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True, unfortunately...

Hey all - glad to see folks back in action. I think I'm done with PoE for a bit. I played a lot of Deadfire last year, and more or less exhausted my interest in it. I'll check in now and again to see how it's going for you. Best of luck!

The Warthog would like to have a word with you.

Excerpt from the Community Update #2 just now: What you will eventually play has been in the planning at Larian and closely with Wizards of the Coast for over 4 years now, with their key creative people colliding with our key creative people in ways that we will eventually talk about in greater length. Our task is to create the ultimate Dungeons & Dragons game; a loving and modern sequel to Baldur’s Gate 2. Oozing with 5e D&D greatness, set in the world that you know and love. You will explore Baldur’s Gate 100 years after Baldur’s Gate 2. The Bhaalspawn saga has ended, and a new threat is converging on the city of Baldur's Gate. But the gods do not forget, and the shadows and scars of the past will not stay silent. You will meet and get to know many new characters, and encounter some of the legendary characters you know and love. Most importantly, you’ll learn how their stories have evolved. And as you play, you will heavily influence their fate. And later: We’ve built an engine that allows all 250 people at Larian collaborate to become the ultimate DM. Allowing for near-limitless reactivity, responsiveness, and a memory that never forgets who you are, or what you’ve done. No matter who you roll, dice-rolls, modifiers, and physical simulation have all been designed to simulate a D&D experience that feels as though it’s straight from the imagination, where no matter the dice roll the story will continue. It’s also a game that is intended to span the entire range of human emotion. It is in equal parts a dark and a light game. “We always want to make failure as interesting as it possibly can,” said Senior Writer Adam Smith. “We don’t put everything that’s cool and interesting behind success.” “Light and dark are really good sources of advantage,” noted Swen in a recent GameSpot interview. The philosophies that define the rules in D&D 5e also define the narrative, where you’ll often make difficult decisions through initiative or through the roll of the dice. The Baldur’s Gate games were dark - sometimes darker than many people remember. Baldur’s Gate 3 is no exception, though in 2020 we’re able to take the gamut of emotion and experience and stretch it further due to systems, simulation, and of course also our cinematics team. Unfortunately we did not make it to the end of our PAX East 2020 live demo due to a feature (see: bug), but those in the hall witnessed a scene where Astarion’s hunger got the better of him, and through a series of dice rolls (and often audience choice), Astarion sank his teeth into Shadowheart to varying degrees of mortality. Astarion was happy (systemically), but Shadowheart often ended up dead (also without irony, systemically). Baldur’s Gate 3 is on course to be a ‘Mature’ game, which is publishing language for “if you go any further the ratings board is going to be extremely annoying”. We want to push the limits of every theme within the game, which should allow you to play exactly how you’d like to play. Astarion may be a Vampire Spawn, but that doesn’t mean he has to be evil - if hungry. Though you saw one path at PAX East, there were many possibilities for good, and evil -- note also, everything in between. It has always been Larian’s plan to create games that allow you to play however you wish. This larger team, and this new engine, allow us to push this further than ever before. Much further than Divinity: Original Sin 2. As you delve into an epic adventure that subverts the binary morality found in many RPGs, and explore Baldur’s Gate with new and existing characters, 100 years after the story of the first two games, dice roll by dice roll, we hope that together we can reignite that great sense of discovery you felt as you dived for the first time into Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2, bringing the experience of an open-ended D&D game to photo-realistic realisation, albeit with 5e rules in place of 2nd edition rules. Things have come a long way in 20 years, but what’s important to us is that you’re along for the ride. You have many questions, and we have answers. We’ll be hosting a Reddit AMA where you can ask Swen (Creative Director), David (Producer), Adam (Senior Writer), Nick (Lead Systems Designer), and Jiji (Writing Director) your questions. 11:00 PT on March 12, over on Reddit!

Third Update: Iacchus, the Pale Elf Wizard - Randomly Generated Party Challenge, PotD Madhmr Bridge is generally a relatively easy area, and I wanted to get the Hermit's Hat before moving on to Anslög's Compass. There are some trolls around, however - I tried my best to improve my chances of actually dealing damage to them by lowering their deflection with nature's mark, knocking them prone with slicken etc. while buffing my accuracy with inspiring radiance and blessing: Sadly, I was unable to get my wizards into a position to follow up with Fan of Flames, so I resorted to blinding and flanking the trolls while my only two reliable damage dealers, Alkyone and Surya, tried to take them out. It took a while, but success was ours: There's also an encounter against a xaurip group involving a high priest, who can certainly be dangerous at this level. I ran into him, not remembering the existence of the encounter, and started in a bad position. Alkyone got exposed to multiple enemies, got knocked out but recovered thanks to wearing Eder's armor. I saw a Pillar of Faith come in and had her retreat, otherwise she might've been gone for good. This resulted in very low hp on Raiden. I kept the xaurips weakened with a chill fog, but had little left in terms of other buffs and debuffs, so Iacchus himself had to take down the high priest with his fine crossbow: After this battle, I decided to finally rest. I solved Ferry Flotsam the semi-peaceful way and travelled to the Compass.

Can't say I agree with that. I think Biden would at least appoint better people and also actually listen to them.

Rule of Acquisition #16: a deal is a deal!

There's nothing to forgive. When you're a Pole, every loss is a victory!

Greetings employees of Halcyon, We have been hard at work developing fixes and implementing features you all have shared with us, and we are excited to share that we plan to release Patch 1.3 later this week for all platforms. A lot is going in with this patch, but we wanted to share with you a few of the exciting changes you can expect to see when this patch goes live: Top Community Requests: UI Changes Font Scaling (added a setting to adjust the size of text throughout most UI) Ultrawide Support (loading screens & cinematics) Improved Font Visibility (coloring) Multi Quest Map Tracking (can see inactive quests on the map and select them) New Reticle HUD Setting Option "Aiming Only" (ADS or Scoped) Fixed the Chromatic Aberration Setting not Saving Gameplay Changes New Invert "X-Axis" Setting Added Toggle for Sprinting Improved the quality of item drops when killing Manti-Queens Fixed the effects of Encumbrance not working correctly with the Confidence Perk We want to thank you all for the continued feedback and patience while we continue to work to improve your gaming experience. To continue to report issues you come across and to share suggestions for the game, please visit the Technical Support forums for The Outer Worlds and search to see if a fellow player has already made a thread about it to help reduce duplicate threads. If you find a thread that matches your issue or suggestion, then please feel free to leave a comment and include any details you would like to share. If you are not able to find a similar thread, then please share it with us on our forums and then visit our publishing partner, Private Division, and share this issue with them through their support website. This will help ensure that your specific issue or suggestion is in their queue and will allow us to prioritize requests to provide the fastest possible turnaround time. Thank you all again, spacers. You are a fantastic community, and we are so excited to have you here with us helping to share your feedback, suggestions, and reports.

^ But will kids today even understand?

A guy walks into Barnes and Noble to buy a book about turtles. After a little walking around with no luck, he decides to ask the girl behind the desk if they have any. "Hardback?" she asks. He doesn't hesitate: "Yeah," he says. "And they bury their eggs in the sand."

The way it blends and shifts genres is really impressive, Hitch****ian almost, and all the while it creates a rather dense and very interesting observation of class dynamics and so on. It's really impressive, both thought-provoking and really great fun. I quite liked this breakdown of it (warning: spoilers for someof Bong's other films): Also, whilst not strictly as good or as unique a genre blender as Parasite, Knives Out shares a few similarities in feel and in the way it handles class dynamics, and is also great fun. Well worth watching for more films of this style!

An article claiming the Douglas A26 Invader was the best warplane ever made. https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2020/03/05/greatest_warplane_ever_485991.html Not sure I agree with that list. IMO the top dog is the F-22 Raptor. Certainly the most maneuverable airframe ever designed. IMO the best ground support plane was the Sukhoi SU-57 for jet engines. The P-51 Musting for radial engines Best air to air is the F-22 and a tossup between the Mitsubishi Zero and F4U Corsair Best heavy lift is the C130 no doubt. The coolest is the Fokker Tri-Plane of Manfred von Ricktofen fame.

Finally saw Parasite last Sunday. It was great. Best movie I've seen in a while.

Thanks for sharing Indira! I'm excited and laughing/giggling/smiling like a stupid. Yes, despite my concerns, every time I hear some news about BG3 my excitement grows. I am happy to read about Astarion, because I'm very interested in him. I hope him killing off party members (for good?) is not entirely based on dice rolls alone. Looking forward to the Reddit AMA!

It's a beautiful system ain't it? Imagine a system that is DESIGNED to paralyze itself. It's a masterwork! Not being sarcastic.

Long live, Astarta! May the gods bless you! I hope your predictions about Astarta's fate, Alesia, turn out to be wrong.

I know. Luckily most of are swimsuits and dresses, so I usually ignore it.

Alrighty then! Time to hop back on the no reload train! Toot-toot! Astarta, Moon Godlike Cipher (PotD Solo) Game Version: 3.7.0.1318 with White March I & II, Difficulty: Path of the Dammed, Settings: Maim Before Death: On; Injuries: On; Expert Mode: OFF, Mods: None Gaming Notes: Spoiler alert! I'm pretty sure I know how this run is going to end. Astarta is going to die. There's nothing wrong with her, mind you: I'm the problem. I've never completed the game with a solo cipher on any difficulty level, much less PotD. And I only have one PotD solo NR success thus far: my pale elf rogue, Alia. I considered a run on Normal or Hard, in the interest of giving Astarta a fighting chance, but after my experience with Alena, in which a normal run felt unsatisfying and the prospect of completing a follow up run on PotD sounded unfun, I've decided to run Astarta on PotD. So, yeah: Astarta's chances don't seem great to me. But that's ok. A run needn't end in victory to be fun, and that's what this is about in the end: Fun! Best of luck to our ill fated godlike! May her run end with dignity! Build Notes: I like Astarta. She works. Some would say her Might is too low and her Dex is too high. I've thought about that, and I think the girl is alright. Might is great, but in my limited experience with PoE solo no reloads, doing what you need to do when you need to do it seems to have a greater impact on survivability that damage output. And how much damage will she really loss? Speed matters there, too. Some calculations suggest this is a closer call than many assume. I'm content with the tradeoff here. What about her Perception? That may be an eyebrow raiser to some on PotD. But isn't accuracy the most readily modifiable stat in the game? And aren't ciphers great at lowering enemy defenses? An unremarkable Per score should work. We'll see how it goes!

Looking at it now, it's probably going to have to be the third option since the other two require overwriting the entire Paladin progression table. Appending abilities is painless and won't cause compatability issues.

I'm getting used to staying up until 0700. I had to take the noc shift because of classes. I have advanced nursing practice and advanced pharmacology this semester. With God as my judge, it's not a pecking order thing. Being a specialized nurse with decent overtime might even make more money than a nurse practitioner. It's not that I get to wear a white coat. It's that I'm old. Old enough that I didn't want to go to med school at the time. Old enough that I don't want the physical demands of being a nurse for the next twenty years. Even that's not the case, though. I want as much freedom to help my patients as much as possible without having to answer to someone else. If California goes the same way as about half of the states, I'll be the primary provider and I'll be my own man. I might be a bit of a jackass around here, which I freely admit, but I'm *good* with patients. They respond to me. they trust me. In the past, if I'd posted this late, it would undoubtedly be the result of overindulgence. Now, it's trying to stay awake. Gives me the chance to catch up on random internet jawbonin' about political events. @Guard Dog Keep up the faith, man. I catch up on your posts when I'm here infrequently and feel like we're friends, even if you don't know who I am. Take that as an insult or a compliment as you wish, but I believe you're a decent guy trying to make sense of what I am convinced is a chaotic and capricious world.

I misremembered about Wrath of the Five Suns being auto-grant, and it turns out there is gamedata that implies that Wrath of the Five Suns was once a passive like Gilded Enmity, which obviously would have been be a lot cooler. { "$type": "Game.GameData.GenericAbilityGameData, Assembly-CSharp", "DebugName": "Wrath_of_the_Five_Suns", "ID": "a9f07686-a064-4733-82f6-37dd1784c77a", { "$type": "Game.GameData.GenericAbilityGameData, Assembly-CSharp", "DebugName": "Wrath_of_the_Five_Suns_BrandEnemy", "ID": "2df1aa92-df90-4a01-bb58-f4b94943b280", { "$type": "Game.GameData.GenericAbilityGameData, Assembly-CSharp", "DebugName": "Wrath_of_the_Five_Suns_SwornRival", "ID": "b6ebb36d-5552-44ed-acf0-a5cbd910c901", Makes it easier to justify replacing FoD with VV and keeping Shared Flames and Eternal Devotion as upgrades, like Kind Wayfarer.

Besides the rest of your VV-statement (which I agree with): usually you will keep the root ability if an upgrade increases the cost. Making VV an integral part of FoD (like Gilded Enmity is an integral part of Sworn Enemy for Goldpacts for example) would be my preferred solution as well. Difference is: VV's not an automatic ability (one just gets by picking the subclass) so maybe that's a problem.

It was pretty darned good. A friend and I both watched it and we both agreed that it was not really a movie that would be in our interests (and therefore we're both automatically kind of predisposed against it), but it still managed to be great.

It's great, innit?

I doubt Biden would do anything near the more ludicrous Trump feats; I doubt Biden could do some of Trump's more outlandish feats if he wanted to. No hotels so no currying favour by staying at them, it's unlikely that Biden's son in law (does he even have one?) is going to be appointed to write a middle east peace plan while financing illegal settlements for one party to that peace plan and being massively in debt to Mr Bone Saw; as obvious examples. With Biden it would be the same old ways of taking legalised bungs to protect special interests, but that is hardly equivalent to Trump. Which I guess is why Trump's pushing the Hunter Biden/ Berisma thing so strongly, since that would potentially be a lot closer to Trump's behaviour. Funny thing is I actually rather like Joe Biden, but I have very little doubt he'll lose barring some major perturbation. He'd have been a better candidate than Hillary 4 years ago, and probably would have won then.

This.... sorry, I was having my edit post open for too long

Imho Biden would make a just as bad a president as Trump. Same level of incompetency. Trump hides his behind bravado and threats, Biden simply can't remember how things works. Edit: In hindsight, maybe Biden would at least let competent people run the government and not sack them every time a subordinate shows glimmers of intelligence.

About Vielo Vidorio, I personnaly don't like when an ability upgrade comes with a an increased cost. Greater Lay on Hands and Hands of Light comes to mind, and always have been an annoying point for me. I would rather see Brilliant nerfed, rather than having interesting designs being squashed for fear of their interaction. I would also prefer if the recovery bonus was integrated in FoD, rather than be an upgrade, because as it stands now, it 'competes' (not really because Pallegina wouldn't be able to make another choice) with Shared Flames, both upgrade following a very similar buff-my-close-allies theme. I haven't done any testing, being away from my gaming computer, but I'm wondering if VV recovery bonus stack in duration ? If it does, can a dual wielding Pallegina grant 12s of the buff ? On the cosmetic side, should VV change the flame's color to red, the same color as WotFS ? I would love to see some changes to the WildMind subclass of Seraphen : I've never done a complete playthought with him, with his original subclass, because the chance of him blowing himself up, while small, is everpresent in the back of my mind. Some tweaks of his unique Cipher subclass would be amazing, but its far from being a priority.

While it's really great to hear about ultrawide support being added for cutscenes, gameplay is where the lack of ultrawide support is mostly felt. Is that something we can still hope to see in a future patch?

Yeah, but BG3 won't be telling a great story. What IE games did, and what Larian is doing are completely different things. The more you define the character, the less space you give to the player: Have full close up, animation, voiceacting - and all is left for the players is to occasionally decide what decision the character will do. Have a written, silent protagonist, with closeup - and players can somewhat decide what the intention of their character might be when they pick a given line. What Larian is doing is a pretty much blank slate, giving players tools and allowing them to play in any way they want. I do find it odd, that they invested in close-ups for BG3, while still keeping a vaguenes of D:OS2 Is it not in spirit of DnD? Do you get a pre-written lines to choose from when you play Table-Top DnD? BG3 gives you options, but what is said, and how it is said is to be defined by you, the player. As to how it is written - Past tense etc. I do agree. Tis odd. I didn't pay to it much attention. What they did in D:OS2 was much more intuitive.

*I decided to post a link to an article that pointed out the problems with the dialogue system in Baldur's Gate 3. - What would the Obsidian forum members think about it?* https://screenrant.com/baldur-gate-3-dialogue-past-tense-breaks-immersion/

Good luck. I'd say see you out there on the road, but we got an ocean between us.

Second Update: Iacchus, the Pale Elf Wizard - Randomly Generated Party Challenge, PotD Today, we cleared Esternwood. Not a lot of combat here, but the lack of a strong frontliner with good defenses is very noticable. Simply fighting against a few spiders and wights already brought Raiden to about half of his health, despite me stacking all available deflection on him. Replacing him with the character with the best constitution and resolve, Aurora, doesn't work all that well - one second into combat, and half of her endurance is gone - though her inspiring radiance always allows for a quick victory against vessels, such as the undead at the graveyard. I found a fine crossbow and a minor ring of deflection here. This party isn't as ranged-heavy compared to my usual playstyle, so the crossbow isn't all that useful to me right now. To deal significant damage, I mostly use my rogue Alkyone, the boar shapeshift and arcane assaults - the two people relying on regular attacks are both melee fighters, everyone else has to use spells. I also made my way south to unlock the bridge and the compass by staying on the western side of both Magran's Fork and the Black Meadow, which means I only had to face one small pack of wolves and a group of wights. Propably going to do Madhmr Bridge tomorrow.

Surely, a good StarTrek game would simply be: A Violin Hero

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No. Kalakoth's Minor Blights IS a summoned wand (technically - doesn't look like it but it is). It replaces your actual weapon for the duration of the summoning. Here are the stats of KMB: https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Kalakoth's_Minor_Blight Note the +20 ACC. It also works with Dangerous Implement (the talent).

1. No, because 2 zeals. 2. 50% is fine, aslo +2PR as it it currently coded, and +10 Acc as FoD. 3. 15% 4. Align with White Flame for the sake of consitency. 5. 2 Zeals Do you want the ability to be upgradable with Eternal Flame and Shared Flames ?

They have high defenses in general. Some have esp. high reflex (rogues and such - I guess some of them also have Adept Evasion which would make grazing them with a reflex CC spell extremely unlikely), some have high fortitude (fighters, barbs...). You have to pick the right spell and have rel. high ACC to reliably graze or even hit.

Cipher has a rel. easy early game because of Whisper of Treason. Some great powers like Amplified Wave can't be used because they require an ally. Druid's early game is ok because Spiritshift is pretty strong early on. Of course its time is limited. But it's good to bring down the tougher foes quickly - especially as Boar (wounding damage) or Cat (fast attacks). Boar can also stack its own regeneration with Veteran's Recovery which makes the early game easier. I don't consider most dragon fights that difficult (at least once you took care of the annoyiong ads like Adragans and such) - but some of the later bounties are tough nuts indeed because of some insane defenses on PotD. Brynlod's rogues have stellar reflexes for example which makes it hard to land some CC or nukes on them etc. The thing which makes Priests easier late game than Wizard and Druid for me is the accuracy. Minor Avatar + Inspiring + Aggrandizing Radiance + Devotions means +40 accuracy. Whooha. Druids don't have a great accuracy buff and you have to use consumables for that. Wizards are a bit better in that regard but not much. But it's doable.

You can make a rogue do AoE with spellbinding items. There are quite some items with good spellbinds and some of them come fairly early (but after you reach Defiance Bay). Since damaging spells work with Deathblows (+100% damage) and some of them even with Deep Wounds (all that do either pierce, crush or slash damage) you can build an effective AoE rogue. Solo is still kind of hard (or better: tedious) for a rogue though. I consider it one of the weakest solo classes (besides Fighter) if you don't want to use lot of splitting, kiting, stealth and invisibility (then it can be a lot of fun). Also spell holding (procs on catching a crit) and spell striking (procs on crit) and spell chance (has a x% chance to proc on hit/crit) can work well. Here Island Aumaua, Arms Bearer, Quick Switch and Deep Pockets makes some sense (to be able to burn through as many spellbinding items as quickly as possible during an encounter). By the way: Quick Switch + Coil of Resourcefulness allow 0-sec switching which can cancel recovery of spells if I am not mistaken. So theoretically you can cast, switch and cast again because recovery ofthe spell got omitted. At least it used to be so. Unfortunately on of the coolest weapons for "casting" rogues - Acuan Giamas (Spell Steal) - comes so late and after the most challenging encounters are already over. If you have it you can steal spells from "proper" wizards, priests and druids (Ogre Druids for example or Xaurip Priests) and cast them unlimited times during a certain timespan. I considered to just give it to me via console early and just have fun with it but I didn't follow that thought. Priest is really fun as soon as you get to the higher levels. The early game is a lot tougher though. But as soon as you get stuff like Shining Beacon and Devotions things become a lot easier. Vessel fights are over very quickly when using Holy Radiance (with poerfect disposistions and high INT and MIG). Single targets are not a big problem with Cleansing Flame (if not burn immune). Generally burn immune enemies are a pain in the butt for a solo priest. In the past I was able to prolong self buffs endlessly with Spelltongue - but I don't know it that's still possible. It helped a lot to be able to buff up like crazy (Inspiring+Aggrandizing Radiance + Minor Avatar + Champion's Boon + Devotions + Shields, consumables like potion of alacrity and so on) and then casting everything to pieces and poke the rest to death (switching to a better weapon like Drawn in Spring). You needed very high attack speed with Spelltongue though (included durganized Spelltongue and Little Savior, Gauntlets of Swift Action and so on). This also worked very well with a Wizard (self buffs + Draining Wall + Spelltongue and then cast CC and nukes) because of Alacrity (no potion needed) which lead to 0 recovery quickly. Also a solo Barb was fine with Spelltongue - especially because Carnage helps with the draining of buff times. But it all stands or falls with the siphoning mechanic of Spelltongue. If it got nerfed too hard then maybe it's not worth it anymore. PS: what about solo cipher or druid?

what am I doing with my life lmao

The real treasure was U N E M P L O Y M E N T

As Bob Marley said “The day you stop racing, is the day you win the race.”. Sadly my management disagrees with this philosophy. Pft.

Just spent the last six days camping and fishing with Sunny & Bella in Florida. The weather was beautiful and, best of all, we had the entire island to ourselves... until today anyway. I was planning on staying through tomorrow but other folks came in and set up camp this morning. So we are heading back home today. No phone, no radio, no internet, or technology of any kind. The most advanced equipment I carried was a flashlight. We fished from sunrise until lunch, Took a walk around the island or up Shired Creek towards the Suwanee in the early afternoon then fished again from around 5 until sunset. I caught reds and spotted trout, including two big ones, off the oyster bars. Then read by the campfire in the evening. It was awesome. I'm telling you guys.. this modern life we live is no damned good for anyone. The stress, the noise, the hectic pace... who needs this s--t? When was the last time you just stopped to watch a sunrise or sun set? Or really looked at the stars? Thoreau was right about a lot of things. This most of all; Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they're after.

I miss Josh.

A couple are here.