Leaderboard

I didn't mention it earlier because nobody wants to hear a "MY PET IS ALSO DYING" story right after someone else told their own story, but since it seems like your dog is no longer exactly quite at death's door, now seems to be the time. My calico cat is about eighteen years old, and in June she stopped regularly eating for about a week and started hiding in weird spots and didn't want to come out. Took her into the vet, bladder infection, needs antibiotics and IV fluids...she went about another two and a half weeks without eating at all, lost half her body weight, looked absolutely deathly, no kind of food (cat or human...tried whole salmon!) seemed to interest her - even some expensive appetite medication didn't help. Any time she'd even try a lick of food, she'd start gagging and run away...one night, her entire body froze up on her as she was walking past me and she literally collapsed directly on my feet and couldn't get back up for a while, one of the saddest and most pitiable things I've ever experienced in my whole life, thought maybe she had a stroke or seizure. Heavily considered putting her down because it seemed pretty certain that she was going to die. All of a sudden, one morning she just started eating again, and now she's more active and adventurous than she had been in like the entire previous year, going on for a few months now. Still skin and bones, it's very difficult for old cats to regain lost body mass because they don't absorb nutrients well, but she seems to have a new handle on life ever since her near-death experience. Anyways, I don't know how much longer she has, pretty sure she won't survive another bladder infection like that at this stage of her life, so... Hug and appreciate your pets (and family members, as applicable) while you have them, you never know when they might suddenly leave you. Glad to hear you still have at least a little more time with yours too, majestic.

Update on the situation with the little bugger that is our dog. Indeed, is. Because, get this, while he was in a torpor on Sunday when I posted, refusing to eat and being lethargic and all, on Monday he was unable to even get up and move, so we put a water bowl right next to him. He'd wake up every now and then, drink a little, and would fall back asleep. We already called the vet, because it was clear that he was suffering, and we all expected him to die, so why not put him out of his misery? Yesterday morning he just got up from the mattress we put him on and walked to his water bowl, drank, then walked around, growled at us as usual because he wanted to be put back on the mattress. He ate a bunch of treats like nothing happened, although he still doesn't wolf down his regular food like he used to. When my wife's sister came to visit he went and greeted her. Not as energetically as he used to, but still, he basically moved more than in the past few days combined. He's also sleeping soundly, with his usual relaxed expression, instead of sleeping fitfully. We put a wet towel on him to help him cool down as it's been ghastly hot these past few weeks, almost never cooling down for more than a couple of hours, with annoyingly hot nights. So, yeah, no idea what is going on, but it doesn't look like the acute organ failure through metastasis that we expected it to be, because if so he would not have improved and probably died by now. We honestly thought the tumors had progressed to the point of organ failure. We're still going to lose him soon - I mean the tumor is not going anywhere, obviously, but perhaps not right now. Or even if he ends up dying really soon, at least he seems to be content instead of suffering. Which is more than we thought he would get.

It sure looks like it. I don't trust the development yet, but this is him, outside, today. On Monday he tried to get up and fell down a couple of times, and looked so miserable we wanted to have him put down to spare him needless suffering. He's still old, has poor vision and pretty poor hearing (or else pretends not to hear any orders ), but he looks fine and happy. Talked to a couple of other pet owners and they sometimes experiences similar things with old pets, cats and dogs. Refusing to eat for a couple of days, shutting down, being weak and then suddenly get better as if nothing happened. Not as extreme as your story about your cat though, of course, but that was from a serious infection. Almost all of them ended with the pets being active normally and then one day just painlessly dying after going to sleep normally. Seems somewhat unlikely that we will get to experience that, what with his cancer, but fingers crossed. You might, so that's good. The experience certainly sounds a lot worse than what we went through, and it was pretty bad on Sunday and Monday. Must have been terrible. I even took some time off work because I couldn't get anything done properly.

Been a while, but haven't really played much worth reporting on, so quick summary of the past few months. Final Fantasy XIV new expansion was released. And well..."Meh." is the nicest thing I can say about Dawntrail. Reached Legendary Rank 3 in Warframe by playing on and off for a decade. The previous quest ("Jade Shadows") was...interesting, given its themes. Can't say I've ever seen a warning stating "This quest contains scenes of trauma related to motherhood" before. New major plot development (Warframe 1999) looks more interesting than I was expecting. Got dragged into some time in The First Descendant. It's a Nexon game with ideas stolen from Warframe and Destiny without understanding how, and why, they work in those other games. Maybe it's an improvement given how Destiny is doing (haven't touched since before they started deleting content, so...hearsay), but I'd just recommend playing Warframe instead of TFD. Back to more positive news, I've been playing quite a bit of Warhammer 40.000: Darktide and have been enjoying it immensely. As far as I'm concerned the main thing keeping me from outright recommending it to Left4Dead/Vermintide enjoyers (note, haven't played a lot of VT2, so dunno how it compares there) would be the multiple layers of RNG in the "crafting" system, which should (finally) be getting reworked end of September. Combat is tight, atmosphere is absolutely great (the music... ), and I do greatly enjoy the banter between the different characters. Also another attempt at finishing Mass Effect: Andromeda. Game starts of pretty strong and then just falls flat on its (supposedly, tired) face. I'm at the point where I gotta deal with the "exiles" and I really can't be made to care about that "faction" at all. Oh well, trying to power through.

The superior format, so I completely get your dream self.

I have defeated Ancient Dragon and Vendrick today. Ancient dragon was interesting. I have postponed to go and fight against him for a very long time, as he was definitely the hardest boss for me in Vanilla game. I spent more than 150 attempts in total in all encounters with him O.o To my surprise, I have defeated him today on my first try O.o I still can't believe it. TBH I have to say, the Fire Resistance items from DLCs definitely helped me to survive his dragon breath. Vendrick on the other had, I have thought, would be easier form these two. But of course I got few time completely destroyed, before I have relearned his moves and attacks. Then, on my 4th or 5th try, I have defeated him without being hit 😄 The funniest thing about it was, that the previous attempt, I was not able even to touch him, as he destroyed me in less than 5 seconds after entering the fog gate, as I have forgotten, that his attacks drain like whole stamina when blocking, and I was stunned with his first attack, and then promptly finished with two more swings 😄 Next in line, before entering the NG+, just a little bit of grinding for missing items.

My dreams have hit a low point, was trying to take some 16:10 monitors some company was throwing out as they went out of business. But the janitor beat me to it.

Harebrained Schemes are working on Survival Horror RPG. On their FB Page few days ago, they have also mentioned, that they were not able to secure Shadowrun, nor Battletech licences for the foreseeable future.

Would someone named Eldar really pretend to be a Mon'Keigh?

I feel vindicated.

That is what I meant in my earlier comment. I definitely could have been clearer in my wording though. There is a difference between the Injuries that are added to crew during ship events and those incurred in normal combat. From what I can tell crew weren't meant to be able to sustain combat injuries. Pretty much the problem stems from direct boarding action coming as a late addition to the game. Why crew members can sustain injuries through that is anyone's guess. I've been trying make a mod that'll fix this issue. But I've not made any headway thus far. There is a work around I found though that should hopefully prevent it. After a successful boarding action: Make a save. Load the save. This seems to clear any combat Injuries the crew sustain during boarding. Unfortunately this can't bring back crew that were outright killed during the boarding actions. Not that I know of, your best bet is to try to find replacements at other ports. 😬

I think I will go for : - Instant melee attack on any kills from the Fighter. At leats it would avoid having your kill stolen by your own DoT. On Kill effect are already a bit luck-sensitive, so avoiding this restriction would help a lot. Quite some MC potential, albeit not as much as Blood Thirst. - +10% Melee Weapon Crit damages per threatened target (count threatened targets as Mob Stance). (restriction to mele weapon because damages bonuses are more beneficial to spell and this is a melee stance after all). Crit damages are quite useful versus trash foe mobs, so I guess it would fit. This would still be inferior to uber versatile Warrior/Conquerer stances vs single target (and crit damages aren't very reliable), probably around equal vs 2 targets until the extra attack happen (if it does). The current description is wrong anyway as it is.

Back at the end of May Wolcen Studios announced that come September, they will shut down the multiplayer functionality for Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, citing unsolvable issues with their current technology and codebase as a reason that they cannot keep supporting the game. That, and probably also because they never added any microtransactions to the game, meaning there never really was a steady stream of income from the multiplayer part, and the game costs 25€ on Steam. They have extended that deadline to September 17th now. Dawn's Healing is an achievement yout get for reviving a fallen party member. They're actually still working on finding a replacement for the achievement so players can complete them all even when multiplayer no longer exists. I'm pretty sure they're honest about the reasons for the shutdown being more a technical quagmire than a financial one. First of all Wolcen Studios is a tiny developer, small enough to be called an indie studio, and they financed the development through Kickstarter. I backed the game at a tier that allowed me to play the early versions, which were incredibly different from the final product (also used to be called Umbra, not Wolcen). The game used to have this enormous open world to run around in, just without much content, and the final release version had much smaller corridor-style levels, more akin to what Diablo 2 did in its third act. Still, those early versions had a fun charm to them that was lost with the more professional official release. Right at the end of the tutorial area before accessing the open world in the alpha builds you found a spell that shoots lightning, called "Unlimited Power" - it was just hilarious. Anyway, what I want to say is that from that development alone it seems like they ran into issues with their intended game design and changed it. It also took them so long to develop that the neat ideas they had for the then somewhat lacking ARGP genre were just, you know, not that novel any more when it finally came out. it is also a game that I think really shows the pitfalls of Kickstarted campaigns taking off and being more successful than initially planned. They raised double the amount of money they wanted for their original vision, and, just like the Pillars of Eternity campaign, they scrambled to come up with stretch goals, one of them being the multiplayer part. I am convinced that it was that stretch goal that ultimately killed the open world aspect of the game they promised. So what they eventually released was a decent ARPG for a small studio, with some fun mechanics and okay gameplay. I should probably replay the game now that the final story elements are out. I played it for a while, but the final chapter of the campaign released sometime afterwards.

You should ask Eldar, do you really think it is a coincidence that he resurfaced and even wrote a blog post right after Gromnir disappeared?

I wonder if there's a minimal interval between ticks of DoT? I'm playing a party with many summons + Spark the Souls of the Righteous. I tried to add the nerfed Combusting Wounds on top, I can't tell if CW ticks with every Spark, or can't keep up with the speed, only triggering once or twice whenever it's hit with 10+ Sparks. But either way I think currently CW is not broken anymore, theoretically it's 1/6 (or 1/7.2 ?) as powerful as before when abused.

There are two main things that more often than not put me off when it comes to American cartoons. I mean I know you already know that, but it bears repeating in case someone else reads these posts too. These are their art style and their unwillingness to engage the target audience at eye level, instead often treating them like blathering idiots. That is not to say that I did not enjoy some when I was a kid. I watched, like any other kid my age, I suspect, the Tom and Jerry short films, The Flintstones and Looney Tunes, The Real Ghostbusters, and so on. The one thing most of these have in common is that they are pretty old. I did not try to rewatch most of them after the fiasco of getting the Galaxy Rangers boxed set - and that was a show animated in Japan. My nephew also watched The Real Ghostbusters on Netflix for a while so I caught the occasional episode, and that was also disappointing. That series was not nearly as entertaining as it was when I was like seven or eight when it first aired. I guess I can be as unfair or unwilling to meet things half way when I am put off by the art style, which is a huge drawback for many cartoons I could imagine would otherwise be quite interesting to me. King of the Hill being one such example. It is also possible that the smaller selection of available animated series on TV back in the 80ies and early 90ies colored my perception too much. I outright hated series like Animaniacs or Beetlejuice. Ugh.

Update (spoiler alert) I sailed to that area today. At first, my ship flew my original flag and passed by the target ship with no conflict occurred. The target ship sailed away slowly and leisurely like they cared nothing about me. But after I put up a flag of the Vailian Trading Company and approached them again from behind, they suddenly turned towards me and sailed to me in a noticeably faster speed. And then the battle began. So that proved they were the one causing troubles to the Vailian Trading Company's survey ships. By the way, after defeating the target, if you haven't taken the quest and returned to the bounty hunter fixer, you would see the original dialog option for taking the quest and the second one for directly notifying her of the completion, as the attached figure shows. In that case, you would only get money and no exp if you choose the second dialog option. You need to choose the first dialog option first in order to get both money and exp. Last but not least, I would like to give the devs a thumb up on this detailed design of NPC having different reactions based on what flag you fly on your ship. 👍

Breaking News: Private Airshow hosted just for one Obsidian Community Forum Moderator. Are gaming communities secretly running the world? Read all about it here!

Then you'll wake up missing organs.

It seems the lady texting me may actually be a real person. We may have lunch together next month...

One other piece of advice: save once you have created your character and just give yourself enough skill points to pass every check in the game. It's but one little action, but it will have tremendous impact on your enjoyment of the game. It is just not worth interacting with the skill system. Do not think of it as cheating, but merely removing a needlessly time consuming and frustrating part of the game.

Oldies but goodies... 😎

Did a great job. I find her to be one of the most engaging companions. Now Xoti on the other hand...*we need to break up*

Yes. In the same presentation.

James Darren actor, singer (Gidget, Star Trek, The Time Tunnel, T. J. Hooker)

Looks like we're in for a rather rough couple of days or weeks, perhaps. Our dog's grown really old (14 now) and he's been diagnosed with lymphoma four months ago. We refused chemotherapy as it provides no chance at healing and really, he's already two years over the average life span of his breed. He's grown somewhat more lethargic than usual (he's really old, after all) recently and now refuses to eat, which is what the vet said would indicate that the tumors progressed to a point where they will become lethal. Might lose a treasured family member really, really soon. Dammit.