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This "balance doesn't matter because it's single-player" is a misguided trope I keep seeing. The biggest examples personally I can think of in multiplayer for balance are still relatively noncompetitive (e.g. MMORPGs in PvE/raid environments). The "balance" needs come from making choices meaningful. There's no meaningful choice if there's a clearly better ability. The argument doesn't even matter if people are just interested in flavor for the other nine, it basically acts as a penalty for people who want to use the other nine abilities. E.G. people who want to use druids as summoners on PotD are basically punished by having weirdly implemented and poorly scaling (if at all) summons compared to even wizards. It's not even really a subjective matter - the maths that designers use to tweak and balance WoW or whatnot is still mostly the same math you can use on single player games (except you perhaps have a much, much smaller population for live telemetry if you even instrument for telemetry). I get that some ppl really like the JRPG-style, have clearly OP&terrible powers and who cares about balance approach. I don't. I like looking at a system full of different spells/abilities/items and finding many ways to put together interesting builds with interesting tradeoffs with meaningfully different optimizations [no coincidence that of all the SP final fantasies I enjoy FFT the most]. Absolute balance is never going to be possible, but so long as there's meaningful decision-making along the way (e.g. Fireball in AD&D is a wildly powerful third-level spell, but there are legitimate reasons to pick up other spells instead without feeling like you're handicapped) it's fine.

Baby manatee separated from mother rescued from Florida river.

Here's a small preview: https://streamable.com/q8c3dq I've been looking at it for about a week now so I've kinda grown immune to it if there is any mistake you can spot from this short video, feel free to say it. I'm generally interested in how you guys think it looks, it's pretty much 90% done right now. Just adding last list of spells for various classes. I tried to make it require as little input as possible, most things are formulated and automated. You should be able to either make a high level character or low level based on your preference. Stats are calculated automatically. There are very minor few scripts running in the background so it's supposed to be mostly very fast to use. If I'm honest, scripts are non essential. My general idea was that people should be able to make a full character or a party without having to fire up the game and cross reference so I tried to add every useful information but unfortunately this is still not 100% true as it doesn't feature descriptions for the abilities yet. You will still need to look at abilities at either Wiki or in game. But for veterans out there it should still serve as a way to quickly share builds.

still remember the two month trying to brute force through gothic 3 never understand the nonsense complain about quest marker too hand holding in games never had that much energy to suffer through any game now

Or we can simply play in Story Mode - everything is easy in Story Mode.

@Boeroer if I recall correctly you can also (ab)use the Disengagement attack mechanic with e.g. Nomad Brigandine to trigger Disengagement Attacks that will auto-miss and trigger Offensive Parry, Riposte etc. Right?

If things go sideways I was planning on bugging out to your place. Can you leave behind a can of sterno and a couple 5 gallon water jugs before you leave?

No. Blade Turning prevents melee attack rolls against you altogether. The attacks will get redirected to another enemy. Your defenses will not get tested and there will be no grazes/misses on your side. Thus you will never see a Riposte (and/or Offensive Parry) while Blade Turning is active. Stuff like on Miscreant's Leather (5% chance of resisting an attack -> turning it into a miss) does work with Riposte (and Offensive Parry) if I remember correctly.

To continue...

Refugees? No. Kidnapped young virgins fresh from a raid? Yes

I love how Diana sits on Chibi-Usa's head. Why do Usagi and Luna sound like they're grannies tho?

Please ban this man immediately

Even in the DiC dub, Minako is the best.

On Amazon Kindle Fire is you buy a script to the DC Comics app you get unlimited access to their whole library. That will keep you busy for years

New ‘Morpheus’ CPU Design Defeats Hundreds of Hackers in DARPA Tests.

Community Patch makes it a lot more friendly for non-deflection maxers. If you pick Tuotilo's Palm with Outward Spikes you will have another retaliation effect on miss that stacks with Riposte. If you then pick a Monk instead of a Paladin you can trigger Swift-Flurry chains from Riposte and Outward Spikes alone (this is with Sun & Moon): With a mortar in the main hand this also kind of works - because a crit from Outward Spikes or a crit from (Riposte-) bash might trigger an attack with the mortar via Swift Flurry - but then it stops because mortars don't trigger Swift Flurry further. Sun and Moon has the advantage that it has two rolls to continue the crit-chain. Offensive Parry also triggers Swift Flurry... Of course with a Paladin it's much easier to reach the effective deflection (also via Inspiring Triumph and Beacon etc.). You will not have crit chains but you will be missed more often (and have strong AR and healing on top). Offensive Parry + Riposte on a Steel Garrote/Trickster is a fun build because Offensive Parry also dazes on hit which unlocks the life leach of Steel Garrote and unlocks Sneak Attack. At some point that's even better with Inspiring Beacon of course, but the dazing is always useful. Inspiring Beacon + Sneak Attack + Deathblows is pretty hefty dmg even with the real. low base dmg of Offensive Parry/WotEP - because they are instant attacks which come on top of your normal ones. And they all drain life for you. It's not foolproof and this approach obviously doesn't work against some kinds of enemies (e.g. ranged or casters) but it's cool most of times because in nearly every encounter there are some melee guys. And it's not like you couldn't switch to another weapon and whack casters more "traditionally".

Cardcaptor Sakura: Clow Card arc finale. There's three episodes - 44, 45 and 46. The show comes full circle. Arc ending spoilers ahead, obviously. Venture forth at your own discretion. That's probably a good choice.

sheesh. clear am doing something wrong as we just completed act 2... again. is a few hurdles which cause us to go slow and many such obstacles is bugs. took us literal an hour o' save and reload attempts to exit drezen citadel after the boss fight-- multiple party members had geometry fails and were "falling" through the floor immediate before the exit area. btw, am using literal to mean literal 'stead o' how kids these days use as euphemism. an hour. we still got the party management bug wherein we cannot adjust inventory, spellbooks or character tabs unless we exit camp. took a week or two off from gaming hoping the newer build would address a few o' our bug issues. didn't happen. etc. am playing tb core, and we can be a bit pokey when doing tb. even so... have spent nearly 1/3 o' our time playing with level 9 builds using respec and/or merc hires. the oracle/thug/bloodrager/scaled fist/paladin build (f'ing d&d and pathfinder *sigh*) looks solid. colluding scoundrel/crossbow sohei/ranger looks good as angel or azata... as long as we get all monk levels (need 11 for second flurry) in before the inevitable alignment shift for azata. am annoyed that most o' our favorite builds is ranged, 'cause nenio, arueshalae, and lann is already having great archer potential. could add wenduag to the list of we kept her 'round. regardless, have spent much time playing with level 9 builds. even so... am also doing a bit of real life landscape maintenance, which means our efforts to advance in beta is a bit on the paltry side. am serious considering ripping out most o' our plants and replacing with rocks. don't need to water rocks. don't need to prune rocks. wood peckers don't destroy rocks as they did our birch trees. keep the redwoods and the roof-high photinias which is functional an extra 30 metres of fencing on the one side o' our house... and maybe a few gardenias. the rest? rocks. not kidding 'bout the birch trees neither. we had six mature birch trees and four is functional hollowed out by wood peckers. gonna replace the birches with rocks. even so... am admiring shady's verve in being able to complete the beta. HA! Good Fun!

Considering the german language, I know my fair share of gender related terms. But stuff like "They will go to the backery" for a single person just sounds completely wrong to me. In german you'd probably use "Es geht zum Bäcker" which even sounds devaluing, as it implies you don't adress the person as a person, but a thing. Anyways. Just saying. /edit: I just did some googling and in german it's actually "xier" and "xies" ... xier, xieser, xiem, xien, dier, dies, diem, dien ... Probably for the better if I just pretend to have never seen this.

Playing Subnautica BZ, having fun as it's as engaging as the first part. I don't know how to feel about the land part yet. Also I miss the sub, the seatruck just ain't the same.

Probably to highlight that Desire is that androgenous being that represents all sexes at the same time, which adds to the effect of them casting a non-binary actor in the role.

As are the people that gets their pants in a knot over it.

You can use that in English as a neutral term "When a person plays Oblivion, they damage their psyche".

That's right.

Tattoo artist offers to cover hate images free of charge

Gorilla mother and human mother bond over their babies

Over 60 Australian and New Zealand companies to radically reduce plastic waste

100-year-old tortoise confirm to be from an “extinct” species. Guess he didn’t get the email

StarCrawlers Chimera

Not playing it yet... just sitting and watching the videos and reviews for Dungeon of Naheubeuk. Undecided as of yet. It looks like the kind of satire that is just up my alley. After all, I did like Grotesque Tactics 2 Dungeons and Donuts.

Why Militias Are So Hard To Stop Interesting article. I have a hard time taking the whole notion of militias being a threat seriously. A bunch of overweight and overage adolescents dressing up in camo and playing soldier on the weekends with overpriced semiautomatic rifles is more absurd that fearsome. More pathetic than dangerous. Then a couple of them thought it would be a good idea to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Stupid. Now all the groups who did nothing wrong that day are a target. As the article points out you are running down a rabbit hole if you are policing ideology. Start cracking down on different groups who may or may not be doing something wrong and you’re going to breed radical groups. You have a handful of people telling everyone the government is a monster that wants to take everything away from them. The absolute worst way to respond to that is to become that monster. That is why BLM has been so effective. The things they were protesting against were actually happening. Every one could see it. The best way to go is what the FBI has been doing: recruiting informants. Any kind of collective crackdown only proves the radicals were right.

As I recall, the DiC dubbing sessions were long, and the original VA Tracey Moore was contractually obligated to a production that was going to limit her availability for recording, so DiC went with a different VA, Terri Hawkes, who wouldn't have any scheduling conflicts. Moore had replaced Hawkes on a different show DiC did, so they may have thought they'd ended up sounding similar, but I think the VA director may have changed as well.

I like to think of it this way: if those nations didn't fund new vaccine development in record time, it would take even longer for everybody else to get a vaccine. The fact that they are getting the vaccines first is what motivated the spending in the first place. Sure it's selfish, but it's human nature to take care of your own first.

what is it? Its not fusion cell. This is fusion cell:

Never tried it! I will give it a go.

World-First Tokamak Exhaust System Paves Way For Nuclear Fusion.

actually managed to nab The Outer Worlds on a sale, played it for a bit (got the character to level 27, game doesn't seem to be anywhere near the end though, so it's pretty big in terms of content, which is not a good thing, more on that below) and I have conflicting feelings about it. now, I'd never even discuss it with people, but since this is the Obsidian Forum I am curious if anyone else here feels the same way I do about OW. on the one hand it's pretty impressive visually. graphics are nice, animations are nice when they don't bug out, voice acting is pretty good as far as my tastes are concerned. shooting mechanics are meh, but that's because of how confused the game is about its combat mechanics (with all the damage types and enemy types it's very hard to keep track of what damages what), but that brings me to my first big gripe with the game: it should never have been a first-person shooter. when the game was announced I immediately thought to myself, "ah, Obsidz are making a spiritual successor to New Vegas with a KOTOR twist to it, nice!" -- I couldn't have been further from the truth. in all fairness, if OW was anything like NV I would've loved it. unfortunately it isn't. my guess is the general concept was closer to "Dishonored with a bit of Bioshock", and I'm going off on a tangent here, but neither games were particularly good to begin with, but at least they weren't too repetitive (at least they didn't feel repetitive to me, but I dropped them after about 5 hours with each, since they're terrible shooters as well). New Vegas worked because it was an open world game (which meant approaching any area from any side you wanted), and with a proper build you could make your character pretty powerful early on, which removed all the tedium from going around and clearing the wasteland. in OW you go around wasting hours upon hours killing randomly placed enemies that have a million HP each, I actually had to buy ammo after a few encounters in a particularly nasty area because I was spending around 200 rounds for my primary weapon each encounter there. and the only time you actually get a rest from all that mindless combat is when you're moving around a quest area. in fact, more than once I caught myself thinking, "is this what Fallout 2 would've played like if it was a first-person shooter?" -- and some episodes in OW really made me feel like I was playing a Fallout 2 remake. the game world is built in a very similar way, with quest hubs, empty spaces between them where you sometimes get random encounters etc. anyway, to make this long story short: this game should either have been an adventure game with minimal combat and hence -- with less filler areas to have to traverse; or it should've been a full-blown shooter without all the weird role-playing elements that make combat such a chore, relying instead on the player's skill and approach to winning each firefight. in the end it's neither tactical nor skill-based, which begs the question of why OT even has combat. my biggest issue is having to visit the same locations multiple times -- it's amazing that in the year of our Lord 2021 we still can't figure out a way to complete quests without walking up to the quest giver (and that's in a game about the Space Age!). I honestly expected an OG Star Trek-inspired adventure, where your time would be split evenly between visiting weird planets and having weird scenarios aboard your ship. instead I got another KOTOR, which already felt outdated when it first came out.

The Mavericks were supposed to be a favorable matchup for the Clippers. There was, however, always the Luka Doncic goes ape$#!+ factor, and go ape$#!+ he has so far. He's one of a handful of players currently in the NBA that can just say "!^<× this, hop on my back, we're winning this !^<×ing game."

have you not been watching the dozens of OG dub clips I've been linking over the past year (Real answer is Luna always sounded like that in that dub for whatever reason, while Usagi's voice changed after the first couple of seasons because the season 1 and 2 VA got pregnant and decided she didn't want to do it anymore or something, IDK - somehow, they were unable to find someone better...somehow, I don't know how.) Ah, that must be why I immediately disliked him so much, . P.S. Not gonna watch the Tomoyo song, seems like it'd be too special to spoil pre-emptively! P.P.S. Some good YouTube comments on that video:

I finally beat act 4, which is as far as the beta goes, and I'm really looking forward to the full game. I might mess around with a few things here and there but I'm trying to wait for the full release before really diving back in.

I liked it a lot. It is more serious, with the main character having more realistic reactions to his situation than what I usually see in an Anime. The following observations are not big spoilers, but I'll hide them just in case.

Whispers' Offensive Parry is not an aoe effect AFAIR. Riposte should work, but it's not 100% chance to proc.

Empire of Sin was on sale on Steam, so I picked it up for some gangster escapades.

You know I can't update this thread without at least one critter story.... so here it is. From the Texas deep freeze a little while back: Texas Family Spends 12 Hours In Car So Dog Can Give Birth In The Warmth

A woman, nicknamed 'book lady,' wants to give away one million books to her community

""When I heard about it, I called Jerry and asked if he would come help us out," Mount Pleasant Mayor Will Haynie told CNN. "After he looked it over, he said, 'There's your problem right there. It's backed up because you have one person checking people in.' Then he showed us how to do it right."" They needed a professional for that, huh.

A Chick-fil-A manager saved a drive-thru Covid-19 vaccination clinic after traffic backed up