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Me hiding my xXxBOxXx behind my back:

The on-crit attack from Frostseeker is melee, not the AoE itself but the attack triggered by the crit that cause the AoE. It is an auto-hit, so no Swift Flurry or other melee crit effects. But Spell Disruption work on any melee weapon attack, so it is applied. Here, I crit Birta with the 3 projectiles from Frostseeker, and then proc 3 impact "melee" attacks that cause the AoE >>> 3 Spell Disruption stacks. A Ranger-Mage Slayer with Driving Flight and Frosteeker can silence a lot of enemies at range ! (without Effort+spells I mean) That work with Hylea's Talon too ( 25% Chance to cause Bleeding on melee Hit), and a SC rogue with Vanishing Strike can apply the Shadow Fang DoT from the Mask of the Grotto Deep at range with Frostseeker.

So I finally got around to retrieving my old saved games for various titles from my old PC which was retired almost two years ago now. A few relevant titles there which I might explore in the coming weeks, such as Dishonored 2, The Outer Worlds and Tyranny. But all said, the Pathfinder talk made me launch Pillars of Eternity. Well, I was in some sort of building. I don't know what I was doing there, so I exited the building. As soon as I did so I was accosted by someone who apparently did not like what I did inside the building, and attacked me. The combat AI was on so I just let my party beat up on the three enemies until they died, even if one of my own got knocked out in the process. I don't remember who that guy is anyway, or indeed who most of my party members are. I then quit the game, because I was too tired to figure out what was going on. I figured I'd come back when I'm more of sound mind. But whatever happens, at least we're out of that mudhole, Gilded Vale.

Bethesda games were shallow as a puddle long before any of them made it to consoles. The peasantry of the world has much to answer for, of course, but Bethesda's crimes against the master race were not committed solely on their behest.

How to serve food on Halloween...

I have to admit, I kinda want to rewatch the Wing Commander movie sometimes.

Consoles have RPGs? I thought there were only those girl cartoon games.

This could awesome or military grade cringe. I don't think there's a middle ground.

Okay. So, warning gore. But I had to share this because wtf?

I like to use Skip The Fade in conjunction with Skip Everything But The Fade for the optimal DA1 experience.

"I'm a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms." Gunsmith Cats (1995), featuring Rally (left) and May (right) are two gunsmiths who maintain and sell guns in the city. But actually, they're bounty hunters who have a propensity for bending the law a little too much themselves and end up, against their best interests, getting roped into helping the feds. For some reason, these two also live together and like to bicker about everything. The first episode (of a 3-part OVA) was genuinely quite fun. I've had this on my to-watch for a couple of years now, but my history in trying out old action-oriented shows/movies has been largely disappointing on the whole, so I'd grown skeptical of it over time. Hopefully the next two will be good as well.

Pity thread incoming. Probably would have had a III by now. Nothing scratches the itch - hell, even my yearly Infinity Engine game playthroughs don’t feel right anymore because I enjoy Pillars so much more.

Usually, the spells or abilities that destroy Near Death on hit require at less to graze with the spell for Destroy : Death Ring (vs fortitude), Boil their Flesh (vs reflex), Worthy Sacrifice (deflection), etc, ... and Detonate (vs fortitude). But this last is not like the others : in first, the spell is not foe-only, and the destroy effect is a separated thing than the first raw spell that trigger that on hit. Like for the other spells that is right, but only this Destroy effect is Melee. So the Destroy effect is redirected to another Near Death target with Blade Turning. * So the magic trick is to spam Detonate on a Near Death monk with Blade Turning and BDD (or Martyr's Memories). The AoE crush damage will help to reach the Near Death level to enemies around the Monk, and every Near Death (including friends and excepted the Monk) in a 20m range (like Sunlance) will be destroyed without hit-roll (the monk take the roll with the detonate hit) one after the other. A transcendant can make by himself this exploit, with a priest for example to keep Blade Turning and Bdd for some times. Mortification of the Soul allow to him to loose quickly his life. An Ascendant can spam repeatedly Detonate. To summarize, Detonate on a Near Death monk with Blade Turning cause to another Near Death to be destroyed "freely".

They were also supposed to do something related to Star Wars, funny how nothing of that materialized after that final Game of Thrones season.

Well, thanks for posting this. I was about to buy this game. Now I'll at least watch a combat video before considering it.

I saw only a few scenes of RoP and it was enough to notice some of the problems @majesticmentioned. I don't think I'll see any more of it. I'm enjoying House of the Dragon so far as at least it has an interesting story and the dialogues are much better than the little I saw in RoP. Now let's hope the show is not cancelled immediately so that these guys don't end up involved in a possible Cosmere tv show. And talking about that, wasn't there a rumor once that Beniof and Weiss would join the Rings of Power team? Not sure how that would have turned out, better, worse or simply a different kind of terrible.

Not sure if Playful Darkness is supposed to be a challenge on normal, but seeing an enemy with 32 levels I used every single buff I had and summoned even level 1 dogs. The creature rushed in my direction, apparently ignoring the summons so I went for the good and old Dazzling Display and that was the end of the battle. I had to keep using it until it was dead. For whatever reason my Persuasion was considered 8 points smaller for the check, but it was still higher than the DC. Edit: raised the difficulty to unfair and tried sneaking and using Dazzling Display before being noticed. It worked and my skill value was still above the DC. Killing it with the new AC and HP values is another matter. Edit 2: Bad timing with the Dazzling Display resulted in my character now having -455 hp. No more unfair for me.

Well, I just uninstalled Scorn, thank goodness I didn't pay for it. The game makes a great first impression. It looks and sounds great, the vibe is awesome, albeit gross, and puzzles are decent enough. Then the game introduces combat and it all falls apart. Simply put, the combat in this game is SHOCKINGLY AWFUL, and this is coming from a guy who plays Piranha Bytes games regularly. The first weapon you get is more a tool. It has a super short range, essentially melee, and you only get 2 attacks with it then you have to wait for it to recharge, which takes forever. Most enemies take 5 or 6 hits to kill and they hit you like a truck and attack far more frequently than you can. You can't block and you are slow as molasses, making dodging very difficult. You can heal but it's useless, counterproductive even, in combat since it takes eons for the animation to play out and you'll take more damage than you heal. It was one thing when there were enemies in open areas where you could run around them and just not fight. Then they started putting enemies in very tight corridors where you can't go around them. Then the put an enemy in a corridor in front of me and dropped one behind me so I couldn't even retreat. Maybe you get a better weapon later and it gets less frustrating. I'll never find out. It's a shame, this had so much potential.

No. If nothing else sunk costs are almost certainly too high. There is also, of course, the example of Wheel of Time which has somehow got renewed for three years despite being so bad even Hurlshot finds it hard to say anything nice about and having an even less experienced/ competent showrunner.

Most people internationally will know him as Hagrid or from the Bond movies, but he was absolutely brilliant as Fitz in 'Cracker'.

To put it in perspective we've got no FEs, and the cheapest card is 2200USD equivalent. Even taking off the GST that's still 300USD above the msrp.

I don't know what a harfoot is. Frankly I don't care about stuff like lore much, Better Call Saul broke the Breaking Bad lore by not having Jimmy catch his second wife with his stepdad and the show still works because it's got a great cast playing great characters and beautiful cinematography. When I see stuff like RoP it just doesn't have that X factor, no matter how much money got poured in to teaching the cast Elvish or great makeup on the goblins, it just doesn't do it for me. Maybe I'm too jaded to enjoy high fantasy and need to see mind-breaking or depressing stuff to be interested, but I just can't seem to care about Elves or incest royals riding dragons.

3rd person action games like Assassin's Creed or the Batman games tend to play better with a controller.

Oh wow Wenduag betrayed me, again. I am stunned by this turn of events.

Poking is for Poker, for the suspens when the game calculate if the Straight Flush is finally turned into an infinte Royale Straight Flush that crash the game?

There is nothing mind-boggling about the Harfoots. They are adorable. But this LA Times column seems to break it down pretty well in terms of reception: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2022-10-13/lord-of-the-rings-rings-of-power-amazon-season-1-audience I'm enjoying it tremendously and look forward to a 5-season run. But I'm also not hung up on the lore. I see a lot of debates about the lore when I play LotRO, which makes me chuckle. The whole premise of LotRO is that you make a character that as basically standing next to Aragorn and Gandalf during all the biggest moments. It's totally lore-breaking. But it's fun and the world is a joy to live in for a bit. I enjoyed the visuals of Numenor, and the making or Mordor, and the Dwarven halls. The high price tag shows in the eye candy. Unlike this guy from WoT: I think they hired the same people that did the Kilrathi in the Wing Commander movie.

I tried my wheel on FH5 also and it was horrible. Asseto Corsa Competizione, on the other hand, is awesome with a wheel.

ROFLMAO poking the dragon... This is during a proper playthrough. She (Stalker/Nalpasca with Mohora Tanga) is dong this without even Heartbeat Drumming. Swift Flurry in combination with Red Flag Flying is enough. For this to reliably work on the big bosses I use a Morning Star with the party's Berserker/Helwalker (including Spirit Frenzy and Enervating Blows), Ngati's Tusk with Hunter of Hunters with the Priest/Troubadour with max Survival+Cap of the Laughingstock and the pike modal (didn't even use that here, was still preparing buffs...), Blessing, Devotions (didn't get to that either) and Cap of the Laughingstock and of course Marked Prey + Stalker's Link, Survival of the Fittest and Accurate Wounding Shot.

I spent a couple of hours trying to get my wheel to play well on Forza Horizon 5 but in the end had to surrender and just accept the gamepad. I suppose we're at the stage where anything but a gamepad is an afterthought on multiplatform titles, even devices specifically designed for the genre of that particular game. Probably still exceptions for the more hardcore sims, but not for more arcadey titles like this. I do sort of remember the backlash when Freelancer came out with no joystick support...

Driving games

I have not seen more than 10 minutes of Bezos' Billion Dollar Fanfic and already that is too much. I think it's not that simple, we have to take into account production costs as well. If millions of people are watching RoP or WoT or whatever that's fine and dandy, but if they average $50 million an episode, they're gonna need a lot more than viewers than most shows. Maybe RoP is getting that, maybe not. I do feel obligated to say that I don't think such number crunching is conductive to good TV or cinema, but it is how most studios are working today. The thing is they hired two guys who didn't have a credit to their names, so it'd be like if the billionaire in question hired some guy he found yelling at a TV in a bar to coach the team. Obviously everyone starts from somwhere and it's a good thing to take a chance on creatives, but for a show that screams no expense spared you'd think they'd have gone with veterans instead of a couple of geen dudes who speak Elvish. So much about this show is mind-boggling.

That worked for me since I grazed after env 10-15 crits. Maybe with a Quantum Computer...

And for crit, Effort is vs Fortitude, Frosteeker is vs deflection/fortitude. So that can be a alternative weapon for the Mage Slayer- Troubadour in this case. This is what I'm planning. I remember, env. two years ago, I thought the hard drawback for the subclasse (I speak about the 20% friendly spell resistance, I dont use ordinary scrolls and potions) would be compensate by a way to spread Spell Disruption at distance !

It looked like something out of a techy Onion-like article but nVidia really are withdrawing the crippled 12GB 4080 from their lineup, wow. Definitely the right thing to do, but it'd take a lot to make Jenson swallow his pride like that. It'll obviously return as a 4070-series card of some sort, but who know when. Many countries including Australia have zero allocation of FEs. Hell, I think we had about a dozen 3080 FEs, which were exclusive to one retailer who sold them by raffle. Essentially they only existed to prove that the $1139AUD MSRP was totally legit and not false advertising.

It's out of early access, so for $12 (slight sale) I bought Gedonia. It looks like an old school flavor (late 90's/early 2000's I mean) open world RPG with lots of exploring and simple quests, factions (where your stats/build affect options available). And there's a house somewhere you can make yours, or something. The voice acting is supposed to be often pretty bad and there may be some bugs/performance hitching but I think I can handle that. I would like some "old school-ish" rpg/arpg gameplay, vs. the modern stuff, so am willing to try.

For disclosure, I do suffer from this phobia. And it hasn't stopped me from enjoying the game a ton. However, the pond section of the game is really unsettling for me. I have to deal with fear of deep bodies of water a lot in video games, and usually I either just avoid the game completely or find some weird workaround to make it less unsettling. I normally wouldn't even bother suggesting something like this, but with the arachnophobia mode in the game, I feel more comfortable that Obsidian would at least consider it. I don't think it is statistically as common as arachnophobia, but I think the ability to make the deep water section less uneasy would not require much (I say this with no development background, so I could be very wrong). For instance, I think thalassophobia mode could eliminate the atmospheric depth lighting from being underwater (allowing you to see to the bottom of the pond). Also, it could remove or reduce the watery vision effects and increase the gamma. In Fallout: New Vegas, if you took Cateye (a consumable that lets you see in low-light areas), it completely removed the creepy feeling of being underwater for me. So something similar to that effect could help.

When I use Entropy with Mohora Tanga I just get a crashed game. And very reliably so...

You should get 100% of your rope back when recycling a zipline. It just makes sense, plus trying to get the right spots has led to me recycling to move them a few times. While we are at it most of the structures should refund WAY more of the spent resources. Maybe add a mutation or set that makes that more efficient? Something has to change because right now these things are frustrating and un-fun.

Europe has a bureaucracy fetish.

And, for spell side, Arkemyr's Mercurial Madness require only the first Will roll, I mean while under the effect, the powerful afflictions per 6s are auto-hit.

It is confirmed. I still loathe airports.

And if you're a Trickster, you can do Now if this doesn't sell Bruce on Wrathfinder, I don't know what does.

I enjoyed Kingmaker's TB mode, it made it much more enjoyable for me.

Completed Wasteland 3. An excellent RPG and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Discovered that the DLC are online-only on Steam, so installed the GOG version (had it on both platforms for co-op reasons). Completed the first DLC, "The Battle of Steeltown", which was infuriating on many levels.

We've had plenty of these discussions on the forums already, and it appears that there is no definite answer to why Deadfire sold so badly. However, one thing that seems fairly certain to me is that a substantial portion of the reason has to do with PoE, not Deadfire. Deadfire's sales were low right from the start, which means that a lot of people were not interested in the game in the first place. Maybe they opted for PoE because of the nostalgia, and then they realized they actually didn't like the game that much, so they didn't bother to even try Deadfire. Deadfire got good reviews, so it's not as if the game was a failure in that sense. It seems more likely that the audience that was there for PoE was not there for Deadfire. Which, in my view, is a great shame, because Deadfire is a great game. It is worth mentioning that buying a game and liking a game are two different things. For example, I think D:OS2 is rubbish. I played it for about two hours, realized it doesn't interest me at all and never went back. But in order to play it for those two hours, I had to buy it, which means that I am one of the people who contributed to its success, even if I think it's utter trash.