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https://i.imgur.com/DYAoR4P.mp4

There is a good chance you won't like SSS ... some of those fights make Narcissisc (sp) seem pretty cake walk. I think SSS has one of the only fights in the game that I needed to cheese - and I enjoyed figuring out how to beat it. I really enjoy having to figure out tough fights

What for you is romanticizing for me is realism and immersion. Yes, believe it or not, I like that part of a game where I am just a tiny little pawn. It *is* engaging and fun for me. This is why I prefer playing BG1 over BG2 every single time, and, I prefer the early parts of BG1 over the later parts, essentially beginning to lose interest once I get to the city of Baldur's Gate.

I think there's a lot of romanticizing going on around here. Yes, getting your first +1 dagger was a mind-blowing milestone, but I don't see how being a 6hp mage with 1 Magic Missile per day or being restricted to autoattack as a fighter type was fun or engaging in any way. I'm all for feeling underpowered in a world where danger lurks behind every shadow, but most of BG1 felt like playing chess with pawns only. No tactical depth to speak of. Bar's pretty low set for Larian, if it's BG1 gameplay people want to compare to.

Do nothing.

Well, a good gamer always prepares for a new challenges. You could for example binge watch some romantic ecchi animes with lots of tenatacles involved, to qualify yourself for such a deep RP experience

Definitely not going to watch an hour breakdown on why a two hour movie wasn't good. I probably agree with a lot of the points, but my first point would be that it isn't worth the time.

I started watching the last season of TNG. It's weird... apparently I have never seen it before. Now I'm actually curious if I have never seen season 6 either. It was running in tv all the time back in the days, but I guess only until season X, then it looped back to the beginning. In a way, I'm really missing the cast of DS9 now. Even Morn, who was so god damn annoying, because he never stopped talking.

The "big money" combo requires separate priest and cipher, because a cipher cannot cast Ancestor's Memory (for the Brilliant buff) on themselves, and that is the buff that potentially allows unlimited casts of Salvation of Time (and thus indefinite durations for any other buffs). Ascendant works well either solo or multiclass, but you should think of it more as a tradeoff, where you sacrifice -1 PL to get significantly increased focus generation. Ascending for the +3 PL bonus can take quite a while to assemble the focus at the start of the fight, which is generally the part of the fight that you most want to be spending your time casting actual spells (like, say, Ancestor's Memory on your Priest so you can get the sweet, sweet SoT spam going). Once you get things under control, you can either Ascend (and stay there forever with SoT spam), or don't bother because there aren't all that many fights where you aren't already well on your way to mopping up before you finish ascending. That's true for single-classed, anyway, if you multiclass rogue or ranger, you will gain focus a lot faster and it becomes a little more feasible to Ascend soon enough to really make a difference. Because action speed is so worthless in turn based, Time Parasite is not the sexy thing it is in real time, so the only real draw in my mind for a SC cipher is Driving Echoes, which basically makes penetration as a mechanic a nonissue. However, if you are paying attention to gearing and spell choices, penetration isn't as big a deal as all that. Beguiler is interesting as well, because you can basically spam Deception spells to gain focus instead of weapon attacks, at least early in the fight when there are many enemy targets. Once the board clears, they instead gain focus SLOWER because they get a lower total multiplier on their damage. But they are more friendly with caster multiclassing, spending the first couple of rounds maxing out their focus (and throwing around AoE debuffs while they're at it), and then rationing out their focus for the rest of the fight along with spell casts. Psions get a bad rap because their focus generation is slower than you can get from the other options, but it's automatic, and in turn based mode it has the extra benefit that you get your focus gen for the round up-front rather than trickling in per second. They also pair well with casters, particular casters that hang back from the fight (because they lose their focus gen for a round if they get hit). Psions in turn-based get 6 focus per round, and an additional 6 per round at every odd PL. So at max level, a MC psion will get 24 focus each round. Which means that as long as they aren't getting hit, they can spam PL 1 or 2 powers indefinitely, which is something other ciphers can't do (except for Ascended Ascendants receiving SoT cheese). If they are instead spending rounds casting spells from their other class, they can bank up a bunch of focus for dropping bigger spells. A minor note, if you are abusing SoT for endless buffs, you are also in the position of abusing Barring Death's Door, and casting BDD on your psion, extending it with SoT, and leaving him at 1 hit point without healing, will mean that he technically doesn't take damage even if somebody hits him, and so he will not lose his focus generation. All that said, a Beguiler is probably better than a Psion in most situations. I personally don't think Soulblades or vanilla ciphers offer any real advantage compared to these three options. Dumping focus on melee strikes just isn't that great. TL;DR: go Ascendant/Trickster, you'll probably be pretty happy with it. Once you play through and see how things work, you'll be able to judge for yourself what you'd like to try.

I think big appeal of BG1 over BG2 was that whole exploration portion of the game, where you could run around countryside. I was missing that in BG2 a lot

There is an excellent animancy themed bow, the Essence Interrupter, available for sale early in the game that also deals the Shock damage type. If you decide to play a Cipher you should check it out.

Dex is not quite a dump stat in TB mode because you will lose a significant amount of Stride if you fully tank it. But otherwise it's pretty terrible. They could have made it slightly better if, when you delayed your turn, you decided exactly when you would re-enter the initiative order instead of just going straight to the end. But as it is, if you really do need to interrupt some crucial thing, having an initiative that is too low is just as useless as having one which is too high. 10 dex is fine. In practice, the way to make sure you can interrupt at need is simply to make sure every one of your characters has a ready method of interrupting at will. If their class doesn't provide one, a single point of Arcana will let anybody use Thrust of Tattered Veils scrolls, which are super cheap and will do the job on any opponent except if they put up Spell Reflection. Note that ToTV even works on skeleton mages who are immune to the piercing damage- they take no damage but still get interrupted. Ciphers still work well for ranged. Good weapons are the Red Hand (arquebus), which is still very good even if it isn't the ridiculous monster it is in real time with pause, Scepter for enemies weak against bludgeoning, Hand Mortar/Fire in the Hole (special Blunderbuses you can get from Serafen's starting equip & personal quest) are good, and in RTwP particularly, Rod with the Blast modal enabled is a pretty decent weapon for clustered enemies, so long as it gets sufficient penetration (which Rods are relatively weak at). There's a unique ring that gives +4 ranged ACC and +1 ranged PEN, which on top of Hammering Thoughts gives ciphers reasonable penetration even with the weaker weapon types. There's also a late-game pistol doing Raw damage (with a modal to also do Crush/Corrode with VERY high penetration), which is also pretty awesome in turn-based because the initiative penalty of the modal doesn't matter at all. For a ranged cipher, pure single-classed will work well enough. Multiclassing either rogue or ranger would give good performance at range. Damage-wise Ranger doesn't really take off until Driving Flight though.

Yes, DLCs are much more challenging - should I say, they have properly designed and balanced fights. Even now on Veteran you can push yourself through most fights without really being properly prepared to counter - it is much better then it was on launch. Its not cheese - being ready to interrupt enemy, suppress/remove buffs, raise your PEN, lower enemy PEN and core basics of Deadfire combat - it’s just too easy to over level most of the content in the base game without changing XP gain. DLCs bring it up to a good level. From what I have seen Megabosses are more annoying - you have to get to know them, and prepare for them - but it is why thy are there, and are skippable if someone doesn’t find this kind of challenge fun. You can and should swap Grimoires - having couple in your item slots for different needs is wizard ABC.

I really scared of elevators. But I'm taking steps to avoid them.

Murder Mystery on Netflix Fairly entertaining and Jennifer Aniston is still a smoke show.

Hmm, Octodad is the vision that pops into my mind, reading about this mindflayer romancing speculation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJKtJG7bDME Hmm, how to post a Youtube-vid? My old format doesn't seem to work... And here's a snippet from PCGamer's interview a week ago: 'Vincke suggests the game will be heavily systems-driven and Larian will be creating its own D&D-inspired ruleset. "We'll stay true to our roots, so we'll give players lots of systems and lots of agency to use these systems and try to accomplish what you need to on your personal adventure and your party's adventure. That's not going to change; that's the core of what we're doing. But then there will be an interpretation of D&D, because if you port the core rules—we tried it!—to a videogame, it doesn't work."' Will this be Sword Coast Legends all over again, with a few skill trees and skills on timers? Since that was a pretty huge mistake on their behalf.

Yeah, I wanted to give Robust and Brillant on PL8 and 9 respectivly at first, but Brillant is such a powerful Inspiration ... You are right on PL, I didn't think about skills wtih multiple keywords ! Maybe then dodge the situation entirely by simply giving a +X% Beneficial Effect Duration on the trinket (or do this only apply to the Inspirations applied TO the character, not the ones they apply to others ?) Another alternative would be to use your ideas you put in and giving each new trinket their own way they interact wtih Holy Radiance, instead of having the full Building on Solid Foundations. For exemple, Amber Star would have its 9 skills, plus the effects of Reviving Radiance. Dyrwoodan Prayerbook would have Aggradizing Radiance. Sermon of Punishment and Redemption (thanks for explaining the resoning behing this trinket!) gets its Radiance to deal fire dmg to all foes, not just Vessels. This solution gets away from PL, and add flavors to the iconic Priest skill, which I really enjoy. How do you feel about a trinket have doesn't give a skill at every Power LvL, by multiple skills at a single Power LvL : I was thinking its a shame we don't get the see the different Incarnates often (you need a lvl 19 pure Pirest, and even then they can only cast the one Incarnate from their god), so maybe a trinket that offer the five different Incarnates to summon (we can even try to give Woedica one) at Power LvL 9, but no other skills at PL 1-8. The priests would only have a single Incarnate skill activated at a time, obvisouly, but they could summon the right Incarnate for the right situation.

woop, sorry Bruce, thank you for asking, how's your new place anyway ... we were fortunate beyond what we deserve to be hired full-time for Building Services at the college ... a sea change for us who've never had benefits of any kind, suddenly inundated with terms like medical, vision, dental, sick time, personal time, holiday pay, even the r-word and something called AD&D, which was briefly mistaken for role-playing activities offered by HR -- today was my Friday, now that Wednesdays are the new Monday ... no more live-action Sunday football or golf ... comic book day will have to share tacos with Tuesdays

Nice website! thanks!

its fantasy, I think most of us fantasy about chainmail bikini chicks than coitus with brain eating squids xD

I edited the gamepedia wiki after your (and Waski's) post.

Not sure I disagree as much as just put a different weight of importance on some of the previous events in history. As I see it, the Middle East has two major sources of conflict at the moment. One is the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and the other is the centuries old Sunni/Shiite conflict. Enough has been said the last 15 years on the former I think, but many people underestimate the hatred that Saudi Arabia is spreading in the region against Shiite's. The complete genocide of Iraqis, Iranians, the Houtis etc. all need to die, anything less will not make wahhabists in Riyadh happy and they will stop at nothing to instigate conflicts and distribute money to "special interest groups" like Isis and AQ to accomplish that long term goal. When they label Iran supporters of international terrorism, the irony is so bad it's not even funny. Hamas is a sunday school compared to the groups Riyadh is backing world wide. Trump thinks with his **** and his wallet and doesn't give a damn about ethics, so he'll say anything and support anything he thinks makes for better golf courses with the Trump brand on them. Why didn't he (Trump) call for international sanctions and a blockade of a regime that murders it's own journalists when they dare to reveal corruption? Well, my thoughts on the matter

Maybe this time the romanceable character will be infected by the mindflayers.

As do I. This is why I hold BG1 in higher regard than BG2. I really liked the scarcity of magical items, and also the whole deal of everything being threatening from the get-go (at least before you realized that you could cheese your way through via ranged weapons, etc.) Swen's statement certainly has me worried.

To be fair to the CIA at least, their assessments were in general a lot more realistic than they are given credit for. But they got end run by what was effectively a parallel intelligence apparatus set up by Cheney, Rumsfeld et alia which was designed with the sole purpose of removing every bit of nuance and equivocation from supplied intelligence about Iraq. When the CIA did believe bad intelligence it was usually a case of scenario fulfillment. And, in the end, it was CIA director Tenet (and, facpov, Powell) who took the fall for the bad evidence despite having tried to get accurate statements made on things like the Yellowcake issue; all the little asteriskroaches doing Cheney and Rumsfeld's bidding went and hid under metaphorical couches. The same was true to an extent with MI6 and GCHQ in Britain. The big issues there were the thesis plagiarisation and the 45 minute claim* both of which were almost certainly political additions. The biggest direct intelligence issue was them ending up circularising the evidence of yellowcake- the US using the Brits running with the story to reinforce their own belief and vice versa. Which is a similar situation to the Iranian limpet mine story: the Brits say it must be true because the US says it must be true, then the US points at British support as evidence they're right. *and lest we forget just how much of a whitewash Hutton was; the 45 minute claim was obviously incorrect and equally obviously manipulated for maximum effect- there really isn't any dispute about it at all- but the only people who got in trouble for it were... the BBC and its reporters who debunked it for making an unprovable sourcing claim.

The wiki states that Aamina's Legacy only does Pierce Damages instead of dual types like other hunting bows. It seems strange. Is it true ? (Sorry for asking this from a place from which I can't launch the game.)

I.. I actually agree, BDSM sessions with Viconia where the best

I must have missed the political speeches in between all the punching stuff and explosions.

As a native Spanish speaker, can confirm a lot of these occured to me when speaking in English.

I agree. One of my fondest recollections from playing BG the first time was how incredible it felt when I FINALLY got my first +1 sword. I suppose this all also fits in with Vincke saying that leveling up is too slow in D&D and again, "not fun" in a video game. So, both XPs and awesome items thrown at you like candy.

My group occasionally plays DnD too, but we either play our own game or sometimes fan modules our GM played at a local con and those have to be edited by him cause they're full of holes. Said GM likes this blog, you might find good ones mentioned here: http://beyondfomalhaut.blogspot.com/

Yes. if the only distributors for PC are companies you do not want to deal with or support with your money it matters a great deal what service you download it from.

Hi Mani Nice to hear from you again, what will you be doing at the college. You mentioned its full time work now ?

Seems to me looking into the full quote of what Mr. Rose was discussing, he was already somewhat disappointed that he was asked to reprise the role only for Ackbar's scenes to get whittled down to him being blown out of the ship and nothing else. That they then asked him to come up front and be - to his feelings - the butt of a joke was just adding fuel to the fire.

Well, it's not like I'm going to switch to Chrome. Having to browse the internet without any of my addons made me realize how completely terrible the internet is, though. uBlock Origin, Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Canvas Defender, Dark Reader...internet's garbage without all y'all.

Is there a particular reason the existing thread wasn't good enough for you? Locked.