Leaderboard

In a similar way that politicians that are against abortion, are actually ok with it, as long as it involves, their family members or, perhaps, mistresses.

Yes, this is the key to maximize the impact of a tank (+engagement) imo. If you then deploy lots of hard CC (from stealth) onto the enemies who surround your tank you'll also prevent most escapes into the backline and such. My go-to strategy with a party mostly is: stealth, send tank in, unstealth tank, buff the party (mostly ACC, buffing doesn't break stealth), use hard CC and debuffs (breaks stealth), finally deal damage. Enemies who don't gt affected by CC will still be bound by engagement. Fortunately those who resist CC are often not the ones who tend to rush your backline.

Completed Solasta: Crown of the Magister. Solasta is a party-based RPG with four protagonists, closer to a dungeon-crawler or a tactical RPG, than other cRPGs. There are several NPCs who can temporarily (for one or two battles) join the party in combat. There are several classes, weapons, backgrounds and manners of speech. Backgrounds provide unique quests (1 per background) during the game. Most of the time the party uses auto-dialogue according to their personality tags, but there are dialogue options as well, which may affect the story. The main story is mostly linear (there are few choices), with new objectives appearing after completing the previous ones. There are several side quests. Combat is usually unavoidable (the game cannot be completed without it), but it is not possible to attack neutral or friendly NPCs without announcing your intention first (there is one exception, where the boss turned hostile after the party looted the room). In the situations when it is possible to use diplomacy, the XP reward is roughly equal to the one gained by killing the boss. The combat is turn-based with adjustable difficulty, from damage dealt to spell requirements to random encounters. There are also separate settings for AI. Maps are fully 3D and vertical movement is meaningful. The reputation system affects only the items available for purchase, but not the story. The crafting system is easy to understand and crafted equipment and consumables provide advantage without being balance-breaking. The graphics and sound are adequate, they fit the setting and do not distract from combat. The style is consistent and animations are expressive. GUI is comfortable to use, but relies mostly on the mouse and there are too few hotkeys. The controls are responsive and rebindable, 5-button mice are supported. Tutorials are easy to understand and helpful, but some important features are not mentioned, such as Identifying magical items. The number of save files is limited to 50 and they are located in AppData (why would a hidden folder) and names for custom characters cannot be repeated. I have encountered several small graphical glitches (animations not playing when speeded up; wrong portrait shown after combat), several small audio bugs (VA and subtitles did not match) and one softlock (during a late-game main quest, “The Mind of the Master”). Optimisation is lacking - frames per second dropped in areas with water, GPU temperature was high during gameplay. Completed Boyfriend Dungeon. Boyfriend Dungeon is a rogue-lite/dating-sim. There are 2 dungeons, 4 bosses, several equipment pieces. The MC's name and appearance are customizable, level progression is completely automatic and linear (higher level = more HP and higher damage). Difficulty depends on the PC's level, because nothing scales and it is easy to out-level everything. There are no penalties for defeat in dungeons, XP and loot acquired are kept. The controls are responsive and rebindable, 5-button mice are supported. The game uses 1 auto-save. There are 7 weapons that are unlocked as the story progresses. It is impossible to alienate or antagonise them, they love the MC no matter what and always available to use after acquiring them. Dialogue choices are rather limited, but often reflected in following dialogues. The main story itself relies heavily on the MC's passivity and lack of attention, while the main antagonist is extremely obvious and ridiculously incompetent. There is no in-game journal or log. In general, clearing 1 floor of a dungeon is enough to trigger next event. I have not encountered any significant bugs. Recommended on sale, because the game technically achieves what it states on the store page - there are weapons who are possible to date, randomly-generated dungeons offer action-based combat, despite both aspects being shallow. Replayed Mass Effect. Mass Effect is an action-RPG/cover-based third-person shooter. There are several classes, companions and weapon types. The game supports auto-/manual and quick saves. The character is customizable (class, equipment, appearance, background, first name). It runs on Windows 10. 2 DLC are available for free from the publisher's site*. The controls are rebindable, 4-button mice supported (the fifth button is not recognised). Some in-game bonuses (i.e. +10% to shields or weapon proficiencies) are locked behind in-game achievements (not Steam achievements). The dialogue system is lacking - the answer shown can be very different from the spoken line; sometimes the player can choose only the tone, but not the meaning. The vehicle, the Mako, has very unusual physics and controls. Replayed Dark Souls: Remastered. Still feels reasonably challenging and engaging. Also, unlike the Prepare to Die Edition, it is very comfortable to play with keyboard and mouse. Not sure, if I should repost my reviews here, but why not. Currently playing Black Legend. It is a tactical game with RPG elements. Good controls, combat, graphics, story, optimisation.

I find it hard to justify picking a SC Fighter. The highest power level abilities are just not good enough. Clean Sweep/Clear the Path are great - but as Eric already said: Clear Out is sufficient and available for multiclasses. The rest is just... boring and a little weak, too.

I would say it is rarely worth it. Inspired strike is overcosted, does not work with AoE weapon, and Empowering it would burn so much ressources that you will fill naked for middle to long duration battles. Sundering blow is great though, especially with AoE weapons such as mortars or rods. Clear Out upgrades are nice, but Clear Out on its own is good enough and can benefit from MC talents. Black Jacket + varied weapon + Clear Out upgrades can be fun, but that's not what you intend to play.

the question is less straightforward than it might appear to be at first glance. wotr provides so many options and one suspects a great many options are working properly or if they are not, most people won't realize if a roll that should be a functional 10% boost is only providing 8%. the thing is, based on board feedback, a few mythic paths are not advancing properly due to either quest issues or mechanics problems. also, if you are unlucky or unknowing and choose a broken class, spells or feats, then no doubt a wotr gaming experience will be frustrating. regardless, it is rare when the best advice regarding a pc game release would be other than delaying your initial purchase for a few months. there is a good chance the game will drop in price after six months or so (not always) and you most certainly will be playing a more stable product after a few robust patches have fixed many problems. for this individual, the game is not unplayable in its current state, but such is because our expectations were for the wotr release to be a functional additional beta stage. HA! Good Fun! ps am already having invested dozens of hours into the game and the end of chapter two (of six total chapters) is gonna happen sometime today. am suspecting less pokey players have gotten a fair bit deeper into the game. not unplayable, but not polished by any means and there is a few bugs which could result in significant frustration depending on your character and quest choices.

As mentionned in the forum, a full attack with a melee weapon in offhand paired with a ranged one in main hand can be devastating : mortar, keeper of the flame (with eder's armor) etc.. And because I like the on-crit-effect and on-kill-effect , I recruted a new ranger (named just "o") and trained him to the level 16, gave him the Sungrazer with Meteoric and Extinction, and Current rush with High tide, and ordered him to do a serie of Whirling strikes in the melee heart, for the spectacle. That was beautiful. (Hide tide can proc from Current rush crit And from Hide tide crit herself like i read here)

Subclass: Imo Steel Garrote is better than Bleak Walker in this case. With Spirit Frenzy you'll stagger automatically and thus the life drain of the Steel Garrote is always active basically, countering the self damage of the Berserker "on the fly" without the need to stop hitting. Even Kind Wayfarer would be better in my book (also heals himself with Flames of Devotion). The bit of extra damage for Flames and Devotion is not that important in a triple crown run imo, especially since Zeal is rather limited. --- Self Damage/damage mitigation: Voidward and other sources of dmg reduction (e.g. Death's Maw) are a good idea. A Paladin/Berserker can reach pretty great AR with the several passives and inspirations (Thick Skinned, Stoic Steel, Inspired Defenses, Hardy...) - Zealous Endurance won't stack with Hardy - but the self heal from Exalted Endurance might still be worth it (never tried though). And he can always counter self damage with Lay on Hands - which is neat. Fanatic also usually reaches very high Fortitude (+20 from Tenacious/Hardy and more from the Paladin's Faith and Devotion and whatnot) besides having access to good defense passives in the first place. Inspiring Triumph (+12 to all defenses) also applies to the Fanatic himself by the way. A Fanatic with the Berserker can achieve near immunity to most afflictions because the Paladin has several resistance passives and the Berserker has Unflinching which - in combnation with self damage and healing, can remove afflictions entirely. This can be important in TC runs because often it's the hard CC that will screw you. --- Friendly Fire: Confusion is bad with AoE dmg or debuffs if you are near party members (Carnage, Sacred Immolation, Inpired Beacon etc.). And auras (e.g. Exalted Endurance) and other kind of passive effects (Inspired Defenses) are especially bad because they will also apply to enemies. You could circumvent that with really low INT - but... meh. It is easy for a Fanatic to eliminate Berserker confusion though - because the Paladin can get a resistance against INT afflictions as passive ability. That will remove confusion from your character altogether at all times. You can also spare the point (or avoid confusion early) and either use Svef (drug), Luminous Lobster (food) or wear Devil of Caroc Breastplate (nice anyway) with the "Mechanical Mind" enchantment. You could also use swords and get Modwyr . It makes you not only resistant but completely immune to INT afflictions. If you want to be more free with your consumables and items just pick the passive then. You can always counter confusion with any INT inspiration. So for example a Priest can cast Prayer for the Spirit on the confused Fanatic to remove the confusion.

Once upon the time, some EA representative explained why some content is accessible either via long boring grind OR lootbox purchase with "we wanted to provide our players with a sense or pride and accomplishment". Lets say this explanation failed hard to connect with the audience, just like my joke.

Aaand it seems I lost a rather long reply because locking a thread just makes the forum software eat it. Anyway. RE: Horizon Zero Dawn. I thought the "main" plot point being predictable was intentional (anyone on this forum would figure it out within 30min of starting the game, I'm sure), where the game eventually ends up going was not something I was able to predict until at least a few major story missions in. I don't mind the walking simulator missions quite as much, though some were overlong exposition dumps and should probably have been spread out over more missions. Certainly prefer it over that very long one where they shoehorned some enemies in that shouldn't have been able to be there at all (that was kinda jarring). To me HZD's world feels more akin to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. rather than a "modern" open world game, and I think I personally prefer that approach over the "crammed with stuff"-design we tend to get nowadays. As to what I'm playing, still mostly, Final Fantasy XIV trying to get all jobs to max level before the expansion hits. I've also been back to building in Conan Exiles, it seems the server software has become a bit more stable, not sure if that's related to the big patches recently or the improvements brought by the Debian upgrade and potentially a newer Wine version but I had a server running for over a week without it going Out of Memory. (bets on how long it'll take before I have to eat those words are open ) Still haven't made it back to my Siptah-game, keep getting distracted by...ooooooh, good building spot!

Then can you please explain to me, why the biggest culprits in the workplace misconduct are the "wokest" companies of them all? Like Ubisoft, Blizzard and now Paradox? This is a serious question... They even have Chief Diversity Officers with 6 digits salaries to take care for that, but it seems to me, they are just rotten to the core, and the CDO position is there only to cover up their ****ups...

Monks are the strongest martial class imo, they are great as multiclass as well as single class in all sorts of roles and combos (not even in martial ones). Overall it's just a very well rounded and effective set of subclasses. I mean...

The summoning animation itself has a pretty log duration in general (6 secs etc.). Imo DEX is important to have as a summoner because of that. You really don't want to get interrupted while summoning and the smaller the window the better. What you don't need at all when focusing on summons are MIG and PER (and to a lesser extend also CON and RES). For summoning the key stats are INT (summons' duration) and DEX (summoning speed). This is also true for buffing support which also only needs INT and DEX. So a summoner/buffer can in max out INT and DEX and distrubute the rest how feels best. If you also want to do healing (MIG), CC (PER), deal damage (PER & MIG) or even be in the frontline (CON & RES) that's a different story of course.

I was in your boat. I also did not see the appeal of monk. But it changed after I actually tried playing one. Those abilities like Swift Flurry and Heartbeat Drumming look pretty innocent. But then you see him make 10 attacks in one action and squishy enemies explode outright when targeted by a monk. It doesn't work THAT good versus tough enemies. But in practice often the squishies are the biggest threat and should be eliminated fast. After that, killing meatwalls is just wrap-up that takes more time. Time a FF can save, btw. with his Enfeebled - can't heal AT ALL affliction (and long lasting debuffs). Plus endlessly renewable resources (not just wounds, their generation can be kinda slow at first - particularly on a FF (it improves A LOT later on, though), but also limitless CC with Stunning Surge full attacks. Then the SC monk end game abilities are simply ridiculous...

I've played a Swashbuckler with an Estoc Devoted / Swashbuckler and never hated that build. Quite the opposite, it was VERY strong, Overpenetrating all the time for 30% extra damage. People exaggerate with Pierce immunity. There are like 4-5 areas total with them. And not that hard. Bog Lurkers are complete pushovers actually. Elite skellies can be a bit tougher, but you can for example: 1. Use Monastic Unarmed Training - blunt works well, 2. Use Grave Calling sabre - extremely deadly against vessels, so even lowered Accuracy shouldn't be much of an issue, 3. Use Spine of Thicket Green staff - bonus vs vessels, Reach. People maybe confuse Pierce resistance with immunity. There are quite a few enemies with good Pierce resistance. But when you have 17 base Pen, rogue and fighter active skills can offer +2-4 Pen more and you crit left, right and center, you laugh at those Pierce Armor Ratings.

a few people notably disagree with me, but i maintain that serafen as a cipher is a trap subclass. wildmind is nothing like wild mages. BG-style wild mages had plenty of upside to balance how much randomness they added*. Wild mind foolishly tries to equally weight the outcomes which--all things being equal--favors the enemy, not the player. (In general, the player is expected to the win every fight in deadfire. Adding more variance simply provides more opportunities for the enemy to triumph over the player.) And, all things are not equal. Some of the "beneficial" outcomes may instead be bad, depending on what ability they triggered off of (since they go off whatever targeting was used). It's fun to buff or invisibility your party, but you were expected to win that fight anyway. It's much less fun to buff or invisibility the enemy... tl;dr: if you want a cipher go with ydwin. serafen is a good barbarian. if you really want a principi-aligned character, pick up mirke. she's way better (and more fun!). * people may forget, but wild mages weren't just about random outcomes. wild mages got extra spells per level as if they were specialized but had no opposition school. they also had plenty of abilities they could use to skew the results of their random wild surges to more beneficial outcomes. they also had one spell that let them cast any spell from their library (with a surge) and all they had to do was burn a level 1 spell slot. these are plenty of bonuses that function as upsides to all the randomness that are missing from serafen's wild mind in deadfire.

I think you'll be hardpressed to do triple crown solo without some form of cheese, or at least something that someone would consider cheese. For example, SC Monk is eminently do-able, but afaict pretty much relies on ajamuut's stalking cloak's cheesy synergy with whispers of the wind. As another example, ironically the strong inherent sustain and summons of a herald I don't consider cheese. There's no exacting metagame or itemization to exploit, just a very strongly complementary set of classes in one package. To me, I think pretty much anything is fair game in terms of "gamer bushido" with the exception of outright cheating via console commands. Personally, I would not find the strand of favor exploit rewarding. But even the latter, triple crown solo is hard enough [and you still have to find the strand of favor!] that really I would say "if it felt rewarding to you, then do it and bask in your glory." if you do something and someone says "hey that doesn't count, you used something cheesy" your response should just be "ok, then, you try it."

That says a lot about the studio if that list is "nothing too crazy" compared to other stuff. Sounds interesting, let's see how big of a nosedive the show really takes, but 39 episodes aren't that long. Sure sounds better than Utena. So the main character is Anno himself, again? Is that true for all the other characters too?

Tl;dr; “pro-lifers” don’t give a **** about kids once they’re born and can drown for all they care. It’s about the logic of religious mindsets. Ilf I focus on a single issue, I can feel good and superior or some such

It's basically playing on the fact that the pro-life crowd who focus on "the unborn life of a fetus is so important we have to do all this to help it" tend to gloss over and ignore the vast amount of kids who have been born and are in the US foster care system. Life is important to them, until it's actually born and requires education, feeding, care, and homes with family. There does seem to be a large segment of the pro-life crowd that tend to be running with that "we care until they're born, then it's all socialism that we're against to actually look after the children..."

Not really to the level of Evangelion, but...some random wacky spoilers ahead: Biggest problem with this series is funnily the exact same one I had with Evangelion: the main character. Let's just say that Anno seems to have specific traits in mind that I do not find particularly enjoyable for his protagonists, .

The Dragon does great anti-mob damage if you use its active abilities. The dragons auto-attacks are very weak, but the abilities get scaled up tremendously because of the creature's (power) level. Animated weapons only do (great) single target damage. So... the dragon's not only a meatwall imo. A Beckoner with two dragons (which are less tanky of course and don't last as long) can wipe serious mob encounters away while still having reasonable tanking abilities (also because there's two of them). If you want to be more flexible with single targets/mobs you can also pick 4 Ancient Weapons (or 8 with a Beckoner) which is better than 3 (6). Also last longer bc of Power Level (unless you are a Chanter/Monk with Duality oMP's +10 INT). The (small) problem with a multiclass summoner is that most Chanter's summons don't scale very well (unless you use @Elric Galad's mod). At least offensively they don't. So at some point they become too weak. Fortunately Animated Weapons do scale well overall so it's correct that you can do well with them as MC. However - the "road of summoning" will be harder because the MC summoner will pick/upgrade better summon abilites a lot later than a single class summoner can. There's not much "self-contained" multiclass synergy with summons imo. It's more advantageous to get the better summons asap. Summoning supprt is best done by somebody else then (party member). Another appeal might be that you can get Eld Nary's Curse which is so much better than the non-upgraded version. Of course then you couldn't concentrate on summoning only but would need to be a summoner/damage dealer hybrid (who needs PER and MIG, too).

So did any other stuff show up? Like, I don't know, giant naked depictions of mythological figures? Any Liliths, Adams, Eves or something? My milage would vary, but it can't.

Particularly one infamous late game pirate saber, the availability of which depends on a certain choice in a faction questline can be ridiculously strong on a monk with his Flurry/HBD multiattacks. Its good for most characters, mind you. But a monk (preferably one who can extend his buffs - like a monk/wizard with Wall of Draining OR has a priest with Salvation of Time in the party) can really make it shine.

"Final" episode of Nadia (23/39, 23rd was the original intended ending): ...Or, if you prefer: ...And a quick, "slight" tweak I just made for no reason: Hm, yeah,. I alllmost stopped watching the first couple of minutes, and then again during one particular scene towards the beginning, but I didn't. Your mileage may vary, .

The Middleman was a fun show.

Tuotilo's Palm is great for monks, giving a big boost in defense with a relatively small dip in DPS. While you do less damage with the shield than you would with most weapons or an unarmed strike, the shield's damage and accuracy scales with transcendent suffering, making it not bad at all. It also gives you a +5 boost in accuracy upgrade for unarmed attacks, which will largely make up for this, especially if your main hand is unarmed. It also gives you +1 deflection and reflex per wound when upgraded.

for pure dps, the summoned weapons are better, but for pure Unstoppable Boi energy, dragon is great. literally a ton of health and various helpful immunities. and even if the summoned weapons can pelt out a lot more damage over their duration, the dragon can burst out a lot of damage and clear out a lot of trash mobs with their tail whip or fire breath right when it appears (easily mid-100s damage in a huge area). with a troubadour or bellower to easily get >100% uptime on the summon duration, i've literally used the dragon to tank several of the megabosses. that might take up the entire screen

Konstanten is a lot of fun imo if you a) crit with him frequently (because he has such a contagious laugh during battle) - should be a goal anyway bc. of Skald. b) bring Fassina as well (really nice interaction between the two) c) do Seeker, Slayer, Survivor (he turns from Sidekick into Companion so to speak) If you don't want to do melee with him (recommend Willbreaker again ;)) I'd suggest Blightheart as weapon. The combination of low cost offensive invocations (e.g. only 2 points for "Her Revenge") with Blood Thirst and the arquebus' "phrase on kill" which triggers on every kill - spells included - on top of your normal phrase generation lets you dish out offensive invocations very quickly which is fun: This is a Berserker/Skald who also kills his skeletons - but the principle is the same with Konstanten + Blightheart (without the skeletons) : cast damage and get phrases for kills (instead of melee crits).

The only bashing shields are Tuotilo's Palm, Magran's Blessing and The Best Defense (SSS). They count as offhand-weapon and shield. Visible because they have attack properties as part of their enchtantments. "Normal shields" only have defensive properties. Ha, they are not off. My inbox was full (again). This happens quite often because the forum doesn't notify me when the inbox is full. I'll delete some older messages... Edit: accidentially deleted all messages. Jeez, I'm too tired. Ah well... At least there's room for new ones now.

Also use natural choke points. That way there is no way through cept the tank. For example have the tank at a door, your party behind. And throw AOE spells through at them. Maybe leave a little room for any melee dps to put in work. If you are surrounded in the open, like with some encounters, the best thing imo is for your entire party to hug each other closely, having the tank face what you think is the most dangerous mob, and pre-emptively cast healing AOE zone and buffs which will now cover your entire party. I've noticed that at least in my experience, there aren't many places in the game where you get punished for sticking close to each other. I actually think the game could need a few more enemies that punishes the player for grouping because that strategy, while lame, is very strong. Edit: Positioning is so important in the initial phase of the encounter, that an impossible encounter can be won - and an easy encounter lead to a wipe. Playing on veteran for the first time through this game, I realized this early. That positioning properly in the environment is pretty much the most valuable asset you have at your disposal. There is a place, an observatory, where an extremely hard fight takes place right inside with tons of strong enemies. I went from being destroyed in a minute, to a 5 minute fight I eventually won - by positioning differently.

one thing to remember is engaging is afaict an active action. you *have* to at least click on an enemy, and that'll trigger engagement (if available). if you just run in, say, try casting a spell, enemies will just walk around your would-be tank. you can even do this to switch engagement, if you have multiple enemies and not enough open engagement. click on an enemy and your character will switch their engagements to include that enemy. i've definitely done this on characters with only one engagement to keep multiple enemies stuck on them and protect other characters. (that being said, once you have engagement, it's sticky. you can read scrolls, drink potions, cast spells, etc. without dropping it)

I really like Witches. Pick Spirit Frenzy (not Spirit Tornado!) and give him the Willbreaker Morning Star (use the modal). Its hits lower fortitude by 25 (once, no stacking) and Will by 3 (stacks per hit). Use Secret Horrors, it's just great. That way you will have applied Staggered (Spirit Frenzy), Frightened and Sickened (Secret Horrors). Even without hitting the enemy with the Morning Star yet you lowered the enemies fortitude by 20 and the Will by 10 with just one spell. Now attack with the Morning Star - the targeted enemy will get -25 fortitude and a Will debuff on top (-45 fortitude!). Not only is this cool for your party, but also with Brute Force it will be very easy to hit enemies (who didn't start with astronomical fortitude). Resolve afflictions work well in combo with the Willbreaker. Also charming/dominating works well with a witch in general (can try to shake enemies with a yell to lower Will right a the start of battle - also here Staggered from Spirit Tornado gets applied). Wild Mind can be very annoying. But imo it's less dramatic as some other players make it seem. It's unpredictable and that doesn't sit well with most players who like to have full control. From time to time I enjoy a little chaos so I'm fine with it. Though I would't be in an Ironman run I assume.

Actual pro-life movement would actually build social benefits that would ensure that there is no people in poverty and that any child born would have decent place to live, access to good schooling and they don't cause unbearable burden to their parents. Making things illegal don't remove reason why people are seeking abortions

this right here is kind of answering your own question. if your backline caster is being attacked, then a tank is not doing their job somewhere. make sure you actually have enough engagement. it seems like you get the gist of it, but just to reiterate: most characters don't have engagement by default and a shield is the main way. some of the real "tank"-type classes have additional ways to get more engagement (barb, fighter), and a few casters have abilities that grant more engagement. generally one engagement per melee is not enough i find to keep my caster-heavy parties safe. fighters are real great for this - one of their stances gives them +3 engagement *and* damage reduction. edit: do you actually see the engagement lines? it should be pretty obvious which characters are engaging each other. disengagement attacks are far more punishing than normal attacks (huge acc bonus, huge damage bonus) Does the enemy have engagement? If not, then just step away and let the enemy retarget your tank, because they'll be engaged (if your tank is properly set up) and the AI is extremely reluctant to break engagement. If the enemy has engagement you should, as some suggestions: instead have your non-tank melee target non-engaging targets interrupt/prone/knockup them (while they're interrupted, they can't engage) hit them with something that grants staggered or dazed (eliminates engagement) hit them with hard crowd control (stun, paralyze, terrify) edit: buff your non-tank melee with swift (can't be engaged) or equip non-engaging armor if you're still struggling, i would question what that other melee character is. most non-tank melee-ers have escape abilities of some sort, even if it's just bonuses against disengagement. Even a barbarian built to be a glass cannon has sprint and leap. Rogues are the most glass-cannon-y of melee characters, and not only do they have tons of escape mechanics, pretty much all their abilities interrupt, which lets you run away if needed. the AI also likes to target lower health characters - try picking up tough, not-dumping your CON, etc. a tank with lower health but high defenses will be a juicy target for the AI. all else fails, equip your non-tank melee with reach weapons (staff, pike, there's a reach unique great sword). edit: worth pointing out there are plenty of (even some pretty major) systems that have tanks but no system of aggro or taunts (which are both pretty MMO specific mechanics imo). Generally they rely on making it extremely punishing for enemies to *not* target the tank, or to step away from them. same principle. it's also worth pointing out that while some AI will love to just target squishier characters (bad news for glass cannon melee with no mobility), some AI are just sticky to their first target (good news if it's your tank). The AI kinda varies. Enemy rogues, for example, can get really punishing because at mid-levels bc they frequently have engagement and will use mobility spells to jump past your front line, trapping and absolutely wrecking your squishier characters - this AI's aggressive willingness to go after squishy characters (even eating a disengagement attack if necessary) is kinda unique to rogue types. Of course, that's what you should be doing to them, given the chance

I just have a hard time with this whole concept of dictating the terms of what a women can do to her body. That should be between her and her medical professional. Ideally, everyone would use birth control. Ideally, if that fails or is not used, people will use plan B. But unplanned pregnancies rarely come out of ideal situations. It is also good to point out that abortion rates have declined quite a bit since the late 70's. We don't actually need to make abortion illegal to stop it from happening. We have had success by offering services to support women with reproductive health instead of trying to criminalize it.

Alchemy lets the drugs last a lot longer. Nalpasca gets addtional Power Level for drugs on top, too. Also Alchemy makes stuff like healing potions supereffective so it's not a bad skill to raise.

If you go with max RES for a Forbidden Fist and also use -x% to hostile effects duration items + -food it's no problem at all. The Forbidden Fist curse will be secs and the healing you get once a hostile effec expires will be higher than the self damage you suffered. Also: Clarity of Agony and Crucible of Suffering... As Forbidden Fist you don't need many attack abilities besides Forbidden Fist itself. It's very strong. Small trick: if you have a Druid in the party the Forbidden Fist can get a lot of wounds in shirt time - when running through the Druid's Tanglefoot.

Interesting question, but it would be helpful to understand what you consider as cheesy, abusive or exploitative. I fear it’s going to be rough to find a strong contender without some kind of feature that some would consider cheesy one way or another. Also, in late game DLCs there are lots of encounters you can’t just sneak out of and reset. Encounters go on as long as enemies live, and you have little space to maneuver. And by then, everybody hit like absolute trucks on PotD, with thousands of health points. I do love Shifter/Assassin solo but in my very humble opinion based on a fair amount of solo runs with other builds I don’t think it’s triple crown solo material. Even using a ton of arcana, alchemy etc. it would be subject to a ton of RNG. IMO the game is balanced so that late-stage PotD is meant for a decently optimized lvl20 party. You will hardly be able to solo against those odds without some kind of Uber-synergy or unexpected mechanic (i.e. cheesy to some) to balance things out .

I'm playing PoTD for the first time and Eder even "only" as Swashbuckler makes him feel really squishy in the beginning. However on PoTD, strangely enough, in just medium armor and multi-classed I feel like he is doing his job as a tank now at lvl10 just as well if not better as in veteran. Because as fighter/rogue I noticed he is still tanky enough but now also provide much needed damage. Having him gouging strike and blind melee mobs, maybe that is what does it dunno. Ballsy to go pure rogue Eder on PoTD though Man that does sound like a nightmare. Even as a fighter Eder on the first island potd I had to use scrolls, potions, traps and drugs to make it. Things I never needed on veteran.

Besides "instadeath by script" you should also watch out if you have injuries and then walk into a scripted scene where you might aquire more injuries. I remember at least one scripted scene where you can get more than one injury (iirc something with the Survivor's route in SSS?). Too bad if you started into that with two injuries...

Who knew Finns could emote this much

It's pretty good. I enjoy survival horror games usually and this one has the credentials. It's more Silent Hill than Resident Evil. Got genuinely stumped on a couple of puzzles so far and eventually I had to cheat and look it up which I hate doing :(. Atmosphere is dark and spooky, monsters are creepy and give you aa run for your money but but are nothing out of the ordinary and the combat is kinda dull, but I guess people don't play these types of games primarily for combat. All-in-all worth a playthrough.

Sorry I post it everywhere, I just can't get enough of that intro xD

I assume it's the common complaint with chanters. The long phrase generation makes the class boring for some people. Chanters are like Marmite. You love them or you hate them. There is no indifference. Edit: I like Marmite. I also like single-class chanters. There might be a correlation. We should do a poll.