have this gay shit.

(sarah’s pronouns are she/her, rookie’s are they/them)

—

“This probably comes as, like, no surprise, but man... I love this city.”

Finding out there was a balcony, of sorts, on the roof of Sarah’s home in Diamond City — home plate, as they call it, which was a name that’d flown right over Sarah’s head until Rookie had gleefully explained the term — had been a pleasant surprise when Sarah had thrown down the two-thousand or so caps to buy the place, clambering up the rickety old ladder to the roof on her first inspection of the house only to find herself in a little sitting area that overlooked the market. She hadn’t made great use of it right away, more interested in the basement underneath that would later become her new base(ment) of operations in the Commonwealth, but then Rookie had shown up to Diamond City on the coattails of a local merchant, and now they spend near every evening sitting in the shell of an old caravan that’s been welded down to the corrugated sheets of the roof, drinking lukewarm beer as they listen to Myrna holler anti-synth slogans, or quietly singing along to songs on the radio until exhaustion makes all the words collapse into mumbles.

It’s a moment of peace, of relaxation, in a time increasingly fraught with battles and tension, and Sarah actually looks forward to tinkering with weapons or armour on her lap at the end of the day, Rookie beside her and resting on an old sunlounger as they hum along to the radio. It helps to put things into perspective, rather than grinding herself down to a sliver as — many years ago — she would have always done.

“I mean, I don’t like the mayor, or his whole ‘no-ghouls’ bullshit or anything,” they quickly add when Sarah glances up from under her eyelashes, head bowed as she turns the extended magazine of a 10-mil pistol about in her hand. Back in the Citadel, over a decade ago, weapon modding was never really a thing Sarah had needed to do, but it turns out that after years of maintaining Power Armor she has quite the knack for it. It’s just a bit more fiddly than she’s used to, is all. “But I really like everything else. The people, mostly. The market. The stands. All that stuff.”

Sarah snorts under her breath, squinting back down as the sunlight slowly dims on the horizon, a cool evening ushering in a breeze and making the hairs on her arms prickle. Spring is approaching the Commonwealth, the months quick to pass, and soon the most hardy of trees will be flush with life again, Ragstag fawns wobbling on unsteady legs, Yao Guai slowly waking from hibernation. It’s a new year, and 2288 is already shaping up to be an exciting one. “You sure that’s not just ‘cause we’re on a baseball field? Pitch?” Sarah screws up her nose. “Stadium?”

“Baseball park?” Rookie offers, though there’s no surety in their voice. “We called it the baseball diamond back in the Vault, since that was pretty much all we had space for.”

“Baseball diamond, then. You sure it’s not ‘cause of that? Isn’t this, like, your wildest dream, or whatever?”

Rookie kicks one leg out at Sarah, too far away for their foot to even hope of landing anywhere near her, but she jerks backwards to dodge it anyway, laughing at their grimace as they retract their foot. “Oh, please! I have bigger dreams than arguing with Moe fuckin’ Cronin about how ass-backwards he got his baseball rules!”

That first argument with Moe had been quite the spectacle, and one Sarah knows Diamond City won’t forget any time soon; Rookie had been checking out his stock with wide eyes, giving each bat a practice swing to feel the weight and heft as it arced around, and when he’d leant down to tell them how crazy Pre-War baseball had been — one team would beat the other team to death with things called Baseball Bats, and the best bats were called Swatters — Rookie had given him a public dressing-down that even Sarah had sidled away from, lest Rookie’s faithful bat, grasped in increasingly irate hands, accidentally found an arc directly into her skull by mistake. It had ended most excitingly with a lot of swears, intervention from the guards, and Rookie’s solemn declaration that they were never gonna buy bats from ‘such a dipshit’, and even now they and Moe glare daggers at each other from across the market, much to Sarah’s ongoing amusement with the whole thing.

As if remembering the same incident, Rookie takes a swig of beer, glowering off at the floodlights that shine down onto the city. “At least Alex agrees with me about him. This shit’s a dying art, apparently.”

Sarah pauses for a moment, and she can’t help the way her gaze tracks towards the far stands, glancing through one of the glassless windows to where ramshackle abodes sit, suspended, above the common rabble. Alex — or the Sole Survivor as some call her now, after her story about the Vault got published for hundreds of eyes to see, and for many more mouths to gossip about — had been granted a house in the upper stands by Mayor McDonough out of the kindness (or manipulation) of his heart, offering her a safe place to adapt to the new and unforgiving world she’d found herself in. Since they’d met, Sarah had struggled to get much more out of her than single-syllable words and pleas for her to find her son, but it was only when Rookie had shown up that her sturdy, Pre-War walls had finally begun to crumble, just a little.

Really, it’s because they’re a Vaultie, too — different experiments be damned — and it helps that they’re someone who was also thrown into the topsy-turvy world of the wastes with nary an idea for the horrors within. They might not quite be out of time, but they do understand being out of place, and when it turned out that Alex is (or, perhaps was) quite the baseball buff herself, they’d forged a connection that made her, initially, a little warmer. Nowadays, Alex is very nearly sociable.

But she still very much keeps to herself, and it’s enough to have Sarah worry. She sees a lot, maybe too much, of Rookie in her — back when they met in Chevy Chase, still new to this world — to be strictly comfortable leaving her to her own devices, but there’s not much else to be done. It’ll take years before she’ll ever really adapt, Rookie had said, years until she can really grapple with the world she doesn’t know. It’s just tough shit.

“Yeah,” Sarah murmurs absently, drawing herself from her rabbithole of thoughts, and Rookie follows her eyeline carefully, knowing exactly where she’s looking. “Well, hey. I guess you have to think of it this way; you and Alex make up two people who know how to play baseball, right? How many more do you need for a full team?”

Rookie laughs at that, sombre face breaking out into a toothy grin, and they slide even further down the lounger as their hat slips over their eyebrows. “Hah! Find me six more Vaulties, and then we’ll really be talking. I’ll be able to hit the first homerun in two-hundred fuckin’ years.”

“Wait,” Sarah says with a frown, doing the maths. Even to her ears, it doesn’t seem to add up right. “Only eight people? You sure?”

Rookie snorts, and then they reach up to take their hat off with a lazy pluck, eyeing Sarah up seconds before her vision goes dark as it’s tossed, haphazardly, onto her head and over her eyes.

“Baby,” Rookie coos fondly as she splutters, nearly dropping the magazine to the ground whilst she scrambles to whip it off her head. “Bold of you to think you can worm your way out of being our pitcher.”

The hat gets launched back at Rookie’s face, the brim making a dull impact on the bridge of their nose, and their shout of pain and laughter echoes right across the city.

[impurelight]

The Outer Worlds - Not The Fallout I Used To Know

The Outer Worlds looks like a Fallout game. It quacks like a Fallout game. But it's not a Fallout game. And here's why. First the story. In Fallout you have this quest that starts small and grows bigger. In 3 it starts with trying to find your father and ends with starting a purifier. In New Vegas it starts with hunting down who shot you and ends with siding with one of the factions to retake Vegas. And in 4 it starts with looking for your kid and ends with siding with one faction and destroying all others.

In The Outer Worlds it starts with trying to revive the colonists and... just stays there. And it didn't give me any real reason to care. In all the other Fallout games I was invested in the story. I wanted to see what happened. Here? Who cares about the colonists? They're all frozen in space why should I care about them?

Then there's the world. It's not open world. Or it is in the same sense that Metal Gear Solid 5 was open world. It's a bunch of big maps connected to each other that you get by traveling on your space ship, which still has gravity despite being in space. This always annoys me. I loved the zero G sequences in Prey, why can't we have more of that?

And the story isn't really cohesive in the maps. In Fallout New Vegas you had the New California Republic, the NCR that were trying to fix the entire region. In The Outer Worlds you have a group called the Board and Spacer's Choice but it doesn't really seem like an actual entity. They get name dropped all the time but they never really play a big role in the story. "Oh, it's this way because of The Board."

And because of this the different regions you visit all feel separate. Like they're just local communities dealing with their own problems. It's not cohesive. And I guess it sort of makes sense with them being on different planets but it makes it so what you end up doing doesn't seem very meaningful or important.

Also the enemies are faceless badies. In New Vegas I distinctly remember there was this gang that escaped. It was like an actual group of people. Like the powder gang or something. Here? They're just bandits. No reason for being there. Just cannon fodder.

Then the writing is pretty bad. Some people say it's good which is weird, but for me there are many times I can't find a good option to respond with. They're all too accusatory for my tastes and there's usually no way to end a conversation early if you're already deep in it.

Also there's always one choice that's like, "Oh, this is totally a joke because no one would ever say this in real life." And there's some options that I'm almost forced to chose because they give me XP.

Finally there's the quests. In Fallout New Vegas it was like, "Oh, I want to do this but I have more important things to do." Here it's like, "Oh, I want to do this and I'm surrounded by armed guards that could do this easily but I'm going to ask you to do it." It just doesn't make any sense.

As for the rest of the game it's fine. It actually feels incredibly dull but that's Fallout for you. I guess I'm just incredibly spoiled after playing Control which has amazing gun play especially with all the powers.

As for the game itself it feels incredibly dated. I mean it has the new looting thing from Fallout 4 where you don't have to go through a menu just to see what's in a box and there are no hacking or lock picking minigames anymore. But it just feels old.

Part of it is probably the removal of vats in favour of a slow motion mechanic. It's alright but it's pretty confusing in battles as the enemies just run all over the place with no clear reason behind their movements. Most enemies will be killed by your companions before you even see them. Speaking of companions there's 2 now. Twice the fun? No, just twice the people interrupting you while you're talking.

Also without vats you're forced to rely on the gun play which feel incredibly dated. Maybe it's just because I played Control that has amazing gunplay.

There's also armour that effects skills just like in New Vegas. But it doesn't seem meaningful in any way and if the armour is effecting you just slip it off when you reach a speach check.

Also back on the quests for a second. There's no good way to find them except for exhausting people's dialog options which feels quite boring. A modern game would just display a quest marker over their head. But I guess that wouldn't be 'immersive'.

The other thing that makes things feel dated are the quest markers. They are the ones that show up on where you're supposed to go and are always visible. It's just annoying. Every game is moving to compasses now because they're just better. They show you where you're supposed to go without being in your face. Also sometimes the quest indicator tells you you're supposed to go through a mountain. Like, there's a path. Just mark which path I'm supposed to take. It just feels old.

Speaking of the quests there's a lot of them. Almost every named character has a quest for you. And you'd think it's good but it's not. Because it becomes more of a game of get to the quest markers than actually doing quests. The only game that actually did side quests justice is still Batman Arkham Knight because you have a limited number of them and they're incredibly linear. Oh, yeah, the quests have a lot of optional objectives here just like in New Vegas.

Also everything 'Fallout' is gone from this game. First of all there's no mods. There's no console commands unless you want to download a cheat program. And there's no third person view which means that character customization screen? Completely useless. They should have just asked if you want to be male or female.

So that is The Outer Worlds. Also something I found really cool about this game is that the exploding barrels are yellow and blue. Yellow for explosions and blue for that stuff that's good against robots. Probably plasma or something.

[battingonjakku]

SW Galaxy of Heroes: A guide to mods

So recently I’ve found that there’s quite a few of us on tumblr who play Galaxy of Heroes, which is awesome. As I’ve been playing for a long time I thought I’d write this guide to give some tips on modding, it’s an area that can be quite confusing when trying to figure out how they work, the best way to farm them, what to farm. It can be for me. So I’ve written a guide to help people out when modding their characters, as getting the mods right can be what turns a good team into a great one.

I’m going to go over the absolute basics - the dots, colours, shapes, sets - as well as giving some tips for which mods to give to which characters, and the best ways to farm them, too. Hopefully this will help you out if you’re just starting out, if you’ve been playing a while you might know a lot of this but hopefully there’s something for you too.

It’s a long read, so buckle in.

Dots, shapes, colours

So first, the basics. Mods come with six shapes, five colours, and a rating of 1-5 dots. Five dot mods are the most powerful and most expensive to upgrade, with 1 dot mods being the cheapest. The shapes are more relevant to the possible primary attributes, the colour will show the number of secondary attributes (and at level 1 points to how many times these can be upgraded). So first, the possible primary attributes for each shape:

Square: Offence Arrow: Speed, Accuracy, Crit. Avoidance, Protection, Health Diamond: Defence Triangle: Crit. Chance, Protection, Health, Crit. Damage, Offence, Defence Circle: Protection, Health Cross: Potency, Tenacity, Protection, Health, Offence, Defence

Mod colours are:

Grey: No secondary stat Green: One secondary stat Blue: Two secondary stats Purple: Three secondary stats Gold: Four secondary stats

Colours (or rarities) are a little more complicated: mods at level 1 can be any colour, but they also change colour as they are upgraded and gain secondary stats. A grey, level 1 mod would then change colour when it hit 3, 6, 9 and 12 where it would then be gold, having gained its four secondary stats. The more ideal mods though have secondary stats showing at level 1:

A green level 1 mod - the secondary stat will be upgraded at level 3, new secondaries gained at 6, 9 & 12 A blue level 1 mod - one stat upgraded at 3, one at 6, new secondaries at 9 & 12 A purple level 1 mod - one stat upgraded at 3, one at 6, one at 9, new secondary at 12 A gold level 1 mod - one stat will be upgraded at 3, one at 6, one at 9, one at 12, no new secondaries gained

The secondary stat upgraded can be repeated - in theory leading to the same secondary being upgraded a total of four times on a gold mod. Looking at it the other way though, it means the secondary might not be upgraded at all.

Mod sets

The other big thing is the mod sets. Putting together two or four mods of a certain set gives a percentage bonus on that stat, the options being health, defence, offence, crit. damage, crit. chance, speed, tenacity, and potency. Individually, a mod set makes no difference: an offence mod won't necessarily increase a character's offence statistics. 

The percentage increases gained by mod sets affects a character's base values, not the additional gains made by adding mods. For instance, I'm using a speed set on my R2-D2 and it works as such:

Base speed: 145 Speed gained from mods: 57 Total speed: 216

So in this case the total speed is made up from the base speed (145), plus the speed gained from mod attributes (57), plus 10% of the base speed (14), all in all reaching 216. For cases where the attribute affected by the set comes as a straight percentage, it’s more straightforward - a crit. damage set will add a flat 30%, a potency set 10% etc. 

I would say mod sets are not the priority, primary stats are, but then again I don't follow that advice because it annoys me if I don't have proper sets. Crit. damage is possibly an exception, too, giving a big 30% increase to the crit. damage value.

How to use them

So, which mods should you give to which characters? This depends obviously on circumstances - how you use your characters, if you're using them in raids or arena etc. You might like to switch up your mods between raids and arena if you use your characters in both places, or you might be lazy like me and just keep them on. In general though, here are some pointers.

It's safe to say that the holy grail of mods are speed mods - that is, arrows with speed primaries and other mods with speed secondaries. A five-dot speed arrow gives you +30 speed, and mods with speed secondaries at level 1 have the chance to upgrade to values in the twenties depending on their colours. It's hard to go wrong with putting speed mods on characters, and at the very top end of arena a lot of it can come down to who has the fastest mods - letting you land those debuffs, raise those buffs, get your Wiggs triple-hit in etc. The only ones I wouldn't advise speed mods for are tanks so you can prolong those taunts - but even then there are exceptions. Characters like Stormtrooper Han and Poe are ones you want to go first, and I have speed on my Baze so I can use his dispells more often. Characters that tend to gain a lot of turn meter anyway are also ones you might not bother with speed for, B2 for example.

The general way to look at it is to base on a character's strengths and the role you want them to play in your team. Below I've thought in terms of sets, but applies generally to primaries as well:

Crit. Damage for characters with high crit. chance, and whose kit often applies them crit. chance up. Think Wiggs, Leia, and many other attackers. 

Crit. Chance will often go with crit. damage - damage a set of four, then crit. chance a set of two. Also especially good for characters who gain bonuses for critical hits - Lando's AoE reset a big example, and it looks like the same will apply for Wicket, too.

Offence for attackers without such a high crit. chance, but who you also want to be big damage dealers. Often goes with the tankier kind of attackers like Boba, Kylo, Vader etc. though good for others like Rey as well. 

Health (and protection) mods for tanks and healers, and other characters you want to have high survivability. You can give these to squishier characters as well, though as these are some of the most common primary and secondary stats they are likely to gain a fair amount in any case.

Defence mods are less useful than health in most cases, but often worth sticking on characters with high base armour e.g. Fives, Sun Fac, First Order Stormtrooper. 

Potency for characters who apply debuffs and turn meter removal. Particularly useful for dark side characters as they tend to be the big debuffers, ones that come to mind include Tie Fighter Pilot (tenacity down, buff immunity), Phasma (speed down), and Royal Guard (stun, speed down) - so all quite varied characters. Good for characters like Teebo that are useful in the Rancor raid, too.

Tenacity for resisting debuffs, I don't use them that much based on the teams I run so I'm not quite up to speed here, but useful for teams like Jedi in AAT, or perhaps coming up against a team that can land a lot of debuffs on you (e.g. I saw someone on reddit I think recently who made a super-tenacity Phoenix team that was working wonders for them).

Speed sets can be a good idea for healers - a speed set paired with a health set for instance. This would give them more survivability and more chances to use their heals and revives. Often good for cleansers too for similar reasons. Think characters like Ackbar, Jawa Engineer, Ewok Elder.

Farming

So you know the mods you want, now to actually get them. There are three main places: the mod battles, mod challenges, and the mod shop. Mod battles I would discount as you only pick up mods with 1 or 2 dots, and even if you're not making the set you want the increases of higher-tier mods will have a greater effect for your characters.

The top tiers of the mod challenges will give you these higher-tier mods, awarding mods of 3-5 dots and of any colour. To get these you need to farm characters of various factions to complete the battles, and though a few of these teams come in useful for heists or legendary events, they're not always the most desirable or easiest characters to farm! Before you’re able to farm mods with the ideal sets for your characters, I would recommend farming health mods and putting those with the most suitable primary stats onto your characters. You will also find squares, circles, and diamonds drop far more often than the other three.

The other place to go is the mod shop, though it'll cost you a few million credits for a good mod. I personally wouldn't buy them with crystals, I rarely have enough saved up to spend there anyway. In the mod shop I wouldn't buy a grey one and would mostly look for ones with speed secondaries. The shop is good because it's less of a gambling game and you know what you're going to get, but at the same time it's not often you'll find what you're looking for. I have horrible luck with it tbh. 

I think this covers pretty much everything, and if you've made it this far then well done! If you have any questions, spot any mistakes, or disagree with any of the suggestions then please drop me an ask. 

P.S. I also want to drop this pretty useful tool which gives some suggestions as to what works for different characters (not completely up to date though iirc).