#this is just one (1) rant to seraph after playing lightfall

[heavenbled]

god i'm writing nighthawk's character profile and im realizing how much fucking lore she has . anyway some of my fave moments below

me thinking abt neptune, a woman who has taken her grief and despair and longing and shoved it so far down into her psyche that she doesnt even think its there anymore and has taken her rage and fire as who she is now not as what road she took after her guilt. and then finding HER planet and people she connects with on a level thats unspoken because it cant be spoken with mere words and sounds and syllables. and then. finding ways to manipulate and use the very river of the universe to find the flow in all things tangible and intangible . a belief in feat when belief has never been there before. hi. i'm indigo. and welcome to my fuck house in which im so fucking mentally unwell

like! after the iron lords fell, sao had nothing to believe in more specifically. she believed in them. she believed in their strength. in her strength. she believed in herself! and that’s what made lady sao tae so worthy and strong, she believed in herself and in her friends and that created a level of strength both her and neptune are still looking for, atleast on a subconscious level. something shes still missing and a life where you don’t believe in anything. a life without much of a purpose. just … aimless wandering and bounty to bounty, mission to mission, layer of layer added to her defenses took her rage and sorrow and shoved it further and further down. created new names, new faces to get the jobs done. became so much of a lie she doesn’t even remember what belief feels like, what connection is. nighthawk became disconnected and disconcordant with the entire universe around her the moment sao perished with her iron lords

to suddenly come to a place, and not just any place — neptune itself, her namesake, the bluest planet that always felt like a call coming home. the very reason she looked at the stars and beyond and kept going to suddenly come here and discover an entire civilization has lived here for centuries and lived WELL! the CLOUDSTRIDERS!!!!! this inexplicable connection, something she’s never felt in motherfucking centuries, something like the song of a people she feels so drawn to. like she was meant to flow with them in this river of a universe. its something like a drop of water being returned to the ocean picking up strand is showing her she is in control of her fate and her destiny, nothing else. and that the very thing she denounced was real, or was quickly becoming real to her; belief begins to sprout and it’s something like taking a deep breath after holding it for so long, subconsciously drowning and suffocating and choking on her own guilt and despair this is when she begins to believe in fate. strings of it all just woven together, everything has happened to lead her here and her god has been with her the whole time and that god is not the traveler

[fadinglight123]

Don’t hide your rants in the tags say the quiet part out loud!!! You’re right, so many of them have just outgrown the game and mastered the mechanics and that’s the only reason everything is easy now.

I have hundreds of hours put into d2 over the course of 5 or 6 years now and I’m still very much a casual player bc not all of us get paid to play video games and life happens. I was finally hitting a point where I could comfortably do solo legend lost sectors around season of the seraph when Lightfall came around and basically blew that up to a truly insane level with the new level being 1830, well above pinnacle cap. There is still plenty of challenge left in the game for people like me. And I’d argue more players are like me than not.

The joy of video games is that challenge is often self-made. There’s a reason challenge runs exist. Just fucking do it yourself. Lord knows I hate most shotguns with a passion so even though I know for a fact a lot of my builds could in theory be wildly broken by trading something with one of several solid roll shotguns I’ve got, I don’t use them 80% or the time.

If you don’t like Divinity or Well of Radiance “trivializing” boss encounters. I’ve got good news. Just click a button and you won’t have to use them ever again! Unfortunately the nature of having a meta at all means there’s no getting out of meta loadouts winning raid races. Unless people want to go back to year 1 d2 with no random rolls etc etc there’s no getting around it so they’re gonna have to suck it up. But that doesn’t mean that shit is required to beat it.

I swear to god if Bungie touches Lament after the hardest day 1 challenge in years bc one salty fucker is too lazy to equip something that isn’t good and complained about it making it “too easy” I will wish every Destiny YouTuber and streamer a very pleasant “step on legos forever” bc my guy LITERALLY JUST DELETE IT FROM YOUR INVENTORY AND DONT PULL IT FROM COLLECTIONS IF YOU HATE IT SO MUCH

Getting real sick of a certain subset of Destiny players complaining that it’s a baby game and crying to Bungie to nerf exotics and abilities when their ENTIRE POINT IS TO BE STRONG in specific ways as if they are being locked into using them.

IF YOU WANT AN EXTRA CHALLENGE STOP BEING SUCH A DPS GOBLIN AND JUST EQUIP SOMETHING THATS NOT TOP TIER META AND STOP COMPLAINING JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

MOOD. Go off.

It's incredibly annoying to me. They always use the argument of "the game should FORCE me to do things, I should not SELF-IMPOSE challenges." And like. ? I'm sorry but what? It's a video game for a big audience, it's here to be playable and accessible to the widest possible playerbase. There are plenty of ways to make the game difficult for yourself, so knock yourself out if that's your thing, but don't force others into it.

Like, I enjoy hard content, I regularly at least attempt day 1 raids, I do master raids, GMs, solo and solo flawless content and all that. But only when I want to. Sometimes I don't and I don't want to suffer in a patrol zone or struggle in a seasonal activity I'm doing for the story. The majority of the players don't want that. Designing games for the professional gamers only has NEVER been a good idea and never will be. Fifty streamers can't sustain a video game. It needs casual players who will want to come back to the game instead of feeling defeated.

One of the reasons I really enjoy helping others is because I know that casual players tend to struggle in stuff that's basic activity for me. I've seen people unable to get through a strike. I've sat for 10 minutes rezing someone who couldn't do the jump in a seasonal activity. I want those people to be able to play basic content without feeling frustrated and I want them to know that there are people out there who will help them out.

And this doesn't apply just to basic content, although it should start with that. I think all dungeons and raids and everything should be things that all players can complete. Fine, doing a master raid with all challenges should be tough, but it should be achievable with time and practice, not impossible. What a lot of these "pros" want is just completely divorced from reality.

It takes days and days of practice every time a new master raid is out for me and my team (all with thousands of hours of playtime) to get comfortable to finally finish it. We're far from casual players and it still takes a lot of time to be able to finish hard content. Making it even harder is insane to me. Like, if something is so hard that my team full of people, each with 5000+ hours of playtime and a coordinated team that's been raiding together for years now can't finish it, that means it's absolutely impossible for probably 90% of the playerbase. That's wild to me. Raids and GMs should have more people playing them. If master raids are too easy for you, Mr. I-Play-Destiny-For-A-Living, that's on you buddy. Unequip the super god tier god roll meta guns and loadouts or play something else.

And ofc, another excuse they make is "if I don't use meta, I am not going to win a raid race!" Then don't. Idk. Let me play you the tiniest violin. This affects literally nobody except a grand total of 50 people. Run your meta in day 1, and play with random shit otherwise. Play raids with all white weapons. Play without mods. Play without a HUD. Do things solo only. I don't know, make up a way to spice things up for yourself. I'm not interested in that and neither are 99% of the players out there. The game is genuinely hard enough for the majority of the players. On top of that, I am here to feel like a powerful space fantasy superhero. I am NOT here to die to dregs in patrol zones. If there's ONE thing that I know for a fact that put people off from Lightfall (as in this year of Destiny), it's the difficulty changes. They're annoying, frustrating and for some a barrier to entry more than anything else.