Humanoid

Prior to the DLC, you'd budget for about level 30 - in reality you'd get another couple levels or so further, but you'd be stuck inside the final dungeon by that point and won't be able to properly use those skill points. 30 levels at 3 points per level means 90 points to spend. GMing a skill is 25 points, plain Mastery is 15, so the rule of thumb is that you got to GM three skills total and master one if you fully focused your skill points. Someone who's played through with all the new post-release dungeons would have a better idea of what the new effective level cap is.

I would've thought that Original Sin would be the opening gambit of that scheme.

Bladedancers are just as powerful with daggers as they are with swords, perhaps moreso given the utility of chewing up block charges. Not that you shouldn't have taken the scout - you probably ended up with the better balance as a result. The Crusader being committed to the shield means they'll fall away rapidly midway through the game as a damage dealer, they are very definitely healers. Aside, you'll probably find you won't have the points to really push three magic skills on each spellcaster, I'd focus on two for the majority of the game as to not spread yourself too thin.

Interesting, because I feel the most common switch is actually the MX Brown since it's marketed as an all-rounder. I believe Logitech's mech keyboards use them, which probably makes them the most readily available option for browns. Only properly used brown and black myself, at home and at work respectively, the latter further dampened with O-rings. I don't like the black, with or without the O-rings, but it's just a cheap Rosewill (Newegg's house brand) so not a big investment. Really want to try out a Topre RealForce, but at about double the price of Cherry switch keyboards and being very hard to source locally, I've been reluctant to pull the trigger.

I think they're only 2-key rollover - or at least the originals were, which would make them pretty poor gaming keyboards.

The other thing is that there's often a fear about allowing one class to get significantly wealthier than the others. God forbid a thief actually be able to steal stuff worth anything. Playing a bit of TOR back in the day as a smuggler, the first act has you acquire a fantastic treasure worth a fortune as a final reward. Except that it isn't worth anything and you end up with the same amount of cash as that altruistic monkjedi who has spent exactly 0% of the game pursuing material riches. Sure, that extreme measure of equalisation tends to be associated with MMOs, but it's also prevalent in most single player games to some extent. Dragon Age for example gave out a few unique items, but a pittance in gold, and the items sell for mere pocket change. As absurd as it sometimes gets, I respect the Elder Scrolls games for at least allowing you to take anything and everything to feed your personal fortune.

Mainly a problem for people who were weird and bought a Pro Audio Spectrum or Gravis Ultrasound instead of a Sound Blaster.

Atari famously buried most of their inventory of infamous E.T. video game, often called the worst video game ever made, in a New Mexico landfill some thirty-plus years ago. Well, those games have been found.

Would be happy with an almost complete rewrite of SWTOR...

Not really advice, but brings back memories of the hyped Quake-killers of the late 90s. I think the big ones were meant to be Unreal, SiN, Prey, Half-Line and Daikatana. Unreal and Half-Life obviously did pretty well, SiN somewhat less so, and Prey had an almost Duke Nukemish development cycle and released in 2006. Daikatana is just a punchline. But yeah, I'm not much use since the last FPS I can honestly say I genuinely enjoyed was NOLF2. EDIT: And some old news headlines from 1998 verify my recollection: http://www.bluesnews.com/archives/jan98-3.html Some familiar names on the page there, heh.

The switches themselves are made by Cherry, not SteelSeries, and are commonly available - the vast majority of mechanical keyboards will have Cherry switches in them (some no-brand boards will have knock-off switches of the same design). The advantage of this is that you can therefore replace both the switches and the caps (since they're generic) individually. A place like WASD Keyboards sell individual switches and caps which you might want to look into (I've used them personally with no issue shipping to Australia). If your switch is damaged and not just the cap, then it's a bit more of a tricky fix which might need additional hardware (potentially messing with solder), but it's still within reason as long as the electronics of the keyboard aren't shot.

My experience with IWD2 was that I started with only two characters, and got to up around the ice palace-type level (no memory of what that place actually is), at whiich point it got a bit too hard for my tastes and I added two more to finish the game with.

Shouldn't the game be named Lost Beta then? I'll get my coat.

I have never heard of an Atom car. Based on the name I was hoping for something like the Peel P50, but alas.

But is it an lgbt-all-in-one table so everyone can romance it, or just an ordinary table that by being such promotes bigotry and exclusion of the minorities? If you implement romanceable tables, you'd need to implement romanceable desks, benches and kitchen counters, yes.

It'll be the biggest event in South African cinema since The Gods Must Be Crazy. Indeed it could be titled The Gods Must Be Crazy in Thedas.

A Let's Play video series of DA3 by Bruce would have to be classified as a romantic comedy.

I don't know Origin's policy on VPN, but the game is cheaper on Origin's Mexican storefront, yeah, for those who want to use a VPN. Amazon, on the other hand, perform no geo-location, they take your billing address country and nothing else.

It's taken me four pages of discussion to notice the typo in the thread title, I'm slipping.

Don't know anything about the game, but upcoming Red Orchestra 2 giveaway. One day only, starting sometime tomorrow.

I'd look towards the 'boutique' home media releasing companies - even if not to purchase, the range of titles they release will give you some very good ideas. In the US, most releases in the Criterion Collection or Cohen Media. For EU releases, there's Eureka's Masters of Cinema collection, Artificial Eye, the British Film Institute, or StudioCanal collection (which is discontinued but still available, classic titles are now folded into the StudioCanal classics line).

Titanfall is $37 on Amazon, I'm told it's a one-day only deal. Probably the cheapest available outside of messing with VPNs, though as usual you'll need a US billing address - just use the address of some random hotel if need be.

If you left out certain things, map markers for example, without changing anything else, the game would almost certainly be broken...because the designers assumed you would be using those "features" and didn't provide any other way of figuring out where your objective is without using them, (that's why, without completely revising journal entries to provide more hints, you can't just plain disable map markers in the last two Elder Scrolls games - you'd have no idea what you were supposed to be doing just from what NPCs say alone, and the vanilla journal entries are just as useless, if not worse). Too hard? Yes, because the game wasn't designed (sensibly) for it...which is what his complaint is derived from, if I'm not mistaken. Also because the exterior architecture in the game is utterly nonsensical. Take New Vegas' mystifying interior corridors and random right turns, and apply them to city streets. Madness. I mean, two of the major thoroughfares in the game that you'll pass repeatedly because they're the fastest ways between point A and point B are a completely straight crawl tunnel that goes underneath an apartment building for no reason, and the interior of a multi-storey brothel.

Unless they go back to large 90s style boxes, it's just going to look like a dude and a black stormcloud or other generic black blob. Heck, I thought they were bats on first glance. I guess that makes it versatile art, you could replace the text with any other fantasy game past or future and it wouldn't look out of place. Still, I won't complain that they got rid of the flowing blood motif of the previous games.

Not really experienced much in the way of movies so far this year, but I figured the long weekend was a good opportunity to fix that. Watched Milos Forman's Taking Off, a movie I had never heard of but purchased on the strength of one review. Forman's first American movie before he moved on to weightier topics, it's a wonderful comedy directed with a light touch, but beyond that notable for an almost everpresent folk soundtrack and low-key performance roles by Carly Simon, Kathy Bates, and also a performance by Ike and Tina Turner. What I noticed perhaps most of all, though, were the faces. A range of interesting, diverse and sometimes astonishing faces that the camera is all too happy to linger on. I get the feeling a fair number of the cast both central and peripheral were hired solely on the strength of their faces.