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Best thing in Skyrim is adopting children, have the AI pathfinding mess up so the child walks outside town and, being set to immortal in the game code for being a child, killing any monster it encounters. When I found where my daughter had ran off to, she had slain a dragon.

If my daughter didn't kill a dragon she shouldn't bother comin' back.

Morrigan wears more clothes during sex than she does while adventuring.

Wow. Kink shaming.

In the early game you don't need them so much. Later she can use items such as Reckless Brigandine and Kapana Taga & shield for 4 engagement slots + Essential Phantom for another 4. Wouldn't be my preferreed role for her either though. When I am using Fassina as SC Wizard I almost always end up with gear (Ring of the Marksman, Helm of the White Void, High Harbinger's Robe etc.) tailored towards the use of the Blackbow + Essential Phantom - because it's just so efficient and effective in most encounters on top of the other spells.

For the late game a Bloodmage/Ascendant is one of the most "straightforward" powerful Cipher combinations you can have (without exploiting unintended behavior of certain items and other very cheesy apporaches). The main reason is that the Bloodmage can have unlimited casts of Wall of Draining which can be used to prolong the ascended state endlessly. That's endless casting of Cipher spells for free, including Ancestor's Memory for your whole party (think of your party's Priest who can then use Salvation of Time to keep the whole party brilliant for the entire fight). On top of that you can of course prolong all other sorts of buffs (accuracy, defenses, inspirations - you name it) and healing over time (Minor Lay on Hands from gloves and/or Blightheart's healing pulse for example). Another very strong combo with Ascendant is Ranger/Ascendant with the Frostseeker warbow. Some prefer Ghost Heart, I would prefer Arcane Archer. It has one of the highest and at the same time "easy to get" accuracy ceilings of all class combos which is important for the bow (it relies on crits) and it does great single tarter as well as AoE damage (from the bow's AoE itself as well as the imbue shots of the Arcane Archer) and has very good focus generation so you can ascend all the time. Then you can decide if you just want to keep shooting while ascended (while ascended the Soul Whip damage bonus doesn't turn off like with other ciphers but instead does MORE weapon damage) or cast cipher spells for free with absurd accuracy (for example crit-dominate half of the enemy group or whatever). This takes off much sooner than the Bloodmage/Ascendant variant - and while it doesn't have the gamebreaking potential the Bloodmage/Ascendant has, it's still an extremely efficient combo for a party until the end of the game. Besides that, my personal absolute favorite Cipher subclass is the Psion - either single class or obviously paired with some other caster like Wizard, Priest, Druid or - yet again my favorite combo: Chanter (more spec. Troubadour). Psion/Troubadour, while being very useful in any party, is also one of the best solo class combos. Just a all around fun, versatile and strong combination in my opinion. It was one of the most enjoyable characters I played during my active playing time with Deadfire - and usually I'm a fan of Monks and Barbarians in this game, so that's extra special. Another very fun combo for me personally was Beguiler/Furyshaper with the Willbreaker as main weapon. A very good debuffer and crowd controlleer if you have good acc buffs in the party (usually a priest) and later in the game also a great damage dealer with the weapon. Also thematically very nice for an MC imo because the main theme of both classes fit nicely imo. I personally am not a big fan of the Soulblade although Soul Annihilation is obviously a great and powerful ability. But it also leads to very one-dimendional builds imo and you really have to work to get away from that. If that's not a problem then any martial/Soulblade combo is great. Trickster/Soulblade with Sun & Moon+Tuotilo's Palm (or any other bashing shield) is very good and so is Streetfigher/Soulblade with Sun & Moon+blunderbuss. Also Bloodmage/Soulblade is very, very good - mainly because of the combination of Citzal's Spirit Lance and Soul Annihilation as well as the fact that Wall of Draining can prolong the Soul Blade's bonuses he gets on kill (+max focus for example).

This sounds brilliant. I might try it if I ever replay Skyrim. Celeste. Slowly climbing up. The story is picking up and the game overall is genuinely nice. Edit. Finished the main game. An excellent platformer with gorgeous art and touching story. Review: Elden Ring. Defeated Margot the Fell Omen at level 25 with a Scimitar +3, then Godrick the Grafted at level 40 with a Scimitar +4. The delay in rolling is very noticeable and irritating, so are the hard-coded menu controls, including the map. Which I had not known I could access out of the bonfires/sites of Grace, because the key was not in the settings. Wandered the Limgrave and Caelid areas for 2 hours, discovered the entrance to the Siofra river, ran away from several dragons and the duo of pumpkin head bosses, found another boat necromancer and killed it. I suppose, the locations are still as lovely as they were in Dark Souls 1, but the reskinned or simply copy-pasted bosses are somehow disheartening. The ones in ER strongly remind of Immortal: Unchained. Somehow Conan: Exiles, Dragon's Dogma, and even Shadow of the Colossus, not to mention The Elder Scrolls, had more engaging open-world structures than ER. There were quests, there were more traversal abilities, there were unique bosses. I suppose, I had had unreasonably high expectations, given the developers' previous games (which have become worse), the high ratings, and the price, hence the disappointment. Still going to finish it, though. The mods are on and I should be able to just run into the next main area, skipping the grind.

And for everyone's general entertainment, how it all ended: Of course, now I have to be squinty eyed on whether I made it the right size for my friend. I guess we will find out when it's her birthday next month.

^ Pretty cool, pretty cool, Raithe. As to my morning: --gets groceries: puts car keys in the fridge --does laundry: tosses four folded pairs of socks in the garbage can instead of the clothes basket before realizing --"where are my main glasses? Screw it I'll just use the older pair, here." ... an hour later..."Where are either of my pairs of glasses? Honey? Seen my glasses?" (one on the back edge of the couch, one on the floor by a to-recycle paper bin) One of those days.

Just for that delivery...

Witcher 2. It appears CDPR implemented cheevos recently, but because everyone and their dog played the game ages ago, I get to enjoy Epic Achievements (0,9%, drank a potion). I remember where I stalled almost 3 years ago (got told to explode nekker nests without any instructions or directions). No idea why I thought I have time to look for them on my own back then, now promptly googled that sh†t and will do so anytime the game decides to be cryptic with clues. Also hoping I'll get to go somewhere more urban next, swamps and wilderness suck. Minigames are no fun, but the story and characters are engaging enough to mostly outweigh annoyances.

DAO's sex stuff was just kind of...awkward, nothing too bizarre? Anyway, I cringed wayyyyyy worse at the singing scene in Inquisition than DAO's sex. That said, from my experience with Larian, in the bizarre & lolrandom department they easily run circles around Bioware...though waitwaitwait. Bioware allowed you to romance Iron Bull, I doubt the bear could cause worse internal damage.

That's true. I liked reading your Fassina guide that focus on using her Poison spells. I love those spells, actually. I wish that skeletons and vessels were not immune to those AND piercing, however! Still, those spells decimate most mobs. Yeah that's true. Mobs can easily run past her to the backlines, which kinda defeats the purpose of her as a tank. The more I think about it, having a a Monk (Xoti, Rekke) is better because they never have to worry about losing the buffs, esp. due to arcane dampener. In fact, Monks can interrupt wizards before they cast those spells. I think the meta for Fassina is more about Blackbow, and then using poison spells, debuffs, or the ever useful Jernaught's Equalizing Burst. I was thinking it would have been better for Conjurers to still have access to Evocation and Illusion, but have some other kinda Malus. It really hurts losing BOTH those schools, especially Ryngrims' Enervating Terror

There is a random event in one of the homes you can live, where your children hear noise from the basement and when you check it, there are skeevers. Your children help you kill the rats. So they are intentionally coded to fight and survive. Dragons are funny because they apparently are coded to insta die when attacking essential NPCs.

remember give those little monster ebony dagger didn't know they can actually kill things

Arcane Archer/Ascendant is very powerful. Use the Frostseeker bow and you'll generate enough focus to get ascended very quickly. From there you can spam powers or continue to ranged dps as desired. With the high Ranger accuracy you'll crit often and your spells will land well and spells like Borrowed Instinct will make you even more accurate. If you don't want to deal much with a pet you could do Ghost Heart/Ascendant which would also be quite good. Another weapon which pairs well with ranged Ciphers of any variety is Kitchen Stove with the Thunderous Report upgrade. That is a 1/encounter ability which will do a ton of damage and get you to max focus (or very close) quite quickly. So that one goes well with Ascendants. Essence Interrupter is a good ranged weapon as well. You said you're not totally opposed to melee builds. I recently played a Stalker/Soulblade using Sun & Moon + Tuotilo's palm (and then later Seeker's Fang + Grave Calling). The way the Soul Annihilation ability works is it does a primary attack, so the off hand is ignored. Sun & Moon strikes twice (once with Soul Annihilation, and then once by itself) so the way that works is you dump your focus with the first attack and then instantly regenerate focus with the second attack from Sun & Moon. In essence that means you can spam Soul Annihilation all day. With this character I would usually throw on a buff or two (Borrowed Instinct and/or Psychovampiric Shield) and then go to town spamming SA. It was quite effective. You can use powers as well when you want to. A good charm spell or debuff can sometimes be more effective than spamming SA, so don't totally neglect your powers. Just a few ideas. Hope this helps.

Losing illusion spells kinda stinks for tanking but she'd still have Spirit Armor, Ironskins, and Llengrath's Safeguard so I don't see why she wouldn't be capable of tanking if you really wanted to. Heavy Armor + those armor buffs and Llengraths should make her quite sturdy. I think the issue more than defenses would be the lack of engagement slots.

but why would she in the first place, she was much cuter and certainly more approachable as a spider oh yes, just the cutest and exactly like how I remember her

You can say that about anyone, without what it makes them special they are all just auto attackers. If the bow expires use the summoned lance or the summoned staff etc and you can always empower to use the black bow again or use a cipher to cast brilliant on you. And Fassina still has some damaging spells like necrotic lance or my personal favorite death ring, she is not useless without the weapons. Maia is probably the best companion for DPS just give her The Red Hand.

anadi illustration in pathfinder 2e are pretty cute

i'm confused, where's the cute spider? i expected shelob, but all i get is some lady? sorry but a half-dressed bint with pale skin, black hair, and full-on uncanny valley just doesn't make a spider (e): Lmao, I did a reverse image search and apparently this literally is Shelob. Alright, whoever designed this atrocity gets thrown out the nearest window.

Wait, when did @BruceVCstart working for Larian?

Yes. They looked at a Druid and thought “could you have sex with it when it’s in bear form?” Truly, creativity worthy of one of those awful comic strips Facebook keeps pushing on me. I wonder if it is a result of me spending too much time on Larian’s forums… The Panel from Hell has drained any enthusiasm I have build up after months of not playing the game. My gripes with the title seem to be left predictably left untouched, and difficult mode seems to just crank to 11 Larian’s cheese mechanics. The last origin turned out to be just that, and the idea itself sounds actually quite interesting, but that leaves our party options really underwhelming. I assumed they were holding off on a real banger. They even created a whole we based mini game (blood in baldurs gate) just to build up to the last origin, that lacks the main component that makes origins interesting to me (aka. companions). At least choice and reactivity looks impressive even though it’s not quite my cup of tea. The choices are so extremely cruel and illogical that I can’t imagine even considering most of them - at least here they keep BioWare legacy alive.

Publishing: Expectations vs Reality - ILONA ANDREWS (ilona-andrews.com)

This is made me chuckle. UA Naftogaz has started cases on US arbitration courts against RU Gazprom, that during the time, when they shot videos how the EU is gonna freeze, they did not move contracted volume of gas through Naftogaz pipelines, and are demanding compensation for breach of contract Of course, Russia is already whining Naftogaz has already won few billions from Russia, as a compensation for lost assets and revenue in Crimea. So I hope they will be successful with this as well. Nothing hurts Russian mobsters more, than losing money. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/07/7/7410322/

Broken Roads demo It seems to be Aussie Fallout with a pinch of Banner Saga. Come to think of it, Aussie Fallout would just be Mad Max, except I've not met anyone wearing bondage gear yet. No world map, it seems, you just go from place to place with (random?) encounters along the way. The art style is quite nice. And that's the last of the demos I downloaded during NextFest. Phew, that was a lot of games.

The Muller-Powell Principle demo Under no circumstance is this Half-Life. Seriously, I know it's also got a hyphenated word in the title, but get those thoughts of Half-Life out of your head. Yes, I'm talking to you. What did I tell you? Just stop it! On a serious note, These devs definitely took inspiration from a couple of Valve games. In terms of look, feel, and tone, this wears its Half-Life inspiration on its sleeve. In terms of gameplay, there's definitely some Portal here. It's a first person horror puzzle game. That gun in the 3rd picture can absorb energy and then discharge that same type of energy as a beam. For example, if you find a heat source you can absorb the heat then discharge a heat beam. The gun and picking up and moving objects are used to solve puzzles to progress. There's no combat, at least in the demo, but there is a sort of spectre. He (said spectre resembles a man) appears in the intro cinematic and again at the end of the demo. If he touches you it's game over, reload checkpoint. You can't kill him, at least not with the tools available in the demo, but you can temporarily slow him down with a specific type of energy beam. So, basically, when senor spectre shows up you run and he serves as a ticking clock element forcing you to figure out how to get past obstacles quickly. Anyway, I like puzzle games, this could be a good time. I guess it will depend on how creative they get with the puzzles in the full game.

This Bed We Made demo This is a 3rd person mystery adventure game. It seems to take place in Canada in the late 50s. You play as a hotel housekeeper. In this short demo you discover that one of the guests has been stalking and taking pictures of you snooping on guests. The demo is just going through this one room. I tried to both do my job as a housekeeper (tidy up the room, throw out the garbage, make the bed, etc.), and snoop, but make sure to not leave evidence of my snooping (e.g. I found a key to a briefcase. After snooping through the briefcase I made sure to close it and put the key back where I found it). The game told me that there will be consequences, good or bad, for picking up items, but the demo wasn't long enough for said consequences to happen. Graphically, the game looks decent. Environment details, objects you can pick up and rotate all look great, decent particle effects. The character models, or should I say model, I only ever saw the housekeeper I played as, was overall decent. She looks a bit... wooden, like she's a very lifelike marionette, rather than an actual person, and the somewhat stiff movement animations kind of go along with that. What I'm trying to say is that the production value is definitely not AAA, but it's not bad either. Voice acting was decent. I'll keep my eye on this, I like mysteries and adventure games. The idea of trying to snoop on guests while trying to not get caught snooping seems like a solid core mechanic, if that's where this game is going to go.

Stray Gods demo So, it turns out that this is a musical, as in a good chunk of the story is done in song. I mean, it's in the title, or, rather, subtitle, but I didn't really pay attention to that, I downloaded the demo because the art style looked great. The singing was performed well enough and there's an audience for musicals, I'm just not a member of said audience. The art style is great, though. It's not fully animated, but rather a series of stills, sort of like a comic book, but not arranged into panels like in a comic book. It's got Greek Gods in it, so if you're into musicals and Greek mythology (with a modern twist, I guess) then this might be up your alley.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew demo The game looks lovely with a great art style and vibrant colors fitting of the tropical setting. Gameplay is great, Mimimi have single-handedly resurrected the real-time stealth tactics genre. They know what they're doing. I'm not done with the demo yet, it's longer than I expected. As usual for these types of games, one of the very few genres I'm actually good at, I'm playing on the hardest difficulty, which in this case is "cursed". I always try to go pacifist. I did Shadow Tactics 100% pacifist (cut scenes don't count, I have no control over those) and Desperados 3 completely pacifist until the final showdown which, after trying everything I could come up with for like 2 or 3 hours, I determined was impossible to complete without killing the people. Looks like I'm going to have to kill custodes in this game, since knocking them out doesn't seem to break their spell, but I will try to not kill anyone else, if at all possible. The game ran like a champ max settings at 4K. No crashes, no glitches, no stutters. Just buttery smooth.

A 79-year-old mathematician may have just solved an infinite dimension puzzle that's vexed theorists for decades | Space

A weird bear sex scenes won’t bring down an otherwise great game - I don’t think BG3 is great though. Bear sex is just another weird thing that Larian seems so very proud of. I never claimed bear sex isn‘t precisely what one should expect from Larian - but I am also not sure why it is there to begin with. I don’t like many narrative aspects of BG3, and unfortunately after two solid PfH this is where Larian put their focus. As to other stuff you mentioned it’s all fine. They said they will do Player Handbook so Monk and Half-Orc/Dragonborn are bare (bear?) minimum I would expect. It seems they finally made proper UI for character creator, which is good, but again nothing to blow my socks off. Does the creator have very necessary class preview? So far it seems it does not. Of so than it is still very much the worst character creator I have seen in a while - with Solasta, Pathfinders and PoE2 fairing much much better. I have questions about implementation of some of the monk abilities, including why some of the reactions didn’t work during the stream when they should, and why they were able to use flurry of blows without using main attack first. Deflect missles seem to work occasionally - also deflecting missle didn’t seem to impact Larian’s homebrew AOE fire arrow. So you catch and throw back an arrow and yet it’s AOE effect still hits you. Like so many aspects of BG3 it seems half-implemented. In general my main takeaway from the showcase is that the game seems to be in dangerously buggy and unstable state considering it is releasIng in a couple weeks time. Tactician mode just looked awful. I still have hope for BG3 - I hope modding will be passionate enough to make something of it. But to be honest, I just expected to see something of higher quality with the game being so close to release, and Larian confidently moving release date forward by a month. Meantime they released a video praising how great their cinematics are, while in that very own showcase basic shot/reverse shot conversations aren’t properly blocked, with a game being about as buggy as ever. BG3 has so much potential, but it seems 1.0 will not be getting rid of “pre-alpha” feel of he early access. there are positives. Some deeper digging suggests we finally got a keychain, so not to pollute our inventory with endless pile of keys.I am sure there is more but Larian chose to focus on fluff instead. Perhaps not a bad game, but bad marketing at least for me.

elden ring keybinding on pc are pure garbage not sure if anyone even tested that before they put out the game

Whisper of the Heart (2022). The basic premise is that Shizuki, our protagonist who was so driven and full of her dreams and ambitions of writing by the end of the original film, is now ten years older: she is a failure who cannot get anything she's written herself published, and she is being left behind by friends who are moving on with their personal and professional lives while she wilts away. She works as an editor at a podunk children's books publisher, in an uncaring industry that cannot really afford to approach writing in the way that she dreamed of when she was a child - she is even micro-managed into pushing the writers she's managing into directions she does not agree with, which only kills her even more. And her guy, Seiji, has been training to become a professional cellist in Italy...for ten damned years, and it has understandably taken its toll on both of them. It's a weird phenomenon to take a child's pure, hopeful, and beautiful perspective of their life and the world...and then flash forward ten years into the future where they've effectively been ground up into a fine paste - a nervous wreck that feels like they can't possibly accomplish anything with their life, that they're just...stuck at best, doing everything wrong at worst, and in the way of others. To a degree, it's kind of what happens to a lot of people in reality: sooner or later, most everyone gets eaten up one way or another by life, including and especially the wonderful, driven, and talented. Okay, as for the movie itself. There are some pretty good ideas here, but it's such a hot mess. I'm just imagining how this might've been tackled if it were instead a Studio Ghibli-animated film made right after the first, and I think using the same core but cleaning and tightening it up, it would actually probably be great. But in 2022, in live-action, made by a mediocre director in what feels like a made-for-TV production, with all of its different ugly warts and awkward compromises...it's definitely less than. Still, the idea is there, just deeply buried.