Bartimaeus

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.

http://webmup.com/HArIv/vid.webm http://webmup.com/aDSfX/vid.webm You can see it in play in those. From reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/30lmx2/psa_doubleclicking_equipment_bug/ I checked like the top fifty or so comment parents, and literally only one person said it didn't do it for them...who then edited their post to say that it did, but it took a few tries.

Pillars of Eternity PSA: Don't equip items by double-clicking on them, otherwise you lose all non-equipment active effects...permanently, including racial and class ones. All I've been doing this entire time has been double-clicking. Gonna wait a few days until some of the worst bugs are cleaned up to keep playing...

Yeah, I did that temple solo on hard mode: it's really stupid to do without picking up the two party members in Gilded Vale. Very frustrating and time-consuming. Now that I'm out in the wilderness with an actual party, I'm having a grand time.

Considering playing on "normal" mode instead of hard in PoE. Does anyone know what the actual differences between them are? Right now, I'm playing as a ranger with a wolf animal companion, and I've been having my character kite and bait enemies like a madwoman to survive. Only enemies I haven't been able to kill so far are those bears, which move too fast and do *way* too much damage to anything about. These shades and uh...creature names that I can't currently remember that have "king" appended to their names in the catacombs of the first town have been such a bother to kill. I guess I'm supposed to come back later, but I want it done now... (edit) Seems like I'll be playing on normal for now, given what the wiki says.

I know I must sound like a broken record at this point, but...really? Literally all the commercials I see for those make them look so abhorrently terrible. But...I thought the same thing about Frozen, Wreck-it-Ralph, Tangled, etc., etc.

I briefly considered testing a normal form youtube link with the https, but figured, "What're the chances?"

That's incorrect. It's the https that it's taking offense to as I said earlier, not the shortened link. e.g. (edit) Oh, cool, I just noticed this is Postmodern Jukebox, too.

I received a game, From ShadySands once before, But it's Batman, so (Steam, if I were to win a copy. Thanks either way, ShadySands, ) (e): Shoot, I can't count syllables. "Already" has three, not two. Changed that to "before",

You only have to post the YouTube link now. Also, don't use https.

I watched the third Hobbit recently, too. Most tolerable of them all, IMO...but still not ever gonna re-watch it. Such sadly mediocre movies.

As far as user-made music videos go, yours was probably the least obnoxious I've ever seen. ...Not that that's a very high bar to meet, all things considered, but it's something, right? (e): Uh, you didn't MAKE the music, did you? I assumed it was somebody else's music and the video was what you were posting primarily.

I discovered Pink Martini yesterday and have liked literally everything I've heard from them so far. Thanks friend who randomly sent me a link because they heard a song on spotify.

Why are there 101 users viewing this topic currently, and what was this about?

I got that board for my uncle recently (built him a computer). It seemed a little overpriced...but he wanted orange, so he got orange. Besides being overpriced IMO and a somewhat tacky BIOS, it seems like a good board with a good feature set.

Are people actually able to eat ramen like...once a day every day? I like ramen, but my digestive system stops functioning if I have it too much.

Wasn't there a recent archaeological recovery of some importance for that movie?