LadyCrimson

Never ending May birthday parties. I keep waking up super-sore/stiff back/shoulder and hip wise. Spend 20 minutes stretching myself all out when I wake up in order to feel half way normal and not stumble into walls from stiff hips making me lose my balance. Keep telling hubby we need a new mattress. He keeps going "it's fine for me." I guess I'm the Princess and he's the sleep-on-a-rock guy. Maybe we need a Sleep Number bed. And I need to get away from this town again. I find it ultimately depressing, here.

Getting close to lvl72 with my Scion-mage in Path of Exile. More levels will likely take a long time to achieve, with the severe death-XP penalty. Mostly a matter of item grinding or working on my other chrs, now. And decorating the Hideout. While I managed to go 4 years with having spent only the price of a typical new release (mostly for inventory tabs and a few pets), my more recent forays into playing the game (and my liking the current version much more than I have in the past) have meant that I've now officially entered the Spent Too Much On A Single Game territory. Oh well, someone has to help keep the game "free" for the majority.

Sometimes when I log into Path of Exile for an hour or two, I spend most of it fiddling around in my "hideout." One day I'll have all 3 Hideout sections, but the Master's daily quest for this Hideout theme gets really tough at high levels so it'll be a long time probably. I've seen videos of elaborately decorated hideouts but I probably won't get that fancy with it. Still fun to tinker with it tho.

Supernatural, as I ate a light brunch. "Haha, that Crowley's a card - talking to a hamster." "Sam's a terrible liar. Also, he's being stupid again." "Ooo, Dean's gonna be mad." ... "Wait, what??? NOOOOOOOO."

Saw Touching the Void (2003) - or, "why I'll never personally be interested in extreme mt. climbing." Then saw part of Jaws 2 - or, "why I'll never personally be interested in water skiing over open ocean."

At least Stallone's Dredd resulted in some awesomely funny YouTube videos. Which I won't post again. But ... yeah. I love what people do with bad movies, these days, sometimes.

I watched the 3 available VoD episodes of this National Geographic Wild (Truth About Cats) series. Pretty fun show, with the bits tracking city/farm cat daily routes via gps trackers and cameras being especially interesting. Although, most of the habit/body language etc. info they're gaining, I could have already told them how it was. But I suppose it's nice to have more official test results vs. "cat ladies possibly subjective observations." Motion dots on a cat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1bVd57qszY

Previous thread Last couple of posts:

Onward and beyond... (post limit).

Since this is a new/updated version, I went ahead and closed the first incarnation of this thread.

I personally like reaching a cap somewhat before an endgame, because I can't stand it when I can only use the last-level powers/abilities/whatever for a few fights. As to the main questline being short - that could be said of most rpg's. Doesn't have much to do with anything - there are always people who play a first run by just following what their questlog says to do, and sometimes that ends up with them doing little outside of the main path. If you increase the max level, then you (likely) also have to rebalance the endgame for chrs. that are going to be higher level, which is tangentially related to the "it's too easy/too hard" syndrome and so on forever in a cycle. At some point you just have to decide "this is the level." There's already a mod that can reduce the amount of XP gained, so if one really needs XP-gain as their sense of progression motivation, can use that.

There's a point of no return. The game will make a separate, new save at that point (not in the auto-save slot), so even if you don't realize it, you can reload that and start back from there to finish stuff, if you wish - as long as you don't delete it, of course.

Most of the side quests I skipped were in Act3. I entered Act3 around lvl 9 (just turned, I think), having done everything I was able/found except that I'd only done 4 of the Paths levels. So...are a lot of people finishing the Paths before going on to Act3? Maybe that's what's pushing most people over? 2nd half of Paths could have been inaccessible until mid-Act3 or something, too, in terms of pacing, maybe. I'm going to take a wild guess that all the bounties available in Act3 were for those who skipped a lot of sidequests, reach the end at too low a level, and don't want to or are "locked" out of earlier quests at that point...I do think there were too many bounties. Maybe should have been the one group before Act3 and only one group after reaching Act3. Or fewer per "grouping." At any rate, as someone above said, it's always difficult to balance for those who want to do "everything" in one playthru, vs. those that tend to just follow the main quest. I've seen it done better in other games than Pillars manages, but not a whole lot more so. It's probably one of the biggest complaints of all leveling games (that one is over-leveled or under-leveled or reaches a cap). Not sure how one would really get around it (edit) outside of making a game much more linear.

I have to say it: Woldan's shoes are stylin'.

I didn't reach the level cap until most of the way through Act3 ... I skipped the 2nd half of the Paths, didn't do all companion quests (don't like swapping in and out a lot) and I didn't finish the last round of bounties. Probably some sidequests I missed as well. I don't have an issue with reaching the cap, but my motivation did wane a lot by Act3 simply because of the combat issues (tedious) so while I could have gone on to do the rest of the stuff before going to the endgame, by then I just wanted to get to the end. I've meant to reload a save to finish anything I didn't complete, but sadly my motivation to plow through more combat still hasn't come back. This doesn't mean I don't like the game. I do like the game and had a lot of fun. Combat just wore me out and that's where motivation was lost, for me ... not level caps/lack of experience gain or whatever else.

Life Itself - this is not a stand-offish, objective documentary (of Roger Ebert), just to say. I remember when it came on VoD and I was not ready to watch it. It's on Netflix now and I watched it this morning. The bits about him and Gene's relationship then when Gene died, and then the end of the film, had me weeping like a little girl. Some because those two were childhood icons, some because such endings often reminds me of my own father (Christopher Reeve really hit home at the time, too) and some because ... whether I agreed with them or not on any specific film/points, or even, at times, as people/personas, I still miss both of them and haven't been interested in following any "film critics" now that they're both gone. Thumbs up.

Antarctica: A Year on Ice (2013) Documentary re: the "common workers" who keep things running/in shape year round for the scientist/other visitors, or something to that effect. The interview/ppl bits weren't terribly interesting to me (typical "why do we do this" human-interest stuff) but the cinematography was insane. Superlative. Gorgeous. Hypnotic. I could use almost every frame of every outdoor sequence as a desktop wallpaper.

There's a lot of things I could nitpick about Pillars mages, but I'm not sure having too few spells is one of them. Is there a reason you feel this way? I actually thought there were too many of them, in the sense that the "cast per rest" tier separation seemed to include too many that were similar. As if they wanted to make sure you had something available even if you used all per rests of a single tier. Although, granted, many of those were the defensive spells, like all the shielding and mirror type ones.

I don't mind the semi-randomness of it, but I do think the true uniques shouldn't have been allowed to drop in the end-game, no-return area. Mostly for the totally non-objective reason that I think it's no fun. *winkwink* Having a lot of them with the potential to drop in the Paths somewhere makes some sense, giving a reason to do that otherwise optional area. Good to know the Boots of Speed don't just drop in end game - although from the sound of it, it seems like that's one of the most common places for it.

I felt this way about the Boots of Speed, when they popped very close to the endgame bossfight.

Occasionally dropping an hour into Path of Exile, still. Enough to get rid of the gaming urge but isn't a committed venture. My Scion-mage is lvl68 and I've been rather dismayed at the imbalance of her ease of going through Merciless difficulty (with almost no defenses) compared to the melee Shadow I tried before. I recall when Freezing Pulse was the totally OP'd magic spell - they fixed it so that's no longer the case, it's now a good spell but not the only spell you'll ever need/want. Which is a good thing. But the issue with Diablo-like games so often seems to be that mob density is so high and fast that, while melee is always viable (and sometimes kicks butt, too), it still just has a hard time being equal to any ranged attacks that can, say, chain and kill things off-screen you can't even see. Arc and Ice Nova need some balancing imo. Or the gem Spell Echo does. I like powerful mages in these types of games, don't get me wrong, but yeah...

Haha...duct tape. Classic. Elder parent stuff this week. Tired. Hubby turns 49 soon. I was watching him from the kitchen window the other day and realized, when he's out in the sun, the back of his head looks more "grey" vs. light brown. It's not all grey yet and in dim house light you don't notice it like that, but the sunlight brings it all out. Based on his temples, I think eventually he'll have white (vs mousey grey) hair. I think it's quite handsome, but I'm biased.

I think Steven Segal stole John Travolta's hairpiece.

^ Maya and Axton 4ever. === The one good thing about peeking at the Path of Exile beta is knowing what the passive tree changes are going to be. Passives moving a step to the left, passives disappearing or slightly changed or being moved far far away, etc. First time having that advantage for me - usually I'd go to play after having not played for 8-12 months and all my chrs. had their passives refunded and I'd be all "wha/who/where, I have no idea where to put them, now."