Dragonheir: Legendary Luck

[Part of the Cursed story line.] 

As grinding sucks I've also tried sneak in some exploration into the new lands which has revealed some rather adult themes. Let's just say I know how to make drugs now and I'm peddling them to the populace? WHAT? Yeah, that's a thing. Anyway, thanks to an unplanned maintenance I was gifted 100 hero dice by the system and managed to roll up Usha the knight (permanent this time) and Zhar'loth a fear inducing monster caster who replaces the under performing Gitouna.

I've also only now realized some heroes have a captain skill that you can pick from at the start of battle! By default it's always been Garius' +% defense but Zhar'loth brings a +%damage which is now my go to. Alas there's no avoiding the grinding and getting to level 100 is really a pain, but my main gets there while the other regulars are on 90. This helps me find and assist a missing princess (and her army) smash back the orc invaders and also unlocks the TEAM arena.

Team arena is almost exactly like regular arena except you put forward three teams to fight each other consecutively and characters can't be re-deployed between them. Again, finding people lower level to fight seems to be the way to go but its much harder to field three teams of heroes fully equipped with fully upgraded gear! And, once again this lets people with multiple legendary heroes absolutely trounce their opposition. Just to give you an idea, some of these guys have abilities to resurrect fallen team mates and/or self revive.

Good news though, using the camp horn feature (a free hero summon 4x daily or something) which has so far done nothing for me has today given me the Legendary Ghost Troll Ripekas who will be taking Usha's position in the rotation as he is a beast of a DPS. I just have to level him up first. Of course all new heroes start at level 1.

There's a server wide message every time someone pulls this off.

Dragonheir: Fey Dragon

[Part of the Cursed story line.]

What's there to do when you run out of "stamina" to grind you might ask? Well, you can try your hand at Fey Meander which is basically fight 6 groups of this level bad guys, go to next level and do it again with a tough poison boss maiden every 5 levels - or you can challenge NPCs in town to fight which is pretty neat (and recommended). Lastly you can try do the main quest which this time saw me beating a green dragon! Woo! And you can repeat this fight every week. Typical. 

Gitouna, Garius and Usha doing some dragon hunting!

Of course you can also try the arena, which gives you a choice of three other player parties to fight and up to 5 rerolls if none of them are to your liking. My best strategy here is the usual D&D one: only pick on people lower level than you for the best chance of success, but even then the parties with legendary heroes (whom I have none of currently) or parties with better composition will kick your ass. In particular Horrus the dwarf tank (who I did get but never used) is a menace if paired with Heksandra and/or Sigrid the blonde short bow archer girl (she prevents your from healing). Basically if I see her and Horrus I skip unless I've many levels higher! :P

Also note your ranking will drop naturally as other people beat your party too and you won't find out about it until you return to the arena. Anyway, with the dragon dead it seems I've finished another chapter and now can go to the adjoining land which is under an orc invasion... or not because the orcs are super high level which means its back to grinding for me!

Dragonheir: Mt. Trollabar

[Part of the Cursed story line.]

I too am surprised that I'm still here, as the story has had some interesting turns wherein I've been betrayed by hot Countess Catherine (who is a OK healer if she's in the party) but also gotten lucky with some hero dice to get Gitouna the dwarf crafter knifer who hits fast and Voresh the ice lich who has a wicked AoE, though it takes time to load up. I've also been loaned the female dual wielding knight Usha to get through a particular place and those three along with Garius and my fire main are my current party.

While smashing through some trolls I've come across the "second" daily type mission which involves fighting a Poseidon type ocean giant and is pretty cool. The "first" daily is harder to find, fighting some sort of death knight through a portal. You also get two garbage tasks daily which are easy and help get you more hero dice and there's also a ranked arena to fight other players parties which is just kicking my rear at the moment so I'm leaving that alone.

Voresh taking on Poseidon Malinus.

Oh, remember how we need specific elemental crystals to level up heroes? It gets worse when you hit the next tiers as the place that drops them makes it much worse for heroes of that element to be there. For example, if I send my fire themed heroes into the fire realm, they do 30% less damage and take 60% more damage meaning you shouldn't send your fire heroes in there. But but but... yep. That means you have to level up AT LEAST THREE TEAMS to be able to farm through each of the three elemental zones! Drow archer Adrie who slows down the bosses from using their ultimates is pretty handy here, but in the case that you can't or don't want to fight the high level variants you can just grind the easier ones and fuse the 2-3 low level crystals you get per run into a higher tier at the ratio of 10 lessers:1 greater. Waaaaaah!

Dragonheir: Elf-landia

[Part of the Cursed story line.]

I made it out of the death lands and into a forest of elves (and am still playing the game surprisingly)! While I've rolled up a fair number of heroes the standouts are Vasska who summons skelies, Isitarian who summons a baby dracolich, and tank/healer Garius who I'm pretty sure is also a skele underneath that armor. As you can only deploy 5 heroes max that means everyone else (other than Heksandra who is an awesome cleric) is benched while dealing with the "ghost elf" threat. That is, elves aren't ascending/being reborn and instead are just hanging around as angry ghosts. Awesome!

Yes, I'm surprised that there's actually a story in here too. Also, there's multiple game modes. Some fights are tower defense things where ranged area folk do better than say Garius. Others like the goblin camp just require super high DPS for your team to clear the waves of goblins in under a specific time to unlock better rewards and a harder mode so that you can do it all again! I found the grind! Lol. Seriously though, EXP which is used to level up your heroes is found in potions which is by design I suppose so that you can better direct which heroes you want to level. The rewards of the goblin camp are almost exclusively EXP potions so you'll need to go in there. Each run consumes "stamina" which is recovered every day or by eating special food items.

Vasska and Garius grinding up some fire crystals.
The fire boss lady is too lazy to stand up!

At particular levels though, EXP potions aren't enough. You need to go into one of three elemental realms to farm up the correct crystal for your heroes element. This also costs stamina, and sure the elemental realms drop crystals but they don't drop EXP potions. Oh! And there are grave sites which you can raid (again costs stamina) for gear. Each grave site drops one particular set of gear which you wear for a matching bonus. These ONLY drop gear and no EXP potions or crystals. I see a trend forming here...

Attack on Titan and Megalobox 2: Nomad

Start with despair and go from there.

Attack on Titan

I've mentioned this anime in passing many times through the years and now that its finally done I can review it properly! Featuring excellent art, awesome music and some pretty nice action scenes this show focuses on people who live in a walled city, trapped but safe(ish) from the ever hungry giants lurking outside who they refer to as Titans. It has one of the strongest openings of any story, and this momentum carries forward through the first few seasons but alas - peters out as the stranger events are given not-so-strong explanations and titans seemingly become less and less dangerous (because the protagonists are improving right? Like in the Walking Dead, season 1 a single zombie is like OMG, season 11 its "oh another zombie horde, whatever"). While I do still recommend it, I don't like the way the story went at the end so no perfect score from me here.

Megalobox 2: Nomad

We catch up with our protagonist Joe, five years after the events of Megalobox and he is not in a good place. The questions of "why?" and "what happened?" are what kept us around, despite the first part of the season having him serve only as a side character (which is weird but makes sense if you stick to it). While the first Megalobox was all about an underdog trying to clinch every win, this season is all about loss and is framed very differently. I made a comment about the original where everyone but Joe gets character development - well here he develops in spades. Recommended only if you liked the first season. If you can put up with the episodes at the start where he doesn't do much, it does improve and finishes pretty strong.

Dragonheir: What the heck is this?

[Part of the Cursed story line.]

This D&D 'somewhat' idle gacha game (less idle than Idle champs though) starts off with a fight against Tiamat, and then you wake up in some death lands where your character is 5 times the size of the map POI's like villages and fortresses. I'm guessing this is because they designed the people at "combat size" and then just went - meh - and kept them that size for world exploration while everything else is shrunk down. It takes a bit of getting used to but you get used to it after awhile.

Combat is clearly the focus of this and while you start with Olaf the skeleton to support your Ice/Fire/Lightning Mage (you must be a mage) he'll soon be joined the dark elf Noteera, troll Gulal, dwarf Forbit and healer Heksandra. Again, its obvious that devs went "meh" at one point as Noteera and Gulal have mini-cutscenes when activating their ultimate abilities while everyone else does not. Outside of setting up your initial battle position there only thing you actively control in battle are those ultimate abilities, and these greatly vary between characters - which is where the "gacha" comes in. Earn dice to roll for heroes! And spoilers: a lot of them suck!

I guess someone makes weapons and armor of that size...?

Fortunately for this early bit that doesn't seem to matter as you'll be smashing through baddies with no problem. In fact it might get to the point where you just press that "auto" button during combat so that the AI handles your ultimate for you. You know it's going to get bad when they provide an "auto" button for combat...

Helldivers 2

The battle to spread managed democracy continues in this four player co-op that has stayed true to the old original while making the game better! You still have grenade-like stratagems to call down to deal with aliens, still have to find resources planet side and still have your super destroyer double as a game lobby to spend research and unlock gear. And there is also still some really epic music backing everything up!

The biggest improvement is the change of view in mission. Where previously it was a top-down affair where you were limited by the screen where your squad was and couldn't wander off on your own, now it is an over the shoulder camera with optional first person view when you aim down the sights of some weapons. This means you can definitely split up to tackle more objectives but death still comes as hard, fast, and usually with a mix of hilarity and annoyance. It's easily taken over our Friday game night sessions and is a real blast to play especially if you have a dedicated squad to play with. You can join other random Helldivers but your milage may vary - that's not something I've tried. Highly, highly recommended, even if Sony is doing BS things to try ruin it for everyone. Greed much?

Whatever Sony ass-hat tried to get that decision through needs to be fired, captured, and fed to aliens. FOR LIBERTY!