Deraldin

A good vanguard works on much the same principle.

But there shouldn't be anyone behind you to "withdraw" with. You really need to chain charge enemies to get the most out of it. Charge one, kill him and as soon as you can, charge another. I've seen people take out the colossus with repeated charges. Charge, shoot, shoot, charge, repeat. As long as you keep charging, you'll keep getting your shields back and the effect of enemy fire will be minimized.

Vanguard takes some getting used to the thought process that goes into playing one well. You want to ignore charge until you have it at least at level 3, preferably 4 with a couple levels of your class passive. Charge is not a suicide button. Charge is a "SAVE ME JEBUS!" button that you use when you are about to die. Shields are down and health is soon to follow, so you charge someone on the far side of the battle. You get out of the way and shields are fully charged. With a few levels in the class passive to minimize the power recharge time it becomes a lot less suicidal as you can chain them together closer.

This one has always bugged me so much. Angles of Death sounds like it could be made into a neat Paranoia supplement. And by neat I mean totally nuts and it will infuriate your players. Angles between 80 and 100 degrees are above your security clearance. All players must spend the entire session leaning at least 10 degrees off center.

Oh god, I'm only a day behind you. If I feel even worse tomorrow I'm gonna blame you!

Which scions? I don't recall having much trouble with the scions on the reaper as there was usually a lot of space in which to back up in while you keep firing on them. The only one I can think of is the first one in the second area as the Husks provide cover for it to get closer to you. Also, aren't Scions 2 shots for Shepard even on insanity? One to take down your shields, and another to take down your health? I don't recall ever being one shotted by them before.

It's amazing. I've hit a dozen husks off the map with it. You just need to try to get them to cluster up a little bit, remove the shields and BAM! Husks go flying in all directions. As quickly as possible. My preference is either nuke gun or collector beam. I used heavy weapons for all of maybe 3 fights in the game so I was usually good to go on ammo when I ran into a Praetorian, with the exception of the first one on Horizon. That one has enough cover around that you should be able to just slowly (ever so slowly...) whittle it down. Nuke gun won't kill it, but it does severely damage it. Take out as much of it's barrier as you can before it get's too close for the nuke and then let loose with the heavy weapon.

Area Incinerate and Area Throw. 2 shots husks.

Horizon and the Collector Ship on Insanity redefined my concept of brutal. Horizon is ridiculous on normal unless you've played and beaten it before. Playing it on higher levels is simply crazy. I ended up cheesing my way past Horizon every time. The enemies in that area are partially visible from the doorway. A sniper or the collector laser beam makes that fight a lot easier before it even begins. Oddly enough, I didn't have any problems at all with the Collector Ship though.

Even if I will always fail miserably in that assault against The Pig, Stronghold is still an awesome game.

I'm almost positive that silencers have been confirmed as a weapon modification. EDIT: A number of E3 previews mentioned silencers.

I heard it was really really hard even at high levels. heh. I started it at level 50 on the second playthrough and it was tough, but not overly so. It had a good level of challenge. Tale, have you played the whole thing solo? I was using a level 19 Combat Rifle until around level 46. I picked it up while playing in a 4 person game. Other guys could beat it in damage, but nothing had the full package of accuracy (95ish), fire rate (13.0) and bonuses to accuracy, recoil and reload speed.

I got up early this morning to stake out a store opening for some deals. There were already over 100 people when I arrived. Showed up an hour before store opening and ended up waiting outside for 3 hours before I managed to get inside. I did manage to snag a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD for half off and a nice sunburn on my arms, face and neck. Also walked away from some minor swag. No word yet if I managed to get any of the raffle prizes. Bastards drew for the ARES video card before I even managed to get in the door.

I checked and I missed quite a lot. Watcher's Keep: Taralash +4 (bow), Firetooth +4 (crossbow), Dagger of the star +4, Angurvadal +4 (longsword), Usuno's blade +4 (ninja-to), spectral brand +4 (scimitar), shortsword of Mask +4, Ixil's nail +' (spear), Erinne's sling +4, Staff of the ram +4 Regular SoA: Mana bow +4, Boneblade +4 (dagger), FLail of ages +4, Dragon's breath +4 (halberd), wave +4 (halberd), cutthroat +4 (shortsword), staff of the woodlands +4, Sling of Arvoreen +4, Carsomyr +5, Warblade +4, Soul Reaver +4, Crom Faeyr +5, Spear of withering +4. I don't think the Bows and Slings count as they use the ammunition bonus to determine what they can hit. The only exceptions are those that generate their own ammo like the Short Bow of Gesen +4 and Sling of Everard +5.

I switched over to the new ISP today. Speeds are only slightly better, but costs are significantly lower and I'm no longer dealing with bandwidth caps or throttling. We'll see how the stability compares over the next few days.

Just paint the golf balls bright orange. Then you can keep playing in the snow!

Much lol to be had.

One of the more entertaining replays I've seen. Zerg vs Protoss.

I don't think my backlog is quite that bad, but I've probably got around a dozen or so games that I haven't finished yet.

Any particular achievements you have a dislike for?

Look up helloween4545, he's good. If you're going to mention helloween, I'm going to have to toss in Klyka1 as well. I've also enjoyed Kikoskia and Mikelat.

There's a few seconds delay between the last building exploding and Defeat! appearing. Still, that's some pretty great timing there.

How did you manage to do that?

I've never been able to sustain a really high post count. I've occasionally managed to hit around 200 in a day, but then I'll end up not posting for a week after that. My post count on here is pretty typical. Around 1.5/day on average. How did you find the time to post 200 times in a day? As long as you aren't picky about the topics and don't spend too much time on any single post, it's possible to get around 200 posts in around 2 hours or so. I had a lot of free time in my last year of high school.