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Memo to any Obsidian person reading this thread: Please, please, please try to convince your Microsoft partner to buy out WotC from Hasbro.

We Finally Know How Ancient Roman Concrete Was So Durable : ScienceAlert

This would be a lot funnier if it wasn't so close to the truth.

Had about 4 hours of sauna and cold dips in the lake with a couple of mates, it was lovely, but I wish I could've had some drinks. 😄

I have to show off the stylish góral hat my folks got me for Christmas: I think it goes well with my dirty porn stache.

Got back home. With the combination of rail strikes, bad traffic, accidents, weather, etc... It took me 7.5 hours to go from stepping back onto English soil to arriving at home. Also, San Diego and Wildomar have been pretty much London weather the past 3-4 days. And American children are like ravenous piranhas when presented with Cadbury chocolate.

Brilliant channel. We need to see compiler as enemy

Lactose Intolerant Armored Arcanist - Solo Upscaled Path of the Damned with Balance Polishing Mod Class: Goldpact Paladin Blood Mage Game Version: Real Time With Pause. Made to play with Balance Polishing Mod and the Community Patch, but will work basically the same without. POTD Solo Viable: Yes, all Upscaled. Megabosses: I farmed Belranga, Dorudugan and Auranic for their mythic stones, without honor. Didn't try Hauani. Companion: Nope. -----WHAT IS INTERESTING ABOUT THIS BUILD?----- For some time now, I've been trying different ways to build a Wizard that could solo at max difficulty, with all the Balance Polishing Mod components including nerfs, and without using anything that could be remotely considered as cheese. BPM already deactivates the funny business around Wall of Draining, Salvation of Time, Strand of Favor etc. On top, it changes Blood Sacrifice to prevent healing for 6 fixed seconds after using the ability. So I built around those parameters. I also didn't want to use Grimoire Imprint shenanigans at all. So I'd like to finally share this build because it does all that I intended in a deceptively simple and brutally effective way, although it's not the fastest at solving encounters... but it's all automated, which is nice. I will detail briefly the proposition and how it works below, and then I'll put the stat/equipment details etc. Please note that Balance Polishing Mod makes it slightly better (e.g. buffed Fire Godlike passive AR) but it can play just as well in vanilla. The core proposition is simple and stays the same from start to finish, it just gets better as we go and grab more gear and abilities: -Pile up an absolute truckload of Armor Rating through passive/active abilities and items, to push the vast majority of incoming attacks into severe under-penetration (-75% damage). You'll still find a few enemies that have Penetration 24-26 on a Graze/Hit (!) but that's rare and manageable. -Pile up high defenses that are easy to maintain through only a couple casts (basically only passive defenses plus Infuse with Vital Essence and Llengrath's Safeguard) to push the vast majority of incoming attacks to Misses (0% damage) and Grazes (-50% damage). You'll still find a few enemies that have autohits and miss-to-graze conversion but that's manageable. -Have max Resolve (35) and Ring of the Solitary Wanderer to cut all hostile effect durations short (approx. -80% duration). -Have a big health pool and some reasonable sustain healing (23hp per 6s, nothing to write home about) to stay bloodied almost all the time (to always trigger Fire Godlike passive +2 Armor Rating and Blood Rage +10 Accuracy from Akola's Apex Ward, more than negating the Large Shield malus). -Use the Large Shield Modal to further neuter any ranged/Reflex targeting attacks (-50% damage). -Offensively, use Concelhaut's Draining Missiles or early on, Corrosive Siphon, to transfer enemy health to our health. -Convert some of that health to replenish spells and repeat the whole process until there is no more enemy health to steal, which means there are no more enemies and the encounter is won. So here is the full breakdown of a high-level encounter: -Ideally, approach enemy from stealth, find a nice position to make a stand. This build likes being out in the open because it can't be flanked (Kapana Taga) and wants to be engaged by 5 enemies to get max defense bonus from Entonia's Signet Ring. Stay in that position for a few seconds to build the 3 stacks of Armor Rating (Stoic Steel). -Begin the encounter by casting Brand Enemy on a priority target (ideally a healer, or an annoying squishy). At this point, we start with defenses in the 170s-200s and Armor Ratings between 21 and 27 (Mythic Magnera's Chain, Stoic Steel, Kapana Taga, Akola's Apex Ward, Gilded Enmity). Not too bad. -My AI script will switch on The Wall modal, start casting Infuse with Vital Essence, Blood Sacrifice until under 50% health, then Llengrath Safeguard. At this point, we have the defenses as per the screenshot above, all in the 200s and minimum Armor Rating is 24 (!). Incoming damage is minimal and importantly, very predictable. Even Bloodied we still have around 250 health. -Then the AI script will chain cast Draining Missiles, prioritizing enemies by lowest Fortitude, and keep casting Blood Sacrifice in-between to keep us Bloodied and full of spells and maintain uptime on Vital Essence and Safeguard. Apart from Safeguard, we want to only ever cast Ability Tier 2 spells to maximize Blood Sacrifice's usefulness. Draining Missiles are very good because they always do the same damage even on Grazes, and having 6 projectiles means they'll always do something. We love consistency and predictability. It is also important to not have too much dexterity in BPM, to have Draining Missiles fired just when the -100% Healing debuff clears out - projectile travel time and target distance play a role there too, so I went conservative with my dexterity, doesn't matter. -Draining Missiles benefit from Brand Enemy +damage so we want to selectively put this on high-priority enemies, but keep some zeal for occasionally casting Lay on Hands if needed on long fights, to reset our primary resource pool i.e. Health. -The encounter will slowly solve itself as enemies fall. There is actually some upside to taking enemies one by one: we limit the level of extra threat generated by the Blood Mage passive when enemies are below 50% Health. So we keep everybody nice and healthy to keep incoming damage under control while we remove threats one after the other. To my surprise, I never had to reload a fight once with this build doing everything on Upscale, even doing tons of mistake (forgetting to pick Stoic Steel on a respec in Splintered Reef, forgetting about The Wall modal in Trial of the Naga, having the script break causing my toon to dumbly autoattack in melee the Ancient Liche Battlemage for 10mn...). It also punches quickly above its level, .e.g I went to facetank Torkar at level 14 without any trouble. With all the little synergies, the math is in its favor to somehow always comes out on top, never being really in trouble. You might wonder if it also works well when enemies can do a lot of Raw DMG. Well, Frightened Child didn't pose any problem, same for all the Vithrak luminaries, the Oracle of Wael... Just a no-cheese, no-nonsense, slow and steady achiever. -----STATS & BUFFS----- Race: Fire Godlike Background: Ixamitl Plains – Hunter FINAL STATS WITH ALL PERMABUFFS AND NO-REST BUFFS AS OF 5.0 (without combat buffs): Might 14 (8 Base +2 Berath +1 Gift from Machine +1 Rabyuna’s Boon +2 Alchemic Brawn) Constitution 23 (15 Base +2 Berath +2 Alchemic Brawn +3 Girdle of Eoten Constitution +1 Hemp Pet) +5 Infuse with Vital Essence Dexterity 15 (7 Base +1 Godlike +1 Rabyuna +2 Berath +2 Alchemic Guile +2 Amira’s Blessing) Perception 19 (14 Base +2 Berath +2 Alchemic Guile +1 Savage Cunning) Intelligence 18 (13 Base +1 Godlike +2 Berath +2 Alchemic Wits) +5 Infuse with Vital Essence Resolve 35 (18 Base +1 Ixamitl +2 Berath +1 Effigy Resentment Pallegina (sorry, bird lady) +2 Alchemic Wits +2 Nature’s Resolve +2 Rikuhu’s Blessing +2 Rabyuna +1 Cauldron’s Brew +2 Token of Faith +1 Solitary Wanderer Ring +1 Boots of the White) ADDITIONAL PERMABUFFS: Food: Hylea's Bounty Adratic Glow All Trainings Dawnstar Blessing Luminous Adra Potion Nature’s Resolve (Accuracy) Savage Cunning (Survival) Galawain’s Gift Magran’s Blessing Immunity to all Sigils Infamous Captain, Bonus Skills, Champion Stats, Port Maje vendor, Fully discovered Map, Bonus Money… invested all 105 Berath’s Blessing Points SKILLS Mechanics 13-ish then max Athletics, Diplomacy 12-ish then max Survival. -----ABILITIES----- ACTIVE Paladin: Gilded Enmity, Brand Enemy. Lay on Hands. Zealous Aura, Exalted Endurance Wizard: Mirrored Image (for early game). Infuse with Vital Essence. Llengrath's Safeguard. PASSIVE Common: Weapon & Shield. Tough. Improved Critical. Spell Resistance. Bear's Fortitude. Bull's Will. Snake's Reflexes. Paladin: Deep Faith. Retribution (optional). Divine Purpose. Iron Gut (optional). Inspired Path. Righteous Soul. Virtuous Triumph. Stoic Steel. Wizard: Spirit of Decay (for Corrosive Siphon in the beginning). Farcasting. -----GEAR----- Weapon Set 1: Kapana Taga (Mythic , All Comers, Lone Champion), Akola's Apex Ward (Mythic, Hunter's Vigor, Hide and Tooth). Weapon Set 2: doesn't matter. Head: Nothing. Neck: Token of Faith. Chest: Magnera's Chain (Mythic, Padded Underlayer, Magnera's Commitment). Cape: Cape of the Falling Star. Grimoires: Iron Clasped (primary), Ninagauth Teaching (for Death Ray - early on or when we need more burst damage), Arkemyr's illuminating discoveries (not needed). Gloves: Bracers of Greater Deflection. Rings: Solitary Wanderer + Entonia's or Ring of Protection for fights with few engaging enemies. Boots: Boots of the White (to mitigate our only AR weakness, Freeze). Belt: Girdle of Eoten Constitution. Pet: Hemp (+Constitution and +Fortitude is good). That's it. I'm also happy to give the AI scripting details if needed, or pointers on the early game. I haven't posted a video to spare you the lengthy fights but let me know if you'd like to see it in action. Let me know if you have any comments or questions!

Delightful Polish lager: I also got some Lithuanian porter that I haven't drank yet. Poland and Lithuania have a long history and were once one country, so I have a lot of love for all things Lithuanian. I'll report back when I drink it. As an aside, my mom did one of those ancestry tests and it came back that she's 2% viking, which means I'm at least 1% viking. Now I feel justified drinking out of a horn:

I tried to look this up but wasn't really able to find the things I am interested in so this is my first topic on the forums I just played PoE I on PotD for the 1st time and want to continue the 2nd game. I think I have a generally good understanding of the game mechanics by now and I want to play with Eder, Aloth & Pallegina because from my PoV those are the main companion characters. So I figured I'd play the healer/buffer role with my main character and will be able to slot in a 5th random companion of my choice all the time. I settled on Lifegiver / Troubadour after some research but I am kind of lost which attributes to pick up. Obviously I would need high Intellect for buffs and high Might for healing. But how high? Stats to dump could be Constitution (like 8 points should suffice because I wont be a frontliner anyways?), Resolve (only argument against that could be that I am longer CCed?) and possibly even Perception (because buffs and heals can't miss? Do I need Perception at all?). But I am not sure what to make of Dexterity (obviously my auto attacks would be weak but do I really gain that much from more action speed if the important stuff I do is spellcasting?). Or is this attribute-dumping even good in PoE II? (In PoE I I played a character with only 3 resolve and 6 con and it worked like a charm for a backline dps character) I hope my thoughts aren't too retarded and I am interested in your opinion.

Merci Constentin ! It seems that I have other issues because even with your trick I cannot post certain things as I used to be able to (like the forum will allow me to post "POTD" in all caps but not the same with o and t in small caps... weird!) Yeah it's very sturdy and so hard to kill it can be a great experimenter. It's a very brute force type of build so it's not subtle at all but it just illustrate how the combination of really high Armor and pretty good everything else (Defense rolls, healing, overall health...) can make a big difference. You see the game differently when almost all enemies on Upscaled POTD cannot reach you with more than single-digit damage.

That appear the forum "bug" after some minutes : refreshing the page before Submit the reply seems to solve the problem. That can be a potent build in a party, to make some experiments with new ideas etc without some too hard risk!

Imo the best reason to choose SC Chanter is Tekehu ; in other case, Chanter as a martial MC greatly benefit to front line, granting to the melee part of the party some versatility and independence (CC).

It is not the only one Old Siec also does, but without green numbers on the top of the characters. With Old Siec, Disintegrate refund the cipher's life per tick I mean, but you cant see it excepted at the looking of our health pool. Mabe also in the combat log but I'm not sure, I have seen that in september

Sensing it'll devolve into a stalemate without the weaponry. Although not sure the volume is all that decisive.

^My two factor authentication was janky after a recent vacation, so if youve managed to replace your phone in the last two years, PM Fionavar and they can straighten it out.

@Keyrock it's not that it's bad... it just feels like he's a bit out of his league (after listening through it)... The original

Damn you @Malcador that brought back memories of manual memory allocation and deallocation, coming up with algorithms for splitting already allocated memory, keeping track of reference counters to allocated memory and building your own "garbage collection" routines 😂

Regarding extending potions I meant could you extend them past the battle and make them permanent... I seem to recall a video by raven darkholme where he said something like when an effect reaches 20000 seconds it becomes permanent. Of course that would take forever with wall of draining but if you spam salvation of time 20k seconds wouldn't take more than a minute or two. Yeah you're right about upscaled armor and fort etc. Deflection is almost always lowest stat, still don't understand why they changed resolve to give 1 deflection and perception 1 accuracy vs 2 in the original. Means on upscale POTD the easiest thing to do is usually to beat things to death because your nuke spells miss, graze, and underpen a ton. Tried fighting the messenger at l14 or so and with BM it was impossible. He healed faster than I could damage him even with eliminating recovery 97%. Eventually I figured out to hit him with combusting wounds and spam minoletta's minor missiles and that shredded him, but lot of fights are like that where I just can't do damage very fast. Part of why hierophant is so good is the +20 acc from borrowed instinct means fewer grazes, plus hammering thoughts is universal +1 pen. Makes a big difference especially since the cipher buff / debuff spells are super fast casts compared to e.g. expose vulnerability. Plus with soul blade you can just zerg things with raw damage. I've replayed BG2 so many times. Many thousands of hours. I got bored and started messing with the scripting engine, wrote a near universal script that could solo every encounter. Didnt test it for all classes but it worked for about a dozen runs (tweaking the script while playing). You can script chars to switch from ranged to melee based on distance and prioritize enemies based on thousands of conditions. Rather complex really. Lost the script unfortunately when my last PC died. Haven't played the game in maybe six years though, maybe its been long enough Id enjoy just playing it. I always wanna do something broken like kensai/mage, sorcerer, fighter/mage/thief or ranger/cleric though. Never did a wild mage. I bought tyranny and tried to get into it but am 2 for 2 in abandoning the run. The plot didn't grab me and the mechanics seem kind of weird. Probably play it eventually. Crossing fingers this actually posts, wrote it on my phone while playing poker.

No, I went instead with SC bellower for the PL bonus. But troubadour is probably the most versatile choice I think.

Two members of Finland's parliament started to campaign for pan EU effort to give Leopard 2s to Ukraine in late last year and they were successful in their efforts to find allies all around and not least among German security policy pundits. But as giving Leopards to Ukraine needs permission from Germany and support from Krauss-Maffei, which has now lead to free Leopards campaign in Germany.

That's one way to stay warm.

Since I'm on an isometric kick I scooped Pathfinder: WotR to play after I finish my current run of Grim Dawn. I'm assuming I don't need to play Kingmaker first (I haven't), right?

Thanks, Boeroer. I think I am going to do a run with a SC chanter, SC Furyshaper, SC Ascendant, SC Woedica priest, and Steel Garrote/beguiler inquisitor (wielding WotEP). I just have to decide which to make my MC. Maybe the Ascendant, since they seem to require the most micromanagement.

I hadn't problems with White Worms lately. But that was during testing sessions. I didn't do a proper playthrough lately. Maybe the upgrade is bugged. Maybe that's it. I don't take it because I think it's not worth the ability point. SC Furyshaper can be build towards Barbaric Retaliation with Battle Axes, Panther's Leap and Blood Storm. Because Blood Ward is the only ability that drains health from every tick of all DoTs (including chants). That means if you land with Panther's Leap, then retaliate with Bleeding Cuts and Blood Storm you will apply so many DoTs in parallel that Blood Ward keeps you alive against almost anything. Also the PL-9 shouts will drain a hell of health if yoi spam them, especially if you have Old Siec and Ward active. That also means that Brand Enemy will drain health with every tick as long as it's active. You can spam it to all enemies if you want and drain health with every tick of it (with Blood Ward). Cipher's drain a ton with Disintegrate. Wizards drain double with Corrosive Siphon... and so on. SC Furyshaper is my personal favorite atm.

The Least Unstable Coil will grant you multiple inspirations with an Empowered "Her Revenge" because every lightning strike triggers the enchantment (for whatever reason) so I'd advise you to pick that invocation. It's very good anyways. A Bellower can stack his bonus PLs from collected phrases (up to 7) with those of Empower - which can lead to pretty spectacular damage numbers (I mean if you want to maximize the outcome of that one empowered invocation - and invocations in general). Of course he can't refill as quickly as Troubadour, but the impact on individual invoctions is bigger. Eld Nary's Curse is most likely the invocation that profits from PLs most. It becomes very very strong. But the buff of the Bellower is actually too short to cover all the jumps from Eld Nary. The last ones will have a bit lower damage. Still the PLs determine the number of jumps - so it's great nonetheless. Don't forget White Worms. It does very high damage with enough PLs. Because its base damage is quite high. It's great if you focus-fire one enemy down and then use it for great impact. Doesn't need to be empowered to be good. If you want more sturdyness: the Old Siec chant works with Invocations - so you can get good health from damaging enemies with Eld Nary or Her Revenge etc. If you make your Herald a Steel Garrote he can drain twice: from his passive and your chant. If you add a Furyshaper with Blood Ward: even thrice (your Furyshaper and you: twice).

Her human body died, but it was not able to transfer over to the blue version like Jake did. So they kept her in the tank, I guess. She also gave birth, to like, herself? I don't know, don't look too closely at the science and you will probably be happier.

Disappointed the humans won't win again.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/dungeons-dragons-owners-wizards-of-the-coast-have-cancelled-5-unannounced-projects Wizards of the Coast cancelled 5 unannounced project.

Guess you're not getting the Azata option then, and, uhm... probably also no early access to your favorite waifu, Aru.