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Call to Slumber is actually enchantment. But very good if a bit touchy on needing to be careful with the micro.

The whole reason why Balance Polishing Mod changed it to an effect that works per encounter (but stacks twice faster and costs twice less).

Holy Moly, that's a lot of cats, do you have to build a city to house all of them? ....oh, it's a currency.

Call to Slumber is a very good option for an Assassin/Wizard as an opening spell imo. It can buy the party a lot of preparation time at the start of combat.

Latest 7th blog is live from our @Pidesco

Good to know nobody will give a **** if we die just because we are old, lol.

Obsidian maths strikes again!

Means twice more than it would cost if it costed only a quarter.

Of course they do, but the coast is more relevant in most of fight for 1 Pull of Eora or 1 Confusion spell. I like Dimensional Shift as imprited spell (with Major Grimoire Imprint trick).

"costs twice less" - meaning it costs half?

Most of the transmutation spells are very impactful : Sliken, arduous delay of motion, Pull of Eora, Ninagauth's Bitter mooring (especially if you have a FF monk in the party), Arcane Dampener, Call to Slumber etc. Dimensional shift is pretty well too, but the coast of 1 ressource make the spell rarely used in my concern. However with a wizard who have access to transmutation, illusion and conjuration, you can have a lot of possibility.

yeah if you do this without save/reloading, the game will stop you at 20 stacks. however the game like... FORGETS what the current stack is and you start creating a new stack after some save/reload cycle. once again, i believe the game will stop you at 20 stacks with this NEW stack. but a save/reload will let you start creating a new stack. it actually ends up being extremely easy to stack this infinitely, just make sure you don't cap out at 20 stacks i think and the game loses track. i actually deliberately avoid doing this because of the combination of just how easy it is to pull this off and how degenerate it makes ranger and ranger multiclass.

Well, the water in the storm is from the ocean, so to be technically correct the ocean is playing 3d chess and doing a flanking move.

Finished Alan Wake 2 - by finished I mean my first playthrough. I thought ending scene was cut rather abruptly, and I hear one needs to complete New Game+ Called "Final Draft" to get the true ending. But considering how I enjoyed the game, and how much there is to digest I am looking forward to doing 2nd playthrough at some point. Brilliant sequel. I liked the idea of Alan Wake1 more than the actual game, and AW2 is a game I wished AW1 was. On top of that lovely ties to wider Remedy-verse, with direct links to Control, but also all of the other Remedy output. For a long time fan it is a treat - and more importantly it never felt to me like fan-service - I don't think I can name one reference that felt to be done just for reference sake. I was less impressed by AW2 first DLC pack - Night Springs. I mean, they are mostly non-sensical non-canon silly short stories, but they just did nothing for me. Non surprising as each story is very brief, and reuses pre-existing locations, but I just expected them to be a bit more weird and interesting. First two that is. I thought the 3rd one was pretty great and it is also one which might have actual story implications for Remedy-verse - though due to nature of the DLC pack it is difficult to parse what exactly we can take at face value. Time will tell I suppose.

Sure, Balance Polishing mod fixes it and I'm pretty sure Community Patch fixes it too.

Concelhaut is desperately missing from your list. He's probably sad to be have been left alone.

With Driving Flight + one of the weapons @Sympetrum mentioned (I believe Fire in the Hole is best because it has a build#in projectile jump as well) you can gain a lot of stacks pretty quickly. You just need more enemies to hit. But could be that Hand Mortar's Blinding Smoke also triggers stacks of Beast's Claw. I did some tests with this in the past and know that both weapons are good with this, I just cannot remember witch one performed better.

A blunderbuss or one of Serafen's mortars and a melee weapon. This trick works with any ranged weapon as long as you're also wielding a melee weapon, but blunderbusses and mortars are the best, I think.

It's a problem with save + reload. It also affects some other bonuses. Something alters the status of those buffs so that the stacking rules get sidelined.

Imo the best way to utilize the Essenial Phantom (until you get Caedebald's Blackbow like @SenSx said, that's an awesome combo) is to give it Concelhaut's Draining Touch as a single handed weapon or with Kapana Taga (reason for Kapana Taga see below). At the same time I let Aloth cast Miasma of Dull-Mindedness onto enemies who will get attacked by the phantom. Bonus points if you have somebody in the party who uses clubs + modal (for me it's often Edér with Shattered Vengeance or Kapana Taga). Club modal + Miasma results in -65(!) Will defense. Maybe Aloth follows up with a mass Confuse and somebody adds a Shaken/Frighten/Terrify effect (Xoti, Aloth) and some -10 defense to all (see Shining Beacon or Ben Fidel's Neck) and enemies' Will defense is at -95 without too much effort. Should you use some party member with maxed Survival and Ngati's Tusk (Hunter of Hunters enchantment) enemies' will is at -105. The reasons why this is a great combination (besides that fact that debuffing Will profits other party members as well) : Concelhaut's Draining Touch doesn't go away on a Phantom. It stays as long as the phantom will last. it targets Will instead of Deflection. Since Will is so easily debuffed the Phantom will land lots of crits as single weapon the phantom will get +12 ACC Draining Touch has very high base damage. It works very well with crits (likely overpenetration + crit damage bonus) It weakens the enemy (prevents proper healing and lowers max health as well as fortitude) Since it weakens on hit it works with the Helm of the White Void (+10 ACC, also works with the phantom) it drains health which makes the phantom a lot sturdier Now you can give Aloth items with +engagement (like Kapana Taga: +2 - or a small shield: +1) and terrify enemies with Aloth (Ryngrim's spells). The enemies will not only get their Will debuffed but also disengage constantly. If the phantom has engagement from items it will use disengagement attacks which have a big dmg bonus - which again works very well with the Draining Touch's high base damage. I usually also give the phantom boots of speed. That way it will close gaps to disengaged enemies very quickly again, re-engaging. It is a very potent setup rel. early in the game: a summon that is sturdy and deals tremendous damage while it also causes weakened. In addition one can wear items that trigger AoE damage on knockout or when damaged: White Witch Mask (Repulsive Visage when blooded), Effigy's Husk, Mantle of the Seven Bolts and such. They also work when the phantom gets killed (not if the duration is up and it simply vanishes though). And it the effects are limited to 1/rest it doesn't matter as long as Aloth doesn't use it up: the phantom will get a "fresh" copy of the item with 1 use/rest every time it gets summoned. You can also give Voidwheel to the phantom so it damages itself with every attack and eventually kills itself, triggering those effects deliberately. Or the Great Sword Effort: it does a Full Attack to all enemy bystanders if the phantom dies. Other nice things to do with the phantom: give it Essence Interrupter - the effect to summon a friendly creature after the enemy is dead also works with the phantom and its copy of the bow Willbreaker or Blade of the Endless Paths (or other weapon which put limited "stacks" of debuffs on enemies on hit) : Since you will have two weapons (1 original , 1 copy) you will put two separate stacks of debuffs on enemies. 2 Willbreaker for example will put 2 stacks of will debuff on enemies, lifting the max of -15 Will to 2*-15 Will = -30 Will. BotEP will be able to debiff deflection by -40 instead of -20 only and so on. Another candidate is Ball and Chain with the Action Speed debuff for example. Citzal's Spirit Lance high deflection gear (armor such as Nomad's Brigandine, bracers, cloak) and Whispers of the Endless Paths with Offensive Parry - phantom will daze enemies if they miss and deal some damage with parries Cast Salvation of Time on the phantom: it prolongs its summon duration The Red Hand - pretty awesome if its enchanted with Double Tab ang you're fighting against vessels I'm sure there's more cool stuff you can do with it. That's what I remembered from the top of my head.

First Frieren got its official announcement of a season 2 being in production, today my other favourite Anime got a season 2 announcement https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/latest/2024/10/5/gushing-over-magical-girls-tv-anime-season-2-announcement

Wing Commander movie, opening day in the theater. Checkmate!

I'm pretty confident that Boeroer + Maxquest + Thelee + Constantin Lévine (the master of the obscure cheese) + me put together beat Obsidian team. I don't even think the 5 of us would be required. Probably "pick 2" would be enough. I don't blame Obsidian though. It's not the same thing to do something as a job.

Why you leaving out Alpha Protocol? You love that game, do you remember that was one of the first discussion we ever had way back in 2010-2012 when I first played AP and you gave me advice

I always find this argument slightly peculiar, if indeed the only complaint is size. If someone is a reader of books or a player of games, it doesn't seem relevant to me to worry about length / size, if you're going to spend that time reading / playing anyway. If the books or the games are bad then by all means toss them aside, that's what I also do, but if not, where's the problem? Btw, I'm not sure about this but isn't BG2, for instance, bigger than Deadfire? I bring it up because you mention DD, so you're likely to have played that.

I watched Megalopolis (2024). Part 70s arthouse film, part 70s does the 30s film (like The Great Gatsby (1974) or Day of the Locust (1975); it swings for the fences and I wouldn't say always makes it, but it was a fun watch. Also rewatched Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001). I saw the shorter release in the theaters so hadn't seen the director's cut which I think makes some little things clearer. I also saw Wing Commander on opening day, watched the whole thing and have never played a Wing Commander game. They're not really colonists in the sense of people colonizing a frontier though; they're families brought into an existing mining colony on a labor contract who decide that they want to escape their world for a system not run by Weyland-Yutani. Its not even clear if they actually accepted the terms of the work contract or were born into it since all of the youths had parents who worked on work contracts for the company and our heroine, Rain, seems to have inherited her dad's debts. Its also unclear if any of them can actually satisfy the work contract since Rain's was extended arbitrarily by the company without explanation.

In my experience, Ninahaugth Killing Bolt does not summon a specter the first time you use it after loading your game. No idea why.

nope. so based on other people loading my save, it's pretty clear that the bad state persists in the save game. i think what's happening is that something bad gets cached or something, because my original game eventually went back to normal and i could cast twin stones (from scrolls this time) just fine. i think the bad spell state got pushed out of the game cache after a certain point. however, the moment i reloaded my bad save (yes i kept it), everything got screwed up again. even creating a new game doesn't fix it. and it's bad in my current game now. i tried re-naming gameglobalobjects.lvl crosssceneobjects.lvl to see if bad data gets stored there, but i think that entire path just gets clobbered upon fresh game load from desktop, it didn't end up making a difference (and my renamed files disappeared). either way, my game is back into a bad state again and I've exhausted my patience for debugging this for at least another few days. edit: i noticed an issue in my current run with ninagauth's killing bolt. it's supposed to spawn a spirit if you annihilate a non-spirit with it. i did, and i spawned a spectre. then later, and then again a few more times, i killed a non-spirit with it but got no spectre. possibly related issue? some game object is getting lost and a reference is becoming broken? hmm

so florida will be drown by storm before ocean can do the job much faster than expected