u/writers_block

Hey folks, so I've gotten set up with a superdupersonic (thanks to Jeff for helping me get on the board I need) and it's already pretty wild straight out of the box.

Riding 130mm 40 degree bears, with the front wedged to 60 and the rear at 23, using the stock bushings and Karmas. I already can't believe the difference in pumping on this board, so I'm pretty excited to really get riding on it, but I also want to play with my setup to get things dialed in.

My biggest questions are around bushings, as I've never used bear trucks in the past, and the stock insert bushing seems to be way better than the stocks in the Paris trucks I used in the past, so I don't want to downgrade by accident. Just to play around, I threw in a pair of 83a barrels in the front to see how it felt, and it seemed like it added a lot of weird slop as a result of not having the insert, so I switched back pretty much right away.

What are people running in their setups? My front feels pretty good, but I feel like at the very least I should get a different rear setup to keep the rear truck fairly firm, since I was surprised by how carvey the setup still felt. I'm 165lbs, by the way.

Also, holy cow the board is rad as hell.

Hey folks, after putting over 1000 miles on my $80 discount Arbor dropcruiser with some Kegels and Knuckles strapped to it, I'm finally reaching the end of it's lifespan. Paris V2 pivot cups are shot, the board is getting crazy flexy and growing some splits, and I keep snapping mounting bolts off the trucks. Figured it's as good a time as any to finally invest in a better board.

I was hoping for a little advice on what I'm currently thinking. I enjoy what I guess I would loosely call cross country freeride. I do long rides (7-20 miles usually, occasionally work up to bigger rides towards the end of the season) on bike trails with decent amounts of hills, variable trail quality, and often cruise through cities and the campus I work on. Basically, I want a board that pushes well enough that I can eat up miles on it, pumps well enough for me to not have to push through all the flats, and carves well enough to handle downhill.

Everything seems to be pointing me towards a Nexus. Currently thinking 50 degree front, 43 degree rear, 87a front, 97a rear, and spring for the Karmas. Does this seem reasonable to people a little more familiar with the gear side of things? I do a lot of power carve pumping and center carving, tons of force into the turn initiations to generate my speed, which seems to be pretty hard on my current deck, so my biggest concern is picking a board that is going to degrade fast from being ridden that way.

Any advice is hugely appreciated!

Okay, so after a nice long time away, I decided a "regular" run through would be fun again, and I was right. Started as a vagabond, been using the longsword and shield the whole game, doing almost all the content nice and slow, really enjoying leaning into the guard counter system again. Now, though, I'm at a point where I'm at 30 vig, 30 end, and I haven't invested in my damage stats at all. I'm through Limgrave & Liurnia, halfway through Caelid, barely died like 3 or 4 times so far, and I'm generally loving doing a "vanilla" run with my sword and board.

My question is: are there fun ways I can take this playstyle and add some color to it? I infused cold on my longsword recently, and in general was kinda thinking it might be fun to go for some int, but I was hoping to get some community feedback on fun sword and board variants.