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Locations trailer: Cool to see Commoragh. Had Owlcat elected to put the game on Kickstarter and they needed a quick extra $100,000 put into the project then I'd wager a stretch goal of "Romance subplot with Dark Eldar Succubus" would do it.

The Twitter link you posted tallies perfectly with some of the points that the historian Timothy Snyder made in the link I recently posted. Ukraine is a huge threat to Russia because it is in the process of demonstrating that a former Soviet state is capable of developing into something of a democracy and getting closer to other European nations. This is intolerable for Russian rule, because it cannot allow its citizens to dream of a "better world", so to speak. In Russia, all elections are just a show[*], and this is why Trump was such a gift from heaven for Russia: the whole Trumpian enterprise was to cast doubt on the democratic process, and nothing could have pleased the Russian rulers more: the more discord there is within democracies, the better it is for Russia, because it allows them to claim with at least some justification that other countries aren't any better than Russia. [*] An academic who studies Russia said recently that all talk of democracy, human rights, environmental concern etc. are, in Russia, just empty talk to such an extent that most Russians are genuinely unable to believe that things like this can have any substance anywhere else in the world, either. (It's the old chestnut about liars being unable to trust anyone else.)

wow i never knew that!

There actually is an unlimited number if you're into grinding. You can get one potion of final stand (+2 of the best healing potions) as loot when attacking master level Valian ships, so long as you kill the captain quickly before he can use it. Monks are very good for this, since you can zap right over with Flagellant's Path and then permanently-stun with stunning surge.

A Morning Star cries for anything that targets fortitude. For Barbs that can be anything that would target deflection (see Brute Force), for FIghters it's Knock Down and Clear Out, Monks have Force of Anguish and Skyward Kick which can all profit a lot from the fortitude debuff. Casters as Druids, Wizards and Ciphers ahve lots of spells that target fortitud as well. Barbarians as wielders of Morning Stars have the added benefit of Spirit Frenzy which staggers on any hit roll (-10 foritude) - this stacks with the Morning Star's Body Blows. Monks are also cool because they can use Enervating Blows and Stunning Blows to stun + weaken which is -20 fortitude. Because of that I often play Barb/Monk or Barb/Cipher with a Morning Star. But I also did a Stalker/Bloodmage solo because Willbreaker lowers fortitude for my Animal Companion's Takedown Combo and the lowered Will is perfect for my Essential Phantom which wields Concelhaut's Draining Touch (it targets Will and weakens for the Animal Comapnion - circle of synergy ;)) Furyshaper/Beguiler is maybe my favorite Witch combo with Willbreaker. That's a great debuffer and Crowd Controller. Since those are more valuable to me than dealing weapon damage I don't like using Soulblade in this case. There's simply no time and motivation to use my focus for dealing weapon damage but I prefer to spend the focus on CC/debuffing for my party. Casting Phantom Foes + Secret Horrors fills focus up for some mind control, debuffs with Stagger, Sicken and Frighten (-10 Will, -20 Fortitude already) before summoning the Fear Ward and then going in and dishing out Body Blows. Also it is a thematically nice roleplaying approach imo. Lil' terror dude. When Wizard is involved there is a nice little trick with Willbreaker: You can summon the Essential or Substancial Phantom and attack the same target together. The WIll debuff of Willbreaker normally cannot go higher than 5 stacks (-15 Will). But since your Phantom uses a copy of Willbreaker it creates it's own stack (also up to 5). That way you can lower the Will by 30 instead of 15 max. And of course it it way faster to down the Will of a single opponent that way. If you have a Black Jacket/Wizard you can also use both Willbreaker and a Club with modals and lower enemies' Will by 25 with the club modal, 30 with Willbreaker (+Willbreaker copy on the Phantom) and on top use a little Miasma of Dull-Mindedness for -40 Will. There are no immunities against this, so even most bosses will suffer greatly from -95 Will. Against most enemies the double Willbreaker approach isn't necessary I guess. You can always give your Phantom Draining TOuch as weapn instead which profits greatly from reduced Will. --- As soon as a Monk is involved I would however not pick Willbreaker but Saru Sichr instead. The reason is that Saru Sichr has an additional hit roll with its poison DoT (Poison Dipped) which can trigger Swift Flurry/Heartbeat Drumming all by itself. And it targets fortitude. So with every strike of the Morning Star you get two chances to crit (one against deflection, one against fortitude) and thus two chances to trigger Swift Flurry and/or Heartbeat Drumming. Both then lead to an additonal attack which itself again has two chances of triggering and so on. Result is that it is much, much easier to create deadly chain of crits with Saru Sichr than it is with Willbreaker.

No, these Swedish fascists are connected to Russia, and incentivized by them. Just like Órban and I assume about every far right party in Europe. Putin is against Nazis in the same way that he considers himself the world's one true democrat.

I've played it a bit in 2022 (up to the battle against goblins at the tiefling camp). The visual design (as in "I can't see sh*t") and the amount of loot were even more unpleasant than in D:OS2, along with the loading times and the system requirements, including the storage (the VA I don't care about and the textures I cannot use, but have to download anyway, because moving them into free DLC is too much effort; might be fixed in v.1.0, but unlikely). On a positive note, there were less combat encounters than in PF:WotR and the combat itself was generally fine. At any rate, knowing Larian, there will be the Ultimate Definitive Deluxe Edition in a year or two after the original v.1.0 release.

Once again, the coveted author tag is mine.

Ofcourse he would, he's French, surrendering is all those ****ers are good for

At least 130 hours. Like @Humanoid said, at this point it is not really worth jumping into EA at this point, though if you really, really want to play it, buing it early will grant you Digital Deluxe upgrade for free. As to game itself, it is complicated. It is less of a Baldur's Gate3 and more of a Divinity: Original Sin2 smashed with 5e D&D with a dash of influence of Dragon Age. So far the result seems rather conflicted. I enjoyed my time with BG3 more than I did D:OS2, but I also found it more frustrating - D:OS2 just wasn't my cup of tea, while BG3 very much could be but than it does something silly. At the very least it is shaping up to be easily the biggest budget proper RPG we ever got.

well the point is that you don't want your enemy to know those data either, thats why they are confidential during war. I mean I am all for open government but I can see why at this point its not reasonable to expect such imformation to be shared. Its not like it contains 'truth' about biological weapons facittilies in Ukraine or some such nonsense

I'd kind of presume that most of the non bulk advanced stuff (ie not ATGMs) has... countermeasures against being simply sold off- that is likely part of what the NATO special forces mentioned in the leaks are tasked with. Not like there's a huge amount of advanced equipment anyway, and much of the newish stuff is like the Caesar- just a gun on a truck with a guidance system the French were selling to the Russians a couple of years ago, so not much to learn from. Even if China started supplying stuff (and frankly, they almost certainly are already, to an extent) it won't be J-20s or Type 99+s or anything else remotely 'interesting'. Old ex Soviet knock offs with plausible deniability and consumables like ammo and rockets, or things they can pass off as being supplied by DPRK/ Iran etc only, most likely. Depends a lot on Taiwan and general western relations though, but even if they get sufficiently annoyed there they still won't be supplying the good stuff, just more openly supplying old systems. End of the day there's nothing in something like a Type 80 tank anyone would be particularly interested in, 30 odd years later. If you were as the US you could, well, just buy a Pakistani or Sudanese one, after all.

Yah, I remember you spoke ill of Bosch. Turns out the Bosch is too big for the space we have, so guess we'll go with Frigidaire or GE as those are decent (apparently). Joys of being in Canada (and well dealing with my parents prejudice on vendors and other crap..)

Makowiec with rum soaked raisins and topped with chopped hazelnuts: I cook fairly regularly but I very rarely bake, however this came out spectacularly good.

I highly recommend drinking any liquor from infused things like rum raisins. It's usually good and wasting alcohol is bad. But now you've made me want something with rum raisins in it, stop trying to make me hungry.

I decided to do some baking (food thread post incoming? 🤔), which is not something I do often. Anyway, I decided to kick this baking project up a notch with rum soaked raisins and so I soaked some raisins in Kraken Black Spiced Rum for roughly 48 hours. I strained the superfluous rum into a glass and, not wanting good alcohol to go to waste, drank said superfluous rum. Turns out, raisin flavored rum is super delicious! Surely someone has thought of this before. It's highly likely that someone out there produces and sells rum soaked raisins. Soaking raisins in rum isn't exactly difficult, but it does take time and never ever underestimate the power of laziness. So, those same people that produce and sell said rum soaked raisins should also sell the raisin flavored rum, on account of it being super delicious.

Unbroken/Wizard can profit from Body Blows with Knockdown early - and also from nasty disengagement attacks once you start terrifying enemies (they crouch around, you can engage and when they crouch out of engagement: boom). It can be a lot of fun but doesn't always work 100% reliably. Still it's a nice "free" source of additional damage output. If he Phantom has engagement (it has with some items like Reckless Brigandine for example) it works with the Phantom as well: It will follow crouching enemies, reangage and profit from disengagment attacks, too. Of course an Unbroken/Wizard will have more engagement slots than the phantom so the chance of triggeriung disengagement attacks its higher if multiple enemies are involved. Reckless Brigandine + White Witch Mask + Willbreaker is my preffered item setup for this. Also pretty tanky that one. But: using the phantom for such things can become a bit tiresome - because a rather elaborate summoning/casting-setup is involved. It might be that you don't want to go through that process in every encounter and soon would prefer a more straightforward approach. For solo I find this totally okay - for a party game it might be too much preperation at the start of battle for some players. Depends on the level of micromanagement you can tolerate - or if you are willing to script this behavior with the AI tool which can really help to mitigate the micromanagement-fatigue. --- I personally like to enchant Willbreaker with "Make them Flinch" (25% miss to graze) and combine that with Gauntlets of Greater Reliability (also 25% miss to graze). That way you can even graze (and apply Body Blows) enemies who have absurd defenses often enough. This can help to more easily crack very tough nuts. I value that over Battered Mind - although interrupt chance on hit is good, too. --- An even more potent "Swift Flurry machine" than Saru Sichr for MC or SC Monk is the spear Mohora Tanga. It has no fortitude debuff of course, but It also has a DoT that counts as separate weapon attack like Saru Sichr, but this one (named "Red Flag Flying") has the way more potent feature to trigger itself(!) on a crit. So it works like this: Mohora Tanga lands a crit -> this triggers Red Flag Fyling DoT getting applied, but it has to do a separate roll (which counts as a proper weapon attack of Mohora Tanga for the game logic) against Fortitude. If this roll crits it will trigger Red Flag Flying again - if this crits it triggers again... and again.. and again... as long as you crit. This is all without even Swift Flurry/HBD involved. Now - triggering Red Flag Flying on its own does not do much - because the DoT doesn't stack with itself. So one might ask "what's this good for"? Since all those rolls are considered proper weapon attack rolls they can trigger anything that gets triggeed by weapon rolls. Look at Boltcatcher Gloves, Gatecrasher Gloves or Hylea's Talons. Also look at Avenging Storm(!). And finally look at Swift Flurry and Heartbeat Drumming. They will have the chance to trigger from Red Flag Flying every time it appliies (itself). This makes crit chains incredibly easy to unlock - and if you combine with Boltcatchers for example it's just a very devastating combination. In fact it it can be so devastating that all the rolls will lets your computer decide that it's best to shut down the game without further notice. This happened to my latest Ranger/Monk so many times against not-so-tough enemies that I decided to stop that build. Crashing game every second encounter wasn't fun anymore. But that was also due to the fact that the Ranger/Monk had incredible accuracy. Once it is nearly impossible to not crit it becomes a problem with this spear. But if you go with lower accuracy it's a great weapon to still have superb Swift FLurry experience without breaking the game too often I guess. Another great Swift-Flurry weapon (without crashing the game) is Sun & Moon. It has basically the same feature as Saru-Sichr because it has two separate weapon rolls (both target deflection) which can trigger a full Swift FLurry/HBD attack roll - and so on. --- My last Saru-Sichr build which wa s really fun was Berserker/Helwalker with maxed CON. Because the dps came from crit chains mostly I didn't need much starting MIG (helped with the self damage of Frenzy+Helwelker passive) and with maxed CON + Tough + Amulet of Greater Health, Death's Maw and Voidward it was a surprisingly sturdy build with lots of crit chains and decent debuffing and CC "on the fly".

Discovered an interesting FF monk + Liberating Exhortation quirk: 1. If you cast Liberating Exhortation on your FF monk, you suspend hostile effects (FF is a hostile effect) 2. If you strike an enemy with FF, they receive the Enfeebled debuff (fortitude check) 3. HOWEVER, because FF is suspended, you do not get the damage buff in the damage calculation (regardless of the number of stacks) and you do not take Raw damage for the length of LE 4. You do however continue stacking Forbidden Fist (I got up to x8 so far with a 44 sec length) What I need to discover is if I can take advantage of this somehow: - Option 1: Suspend, stack FF with no damage, wait for LE to end, then attack with a huge buff to damage (Kamikaze style) but risk dying horribly - Option 2: Turn FF into an Enfeebled Debuff build and use it as form of CC (dash around with enhancements to stride, slap enemies with it, then have someone else drop a big CC, e.g. Blind, Paralyze, Terrify) Note: I feel like I typed this up last night. I'm having a weird Deja Vu about this post

Wormie I have decided to buy the CE of BG3 when its released I have only been following the official updates and avoiding early access feedback but I loved D:OS2 and Im confidant Larian will deliver on BG3 🐲

Wow, thanks for a mini-guide on Morningstar builds, @Boeroer! What a helpful summary! Now I’m tempted to go for a wizard multiclass with substantial/essential phantom and take someone like mirke as a SC monk with Saru-sichr for deadly triple morningstar power 💀

I guess the one thing that does not quite work for me in relation to the soulblade subclass is that the focus is perhaps too much on melee side. A weapon like WotEP would probably work better for it, plus you are always incentivized to just spam soul annihilation. I want to exploit debuffs provided by the Willbreaker via spells and still hit hard with the morningstar itself. I thought that ascendant would be too casting focused, and beguiler - a decent trade-off.

Witch is really really good with morningstars @Boeroer has talked about this build before, maybe he can elaborate. I can give you the gist, cast borrowed instinct, secret horrors, and use brute force with morning star modal plus spirit frenzy which applies staggered on hit, together you debuff fortitude by like 45 points. The "will" debuff in willbreaker is also good because most of these cipher spells target will. At this point you crit a lot, also could cast some disintegrations and such. I like barbarian / soul blade for witch personally, not exactly sure the ideal stat spread but have used in the past max INT max PER low dex medium might high con low res. I feel like with frenzy barbarians have such bad deflection they're just going to get hit anyway so I usually dump resolve, but I guess you could also max it (lower con and might some) and with borrowed instinct defenses it wouldn't be that bad. You have pretty good healing once you get savage defiance and especialy stalwart defiance, which at 2 rage can be used multiple times per fight. On barb side I mostly pick +damage and +action speed passives like blooded, bloodlust, one stands alone, bloody slaughter, blood thirst, and defensive stuff like unflinching and thick skinned. Only actives I usually take are frenzy tree (stop at spirit frenzy, spirit tornado is bugged with stagger procs) and defiance tree, though the shouts are okay. On cipher side, spells mentioned already but also hammering thoughts, iron will, lingering echoes, draining whip, phantom foes, psychovampiric shield, mental binding, and one charm spell (i usually upgrade as i go along). Only direct damage spells you really need IMO are disintegration, maybe soul ignition, at least if you're a soul blade, because it's generally higher DPS to use soul annihilation Oh and morningstars have good penetration already, with hammering thoughts and phantom foes that gives you +2 pen so you're effectively at 15 pen legendary, 16 mythic and it does crush/pierce. There's almost nothing in the game that resists crush and pierce at 16+, and even if it did you can use slayer's claw to upgrade frenzy's strong to energized to get 18 pen at mythic, and that will get through everything. You'll also crit a lot which adds 50% pen, so even on upscaled POTD you don't really need devoted. Compared to a witch it's the same pen bonus anyway (at least when phantom foes is applied), so devoted gains a crit bonus but has a bit less accuracy, much less CC, less fortitude debuffs. Devoted is sturdier though, with unbending, and disciplined strikes is a pretty good source for crits. If I were going solo a witch might be tough until you get the defiance tree but in a party the healing is plenty. I don't know much about warlock builds, I guess you would cast spells to debuff fortitude, otherwise I'm not seeing a lot of synergy there.

Some guy saying enemy's equipment is trash, truly a shock. Surprised they even took the tank back to the US at all

https://www.technology.org/2023/04/18/americans-surprised-by-what-they-saw-inside-the-t-90a-tank-photo/ @Gfted1 you will appreciate this with your interest in military hardware

I dont believe China wants increased tension with the US\West for several reasons and they want to focus on there own geopolitical ambitions. If they supplied military aid to Russia they would only increase Western criticism towards them Also I think they were hoping for a quick Russian victory but the numerous failures of the Russian military strategy has ended this. I believe they want to stay out of any military connection to Russia because it would also undermine there stated comments that they want to help find a peaceful solution and if they provide military aid it will only prolong the war and they will appear as hypocrites

Maybe Russia needs to invade all of Europe to stomp out this scourge?

Encased. Tried a stealth-only run through the starting area successfully. In general, I am quite pleased with the game, not counting the looting (too much trash) and fatigue* systems, and was able to complete the prologue without combat. Probably could even without interactions with NPCs, if I wanted to. *the difficulty options do not seem to affect the fatigue gained per lock picked (75), so I might try to remove it with console commands.

The SD has some neo-fascist past, this much cannot be denied. It's also on the right. To conclude from this that it's a Neo-Nazi party is precisely the kind of thing that tends to make internet discussions both abrasive and worthless. I think it would be a good idea to either become better informed or less extreme [sic] in how your phrase yourself. And no, I have no sympathy for the SD at all.

The easiest (and I guess mostly overlooked) solution is the pair of Healing Hands gloves. My Aloth almost always uses then at higher levels with WoD. Also Blightheart's Heartbeat can be a nice healing source to prolong with WoD because it doesn't rely on crits. It's a nice weapon for a Wizard to have anyway (bc. 10% corrosive lash for spells).

Playing the Resident Evil 4 remake and finished my Professional Run. Some bemoaned the absence of the cheesiness that made the original memorable, particularly with Leon's interactions with the villains. But I would say my criticisms aren't so much that they are no longer present but the fact that besides the greatly expanded relationship with Krauser Leon _barely_ interacts at all with the villains until their respective boss fights, such as Salazar mostly having one-sided conversations with him throughout the Castle section. I rather missed Salazar slowly going insane with each successive failure to kill Leon, a dynamic that now seems to have been condensed into their boss fight. Speaking of Krauser it occurred to me that the apparently ret-conned Operation Javier is basically the plot of <<Clear and Present Danger>> one for one:

Helwalker/priest is a good one. Helwalker / blood mage is also immortal and doesn't need brilliant, though admittedly laying walls of draining is slightly trickier than casting salvation of time over and over, and this doesn't come online until l19. Also not an unlimited number of potions of final stand, but even without any blood mage can do find in most battles just extending arcane veil, llengrath's safeguard, llengrath's displaced image, etc., and can always run away with arkemyr's brilliant departure to regen health. Helps to have some kind of passive healing like from devil of caroc BP which can be extended with WOD when you don't have the final stand potions. Also sanguine great sword. And unstable soul essence. And darkest before dawn. This combination also benefits from citzal's spirit lance being awesome with stunning surge. I suspect skyward kicks are also distributed by the lance but I haven't tried it. Mule kicks are, and they are mechanically similar, so maybe. ---edit--- LOL I already mentioned this build. My memory...sigh.

A SC monk is fantastic against mobs due to WotW. However, as @masterty66 notes, monk/priest is also a great combo. It is particularly good against megabosses and other tough fights in the DLCs, and can handle mobs too although not as quickly as the SC monk. This is because a monk/priest is immortal (by prolonging Barring Death's Door with Salvation of Time) so long as you have a source of brilliant, which is also prolonged by SoT.

By that very definition, you can go whatabout crazy. US invading the Middle East, Blackwaters actions and so on. My favourite is a video from an US attack helicopter painting civilians from a couple of clicks away. The ****er is trying to deal with the CCP, **** him, the least I can do is meme about them. Atleast we didn't try and encourage the Allies to negotiate peace with the Nazis.

I got bored with it pretty quick. That being said I never really enjoyed DOS so I might not be the one to comment. Something about larians writing annoys me. Also 3D environments are annoying, much prefer static environments. Rotating the camera is a pain.

lamplighters dev diary #5. turn-based combat one aspect we found intriguing in part 'cause o' what is not detailed-- The Stress System Being attacked in combat is stressful. In The Lamplighters League you can use the stress of your enemies to your advantage! But you also have to pay attention to your own Agent’s stress levels as well. Let’s dive into the rules! What is Stress? Every time any unit is attacked, they will accrue a point of Stress. Note: Hits AND Misses both accrue the same amount of Stress. So even missed abilities have some effect! Stress is represented by the pips above the unit’s Health Bars. When a unit reaches maximum Stress, they will Stress Break. Stress Breaking When a unit Stress Breaks and hits max stress, something happens! For Enemies: Some enemies Flee and will cower for a turn. Some enemies go Berserk and attack a nearby target – friend or foe! For Player Agents: Stress Broken Agents will lose 1 AP their next turn. More effects to be revealed later… am getting how stress is a fatigue mechanic, and am curious, but we would like more info. HA! Good Fun!

But there genuinely is information that is better and safer left undisclosed. Think of the Edward Snowden case: the leak contained an awful lot of stuff that was very inconvenient for the NSA, and the press did not comply to any requests to keep it away from public view, so the description of the media as good doggies doesn't really hold, at least not in all cases. Note: I don't know what's in the files, so what I wrote above may not apply. But again, the situation is probably more complex than how you describe it. Over here, for instance, there are certain facts concerning what has and what has not been done to help Ukraine, and in my mind there's no question that information such as this should not be in the public domain, because it's better if Russia doesn't get hold of it. But in terms of US history, it is true that the government does have an awful record of lying to the public, and I think it's absolutely clear that this is one of the reasons that conspiracy theories are so rife in the US, even if there's ordinarily a logical flaw in succumbing to them. (History is a bit of a bítch: the fact that folks like Galileo and Semmelweis were mistreated and misunderstood enables every crackpot to think that they are equally mistreated and misunderstood, when in fact almost none of them have anything worthwhile to offer to the world.)

Solasta has the most fun tutorial with them all in the tavern sharing stories.

eles já adicionaram algo assim, eles fizeram isso, então quando você morrer, você pode reaparecer na estação de campo mais próxima i don't speak Portuguese, so I used google translate

All he had to do was take off the wrap around his third eye and say 'hey, look at this!' 😂 edit: some of us are old enough to remember how the Horus Heresy came about in the time after Rogue Trader. GW needed some kind of justification for why there were 6 identical plastic titans in the Titan Legion box, 3 bad guys, 3 good guys, but other than the colour of the plastic, being the same model. Hence, a random comment about a civil war named The Horus Heresy was mention in passing. It was a cost cutting measure because they couldn't afford the tooling required (plastic is cheap, making the injection molds is very expensive) to put two different models in the box. Thus the heresy came about. Don't get me started on the primarch names (which came about when the GW guys met in a pub and started noting down names while slapping their knees in laughter in a drunken stupor... mind you I love the lore to bits, but half of those names are just cringe worthy (and that is me being nice) 😝

First, levels should be called "rank" atleast to pay homage to the OG game. I'm not liking what seems like the wound("HP") count, the most I've seen in a real game was 28, at the highest possible rank. It makes me think things are going to be spongy. It's hard to say though since we know nothing about the gear, but if they bother with even a small fraction of what is actually available to use, and if they stay relatively close to what damages are in the base game, it's going to be tanky as ****. Though I do like the veil idea. Edit; Seems he has a couple of more videos I really dislike how they've "adapted" the rules from the tabletop. I dislike Action Points, their armor absorption system seems overly convoluted compared to tabletop and they seem to have dropped the base d10 system for weapon damage. It's a shame, the ttrpg system was pretty well balanced though punishing if you did things like stand in the open.

I wouldn't mind being an alpha/beta tester, but I'm not doing no work for free, much less paying for the "privilege".

Ain't nobody got time for Alpha testing at our age. I can barely make time for the finished games.

I only get beta access with my purchase level and I'm not even sure I'll bother unless I get too curious. I want to play early but I don't want to actually test anything and I don't expect a very polished alpha.. or beta... or even release.

The interstellar peddlers of make up are as old as Rogue Trader itself (1987)... followed by Adeptus Astartes chapters using lethal trigonometry (The Dark Angles and the Blood Angles)