They can’t manage the glory that is Dark Souls 2!

I’ve been kinda busy this week and I haven’t really touched the game in a while (waiting for 1999) so I thought I would just go back to the basics and bring back the starters! Also 1999 is bringing us the proto versions of these frames so there, that’s my excuse!

Excalibur is still a pretty damn solid frame, despite all the yeas. His Exalted Blade shows it’s age the most, being worse than your average melee weapon these days, but the rest of his kit stays solid. Slash Dash is weirdly enough his best damage dealing ability, as it scales with your actual melee weapon mods and procs guaranteed Slash. Blind remains a solid panic CC while also massively boosting your melee damage. And Radial Javelins with it’s augment is a Roar that applies to melee only, not bad! He’s probably the weakest of the starters late game, but I would still rate him as 2nd best choice for new players. Mag outscales him lategame, but her kit requires mods and specific weapons to really shine, something a new player won’t have. Volt is still the strongest starter, very cheap decent damage 1st ability, very cheap speed buff to get through missions faster, invincible directional shield that makes defending much easier that you can also pick up to provide yourself with great defense (it also boosts your guns damage while shooting through it) and to top it off a good AoE ability that remains competitive all the way until Steel Path.

With their Prime just released, I thought it’s a good time to revisit this frame. I have little to say about Xaku myself, I never played them much and I’m not a huge fan of their kit, powerful as it is. Xaku lovers, this is your time to shine!

A 30min episode yet it felt shorter than usual! This was the character growth episode, for both Emilia and Subaru. Recalling Subaru’s arguably lowest point right before the speech was brilliant, man has grown so much since then! Things are looking up so much I’m dreading what’s coming, this is Re:zero after all and we’re only at the mid point of the season. Even the “sv_cheats 1” using knight himself finally showing up only makes me more anxious for what’s to come.

Gapacho is actually some sort of cryptid, unintelligible noises only perceivable as words for those around him, impossible to capture in image - visible only inside of your mind, shows up out of nowhere and disappears just as fast whenever it’s convenient. Someone call the SCP foundation, I think we have a loose one here!

My favorite frame, and another one that has received a massive power-up since his last thread! I mentioned it before but I love Nezha. Strap in, this will be a long post! I play a lot of tanks. 4/5 of my most played frames are tanks. Nezha was what I finally settled down on after playing Rhino, Inaros and Revenant. He’s just such an amazing generalist that it’s never a wrong move to bring him, no matter the mission. He’s very fast with his Fire Walker + passive which makes him a good pick for any speedrun mission, like relics or captures. Damage boost with Blazing Chakram and incredible survivability with Warding Halo makes him a great boss slayer. And Divine Spears (pre-augment) were OK CC if you needed some. He’s never the absolute best pick, but he’s also never a wrong one. The one thing he wasn’t quite great at was AoE nuking, you had to rely on your weapons for that. Of course, this has changed completely all thanks to Divine Retribution! Now Nezha has the complete package, going fast, having a dmg boost, not dying and nuking crowds! This augment turned an ability many people subsumed over into one you base his whole build around. Here is what I’m running on my Nezha:

The most important stat becomes range, you want to get as much of it as you can. Overextended in a no-brainer, so is Stretch. The reason I’m running the Archon version is because I also use Panzer Vulpaphyla with Shocking Claws which makes the Quills it shoots out proc electricity, triggering the Archon Stretch (don’t ask me how that works, spaghetti code). This is absolutely not necesarry but a nice to have bonus if you use the Panzer. Your core energy economy mod is Equilibrium, Nezha’s 2 causes each enemy it hits to drop a guaranteed health orb. Even if you can only hit one enemy, that’s still 30 energy generated for you, and you will almost always hit at least 3-4. The Umbral set is great as Nezha loves all 3 stats it provides. You can easily just run the base versions of the mods and do just fine. Adaptation is another no-brainer, your Warding Halo + your armor + Adaptation will make you nigh invincible. The Arcanes are to taste, although Grace is incredibly good if you have it. Blessing works exceptionally well on Nezha given you are already incentivized to spam his Chakram and generate health orbs that way. This could be Guardian or Augmented as well, both solid options. The Aura is another personal choice, I like Sprint Boost because Nezha’s run speed coupled with his slides allows him to completely forgo bullet jumps in favor of just sprinting though the mission. Growing Power is a good option too, as is Brief Respite for some extra shield gating from your Blazing Chakram and Divine Spears spam. Cunning Drift is pretty much the BiS Exilus mod, more sliding and more range - both things we love!

Now that I’ve explained my mod choices, it’s time to talk about the star of the show - Divine Spears + Divine Retribution! This ability requires you bring specific weapons that can enable it. Anything that relies on status to kill will do, for melee that would be anything with Melee Influence (the scaling gets pretty funny if you can hit a lot of speared enemies) or a Glaive Prime with it’s guaranteed slash procs. For guns, my favorite in the Strun Incarnon. Build for status and Viral/Slash it outputs an insane number of procs. One important thing to note is that the augment has a specific quirk to it - if you kill a speared enemy in one shot with the weapon’s raw damage, no statuses will spread to others. This can be pretty annoying for anything non Steel Path, but I found a workaround. Using your Blazing Chakram is a pretty good way to build up a cascading amount of heat procs on all speared enemies without killing them outright, as the Chakram’s initial damage isn’t that high. Of course, just using your weapons to kill everything low level is also completely viable.

That pretty much wraps it up! This really ended up being quite a long post, but I really really love this frame. He’s the frame I play as most of the time and my reliable ally in any mission as a 95% solo player. Here is a bonus fashionframe of my Nezha to end it on:

Seasonal death counter: 3 (+0, based on how this season started I thought we would have a lot more of those, I feel kinda silly for making this counter now…)

Dragon blood is some serious stuff, not only did it regrow Subaru’s leg, it even grew back the bandages and his shoe somehow! Impressive! Regulus really is speedrunning the “most hated character” title, which is pretty impressive as he has some serious competition with Capella and Gluttony. Man is just truly vile.

What a cliffhanger post-ending! Al sounds just as surprised to see someone respond as Emilia did, wonder if he found one of those communicators somewhere and tried using it.

The whole point of having Aegis Gale is to free yourself from the Blazing Pillage spam. That and it’s genuinely hard to fit in two augments at the same time without making serious sacrifices to the build.

My solution to the “running out of shields” problem, which is especially prevalent against the Infested, was subsuming Rebuild Shields (Condemn is a solid option too) over her 3 which you don’t really use now with no need for it for Blazing Pillage anyway. Pay 500 shields (or much less if you run efficiency) to get almost 7k back every 12sec, pretty good deal!

Edit: Forgot to mention Sentinels are also very good with the Guardian mod, couple it with the Bond mod that I forgot the name of that reduces all companion ability CDs when killing enemies with 3 or more statuses and a Tazicor or Helstrum on your sentinel to prime for you and you can lower the 30sec CD by a lot.

I wanted to revisit Hildryn first cause she’s gotten a massive glow-up since her original post in the form of her new augment, Aegis Gale. No longer is she forced into the incredibly boring Blazing Pillage spam gameplay, she can now take to the skies and rain down death like she was intended to! She went from a frame I farmed purely so I can subsume her for Pillage to one of my absolute favorites all thanks to this augment. The augment allows you to turn your Balefire while in Aegis Storm into a burst fire cannon, firing out 4 projectiles with a single button press and adding extra damage to it scaling with your maximum shield capacity (which given that you are Hildryn, should be pretty impressive). Changing it from the clunky charge-up into a burst fire alone is a huge QoL improvement already (especially with the accessibility settings letting you turn it into a proper full auto), but the extra scaling damage is what really pushes your Balefire into a proper endgame capable weapon. My one complaint is that I really wish this would just replace your actual primary fire, having to hold down M3 is pretty awkward. I know there is the augment for her 1 that you could run with this one, but no one is gonna be doing that given how much stronger the alternate fire is compared to the charged primary.

For all of Subaru’s faults, man has a determination that I don’t think Kazuma would have. One particularly gruesome death would likely be all it took for him to fuck off to a far away place and turn this show into a slice of life (at least until the now unchecked witch cult ran rampart and caught up to him). Subaru might not be the cleverest, but despite some truly sanity-shattering things happening to him he just keeps going.

The eye opening moment is when one of these threads touches on a subject you know a lot about and the top upvoted comment is spouting complete bullshit. See it once and you start to doubt the credibility of every other highly upvoted comment that looks legit but could be just as wrong, you simply don’t know enough to immediately disprove it.

Yeah, I’ve wondered that too. He doesn’t even really need a weapon either, just spill his secret and he gets an instant heart attack anyways. Unless I forgot some detail from Season 1 (I very well could, it has been a long while) there is no penalty for suicide over getting killed and with how gruesome most of his deaths are he really could use an easy way out.

Extremely rare SFW Oglaf!

Seasonal death counter: 3 (+0, This really is a good time to add to this counter, Subaru. Things are already looking pretty grim as they are, you don’t want that save point moving now!)

So the archbishop wasn’t actually a dragon (even though they have the blood of one), they were a damned shapeshifter! Anyone who had to deal with Orin and her gang of shape-changing murderers in BG3 knows how annoying those things can get.

Capella really asking the “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” question except literally. Regulus is pretty interesting, he’s relatively “sane” compared to the rest of the bunch, he’s just an absolutely awful egoistical asshole who was given demigod level of power so no one can say “no” to him. It really makes his just so very hateable even when compared to the rest of his already hard to like comrades.

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As a huge Nezha enjoyer, the Strun Incarnon is an absolute BEAST for his new augment, Divine Retribution. Insane status chance with base 50% Slash weighting on the Incarnon form explosion, which you can (and should) push even further with Sweeping Serration, and “low” enough direct damage to not vaporize whatever you’re shooting at (in Steel Path at least) on impact, allowing the procs to spread to every speared enemy. Usually a single shot is enough to wipe out everyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the AoE (which has no LoS restrictions BTW!). If you want a weapon that feels like the old Tigris with Slash procs everywhere, pick the Strun up!

We’ve done it! All the currently released frames are covered! I didn’t really plan for what to actually do at this point… I’m open to suggestions! My current ideas are: I continue the threads only when a new frame or Prime releases (would probably need a new name as they definitely won’t be weekly anymore) or I make a poll with some select warframes on every new thread and let the community vote on what frame they want to revisit next week. But enough about this, this is Koumei’s thread after all!

I feel like this warframe is very polarizing. Depending whether you enjoy the chaos or randomness or prefer a more reliable and consistent playstyle, you’ll either love her or hate her. I’m definitely the latter. Her 1st ability looks really cool with the thread spun up across the level geometry, but in gameplay is objectively useless. Not only will you struggle to get enemies to walk through the damned things on anything but the most cramped tilesets, because of how they are placed a lot of enemies will just walk right under the threads completely ignoring the ability. Each thread also only inflicts a single stack of whatever stats they rolled, absolutely useless. This is your subsume slot. Her 2nd ability takes the Duviri Decree mechanic and removes the two things that made it good - the passive 10% dmg and HP buff each decree gives and the ability to select from multiple ones. 90% of Decrees you get are going to be absolutely worthless to you, and good luck actually getting the challenges themselves done in a squad with a single competent damage frame. Rolled a Decree challenge you can’t complete? Enjoy your 150s wait time! Her 3rd is a Revenant’s 2 except entirely random. Depending on how the RNG gods feel, you can be an unkillable juggernaut or a paper mache frame that dies when an enemy looks at her. This is Xaku’s 4 all over again, I don’t like leaving my survivability up to chance. Her 4 is her best ability, but yet again you are entirely on the whims of RNG on whether you roll good statuses or not. Roll all 6? Congrats, you have an AoE nuke capable of dispatching lvl 200 Steel Path enemies with ease. Rolled anything but that? It’s a cone-shaped Rhino’s Stomp except the enemies move in an annoying matter making them more difficult to shoot. There is one good thing I can say about Koumei! She’s available very early and thanks to that, teaches all new players a very valuable lesson - when you gamble, you never win.

Seasonal death counter: 3 (+0, Subaru is on a roll!)

Poor Garfiel just can’t stop losing! Subaru had some pretty gruesome deaths but Garfiel is the one who is constantly getting the despair this season. It wasn’t enough that all the archbishops decided to show up, one of them happens to be a fucking dragon! One with ultra-speed regeneration, no less. Even the basic faceless cultists are no joke!

The teacher explained it in this panel:

Being able to call lightning requires the power to manipulate clouds to make lightning, which happens to also let you manipulate the weather somewhat. She’s been slowly drawing in the clouds and the typhoon so it arrived earlier than expected and thus goes away before the festival.