Is Fimbulwinter Coming for the RCU?

 I only just caught this, and was admittedly led to this via TVTropes' Wild Mass Guessing page for Control Resonant, but something just clicked for me:

Oh, and spoilers for some things from Control Resonant.

Spoilers Ahead:

Passing Through the Union Apartments in Silver Pines

 I find boss fights in Survival Horror kind of weird:

The structure of a survival horror game is built around resource management. Ammo and healing items, and other consumable resources (like duct tape in Silver Pines, which is used to repair your melee weapon) are all limited, and so any missed shot is obviously kind of devastating, but even choosing to fight an enemy rather than evade them means chewing through resources that you might need at a later point.

Bosses, I suppose, are those climactic moments that all the conservation was for in the first place.

But you can get into this place where, if you save your game after overcoming some challenge and hoping that you'll be able to recuperate the stuff you need for a boss, you might find yourself screwed.

One thing I really appreciated about the Silent Hill 2 remake (and presumably the original) is that you always have your melee weapon (first a plank of wood and then a steel pipe) to fall back on if you're out of ammo. You can dodge foes' attacks and swing your melee weapon to take down enemies, so there's always some recourse if you're resource-scarce.

Furthermore, I believe SH2R also cheats a little and has ammo and healing items respawn within boss arenas - while it's dangerous to go gather them while a scary monster is coming after you, it's still an out.

Silver Pines does not give you items in boss fights. At the same time, I can't complain too much because the map is very open. Unlike SH2R or RE4 (also only played the remake,) there are no points of no return, as far as I know.

I'm currently on a "dungeon," the Union Apartments, which is a condemned building that someone who knew Eddie Velvet (the objective of our quest - to find him) lived in. I'm not even totally sure that I need to be here yet, as there's tons of places in the town that I can explore, but I think I've hit a point where I don't really have the means to go elsewhere.

So, first off, I felt very dumb, because I didn't clock the central puzzle of the dungeon and found myself, having explored nearly all of it (you have to get an elevator button to reach the fourth floor, which is the reward for solving the main puzzle) I hit a point where I had no clue what I was supposed to be looking for, failing to realize that the code on the door to the room where the corpse holding the elevator button was related to stories about inhabitants of the building on a nearby corkboard.

One of the tough challenges in the game is that evading enemies can sometime be really hard to do - often, they're near things like locked doors that require you to go through your inventory and insert a key, and when you get the little interactable image of the door, this does not pause the game, so you can get attacked while trying to unlock it.

I have gotten a bit better about noticing enemies that are off to the side and can be safely ignored, but of course, exploration often compels you to check out-of-the-way corners in case there's some crucial passage or item.

Anyway, I've made two attempts on the boss of this area, and the second time I don't think I missed with any shot I had, and then I attacked with my melee weapon (still just a box-cutter - not sure if I could have gotten a better one by now) and the box-cutter broke (you do still deal some damage with a broken weapon, but far less). So, I found myself in this fight with literally nothing left to throw at the boss, and I didn't really love that feeling.

Yeah, I mean, I've now actually gotten a few survival horror games under my belt, and I don't hate the genre as much as I thought I would.

From a design perspective, I think there's an interesting question of where the pressure valves are. Silver Pines has four difficulty settings, so there's that (not sure if those do anything beyond simply reducing enemy damage and possibly their HP) but I'm curious what might be going on behind the scenes.

My understanding is that RE2's remake (and again, presumably the original) has a set, flat amount of resources in any playthrough, such that walkthroughs can tell you where every bit of ammo and healing herbs can be found - though I believe the exception to this is boss fights, where even areas of the arena you've already searched might suddenly have some more ammo. I believe SH2R will (and this might depend on difficulty) make resources spawn more the rougher a time you're having, despite the pressure valve of having a pretty decent melee weapon and a reliable dodge.

The story is still quite enigmatic: I met an NPC who seemed to accuse Walker of being a serial killer, perhaps a police officer or fellow private detective, though when Walker asked if he was under arrest, this unfriendly guy more just mocked him.

It sure feels like the monsters in the town are transformed versions of the people. While the first boss, fought in an underpass tunnel, didn't have any obvious plot identity to speak of (at least that I noticed) I believe that the second one might be the woman that Eddie had been with - we start the fight with her by turning off the faucet on an overflowing bathtub, which makes me think she might have died by suicide in there.

The degree to which Silver Pines is real is certainly a question: most of the NPCs are very strange. How did Walker get here, even?

I do hope that I can figure out how to take care of this boss. Perhaps with the scant ammo I've gotten here I might be able to break some locks and such out in town to find more resources (I've got rifle ammo, but haven't been able to get into the building with the rifle).

Battle Smith vs Wyvern

 Have we really not done this one?

While I love the concept of the Armorer, I think overall the reigning champion of most powerful Artificer subclasses is the Battle Smith. The main reason for this is the versatility of their weapon choices, which both allows you to spec into various weapon-type-focused feats as well as getting any kind of magical weapon that your DM grants you, rather than being limited to what you can replicate.

Also, while they're limited to Medium Armor, the fact of the matter is that if your Dexterity is 14 or higher (and I try to get that on any character who doesn't wear heavy armor) you'll only be a single point behind someone wearing plate armor, which, coupled with the Shield spell as one of your specialist spells, means you're going to be one of the hardest targets to actually land a hit on.

Battle Smiths also get a kind of mini-smite in Arcane Jolt that can also be used to help heal (while they're the best Artificer for pumping out single-target damage, they're also going to have a decent amount of supplementary healing. Not enough to replace a Cleric or Druid, but arguably on par or even better than most Paladins).

The Steel Defender pet is interesting: there's surely some shenanigans you can pull with them, though I'm going to be treating them largely as just a little bit of bonus damage and some protection with their reaction (the latter of which is not going to come up in my calculations here, actually).

But let's also figure out the following:

Martial characters rely a lot on getting good feats to boost their damage. But these feats typically only boost Strength or Dexterity (or your choice of each). All Artificers use Intelligence as their primary stat, with Battle Ready allowing you to use Intelligence for attack and damage rolls when wielding magic weapons. We can assume that you'll have magic weapons, because you can make them yourself with your Replicate Magic Item feature.

But do we pick up exclusively Intelligence-boosting feats (or even ASIs) at levels 4 and 8 because these improve our attack and damage with weapons, as well as our attacks with our Steel Defender, as well as our spell attack bonus and save DC? Or do we allow our Intelligence to languish for a bit in order to pick up something like Great Weapon Master, Polearm Master, or something else of that sort?

Here's my guess: the extra damage from a Great Weapon Master feat is ultimately going to be big enough that it's worth delaying capping our Intelligence. There will certainly be other ways to build this, but my gut tells me this is the best for prioritizing pure damage.

Taking this feat, we'll need to start off with a 13 in Strength, and this will put our Strength to 14. Is there some argument to be made for multiclassing into Fighter? Probably, but I'm not going to roll that way.

If we pick a background that lets us start off with a 17 in Intelligence, that will mean that we can get an Intelligence feat at level 8 (or we could get it at 4 if we're willing to wait for GWM until later) to push it to 18. Do we get two more such feats at levels 12 and 16 to cap Int before we get our Epic Boon at 19 (assuming the campaign even goes that high)? Maybe, or we could just take an ASI at that point to leave room for something else at level 16. But that's beyond the purview of this post. We should assume we're looking at an 18 Intelligence by level 10.

But what Intelligence feat are we picking?

My default is typically War Caster. It's just so good. But we do, admittedly, already have proficiency in Con saves, so it's not as crucial for protecting our concentration (though Con save proficiency and advantage on concentration saves synergize very nicely). Because Battle Smiths do not have the "Bladesinger extra attack" we're less likely to pick up cantrips like Booming Blade, though the "spell as opp attack" is certainly not limited to such cantrips.

If we're in an Eberron campaign, there are certainly some feats that tie into, like the Dragonmarked origins that can be nice (though sadly, House Lyrandar Heir as a background doesn't boost Intelligence, so we wouldn't be able to get its associated feats and get Greater Dragonmark to be able to cast Conjure Minor Elementals by 7th level. Amazing for a Monk, though) but I'm going to try to be setting-agnostic here, so we'll limit things for the time being to those feats found in the PHB and in Arcana Unleashed.

The latter is going to require a bit of thought, as I haven't yet really internalized what all the best feats are from that book. I really like the "Spell School Adept" feats, though these are of course most impressive on full casters. We also already have Shield, so that makes Abjuration Adept less exciting. Evocation Adept will give us Fireball. Conjuration Adept's boost aside from the extra spell preparations doesn't actually help Conjure Barrage, given that it helps with concentration saves, but it will give us Conjure Animals, which is actually a very good spell (it is, I believe, strictly better, or near enough, to Spirit Guardians at the same level). You know what, just because I always go War Caster, let's have some fun and pick up Conjuration Adept so we can run Conjure Animals. It might require some real flavoring to make it make sense, but it's good.

    Actually, here's my pitch: We're a gnome (I usually leave out species choice here, but this is primarily for flavor) and all of our inventions use the time-honored power of Miniature Giant Space Hamsters running on wheels. When we cast this spell, we're unleashing a swarm of Miniature Giant Space Hamsters to gnaw at our foes.

Ok, so, our feats give us Great Weapon Master at level 4 and Conjuration Adept at 8. We'll be a little spread thin with Point Buy, but we should be able to get Dex and Con both to 14 if we get a background that can give us both Intelligence and either Dex or Con, while starting off with 13 Strength (14 by level 4) but this will require us to basically dump both Charisma and Wisdom. The former isn't so bad if we have someone else in the party that can do the talking, though Wisdom is a little rough.

Next up, we're going to talk replicated items.

Simply put, we're going to, by level 10, make ourselves a +2 Maul (or Greatsword, but without weapon masteries, this is mostly arbitrary) and a Repeating Heavy Crossbow. Both weapons have the Heavy property, and will thus benefit from the damage boost of Great Weapon Master, which will be a significant chunk of damage at these middle levels. (I would for sure flavor my Heavy Crossbow as something more like a pneumatic bolt-launcher or even railgun.) That means we'll have great weapons for both melee and range, and the Repeating version of the Heavy Crossbow lets us use Extra Attack with it even without Crossbow Expert.

We'll also make a Wand of Magic Missiles, not for us, but for our Homunculus Servant. One level later, we'll instead hand them our Spell-Storing Item with Conjure Barrage loaded into it, which they can use basically every turn in combat, but given the breakpoint we've picked for these tests, we're stuck giving them the wand. We won't give them Dragon's Breath because we'll want to have concentration for Conjure Animals.

We won't be using Shining Smite, because this requires concentration. Certainly something to do if we are out of 3rd level slots, but not in our "ideal" scenario here.

Now... I think that's all we need to figure out before we start calculating damage.

Oh, one last note: while we'll have that Repeating Crossbow, the Maul is going to do more damage overall, so we'll assume we're wading into melee. That said, against a swiftly-flying Wyvern that also hits pretty damn hard with its attacks, we very well might prefer to stick to ranged attacks. But if we've allowed for all the other melee builds to not worry about that, we'll assume we are fighting in melee here.

So: Game Plan:

    Oh no.

I just re-read Conjure Animals. It's a save-for-none spell. This pretty significantly changes my intentions. Indeed, it throws a lot of this build into chaos. While a save-for-none isn't necessarily terrible, it does cut into its actual average damage per turn by a pretty wide margin.

So, not only do I think this means we're not taking Conjuration Adept as a feat, it also throws open the question of what spell we even want to concentrate on.

For feats, I think we'll just retreat back to the default of War Caster.

But for our concentration spell, I see a few potential options: we could cast Haste on ourselves (if we have an ally who hits harder with attacks, we might consider them, though I actually don't think there are many who would do more). Haste is, of course, always a risky spell given the stun that happens when it drops, but our AC will be boosted on top of its already high level (oh, by this level we can have +1 Half Plate and a Cloak of Protection) and we do have Con save proficiency. Alternatively, we could stick Dragon's Breath on our Steel Defender (though it won't be able to use it on that turn given that we also need a bonus action to command it). I'm going to say let's do Haste.

Ok, phew, with that fixed, let's actually get our game plan together.

We have our Homunculus Servant off at a safe distance with the Wand of Magic Missiles. They're just going to be firing that off at 1st level each turn, dealing 10.5 damage on average.

On turn one, we cast Haste on ourselves. We can then run up to the Wyvern (with our presumably 60-foot speed) and then use our Hasted action to attack with our Maul

    Now: bit of a sidebar here: does the Hasted action benefit from Great Weapon Master? I would argue that it does, because it is "another action," much like a Fighter gets with Action Surge, and even if it limits what actions you can take, it still does refer to it as an additional Action.

We'll thus be making one attack with our +2 Maul on turn 1, and then on turns 2 onward, we'll be making three such attacks.

If any of these crit, that will trigger GWM's Hew, allowing us to make another maul attack with our bonus action (no GWM damage bonus on this one, though the entire attack is bonus damage from that feat). If we don't crit, we use a bonus action to have our Steel Defender attack instead.

Notably, if any attack crits, we'll also expend an Arcane Jolt. We only get 4 of these per long rest, so we'll reserve these for crits only. This includes if our Steel Defender crits. I'll assume as well that we're not going to crit 4 times in a single combat, so we should be able to use this whenever we do.

And that is, I think, it, so let's get a-calculating.

Homunculus Servant: thanks to Magic Missile auto-hitting, and the Homunculus requiring no action to command, we'll just assume it's expending a charge each turn to deal average damage of a 1st level MM, which is 10.5. There are only 7 charges, but we're happy to blow through them and potentially turn it into something else with Magic Item Tinker when we run out. But yeah, assume this 10.5 average every turn.

Maul and Steel Defender:

Ok, our hit bonus is +10 (4 from Intelligence, 4 from proficiency, and 2 from the weapon's magic bonus) and the maul hits for 2d6+10 when used as part of our action. So, 17 average damage on a hit, and 7 more on a crit. Except actually, using Arcane Jolt on a crit will add 2d6, which gets doubled to 4d6 because it's a crit, meaning 14 extra damage on a crit as well, so that bonus crit damage winds up being 21 more damage.

Note that we can only do Arcane Jolt once per turn, which further incentivizes us to save it for crits. The math might get hairy thanks to that, but let's see if we can figure it out.

Turn one, we're only going to get one Maul attack. So, with a +10 to hit, we land on a 4 or higher, or an 85% hit chance. 17x85% is 14.45. Then, our 5% crit chance adds 21 more damage (with Arcane Jolt), so we're looking at an additional 1.05 extra damage (from the crit alone). So, this attack will have an average damage of 15.5.

If we crit, we'll then Hew with Great Weapon Master. This still has a +10 to hit, but only hits for 2d6+6, or 13 average, with just 7 more on a crit (by definition, we've already used Arcane Jolt). So, 85%x13 is 11.05, plus 7x5%, or .35, giving us 11.4 with the Hew attack. But this happens only 5% of the time, so it's really .57 more damage.

If we don't crit, we're going to instead command our Steel Defender to attack. This guy, though, only has a +8 to hit, so it's only a 75% hit chance. They hit for 1d8+6, or 10.5, plus an extra 4.5 on a crit, except actually it's 18.5 more on a crit because we'd be using the unused Arcane Jolt on this. So, 10.5x75% is 7.875 and 5%x18.5 is .925, so we wind up with 8.8 damage. This scenario, though, is going to happen in the 95% of the time where we don't crit with our Maul, so it's actually 8.36.

Bringing this together, we wind up on our first turn with 34.93 damage.

But that's just our first turn:

Second Turn:

Things are going to get a bit more complicated. We basically have three attacks. The first attack is actually identical to the single one we got on turn 1, so that's 15.5 on average.

Now, the second attack works the following way: We will only Arcane Jolt if we do get a crit on this attack but also didn't get a crit on the previous attack. So, while the 17x85% part of our calculation remains the same (14.45,) we now need a variable crit damage bonus. 95% of the time it's going to be that 21, while 5% of the time it'll only by 7. So, 95%x21 is 19.95 and 5%x7 is .35, meaning that the crit bonus here is now 20.3. 20.3x5% is 1.015, so our average damage for this attack is going to be 15.465 (very close).

The third attack (our Hasted action) is going to now only get the Arcane Jolt damage if it crits but the previous two attacks didn't. So, we figure that there's a 95% chance not to crit on the first attack and a 95% chance not to on the second, meaning that there's a 90.25% chance we didn't crit on those two attacks. Thus, if we do crit on the Hasted attack, we're looking at 21 extra damage 90.25% of the time and 7 extra damage 9.75% of the time. 21x90.25% is 18.95ish and 7x9.75% is .6825, so our crit damage bonus here is about 19.63. So, once again, we start with that 14.45 and toss in 19.63x5%, which is about .98, giving us average damage here of 15.43 or thereabouts.

Now, the Hew Attack is going to deal the same amount of damage if we actually get it, so, 11.4 average. But the chance we get this is much higher now, as we've had three chances to crit. 95%x95%x95% is roughly 86%, so after three attacks, that means we've got about a 14% chance to have crit on one of them. So, 11.4x14% is 1.596.

Then, that 86% that nothing crit means we'll use our Steel Defender, which deals 8.8 on average if it gets an attack, but that's now happening 86% of the time, so we're looking at 7.568. I should be consistent, make that 7.57, and the Hew attack 1.6, rounded to the hundredths' place.

So!

On turn 2 onward, let's add it all up: with the Homunculus shooting off Magic Missiles, and then our 3 or potentially 4 maul attacks, with a Steel Defender coming in should we not crit at all, we're looking at 66.07 damage each round after the first.

I think that's very respectable.

Note that the damage does drop off a lot if the Wyvern takes flight - we will need to use the Heavy Crossbow, which has a lower hit chance (Repeating Shot only gives a +1 bonus to attacks and damage,) as well as lower damage dice, and then you also don't get to do your Hew attack. However, technically speaking, you can actually give the Wand of Magic Missiles to your Steel Defender and let your Homunculus Servant make ranged attacks on its own. Its range is a pitiful 30 feet, though, so good luck on getting it close enough to actually hit the thing. Still, you have options that, say, a Barbarian is unlikely to have.

Filing Off the Serial Numbers with WoW D&D

 When it comes to D&D, I am a strong advocate of "pillaging." There's nothing you can't take from the game's official books, or third party books, or even other games to build out your campaign, as long as it works for the players at the table.

DMs, of course, are the ultimate arbiters in this matter, but I would broadly encourage you to err on the side of openness toward non-core content. That being said, I also recommend being variably tolerant of such content, depending on its proximity to the core rules. Broadly, I'd say: if it's in the PHB, you should only ban an option if it's extremely disruptive (which I don't think much is). If it's in some rules expansion book like Xanathar's, Tasha's, or Arcana Unleashed, I'd also say that players should be able to assume that they will be able to play with those options. If it's in a setting-specific books, I'd generally say... probably allow it, but review it to go over whether it truly fits, and if not, if there's a way to re-skin the option to make it work in your campaign. For example, can there be something like Dragonmarked houses even if you're not playing in Eberron? Maybe not. But could Artificers exist in your world? Almost certainly (even if you're opposed to a Steampunk/Industrial aesthetic, maybe encourage your Artificer player to flavor their creations in more of Daedelus orLeonardo di Vinci vibe - and if they're playing an Alchemist or Cartographer, you're probably fine already).

So, this brings us to the World of Warcraft book. While Azeroth could pretty easily work as a D&D campaign setting without too many changes (once you start getting into the more cosmic forces, you might have to tweak some things, like the fact that the Twisting Nether is very different from the Abyss,) the book seems largely intent on letting you really re-create WoW classes and characters, going so far as to alter core class features beyond even the prominently-explored hero class subclasses, such as the introduction of what I believe will be scaling Bear and Cat forms for Circle of the Moon Druids to better re-create how they function in WoW (quick preview of my recommendations: this could honestly fix my biggest problems with the Moon Druid, and assuming the actual scaling templates are any good, I'd heartily recommend allowing them.)

So, obviously, the book doesn't actually come out until November 17th, though as a Master-level D&D Beyond subscriber (as a DM, it's very nice to be able to share all this stuff with my players) I believe I'll be getting it earlier. Oh, it's on election day. Cool. Nothing stressful to distract me from reading through it...) I'll get access to it in a little under two weeks. Perhaps this is premature, but oh well.

The crux of this, though, is the following: What here might we be able to rip out of the walls like copper wiring to use for our own homebrew setting?

The broad answer is, basically, that it really depends.

For example, I love the Draenei in WoW. Profoundly ancient people who fled their home world after the majority of their kin accepted a deal to become demons, they spent 25,000 years - many individually, as they seem to be the longest-living peoples in the Warcraft cosmos we've come across, at least among mortals - trying to find a safe harbor to rebuild their civilization, only to barely survive the genocidal origins of the Orcish Horde before finally finding reliable allies amongst the Alliance. They are blue, which is something I've realized has defined both of my longest-running D&D characters (a Blue Dragonborn Eldritch Knight Fighter and a Triton Scribes Wizard) and is pretty strongly my favorite color. But I also think I relate to them as the descendant of people who suffered through the horrors of genocide and fled their home as refugees.

But should I just pop Draenei into a D&D setting? Would that be weird?

See, one advantage I think that fantasy RPGs have over sci-fi ones is that, with perhaps the exception of Greys/Little Green Men, there's no universal trope of a standard type of alien. Indeed, you don't tend to see these classic aliens in space operas like Star Trek or Mass Effect (RIP Bioware) because they're more associated with the more modern-set and horror-adjacent alien abduction subgenre. By the time you get to a future setting where humans are living in some kind of shared society with aliens, there's more of a demand for A: more relatable aliens and B: more originality.

Now, I'd argue that Star Trek in particular actually has a lot of very prominent alien species that exist in an almost perfect one-to-one with fantasy, with your Vulcans as elves, Romulans as dark elves, Klingons as Orcs (Draw Steel's Orcs are explicitly inspired by the Search for Spock-onward era design of Klingons with the boney ridges on their foreheads) and even the Borg as basically space zombies.

But still, I'd say that all in all, there's no standard set of sci-fi species that are as universally iconic as your elves, dwarves, gnomes, and orcs (maybe throw halflings in there, though to me those have always felt more directly taken specifically from Tolkien).

Ok, but to get us out of the weeds: The specific story of the Draenei in WoW requires, I would think, at least a pretty strong kind of anchor point for their connection to the Light (perhaps reconceived as some benevolent deity) and likely their kinship with malevolent demons (I actually think there will be an option to play as a Man'ari Eredar, which is sort of doable simply by playing a Draenei character in WoW and picking different skin and eye colors - the idea that after the Legion was defeated, some of the former demonic Eredar sought out reconciliation with their exiled kin).

But if you're using a homebrew world that mostly tries to stick to official D&D stuff, even if that includes species from other D&D-canonical settings, this might be a step too far.

Ok, but if Draenei are pretty specific, what about, say, Worgen?

Worgen are WoW's take on werewolves. They adhere to most werewolf tropes, even hailing from a dreary, rain-swept kingdom that uses actual English accents. While the Worgen first used local alchemical research, and later guidance from the Night Elf Druids whose culture had accidentally created the Worgen curse in the first place, to retain their human minds, Worgen cannot help but transform into their humanoid wolf-like hybrid form when stressed, and some simply embrace that as their true form even when there's no danger (in-game, you can separately customize your human and worgen appearance, and can swap to your human form, but if you get into combat, you automatically transform back into the worgen version).

I think this would probably be a pretty straightforward way for you to play a werewolf in another D&D setting. We, of course, also got the Lupin in Ravneloft: Horrors Within, though supposedly the Worgen will be more akin to Shifters from Eberron. Most of Eberron's original playable species are already kind of "like this kind of monster, but playable,) such as how the Changeling is a playable Doppelganger or how a Warforged is a playable Golem. In other words, I think this would be something you could easily work into any campaign world that has even a small corner of it that leans into gothic monsters. D&D werewolves aren't even controlled by the phases of the moon in the first place, so there's no need to worry about the fact that Worgen aren't either.

Now, regarding subclasses:

I think for the most part, we're going to be seeing subclasses that are built out to be pretty broadly applicable. Notably, some of the subclasses coming in the WoW book are updates to 5.0 subclasses, and from the descriptions we've gotten, they don't seem to be going out of their way to incorporate mechanics from the WoW specs that they represent. For example, WoW's Outlaw Rogue will be brought in with an updated Swashbuckler. But while Outlaw in WoW mixes the use of swords, axes, maces, and fist weapons (the other two WoW Rogue specs use daggers exclusively) with various abilities that see you pull out a flintlock pistol to shoot at your target (the pistol isn't actually an equipped item, but just a visual part of the animation for these abilities,) there's every indication that the updated Swashbuckler will simply be a tweak to the subclass that appeared in I believe SCAG and Xanathar's, so it really should not have any trouble working into a non-Azeroth campaign.

The Warrior of Mystic Brews is the update for the old Drunken Master Monk, and while it incorporates an actual brewing mechanic that does seem inspired in part by how the Brewmaster Monk in WoW works, I think that this is actually just something that brings the old subclass a bit more oomph that it needed. While purists might want a Monk who just replicates the idea of someone using Drunken Boxing martial arts techniques, the fact is that every 5.5 Monk subclass other than the Open Hand one does have some little bit of magic to it, and the "magic" here is all just mixing brews together. Honestly, I just hope that the subclass winds up better than it had been, because I loved the flavor of it.

Now, as for the original subclasses, I believe we're talking the Path of the Elements Barbarian, Discipline and Shadow Domain Clerics, Oath of the Holy Paladins, and then the "hero class" subclasses, the Oath of the Ebon Blade Paladin and Demon Hunter Ranger.

Let's put a pin in those last two.

Broadly speaking, I don't really think any of the non-hero class subclasses should pose much of a problem. Shadow Clerics will give us a nice opportunity for a darker-themed Cleric subclass, of which there aren't actually a ton of options (the Grave Cleric got a pretty substantial rework in Horrors Within that I do think unfortunately becomes a bit more of a nerf than a buff, though I don't know that it's a bad subclass if you aren't comparing it to its Xanathar's predecessor). Oath of the Holy, depending on how well-implemented it is, might actually fill a cool niche for players who knew that Paladins had inherent healing abilities, but didn't realize how the limitations on being a half-caster would make actually being able to act as a party's primary healer quite difficult (when we hit level 9 in the Wildemount game with my Wizard, we all breathed a sigh of relief now that the still-full Paladin could cast Revivify. I now carry a scroll of Gentle Repose on me at all times to make sure that if anyone goes down, we'll have enough time to get them revived). Path of the Elements will hopefully work as a kind of replacement for the Storm Herald Barbarian - a concept that was very cool but was implemented really poorly. So, here's hoping that it'll be like the Undead Warlock's upgrade over the Undying patron, or how the 5.5 Elements Monk is way better than the Way of the Four Elements.

Ok, but what about Ebon Blade and Demon Hunters?

While I think that, in WoW, Death Knights and Demon Hunters are both really iconic classes, both of which are dark antiheroes (not to say that other classes can't fit that bill, like Warlocks for example). The climactic clash at the end of Warcraft III's Frozen Throne expansion saw Warcraft's most iconic Death Knight, Arthas, fight a duel against its (well, only at the time) Demon Hunter, Illidan, so I have this kind of link between the two.

But Death Knights obviously have tons of precedence in fantasy, and in D&D in particular, with folks like Lord Soth. We've even had a subclass in the 2014 DMG, admittedly meant for NPCs rather than players (back when they expected you to stat out an NPC like a PC, which I don't think actually works well,) the Oathbreaker Paladin, which was meant to represent a kind of nascent Death Knight - someone who was on the path to becoming one.

For this reason, I suspect that the Oath of the Ebon Blade might actually be a reasonable 5.5 update to the Oathbreaker Paladin, only taking it further and actually making them a true death knight. Funnily enough, if we get our "villain" book sometime next year, we'll also have the Death Knight feat path, and I wonder to what degree these will be redundant for one another or fit perfectly together. But the point is, they're already looking for ways to let you be a Death Knight in mainline D&D anyway.

Demon Hunters, though... are much more specific to WoW.

To be clear, there are other things you could call a Demon Hunter that would pretty easily slide into any D&D campaign. Funnily enough, Blizzard themselves made a Demon Hunter class in Diablo III that looks nothing like a WoW Demon Hunter.

WoW's Demon Hunters are not just gothic Van Helsing types, but instead are tattooed elves (still only elves can be them, though I don't know that there's any lore reason telling you that this is a matter of physiology) who have absorbed the essence of a demon into their bodies, causing them to grow horns, and often scaly skin. They also ritually gouge out their own eyes, the fel energy (or, recently, void energy) within them giving them sight beyond sight. Also, and I don't know how and if they are going to implement these in-game, they fight with special weapons called Warglaives, which are giant two-ended slashing blades that they dual-wield and somehow avoid slicing their own legs off (truly one of the great impractical fantasy weapons, but they look cool as hell).

Now, unlike Death Knights, there's nothing quite like a Demon Hunter in just about any other bit of fantasy (though bizarrely, they have a lot of parallels with Daredevil from Marvel Comics, even down to Matt Murdock wrestling with Catholic guilt and the more metaphorical idea that he's got a demon within him).

Thus, it might be a little less simple to implement these into your game world. I will say, though, that we do have monster-hunting guilds, and while Blood Hunters are specific to Critical Role's Exandria setting, they potentially occupy a very similar niche, so making Demon Hunters a branch of the Claret Orders could work. But that's fitting it just into one other setting that might not be where your campaign takes place.

While we might say that at the end of the day, a Demon Hunter in D&D is going to be a type of Ranger, we don't yet know to what extent the subclass will really change how the class works. One thing we do know is that they'll gain I believe always-on blindsight, and to a greater radius than the Blind Fighting fighting style. But, for example, I don't know if the Demon Hunter version of the Ranger will preclude the use of ranged weapons (even the newly-added Devourer specialization in WoW is more of a spellcasting spec - which is likely why you'll be able to take Warlock cantrips as a fighting style option.)

Still, as far as I can tell, the subclasses aren't going out of their way to namedrop specific WoW lore proper nouns. I doubt that the Shadow Domain is going to have abilities tied specifically to the Old Gods, even though the WoW version does have various talents called Idol of Yogg-Saron or Idol of C'thun. Really, that's something I'm eager to see: the extent to which the character options come ready to be incorporated into other campaign settings.

Still, my guess is that, especially given how much WoW leans into the same fantasy tropes that D&D does (some of those tropes, of course, coming from D&D in the first place) I doubt it will be very hard to use the vast majority of what we get in the book. And hey, the book's already going to be asking a bit of re-skinning to work in Azeroth. Liches, for example, are a thing in WoW, but they've got a pretty specific look of being a big (like 15-foot tall) floating skeleton often in vaguely Pharaonic garb (there are some who wear different robes, but the giant floating skeleton thing is pretty universal). Also, WoW's Wyverns are very clearly Manticores, so you'll want to just kind of make that adjustment.

The Death of Bioware and Our Corporate Hellscape

 I'm really just sick of this shit.

EA, never a bastion of artistic integrity, to be fair, was bought out and on the chopping block is the storied Bioware studio, which gave us the first two Baldur's Gate games, as well as the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games.

Notably in that latter case, the studio had quite famously been working on a fifth game in the Mass Effect series, one that intended to return to the Milky Way and pick up the story of Commander Shepherd, somehow... a task I don't really know how they were going do given that I think most of the endings you might get with the third Mass Effect game leave Shepherd decidedly not alive anymore (or at least not alive in the same way).

But evidently, there was some kind of a plan. And while I'm certain there would have been a whole online discourse with a lot of really bad takes (and probably also some well-thought out criticisms) over the manner in which they cracked and stuffed the Mass Effect story into a shape that allowed it to continue on, I think we need to reckon instead with a broader issue.

Whatever flaws the studio's games might have, what made Bioware beloved was its ability to put really narrative- and character-focused games out there. I never played the Dragon Age games (maybe the first like hour of Origins) but I'm given to understand that people have very similar feelings about it to Mass Effect. And in Mass Effect, the characters are so compelling that you feel like you know people like Garrus Vakarian or Tali Zora vas'Normandy. The stakes of the series were apocalyptic, but all the while, the threads that held it all together were the relationships you could build between Shepherd and his or her crew of heroes.

But there we go: money people decided they wanted a big company in an industry that is supposedly more profitable than Hollywood (though while I might have said ten or fifteen years ago that was because of explosive growth and popularity, now I feel like it's because Hollywood has been contracting faster than gaming).

Indeed, Hollywood just saw the parent company of one of its oldest, classic studios gobble up another of its oldest, classic studios, with a strong implication that a lot of things people love will stop being made in the interest of cost-saving corporate consolidation. Here, we're seeing the same sort of move - EA has announced that they'll be focusing instead on annual sports releases, you know, those games that are basically the same thing every year but with updated rosters of real-world players.

The defense that people have of the capitalist system is that it enables people to build the businesses they want to run and for customers to freely choose from a wide variety of goods and services. But we're really seeing in our modern day how that's just not true. Corporate consolidation robs us of the choices we might have had. Guys, I have zero interest whatsoever in buying FIFA 2027 so I can watch little digital guys on my screen play a sport that I don't watch when it's real human beings. If you like those games... fine, great. I love that they make them for you to play. But if a company that once represented a huge, broad array of video game genres is now narrowing its focus in the name of profitability, we're really losing out. And the system is not working the way that we were told it would.

Aln'Hara, Azeroth, and the Rift of Aln

 There are times when a piece of media so heavily implies something that you can find yourself forgetting that it hasn't technically been explicitly established.

Back in Legion, or really when World of Warcraft Chronicle Volume One was published, the notion that Azeroth was a living planet with a soul became established canon. But while there's certainly tons of stuff that Blizzard has added in and retconned (I'm deeply skeptical that the Jailer was even conceived of before the development of the Shadowlands expansion actually began) I think this idea of a Worldsoul was probably there fairly early on. When we defeat Yogg-Saron in Ulduar, back in patch 3.1, the Old God refers to the world as "this miserable little seedling," clearly implying that there's something living within that can grow into something new. Now, I don't want to read too much into that: it's not obvious that at that point they had the notion that the Old Gods were sent to Azeroth for the purpose of corrupting the Worldsoul, and the relationship between Fel and Void (or, really, the lack thereof) probably took a while to develop, which is why for so long Voidwalkers were one of the staple demons we encountered in WoW, only seeing (at least the ones that aren't Warlock minions) them reclassified as Aberrations quite recently (maybe as late as War Within? I could be wrong there). In a similar way, I imagine that it wasn't really until Chronicle came out (or rather, until they started hashing out Chronicle) that they even really hammered out the notion that Necromancy and more broadly Death Magic was its own fully separate thing in contrast with Shadow and Fel magic.

Indeed, this complicates the narrative of the creation of the Lich King: as established, Kil'jaeden originally bound Ner'zhul's soul to the armor like Alphonse Elric to make the first Lich King, and if I recall correctly, Frostmourne's origins were slightly hazy, but was likely sealed up in the Frozen Throne (or rather, the crystal that would come to be called that) along with Ner'zhul. Thus, the Scourge's necromantic magic was assumed to be a kind of derivation of the Legion's demonic fel magic. (Though I also believe that there was some dubiously canonical notion that necromancy was actually a branch of Arcane magic). Given how much I love the Scourge as bad guys, I was actually really appreciative that they were fleshed out as representing their own separate cosmic force, but the messiness of the Shadowlands expansion undercut some of this appreciation (including a total lack of even one throwaway line to explain how Kil'jaeden learned of the Helm of Domination and Frostmourne, and how he acquired it. Literally just one little reference to the demon lord investigating obscure tomes of necromancy and whispers of a shadowy realm beyond the physical would have done it for me.

(Actually, sorry, gotta rant here: I wish the Shadowlands had been something more similar to D&D's Shadowfell, a kind of dark and macabre reflection of the real world. I would have been totally fine with an entire expansion that had the gothic and spooky aesthetic of Revendreth. Mind you, WoW's take on Planescape would have also been very cool, but I just think that the way the Shadowlands fits into WoW's cosmos is just kind of unsatisfying. Are we to understand that all those people faithful to the Light went off to an afterlife that didn't really do that?)

But let's pull things back and talk about the post-Shadowlands lore, given that there's a strong chance that at least some of that stuff is going to get retconned away given its unpopularity (there are aspects of it that I do really like, to be clear, and I'm not as much of a Shadowlands hater as some people are. Warlords of Draenor remains the worst expansion).

Ok, so, we know that Azeroth has a soul, this Worldsoul that is the real living, conscious, and seemingly benevolent heart. There's something special about it that makes it the envy of all the other cosmic forces in the universe, with documented cases of the Burning Legion trying to destroy it, the Old Gods (and now Xal'atath) trying to corrupt it, and the Jailer trying to dominate/seize it. Indeed, the actions of the Pantheon actually follow a similar pattern - heavily changing Azeroth in an apparent attempt to ensure that the Worldsoul is eventually born as a fellow Titan dedicated to the Ordering of he cosmos.

Now, to back up: in Chronicle, it's flat-out stated that what a Worldsoul is is a kind of fetal Titan - that it is natural and expected that once its long gestation is completed, it will emerge as a Titan. Aman'thul is depicted, along with the rest of the Pantheon minus Sargeras, as unambiguously benevolent in his intentions.

But not to whitewash things here: our first real exposure to anything Titan-related was Uldaman, where we fought Titan creations, including Archaedas as the final boss. While this puts us into an antagonistic relation with him, to be fair, I'd argue this was a bit more of us barging in and killing him for no really good reason. But later, we saw how the Reorigination protocols callously threatened to wipe out every living thing on the surface of Azeroth during the Ulduar raid. Again, this was probably a really serious "last ditch-contingency" plan that you could forgive perhaps if the assumption would be that the alternative to setting it off would be the reestablishment of the Black Empire. We did also see how Titanforged peoples were not necessarily benevolent: the Mogu were brutal tyrants over Pandaria, and while they were clearly going against "programming," and turned against Ra-Den, it shows that the Titans' works didn't always mean the best for everyone on Azeroth.

But it really wasn't until Dragonflight - which is the first expansion of the really "modern" era of WoW - that the benevolence of the Titans was truly put into question. There's significant implication that the waters that feed the Ruby Life Pools carry with them a kind of magical indoctrination, ensuring not only that dragons undergo the physiological change from their original proto-drake bodies, but that they are inclined to uphold the Titans' vision for what Azeroth ought to be. This is the real crux of the Primal Incarnates' fight against the Aspects, the Incarnates viewing this reinforced allegiance as a corruption not unlike the Curse of Flesh from the Old Gods (the Curse of Flesh technically being more like a computer virus entered into the Titan creation forges. Interestingly, the Orcs are also flesh-and-blood despite descending from a Titanic creation, though that process and history was wildly different. Hey, do the Orcs know that they're more closely related to humans, dwarves, and gnomes than you'd expect for creatures from another planet?)

In the Emerald Dream, we find some record (I think a book of some sort written by dragons) that suggests that Aman'thul was opposed to incorporating the power of Life into their creations, fearing the lack of control from some other primal magic, though I also believe the Titans are actually quite comfortable wielding the Light.

And Aman'thul really does become this kind of centerpiece of doubt as to the Titans' ultimate motives. He is the oldest of the Pantheon, and in the mythical ancient history, once he was born, he went around and nurtured other Worldsouls until they were born as Titans, collecting this family as he did. But were they bound to be born similar to him? Or did Aman'thul help to shape them, creating Titanforged facilities and servitors on these worlds to cause them to be born as Titans and not some other thing? Is what it means to be a Titan something that Aman'thul invented as a reflection of himself?

I'll note that this might not be inherently a bad thing, but it is an act of will upon the cosmos that might have precluded other possibilities. Had there not been this intervention, might Khaz'goroth, Norgannon, Golganneth, Eonar, Aggramar, and even Sargeras been profoundly different kinds of beings?

We're told that, to begin with, Azeroth was a world of elemental chaos. Because the Worldsoul was so much more powerful than those of other worlds, the kind of fifth element (of six, actually) known as Spirit, which binds and balances the four classical elements to work in harmony, was scarce, most of it going to feed the voracious Worldsoul, and thus causing the four elements to clash in endless conflict. (Notably, Draenor didn't have a Worldsoul at all, which allowed there to be an abundance of Spirit, and for that reason, the elements on Draenor are very cooperative, its four equivalents to the Elemental Lords just chilling peacefully together in Nagrand. No wonder Shamanism came easily to the Orcs). I will say that I wonder what relationship, if any, the Primal Incarnates had with the Elemental Lords. Each of the Incarnate represented one of the classical four elements, like the Lords. But did Raszageth have a particular relationship with Al'Akir? We do see Fyrrak allied with Smolderon (the heir to Ragnaros that Shamans anointed as the new Firelord in Legion. Guess we gotta find another one).

Anyway, the elemental chaos gets taken over by the Old Gods (another group of four, though no obvious elemental theming there. I do feel like sets of four is a really common motif in WoW for whatever reason,) who force the elementals to fight in their endless wars (the elementals were doing that anyway, but maybe didn't love having these new masters) while they build their Black Empire.

This is when the Pantheon finds Azeroth, and decides to remove, and then when that doesn't work, simply contain, the Old Gods, crafting the Titanforged to destroy the Black Empire and the Manifold to repair the damage but also set Azeroth on the path to Titanhood.

Now, we finally get to what I was referring to at the start of this post:

It would seem that Harandar is the location where the Worldsoul originally sat. Harandar is a place of lush life, most of which is plants (even the dinosaurs and birds).

Now, there's a funny little question of continuity here: Harandar is where the roots of the World Trees all converge, somewhere deep below the surface of the planet (is it meant to be in its core? If so, Azeroth's geological structure is very different from Earth's, because that deep you'd be in a giant sphere of metal). The roots all kind of converge to form a cradle where the goddess Aln'hara once rested, long ago.

Here, the super-heavy implication is that Aln'hara is the Haranir name for the Worldsoul of Azeroth. There's a lot of evidence to support this. The Haranir experience of receiving visions from the goddess looks very similar to the way that the Worldsoul contacts others on Azeroth. Furthermore, the Aln Dust that we must gather to suppress the overpowering psychic voice of the goddess has a blue-and-gold color scheme identical to the color of Azerite that we encountered in Battle for Azeroth - again, I think the only reasonable conclusion we can draw is that Aln Dust is like, powdered Azerite (perhaps a different kind of Azerite, but from the same source. We can also presume that the special water from the Well of Eternity that Ilildan collected before the Sundering, and which served as the source for both the water that feeds Nordrassil and the Sunwell, was likely liquid Azerite or perhaps some kind of Azerite solution).

But here's where the continuity gets funny: my understanding is that Nordrassil was the first World Tree, and it was planted at the end of the War of the Ancients - and while that is, yes, long ago, it's still relatively recent compared to the Ordering of Azeroth, when Aln'hara/the Worldsoul was relocated to the Worldcore. Indeed, Teldrassil, itself was only a decade or two old when it was burned, created specifically to be a replacement for Nordrassil after the damage it took in the defeat of Archimonde. But likewise, Vordrassil was a project of Fandral Staghelm, when he was acting as the Night Elves' archdruid while Malfurion slept in the Emerald Dream (remember when he was one of the two Night Elf racial leaders? No? Man, I'm old,) which certainly had to happen post-War of the Ancients.

In other words, what roots actually made the cradle? Were there older World Trees that have been forgotten or lost? Were these actually the roots of G'hanir, the mother tree, from whom the other world trees were, like, graftings? G'hanir exists within the Emerald Dream, but it doesn't seem that hard for me to imagine that its roots reach out into the physical world to cradle the Worldsoul.

Next, I want to talk about the Rift of Aln.

When the name "Rift of Aln" was first introduced (I can't remember where, but it was at least part of the lore by Legion, though I think it might have been mentioned as early as Vanilla,) it was simply known to be the part of the Emerald Dream that was where the Nightmare was strongest, perhaps its origin point. The Rift of Aln is where we fight Xavius in the Emerald Nightmare raid, beyond which we find the "heart of the dream."

My assumption was that the Rift was, unlike most of the locations we saw in the Dream, not the counterpart to any location in the physical world, but a rift in the fabric of the Emerald Dream. Its vague, misty form when we face Xavius (kind of a grey void other than a lattice-like pattern above us, which to be fair, doesn't not look like the goddess' cradle in Harandar).

So I was kind of surprised when I did the quests in Harandar and found that there was, in fact, a real place of the same name on the physical plane. The Rift of Aln in Harandar looks very different, though given how empty a void the one from the raid is, it'd kind of have to be.

Now, the "Aln" part of the name makes sense: it's related to Aln'hara (I'm sure this was arrived at backwards, with the name Aln'hara created to incorporate Aln into it, and Hara linking her to the Haranir). But I also think that the Rift of Aln might actually start to give us some clues as to the nature of Azeroth/Aln'hara's unique powers that have made everyone so eager to claim her as one of their own.

The Rift of Aln is filled with weird kind of dream-creatures, beings imagined into existence by the Worldsoul. Even though she's been away from Harandar for a profoundly long time, this lingering echo of her dreams remains. And these dreams seem to be beings of great power - the Haranir who go there have to be ritually severed from their psychic connection with the Worldsoul so as not to have her lingering psychic dream-energy overwhelm their minds and drive them to madness - a madness nor born, I think, out of any malevolent intent, but just a being so beyond mortal comprehension that getting a direct feed of her thoughts would be like filling a water balloon with a fire hose.

Obviously, it's hard to gauge via game mechanics how powerful these monsters are compared to these other monsters, especially with level scaling, but we do have one pretty important example:

Ula'tek.

See, in the distant-past prologue during the quests that led us into the 12.1 content, we find that the Amani shaman, Nek'zali who summoned Ula'tek with dark, sacrificial magic says she is pulling this creature from a "Rift in the world," which to me suggests she's conjuring the kaiju-like hydra from the Rift of Aln.

Is it possible, then, that Ula'tek is, in fact, some kind of dream-creation of Aln'hara's? Ula'tek's creation may not have even been intentional - just some kind of psychic manifestation of a weird monster born out of this vast, incomprehensible mind. Was Ula'tek always intended to protect Azeroth? Or was she actually some kind of nightmare? A primordial embodiment of viciousness and terror?

Perhaps Nek'zali's ritual didn't just teleport Ula'tek from the Rift of Aln to the Coiled Isle, but might have actually given physical form to this nightmare of the goddess.

Now, tying this back together:

My belief is that Tyr's flight to what is now Lordaeron happened before the Sundering, and actually a big part of that is because of Kith'ix, whose downfall led to the rise of the Amani Empire. And generally speaking, I think that the major Troll Empires all pre-dated the Night Elf empire that would dominate ancient Kalimdor until the Sundering. (This does also mean that Azeroth's modern humans have been around longer than ten thousand years. It would be weird for such a widespread species on Azeroth to have literally not existed before many player characters in WoW were born. My Draenei Death Knight is a minimum of 25k, and don't give me any damn "space travel time dilation" stuff. The Draenei make the Night Elves look short-lived, and that is a bit of canon I will never let them take away).

So, timing-wise, we know that Ula'tek was dreamt up by the Worldsoul long ago. Maybe it was even before the Ordering, given that we don't know if the Worldsoul's dreams continue to manifest in the Rift of Aln (and I'd guess not, as I assume that the reason that location in particular is where these manifestations arise is because of its proximity to the Worldsoul's original location).

And perhaps this is the power that makes Aln'hara/Azeroth so unparalleled: this ability to dream into existence extremely powerful things might not really have precedence. Even unconsciously, Azeroth can will things into existence.

Ok, last major topic: dreams.

Azeroth's dreams manifest in the Rift of Aln. The Rift of Aln within the Emerald Dream is the core of the Nightmare, but it's also seemingly the passageway into the Heart of the Dream, where Malfurion takes us at the end of the raid.

The Nightmare itself is relatively recent - it began with the planting of Vordrassil in Northrend (the massive fallen tree in Grizzly Hills,) as a means attempted by Fandral Staghelm to seal off some of Yogg-Saron's leaking corruption. That backfired by instead allowing the Old God corruption into the dream via the tree. (I'm not going to get into why N'zoth wound up feeling more associated with the Nightmare than Yogg-Saron, because I honestly don't have much of an explanation for that).

But it seems that the association between the Rift of Aln and both dreams and nightmares (obviously both being essentially the same thing) dates back long before its association with the Emerald Nightmare.

Instead, what I would guess, is that the Rift of Aln, and Azeroth's dreams, are the basis for the Emerald Dream itself. While there's some credit claimed by the Titanforged Keepers, Freya especially, it was always left open that the Dream wasn't created by Freya so much as it may have been simply discovered by her. The origin, I would think, is actually the Worldsoul.

Which... I don't think is even very controversial a statement. But I think we're seeing these loosely-connected ideas tied together more firmly. It also, I think, makes the strategy of the Old Gods to corrupt the Dream make more sense: if the Emerald Dream is something of a direct path into Azeroth's very mind, then it's a great avenue to introduce your corruption to the world on a psychic level.

I think this might actually give us an answer to the origins of Ula'tek, but it also buttons a few things up in a way that actually makes decent sense.

Again, technically the game has never outright stated that Aln'hara is the Worldsoul of Azeroth. But, like... there's no way it isn't, right?

A Guide to Control Resonant's Combat

 Having beaten the game a while back, I've now been watching various videos and podcasts and such talking about Remedy's Control Resonant, sequel to 2019's Control and third official (and fourth actual, at least until/unless Max Payne and Quantum Break are somehow rescued from IP-rights hell and worked into it) game in the larger Remedy Connected Universe.

One of the things that surprised me was complaints about the combat feeling slow because of spongey foes. Now, certainly the big Resonant bosses have hefty health pools (and while I found the fight to be a fantastic spectacle, I do understand complaints about The Dancer's fairly trivial first phase feeling like an annoying thing to have to repeat to get to the really challenging second phase. I guess a decade of FromSoft games has made me more tolerant of such things. I didn't even known you could skip cutscenes in Bloodborne on my first playthrough, so I watched the mid-fight cutscene in Ludwig the Accursed/Ludwig the Holy Blade in its entirety about thirty times before I got him down. At least the music cue that follows is perhaps the most glorious bit of music design in all of gaming).

But fighting the Hiss, Mold, and... third, spoiler faction that comes later out in Manhattan, I honestly sometimes felt like the fights were over too soon, so this complaint about enemies lasting too long kind of baffled me.

The game lets you tweak its difficulty through numerous levers, giving you the option to change enemy health amounts, how much damage Dylan puts out, how much damage foes deal, etc. I didn't touch these, trusting Remedy to give me the intended experience. I did hit a point toward the end of the game where I was barely ever dying (indeed, by about a third of the way in, I probably only died to non-boss foes maybe three times) so if anything, I could have turned the difficulty up, but I didn't feel the need to.

So, what is my advice?

Let's start with the basics: rules that some players don't seem to have gleaned, but are right there in the game's UI if you pay attention.

First off: get every upgrade you can for the Aberrant, even with forms that you don't use. Every upgrade you get will increase the overall damage and Falter that the Aberrant deals, so ideally by the time you finish the game, you should have nearly every form's tree filled out. The Primary forms will give you a larger boost, so unless you really want to get more of a secondary form or combo finisher (for example, I used Crush, the massive hammer for my main secondary form, but invested heavily in the Drill one because Mold enemies are resistant to Crush's damage, so I would have an option to switch to) the first place to put upgrades for unused forms is in Primary. By the end of the game I had all three Primary and Secondary forms fully upgraded, and I think two combo finishers while the others had all but their final or penultimate upgrades. I suspect that if you really scour the world for absolutely every resource you can get, you can probably get all of these upgrades, but more realistically, you'll just have a few more to grab in NG+.

Second off: managing your Power is key. Your Power meter actually works similarly to how Jesse's did in the first game, as well as the Service Weapon's ammo, which is that if you fully deplete it, it takes longer to start recharging. Now, unlike in the first game, where the recharge on your Power simply took time, you'll now get more of it back by attacking foes. But just as you should try not to run out of Power, you'll also want to make sure you're using it. Combat Abilities (the magic powers you get off of the Resonant bosses, with the exception of the last one, whose thing works differently) can be very good for dealing damage and Falter, and so if you ignore these and just use your weapon attacks, you're leaving a ton of damage output on the table. Try to make sure you don't "cap" your power in combat, or if you do, be sure to start using it ASAP, even as you let off the gas once you see that you're getting close to running out.

Now, what powers you actually take can vary widely depending on your choices on your run of the game. Personally, I found that the Ignite power was really strong, and also sort of the most straightforward to manage, as it's basically a buff you put on yourself, causing your attacks to deal fire damage and build up the burn status effect on foes, while slowly draining your power. Just activating that when combat starts and then turning it off when you're about to run out of power (something you can do even in the middle of an execution animation, which is a great time to do so because that's when your damage output no longer matters). But combat abilities in general are going to be pretty powerful, which is why you have a resource to manage with them.

Ok, now, beyond these bits of "here's what the game did actually tell you, but you might have missed" things, let me talk about strategy.

Executions are the best way to make it through combat, so building up Falter key priority. The reason is that the first talent point you get, you must invest in Dominance, which gives you a brief buff after executing a foe that wildly, massively increases the damage you deal as well as the health resources that enemies drop. Not only does an execution mean the enemy you're fighting is dead, but this buff will let you tear through its buddies. Thus, I will start a fight by prioritizing Falter build-up rather than raw damage.

How do we do that? Well, Primary form attacks don't actually build any Falter on their own. Thus, we have a couple things we'll want to do either instead or along with them. We can just use our Secondary forms, making heavy attacks. Ironically, this might wind up putting out too much damage and kill our foes before we can actually execute them, though it depends on the enemy. Combo Finishers, depending on which ones you get, can also deal a lot of Falter to foes. In my experience, though, a combination of heavy attacks and combat abilities tends to be the best option for filling that yellow bar asap.

Dominance, though, only buffs secondary attacks by 50%, while it buffs primary form attacks by 100%. Thus, once you get the buff (you'll hear the Board do its weird belch/cheer/whatever sound it's making) you want to spend those couple of seconds whacking all nearby enemies with your primary attacks (I picked the Glaive as my first primary form and mostly stuck to it, meaning I could often hit several drones and even often multiple heavies with these super-charged attacks).

Now, who do we go for?

While I don't know if this was the intended combat rhythm, I found that ignoring Drones and just charging straight for the Heavies wound up being a very effective strategy. Drones are annoying, but as long as you're diligent about dodging incoming attacks and moving fast, they're minor enough that you can avoid them. Instead, once you execute a Heavy foe, swiftly killing nearby Drones with Dominance will not only go very quickly but also give you a lot of healing resources.

You need to kill the Heavies to actually bring a fight to an end, as Drones will endlessly respawn otherwise, so it's most efficient to just take them down ASAP and then clean up the Drones afterward. If you find yourself low on health, you can take out some Drones to get a bit of healing, but I really think going straight for the big guys is your best call.

Now, some specific suggestions: I took the Uppercut Surge combo finisher as my first, and this wound up being a strong choice. You can more or less keep a foe stun-locked by spamming your attacks with this, and because you and the foe are launched into the air, it becomes harder for other enemies to hit you while you're doing it. By late-game, it also does pretty enormous Falter to the foe, which is what we're trying to do. It's not as ideal for bosses, though, which tend to be immune to this sort of stunning or even forced movement, so you might want to pick up something a little more focused on just damage output (bosses can take Falter, but filling the meter just gives you a brief window of bonus damage, which is something I think I only ever accomplished on the final Resonant).

My last little bit of advice is that, while you get a clear benefit from investing in multiple Aberrant forms, it's also good to change up your loadout for the situation at hand. You can literally do this mid-combat, as long as you don't pause while in the middle of an actual weapon swing (sometimes you have to wait a second or two after for the game to decide you're finished). For example, my default was to go with Glaive, Crush, and Spin Edge, but I'd swap Crush out for Drill when fighting Mold and swap Glaive out for Strike and Spin Edge for Wide Edge when fighting bosses (and then also kind of went back to Uppercut Surge in general when I realized how much Falter it did in comparison).

Likewise, swapping Artifacts can be very helpful depending on your situation, so try to craft as many of these as you can.

Playing this way, I found my experience as Dylan Faden to really reflect the awesome power he has in-story, and no combat felt like it dragged on too long.