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Sounds like Tactician/Cipher. If you plan to cast a lot of Deception spells as CC I would recommend a Beguiler instead of Ascendant or Soulblade. Since you plan to become Brilliant anyway you don't really need Ascension. Soulblade is nice in combo with Tactician (can spam Soul Annihilation), but not so nice if you want low Might and want to cast CC and buffs. Beguiler gets focus from casting Deception spells. If the spell is cheap and can hit several enemies at once (Phantom Foes, Secret Horrors) you can gain (a lot) more focus than you spend. And sicne you want to cast Phantom Foes a lot anyways... You don't have to afflict the enemies before: the Phantom Foe spell itself already unlocks the focus gain: first the flanked affliction is added and THEN the game checks if the enemies are afflicted and you should get the focus refund. Little weird, but good for the Beguiler. But Ascendant would also be okay. You can check out the mechanics of Unbending in this post: It doesn't scale with MIG because the height of the healing tick is directly derived from the damage you received. It's the same with draining weapons, where the amount of healing is based on the damage you do and also not influenced by MIG. Keeping MIG at 10 is okay, but dumping it (below 10) is a rel. bad idea because this would mean a multiplicative malus for both damage dealt and healing done (see Constant Recovery, Second Wind/Athletics, Pain Block etc.). In general you want to avoid damage and healing maluses, because their impact is too big for the few points you spare. But as I said: 10 (no bonus, no malus) is okay. Unfortunately going from 3% to 0% bonus isn't that same degration as going from 0% to -3%. Your Resolve should only be super high if you want very high deflection and will defenses - and if you want to shorten hostile effects' duration (on you). That's most often the case if you are a tank. If you don't plan to tank a lot you don't need a lot of Resolve. If you do it's a good idea to raise it (and also use deflection gear such as a shield, bracers/cloak/ring/armor with deflection bonuses etc.). On the other hand: if you plan to become basically immortal from Unbending you don't need high deflection anymore. I guess I'd go mediocre so that it's not too bad before Unbending but also isn't "wasted" too much after Unbending becomes accessible. A caster in general profits a lot from high DEX. Good ection economy and reactivity is important for a "smooth" feeling when casting spells. The longer your casts need the higher the chance that you'll get interrupted, especially when going solo. Fighter/Cipher can achieve nice accuracy via abilities, so maxing PER isn't necessary. I would still keep it at >15, esp. solo. Else it could be annoying to not be able to find all traps and secrets. Discovery of those is governed by your final PER value. Instead of Squid's Grap you can also use Kapana Taga (club) or Gipon Prudensco (padded armor).

Awesome! I really don't know why some mechanics - such as keywords - are obscured in the first place. Deadfire is way better than PoE in that regard, but still not great.

I would say that 'biological female' is not a remotely useful term, and frequently it is not used for clarity, (because that is not what it provides) it is used with the intent to hurt and deny the identity of trans women. Because frequently it is used in conjunction with calling a trans woman a 'biological male'. To demonstrate why I don't think 'biological female' is a particularly useful term, in this or any context, I'm going to talk briefly about Mack Beggs. Mack was the subject of an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary entitled Mack Wrestles. He was a collegiate wrestler, and in 2017 he beat Chelsea Sanchez to win the Texas Girls' 110 lb championship. If you're wondering why Mack, a person I've just used the pronoun 'he' for, was wrestling against a girl in a girls' championship, it's because Texas athletic rules at the time had a rule that you must compete in the league for the sex assigned at birth. Mack is a trans man, or as someone might ignorantly say, a 'biological female'. But, crucially, Mack is obviously not who people like the author of that crappy article are talking about when they refer to 'biological females'. Now they could say 'biological females who haven't transitioned to men', but guess what, there's already a term for that, and that term is 'cis woman'. So no, Bruce, I would say to anyone wanting to use the term 'biological females' to refer to women who are not trans, do not do this, say 'cis women'. You will be achieving a better level of clarity and as a bonus, not making trans women feel trash by the comparison. Of course a big problem with using 'capable of having children' as the definition is that many are not. Not after menopause. Not if you're sterile. Not, for many, if you've had certain conditions like endometriosis. Some people prefer definition relating to numbers of X and Y chromosomes, with the issue being that some people may instead be born with XXY, or XO, or have the usual expected chromosomes but not have the sexual characteristics to match. And for most people you or I interact with, their number or type of chromosomes or what sexual organs they have will never be any of our business. In my day to day life, in the ways I interact with someone, what someone is 'biologically' is as meaningless as it is hard to pin down. Socially, in terms of how I relate to people, I'm gonna find terms like 'man', 'woman' or 'non-binary' with adjectives like 'cis' or 'trans' if further clarification is needed, infinitely more useful. As it relates to sport, however: Sport isn't fair. Some people are taller. They have an unfair advantage over me in a bunch of sports like basketball or volleyball where height matters, and no amount of training will make that not true. Michael Phelps has an abnormally large lung capacity. I'm not averse to requiring a certain testosterone level at certain levels of competitive sport, but in the overwhelming majority of cases my stance is: let women play sport with women, let men play sport with men, stop proposing dumb stuff like a whole separate league for the three trans people in the state.

Ok, I spent my first hour trying settings on the Indy game etc. Here is my very early performance take, with only the mandatory global illumination/not full ray tracing: (2080ti/9900k/32systemram) EDIT: oh, for whatever reason, despite seeing posts to the contrary, I had zero shader compilation etc steps. It just fired up/went to menu. Maybe it just did it super fast in my case. Or maybe because I don't allow Steam itself to do any caching (steam setting unchecked) - I let the gpu do it. ---the "texture pool size" is the main vram controller. If you have an 8gb vram gpu, I'm going to guess that one would need/want that on "Low". ---Since I have 11vram, the game likes to use about 8-8.5vram of it with texture pool at Low, mostly medium settings, DLSS-quality. If I up texture pool to Medium, all other settings the same, that goes up to 9-9.5. I do not know if this will increase later/other areas in the game. If I put it to High, 10+gb and game wanted to warn me I was being stupid. ---the settings I'm using, if one is interested: (4k/55" TV being used) in this image Motion Blur is totally off, btw, there's two separate setting lines for it. >.> ---altering resolution (I tried native and dlss 1440 as well as 4k) did little re: vram usage, mostly only FPS. Maybe 1gb less vram. Upping certain other settings (shadows, reflections, global illumination etc) will affect vram used a fair bit taken together, so the lower the texture pool size, the higher you can put those types of settings. ---fps for me at dlss-4k is the usual "mostly 60 but I'm sure areas/moments will drop to 50". I did try native 4k, that dropped fps by 10 or so, average. ---fps at 1440 with the same settings in the linked image gained me maybe 15-25fps (depending if dlss on or off) but vram usage remained close to same. To be honest, the difference between "low" and "medium" texture pool size, visually, wasn't all that noticeable. I suppose some tree leaves looked slightly less crisp. So for those of us that don't have 16-24 VRAM, may as well leave that one at "low" - it's not going to look super better at Medium. High did start to look sharper/cleaner, a little. That said, it still looks good/fine, imo. Faces and rocks don't get low-res fuzzy or anything.

Long photo heavy post! Cone to go?

You mean Ancestor's Memory? It will cost focus to cast it on party members, sure - but you can always get new focus from stuff like Phantom Foes and being Brilliant (Tactician) yourself. As long as there are several enemies Phantom Foes (and also Secret Horrors) is a great way to flank/afflict enemies and generate quite a nice amount of focus (if there are enough enemies left). And on top you can gain a good amount of focus with Clear Out, Kitchen Stove's Thunderous Report and all other sorts of weapon attacks, too. The good thing of the Beguiler's way to get additional focus is that it's not dependent on weapon damage at all - with lowish MIG that's an advantage imo.

You also boot into your operating system of choice within five seconds of pressing the power button on your computer (unless your system spends a lot of time POSTing). PCIE 4.0 NVME SSDs are noticably better than PCIE 3.0 ones, while PCIE 5.0 ones have pretty steep cooling requirements and offer no real improvement over 4.0 ones in everyday use due to having similar performance for random reads and writes.

It got me <1s loading times in Skyfield and solved all my audio lag issues. Also helped with DirectStorage of Forspoken

I tested it now since it's only 1€ for first 14 days. But oh boy, that download speed is atrocious... I'm at 17% now and downloading for 1 hour already. /Edit: You have to do this to fix the download speed: https://www.esportstales.com/tech-tips/how-to-fix-xbox-app-slow-download-speed-pc-game-pass

Well **** dude. You went above and beyond here. Thanks

you download the games which is lamest for me. I had gift code for subscription and I hated that I had to download 100+ gigs game on my sistem in order to play it for just a week

IIRC these show up far later into the game, but I think the idea was to eventually get to the Club, yes. So, I'll go Might 8 with the Berath's that gives +2 Max Intellect Perception 13 (15) Dexterity Max? 8 Constitution? Rest Res? Sounds smart? Beguiler sounds like it will work well, true. But what about the Brilliant buff? Won't that suck up all my Focus?

Assad has become Russia’s puppet the day, they bombarded first hospital. This led to displacement of more than 12 million people while killing another million. All with the blessing of Kremlin, as destabilization of Europe woth refugees to allow rise of pro-Kremlin far right in Europe, was Putin’s plan since day 1

Tens of thousands of refugees are already on their way home from Turkey and Lebanon. This will lead definitely to more stable situation in Lebanon as well, as there have been allegedly more than 1.5 million of them sheltered from Assad regime. Seems like even ex-Alqaeda and ex-ISIS guys are for them considered a better option than Russia was

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-syria-rebels-stars-aligned-assads-ouster-2024-12-08/ So the first picture in the article features a guy with an ISIS flag and yet there's no mention of ISIS in the article at all? Huh, that's a little weird.

No I meant in general that people shouldn't do that, I didn't mean you specifically

ROFL I wrote "ection economy"

I dunno, for the lowest "texture pool size," medium-ish settings and no full ray/path tracing, I think it looks pretty good. And ofc, it looks a lot better on-screen vs. screenshot. *shrug* Outside of enforced RT global illumination req, the game seems well optimized re: looks vs. performance, actually. A lot of world details for those that like such things, too. The face and body animations (clothes, running, expressions) are sometimes off, but eh, still fine.

Cool. Guess I will try it then. In other news, itch.io is currently down: https://bsky.app/profile/itch.io/post/3lcu6h465bs2n

I never noticed you raise the obvious failed state of Syria under Assad when it was a staunch Russian and Iranian ally? And these government failures were a contributing factor around the predicted overthrow of Assad But now you dont have much faith in the future of the country? Interesting what motivates you to be "concerned "

Oh yeah, how we could forget Taliban, who is despised by their own people being business partner to Russia after they knocked out USA: Good. Possible HTS, who has been welcomed by their own people, and who for now promised to not exectute revenge on the rest of the Assad supporters, showing interest to talk with the West after they kicked out Russia: BAD!!!

Hi, I think it's always wrong dumping MIG anytime: you have to damage and heal (drink potions and so on) so never never low MIG. And I believe Ascendant ability gain so much from MIG. RES can stay mid/low, but in a party you can raise it, if you want go "heavy" as a tank. PER always HIGH/MAX in solo, in a party you can stay HIGH, no way below 13/14, game become less fun otherwise imho. So i'd make somenthing like: MIG mid/hig CON mid DEX mid + remaining from the rest if you have PER high INT max RES low/mid.

The details of 400k casualties (not KIA) from Zelenskyi’s speech. “Zelensky: Since the start of the full-scale war, Ukraine has lost 43,000 soldiers killed in battle and provided assistance to 370,000 wounded. Around 50% of wounded soldiers return to duty. Russian casualties exceed 750,000, including 198,000 killed and over 550,000 wounded.”

And Trump wearing suit in Ukrainian colors, few Russians and their trolls had a heartstroke after seeing this picture

Based on some forum posts and user reviews, in terms of the Indy game I think this is mostly going to be dependent on resolution and settings one personally tolerates. Outside of the "needs a rtx capable card", ofc. I mean it sounds like the visual differences with settings aren't super extreme - a trend I've noticed happening over recent years in a lot of games, actually - and one has to remember that while actually playing, most aren't staring at every pixel to notice fine differences, like all these comparison videos emphasize. In terms of upgrading GPU's - I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist but it does make one feel like AAA devs/nvidia are working together to force people to buy the top tier cards - eg, gimping the 60/70/80 series re: vram. >.> I've said it before and I'll say it again - it may be "slower" generation but the 11gb of vram in my 2080ti (and sometimes, dlss, of course) is probably what has allowed to me to marginally still run some of these games at 4k at my personal tolerance of 45-60fps/mid-high settings etc. I refuse to do less than dlss-quality tho. I've tried. "Balanced" dlss still looks like crap, imo. I might as well just drop the native resolution to 1440, then.

'Biological female' and 'biological male' are crappy dog whistley terms that also don't give enough information. Use the phrase 'cis women' you sorry excuse for a journalist. Also no actually trans women don't necessarily have levels of elevated testosterone, because most competitions require them to have been on HRT to reduce their testosterone for about two years, which was the case with Lia Thomas. On the Lia Thomas story, no again to that worthless excuse for a journalist, the placing does not tell the whole story. While competing in the men's comp, Lia was undergoing HRT from May 2019 until what appears to be her last swim in the men's comp in January 2020 before taking a year off before competing in the women's comp, as per competition rules. Her pre HRT accolades were pretty good, and included a 6th fastest time in the country in 2017. It's interesting that a lot of the dialogue about her 'rise' from some ridiculously off the pace ranking in the men's comp to 'one of the top-ranked' swimmers in the women's comp seems to have her soaring from a mid 500s ranking. One can only assume that ranking is from when she was on testosterone blockers, because a quick squiz at an archived version of the swimcloud site shows something of a different story. That archived page here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220318183249/https://www.swimcloud.com/swimmer/314430/rankings/ Starts ranked only 84th in the state in 2013-14, rises to 99th out of all high school students in 16-17, and 100th in the country in the 2018-19 season. Her current swimcloud page inconveniently lacks all that, in favour of showing only her 2021-22 ranking, where she apparently rose to 44th in the country. Meanwhile, Cora Dupre, who was 45th in the country that season, was 83rd the season before. So no, actually, Lia Thomas was an elite swimmer when she competed in the men's comp, became merely 'very good' when she was competing against men but taking HRT, and reverted to elite when she was temporarily allowed to actually compete as a woman.

https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/42549609/inside-san-jose-state-university-2024-volleyball-season-gender-fairness-safety Pretty detailed breakdown about the controversy surroundingy alma mater. Spoiler alert, they ran the data and the transgender player doesn't hit harder. She isn't even in the top 150 in the country.

Avowed forces you to hear politics at about the same rate as both Pillars of Eternity games. Hope that helps.

I've been religiously following his Channel since last year to the point that it's frighten me that he could just... stop uploading.