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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2471 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 3, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Vidya thread.

49.4% of players have the "Defeat the Paintress" achievement. 49.0% of players have the "Go back to Lumiere" achievement.

0.4% of players have quit the game mid-cutscene and never launched it again.

be me, Dark Souls 2 fan (though I haven't played it in several years)

enjoy using Heide Spear, which has innate lightning damage, on a character whose dump stats are attunement, intelligence, and faith (which are useful only for magic)

notice that a new wiki has been created for the game

idly check out the page on scaling

mfw lightning damage scales with faith

mfw the meta tryhards say that there are "low returns on melee weapon scaling", so you're supposed to go for weapon upgrades and temporary buffs instead

Maybe I'll start a new playthrough with a character for whom faith is not a dump stat.

Yeah, the Dark Souls game mechanics are very counterintuitive. In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work. In Elden Ring, you can one-shot (up to phase transitions, which are often hardcoded) every boss in the game by doing the correct buff incantations, which basically renders the entire game trivial. And it's not like this is some glitch or exploit -- it just falls out of basic understanding how buffs stack and doing the obvious thing.

Then again, this is hardly unique to Dark Souls. Basically every single-player game is like this, in the sense that actually knowing how the mechanics work is a game-breaking superpower, rather than the baseline expectation.

actually knowing how the mechanics work is a game-breaking superpower

See The Power of Ten for an exploration of that. TL;DR of every book in the series: The MC is a gamer dropped into a (real) world that runs on that game's logic. By using their (relatively modest) starting boost and (absurdly OP) mechanical knowledge, they grow powerful, save the world, and ascend to immortality.

I'm not sure about recommending that series based on its merits, but it absolutely 100% demonstrates that point.

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