Bartimaeus

I ran into all of those on my first playthrough. Thinking of firing it up again as a BGT-BWP, going to do either a F/M/C or F/M/T(possibly with a kit cuz I'm a cheater). A bit put off by the time it takes to do a BWP install, but perhaps I'll find the time when I'm done with PoE. I still install mods manually. Big World Setup is useful as a guide, though - though I wouldn't use just plain old BWP, since that would add way too much junk I don't want regardless of the settings I use. Also, frustratingly, the BWS is locked to always install Baldur's Gate Trilogy, and while BGT is great, I just don't care for BG1 that much and it's more trouble than it's worth. I'm playing with Item Revisions...any undead hit with it needs to make a plain save vs. death or it does nothing. Vampires are impossible to kill with it, skeleton warriors extremely unlikely, and liches unlikely (yes, liches are the easiest of the three, for some reason - crappy mage save vs death progression table, I guess? ). And since I'm playing with the hardest SCS settings, it means I have to tear down spell defenses regardless, and if the battle makes it that far, it's usually all over for the lich, anyway. It's not as useful as I'd hoped.

Baldur's Gate 2. It amazes me that after...literally, probably 50 playthroughs since I was 5-6 years old, I'm still finding new stuff. Met some rogue named Itona at the northern limits of Trademeet - in all my years playing, I'd never seen the lady - and, to my great surprise, she was not mod-added. She's a shadow thief and gives a little hint on how to find Ihtafeer, the rakshasa the djinn are hunting. She also wears the Gloves of Missile Snaring - a pair of gloves I knew existed from messing around in game and save file editors, but never thought actually appeared anywhere in the game. Little stuff like this astounds me. I also found out that an NPC in the Council of Six building in the government district, a guy named Llarsh, who I'd always thought was just for flavor and never served any useful purpose, actually DOES have a purpose. If you steal Valygar's tax forms from his house in the docks district, you can give them to Llarsh and he'll tell you about his cabin. FURTHERMORE, somehow, I'd ALWAYS missed the fact that Cromwell can upgrade the Mace of Disruption. For some reason, I was under the impression that that was a mod-added thing (and a mod I did not have), but no, that's in the vanilla game, too! If you keep the pure illithium from the Sir Sarles quest (the artisan that the churches want you to secure for them), you can instead give it to Cromwell. Plus, the church you're working for doesn't even care, as long as you bring back the fake illithium - they'll be happy to use that instead. I can't believe I've missed all three of these. I'm playing with all my regular mods (Sword Coast Strategems, Item Revisions, Spell Revisions, etc.), except I'm using a 50% creature and quest XP reducer. The going has been a little tougher at times than I'm used to, I have to admit. The planar prison (Haer'dalis quest) was pretty friggan' hard. Yuan-ti - particularly the mages - are such pains in the butt. I think I have another mod...polytweak, I think...that improves them alongside SCS. Eek.

The entire save, or the current save? Try to use the chapter selection and pick the latest chapter autosave if you can.

No, otherwise I'd never sleep. If it did, on the other hand, I don't think I'd ever be awake.

So...unlike the original, are you trying to say it's actually watchable? (Just kidding - I know that almost certainly means it'll somehow be much worse than the original.)

Raining and thunder over here... (Source: I don't know, my friend sent it to me a while ago)

That's also how I felt...though unlike you, I generally thought having Legolas in any of them was kinda lame. Tauriel I'm okay with, but Legolas always feels like he's trying too hard...

Oh I open all books and click all chat options, I just don't ... read them with super concentration, since I just forget it all after the next combat or two. There was a couple of lore tomes that had stories I liked enough to focus on them enough to remember I liked them, but not enough to quote them or their titles even. You're an oddity. I really wondered why so much time would be wasting developing such in game lore that had no relevance to the main plot. I guess it's for people like you. I've read all the BG2 books at some time or another. History of the Dead Three was always my favorite - Jergal becoming tired of his godhood and giving it away to Bhaal, Myrkul, and...Bane?...via a game of seeing who can throw a lich's head the farthest or some such. Good times,

Hah. You and I have different definitions of "mad cheap". I was thinking more along the lines of my $100 for my 4770k...haha. I haven't bothered with overclocking at all, because...why? I have so much more processing power than I'll conceivably need for the next few years, at the very least. After that, games will hopefully become quad threaded instead of still mostly dual-threaded, which should make it even less of a need.

How much did you pay for the 4790k?

How absurd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HsCEQz48tg

I bought 2x8GB of RAM for $75 expecting it to be canceled. It arrived just now. Whoops!

That's why I use Cheat Engine's program speed setting hotkeys for pretty much all my SP games. Life is short enough - let's get through the banal stuff in this stuff quickly.

Eh, Gandalf the Grey DID defeat the Balrog, and I have serious doubts Vader could do that. ...but he died in the process. Hm. I'd still give it to Gandalf to at least get the job done, even if perished doing so. Vader, I don't feel so confident about.

Given that Gandalf basically has force powers anyways (see the Fellowship of the Ring, fight between Saruman and Gandalf in the Orthanc) and that Gandalf is much more limber than Darth Vader in general AND has a wide variety of other powers, I'd have to give it to Gandalf pretty easily, too.

My party was full when she dashed up to me and ... I told her to not bother me now. So she disappeared. Never saw her again. Maybe she's around somewhere, sulking, but I have no idea where. When I came upon Grieving Mother, I gave her a wide berth because I'm not ready for her yet either. ...I wish companions didn't auto-level upon joining like they do. Or rather, that they didn't auto-assign skills. Reply to something you said earlier: the "Mercenary" thing is, I am pretty sure, the background you chose at character creation. (e: whoops, missed mute's post ) I assumed, when it does a "detection" for what you are (rational, clever, etc.), that it just meant they were saying something different to you than what they'd normally say, or out of a pool of options (depending on whatever's highest or whatever). In regards to leveling, I recommend installing the IE mod and using the "ChangeClass" console command, which sets characters back to level 0 and you can choose their class and skills and stuff up to their current experience level. Doesn't disable achievements or anything, and you can ignore everything else in the IE mod if you want.

I don't think the Aggressive/Clever/etc. conversation options require stat checks. I am pretty sure you can have your intelligence set to 3 and still be able to use "clever" dialogue options. Only choices specifically marked with stat requirements (assuming you have those enabled/shown) actually require the stats. I'm also a little mystified in regards to the lack of base stat improvement. Torment got away with tying base stats to dialogue options, IMO, because you got an additional stat point every level up, and there were particular quests that gave you permanent stat bonuses...and probably a few items and spells that temporarily did so, as well, but I don't remember if so. The Torment combat stats also didn't really matter, so you tended to max out CHR, INT, and WIS on a second playthrough anyways. Pretty poor design, but...you didn't much play Torment for the combat anyways, and this is just a side-effect of that. Here, I'm permanently locked out of a lot of solutions to quests if I try to build a decent combat character...and it'll never get any better. Worse, when you *do* choose to go for the conversation stats instead of combat stats, it seems like while there's often a difference in flavor, there usually isn't in terms of actual effect. Having the stats to convince the grain hoarders in Gilded Vale to let up and sell to the angry farmers leads up to virtually no difference in content or reward versus simply telling the farmers to bugger off. Not very satisfying in any respect.

I like that dialogue generally lets you RP more - you have a more conversation options than you did in the BG games that will generally let you play your character more or less how you think you should play them. But...it seems like most of them lead to the same exact dialogue branch, which is kind of lame. Seems like they're there more for flavor than for actually making any sort of difference. Which, you know, isn't terrible, but...pretty much effectively the same issue the BG games had. Certainly nothing like Torment's level of meaningful dialogue options. I also am not the biggest fan of the general combat design. It feels like most combat encounters play out exactly the same way as any other, and that I use the same two strategies or so for every single encounter. Also, while party composition definitely does affect how effective your party will be in combat, it doesn't feel like it much affects how you actually use your party in it. As a result, one of the biggest things I like about BG2 (tactical combat) I'm pretty much always trying to avoid in PoE because it feels like such a repetitive chore. I'm thinking about just...playing on easy and getting through the rest of the game, to be completely honest. I restarted four or five times trying to find a character I really enjoy to play, and now it's killing me to go through these fights again.

Neither can I, pal. Dark Souls 2 was released in 2014. DirectX 9 was released literally twelve years before that...DirectX 11 5 years. Why didn't it have DirectX 11 support to begin with? For that matter, why did the game look worse in some areas than DS1 did? Why are people paying $20 to $30 for this cash grab, this predatory practice? I just don't get it. Maybe it's the fact that I don't much like Dark Souls 2 to begin with...but I don't usually feel the need to tell people how to spend their money. I just feel like it's an awful precedent to set and encourage. FromSoftware and Bandai should be under much greater fire for this crap. Restarted PoE because of the new patch. Playing a Cipher now. My previous class was ranger, and I can't help but feel rangers completely suck now...but maybe I just didn't build mine right.

And it was already an easy boss battle to begin with...but hey, that's a recurring theme with Dark Souls 2, now, isn't it? I beat probably 90% of the bosses on my first try. And unlike DS1, it's not hardly any more difficult on NG+ - I edited my character to immediately go to NG10 after beating the game, and made it roughly a third of the way through before I quit out of sheer boredom. Just like on NG1, the biggest difficulty of the game is not getting randomly murdered by trash enemies in retarded ways while trying to grapple with the awful controls that're somehow even worse than DS1's. That's also a common theme with DS2, in my opinion - somehow worse than DS1. Suffice it to say, I won't be spending a cent on that joke of an upgrade.

25 hours is a long time? I have a few thousand hours in the BG games, another few in Diablo 2, 1.5k in Team Fortress 2...I don't feel bad for not playing those constantly anymore.

Well, actually, with SATA 2, your max bandwidth would only be around 300MB/s, even with a SSD that can technically support up to 550MB/s...

Infected with malware thanks to puush auto-updates. Thanks for not including the option, puush devs! (I always disable auto-updating, if possible.) Thinking about switching to a different program...

Yep, I saw that. Unfortunately, you can't do that for your PC, and have to fiddle around with the console to get stuff fixed maybe. I don't know what I've lost, if anything, to begin with, so like 213374U, I'll just be waiting it out. Not to mention, I kind of want to restart and go back on hard mode - normal's been a bit too easy. Not exactly a cakewalk, but not hard enough.