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Its early days for my first POE experience, I am about 3 hours into the game and its fun so far Its taking time because the ruleset is different to what Im use to with D&D but Im learning it and enjoying the lore and how the narrative is presented. But of course I dont know anything about the lore so that will take time to understand the history of the game universe Its unusual but expected to play a game outside of the Forgotten Realms with all this new IP but I want to understand it so I'm reading and absorbing everything because it also makes sense for future games

Precisely. There's ****-and-ass adult, but there's also death-and-taxes adult which is no less adult. Playing "Sunless Sea". I think last time I tried it, it still was "One game, one save" thing. Now it allows to save in ports, and what do you know, turns out that diligent savescumming really helps enjoying a story-heavy Lovecraftesque adventure.

Good! Read the books you find. Personally, I didn't fully enjoy PoE1 until my 2nd playthrough. I felt lore here isn't just a background, but it creates a basis for the world state of PoE1, and I found a lot of interactions more compelling with a better understanding of the world, and future events. Don't worry about gold-plated NPCs - those are backer reward related and aren't really worth your time. I like beginning and I like the end. I just think act2 is a bit of a bore. PoE1 is stretched thin (like butter scraped over too much bread), and it is most noticable in city hubs which should be brimming with content. That's where I got stuck during my last playthrough. Fortunately, White March is IMO the best PoE content, and it can be more or less played through while slogging through act2. That's where PoE2 is simply superior to me. While I wished for ending to have a bit more punched, in all my playthroughs I had a great time from the beginning to the end.

I think the beginning of PoE is the best part. I found the tedium built up with time.

With my newly arrived WinWing F-15EX throttle handles I've been getting deep into DCS: F-15E. While the work done is quite impressive, helped by real-life former F-15E aircrew Jeff "Notso" Bright, it makes me think back to one of my favourite flight sims Jane's F-15 which modeled the same aircraft and just how close the EA Baltimore team managed to get to the real thing. Pulling up the NAVFLIR HUD and A/G RDR and A/G PACS on the MFDs, compare and contrast:

King Arthur: Knights Tale Roman Legion Dlc trailer

Call me vulgar, but I like Sergio Leone and I love "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly"

one-handed style is very niche in deadfire compared to poe1. and that niche is not focus generation, you are tanking your focus generation unfortunately (for more info on the niche, i wrote it up in one of the sidebars here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/weapon-styles). two weapon style is overall best for dps/focus, two-handed style is also good and has other advantages (quarterstaff and pike give you reach like in poe1 so you have good dps/focus while being relatively safe like a ranged attacker if you have a good tank to body block). with party support a club will work best. also, the cipher doesn't need to use a club, you can have someone more melee-capable use a club to keep enemy will low. ciphers will actualy suffer with club because of the -25% damage penalty from the modal. eventually you get a high-level passive that you can take that gives you bonus to accuracy vs will which will help. edit: same thing goes with morningstar modal. put it on a front-line tank, hit an enemy with it, and suddenly you have a juicy target for a cipher disintegrate. IMO the tier 1 beam spell is always good although the targeting can be a bit challenging. ascendant is not really meant for front-loading powers, since you have to build it up. there are other ways to super charge focus generation for an ascendant (there's a unique blunderbuss that can be enchanted with a once/encounter massive push back attack that will top you off with focus almost assuredly). aside from psion, the other ciphers will do overall better with front-loading attacks, and the beguiler can generate tons of focus real fast with the right powers. i think those are decent stats. unfortunately a cipher on hard/potd is just going to be squishy for a melee-er, you don't have survivability-boosting abilities/passives compared to martials and heavy armor is really taxing on your ability to use powers; so additional con/res may help a bit but won't help the big picture that much. eventually by mid/mid-late game with more powers, the ability to pick up Tough, and the slowdown of the AR vs PEN arms race on hard/potd will make things easier. in the meantime, rely on your party to support you. firearms are great. their #1 feature is that while reloading, you can do switch to doin anything else, like quaffing a potion, using a power, etc. one-handed pistol with modal is also a super way to do firearms w/ basically minimal reload time (the math works out heavily in your favor doing one-hand pistol with modal that it doesn't with any other weapon). crossbows/arbalests are similar, but they especially come with utility for interruptions, which is more important than any damage they can do. there are also some frankly stupidly good unique firearms. there's a pistol that can do raw damage and be enchanted to do even more damage on top. there are two blunderbusses that instead of firing 4 bullets, fire one bullet that explodes (also decent for focus generation). there's an arquebus that lets you fire twice before reloading--basically eliminating the slow reload tax. that's kinda what i do. i give each character a main skill to focus on, maybe two tops. the diminishing returns on party assist are pretty nasty. more important for watcher to focus because there are lots of checks that are watcher-only, but that's the general idea. the main argument for not giving everyone these skills is that IME keeping your characters stocked with enough potions and scrolls is expensive. eventually by late game you'll be overflowing with high-powered scrolls (through forgotten sanctum dlc) but good potions will always be hard to keep up. I max out at two characters investing in those skills at a time. similar with explosives, though explosives are honstly easier to keep stocked up (most explosives recipes give you more than one bomb/craft, and even really basic ones are good). in terms of potions being usable by all, the best benefit from alchemy to me is making even lesser health potions extremely useful. combat is slower than in poe1 so drug durations won't get too high relative to fights, but high alchemy is needed if you want to do more than one fight (+ some exploration) with the effects of a drug. edit: also if you are interested in poisons maxing out alchemy is basically mandatory for them to be usable at all on hard/potd. on potd you also need additional help from items and miscellaneous general buffs (like a source of aware to get graze->hit or independent accuracy bonuses not tied to perception). athletics is also good for a lot of characters. it falls off quickly, but even with the fall off it's very useful heal. i have a fighter mainchar right now that is maxxing athletics (for an item that gives you -% recovery based on athletics), and at level 12 i can heal ~200 health with athletics (at fast speed with no recovery). for mercenaries i might need i tend to pick up laborer as a background since that's +2 athletics off the bat, and that's basically a free, no-recovery potion every encounter. if you hover over your character, there's a tooltip to the top left of hte screen by default. There should be a number next to a "Concentration" label near the top of that tooltip that will have a number if you have more than one layer of concentration. Plus I think there's "Concentration" next to whatever effect is granting it in the list of active effects. edit: there's also a visual indicaiton in the above-your-head combat short tooltips - the circle that shows your current action will be glowing if you have any concentration. very important for at-a-glance info on whether that enemy caster is interruptible.

My legs and accompanying joints are bad. Not worn out*, just bad. They smoke with cigarettes and wear dark pleather jackets and pantaloons, and are generally ill-tempered. I do work out but my cardio is limited to walking so I can't run away from my problems, I either close my eyes and pretend they don't exist or walk away at a glacial pace. I beat the new DLC for WOTR the other day and am now playing through the main campaign again. I also just hit level 150 with my High Elf Mariner in LOTRO. *this is a lie, this guy lies.

I'll second jogging. I started running in my 30's and it helped a ton. I assume people that don't like running just don't have enough problems to run away from. I really enjoyed rescuing thralls on Siptah and I didn't understand why they didn't add that to the main map. It would crack me up when I rescued a thrall and was like, "If you can get back to my camp safely, you can join my team."

The Expanse series is better by the simple virtue of those writers not being lazy like the original authors of the books. The belter patois for the series was properly researched. In the books it was machine translated using very bad, outdated translation machines. For any German speakers who haven't read the first book and wish to groan: "Schrauben sie sie weibchen." Shirtless said in Belter inflected gutter German, leaning forward.

Will share if discover how. Jogging helps, though. Sounds good. Thank you for the information. The last I played, in the Siptah DLC, it was possible to rescue the NPCs for them to become followers.

Funny you mention that, for my Captain picked up certain...habits...and now, lets say, he does not exactly resort. If you get my meaning

From what I understand act3 is quite broken at the moment, but it should be addressed in soon to come patch 5.

After a quickie search, apparently Todd thinks some of this show will be official lore? Chr. stuff or something? The only visual media where I thought it was either equal, even if different, to slightly better, from an original source material would be on the film side. Like Shawshank Redemption. TV series .... can't think of anything off hand. Although I think there were several more modern series that I liked a fair bit, or at least liked a first season, but these days I typically have never read/seen/heard of their source material so can't compare. I really liked the old Shogun mini-series from the 1980's, but I wouldn't at all say it's better than the book. It was very good for a mini-series tho - for its time.

^ It's been a long time but I'd agree. Although for me it was perhaps more like ... 3/4 of the way through the map back and forth and the combat became such a slog I was completely mentally exhausted trying to finish it. I don't even remember exactly what was annoying me so much, party control/mechanics, design, the length, dunno. Before that point however, I had a ton of fun with the game. ============ NMS - still haven't finished the MQ. I looked it up in a vague way and I think I'm just a few steps from the end. Outside of the ability to go to new galaxies and start an Echoes expansion quest, with the rewards of the latter being nothing I'd care about, there's no motivation. May be getting a tad "bored"/need a longish break from it. Maybe I'll finally run through Ghostwire Tokyo for kicks, soon.

Fallout tv show is the only time ever where I think less input from the "creators" is better. It's already at a bad start since everything we see so far is very much Fallout 4 inspired. If they do Bethsoft quality writing, I probably won't even last the first episode.

A figurehewd, which was campaigning for Ukrainian genocide with her “academic research”. And as always, FSB had the case solved in two days, while they are still “searching” for the murderers of Nemcov. Yeah… as convincing as all the arguments about flatness of the Earth Well, you both got a point with the anti-corruption, but together with her, number of GRU officers have been poisoned as well. So this makes it much less probable theory. I think, the attack on president was expected by anyone, and everyone takes it as it is: A valid target of warfare. The same would be considered if they attacked Budanov directly. On the other hand, Poisoning the wife of most powerfull UA officer, is on par of trying to kill Putin’s or Shoigu’s children. What do you think would happen, if UA attempted something like that?

Finland, by the way, has now closed the entire border with Russia. It's not going to be interesting to see how things develop from here, because it's hard to believe that Russia would stop.

edge of tomorrow and the boys those would be total garbage if they follow the original

I've started in on Conan Exiles. Apparently the next updatw gives us the ability to build pubs, and then people will show up, and you can even recruit them. I guess that is a good option over the wheel of friendship.

It's higher level and more epic than Through the Ashes and even has its own alt-mythic system. It ties back into the main story and as you do more "adventures" the timeline moves along and you hear about what the commander is up to. The 2 major NPCs (gnome and tiefling) are back and they added a third, an android bard lady who immediately tells you she's not for romancing. They added some interesting mechanics and even the new puzzles aren't completely terrible. Difficulty is all over the place but if you've been playing these for a while then you probably already know how to easily game the system... though I'm a big proponent of just lowering the difficulty if you aren't having fun.

I beat the Lord of Nothing just a few minutes ago and I really enjoyed it. I was surprised that it wasn't super buggy, though not bug-free, and I could complete it with no major issues. I liked the almost mythic system they put in and think the 3 NPCs from this might be my favorite of the bunch. Curious to play through the main campaign to chapter 5 and see what they added. E: I don't like that you can't stack dragon bloodlines anymore. I can still easily delete things but I had a groove and they're making me switch up things, the bastards.

Putin decided to escalate to conflict to immeasurable levels, by allowing his lapdogs to poison wife of Ukrainian Head of Intelligence Budanov…

Pence told Jan. 6 special counsel harrowing details about 2020 aftermath, warnings to Trump: Sources But, the sources said, with the pressure on Pence mounting, he concluded on Christmas Eve -- just for a moment -- that he would follow Trump's suggestion and let someone else preside over the proceedings on Jan. 6, writing in his notes that doing otherwise would be "too hurtful to my friend." "Not feeling like I should attend electoral count," Pence wrote in his notes in late December. "Too many questions, too many doubts, too hurtful to my friend. Therefore I'm not going to participate in certification of election." Then, sitting across the table from his son, a Marine, while on vacation in Colorado, his son said to him, "Dad, you took the same oath I took" -- it was "an oath to support and defend the Constitution," Pence recalled to Smith's investigators, sources said. That's when Pence decided he would be at the Capitol on Jan. 6 after all, according to the sources. and so once again we see america relying on the marines to save democracy. HA! Good Fun!

Last Train Home has been released on GOG as well today: https://www.gog.com/en/news/release_last_train_home Czech made game, about Czecho-Slovak Legion trying to return home after WWI during the Soviet Revolution. Now even you can enjoy the Russkiy Mir first hand, without fear of being sent to Gulag! Best to be enjoyed with a cup of tea and open window, to fully absorb the atmosphere of the setting.

Promo sentence: NASA’s planned missions are one step closer to being fueled thanks to the Department of Energy’s shipment milestone of Plutonium-238.

Well, it's adult as well. In a way

am kinda ambivalent 'bout italian filmmakers. bicycle thieves and umberto d is two vittorio de sica films which has both, at one time or another, graced our list o' top fifteen films all-time. am having a bias against films about film, but am gonna be honest and admit we teared up the first time we saw cinema paradiso. am not a huge fan o' fellini, but am able to see how his influenced many filmmakers we do like. etc. on the other hand, korean film is a tough slog for us. we don't like b-horror but am admitting koreans has done such well. we finally saw parasite after all the hoopla died down-- meh. the premise required insurmountable suspension o' disbelief. in fact, is a few lauded korean films which require excessive voluntary density. example: viewing snowpiercer has us shedding neurons by the minute. is a bunch o' ok korean martial arts films which coverup flaws with more than a little "ultra-violence." just not a fan thus far. different strokes. HA! Good Fun!

Larian's D&D Game Act 2 (ending sequence)

I hope Geert starts a referendum on NeXit as soon as possible. People are sick of paying for climate change, immigration and ****hole countries.

https://www.eurogamer.net/new-tribes-game-seen-in-first-gameplay-footage Tribes 2 remastered is all I want.