jstout

Dear SassyBrat: As you now well know, you mess with the bull, you get the horns. Damn, that night vision scope on the heavy sniper is awesome. Works great during the daytime. It turns everything else dark blue while leaving people (NPCs and players) lit up in fire orange. Find the orange one with the name above their heads, and execute. Ask SassyBrat.

I ran the Architect on bronze, but I suck at soloing. I scored I think 25 points, so I Googled best character for tech challenges, it says Krogan Engineer. OK. Gawd, how he sucks. Never agayn. I put him on The List.

Screw the Krogan Engineer and screw the Tech Challenge. Life is way, way, way too short.

The team sticking together during hacks is a magnet for enemies, though, at a time when you want to get the thing over with without dealing with a bunch of resistance. Even when I'm not playing a cloaking character, we'll tend to spread out a touch so we can intercept anything trying to come into the hack from a little farther off before it actually gets there. If something makes it through, then one person is in the hack, of course, to deal with it or the outside person simply takes a few steps back inside and clears the hack again. I had 94,000 credits last night and decided I wanted one more disappointment pack before bed, so I played a gold with three randoms. Went fine. So after it was over, I got some kind of server error on the loading screen and got screwed out of my pay. Of course, I still had to replace the two revives I used. Fuckin' game.

If you have someone who can cloak, you're playing hacks wrong. Let the person who can cloak handle it while the rest of the team stays far away, drawing the heat off the hack area. Watch the progress bar, and if the hacker looks swamped, go help.

On playing by myself for the first time in a while, and it's damn hard to find teammates. It took me about 10 minutes to find a second for a silver strike team. Once you start, you can generally find people to join, but I wasn't looking forward to trying to solo a silver Remnant strike team. So I waited and waited. That silver strike team was the first time in days I felt like I was operating at a decent level. Teammates were kinda spongy, I was saving them and taking out Destroyers and doing my thing. I usually feel about a step off, due to rust. I'm gonna have to edit this post in a few minutes to liveblog my disappointment pack. I will get the Human Juggernaut X, that's a virtual guarantee. Also guaranteed is the rest of the pack will be worthless, except for maybe an RPG. EDIT: Sure enough: Human Juggernaut X (fine) Talon Bulwark IX (won't use it, don't care) Biotic Power Amp II (don't really use biotic characters) Experience Enhancer I (yawn) First Aid pack. So I got an upgrade for a character I sorta like and a first aid pack for 100,000 credits. That's better than I usually do. DOUBLE EDIT: Just had my funniest experience playing this game yet. Daily challenge map was Firebase Zero, so I put it on that map, Gold Outlaw. Guy with the name "BronxBorn" joins. Given his name, what happened next will hardly surprise you. In his best cliche New Yawk accent, he calls me a pussy and a fucking fag over the game chat for changing the map from "Random" to "Firebase Zero" after getting him on board, and that's a pussy map, etc. Problem was, I needed it for my daily, so it was on Zero the whole time. So he leaves. Whatever. Me and another guy starts. We get a third, a guy who was AFK the entire fucking game. We get a fourth - BronxBorn. Dr. Stout immediately puts him on the DNR list. So he proceeds to not surprise me at all by getting killed 2200 times and taking the only other guy's time to revive him while I ignored him. Meanwhile, I'm having a tough time and have used all but 1 revive by the middle of wave 5. Ut oh. So now I have to count on them to revive me. I die, sit there, and ol' Bronx Boy revives me. So I take him off the list. Of course, I ended up dying with seconds left in extraction and not being able to revive after I used my last one when no one could get to me.

We finally got a decent teammate right at the very end, a low-level Avenger who could pop the Black Widow. We could've easily done it with three of us, but having someone else's name to laugh at is always fun. Playing Bronze is almost relaxing. Oh yeah, it was always entertaining to watch the lowbies constantly revive. We'd be two steps away from them with absolutely nothing to do but revive them, and they'd revive themselves. Gotta be stingier than that, given the situation. Here these guys were with 400 APEX ratings and the lowest one of us is almost at 21,000, and we're like "play ball, Foxy. Just stand back and watch the show. We got this shit."

Mass Effect: Andromeda trade-in credit: "Sir, you owe us $3 for taking that one."

Fortify should be turn it on, forget it (until killed), not something turned off and on as an offensive weapon. I do think there's a Platinum-level spec out there, but I'm not sure what it is. When you get the Avenger leveled up and get the gameplay down, Gold becomes kinda routine, so a high APEX is no big deal. Plus there's less competition. I kept meaning to go on last night and peer into the juggernaut further, but I got engrossed in slime ranching. I also wanna re-spec the Avenger for Platinum (less emphasis on melee, more on guns), 'cause all that warping around meleeing will get you in trouble. Gotta stay stationary more. Gotta pick your spots more carefully.

Turning off Fortify to trigger a combo seems backward. It also sucks that two of the Level 5 powers help you with that hovering, firing crap while providing you with something kinda useful. The 1.5 seconds of invinciblity is fairly useless, and the ramping bonuses with the armor are so hard to get going and keep going. More thought needed.

Kinda rough finding teammates last night. That'll teach me for finishing Slime Rancher. Generally, I had to start 1-2 men down and wait on people to join in. Got the Juggernaut up to IV-20. He's been in every reserves pack I've bought since he came out. I know have all my ultra-rares at at least X, so I can start getting those again. Juggernaut is hard to spec out - several of the A-B choices are both bad, honestly. I don't really care for any build I've seen on the Internet, either. Bronze and Silver are fun but don't pay shit. Gold pays better, but feels like it takes forever.

Wouldn't the WWE having an organized strength coach be an argument against the "independent contractors" thing? Maybe they have them now, but I think the WWE no-brainer they've missed is not having tour buses for the talent. Put them on buses like they're Bon Jovi and they can rest on the bus to the next town. That also pokes holes in the independent contractors thing, though. Crossfit's "dangerosity" is that they do these Olympic lifts to muscle failure. Olympic lifts require a precise amount of form or you can fuck yourself up. It's hard to have form when you've lifted a barbell over your head 20 times as fast as you can. If they did, say, dumbbell curls to failure, then you just drop the dumbbell, no big deal. If you're doing an overhead press and fail, you have a bar full of weights over your head that you can no longer lift. Best-case scenario involves you messing up your shoulder.

I think that if leveled up and specced right, the Juggernaut could be a viable platinum character. Someone else tell me how that goes

I don't give a wet damn to earn money anymore, and every player beats my ass with the marksman rifle and RPGs when I try to scrap. So I just kinda drive around or fly around pointlessly.

They had to have toned it down. Got the new character and played one game with him. He's solid. Robert and I couldn't get four for a bronze (the challenge level) on the challenge map. We got a fourth on wave 7. Bless this game's heart.

Actually, they can adjust character stats (damage numbers, etc.), just not make fixes. And I'm still ready to go if wanted by anybody, but as you saw again, constantly fooling with teams of randoms is a pain in the ass.

Some people on Reddit were able to finish it, but most weren't. PC players were especially unlucky. The Celebration Pack is the same as a $100,000 Premium Pack. A couple of people said you don't get the pack if you send a strike team to do the mission. It's like they're running people off purposefully.

Aqua is a notoriously buggy map anyway. I may actually have to see this in action. They won't patch it - no more patches. The best they can do is take it down.

I swear to God, at one point today while flying around that big bomber, I said to myself "I can't fly this thing. Dammit, where's Dan?" I knew before I bought the hanger that I wouldn't be doing it much at all. I just wanted to see its deal. One of the thousands of previous glitches has left me with plenty to blow on stupid crap.

It's kinda the same old thing, reskinned. It's crates with planes, as someone said. Any of the XBox crew knows me and planes don't get along. I managed to do the setup mission, then one crate run that didn't involve a plane at all, but the second one went all to shit when I had to turn around in this huge plane and plunked it into the ocean. I was in a very chill room. Everybody was trying out the new stuff. I waited before taking off once because another player was landing. I felt like a real pilot until I dunked that sucker in the ocean. At least Ron's absolutely hilarious. You can get discounts on the new planes, like in the last two updates, but I'm not sure how yet. Missions?

Folks on the ME multiplayer Reddit board say Destiny 2 is gonna put a serious drain on the small amount of players left in multiplayer. It already took forever to find four for a match before.

Good to see a glitch raging the day before their next big expensive update comes out. They've sold enough shark cards.

I would run out of minigun rounds and wind up trying to kill it with a pipe gun. I did the building thing and it quit coming around until I'd leave the building, and then it'd pounce on me with a quickness. Some of us weren't meant to play survival.

I had a tough time doing that on normal. I tried starting a new game with survival mode and couldn't get past the very first deathclaw, even with the power armor and minigun.

You can put way more slimes in a pen. I suggest the high walls, though (the roof is great, too). If you get the plort collectors, you never have to set foot in the pens (great tip, Shane).