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I finished DA:I last night after about 100 hours, it was an entertaining gaming experience and it scores a 65\100 on the globally respected " BruceVC game rating system" . I cant give it higher score because of the 2 main criticisms I have for it which are the combat is routine, its still fun using tactics like Fire Mine but overall its not complex or strategic. You also end up using AI for party members because you dont want to have to micromanage the various abilities in every combat....it would be laborious map markers make exploration easy, I like to explore and find things. So it lacks challenge in this respect These negatives dont negate from the things that are positive, so what I enjoyed about it include the Power Point system is an excellent component. It motivates you to complete the myriad of quests and to participate in activities like the Requisition Table and gain points. I would like to see similar systems in other RPG as a good reason to complete quests I liked the politics and machinations of the War Table, it is fun getting input from advisors and taking their advice I gave the Grey Wardens another chance and at the final narrative updates they rebuilt there origization I liked the idea of being the Inquisitor and the status and influence it provided I appreciated the large number of quests and map regions Crafting was fun and worthwhile, you end up looking for resources to improve your items I loved closing Rifts and I enjoyed the broader narrative Frostbite provides a beautiful graphic experience especially when you can max the settings So its a fun game that I recommend but its important to be aware of the shortfalls which I mentioned

I thought this analysis was extremely interesting. How true it is, I don't know. But it reminded me of the fact how much cultures differ in things like this. The French are notoriously prone to demonstrating, rioting and protesting -- and apparently the Russians are something of an opposite to that, priding themselves on their ability to suffer. As far as diplomacy goes, I remember reading something about how the Israeli are the most argumentative and confrontational negotiators, whereas the Japenese are their opposite in this regard. (The Israeli are also proven to be very untrustworthy, but that's another story.)

Alien Breed Trilogy giveaway next 40 hours or so. https://www.gog.com/en/news/we_love_games_special_alien_breed_trilogy_giveaway

Yeah, in general I think Bonded Fury should provide significantly better buffs than priests, chanters, etc. can for your team. If you have some priests and chanters a SC ranger's pet just does not feel that much stronger than a MC ranger's pet. Right now Bonded Fury merely provides "cheaper" buffs for your pet but that's not really relevant because lots of inspirations are AoE effects anyways, with the exception of Tenacious, or are already attached to lower tier abilities available to MC rangers. Giving the pet Intuitive via Shadowed Hunters was a good idea but I think giving the pet 25% hit to crit when its baseline damage output is extremely low isn't sufficient by itself, something that Bonded Fury could help in doing. However I think it's also worth pointing out that SC Ranger as a whole is pretty good in BPM. Twinned Shots and Whirling Strikes are already very powerful. It's just that your pet is very underwhelming, I did a SC Sharpshooter run a while ago and basically just killed everything before my pet could get in melee most of the time (you get 2 shots + 2 bounces from Twinned Shots, if any one of them crits Veilpiercer negates your recovery and you essentially have ranged Scordeo's Edge). So perhaps a rework to Bonded Fury might have to be accompanied by a nerf elsewhere.

Pharaoh remake is out for anyone interested.

'ccording to axios, the smoke plume lasted for "several hours" on february 6 and were the result o' an intentional burn 'cause o' concerns about possible explosions. so maybe not the tolkienesque hellscape being suggested? also, while is way too early for people to be confidently judgey as to causes and blame, the same axios article observes that federal investigators in an admitted abbreviated and quick initial assessment determined a single axle on a single train car were to blame for the derailment, so the lexx parade o' horribles resulting from biden efforts might be a smidge misguided. as usual, is probable best to wait to see if the accident were indeed the result o' a single wonky axle and if negligence were involved in missing the danger. however, also, am gonna suggest for anybody actual interested should read the referenced (edit: added link) lever article instead o' being satisfied with newsweek. the ECP issue alone appears multi-layered with a whole lotta blame to go around. AP Exclusive: Transport safety rules rolled back under Trump 'ccording to the lever article, the trump admin used bad math to justify their termination o' the ecp requirement. "But a 2018 investigation from the Associated Press revealed that the Trump Transportation Department had flubbed its calculations. By excluding the most common type of train derailments, the government’s analysis omitted at least $117 million in estimated future damages when it revised the rule’s potential benefits to justify its repeal. "The agency acknowledged the error and issued a technical correction to its analysis, but said that the expense was still too great to reinstate the ECP brake rule." the thing is, the biden administration made no move to fix the errors attributed to the trump admin. has been a couple years o' biden and the ecp issue coulda' been reexamined by biden. hasn't happened. "According to federal investigators, the derailment was caused by a mechanical issue with a rail car axle. Ditmeyer and two other experts told The Lever that ECP braking probably would have reduced the damage caused by the derailment by bringing the train to a halt more quickly and stopping all of the cars simultaneously." "probably" is a notorious weasel-word but in the absence o' actual facts is no doubt warranted. that said, ecp sounds like a no-brainer particular for trains carrying hazardous materials. unfortunate, the hazardous designation has been almost utter emasculated and the last two administrations both dropped the ball on ecp regardless. the article from lever is not short but it does a better than fair job o' presenting issues. norfolk southern and other carriers spent many millions of dollars lobbying in an effort to fight common sense safety measures, which is unfortunate but hardly a surprise from corporate entities in the business o' making money. is the reason why every american school kid learns 'bout the triangle shirtwaist fire, though upton sinclair's the jungle remains on too few high school required reading lists. worse, at least a couple Presidential administrations failed to address what looks in hindsight to be multiple potential safety issues at least tangential related to the ohio derailment. same old same old. edit: the ohio train derailment story we have been following Charges dismissed against NewsNation reporter who was arrested at East Palestine press conference "DeWine said Wednesday on “CNN This Morning” he has “never had a problem” during any of the news conferences he’s held during his tenure as governor. "“This reporter who was reporting live from the back of the room never should have been asked to stop, never should have been told to be quiet,” the Republican governor told CNN’s Don Lemon and Kaitlan Collins. “That was a big, big mistake. And you know, the person who did that, I’ve explained to them and I’m sure that he’ll never, never do that again.”" dewine is purposeful misrepresenting. major general john harris o' the ohio national guard instigated the incident, but were not mere asking the reporter to be quiet. also, there were multiple law enforcement fails after the general were no longer involved. 'course the law were on the side o' the reporter, so... https://apnews.com/article/john-harris-ohio-entertainment-7fc5a99bef73ffccce2597760d63e6cb https://vimeo.com/user155050674/review/797528737/06a0b2702b another video o' john harris ... am knowing is petty, but we cannot help but observe fran dewine's not so flattering dress is absolute screaming for a john waters critique. HA! Good Fun!

West is thankfully already doing it’s job to solve it. E.g. US has signed 500million deal to manufacture shells for Ukraine. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/02/15/7389392/

Lucky! Getting selected for the jury is the worst.

Ha, you know I will!

Hey @Boeroer, Sorry to hear about the phone breaking down I went ahead and deactivated the 2FA on your account, so you should be good to set it back up again from a new device when you're ready. If you run into any other trouble with it, just ping me and I'll see what I can do. Hope this helps!

I really like the idea that bond generation is somehow related to pet+ranger interaction, and on pet-crit would work in this direction. However, would you be able to generate enough bond on the tougher fights (where you really need the extra bond)? Or would you than rely on gimmicky friendly-summon (from chanter?) critting to create bond with the pet? EDIT: and cat animal companion would probably be the best choice for attacking faster.

I do think proper offensive use of the pet should be rewarded (i.e. attacking vulnerable targets instead of just using it as a meat shield), so maybe make it only give bond on crit? Say, 50% chance. I also think it would be cool to have Bonded Fury give just Energized instead of all 6 tier 2 inspirations, as many of these inspirations are easily provided by other party members or are already present on the ranger skill tree. That way the pet is a real threat to low deflection enemies.

Not caused by the strike, but it's the result of neglect with the train/rail network. Instead of maintaining the system, cost are cuts, people are overworked, everything needs to happen fast, etc. etc. the usual thing. The reason for the strike are those issues, which are still being ignored. Meanwhile the company heads pay each other a nice salary, and use the rest of the money for stock buybacks. Such is life, I guess. /Edit: Heh, apparently some track it back to Trump. https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-blame-ohio-train-derailment-1781163?amp=1

Sometimes guys needs to compensate for "shortcomings" in other areas if you get my drift. Sometimes it manifests itself as over the top brutality, aggressiveness or bullying. Heck, you see it on the internet too, when guys feel insecure in their masculinity

Played a VN, "I was a teenage exocolonist". Well, a VN with card game attached but it was easy even for card game zero like myself, so a VN. The game sends really mixed signals and after multiple playthroughs (they're more or less mandatory if you want the full story, because the game branches quite a lot) I'm still undecided if the game is woke extreme or woke critique. Like, we're a vegan pacifist crew that fled the ****ed up by wars and climate change Earth on a museum spaceship that's fitted with AI that we treat like a regular sentient being, most of crew are transhuman but if our PC doesn't want body mods that's ok too. So woke, right? Except...we are a creepy cult complete with Supreme Leader and communal children, crew skillsets make the crew woefully unprepared for colonization, those body mods are often not just useless but downright harmful (like timid girl afraid of her own shadow equipped with hearing of a bat), we actually stole that AI, and I suspect that "veganism vs starvation" and "pacifism vs the world that wants to extinct us outta there" fights are slightly unevenly balanced. Then there's a non-binary character who is so infantile and undecided about anything in their life you cannot help but wonder if they're only non-binary because they can't decide on their gender either. Oh, and there's also a character that screams "Very horny furry bought a make-a-character kickstarter tier and this is where he and the devs compromised". There are romances too, because of course there are, and they're of the same "Disturbing dysfunction in cotton candy coating" flavor as everything else (that was a praise). Even the style follows the same pattern as text is often bleak and harsh (also often surprisingly sound at science fiction part) while art is this cutesy pokemons and other anime sh†t in pastels. In short, I loved it and thoroughly recommend it, particularly to people who like "WTF I just read/watched/played?" feeling and banana jalapeno pizza aficionados.

Bonded Fury costs an appropriate amount of bond for its duration. It just needs to be *stronger*. Changing it to 1 bond and doing nothing else...I'm still skipping it. Seriously, you could give the pet ALL tier 3 inspirations and it will still be much worse at combat than any companion. But the ability would be worth taking because some of the tier 3 inspirations improve survivability and utility of the pet (robust, swift, energized) where the tier 2s really don't. Sure, nimble is fun but how many disengagement attacks can a pet take? The point of buffing SC ranger is to make it attractive vs. multiclassing for a given role (striker, offtank, ranged dps, etc.), right? If you want I can explain why and how any given role is better suited by a multiclassed ranger than SC. The SC pet is too dependent on resources from other classes to fulfill its role. You have basically said as much. You wouldn't need to spam moonwell and nature's balm on a seer, and the seer has many other regenerating abilities far better than L8+ ranger abilities. And I don't know what difficulty or circumstance you were playing with the druid, but a single class ranger's pet cannot both engage in combat and survive a large number of encounters on high difficulties without dedicated healing from other characters, and generally the pet is not worth expending those resources, so you often end up keeping the pet out of combat, making it more of a burden than a class feature. Who cares what the class resource is called? They're just themed words picked after switching all class resources to per-encounter from POE1. But if you really think the name "bond" is that significant, maybe "bonded fury" should apply to both ranger and pet? (Actually that would be OP but maybe you see my point of attaching too much emphasis on names) The problem with attaching resource regen to the pet is the pet sucks in combat and dies faster than everything else. If the pet's combat abilities or survival are significantly improved then it's fine. But whatever method is chosen to proc bond regen, it has to actually work...like distraction training requires enemies to attack the pet and miss, so the pet needs to tank (and be missed, despite its bad deflection) for bond regen. By comparison fighter's discipline regen works well because fighters have the tools to take damage and survive. Wall of flashing steel works well because rogue can crit. Having specific ability on-crit resource return is also a good idea, particularly for twinned arrows and whirling blades. Even at 1 bond twinned arrows isn't worth using in tough encounters that require many thousands of damage dealt. It was a modal in POE1 and wasn't particularly broken. Given heart seeker is permanent I suppose it makes sense to switch it to per encounter. The thing I keep hammering and that is more important than any other consideration is changing one of the abilities to give the pet robust (hardy companion or bonded fury) over 15s per bond, or a similar (or better) level of healing over that duration. That change by itself makes SC Ranger much more viable on high difficulties because so many buffs and abilities depend on pet survival.

So my conclusions for now : - Bonded Fury needs a buff. Nimble is great in my own experience though. Acute works with several pet abilities, even if not great. Could be tweaked to 1 Bond with a bit of Recovery, since Bond is the issue. - Keeping the pet alive isn't that hard in my own experience. Granted my SC experience was with a bear Stalker with a druid in the party spamming AoE regen. Heal/Hardy Companion will probably receive (yet another) buff though, also because Bonded Fury buff could make Hardy obsolete. - Vengeful Grief could be buffed a bit, maybe without expectation that it will save the class. Maybe a slow Bond Regen. - I'm not too much in favor of pet independant Bond Regen. The ressource is called Bond after all. And on Crit would be too similar to BPM SC Rogue. The Vengeful Grief Bond regen could address the defavorable scenario when pet is down. - I'm considering setting Heart Seeker as per encounter instead of Bond costing. Would ease the Bond dependancy. Or intermediate solution such as cheap with long cooldown. To be continued

Yes. I presume, these institutes are very well guarded and, if it was deliberate act, and if it was near enough, it still possibly disrupted the operation of the institute. But as Lexx mentioned, how “near” was not specified.

https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/3297356/opening-remarks-by-secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iii-at-the-ninth-ukraine/ Here are the comments from yesterday of Lloyd Austin at the Ninth Ukraine Defense Contact Group Its powerful words and accurate. You cant dispute almost everything he says, to quote some of the truths he mentions " And we're here to reaffirm our resounding support for a free and sovereign Ukraine. Nearly one year ago, Putin began his unprovoked and indefensible invasion of Ukraine. Putin thought that in a matter of days, his forces would seize Kyiv and overthrow Ukraine's democratically elected government. And he thought that the international community would just live with it. Russia did not prevail. Kyiv did not fall. And Ukraine's friends did not falter. In the year since Putin's war of choice began, Ukrainian soldiers have won the battles of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson.They pushed back invading Russian forces with Javelins, Stingers, and other systems donated by the countries in this room. The world was inspired by the resilience of Ukraine's people and the courage of Ukraine's troops Well said

am realizing the tounge-in-cheek, but snoopy in a sopwith camel is unlikely to be able to reach anywhere near the 60k feet the chinese balloons were encountered. would be shocked if the camel could exceed 20k feet. more important, your post gives us an excuse to link the following: edit: tangential related, on our personal top ten most underrated pc games is crimson skies. HA! Good Fun!

You need the right technology to match your adversaries...

This thread is back from the dead

Real footage of recovery operations

Ukraine shot one down as well

Just there to say I love this week's matching deals on gog.

just tested; can confirm that dagger modal is a standard deflection bonus that is conditional, which means it does not stack with things like arcane veil or mirror image.

Concelhaut - best pet. The **** he says, lol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs926AIL-ck

Jerry Jarrett, long time wrestling promoter, age 80.

Raquel Welch

I wasn't joking. Skynet is going to be an actual net in the sky. How do you hold the net up? Balloons.

I have my broom, I have my Room of Requirement, they keep sending me to learn ever more spells or broom upgrades or whatever else - when do I get to have Beasts ?? I keep seeing them in the wild, they run away (I don't have ability to catch/tame them I guess?) or ones in at camps in cages with locks. For that matter, who teaches lockpicking? lol Maybe the next one....