mandate of heaven actually does work on my end i have no clue what’s happened
I should have specified, the event doesn’t give them out at all, maybe it works if you have them, but the text box says you should get 3 stacks, but you don’t get any
Oh that’s what you meant that makes more sense
Yeah lemme fix that next patch will fix this, the magical girl freeze, ATHATH’s skill desc, and also increase the native americanness of memetzar
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Nice, nice, should help a lot with the final map lol
Ended up finishing Dies (the J ending, at least). It’s unsurprisingly very good, everything is bullshit until you figure it out, and then you feel like a god. The endgame especially is really good, and as Bobby said before, it’s really fun to try and catch all the references to various projects people made, and you do genuinely feel para-socially attached to these forum members as you learn to play around their gimmicks. It’s an LT game, so it looks and runs beautifully, and it’s a Sigma game, so obviously the units all feel very interesting. 8.5/10, probably? Though there are some sections that are way better than that (Endgame, the route split, Polinym’s map), and some that are way worse than that (I never want to play the moist orb map again). The puzzle solving nature of trying to get things to work in Dies is addicting in a way no other hack has been for me
I also ended up using myself the whole playthrough, I really like how much I had to struggle to make me usable (and how much thought was put into me, a random nobody with two lazy redesign hacks), and the final map quote was incredibly hype. Obviously I am not alone here, there are a lot of people who as far as I know are not well known in the community, but still have a ton of care put into the in-jokes about them.
And also, despite this being the funny self-insert hack, there are some strong emotional moments in it, and while other people have already discussed them in depth, I did just want to say that Dies has definitely inspired me to pick up hacking again, it’s a really cool creative outlet, and I think Dies has done a good job promoting the cool things about hacking.
Anyway, all that to say that I’m not doing helltorture for at least a year, fuck you for that ending
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Congrats
What’s your favourite moment?
Mine’s in the super hell chapters where Hatsuru reemerged as an Emblem Ring and Engages with Bobby Asaka to win the Lose fight
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That was definitely really solid, the moment that stuck with me the most I think was Bobby talking with Ty about there being no buyable throwable weapons in Dlatmol. It’s very minor, but it’s a nice character moment, and it’s a really neat thing to think about design wise, in terms of writers needing to have things make sense to them without overloading their players with irrelevant info.
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Bug Report
In the transition between the Chapters Lord of the Storm → Furry Rights, all “End of Chapter” effects do not trigger.
Rivian remains a Chicken and does not get rid of his Demon Qi stacks
Paymaster does not activate
Cres does not get auto-revived if killed
No unit gets weapon/item ranks like they usually do at the end of a Chapter
Doc and Darrman do not get auto-revived if Mercy killed (maybe intended that way, idk)
I did not get a Soulhawk level, but I assume Soulshare doesn’t trigger either
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Ended up doing a maps tier list just for fun. Feel free to challenge me on it, though I really remember very little of the pre-routesplit midgame. In general, it feels like a lot of the difficulty is frontloaded, ending in Ort, which is really hard for some reason. The routesplit is mostly chill, so long as you bring a debuffer (such as Rivian) to Scythe the rest of the units can go to CMC, which is still so hard that I’m going to make my plan to beat it before starting Helltorture. (Galeforce is pretty free). The endgame is pretty easy, considering you almost certainly have at least one capped out trainee that can deal with most of the bosses (or y’know, just a full, competently made team). No idea how to get the bottom three chapters, I assume at least one is difficulty mode locked, feel free to educate me.
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On those last three: two represent Portal Fantasy Mode-exclusive alternate endgames, and the last is a hidden bonus map. I’ll give you one hint at how to get it: you may have noticed how there are quite a few effects that specifically key off ArcherBias. The real ArcherBias is only around for an interlude, but could there be another way to have a unit named ArcherBias in the party? And if so, how do you think the real ArcherBias would react upon seeing that?
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Oooooh, I gotcha
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wait why am i in here
Is there a reason why Ignis can’t buy from their own pawn shop? I get why the vending machine can’t vend to themselves, but Ignis is just kinda in a weird place where if they could do it, it just barely might make their atrocious bases and growths worth putting up with, but idk. If it’s a buyable statboosters issue, they could always just get their jlpt changed. Otherwise, I’m really not sure how you are supposed to get weapons on this unit aside from liberal use of ATHATH
no getting high off your own supply
(you can have DT buy items and then have ignis buy them back off DT in a pinch if you need to save ATHATH uses)
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ehhh honestly ignis kinda fucks if you wanna stick with em just due to wire+underdog being potent enough to rock. or just doing a fullinvest stack and having one of the Generally Better Knife Users outta enough damage to hurt/kill and not face the usual issue of being frail and having to eat hits (and at least deploy of em also means no new for open inventory slots so you can be way more lax on who does what for loot/droppables)
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When you committed to Tier Listing / Reviewing every unit but then you get to the end of the route split segment
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It is really fascinating to me hearing how drastically different people’s experiences of Dies maps are. Speaking for myself I loved Moist Orb and had a total blast with it, but I’m also astonished that the Polinym map is on the same tier as the Spensir map when it was probably the second hardest map in the game for me. How did you manage it so smoothly?
if the answer is just Camdar I think I will consider crying
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Yeah Polinym map is actually really hard for me too until I found the Dooblerino combo
Camdar is definitely part of it, but wasn’t the main part of it. For the most part it just comes down to the super high deploy limit. You have three good dancers by this point in the game (Emmet, Redacted, and Yasako) and Ultrax is effectively two dancers with Ashley combined with the boost system. Levin is super important for playing this map legit, as the levin boosts are pretty insurmountable if the fight is kept anywhere close to fair. The left side is much easier than the right, 1-2 good units can easily sweep it (I used Trybel and Krow, but I’m sure in Helltorture you could make do with units like Sherloca Fan (though don’t take my word for it, I haven’t played that mode yet). For the most part, the monsters spawning are actually good for you, it lets your bad units contribute by building Ultrax charge without getting into range of actually scary enemies (though you do want to deploy primarily bad ranged units to not eat counters from the zombies). The middle section is decently hard to break, but having a gun/bow unit get boosted/danced to take 3-4 turns and kill the bolting mages is fairly trivial. You should have enough unit slots to bring Darkknight clone to get a free kill, then recruit Darkknight (though be careful, they won’t have any charges of Mandate of Heaven, this is only for getting around having to fight them). From there, there aren’t that many enemies left, and not a lot of them move, so get your ranged units up there to destroy the pillars, and bait the wyverns asap so you don’t get squished between them and the final reinforcement wave. AOEs are going to be your friend with taking them down quickly, I used myself with the petal blizzard bow, but I’m sure there are a few other units (including the beckpic) that can replicate that. From there, just remember that the map ends once the beckpic reaches the goal, so don’t be afraid to spam boost, dancers, and shove to get it there on time. Camdar does help a bit in terms of breaking the pillars ahead of schedule, and potentially taking out each of the levin buffers (if you don’t care about Levin killing them, that is) but this is far from his best map.
Hopefully that helps? I don’t think I did much special, it’s just that Ultrax is really strong, Bobby is really good at baiting things, and you have like, 20 units to dogpile this relatively understaffed map. You also just got like, 8 free intermission chapters for which to grind a weak unit with good skills up (I picked Trybel, but I’m sure there are other good options as well)
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Legitimate question for Helltorture, who actually matters in this difficulty?
Because so far, I’m leaning towards Devvy being the only important unit until Parrhesia, and Devvy, being a unit with 4 soullocked prfs, is very hard to invest in. Maybe Ramm? Rivian technically scales, but does so so slowly that it seems pointless. And Krim is…yeah. Nothing seems incredibly bad so far, it’s moreso I’m not sure what I am supposed to be doing except just surviving, given that it’s so hard to invest in anyone at this point
Vyland