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Made the final arrangements for my birthday wine tasting. A new yearly event where I invite my closest friends, and we have a (relatively) formal blindtasting of wines from my cellar. 4 whites, 4 reds and two dessert wines are good to go - the oldest from 1966.

The ability "Resilient Companion" along with some other (active) AR buff (like from your party's paladin or a cipher or whomever) helps a lot - given that high AR is the most impactful defensive stat you can have. AC's AR also scales with level. But a passive +2 is a big deal actually since underpenetration leads to a lot of damage reduction. The numbers -25% (-1 PEN), -50% (-2 PEN) and -75% (-3 PEN) don't do it justice because it's actually a lot more after the numbers come out of the damage resolution. The bear has an additional +2 which stacks - so he is the tankiest AC of them all when it comes to high damage spikes (like when he gets targeted by several enemies). The boar has infinite health regeneration which means that when concentrated on he will go down a bit faster, but he can absorb a lot more damage when it doesn't come too quickly. Both are pretty ok as offtanks and sturdy flankers. Maia's bird actually has the best stats by the way (if you sum them up: highest stat number). You can't tank with any AC though. They don't have the defensive stats for that, not even the antelope (although it helps). And that's not what they are for. Use them as flankers or as bodyguard against rushers or even as path blockers (some of them, like bear or lion, have bigger models and tak up more ground space which helps with blocking pathways a lot). Always unstealth and egage with the tank(s) first - only then send in the ACs. Besides that ACs can get healed and they also don't suffer injuries when they go down (and then potentially revived). If you have a PL9-SC Paladin in the party he canl get +2 Zeal every time the AC goes down. So you can revive quite often without any hassle with injuries. Never forget that they are like permanent summons which you can upgrade. If you would present a n item which would invoke a permanent summon in every fight (and even buff and revive it etc.) everybody would be "Whoa how useful!" - but somehow with the Ranger everyboy just goes "whoahy is de pet so bad?". I don't get it. One of the most fun solo chars I had so far was a melee Geomancer (Wizard/Stalker), combining very high AR with three bodies (bear, me and my Essential Phantom) with great damage, debuffing and top accuracy. That build relied heavily on the AC. Also fun was a ranged Scout I posted in the build thread who uses Watershaper's Focus. It's still fun and viable but doesn't use the AC a lot. So both can be nice and viable.

You know what? What if they had made a mechanics lesson/explanation that would have been presented before the game starts (skippable of course). Done in a P&Paper rulebook manner (meaning description + examples) and in style of all the other scripted scenes and ship combat "on sepia paper" you have in the game. With those watercolor drawings/paintings left and right which help to visualize the explanations and examples. Fully voiced. Like if the Dungeon Master read the rulebook for you. Maybe even interactive so you could navigate to certain chapters. Not necessarily superlong an in detail, but at least to cover all the basics. Do you think that would have worked? And would that have been worth the effort?

So, for no particular reason I decided to build my first character without putting a single point in any weapon skills; the goal was to beat the game without personally ending a life. Also no destroying any robots, no squishing any bugs, nothing that would trigger 'Enemy Killed'. That went for companions too. Sending robots back to their charging pods or putting enemies to sleep was allowable, however. The end result? A pretty big success, in fact. The main quest did not require me to actually kill anyone, and I was able to complete the vast majority of sidequests. There are points where killing might seem inevitable, such as the radio tower; but they are ultimately avoidable. Since I saw some other people interested in a 'pacifist run', I thought some might be interested what exactly you can and can't do, as well as what they'd need to pull it off. First, some tips: What you need to know In Fallout: New Vegas you had relatively little control over the companion AI; if you had them with you, they would shoot. It's important to realise that this isn't the case in The Outer Worlds: companions can be set into 'Passive' mode, which will prevent them from attacking under any circumstances unless specifically ordered to. This is good; companions provide massive buffs to your skills, so for a no-kill run they can be very important failsafes. To put it in perspective, by bringing SAM and Max along I was able to boost my Intimidate by 43 points, while still providing large boosts to Hack and Science. They're useful. Inspiration and Determination, though, are largely irrelevant beyond the level 60 Inspiration perk; double the skill boost from companions, which is very enticing, but maybe not worth the investment. I am unsure whether it applies to the Companion Perks that boost your skills further while a companion is in the party. It's also important to have a good understanding of the stealth system. Since you can't access terminals while in combat, it's generally going to be important to stay in stealth -- even ignoring that if seen people'll shoot at you. You can, however, still pick up items and leave/enter areas in combat, so the running wildly approach is sometimes an option. So: crouching in tall grass makes you virtually invisible, and inside you'll want to make good use of cover and enemy patrols to make your way through areas. You'd be surprised by the amount of back and alternate entrances; if going in through the front seems impossible, it's not a bad idea to scout around. Hacking/Lockpicking will open up routes and potentially save you from having to scour areas/bodies for keys. What quests I couldn't do What you think you might not be able to do, but can What I didn't do, but you probably can What I did, but you might disagree with Other notes The marauders at the start of the game, near your ship? They don't need to be dealt with, not even by talking the guards into fighting them; you can just stealth past them. ADA's fake-venting stunt will scare them away, as the two Spacer's Choice people will tell you. If you put out a fake tracking signal for Phineas, I wouldn't count it against the run but he'll kill a few people having prepared his defenses, which Sophia will wave in your face. I don't actually know if you lock yourself off anything by sending a real signal; and of course, if siding with Phineas you probably don't have to send anything at all. To my knowledge, Nyoka's companion quest cannot be completed; fortunately, everyone else's can be finished. Every quest I was able to complete by location, to my best recollection

No, no, no. Its like your key, only better 'cause its Wormerine's.

Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin

Haha you're right, silly me. It's still viable for the Ultimate, one just has to have brilliant cloak equipped then and be ready to use skellies on self if invocation fails. As far as I've seen casting it on at least three targets makes it quite likely to trigger brilliant, if it fails withdraw and then just let skellies hit self with cloak I guess.

Coil is waist too Vic, like magran belt.

Just got the email with my game key for Epic.

Helping others.

So I wonder how many Thanksgiving dinners were ruined by politics last night? https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/nov/27/donald-trump-supporters-brace-thanksgiving-dinner-/ Wasn't going to happen where I was. I can guarantee you I was the only non-Trump supporter in the room. In fact I was probably the most politically liberal one in the room by a long way.

Dramatic reenactment of me watching the Boys/Bills game:

A dramatic reenactment of the Dallas Cowboys in the 2nd quarter:

I think it's ok if mechanics are simple - as long as they allow for nice character builds. Sometimes they are not even that simple but simply well explained and rational in themselves - not many exceptions, no tables to look up etc. For example Dragon Age Origin's mechanics don't seem to be very complex. But in tandem with the effect combos that you can discover it allows for some nice and cool character concepts. For example I made a CC mage and mostly focused on stacking several seal spells on the ground in order to create that one truly awesome repulsing seal that sends enemies flying in all directions. At first I thought "meh what a boring ability system" - but actually it was ok the way it was.

I'm taking Sunny & Bella with me to the VFW in a little while. We'll have our Thanksgiving there. Deep fried turkey, smoked ham, lots of sides and I'm bringing desserts. I ordered a large sweet potato pie, pecan pie, apple pie, and a pound cake from the Kroger Bakery. We are celebrating together with the American Legion and Marine Corps League this year so it should be a pretty good turn out. Afterwards I expect cigars, expensive whiskey and football long into the evening. I only wish Tommy were here.

Di verus, don't go to every district and pick up every quest like some touristy nasenale.

No one could possibly believe Donald Trump had a heart attack, even at 70+ the man still has the physique of Rocky Balboa in his prime.

Game is too short!

Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin. The Iron Passage. It was a co-op area and I attempted to complete it with two NPC phantoms. They survived the first room, then I BC'ed them and went alone, dodging attacks, instead of fighting (except the priests, poison arrows were quite effective against them). I made it to the fog gate and successfully defeated the Blue Smelter Demon, though it took several attempts.

I like Deadfire's approach in broad strokes because it "rationalizes" the system a bit more. I think the main problem was the instances where it was poorly balanced: for martial classes, most abilities should only be 1 resource with uncommon 2 and a rare more than that, which is generally true, but violations of that make the class seem overly constrained (corpse-eater barbarian and rogue mostly, paladin to a certain extent for all the high-level stuff but they could also regen their resource if single-classed). Also Brilliant was way better for casters than martial for a related reason. I think a way to fix the "ability economy" you mention would've been to let picking up a new martial ability grant you an increase to your power pool by +(ability_cost - 1). That way you're less incentivized to stick to a few cheap low level martial abilities all the time (especially for rogue where their abilities escalate in cost very very quickly), and each ability you pick up never gives you fewer uses of abilities (whereas in the rogue case, you could go from 5 encounter uses of crippling strike and/or escape to picking up shadowing beyond and suddenly if you use this shiny new ability you only have 2 crippling strke/escape left, for a net loss of two abilities per encounter just from trying to use a shiny new ability). From a "rationalization" perspective I also like Deadfire because sometimes the level-up choices in PoE1 seemed arbitrary in whether they were per rest or per encounter. Of course, Deadfire also threw that out the window a bit by having item effects be mostly per-rest but also sometimes per-encounter for Balancing Reasons(tm) *shrug*.

thelee is absolutely right on this. When I did a lot of the harder bounties and fights, I had to resort to that unintuitive non-healing crutch more often than not. The system was annoying in that way, and perhaps in its entirety. I like a reasonable amount of resource management like everybody else, but not drab versions or convoluted versions. I reckon this version was both of these things. And I do recall that the system was one of the most disliked things in PoE1 - it was almost "hated" on par with the spiritmeter mechanic in MotB.

Oh I comprehended the idea quite well. That's precisely why I *wouldn't* heal my characters even though literally anyone else in any RPG situation who sees a fighter at 10/80 endurance would, because I would be extremely aware that they were also at 95/320 health, so a simple 20 point heal takes them out of the range of a harmless knockout to be dealt with for a rest after the fight (along with the rest of the low health) and into a permadeath which would require a reload and having to do the fight again. Having to do that calculus is the least intuitive aspect of any cRPG i've ever played. And it's not like this is a one-time thing, every single run I did of PoE involved doing this calculus at various times. It happened in the backer beta even (I even left angry comments about this flaw in the feedback, because in the backer beta I had already encountered a situation where it was better to leave my wizard knocked out because healing them resulted in permadeath). Never mind that when your character has health < max endurance you start to encounter the fairly-unprecedented RPG situation where your characters are approaching death and you have lots of heals, but none of your heals will actually help you anymore (the only thing that can save you is Barring Death's Door which was such a niche spell in PoE1 that existed only to interact with this unintuitive mechanic). The endurance/health confusion for new players was by JE Sawyer's own assessment as well. (As a former new player, it was most confusing during the original backer beta in which instead of a health multiplier, you had equivalent health and endurance and a fraction of damage was dealt to health while the normal amount was felt by endurance, and that fraction differed between classes. Mathematically the same, but a gigantic "huh???" to anyone coming from any other RPG.) OK, maybe people don't like that a herald can keep your entire party up in perpetuity. Again, just because endurance/health was a thing that could do this doesn't mean that it was actually a good solution to that problem. (edit - Nor do I agree that it was a problem. I think if you are able to metagame a system into giving you infinite sustain in many combat situations, your reward should definitely not be permadeath during the long tail of other long fights.) (edit - the converse is true. if you can't muster the trivial dps to outpace a troll or battery siren's regen, you should not be able to grind out the fight anyway given enough de-aggros or enough time to put in 3 to 6x their max endurance's level of chip damage)

These have their own name, you know -- arrpg.

You can cheese your way into saving in supernova by fast-traveling to The Unreliable, this creates an auto save point in the place you were, you'll just have to load it back again to continue. You'll have to endure some seconds of loading, but I think that's your best option. Also you always save between loading screens, so just hop inside such doors and load the save again. You don't have to get back to your ship to save. And I also believe the game creates a save file when you exit, but I can't confirm that. Saving limitations exists to make you think twice before facing some enemies, I have once come acoss two Mantiqueens and some Mantissaurs in the same group and I just left them alone and came back later after improving in gear and level. I did grown to like those limitations with time, they put the feeling of "I have a lot to lose risking that" into your heart.

I have to say I'm just as baffled as Josh on why Deadfire did not sell well. Maybe it's because games like Deadfire are right in my wheelhouse. I greatly enjoyed all of the games he referenced, PoE1, PoE2, Pathfinder Kingmaker, Divinity, etc. Both turn based and RTwP can be great if done well so I don't think one is inherently better than the other. RTwP worked great for Deadfire in my opinion. I tried the turn based update and hated it. Turn based worked well for Divinity but even DnD computer games tend to use RtwP. Honestly, of all these games Divinity was my least favorite but not because it was turn based. It was good and I liked it but I can't understand why it sold so much better than PoE unless I am just in the minority. I think for me the depth of the character creation with so many ways to build characters and each one still being unique plus all the added options of subclasses and multiclassing is what I love most. This is something that Divinity lacked. Each class in Divinity has a few active abilities at any one time and you quickly learn which ones are the best and you rarely have reason to deviate. Also, the AI script system was something I really enjoyed in Deadfire and is great for RtwP. As for resource management, I also prefer limited resting and long term resource management. Maybe it is just more realistic to me to not be camping in a dungeon or wilderness full of hostile monsters after every fight or watching your HP shoot back up to full as soon as the battle ends. A dungeon should be a test of endurance. I've always liked how 5e DnD has the concept of the short rest and long rest. They generally recommend only allowing two short rests per day which partially restore some health and resources (but not all) before you have to take a long rest which would require returning to town to sleep at an Inn or your stronghold / ship. When you return to town with your team exhausted of all spells, out of arrows, beat up and down to your last few hit points, carrying empty potion bottles and hard won loot, you feel like you have truly been through an ordeal that challenged you to use every last resource at your disposal and barely survived to tell the tale. I've actually been thinking of re-installing Deadfire as I wait for any news on BG3 just because I need something to scratch that character building itch. I don't know if anyone from Obsidian would read this but I want them to know that I loved Deadfire and I really hope the "poor" sales do not result in the end of PoE games. Thank you for creating one of my all time favorite games, from someone who has been playing computer RPG since Ultima IV!

hard disagree. i have to imagine it's some form of stockholm syndrome, absent imagining better alternatives. endurance/health was one of the worst, most unintuitive aspects of PoE1. it was an immense source of confusion to new players and it led to extremely bizarre outcomes and incentives in-game. (I have literally let characters get knocked out instead of healing them, because it meant the difference between unconscious-and-ignored-by-enemies vs permadeath. in certain setups, consecrated ground or other persistent regeneration is your own worst enemy for squishier characters. in addition, you could grind out fights you had no business winning simply because enemy health would slowly go down over time despite potentially infinite healing either in-combat or from deaggro-out-of-combat-regen; not gonna lie my poe1 ultimate won some fights like this.) of all elements of poe1, i would consider endurance/health the biggest design flaw. the only thing i would tweak about deadfire's wound management is to make it more like tyranny's, where simply getting low health would trigger a wound (iirc you had a higher wound limit and a knockout yielded more than one wound so it was still worse than falling low health). This would solve the "don't be careless" aspect better than returning to endurance/health. in practice in poe1 when you're high enough level, your health pools are so large that chip damage is ignorable, so i don't see how endurance/health solves this any better. edit - i would also make the change to make "wound" a less common-type of injury. it is by far the most punishing injury since it actively reduces the effectiveness of heals on top of a minor max health reduction and might lead to a desire to rest as soon as one gets an injur. iirc, tyranny's wounds all had the same effect that simply stacked, so it was less "jeez i should rest right now" and more ad-hoc decision-making about how much of a penalty you wanted to accumulate. i think there's virtue in having a diversity of wound types even if it is a bit murky (it's not like you really have a choice on how your character gets knocked out), so i wouldn't go all the way to tyranny style, just that there exists a happy medium between the two approaches.

ridiculous. the difference is the developers is able to make encounters w/o the immense important variable o' temporal rest proximity being a non workable factor. is no need to consider how different a party of depleted vancian casters will fare or converse, a fully rested group o' vancian casters, v. a group o' ogres. save for boss fights, developers cannot know how recent the party has rested, even though the difficulty o' any given encounter will be fundamental impacted by the answer to such a question. doesn't trivialize encounters. makes more likely encounters will be designed appropriate. per encounter makes encounter design more intelligent... better. is opposite problem you suggest. to avoid player frustration, developers need consider how a depleted party will fare 'gainst a rando encounter. chances are the developers tune down such encounters a bit to avoid such disappointment, which no doubt angers veteran players, or players who happened to have their party rest immediate before the encounter? mess. stoopid. anything more than extreme limited nod to per rest resources is not conducive to intelligent encounter design. stoopid. HA! Good Fun!

So.. the first time in 10+ years I've gone with Nvidia again (since AMD hasn't released anything competitive in the upper echelon of GPU's) and my GPU died on me. It was an ASUS GTX 1080Ti Turbo.. and it cost something like $800+ (don't actually remember). It didn't even last two years. Luckily it's still under warranty so I just sent it back to the store. My old AMD card is still running without problems in my cousin's computer and that's twice as old. I dislike everything about Nvidia except the performance. The way they make proprietary hardware (G-Sync) to raise the prices, the way they make you log into ****ing Facebook for their GPU drivers, the way their drivers are HALF A ****ING GIGABYTE that you need to update twice per month, the way they always make new technology locked to their own hardware (RTX, hairworks, etc).. and the absolutely ****ty quality their third party manufacturers have to build to try to keep their prices below at least $1000. I can't wait for AMD to get back into the top end GPU segment. Holy ****.

I went ahead and got a 5700XT and Ryzen 9 3900x and a new X570 mobo with most of the bells and maybe half of the whistles. It helped that my friendly local computer store was selling everything 50 bucks under MSRP.

Reminds me of when I had an absolute bloodbath on my back patio when I lived in (coincidentally) California. Coyotes had climbed up our hill chasing something, probably rabbits seeing as there were a lot around that frequently visited, and just started destroying everything and physically attacking the house in the middle of the night. They repeatedly charged (and struck with their entire bodies) the back glass sliding door I had that went to the living room (it was a weird house - California...), but weren't able to get through luckily. Left carnage everywhere - looked like somebody had been murdered on my patio. I'll take the raccoons, thanks.