Boeroer

I will just ignore the constant personal attacks from now on. I neither have time to film my rofling wife all the time nor to draw memes of doom avatars on hobbyhorses jumping over Fulda Gaps. Doing the calculation (1% of 90 Million) was only to show that "only 1% mortility" can lead to the faulty assumption that 1% isn't much of a big deal. Sounds rather low. But it is not. Showing the number of 900,000 deaths should give a better impression. Besides that: we are not 90 million in Germany, only 83. And 1% of that also isn't a million - i just rounded generously to get some simple numbers and illustrate my point. Of course not everybody will get infected. But a lot of people who read or say "just 1%" don't realize that 1% in a densly populated country like Germany would mean nearly 1 million deaths IF everybody would get infected. Even if only 50% of the population were infected in a rel. short amount of time (which would be realistic if no countermeasurements were taken given the initial exponential spread) the consequences would be so bad that many more people would die from attendant circumstances. First of all a 1% mortility rate with an unhindered infection spread would crush the otherwise quite solid German health care system in no time, leading to many more deaths originally unrelated to Covid because of lack of health care. Mortility rates would also raise significantly as soon as not every severe case of Covid-19 could be treated properly. Triage would be normal. 1% mortility with a highly infectious disease that transmits over air in spuperspreader events is very bad. Especially now with the UK mutant. You made it sound like it's not. I believe that is wrong and irresponsible. You also made it sound like it's even less of a big deal because the virus mostly kills elderly and those with underlying conditions. If you didn't mean that but rather tht you should just protect vulnerable groups then cool. At least you don't want to imply that some lives are more valuable than others. Still: I diagree. Protecting the elderly and sick from infection with Covid-19 while the rest of us goes on with their lives doesn't work. Sweden tried that and failed. You can't visit your parrents in homes for the elderly anymore and yet they die from Covid-19. Besides that the data from Euromomo I presented also shows that a significant part of the dead were between 45 and 65 years old. Those are people who have to go to work. The highest death toll in numbers comes from people between 65 and 85. I wouldn't call people who just retired "elderly" yet. "Only the elderly and sick" sounds less threatening (especially for the young, healthy and egoistic ones), but I'm already near the age range where lots of people died. I wouldn't call me an elder yet (I'm 44): I have three young kids and a wife of 38. Pretty difficult to protect people like me from infection - especially while my kids still go to school and kindergarden. This will be problem for lots of people with underlying conditions (like asthma) as well who are young and otherwise quite healthy and active. You made it sound like it's all not that bad. But I - as well as the vast majority of citizens, media, politicians and scientists - do think otherwise. And yes, like most people I believe an actual pandemic is worse than a nuclear war that didn't happen.

I still don't understand why there are only two major parties in the US. The fall of the Weimar Republic taught us that too many tiny parties are no good either (hence we have a 5% hurdle in Germany nowadays to prevent the Bundestag from deteiorating into tiny fractures and coalitions to become too unstable) - but only two "real" alternatives sounds bad, too. Besides that it's quite weird that Democrats in the US are all labeled socialists, communists and whatnot by Republicans - while half of them would be seen like conservative (CDU) or neoliberal (FPD) in Germany and most of Europe. People like Bernie Sanders who call themselves Democratic Socialists would still fit into our moderately left SPD or be part of the pragmatic wing of Die Linke (leftists) or Die Grünen (greens) - not even part of the hardcore left. Republicans would fit into AfD (populist right wingers) and the right wings of CDU/CSU and FDP. Yet we don't have a socialst system. It seems - compared to Europe - that US's politics as a whole is shifted to the right. Obama wasn't following very left politics if you view it through the eyes of an average European voter. Why don't the green party or the libertarians etc. get more votes? Is it all the fear that the vote will be in vain what drives people to only vote blue or red? Or is tehre something else?

Yes, that's why I said "potentially".

Ouch... happy to get the Biontech one then - unless I'm already immune. I was pretty sick with a devilish cough around christmas and new year's eve but a test came back negative - didn't do an antibody test yet but will do so soon.

Ah sorry, I completely forgot that you can no longer buy the Blackwood hull but must collect the logs it nowadays. That was indeed changed in a patch. Dragonwing Sails you can still buy. On one hand it's less expensive I guess - but of course that takes a lot more time to hunt for the logs. It's a little bit meh that you can't sail to Ukaizo with the Red Dream Hull nd/or Gulskin Sails - since both are twice as strong as Blackwood Hull/Dragonwing Sails - they just make you a bit slower - but sturdy as hell.

I personally think Morning Stars are best. Also because a Barbarian can get Brute Force. With that in mind I'd also pick "The Long Night's Drink" as one of my phrases. It stacks with the Morning Star's modal. Club+modal is also nice because several invocations of the Chanter target Will. But the Willbreaker Morning Star lowers both Fortitude and Will - because of that it's my favorite Howler weapon. Spirit Frenzy lets you stagger enemies with all attack rolls you do, so Barbaric Yell etc. will all also stagger - which stacks with Long Night's Drink and Morning Star to a fortitude debuff of 25+10+10=45. Once you get Brute Force it's crit time. That's why a Skald also works very well. But a Troub. can have two phrases overlapping easily which is cool as well. Anyway, using a yell or shout + Spirit Frenzy and Long Night's Drink + Willbreaker will lead to severely debuffed Will and Fortitude which is awesome. And once you get the Champion invocation you can interrupt with ALL crits you cause - including those from phrases like the Long Night bit also Carnage, Yell/Shout, offensive invocations and so on. That makes it a real pain in the ass to fight you. You will interrupt all the time. While debuffig enemies severely. As a Troub. it's beneficial to then use Brisk Recitation because then you'll interrupt every 3 secs instead of every 6 with chants. But I'm sure you can also do good things with a different approach. That's just the way I like a Howler best.

You can buy the hull and sails you need and it's not that expensive compared to buying a bigger ship and equipping it with the good stuff etc. That way you don't need to side with a faction that would provide other means of reaching Ukaizo (like submarine or ghost ship). Of course getting one of those costs nothing (I mean money). It's true that you don't need to do ship combat and therefore don't need to buy anything for your ship if you want to resolve every ship encounter with boarding. Ship to ship combat just gives you the advantage to be able to take on overleveled ships a lot sooner because sailor/captain XP is independent from level. That way you can win ship fights and get the better loot (and even some uniques) a lot sooner as you would be able to if you chose boarding. And it's not even expensive. You only need some decent cannons and two master cannoneers. Also when you go solo ship combat is a lot easier than boarding fights imo. But yes: not mandatory at all.

Also spares you all the turmoil in the forums that happens in the first weeks after release.

Did you read that they found a potential patient zero - in Italy? From November 2019 which predates the cases in China. The article is in Italian. But maybe somebody saw an English one?

Only if you stick to the Fulda Gap. That's clearly your hobbyhorse.

I just watched Josh's post mortem of Deadfire again and he said something about 3 DLCs vs. 1 big DLC: the overhead work and costs for launching multiple small DLCs was much higher than if you'd release one big DLC. So maybe our idea isn't that great after all (at least for devs).

Well, Israel and the UK vaccinate a LOT faster than any EU country at the moment. It's true that it's not only a problem with the numbers of doses but also with the distribution and appliance. In Israel you can get vaccinated via drive-in or drive-through. In Germany that's not possible because you have to fill out more forms and get more intensely lectured about the vaccine than you would have before difficult surgery (this is no joke, I spoke about that to a surgeon a few days ago). I get that they don't want to scare people and inform them very well. But maybe this is too much paperwork in this situation - no idea. My mother in law (70) got a new hip this week. Would have been cool to get vaccinated before that I guess.

Oh boy, you should really watch Josh Sawyers post mortem for Deadfire. He named the ship combat "quicksand": no matter how much money and resources you threw at it, it was swallowed and gave nothing back. Here (it's interesting - he's giving great talks imo) :

https://news.avclub.com/dave-mustaine-thinks-obama-staged-the-shootings-in-colo-1798232868 Wouldn't have surprised me if Dave Mustaine was at the capitol. But he's a big fan of Santorum and Santorum didn't like that, so maybe not. Maybe Billy Corgan was there? Ach... I used to really like The Smashing Pumpkins when I was young. Morrissey, too. Damn...

Sorry double post: There's no doubt that individual european nations had to face bigger challenges than Corona after WWII: The collapse of Yugoslavia, the Greek financial crisis (Greece handles Corona well so far), Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania... On the other hand the Corona pandemic still isn't over yet. And given how lousy the vaccination goes in most of Europe due to the chicken-hearted purchase orders of the EU I fear it won't go away as soon as I'd hope for.

Lots of bla with intentional misinterpretations of what I said. Back to the initial statement: You could just do a survey about what people believe is or was the greatest challenge after WWII was so far. I'll take any bet that the majority of Germans and Europeans would say "the Covid-19 Pandemic". Original situation was that Merkel's statement was ridiculed. Nobody is laughing about that anymore. Most agree. What people would laugh about is when you'd tell them the biggest challenge that Europe faced after WWII so far was the Fulda Gap... I'm not doing geopolitical analysis. My wife does. She's a diplomat with the German foreign ministry and just did this when I told her that the Fulda Gap was a bigger challenge than Covid-19: The other girl is my french sister-in-law who's working at a public health office. Here's Merkel after I send her your post: And that's it from me. Fulda Gap...

Well ship battles were made optional after player complaints (players who didn't want to do it) so straight to boarding became an option with a patch. If Josh Sawyer would have had a say in this we wouldn't even have ship fights (and also no Full VO). We would have had lots of other content though...

Priests need a few levels to really take off. The following one also does some nice melee damage (for a priest). Priest of Berath "St. Gangrene": Race: Coastal Aumaua or Mountain Dwarf or Human MIG: ++, CON: - , DEX: + , PER: +, INT: + RES: -- One point here and there doesn't matter, you don't need to minmax the heck out of this - I would max out Might though. Talents (not in that order necessarily): Veteran's Recovery, Inspiring Radiance, Aggrandizing Radiance, Weapon Focus Soldier, the Pallid Hand, Runner's Wounding Shot, Two-Handed Style, Savage Attack special Spells: Devotions, Champions Boon on self or Minor Avatar Items: everything that raises MIG and stacks. So Maegfolc skull is your goal for headgear for example. Also all story bonuses you can get (Gift from the Machine, Blood pool etc.). Then DEX stuff, then PER. Girdle of the Driving Wave is fun to give your Priest more melee options but of course Belt of the Royal Deadfire Cannoneer is also cool. Weapon: Tidefall! Tidefall has an enchantment named "wounding" which is very powerful to begin with and also scales with Might. Priests can get very high Might. Also the high Might helps with damaging spells and with healing. Holy Radiance with perfect disposition scaling, high level and high might can one-shot most vessels. When you reach 40 MIG your wounding lash on Tidefall will not only do 25% as raw but instead 47.5% of your initial damage. This is great melee damage because the Wounding lash is a multiplicative dmg boost. Also wounding stacks with itself in the enemy. So you can deliver some nasty swings while buffed up. But also your spell dmg and healing power will be great. Don't forget to put another lash (for example Corrosive lash) on the weapon. Play him like a Rogue - meaning: don't run towards enemies like Leeroy Jenkins but instead wait for your tank to engage and then flank the enemies - maybe after buffing up you and the party first. That way you don't get downed so much (Priests are a bit squishy after all). You can combine Wounding with Cleansing Flames which will double the ticks of wounding. When you combine Runner's Wounding Shot with Cleansing Flame you can down even though foes very quickly. This guy needs some levels to rock. You can get Tidefall rel. early if you have 10 mechanics. Before that use the Great Swords "Justice".

I guess so. THey also now know better which features to keep and which to drop (and not sink any money into) I guess. Theay also wouldn't need to enhance the graphics further nor reinvent the "mechanics wheel" like they did with Deadfire. The mechanics are pretty good now and you could just take the existing "engine", tweak it a bit (remove some inconsistencies) and basically do new DLCs (which not be calles that but you know what I mean). Should be a lot cheaper to produce - i guess?

Where the hell did I say that climate change wouldn't be an even bigger challenge? I strongly believe that it will be. Severly worse than this no doubt. But we are not talking about a bigger challenge that will come but the biggest challenge since WWII so far. At the moment the challenge of climate change is to prevent hitting +1.5 degrees (or +2 degrees). That isn't actually that big of a challenge if the government and economy would be inclined to get serious about it. Had we lowered our CO2 emmisons by only 4% per year since the 80s we would already be there. Done. We didn't and that makes this thing more and more challenging with every year - but we're not there yet. It will be a huge challenge if we sleep on it any longer. And if we don't succeed at all it will be impossible and a challenge we will not be able to master. So about climate change I'm on your side, you can stop clutching your pearls now. Yet some prospect isn't a real challenge for society. Nothing rolled up the Fulda Gap. Maybe it was a challenge for the military and the government at that time - but for citizens it didn't really come over as a big challenge. I don't really remember it and it hasn't imprinted itself into the memory of my parents like Chernobyl has for example. Also a giant meteorite didn't hit earth - although the prospect of one doing so might be terrifying. And David Hasselhoff didn't get the Nobel Peace Price for singing down the Berlin Wall. Phew. The challenge of the COVID pandemic however isn't just because of death by virus. It's that, too - but on top of that comes the medical, political, economic, ethical, social an cultural distortions. Not only in Germany but in also in Europe. Look at the fragility the EU displays atm. We had to close borders despite our open-border policy in the Schengen area. I was in Romania when the first wave hit and they did a hard lockdown immediately which impacted the life of citizens severely. When I look around I strongly believe that the vast majority of Europeans (especially Spain, Italy, Belgium and Netherlands which got hit esp. hard in the first wave and the UK which gets pummeled now) would agree that this pandemic IS the biggest challenge Germany and Europe have faced since WWII. Not that it's anywhere near as bad as WWII itself, of course not. Claiming that would be ridiculous - and nobody did. But since WWII we didn't have anything that caused such upheaval in all parts of our society. "Reichsbürger" together with hippies and esoterics try to storm the Reichstag - because they fear that Germany will become a dictatorship (bc. of some soft lockdowns). Wow - never did we see such turmoil since WWII. As for the ridiculous "~1% mortality rate" nonsense: You realize that in Germany alone we are nearly 90 million people and that 1% would mean nearly 1 million dead people on top of the normal death toll if we just let it happen? Also the mortality rate would go up like crazy because the medical system would collapse. And what is "which threatens overwhelmingly the elderly and vulnerable" supposed to mean? It doesn't matter who dies - unless you want to impute less value to the life of old or sick people - which I hope you don't want to do. Look at the situation in the UK: the NHS is about to collapse because of the new mutant that is spreading so fast that they need to do a hard lockdown now. Here's the cumulated deaths in Europe so far: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps As you can see there's two significant spikes since the virus hit. And that's DESPITE of all the efforts that were taken. You can also see that it's not only the eldery but people at 45+ who die a lot more often than in the years before despite the nasty influenza season we had in 2018. Also check out the graphs for excess mortality down below and keep in mind that is WITH countermeasures - which then have a huge impact on civil life and the economy. Would the situation be better if we did nothing? All serious scientists (economics included) agree that the problems would be a lot worse if we just let covid sweep over us. So yes, I double down on Merkel's claim that the Covid pandemic is the greatest challenge for Germany and Europe since WWII - and so did Merkel already in June (when cases where dropping but she was convinced that a second wave would hit in winter). And she would do so now since the situation is much worse - would you ask her directly. She doesn't mention it anymore because nobody except looney conspiracy ideologists really question that statement anymore. And rightfully so.

Well, we'll speak again in 10 years I guess.

True - but I would argue that it's better to have no VO instead of bad VO. Unless you want to support players with disabilities of course - for them text-to speech would be great to have whatever the quality is unless you can understand it well. But as I said: 10 years is a lot of time for tech, especially when it involves KI. With a smart enough KI and good training I can see that text-to speech might indeed be a great solution to this problem. Those Google Assistant phone calls were impressive. And at the same time maybe it will also replace lots of narrative designers, composers, artists and testers - depending on how well it can generate game content that players like. That will be weird... Maybe we will soon have a "made by real humans" label.

Yes, Stalker's Link should help Maia to land CC effects, too.

Yes, it is. But if streamers can't be bothered to read out text rather than looking into the camera while it gets read for them then screw them I'd say. There's a very popular German Let's Player named "Gronkh". I don't follow him but in the few vids I saw he was reading all dialogues with different voices and intonation. It was engaging enough (and sometimes also funny) and he doesn't seem to have any reservations or problems with non-full VO. To the contrary I'd say. Of course you should be a streamer who can read fluently. Some might struggle with that. But then I'd argue they shouldn't play dialogue-heavy CRPGs in the first place.

Excuse my french, but streamers my ass. I feared that video might sound like it does. A bit like Commander Data reading the lines. Ok, it's from 2012 - but I also checked some text-to-speech for some learning software today (coincidentally) and at least that one still wasn't anywhere near a proper trained voice actor. But 10 years is a long time for those things - so maybe...