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You probably won't. I miss all of my dogs quite a lot, though as time goes on it feels less painful. Just do what you need to do man.

I disagree. Imo, the head would have been cut from the snake and the whole movement would have died in its tracks. Generally speaking, I dont support death by lead poisoning but Im willing to make an exception in this case. Vance wouldnt even exist without Trump.

This is the butterfly effect from canceling gun clubs in US schools in the 80-90's. We wouldnt be having this discussion if the bullet would have been 3 inches to the right. The nazi long game wins again.

And it looks like UA will not need the western long range weapons anymore in close future. They just hit missile ships in Caspian Sea (1500km away) which were launching missiles against UA cities. This also made at least one airport in similar range from UA, to stop operations. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/11/6/7483198/

Looks like Elerond’s gloom and doom has not fully fulfilled. Pro-European Maia Sandu has won presidentship again. Looking at it after yesterday, we live in a very strange world when ex-soviet satellites with strong pro Russian sentiment among population, are better at fight against the Russian influence operations than the USA and Germany

Wonder when the Democrats are going to work out that trotting out the Liz Cheneys of the world isn't going to get them votes and may actually cost them some- and definitely will cost them enthusiasm among those who should be voting for them. Yeah, never, since the leadership prefers ludicrous neocons to their own supporters. Or that not being Trump isn't really an actual strategy. At least the last one isn't likely to be in play in 2028. Still think Harris was a decent enough candidate hamstrung by bad party policy and strategy plus no one being willing to have the Difficult Conversation with Biden a year ago; though she's certainly done a lot worse than I expected. At least I'm not a professional pundit, a lot of them should be re examining their career choices, again. Another relevant TPM quote about Trump's Presidency

I'm not talking about Americans or even just Americans who voted for Trump, though. It's the same here in Europe. Or say, entirely randomly, in places like South Africa.

You son of a B, Im in. She supports UHC, UBI, UFH and UFE all of which are fundamental life necessities that Im owed by my birthright. At least IL went blue.

AOC 2028!

More games should have (human) characters with slumped shoulders or slouched backs or maybe bow-legged. I get tired of all the ram-rod perfect-posture like they have poles stuck up their

If Trump will win, I have lost my trust in all of you americans. /Edit: Did a quick google. I really can't understand this. wtf, americans are some of the dumbest people on the planet. If any american around here feels insulted now, yeah, you probably should be. This is just absolutely embarrassing for your country.

Bug Report #2 Random item drops tied to days of the month are still broken. Text in character creation and level up menus is nearly unreadable on small screens. There are options in the game to make the font larger, but it doesn't affect these menus. Text displays fine in the rest of the game. Not a bug, but still. This is about the Kickstarter Backer achievement, which is currently impossible to obtain legally. It may have made sense when the game first came out and you wanted to reward the players who backed you. However, instead of rewarding a thousand players, you're punishing hundreds of thousands of players whose only fault is that they started playing after 2015. Because of this, we can't add POE1 to the list or showcase of perfect games, for demonstration. And the funniest thing is that the only ones suffering are steam players, because 87% of players in the epic games store got the achievement. Is there any point in keeping this achievement when it's been 9.5 years since the game came out and the achievement itself doesn't work?

Thanks guys. We got him as a puppy. He was the runt of the litter and nobody wanted him, so he was all alone in the pet shop. My wife immediately fell in love with him (although, yeah, back then she was not my wife yet ). It was a gamble, because we didn't know how the cat would take to him. Pretty well, as it turns out, so a couple of months later we had a young Westie with all the fun mannerisms of his breed who was mostly socialized by a cat who adopted him. It made him borderline untrainable and no matter how hard we tried and added some cat mannerisms added into the mix. They're already a notoriously stubborn breed, and since the cat never once did what we told her to do, neither did he. He peed like the cat, and after he was done, he would take a step or two forward and start scratching the ground with his hind legs. You know, to cover it like the cat does in her litterbox. It was adorable. He eventually started to leave his marks here and there (even though we had him neutered, no idea where he picked that up, but he only ever did that outside) in the normal way male dogs do their business, but that was only for marking. Yeah, he did, tumors aside, he was in really good shape for his age. We only needed the vet a handful of times. The funniest one was when he was lying in a corner, whining and being miserable. That was a Sunday evening and we called the emergency vet hotline, brought him to the vet, the vet pressed a little on his abdomen to see what might be the cause for his discomfort, and then he farted loudly and everything was fine again. 300€ for flatulence. The other stuff were vaccinations and a minor injury from an ill-fated attempt at playing with another dog, and one time he ate dark chocolate that fell out of a bag. That one was a close call, but we noticed it early enough. Vet gave him something to throw up, and Simon then proceeded to take a giant dump right in the waiting area as a thank you. Like I said, he hated being at the vet. Heh. Yeah, can't imagine ever not missing him. He was a happy and super cute little dog who tried his best to be a cat. Speaking of the cat, she's been nervous for a while now. She used to play with the dog and they'd chase each other, and recently always went to check on him. She misses him and is constantly chasing my wife for attention at the moment. Back when they were both a lot younger, she'd sometimes jump on the table to steal some food and throw it down to him.

One of the German papers has a single word as their headline. It starts with F and ends in K.

Interesting! I have of course built Dragon Thrashed chanters - its the funnest build imo - but in full party run I tend to prefer Mith Fyr. Lashes are insane in this game, and a universal lash is just too juicy to pass up. I'll be sure to mention both strategies in the video. You make some interesting points about the ranger! I honestly didn't know about the damage scaling quirks for the pet. I'm just entering Defiance Bay on a run right now, so I'll slot Sagani into the party and see how I feel. Its been a while since I've used her.

Democrats didn't show up to vote.

What still surprises me is how so many people have an idea of Trump that does not track with reality in any way. Despite what he is being right there in everything he says and does openly and plainly.

I agree that Priests are special, best class in the game hands down. So lets talk about Ciphers next then. I agree that Ciphers are usually rated highly for reasons I think aren't solid. Splitting their action economy the way they do is a problem, especially when they never really become great weapon strikers, having to auto attack so much is a weakness, not a plus. That said, late game they are insane carries. Mindweb is on par with what Priests offer. They can reach unholy peaks for accuracy, which can turn into stunlocks on their auto's with the right weapons.. In mob fights, an Amplified Wave opener is a single cast, no brainer, resource free win button. Its hard to separate their value from that of the Priest, because the two synergize so well. But for my money Ciphers are stronger supports then Chanters at the point of the game where it matters most. Am I missing something? Rogue DPS is mediocre in PoE1. Druids out damage them, and have insane spells on top of that! Monks keep up and are also unkillable demons. Hell, even Fighter DPS gets overlooked in my opinion, and late game Triggered Immunity can make some run-ending fights a free win. If - IF - rogue's are good at anything, its late game when they can blink onto priority targets, land a few dual wield Saps to blow them up, then Feign Death to drop aggro. Its pretty good, but other classes can do comparable things and more. Talk to me about Ranger though. They are the class I am least experienced with, and you ranked them at Bread-n-Butter. What's the reasoning there? Great! Whatever you feel up to will be great! If you want to do 5 new builds like last time, I won't say no! But don't feel like you have to! I think fans of yours (like me) just like hearing you talk about the game, so we'd listen to whatever bone you're willing to throw us! As for time, just e-mail me when you're ready and we'll schedule something.

Biden should resign, let Kamala get the job for a while

Well, look at that. Gains over the 7800X3D look pretty good, but Steve's chart shows that AMD is doing an Intel here now that moving the cache around increased their thermal headroom. Gains in performance of the 9800X3D come from a pretty steep increase in power usage over the 7800X3D: On the flipside that doesn't look like there's a Zen 5 bottleneck. The increase in performance just comes from using more power on a similarily performing architecture. The CPU is, of course, still more efficient than Intel CPUs in gaming due to their much higher framerates at a still lower power budget. Again this is something that will never change for gaming until Intel - or any other competitor - can get a gaming focused CPU with equally large caches out there.

Well, the Democrats are now 0-2 running female candidates for Presidents. My conjecture is it will take a special female candidate to win the office for the first time (assuming there will be any future fair elections). To me, Harris lacks charisma and doesn't have a good speaking voice. I thought at the time that Biden made a non-optimal choice for VP, and now here's the consequence. As for the election whiner, well life is funny even when it's not. It was a "titanic" victory.

So as things roll on and the dust settles some thots: 1) Total voting looks on track to be more than 10 million less than four years ago. In some ways this feels very much like 2016 again, with two deeply unpopular candidates running and there not being much enthusiasm for the dems while gop is animated with cult adoration. Overall I think a read of this as a broad rejection of the Biden administration (and the continuation of it via Harris) is probably more correct than people generally becoming maga. 2) The momentum from Kamala replacing Biden completely evaporated in the face of the laughable centrism of dem strategists. Dems managed to alienate potential voters with wishy washy nothings on pretty much everything while all outreach to Republicans yielded jack ****. Again I think the dem strategy of taking progressive and minority voters for granted while they chase conservatives is a huge mistake and by God are we seeing that unfold. 3) Things are either going to go to **** or it's going to be a situation where a Trump bi/trifecta doesn't do anything because they only have concepts of a plan, if that. Maybe 50/50 split. Either way we'll probably see Dems really win in 2026. Assuming they don't **** it up by uncritically supporting a genocide or trying to beat Trump on the border. 4) While I don't think Trump goes away with Trump (assuming he does go away), I do think the reorientation of the GOP as a cult dedicated to him is going to collapse because he doesn't have a successor and doesn't care to appoint one. Will be a nasty fight to claim his mantle and even so won't really guarantee Trump level support, in many ways Trump is lightning in a bottle that probably won't be replicated by losers like Rhonda Sanctimonious or Rammyswammy or Lyin Ted.

They are not “Origin story” companions, as you can’t play as them. There are also two more potential companions to come . yes, there is a gulf of content between Origins and Joinable NPCs, especially H and M. According to what Larian said early on there was supposed to be far more Origins than the game shipped with. The suspicion is that they proved to work intensive and they padded out the roster with joinable NPC with lesser interactivity past recruitment. I don’t think it is a terrible idea, but stitches are a bit too visible me for my taste (at least in H’s case - when I played BG3 it was impossible to have Minthara and Halsin in the same playthrough).

I bet you it was Russian nazis that flipped WI to red. Or maybe it was @Bartimaeus

Nah, I expected this response. EU is not better at all. However, if something like this shifts in Germany, most of the world couldn't care less. Meanwhile the USA have a *huge* influence on the rest of the world. That's the big difference. Also the US have the biggest military power in the world, which means it's technically a danger to all of us. I don't want them to be a super nazi state. German military is a joke. If we go to war, half our soldiers will call in sick leave and the rest didn't even had basic training yet.

The shift key! Indeed! I'm fighting megabosses, so I guess the battles worth it You save my day Wow, like new year day eve and christmas lights on the battlefield And you can put on top others priest buff plus chanter aura and so on!

Bug Report #2.1 (because I can't add to the old message) The His Old Self quest is a bit glitchy. If you find the real Purnisc, go down to Nyrid and agree to kill Purisk, you can return to Kaenra and turn in the quest. She will give you her reward, and Purnisc will disappear. You can tell Nyrid that you killed Purnisc and he will give you a discount. This way you will get both rewards. There are two prisoner rescue missions in Heritage Hill - Safe Haven and Undying Heritage. In both missions you can choose where to send your people. I sent Saeda to the gate and Icantha's prisoners to the tower. The problem is that I'm playing in pacifist mode and haven't killed a single zombie in the entire location. There are hordes of undead in front of both buildings and the people I sent just teleport through them.

Probably. I don't pay too much attention to what the book is they're flicking through.

One thing that people don't talk yet is that Harris can still declare herself as president in January 6

I that really true though? Considering how elected officials selected who can vote.

It's officially over, Pennsylvania has been called for Trump. We probably won't know who won the House for at least a few days or maybe more, depending on how close some of the races get.

I think the most likely thing to happen if Trump wins, which I've said I've felt is likely to happen for months now, is that he does indeed go back to tweeting and doing rallies because that's just who he is. At the end of the day Trump doesn't believe in anything but Trump having a fun time, the worst things the Trump White House did the first go around were things that Republican think tanks had been cooking for decades in their dark money hell pits rather than something Trump himself thought of. The problem is that he's going to let an even more noxious gang of ghouls run things for him while he parades around for the next four years, and you can bet your ass they're going to **** things up.

She seems to be, but didn't work here. Who knows, maybe it was something as stupid as not going on Rogan, the public is amazing some times.

Let's be honest, if my character choices were a man who looks like me, or a stupid sexy himbo, I'd pick the later always.

Thanks for taking the time to help! You opinions are valued as always. BTW, I've been meaning to write, I'm open to doing another Top 5 Funnest Builds interviews but for PoE1. Let me know if you are interested! I expect the difference between our opinion has to do with rest restrictions. In resting games like this, I always assume a squad that can reliably clear an encounter by spending less finite resources is better then one that spends more for the same clear. I track this by tallying rests and try to reduce the amount of rests needed in each run. Priests are on a tier of their own when you can spam their spells. Druids excel by having a higher baseline impact when not using spells, which allows you to horde spells and go nova in key battles. What do you think of that kind of reasoning?

yeah the +1 AR from stalker is really good. i've done the same (with bear). but also with antelope (extra AC on top of higher AC). honestly i am not terribly scared of fort and will attacks, at least early on. better deflection and really good reflex (getting caught by drake breaths, man) do sound better to me than mostly irrelevant-in-early-game AR. i'll admit i've never done boar, but that regen seems too slow to be that good.

About 35 hours in, felt like writing something. Not sure how long this game is, seems like there's still lots more Overall impression is "kinda ok". Probably wouldn't play this if I wasn't interested in the DA world. Story setup felt interesting, like I said before, but after that it's felt a bit meh. Some of the factions in the game world have been changed, and IMO in a boring way. Can't avoid change, I guess, but the Qunari just feel like basic baddies now and the Crows like a vigilante group. Apparently this mostly relies on stories from non-game DA products, but doesn't save them from being boring choices. Main baddies are boring, hoping they'll shape up by the end. Most of the NPCs are either immediately on your side, or your enemies, without too much in between. Dialogue is the usual Bioware fare of quipping and one-liners. The main difference is there's no massive interrogation trees with important characters anymore, most of dialogue is either in party banter or in specific quests for them. Lots of just text stuff around to flesh out things, like in most RPGs. Exploration is quite parkoury and 3D. There's always things to fiddle with, or loot to get. It's quite smooth overall, but you can spend 30mins trying to reach a chest without figuring it out. But it does feel meaningful, in that what you find ties into the rest of the game fine. Combat grew on me a bit. At the start it felt like I was just dodging 90% of the time, but it feels quite smooth now. I don't play that many games with actiony combat like this, so not sure how other games do it. I'd still prefer the more party based approach of older DA games.

Stalker 2 is two weeks away. I want it to be awesome.

I heard Hurls-h/n-o(r)t played DA: Origins a couple of months ago, and was surprised how well the graphics have held up. (People who have played Champions Online will also know that they have to shut down all those beacons. They emit a high frequency signal that drives the Qular crazy).

Hey, maybe Bioware's execs let EA's execs write Veilguard out of gratitude, judging by general opinion on its story Anyway. All this talk of DA made me reinstall Origins, which I don't think I need to spend more time with, since it's one of very few games I collected 100% cheevos for, but here I am. I love how things make sense in it. It's also less brown than I remember it.

There was also 'never any mandate' to use Frostbite for Andromeda or for DA2 to have such a short development cycle. And Bioware did exactly what it wanted with Anthem too! (Funny thing being that just makes both sets of execs dumb; the Bioware ones for consistently making bad decisions, the EA ones for not intervening in the bad decision making. At least EA execs imposing the bad decisions could have the Bioware ones being competent but overruled)

Imho Dragon Age allowed for a great first play through of Origins. Very enjoyable and fun and some good moments. But BioWare did not have a good further Dragon Age game in them. The setting may have had more potential , but BioWare was not the company to explore it. 2 was simply bad. The experimentation in chapters years apart not working well, causing the player to stand still while the game moved on. The spawning of enemies was silly. The evil high Templar was comical in how bad she was written. Inquisition was a single player MMO with all the bad of an MMO without the potential benefit of sharing fun with strangers. And as in so many BioWare Games, in both 2 and Inquisition there was the disconnect with what your character should say, what you thought your character would say, and the soppy cringe they did say. They should have left it at origins and made that StarWars MMO a series of single player titles, one for each class in each faction. They would have made a dozen great games instead of a couple bad single player ones and a mediocre mmo.

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-north-korea-deserters-meat-assault-1972200 NK soldiers in Kursk are already deserting and they not even in the Russian meatgrinder yet

It only works when the target actively "walks" (pushing/pulling and stuff like moving via Escape won't trigger the DoT). So it does indeed nothing if the target doesn't move normally. If it does walk/run it's pretty hefty dmg though. Extremely good against slow but hard to crack enemies like Iron-/Steelclads etc. It's even more devastating if you use it with any kind of AoE weapon (Whispers of the Endless Paths, Hand Mortar, Fire in the Hole, Citzal's Spirit Lance, Kalakoth's Minor Blights, Rods + Blast modal...) Debilitating Strike stops being useful once you get the Persistent Distraction passive which unlocks Deathblows by mere engagement. That needs a melee weapon though (else no engagement). So as a melee Rogue I'd always prefer Arterial Strike + Persistent Distraction over Debilitating Strike. Arterial Strike stacks with Gouging Strike and alse Ring the Bell and Toxic Strike. If you combine some of those on one target its AR won't matter - its health will melt away very quickly. And most of those guys do move. The only case where I'd may pick Debilitating Strike over Arterial Strike would be a ranged Rogue who doesn't use Hand Mortar - in order to unlock Deatblows. But on the other hand I can also unlock Deathblows with Blinding Strike - so it may be that I won't take Deb. Strike even then. Another alternative is to simply not upgrade Crippling Strike. If you feel Arterial Strike isn't worth it and Deb. Strike neither - then spare the ability point. Crippling Strike scales with Power Level just fine - and from a direct-dmg-perspective both upgrades won't add any direct damage.

Kissinger lived until 100. Wouldn't surprise me if Trump just doesn't die either.

Its because we dont have UFE.

War and military is extremely unpopular in Germany. I'm pretty sure whatever party will re-introduce the military draft is going to lose the next election. Currently we are pretty much using our anti-war sentiment to just do the same as always-- absolutely nothing. The only ones winning are the people invested in the arms trade, that's the only thing we're stocking up in.

"During early development of The Veilguard, BioWare experimented with multiplayer once again, however, Epler insists that there was never a mandate from parent company Electronic Arts to implement any specific online or live-service modes; the devs were just exploring different ways to tell the story." Reeeeaallly?