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@majestic you naughty @Bartimaeus I thought 3e kept Paladins as LG? Do you mean 4e? I honestly don't remember 4e but I know in 5e you can in fact be an evil Paladin. I think the fantasy of the D&D Paladon can have fascist appeal, as can be seen by the legions of dip****s obsessed with statues who love saying "DEUS VULT". But I don't think it's reductive to that interpretation and that fascism is notorious for adopting anything that is around in order to come to power, including trappings anathema to fantasy Paladins. I think more broadly the fantasy of the Paladin appeals to people who believe in being both honorable and orderly combined with benevolence....which can largely gel with most political alignments and many temperaments. @Sarex My first game was as a Paladin as well, and I do return to the class but generally I try to play different classes. One one hand I think that Fantasy cRPGs would benefit from having their Paladins (or analogous) bound to a code of conduct that signifies you being held to a higher standard. On the other hand, WotR has had many such cases of people failing as a Palladin because they didn't execute an orphan or something. So maybe it's just not something that can fit well.

I've already seen them. Uncle DIO turns into a dinosaur, which further supports that Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is an Isekai.

Happy Easter folks!

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/8/ukraine-children-returned-from-russia-after-alleged-deportation Russia has started returning some of the Ukrainian stolen children, amazing how quick ICC war crimes charges can change Russian attitudes

Another milestone has been achieved during the invasion.

Lmao, I tracked all the [lawful] options in the prolouge and Act 1 and all but two were psychotic. I think when writing it they looked at what Regill would do for [lawful] options, because they all tend to be cruel (usually pointlessly so). I've been buying very few games for a while and shooting for replayability.....but still struggle to find the time to actually play the damn games. If only AI could actually do the jobs instead of make uncanny valley photoshops. Soon I will commit to being a Lich tho.

Yeah... I could not make my self pick most of the choices that were lawful in WotR. I really don't know who shat in their cereal when they decided on those lawful dialogue options. I could not keep my PC in the LG part of the alignment pie. I would like to also, but I am so low energy for games these last couple of years that I have to make myself start playing a game to get in to it. Makes it kind of difficult to do a replay. Hopefully will get to that monk run of WotR.

You are not missing anything I think. It's just the original knight in shining armor concept, which looks good when you are a kid, but when you grow up you, hopefully, figure out that the world doesn't actually work like that. I mean how many people like the Jedi and they are, for all their talk of balance, basically paladins with a lightsaber. I personally play them because the first game (first CRPG game to be exact) I played as kid was IWD2 and the premade party I chose (because of this banger picture) had a paladin (The Watcher) as the leader of the party. Later when I actually figured out how to play the game I got used to the all in one kit and liked playing it in later games.

Ah, you were quicker than my edit, thought of a better silly reply and edited it - just apparently not quickly enough. Damn.

When I am told "there are some paladins staying at the inn", my expectation is that these paladins aren't currently butchering everyone and burning the whole town down, which I did not have any guarantee of in 3E's usage of it. If the word "paladin" is stripped of the meaning that literally everyone knows it to mean (heroic warrior of some goodly-ish ethos), then you might as well throw away the term entirely. "Champion" is a pretty dumb-sounding name, but if it's simply a base stepping stone to some other more specific concept like a paladin, anti-paladin, blackguard et al., then it's fine. I wonder if there's any overlap between the people who genuinely love and empathize with the idea of being a paladin and generally fascist morons. Can't really see why else the class would much appeal to anyone, but maybe I'm missing something.

High ranking members of Charlemagne's court? Yeah, yeah, I know where the exit is. *leaves*

Paizo's First Draft of Its Open RPG License is Done and Public (gizmodo.com)

I think they were trying to expand Paladin to be more alignment neutral, I believe Champion was originally intended to be the subclass. iirc some people got mad at the idea of Paladins who weren't LG so they ended up calling the class Champion and Paladin became the LG subclass. In practice I think Good Champions will be very familiar to Paladin players and Evil Champions will be familiar to Blackguard or Antipaladin players. There's obvious changes because of the larger changes of 2e, but the class remains the go to for Holy Knights or Unholy Knights and performs really well as a melee tank who can take hits and avoid spells better than most (if not all) other martial classes.

If China attacked Taiwan tomorrow it'd be funny to watch how quickly Zelenskiy would be dropped like a hot potato.

To be fair, if I were to leave Sweden, Canada is likely where I'd go. Got relatives in Vancouver. I just need to win a fem mil on the lottery first so I can rent an apartment for a couple of days

...dunna let the Dwarf ruin yer outlook on Canada, peoples...an' ye can dress fer the cold; harder ta dress fer rampagin' lunatics legally armed ta the teeth... ...WHO LUVS YA, BABY!!...

"Europe must resist pressure to become ‘America’s followers,’" bruh, we are america's followers for 70something years.

Easter Feast Mode Activated

Did you level yourself up with the console? Because a lot of strong builds start out kinda weak. Soul blades don't get their best spell until level 13 (borrowed instinct). When I'm testing builds I usually load a L20 character with lots of gear in the SSS arena, remove his gear, then use console "opencharactercreation" to make a new character, then "addexperience 200000" to get him to L20 (or whatever). Tactician / soul blade sounds good because phantom foes can flank everyone, but for that to work it has to land vs everyone, and even then, brilliant is kind of useless on the cipher side. So it isn't as good a combination as it might seem initially. Also you have no way solo to avoid the penetration and accuracy penalty of not having an ally. So you always have -1 pen and -10 accuracy. Cipher can make up for that with hammering thoughts and borrowed instinct, but still. A tactician / blood mage can just summon an essential phantom every now and then. Tactician / skaen can summon spiritual ally. Your stats are not how I would have spread them but there are many ways to build characters depending how you want to use them. I'm assuming since it is a soul blade you want to melee more than cast spells. Your stat spread is okay for that, though you really don't need that much resolve. Just wear the ring of the solitary wanderer to make up for the +hostile effect duration, and keep up psychovampiric shield and you can dump resolve quite a lot. You want max INT almost always though. I'd probably have done 12/9/14/20/18/4 assuming I'm a wild orlan. Before berath. So 14/11/16/22/20/6 I guess. Your stats seem too high, they should sum to 88 with berath. Yours sum to 94. Yeah I think you don't need that much resolve because psychovampiric shield is +5 and borrowed instinct is +20 all defenses. Your might is too low for soul annihilation to do much damage or build focus fast. Blood mage / tactician is a lot of fun. Tactician / skaen would also work. All you have to do to proc brilliant is use arkemyr's brilliant departure or shadowing beyond respectively. But with blood mage you also have blood sacrifice which once you have unbending built up you can spam as much as you need. You do need Berath's Challenge on, but don't worry, it doesn't make the game harder at all for solo. Berath's challenge is two things: if you go unconscious for 10 seconds, you're dead. Since you're solo, this would happen anyway. And the second thing is you can't flee battles. That's what allows invisibility to proc brilliant, because for some reason when you "flee" with invisibility the enemies start to ignore you after a few rounds. Normally combat would have ended there, but with berath challenge they're all considered flanked at that point for some reason. And yes you use either invisibility spell, then wait like 3 or 4 rounds and brilliant will proc, then you just wait and they refill both fighter and wizard / priest resources. Blood mage can also proc brilliant with chill fog, may be useful at lower levels. Also interrupts give back fighter resources, but it isn't "any" interrupt, you have to interrupt a spell or ability, something with an icon. Mule kick interrupts on graze, and if you're using citzal's spirit lance and you mule kick, you mule kick EVERYONE in the lance AOE radius, so you can often do that for free if one of those people is trying to cast something. You can also interrupt with things like the slicken spell. I'd use similar stats for either a blood mage / tactician or blood mage / skaen as they're both caster / fighter hybrids. Something like 9/12/14/20/19/4 for blood mage (need a bit of CON for blood sacrifice), for skaen maybe 13/8/14/20/19/4. You don't have to dump CON and RES that much though, could do like 9/10/12/20/19/8. Most important thing is high PER and INT and decent DEX so your spells last a long time, your attacks and spells have good accuracy. Resolve doesn't matter much for deflection because blood mage and priest both have so many buffs. Troubadour / psion is fun if you like summoning things. That's most of what you do. You don't need a lot of the traditional combat stats like mig / con / res because it's your summons fighting and you shouldn't be getting hit much or doing direct damage that much either. The Ancient Instruments of Death are really good, though you don't get them until level 19, but other summons are quite good in various situations, like the wyrms, the ogres, the will o wisps., even the lowly skeletons. You can cast pain link on your summons which returns damage to things attacking them. You can also buff them with pain block, echoing shield, tactical meld, use ectopsychic echo for beam damage, as well as using direct spells like ringleader and mental binding. If you like summoning and crowd control, this is the build. Stats I would go like 9 / 8 / 18 / 20 / 19 / 4 (as an orlan, but you can be whatever, though little point in being human). Hey I like doing this kind of thing It depends which of these three builds you pick, though gear for tactician / skaen and tactician / blood mage are similar. Here is a tactician / blood mage gear. I tried to pick gear that is available in the first half of the game, though really this gear is fine the whole way. The sword is important, squid's grasp. You need that or the club kapana taga for the flanking immunity, and devil of caroc breastplate you should enchant with mechanical mind so you can't be confused. You can still become shaken if you summon a weapon and get flanked. The late game pet retina can help with being flanked. What I like to do is start with squid's grasp and a shield (lethandria's devotion is good but whatever you want), cast a bunch of buffs from llengrath's martial mysteries, switch grimoires to arkemyr's grimoire (or arkemyr's illuminating discoveries), cast arcane veil, then all the wizard buffs are up, cast unbending trunk and a wall of draining, position yourself or cast CC spells as necessary so you won't be flanked, then cast citzal's spirit lance. You'll lose flanking immunity but the weapon is insanely good and distributes mule kicks. You can of course attack with whatever other weapon you prefer, but put squid's grasp in your offhand. Not only for the flanking immunity, but you also get +20% attack speed when threatened by 3 or more enemies. It is really good solo, you can get it at treasure trove in dunnage. Here's what I picked at each level (not necessarily in this order) Disciplined Barrage, Knock Down, Slicken, Chill Fog Fighter Stances, Weapon and Shield, Two Handed, Confident Aim Disciplined Strikes, Mule Kick, Rapid Recovery, Hold the Line, Bear's Fortitude Charge, Weapon Specialization Conqueror Stance, Unbending, Tough, Uncanny Luck, Armored Grace, Pull of Eora, Rapid Casting Improved Critical, Martial Caster Unbending Trunk, Weapon Mastery, Wall of Draining I should note I skipped Vigorous Defense and Refreshing Defense because although these are very good, the +20 defense doesn't stack with Llengrath's Safeguard, which gives +20 all defenses AND +5 armor, so the safeguard is better, though you get it a couple levels later I think, so you might want Vigorous Defense in the meantime and respec later. Note you don't really need to memorize any spells, but I'd take at least Wall of Draining, Chill Fog, and Slicken for their utility to the class, and I personally love Pull of Eora because it groups enemies nicely and interrupts them (though I don't think it returns points like other interrupts), mostly it is just awesome for setting people up for citzal's spirit lance or AOE spells. Wear Upright Captain's Belt or take Hold the Line so you'll be immune to the push/pull effect from Pull of Eora. I can go into my picks for Skaen if you want though I'm less familiar with that build, can also do troubadour / psion, I am pretty familiar with that build Items starting at helm and going counterclockwise: cap of the laughingstock (gives you +10 accuracy vs deflection and if you have a phantom summoned or use mirror image it gives you immune to resolve afflictions so now flanked won't cause shaken or confused) charm of bones devil of caroc breastplate (take devil's due and mechanical mind) ring of the solitary wanderer boots of the stone pes (or frau nils or abraham, replace later with blinky or retina) girdle of mortal protection (can replace later with girdle of eoten con) entonia signet ring (stays good, may want to replace with ring of prosperity's fortunte when rich) gauntlets of accuracy (stays good, lot of good bracer choices) giftbearer cloth (use cape of falling star or cloak of greater protection before you get this, once you get you want history at least 15) weapons griffin's blade, squid's grasp, kapana taga, lethandria's devotion other equipment of note: rekvu's fractured casque gives immunity to interrupts if you have an injury. Just run over a caltrops trap to get a wrenched knee (-25% stride), stride doesn't matter since you have deletrious alacrity of motion. Or you can kill yourself with necrotic lance for acute rash (fortitude debuff) or with fire for serious burn (-2 dex). These are the least bad injuries and in some cases absolutely worth it, particularly the wrenched knee, there are caltrops traps at poko kohara ruins. If you need to clear injuries drink luminous adra potion, which also gives you +2 all skills, and it stacks with hylea's bounty. For solo runs you should try not to rest so you can keep dawnstar's blessing and nature's resolve. Just use hylea's bounty early, or hot razor skewers which you can buy in neketaka would also be good for this build. Guide for no rest run

Lost Highway (1997) It's absolutely one of the wildest films I have ever seen, and after over a decade of searching for it (to see legally and affordably, no bully NSA), I finally found it available on Criterion. For me, it held up just as much or even moreso than when I first viewed it as a depressed teenager. The film runs through time and reality like an ouroboros while constantly creating the feelings of an unsettling nightmare via low rumbling sounds and stretched of pitch black darkness. Absolutely incredible, the transitions are horrifying and The Mysterry Man is one of the creepiest entities in a film that isn't outright horror. Rashomon (1950) Four conflicting stories of rape and murder, each told by someone looking to frame themselves in the best possible light and nones of them are the "true" story. Perhaps not the best film Kurosawa made, but definitely a very good or great film that uses beautiful visuals and unreliable narration to incredible effect.

Excellent. Random question, I was running through The Enclosures in Forgotten Sanctum and I destroyed "The Mouth of the Organ" on the left side of the map, then got murdered quite rapidly. Reloaded and toggled "god" and "toggleresourcelimit" because something seemed wrong about the fight, and what it is is that it is completely impossible. Even with invulnerability, limitless resources, super high accuracy, carnage, high attack speed, and rekvu's fractured casque for freedom from interrupts, I could not kill even one of this group. It's a bunch of humans, mostly barbarians, monks and paladins. "Revised Thugs" and "Sanitized Fanatics". I watched it go on for about 20 minutes before concluding it was impossible. It is probably possible with a full party of custom made characters, but I suspect just barely. I mean this fight is by far harder than any megaboss. I tried it in vanilla and while challenging the enemies went down after a few minutes. I think it is impossible in BPM because the humans appear to have limitless resources. The barbarians spam Spirit Tornado and Heart of Fury for high damage and keeping you staggered, the monks spam Skyward Kick, and worst of all the paladins spam Light of Pure Zeal. This is a barbarian / ghost heart I'm testing and it is an incredibly strong and high DPS build but just gets wrecked by this encounter. Since the encounter is avoidable by stealth (or just not destroying the mouth of the organ, which I did by accident), it isn't that big an issue, but you might want to check it out yourself, I'd like to know if others find it impossible as well. ---------------- Also keep running into spore infested librarians who spam savage defiance like 20 times a second. Mostly a cosmetic annoyance since they don't stack.

Are you playing vanilla or do you have the community patch? Are you willing to do "cheesy" things like use wall of draining or salvation of time to make yourself invulnerable? Or do you want something more straightforward? Blood mage / anything can solo the game if you use wall of draining properly. I like blood mage / soul blade personally, but blood mage / tactician is insanely good and a bit more accessible, since you won't need potions of final stand every fight. Unbending is extremely strong solo, particularly with wall of draining since you can extend it to the point where you are healing more damage than you can take every round. And with tactician, Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure lets you get brilliant inspiration any time you want. Before getting ABD, you can do it with potions of invisibility. Tactician / Skaen is very strong for similar reasons, you can use salvation of time to extend buffs and shadowing beyond to proc brilliant to get more salvation of time. That and Barring Death's Door makes you immortal. For tactician builds make sure you have ON berath's challenge, it keeps you from fleeing from combat which is necessary for invisibility to proc brilliant. Priest / anything can do it, Skaen is usually chosen for Escape and Shadowing Beyond which help a ton until you get barring death's door and salvation of time combo. Tactician / Skaen and Skaen / blood mage are probably strongest. Assassins are quite good due to assassinate passive, you need berath's challenge OFF for maximum benefit, the idea is you do large spike damage then disappear, regain assassinate passive, spike damage, repeat. Kinda boring IMO but some people like it. Troubadour / psion is a great combo that can solo the game mostly relying on summoning things and buffing your summons. Monks are one of the more straightforward options. Forbidden fists are probably the best non-mage and non-priest options (those can make you immortal with wall of draining and salvation of time). You need to community patch for FF attack to work properly with some things like building focus. FF / soul blade is really good and can solo everything. Probably any FF can, if properly built. Tell me what you're looking for and I can be a lot more specific

Yes, but it is fairly hard to reach for the average person, as retiring right now at the current cap would require someone to have earned over 30 years of 90th+ percentile incomes. Someone who has the necessary income and wants more out of their public retirement plan can supplement with private pension plans, or more likely, at this level of income, direct investments and special company pension plans. There are some exceptions, like government employees having generally better pensions in exchange for fixed income levels and fixed pay raises, i.e. they earn less than regular employees at comparable jobs for better average pensions later. Not that average income levels of government employees are bad compared to average income of employees, as there is not as much need for low wage unskilled labor, and the unskilled labor that does exist is not paid half bad - not in terms of general income, but they do get hazard pay (which then does not count towards their pension, if I recall correctly). Trash collectors and sewage workers earn a pretty penny in exchange for being subjected to health risks all day long.

So dwarf obsession caused freezing temperatures for a whole country.

Hellpoint, which I got on GOG in a giveaway two years ago. The DLC was on the spring sale for 2.99 €, so I bought that and off I went. Hellpoint is Dark Souls in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE. Well, on a space station. With less interesting and easier boss fights, but better exploration* - although that is subjective. Dark Souls (talking about the first one here) has better combat and equipment variety, and equipment that changes gameplay more than Hellpoint's, which while having similar items to regular action RPG staples like rings or amulets are not particularily interesting, most of them are flat bonuses. That pretty accurately describes everything about the game. I actually liked the game, warts and all, better than the clearly more polished and balanced Dark Souls, primarily because uncovering what the hell is going on was more fun in Hellpoint than in Dark Souls, but let me put a caveat here, I am someone who was disappointed by Dark Souls "story" (you're the chosen one, either go do what the dark snake or the light snake tells you, mmmkay, this is supposed to be incredible? Riiiiiiiight...) after hearing so many people rave about the depth and, uhm, subtle storytelling. Sci-fi worldbuiling is also infinitely more interesting to me than fantasy worldbuilding unless there's something interesting going on. It does have some fun concepts like a part in the DLC where you can set your game to change enemies whenever you kill one. Basically the setting causes all enemies in the game to move to the next NG+ level whenever one dies, making for an incredibly rewarding difficulty ramp that will have even the mookiest mooks one shot you pretty quickly. I survived long enough to realize that at some point the scaling just peters off. The less fun side-effect of this setting is that you'll just break the game really quickly, gathering millions of souls axions in short order. *Keep in mind that exploration rewards the player with a plethora of not really interesting gear, but many, many bits and pieces of lore. If you like the Dark Souls type of exploration that rewards players with potentially gameplay changing items, this is not really a game for you, or at least it will not be the primary motivation to continue. Lore and plot related elements was mine. Just something to keep in mind.

Version 2.5.2 has just been released : Deadfire Balance Polishing Mod at Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com)

But that is the best part! Anyway games rarely push that idea anywhere meaningful, which is a shame.

I think that approach is actually a lot more respectful of the idea of a paladin than what 3E did. I found it difficult to conceptually reconcile the "paladin" with it being perfectly okay to be murderously evil and the like - what does the term "paladin" even mean at that point? Rather than let "paladin" potentially mean the complete opposite of what everyone's idea of a paladin is, they decided to rename the class while then reserving the term for defenders of good, bringing it back to its classical meaning even if it's no longer the proper name of the class. I mean, as much as paladins can be defenders of good, being lawful stupid with the equally stupid evil that results and all.

Oh yeah https://2e.aonprd.com/Classes.aspx?ID=4 The class is revamped to sort of be thematically a mix between the Paladin and Warpriest from 1e. You're a warrior empowered by a diety but it opens it up beyond just Lawful Good. Mechanically it has the highest potential AC (which is harder to stack and more useful in 2e) and the good guys get a self-heal. Basically your Cause (the subclass) is tied to your alignment. It comes with specific codes of conduct and determines your Champion Reaction. Paladins are what you expect and Seelah is still the Iconic. Evil Champions are restricted because their codes of conduct implore them to be extremely ****ty, like Tyrants being compelled to bring some "freedom" to democratic governments.

NANI!?!

I forgot to post about them tbh, they were pretty good. It's been stormy weather in Houston so I've been playing around with a PF2e Tabletop game and watching strange films/shows. In addition to vouching for Uncle DIO I can report that David Lynch is indeed the man and that Champion (the class that kinda replaced Paladin in 2e, of which Paladin is a subclass) are incredible tanks.

Did I miss the post, or were the episodes not that good?

"Is the King Cobra the best pet snake for you?" "Well... no. It most certainly is not."