i don’t think some of these will be true but it will be funny if they are, and also i want to be outrageous on main and have something to laugh about in a year’s time or such! so the thing is, everyone wants new elites with new weapons for new aesthetics but what if the new elites are armour types instead? infuriating! anyway i am ready to receive my game design award. but with three professions per armour class, they would repeat! that’s not fun and snazzy. i guess i’ll have to give some of the elites a weapon instead:)

revenant: it’s time they finally get a greatsword. we are all thinking it, and it has to happen. it probably won’t be the Trahearne legend people want though... oh well :(

warrior: something with medium amor OR a dumb magic weapon like a scepter or a focus, but not a staff because that would basically just be a daredevil. don’t @me

guardian: light armour for an almost mesmer aesthetic but more blue. i don’t have good ideas about weapons - a warhorn would be bland but fitting therefore unlikely

thief: an axe (maybe two) and the ones you get from the spec itself will look like kama. with the expansion being Canthan i would be shocked by anything else tbh!

engineer: light armour or some sorta magical weapon - perhaps a staff. ultimately engineers are nerds and i hope for something scholarly for them this time around?

ranger: heavy armour. there aren’t really nice weapons left that vibe with rangers. i don’t know which one i hope for less, hammer or rifle... anything but those, please!

mesmer: with absolute certainty dual daggers. the mesmer is going to graduate to be the ultimate magical assassin with tiny magical assassin knives. i will cry if not.

necromancer: fashionable leathers. i know we all want swords, and at this point necro is the only class that can’t use them -- and, i’m sorry to say, it'll stay that way

1. Not getting bit by mosquitoes 

2. drawing OCs 

3. People’s reactions when i draw said OCs 

4. Waffles. 

5. When @redplanetofmars goes “mah mah mah mah mah”

@slipperyslideyday @memes-about-true-love @antikallura @faux-paragon @sockythedog @patzkrieg @latorgator @secretstabby @owletfluff @the-zubat

It's a fun choice that hector's name is hector when the armads thing seems inspired from that of hector's #1 enemy achilles, that had to choose between living a long peaceful life or dying gloriously on the battlefield (and choose the latter). While myth hector had to keep fighting because of duty, but really just wanted to keep his family safe... which is the reason why our hector choose to die on the battlefield.

“…I don’t care. I will help my friend. That’s why I’ve come this far. Armads! Your power! Lend it to me.”

i knew the new star chart (which is admittedly no longer new by any stretch of imagination) is great, but i didn’t expect that junction tasks would be so useful! they really help with the dreaded “so what am i supposed to be doing now?” issue

i was surprised to find out that Cetus completely blocks progression just a couple of missions in. i thought it would be optional at that point, though i don’t actually mind it. i always wished we would see civilians early on as a more tangible way of showing what we are even fighting for in the first place, though i am not entirely certain if it succeeds in doing that. also i would have liked a bit more hand-holding when it comes to your first syndicate. the system itself is self-explanatory enough (i think? like, once you find Konzu, if you keep taking jobs and coming back to him you are bound to level up and so on) but where’s the incentive to do that at such low level? though, in all, i guess it looks enough like any starter town/quest hub so!

that said i really disliked how crowded it was. you’ve just been woken up, i always thought it was supposed to be a lonelier journey. and less shiny, at this level, also..

i was thrilled that they let you know about scanning things with Saya’s quest, but it does nothing to introduce the codex as far as i noticed. the name itself should be enough of a hint, i guess? but with how often i’ve seen people complaining about scanning breaking the flow of the game, i’d expect a more in-your-face incentive to actually do it. by the way i’m really not a fan of the way the most readily available lore is all shoved in the Fragments section, though i personally can’t think of an obvious better way to organize the codex. also found it incredibly disappointing that Ordis doesn’t react to scanning the Cephalon Fragments one way or the other.

speaking of story and lore, bosses are still weird. you encounter Vor and Kril twice each, and still with no explanation for it. perhaps my experience on Uranus is not universal, but i didn’t get Natah till after i killed Tyl Regor -- and he is not only very much alive in that quest, but taunting you to go kill him as the final transmission. i can’t think of a solution to this past changing the quest trigger and/or locking the boss node behind quest completion but i think it’s just not right the way it is. finally, the Alad V situation is absolutely tragic. i know it’s been said many times but it’s still shocking, and it’s not even a question of messing up your own progression -- which i also did because i went to Maroo’s bazaar before i met her in her quest. ow

quest-wise, i was surprised that it only takes about 30 hours (mission time) to get to TSD, and TWW is just a few missions away from it. it’s a completely different experience when they are not months away from each other and there’s no build-up to them. it was interesting doing them when i only had my starter, though! it puts a certain weight on the warframe being harmed and then lost when you have no replacement for it. i wonder how it would’ve felt if that were my first playthrough.

once past TSD, not having any colour palettes is really painful! as always i’m just fine painting all of my stuff off-white with an orange glow, but when it comes to operator customization, the colours are lacking. i still managed a cute one, but it was a bit weird that you can’t do something as basic as brown hair? i could’ve compensated if i had logged in for the free palettes, particularly Valentine’s, but it would be very kind and helpful regardless if the entire classic palette was unlocked from the beginning, or at least available for credits. (yes i know colours are cheap but i was waiting for a discount which i only got today. would a new player know these exist? things always seem expensive to me without. maybe cause i’m poor?)

backtracking a bit, i admit that having the free Vectis from PoE launch helped me immensely with progression. is it an advantage that i got it for free? i don’t know. it’s low mastery and relatively accessible craft, and it was the first or second gun i made on my main account as well. but it is great that it came with a potato, though!

thank god it’s not clan research despite being a Tenno gun by the way. an awful lot of things are clan research. i’m not allowed in my own clan on alt, which is a bit inconvenient, but not tragic. i imagine for people who are just now starting out it could be quite frustrating once they realize how many great and useful things are clan-gated. my biggest gripe is the incubator upgrade because without it raising dogs can be very stressful and expensive. then there’s all the great guns of course

i wanted to make some sort of post about the narrative function of Vahenz in Ninefox Gambit and Mikodez in Raven Stratagem and the parallels between them (not limited to their endearing obsession with sweets) but it turns out that while it’s easy to make notes on the iphone, organizing them is a challenge :? so instead i’m gonna say that i have this feeling that both of them start out with some speculations that are kinda off-mark, but later on they make speculations that we know are spot-on, and from there on it’s like they can be trusted to supply reliable information (as in... to the reader, i mean)

like okay one specific note i can find is about halfway through Ninefox Gambit where Vahenz says “Setting a deathtrap for not one but two armies - that’s not a psychotic break. That’s a plan with a twenty-year setup.” which on my first read i marked as “nice foreshadowing!!” and on the second read “she is so right and so willing to give hints but by this point she has discredited herself to the reader” so i guess that before that point she was mostly wrong and afterwards she was mostly right and what i wonder is, how would we know when to start trusting her segments? there must have been something because the only things i highlighted before that are things marked “aww cute” but idk?

i skimmed the notes on Raven Stratagem and a third into the book Mikodez still sounds unreliable to me, because he’s wrong about Jedao. i mean, if he thinks Jedao simply enjoys killing people which going by the carrion glass segment is not true, then his conclusions about Jedao’s further plans are wrong not just because “this is a chapter where Mikodez is wrong” but because he doesn’t have reliable basis for speculation. in the last third, in the counterfactual scenarios game, "He’s at war because it’s the world he knows, but he tells himself he’s putting something right in the process because he needs a reason for the butchery” which isn’t true unless i have tragically misunderstood everything but after that he gets on the right track and... he gets on the right track so i guess not quite the same thing Vahenz does, after all. this post is a mess, i won’t tag it!