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Just to be clear, I am using the Community Patch. The fact that the vanilla Biting Whip is completely uncompetitive is fairly obvious to me since, as you say, a (usually conditional) 10% additive damage bonus just isn't very large even if you ignore the lower focus drain percentage. I'll see if I can track down @MaxQuest's calculations. I'm guessing the aim was to have it still be inferior when it comes to Focus generation, but have the difference be smaller and have the lash be more appealing in it's own right. I assume your advice to take Biting Whip in my case still stands even with the Community Patch? EDIT: oh also thanks again for taking the time to reply 🙂

That looks excellent, its been a while since I have a watched a good mermaid series

Hello and welcome. 🤗 I never used the Epic Games platform but a Google search result leads here: https://www.epicgames.com/help/en-US/epic-games-store-c-202300000001639/launcher-support-c-202300000001735/achievements-are-not-updating-in-the-epic-games-launcher-a202300000014828 Maybe it helps. That's also the answer Gemini suggests in general. So it's not a general problem with the game (because PoE's achievements usually work with Epic, too) but rather the Epic cloud services not synching properly for whatever reason.

The greatest horror\supernatural series of all time is returning From S4, April 19

Imo the original Biting Whip is almost never worth taking (with the original value of +10% additive dmg). With Soul Whip, +20% dmg are done and 0.5 points of damage get transformed into Focus (or half your damage in other words). Other dmg bonuses aside (who all work in favor of Draining Whip because Biting Whip just adds additive damage) let's just assume you rolled 100 base dmg with an attack (which is absurdly high,so this example is actually shifted in favor of Biting Whip, and still...): Soul Whip (+20%/0.5): 120 dmg/60 Focus Biting Whip (+30%/0.5): 130 dmg & 65 Focus Draining Whip (+20%/1): 120 dmg/120 Focus This is so unbalanced it's ridiculous imo. Every additional point of damage (from other damage bonuses) make Draining Whip perform even better in comparison -because its effect is multiplicative while Biting Whip's is only additive. You can decide between +10% additive dmg gain (which translates into a tiny bit more focus, too via more dmg) - or no additive dmg but +100% focus gain which is multiplicative because it is based on all dmg dealt (including lashes). I mean even if you want to build the absolute weapon dmg monster cipher you would be better off taking Draining Whip, forget about the measly 10% additive dmg and instead cast Recall Agony for 30% multiplicative and even have spare focus left. Even in case of Soulblade, Biting Whip is a trap choice, too, since you can convert focus into damage directly and a ton more focus per strike translates into much more raw dmg via Soul Annihilation. The only build I can imagine where I maybe wanted to use the original Biting Whip over Draining Whip is with an Ascendant/Ranger or -/Rogue -/Shattered Pillar or so who wants to keep attacking even when ascended and not spam spells (because Soul Whip doesn't turn off while ascended so you keep the dmg bonuses from it). One cast of Borrowed Instinct maybe and then keep attacking. In that case Draining Whip wouldn't do anything while ascended (because you're already full - takes you longer to get there, but if that's okay with you...) but Biting Whip would still add +10% damage on top of the already elevated Soul Whip dmg of a currently ascended Ascendant. But even then I guess it would be better to ascend more quickly with Draining Whip and cast a Recall Agony for more weapon damage. Back when CP was created I believe it was@MaxQuest who did some calculations and tests on how high Biting Whip (as a multiplicative lash instead of an additive dmg bonus) should be just to be on par with Draining Whip. That's how he landed at the current solution which is in the Community Patch. There has to be a discussion/thread about it somewhere here in the forums. 🕵🏾‍♀️

First two episodes of the new season of Scrubs feel good so far. It's very close to the vibe of the old show. Would be interested to see if the janitor shows up.

From a story by the author of "Let the Right One In"

Hi new player here! So i've been playing Pillars of Eternity for about 30 hours on Epic Games and I've realised I haven't unlocked any achievements for the game despite meeting the requirements. The ones I should have are Scribe, Alchemist and to complete 5 upgrades at the stronghold. I haven't entered any console commands as i'm aware this disables achievements, i'm just generally confused.

So is Biting Whip ever with taking in the Community Patch, or is it more of a "less bad" change than a genuinely competitive choice?

My full Ironman training is going pretty well. Since November I've done a good job of swimming regularly, and my running speed came back pretty quickly. I need to build up my riding miles, but I can do that as it gets warmer. The toughest part, as usual, has been the nutrition. Did you know that exercise causes hemorrhoids? So I was dealing with that for a bit. I am enjoying the gamification of all my training. I'm using Tridot for my workouts, and I'm almost level 17. I don't know what that means, but it's a fun carrot to chase. With the weather being bad, I did a fair amount of indoor rides using Zwift. I'm up to level 24 in that cycling MMO.

forgive me, I forgot to mention I also applied as well. Specifically for Area Design and QA.

Another body exchange, this time 1000 Ukrainian to 35 Russian. Definitely should have had the hundreds of Russians killed in Kupiansk this time, but the ratio i still in the high 20s to 1. Next time, the hundreds killed in Zaporizhia oblast maybe.

Could I also get a follow-up as well? Judging on past years, radio silence typically means one didn't make the cut but I would appreciate a follow-up if possible as well.

Draining Whip is very good in general - Biting Whip's original dmg bonus is a joke in comparison. CP just brought Biting Whip up to the power of Draining Whip. For a Beguiler I would always pick Draining Whip.

Playing Avowed on PS5, and the white arrows for the Wasteland Courier quest don't show up consistently. When I realised this I initially restarted the game, which allowed arrows near my character to show up, but not those farther away, then realised that changing the graphics settings between 'Balanced' and 'Quality' results in the arrows disappearing and reappearing, as shown in the video I've uploaded to YouTube:

So after a brief period of restartitis I am back to this build and I have another question: I have the full Community Patch installed, which means Biting Whip is a 20% Raw lash rather than just +10% Damage. As a veteran of PoE that seems extremely good: essentially a 20% multiplicative damage bonus that ignores armour. First, is this correct? Second, if so is Biting Whip a viable choice for this class combination? The way I see it, I should be able to generate a fair amount of focus by way of AoE Deception powers, so increasing my Focus gain isn't as important. Thoughts?

Don't know for sure, but that's certainly what I've heard as well. I don't think there's much doubt that Steam has added features which are designed to be addictive every bit as much as, say, Facebook has too.

Heya Wishtap, The new merch store is coming - look forward to letting the community know!

Rob Grant, co-creator of Red Dwarf

Hi Ali-Sama, Thanks for the affirmation and welcome to the community. Please reach out as you get your footing amidst the trolls, denizens, stalkers, and regulars

Hi there, I will follow-up via DM. Fionavar

I decided to buy Atomfall with all the DLC and Im going to play it next I have heard good things about this game 🤖

While I don't know, having never developed a game myself, I would strongly suspect making a 2D game with isometric presentation to be considerably more straight-forward, and has you using your hours on something that leverages your gameplay and not something that's only under the hood. Instead of x-y-z you only have to think in x-y. I guess the most direct analogy is maths when you have to add dimensions, as the product is non-linear: 2x times 2y is 4, while 2x times 2y times 2z is 8 -- double the total of what you had to take in account going only x-y. For example you can drop everything about 3D rendering, lighting, more complex pathing, etc etc. The Pillars games' presentation is rendered 3D, so it's 2D when you're playing the game. The only things still real-time rendered in 3D are basically the characters / NPC's, and a miniscule numbers of special effects, some doors et cetera. But because the characters are in 3D, they still had to add dynamic lighting on top of their 2D. The final product is as you know absolutely beautiful, but there's still considerable time investment to achieve it. But again, the gameplay is 2D. Again, I'm not a game developer so take my thoughts for what they are. But I hope they've given you some things to consider. Best of luck to you whatever you choose!

Didn't Valve only add the mechanic in this way to get around all the scrutiny that "regular" loot box gambling mechanics got?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/02/20/mamdani-nyc-budget-affordability-crisis/ Fareed Zakaria has written an article highlighting serious concerns around Mamdani's budget and plans to deliver on his promises to make NY " affordable " This is almost always the case with socialist promises, they end up with a massive tax bill because how do you pay for it? He also raises a trend around financial mismanagement seen in several Dem controlled cities I have included the full article below and I would encourage everyone to read it who is following Mamdani and his plans going forward "Zohran Mamdani ran on a promise to make New York City affordable. This week, he unveiled a budget that is, in a word, unaffordable. New York has been fiscally profligate for so long that the headline number — $127 billion — produces little shock. But for perspective, these are similar to the annual expenditures of a midsize nation (with all the expenses a country requires) — like Greece or Thailand — devoted to governing one city. New York City’s budget has ballooned in recent years. Mike Bloomberg’s last budget, adopted for fiscal 2014, totaled about $70 billion. In little more than a decade, the budget has nearly doubled, growing faster than inflation and faster than the city’s economic growth. And much of it has happened as the city has been losing the one thing that makes big government easier to finance: people. New York City’s population fell sharply amid the pandemic, with a 5.3 percent decline from April 2020 to July 2022. More recent reports show a rebound, but the city remained below its 2020 baseline as of 2024. The arithmetic is brutal: A larger bill is divided among fewer payers. Per person, the imbalance is stark. Using the Lincoln Institute’s fiscally standardized numbers, New York’s general spending in 2023 was more than 30 percent higher per capita than Los Angeles’s — and more than double Houston’s. And what do New Yorkers get for this? Look at New York City schools, the largest district in the country. The city’s education budget has climbed while enrollment has shrunk. It has risen from roughly $34 billion in 2019 to more than $40 billion, with per-student spending projected to reach nearly $35,000 in fiscal 2026 — among the highest in the nation. The outputs — graduation numbers, test scores and reading levels — are at best middling, often comparable to places that spend a fraction of what New York does. Now come the taxes — because every political argument in New York eventually ends up at the same curbside: Who will pay? New York City already sits at the extreme end of the American tax spectrum. For high earners, the combined state and city income tax rate reaches 14.776 percent. Add federal taxes, and the combined marginal rate can exceed 50 percent, reaching roughly 55 percent on certain investment income. New Yorkers pay tax rates comparable to those in European countries that provide, in return, universal health care, free college education and amazing infrastructure. New Yorkers get some 300 miles of sidewalk sheds and construction fences. On business taxation, the city is also off the charts. The Citizens Budget Commission reports that New York City business activity faces the country’s highest combined marginal corporate tax rate — 17.44 percent once state, city and regional layers are stacked. Mamdani wants to hike income and corporate rates even further, or else he says he will raise property taxes by almost 10 percent. Property taxes already made up more than 27 percent of the costs of homeownership in the city as of 2022, above the national average. New York is really the prime example of a problem Democrats seem unwilling to confront. Blue cities are out of control, promising more, spending more, delivering less and pushing off the fiscal problems to some future day. Take Los Angeles — another one-party metropolis wrestling with affordability and disorder. The city’s homelessness budget for fiscal 2025-2026 totals about $950 million. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported that in 2023 homelessness was up 9 percent countywide and 10 percent in the city, and a 2024 Associated Press account noted that homelessness has surged 70 percent countywide since 2015 (and 80 percent in the city) amid public frustration “despite billions spent.” An audit reviewed $2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that officials could not reliably track where it went or what it achieved. Or take Chicago, with a mayor whose approval rating is deep underwater and where the pension promises are so large that they will surely bankrupt the city at some point. What is the theory of good government here? If the answer is “keep adding programs,” the city will keep producing unaffordability — because unaffordability is what happens when government becomes a machine that grows faster than the society it governs. Mamdani’s basic instinct is right. Focus on affordability, especially housing. But not by providing government subsidies — these only seem to have driven up the cost of rent, as subsidies naturally do. (The city’s rental-assistance spending rose from $263 million in fiscal 2020 to $1.34 billion in the most recent reported fiscal year. That is a fivefold increase in a handful of years — and housing costs only got worse.) Matt Yglesias persuasively argues that the city should make it easy — and routine — to build abundant market-rate housing. That will bring in more people, expand the tax base, fill the schools and increase local GDP. And that will make the budget affordable. Democrats in city halls can make the right choice: stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements, and instead make government work — safer streets, functioning schools, predictable sanitation and, above all, enough housing that the middle class can find places to live. New York does not need more soaring rhetoric. It needs more homes."