Lego Ninjago. Not normally a Lego game fan but playing a bunch of Ninja games and it was "free" so tried it and it's not bad. Kinda fun. If I redeem my free month of Game Pass soon I might try NGIIB.

I hear that the console versions are much worse in this regard. Then again, I imagine very few on PC sit in the same room over LAN when they play.

XP penalties are a hassle for sure, my Titan is level 79 now, I've reached Tier 10 and 11 maps as the highest. As long as there aren't too many modifiers, I good decent tankiness. There are some balancing issues with my build (note, for instance, the hilarious overshoot on Cold Resistance), but it generally works. Best of all is that it's not a meta-build made from guides - I simply combined some aspects of what I've learned so far and made a hybrid. I have a feeling that I'll have to go all in on Ancestral Totem later on though, and become passive with the Titan himself while they clean house. My current strategy when leveling is pumping points into Block Chance, I'll pump into Armor nodes after that. The reason is that Block completely negates damage, while Armor simply mitigates - it makes a huge difference!

I have very little Life and Mana, the latter became an issue with my Ancestral Totems, so I switched to "Life Cost" on a gem with them. Along with decent Life Leech, it works well, especially since my build is largely focused on Physical damage (Leech always scales off of physical damage). I place my Ancestral Totems (3 of them), lose about 400 life doing so, and then Leap Slam into the crowd they're chewing up, leeching life from what remains. It's effective, for now. But I know that higher tier maps will be hard. I haven't had a proper power boost for a long time now, and my DPS is falling off some. Hammer of the Gods does great damage, but it often misses on groups or bosses on the map, it's better suited for large main bosses all in all. One issue for me has been maps with tight corridors, combined with on-ground effects. The combination of "Burning Ground" and any sort of acid of smoke eats me up in seconds, if I happen to leap into it. My Totems use "Sunder", which makes it hard to see the ground, so sometimes I have to sit back and wait to know whether it's safe or not.

My Monk is kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum; his DPS is great but he's squishy like a raspberry. He frequently turns into jam.

For comparison: Titan has about 14.5k DPS on his main attack (Leap Slam), with another 25% when the totems are out, so around 18k DPS or so. Hammer of the Gods is in the region of 37-40k when buffed by Totems, much, much more if it triggers the aftershock (30% chance). But the cooldown is immense (about 25 seconds or so).
Monk (Invoker) has 50k base DPS on Ice-Strike, with Charged Staff this climbs to about 75-78k. With another boost from Unbound Avatar, it's easily in the 110-130k region, and this is without the bell. I can imagine the Bell bringing the max boosted total up to 180-200k all in all. It absolutely rips through packs of enemies, and destroys most specials and bosses before the ever unfreeze, but one boss with one pain-in-the ass ability pops me in one hit. And this is all with a pretty piss-poor weapon in hand. As mentioned; my defenses are woeful, save for capped Lightning resist (the others are in the 60-ish area), and I only have Evasion to properly rely on (you need two defensive layers, at least).

I also have the Witch with Minions, but haven't played it for a while, as well as a Deadeye. The Witch is the safest playstyle in general, but she was worthless defenses and poor resistances, meaning that bosses in smaller arenas shred her in seconds, usually while waiting for the minions to respawn. Deadeye needs better gear, I haven't leveled it beyond 71 for now. Early 70s is the pain threshold where gear becomes much more important, and deaths start happening more often.

So, of all my characters in the high 70s now, only the Titan is viable, but it's slow and methodical. Still running the same weapon, I have a much better one (as in at least a 50-60% hike in DPS), but lack the strength to wield it (Giant's Blood). Losing the shield will break the build entirely and I'll just keep dying.

We played a couple of them on ps3 together. They were fun in couch co-op as well. But indeed, the latest completely dropped couch co-op.

I see DW9 (not Empires) added it later (didn't have campaign co-op at launch) but opinions are divided. Or rather negative, called the worst dynasty game and sits at 65 on metacritic with 4.4 user score. Also low rating on the psn store where usually everything is above 4 stars... The open world gets universally panned :/


In PoE2 it feels like we're test subjects at this point (which is not surprising for a beta). Just a stat how long we'll hold out until giving up, not respecting our time at all. Rats in a maze. I'm not sure if this is a good way to build up 'hype' to a release. If you want us to debug (which we essentially do with multiple crash reports per day lol) then give us debug tools (cheats).

The loss of xp mechanic was already panned in PoE1, so don't know why they insist on continuing with it. You already get punished enough on death. You can't resurrect your partner, you can't go back in the map after leaving (maybe a bug as the survivor logged in alone isn't allowed back incorrectly saying you died), you lose the modifiers on the map and you lose the way stone (who's drop rate is still pants and making a T7 map stone, from T1's that the merchant sells, takes 729 stones combining into 243 T2, 82 T3, 27 T4, 9 T5, 3 T6, price 3.645 million gold haha. So you have no choice than to run maps with dangerous modifiers that can suddenly get you killed.

I'm not sure what they're trying to test but it feels geared to hardcore players that play 12 hours a day, watch streamers, min max guides, scour the trade website for gear etc. I'm not gonna create an account for the trade website, no thanks. There's my beta input :) Can't drive me to annoying online interference mechanics. Being tested for micro transactions...

Anyway we can still rampage through lower tier maps until it gets boring, the end game seems huge. Just a shame we won't get any more passive skill points or upgrades anymore, which is gonna make us lose interest. There's your data point.

Really wish I could play somethign but we got hit with A storm here that has crippled the countries power grid, been 5 days since I played a video game and it could be a week before I can play again. Fingers crossed I'll be able to adjust back into the games I was playing without having to start a fresh game.

Jumping on the 10th gen with Switch 2 in a few months

as for 9th gen, I'm still playing Zelda Totk at almost 200 hours, Metroid Prime remaster, Pikmin 4 and Started Astral Chain as well

Ninja Gaiden II Black. It's fucking awesome.

PoE2 just had another patch, supposedly fixing many things.

The font got a bit bigger for loot on the screen, loot still sucks though.

The end game is broken, seems to be balanced on hardcore grinding who pass items down via the trade website. Since we're not trading (can't even go online in couch co-op, probably cause my wife doesn't have/want a PSN account) we can't absorb the heavy blows and other nonsense random instant death mechanics.



2 hours of grinding wasted in an instant from XP loss. Of course also lose the way stone, the loot left on screen, the modifiers on the map, and the mood to continue. I had to record it to find out what killed us. It's the first time we fought this sub boss again since the campaign. We didn't have that issue then.

With (sudden occasional) damage scaled to characters with 10x the hp and energy shield as us mere mortals have, it's becoming more frustrating every next death.

We logged off, stared at the other characters we made a while ago and went to watch tv. What's the point in playing new characters if this is what it leads to anyway.

PoE2 better not get invested in it, couch co-op score 4/10. But no doubt we'll try again as there's no alternative. (D4 but not feeling it, plus psn account is required for that in couch co-op)