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I didn't go to a Christmas party because I didn't trust everyone invited when it comes to health and safety. People felt I was being unreasonable and strange as I tend to be. I noticed that the people I talked to since then were oddly evasive and didn't even mention the party. Today a friend called and in the course of the chat asked me if I heard who just had a positive test result a few days ago... I am not happy a friend is ill. But it explains a lot why everyone has been acting so funny. They are trying to avoid the "I told you so". As if I were going to "I told you so" when a friend is ill. I did learn though that just the knowledge that someone has the high ground to say it, makes people wince more than the actual words

I agree with Bruce. COVID impacting my social life for 2 years is worse and has more far reaching effects than the entire history of colonialism.

There dammit! THERE !!! Stop the violence against the Aussie language

Hi Folks, I've only stumbled upon this now because to my great shame I only ever play Bloodmage as Wizards... maybe you did know this already? If you're playing a non-Bloodmage, when you have the Grimoire of Vaporous Wizardy equipped, using an Empower point to replenish spell pool refunds not 1, but 2 spells per level (except your last one, Tier 7 for MC and Tier 9 for SC, which only gets 1 spell). Even better, you don't have to commit to using Grimoire of Vaporous Wizardry at all! Just have it in your quick items, pause the game, switch to it, use the Empower point, switch back to your main Grimoire and you have simply doubled the normal amount of spells replenished. It's not game breaking but hey, a very basic SC Wizard has 17 Spells + 9 refunds = 26 Spells. The same SC Wizard with Vaporous Wizardy (even as secondary Grimoire) has 26 + 17 = 43 Spells. You can do a lot of things with 65% more spells to cast! So even without being a cheesy little monster and permastealing spells, you could cast e.g. 4 Shadowflames + 5 Freezing Pillars + 5 Wilting Winds + 3 Meteor Showers/Missile Salvos in a single fight. 5 Enervating Terror, 4 Death Rays... And if you just want to use the Vaporous Grimoire temporarily, having a couple layers of Concentration (e.g. Combat Focus + Spirit Shield + Arcane Veil + Upright Captain's Belt = 4 layers) is enough, no need to go down the Rekvu's Fractured Casque + Injury path. Or simply get a paladin to cast Hands of Light on you. Especially with BPM considering the Blood Sacrifice and Brilliant nerf, SC Wizard is growing on me! EDIT: cherry on the cake if you're playing a Loremaster that can refund more than 1 Empower Points to max easily with Sasha's Scimitar and Her Revenge/Her Tears, this makes Chanter/Wizard No Subclass strictly better than Chanter/Bloodmage, at least with BPM! If you factor in that it can get anyway all Tier 1-3 vancian caster spells for free, that could potentially be one of the very strongest Solo options for BPM.

Just paid the annual road tax. At least I no longer have to attach an ugly sticker to my windshield. Progress, right?

Actually, if the pandemic showed anything it is that countries' cannibalization of their public healthcare in favour of privatization and tax cuts for big business was criminal in how unprepared it left them for the pandemic. Also how narrow minded and selfish most of the rich countries acted. But aren't you getting tired of trying to turn every single one of your posts into lashing out at the evil left?

Her looking Aiel is fine, their racial characteristics are 'blonds and redheads' and Tigraine was blonde. Going from a pampered princess in her early twenties to a proper Aiel fighter who can solo multiple armoured guys while having contractions a few years later stretches credibility somewhat and is only really acceptable for the standard reason that implausible things happen all the time in WoT- Rota vult. And even that is a stretch, given all she actually has to do is make it to Dragonmount and die. OTOH, it's exactly the sort of thing that I'd be ignoring if the rest of the content was good- in the books a different daughter heir becomes an accomplished tight rope walker completely randomly after all, and without even the excuse that it had to be due to prophecy... Obviously I agree pretty much completely with everything. The only caveats I'd have are with how hard it is to translate pov to TV, and that all the female main characters (counting Egwene, Nynaeve and Moiriane) in WoT aren't really 'likeable' early on, largely because they're viewed from the pov of Rand and Perrin in the books (exc Egwene, to an extent, though as I've said before I find her most likeable early on). Probably the best example of how pov effects things is Mat, who a lot of people don't like in the early books because he's seen through Rand's pov and is complaining and always saying he'd leave if he could- but, when you do get his povs he complains incessantly and is always on the verge of running off; yet somehow always ends up doing the right thing anyway. So a lot of people dislike Nynaeve in the early books because she's an authority figure to the boys and was a young woman authority figure in her village trying to order people three times her age around, or Moiraine because her intentions are opaque and the boys don't trust her. Some modification to their apparent personalities to make them more likeable is not a problem when you have a switch to a more omniscient pov because they actually are more likeable than the povs have them as. I'm not actually sure the show tried that at all though. It's far easier to make them 'likeable' instead of likeable by having them do all the cool things. And yeah, with that approach you end up with Superman very rapidly because you have to have them doing cooler and cooler things and get into a spiral of plot inflation. Given the content of ep8, power wise there already is absolutely nowhere for them to go upwards except into the completely stupid.

@majestic Of all the songs you picked that one... It's a popular song I guess and it won eurovision, but man am I sick of it by now. Here is something much better.

sure there are. coulda' done as we suggested. is also nothing to prevent "ninja-tastic" (which in itself is wholly unnecessary) with a not pregnant woman at some point later in the show, if for whatever gawdawful reason reason you wanna go that way. show the woman dispatch a couple competent swordsman in a not silly fight would somehow diminish her skill in the minds o' viewers? you are not serious. sorry, but this is matrix reloaded all over for us. maybe you think the pregnant woman battle is fine, which is ok. to us the fight were indeed "glaringly wrong" and were unnecessarily campy. the fight distracted from what coulda/shoulda been a more emotional impactful scene. opinion. regardless, to suggest the fight were somehow necessary over-the-top is just plain wrong. is no doubt many ways the scene coulda' played out and am certain a few such ways wouldn't o' left Gromnir rolling his eyes and internal groaning. btw, if "ninja-tastic" requires superhuman abilities w/o magic, radioactive spiders or bionic man kinda stuff, then you have already left us outta your prospective circle o' fans... again, unless you is genuine going for camp as with five deadly venoms and the crazy 88s, but that scene did not strike us as trying for camp. HA! Good Fun! ps as improbable as it seems, or recollection is that jordan denied his aiel were inspired by herbert's fremen. supposed inspirations were real world bedouin, apache and zulu cultures and warrior traditions, which were simillar source material for herbert. anime shinobi were not listed by jordan as inspiration.

As they say, it's a beautiful fight sequence. Not a serious one. It tells the story they need to tell, and while it's somewhat silly and OTT it isn't.. glaringly wrong? Just implausible. I always find it interesting to see the balance of "we want it to be believable" versus "we want it to tell a story" for fight sequences. I think they benefited from directly casting a stunt-woman in the role, rather than an actor who then had to learn how to do that, helped sell the physicality of it all. Throw in fairly decent choreography for multiple people on one, and it shows they put some thought into the practicality of it to a certain extent. Not as atrocious as a certain Snoke Praetorian Guard fight sequence in another franchise.. Actually, there's some interesting behind the scenes stuff on Amazon about that episode, apparently it's the first tv show the Director was able to convince to use a Bolt robot camera to do the shooting for it. Some quirky technical aspects. On a different vein:

Tactician/Berserker is solid in a party, but certainly not made for solo. Also, for me there's a big difference between a class able to finish the game solo (by skipping content and avoiding fights) and a class able to complete the entire game solo (meaning he can beat any encounter in the game). For example a blood mage can't beat the Changeling's Dance encounter without heavy exploits and I certainly wouldn't rank him first. My top 5 would be: forbidden fist troubadour/paladin blood mage/paladin tactician/assassin forbidden fist/psion (or forbidden fist/soul blade with the CP)

Arcane Reflection spells have a limit of total spells reflected by amount of level : 30 spell levels for PL 6 Arcane reflection. Standards AoE spells like Chillfog, Storm of Holy Fire, Writ of Sorcery or Arcane Dampener are not reflected however. Venombloom is a little different : the raw damages and the Weakened affliction are not reflected, but only the Frightened effect. With a resolve immunity for the Druid, in some ticks (depend of the PL bonus the druid get) the Arcane Reflection is removed, without malus. Another good spell that clear quickly the Arcane Reflection is Avenging Storm, even if Shock damages are reflected : it is available on top with scroll or item and a multi-hits weapon clear the effect on potentially one hit! Another class really interesting to clear the effect in the same way is Cipher : with (for exemple) Mental Binding, if the reflecting ennemy is only in the AoE, the immobilized effect is not reflected. But if he is the target, the Paralized effect is.

This is extremely important imo and a factor that many people overlook when designing/playing builds. There is a huge chunk of the game that you play before being level 20 and before being geared out and if you struggle during that period of gameplay that can be frustrating.

It's like when you drive a car off the lot. Immediately drops in value. ...come to think of it, I was able to return that car I bought. Years should come with time-back guarantees! Then I'd still only be 30!

Hello, I started playing PoE in 2017 and completed it. I started playing Poe2 in December and overall I xperienced again the frustration related to fight mechanics, which I don't find intuitive or natural. I can deal with most fights, though I disabled level scaling completely because I hate that in general,but some fights feel unberable and excruciating, like Mega-bosses. I have read they are intended to encourage diversifying strategies and optimizing team, but this feels really frustrating to me(I play on Veteran). I like the story, universe, music of the game, but the fight mechanics are what annoys me as they are too "balanced".When I played BG2, I did feel overwhelmed at times, but I had my own mechanics to counter the difficulty(using traps, summons, Carsomyr was so good). On a technical note, I feel frustrated by the amount of fixes I had to apply to fix performance issues: disabling many settings, telemetrics, chaning settings from nvidia panel control. I had to install game again on SSD to reduce loading times. Even now I still have issues and some crashes once in a while.

It certainly tracks with the US, but it seems to do a lot more summarizing than satiring, if that makes sense.

This movie is particularly funny for Brazilians, since Bolsonaro seems to be following the script pretty closely. There are many similarities, including the after credits scene which, in Bolsonaro's case, happened when he tried to offer cloroquine to an emu and it pecked him.

Interesting that it was my Jets and not a alcoholic episode that finally sent Antonio Brown over the edge.

If the US had UBI and UHF, the Covid death total would have been slashed. The fatcats win again.

With a party assist, it is maybe convenient, otherwise confortable, to specialize any character : I have a SC transmuter in the Inn, he is great to play. But he is a disabler, not a freezing Wizard : I'm agree with Not So Clever Hound, if you focus on freeze damage your build, No Subclass or Bloodmage as MC/SC wizard is top!

I did get your point. I was just poking some fun.

I originally had some Dino Merlin lined up (something like Deset mlađa), or thought about Enes Begović (say, Samo jednom se zivi perhaps) but I wanted something more obviously similar to the first enka ballad I originally used and that was pretty much the only thing I found on short notice. Then I switched the Japanese song out, and yeah, it ended up being a mess. Never mind. The thing is, anyway, you can take any of the more popular Enka hits on YouTube and if you don't speak either Japanese or Serbo-Croatian you're not really going to notice much of a difference our could tell which is which, as long as you can't pick out the more traditional instruments.

That's just JoJo in general.

You're right, I unchecked "Only Scale Upwards" while Level Scaling remained activated. Then indeed, if you play without scaling at all the encounter becomes much more forgiving.

GioGio’s Bizarre Adventure, Golden Wind 20-25 The gang finishes the mission, have a last meal in Venice Venezia and learn all the lessons the Stardust Crusaders had learnt. This is JoJo, so there will be people acting weirdly, tongues and bad choices for transportation.

That fight scene is not good. It's not fun enough to work as camp, it's too ridiculous to work as serious, and the way the pregnant lady moves between acrobatics and emoting labor pain inspires a feeling of whiplash. Well it looks like I dodged a bullet on this show.

Hey Constentin, don't worry: try to talk Boeroer into a Mage Slayer build using Willbreaker to kill Many Lives skeletons and you might have a fan.

You can laught but I like Mage Slayer, this class should be very fun to play if the Spell Disruption on melee attack would be applied to weapon's proccing effects (like the AoE of Citzal's Lance or Amra for exemple) or also ranged weapons. With the pulsing "great maelstrom like" Storm rune shot from Thundercrack pistol (not mentionned in the description : 10-15 shock in AoE per 2s for 4s base (5 times with 35 int) ) that would be a stunning version of Writ of Sorcery + frenzy stuff.

Yes, really...have we learned nothing from the new Star Wars sequels? You can have your characters be awesome...in ways that are grounded and feel deserved, that are pointed play-offs and contrasts to their established vulnerabilities. Why is everything constantly devolving to characters never making any mistakes, not having any weaknesses, and not ever being outmanuevered? Especially, it seems, for the poor women in these shows - having a character start off weak and inexperienced and having them learn from their costly mistakes, work through or at least mitigate the physical/emotional vulnerabilities they go through or discover about themselves, and succeed in spite of or even because of their character weaknesses is literally how you make strong and grounded characters that people like and want to root for. If your characters never make any mistakes or have any apparent weaknesses and are always awesome at everything right off the bat...please just throw them into the garbage can and start the whole writing process over again, because at that point you're creating clones of Superman but without the weakness to kryptonite or having them wear the 'S'-emblazoned costumes. For this specific character's case, she's supposed to die right off the bat, so she's not a character that needs to grow or have stated weaknesses...but she's still a pregnant woman that is literally fighting for her life against vicious assailants, and that should draw some kind of empathetic response from me, and it can't - not when it's just this ridiculous cartoon action silliness that is, through its framing, informing me that none of this is serious or matters at all. Again, different strokes for different folks, I know - other people clearly love this stuff. I just want a reason to care before they forcibly drown me in a deluge of meaningless action, I guess.

I play always upscaled thus I can't tell if there's a difference. However I'm still interested in your strategy because I find this encounter very difficult to beat without great passives. Personally I don't find herald boring because it's a very versatile class - you can use summons, invocations and play easily as 1h/s, 2w, 2h or even ranged. On the other hand, I consider very tedious to pass half of the time to buff or maintain the buffs as a caster...

For some reason I thought you had mentioned it for solo but I must have dreamed that up . That explains also a lot - I wasn't totally seeing the solo survivability in many high level fights Yes, I think more broadly any such kind of ranking will depend on: what one considers as fair game vs. exploits they don't want to use for themselves (e.g. prolonging BDD vs Temporal Cocoon vs permastealing spells vs. switching back and forth to Slayer's Claw for Energized vs abusing SoF left and right... 50 shades of grey cheese) whether it is good for each and every possible encounter or the vast majority (and what one considers "vast majority" e.g. Hauani o Whe viable or not, all SSS fights viable or not...) what one considers interesting and fun enough to play (you may have noted that I'm a sucker for Wizard archetypes so I definitely have a biased experience there. On the other hand, I absolutely acknowledge the power of a solo Herald, but I despise its gameplay ) So I appreciate you sharing your top-5. I think that we would come up with a very consistent list of, say, the top-20 solo classes without a precise ranking. It seems to be at least .

Foor you are to tell me, now I will have to patch it out Enjoy it while it lasts (or use previous versions when it stops )

Yes! A No-Rest Loremaster can even cheese the BPM Empower Mechanics nicely: Take useful Empower passives e.g. +ACC and +PEN (you have a grand total of 3 ability points to spend at Tier 7, so tough choice) Empower an inocuous spell on yourself outside of combat e.g. Confusion (you now have the passive BPM +ACC/Pen buffs until next combat end) Go start a tough fight and use your Empower point to replenish your spells with Vaporous Grimoire when needed, while benefiting from those nice Empower passives Once done, pick an easy fight and Empower Her Revenge to refund all your Empower points Rince and repeat Sorry Elric

Chillfog is not reflected, only Venombloom : according to the description, the damages and weaken effects are threated as AoE , and the Frightened effect is wrote as Target. AoE doesnt affect the reflection, but Target does! Sigils have not spell limit (I took a look in the game files), but Arcane Cleanse or equivalent should work.

He was meant to be running honeypots for Mossad, though there isn't any actual evidence, just a load of speculation. Ghislaine has a very proximal relationship with Mossad though, through her father who was definitely one of their assets.

Is there any update or fix for GOG versions or do i need to request another refund??? I just requestsd a game pass refund for their broken (unmoddable with bugged items still) version and got the GOG version and apparently its not compatible with the saves based on the above? Do i really need to request a GOG refund and download the steam version? Getting really tired of this (Update after trying it personally) The Fix worked on the GOG version I just downloaded. Perhaps I got a newer version or something? I'm not sure, but my files which were loading as either corrupted (no party, no stats on C sheet, etc) loaded fine. I haven't left the initial area I was in, but I also backtracked within it and had no respawns, character is right, all items correct, quests look good... so I'm very optimistic. Bookmarking this page and will update as I play further. All this just to fix an arbalest... sheesh. Finally, One-Eyed Molina's Gold-Fingered Spike-Flinger finally works as intended. All I have to say is K_A_T thank you SO much!

Yeah I discovered this with blunderbuss. A moderate amount of self-lightning damage to absolutely strip away reflection is a nice trade off. i think it helps that even though each individual bolt doesn’t do much it still counts as 8 spell levels per bolt

Diamond is Unbreakable: Atom Heart Father David Bowie's dad takes pictures and Okuyasu runs into a window.

Gatling guns in anime just makes me think of that gosh-awful sequence at the beginning of...Evangelion Rebuild 4, I think it was? You'll have to tell me whether it's better or worse than that, .

Yes, that's why I wrote that Assassin is better with BPM than Vanilla if you exclude SoF from the equation, as SoF isn't cheesable in BPM but turns any SC Assassin into a god of murder if you abuse it in Vanilla. I haven't installed it yet, but it's a good point and I will. I need to practice it and see how it concretely affects resource management. 1 resource / 30s is nice, but a lot of things can happen in 30s when soloing... For casters, is the 1 resource a refund on all spell tiers or just one spell of one tier? Of course, thanks for your continued efforts to build this great mod!

But that's still disregarding the fact that SCs gain access to impactful, higher tier abilities a lot earlier. Since the game is about progress from lvl 1 to 20 and not just a snapshot of a finished lvl-20 char this is important imo. Again the Psion/Troub example: A SC Psion gets Puppet Master a lot earlier than a Psion/Troubadour. And Puppet Master can be a game changer if I can access it early. Same as Devotions otF with an SC Priest compared to MC Priest/whatever. There are of course character combos that are absolutely great as multiclasses and SC chars that aren't great at all. But all those different aspects makes a generalized ranking kind of impossible imo. It's more easy to do a well-informed "my favorite classes" ranking imo that doesn't try to be super objective in the first place but still can show some interesting and important viewpoints and arguments.

So far 2022 has been quiet. I don't trust it.

Happy New Year everyone. At this point in time, 2022 is already old down here and I'm sober again

I ran out of internet again. Could play this or that. Could watch this or that. Don't feel like it.

Adding elevators, which could be designed from dumbwaiters, would revolutionize building in Grounded. It could be made simplistic, or relatively complicated with gears and ropes like in real life. To dissuade people from spamming the build to reach very high places in game by "cheating", you could make it very expensive to make and maybe very large to fit the whole group. That way, people would only build it in their bases and it would be more of a luxury build instead of a height spam. People already spam clover roofs as a ramp for this purpose anyways... This would be the tier 3 of stairs, where as tier 2 is the bounce web. It's recipe could be silk for the ropes, a choice of grass or weeds or mushrooms for the walls and floor of the car, and maybe some other things like boiler glands or firefly goop for adhesives and lighting. Like I said earlier, you could make it look sophisticated with gears on top of the car's support showing the ropes, or could sell the idea by just making it look cool. To operate it from the outside, you would just pull the rope (player pushes button) and it would come up or down, and you would do the same thing inside. You could simplify it by asking on screen what floor the player wants to go to, "up 1 or down 1" which would be shown as "push button for..." You could also just have the player select a floor from a pop up menu when prompted, or if too complicated only allow 2 floors per elevator, so there's just a prompt to "use elevator". To add a floor to the stop, the player could do it in build menu and attach the floor to the shaft, which would have to meet certain conditions and such to prevent bugs. The concept makes since since there's no electricity, and the concept has already been done in the form of dumbwaiters. I think it would be a great addition, and it would basically be the vertical version of ziplines!