Keyrock

Brees & Co. took the defending champs out to the woodshed On a more somber note, sucks what happened to Alex Smith. He may be on a division rival, but I hate to see a guy get seriously hurt. Broken leg, yikes. 20 years ago that would likely be a career ender. With today's medicine, he'll hopefully be back and 100% next year.

They said the plan was to add private servers and instances (as well as modding support) ~one year after launch. So they released a shell of a game and are going to add in the features everyone wanted at launch a year later. I call this the No Man's Sky method.

Recursive acronym humor.

Muh Boys managed to blow a 10 point 4th quarter lead, which is CLASSIC Cowboys, but then they somehow still won, bringing their record to a lukewarm tap water record of 5-5. Somehow muh Boys are only 1 game out of 1st in the NFC East. The benefits of playing in a garbage division, I guess. The NFC East. It's Meh-tacular!

Off brand Chuck E Cheese's?

Good. Gooooood. Suffer Packers fans, join me in my misery. Aaron Rodgers has ripped my heary out multiple times. Hopefully this team maintains a sliver of a chance to make the playoffs then loses in week 17 and McCarthy somehow keeps his job. Kefka_laughing.gif

^ You couldn't pay me enough to drive up there.

That is indeed weird, random, and interesting. Also, disturbing. D:

I got to drive through the Appalachians during a major ice storm today. That was fun.

That's new to me! Cheers, I'll check them out further in the near future. Like the vast majority of Polish bands, SBB is mostly unknown outside of Poland.

That's right, I forgot we are now at the whim of our new Redmond, Washington overlords.

Let's see how high we can run up the page count before a mod notices. THQ Nordic has acquired Bugbear Entertainment and Coffee Stain Studios.

So is EA going to essentially murder Westwood Studios for a second time?

I'm praying for a Linux port of this gem.

^ If you insist

RIP Stan Lee. He had a cameo appearance in all our lives.

My theory is that Sun Ra is a being from a parallel universe that crossed over into ours. Syd Barrett briefly crossed over into Sun Ra's universe after he did ALL THE DRUGS and afterword he tried to tell our world of the parallel universe but lacked the language to communicate it, plus the experience broke his brain.

Well, muh Boys beat the defending champs, who look like they might not be defending anything this year. Zeke was terrific, as usual, Dak was efficient, if unexceptional, and we're headed for another 8-8 season, just as I feared. Our useless patsy of a coach will keep his job and we'll Groundhog Day this all over again next year. *sigh*

The tooltip for Dex in Elex says it affects ranged weapon damage but I have no scientific data to actually back up that claim.

What evidence is there that a scientist is a particularly well suited profession for a politician?

While I don't think rate of fire is that big a deal, it has its uses. Once an enemy starts charging you it's significantly harder to hit and the chance of missing shots and wasting ammo increases. Knowing I can squeeze off 3 shots almost instantaneously (enough to drop many enemies) that will all land before the enemy starts moving rapidly is a bit of a plus. It's a minor factor, though. In the end, once you're high level and have high-tier gear, you're going to be murderating the vast majority of enemies with ease, regardless of whether you're wielding a plasma rifle, a bow, a rocket launcher, etc. Not to mention that my best combat ability resides in my psi amp anyway. It's all about looking fashionable, as far as I'm concerned. Don't get me wrong, there are some sweet looking bows out there, I'm just partial to the futuristic look. That's the thing about PB games, they have a bit of a backwards difficulty curve, where the game is at it's hardest at the very beginning and gradually becomes easier over time. So the quest for the absolute strongest gear you can find becomes almost meaningless, because your character is so ridiculously OP at high level anyway. It seems counterintuitive to how you would want to design a game, but it works IMHO because the struggle is so real at the beginning of the game that being an unstoppable murder god at the end is your reward for toughing it out through the beginning. Plus, PB's world design and quest design is so good that it carries the game once combat becomes trivial. It does for me, anyway. Your point that energy weapons are comparatively weak to other ranged weapons and that seeming weird is valid, though. You would think a plasma rifle or a rocket launcher would be at the top of the damage food chain, but it's not.

The benefit of unique weapons, of whatever type, isn't always raw damage. Many of the unique weapons have lower or just plain different stat requirements than that of their more mundane counterparts upgraded to do a similar amount of damage. Because of the way Elex handles armor and because ranged weapons don't get combo damage buffs they way melee weapons do, I have found that below a certain damage output they are highly ineffective against many of the more armored enemies. I find that number to be around 70 or 75. Any ranged weapon with a base damage of 75 or higher is going to be highly effective against almost anything. The Redeemer has a base damage of 100, so it shreds through almost anything in just a few blasts. It does this with a stat requirement of 65 dex and 65 int. For comparison, a War Bow II, which also does 100 damage, has a stat requirement of 48 str and 71 dex, so it's more fitting for a character with a different stat build. Besides that, plasma rifles have a better rate of fire than bows, but bows have better range. The range on energy weapons is pretty piss poor, to be honest. More important than any of that, The Redeemer looks really badass:

Thank goodness joining the Microsoft family will provide inXile (and presumably Obsidian) with dedicated focus groups. As we're all keenly aware, focus groups are the key to maintaining creative vision.

I finally have the stats that I can use the Redeemer plasma rifle. Nothing and no one is safe now. Time to cut a path of destruction across Magallan. Edit: Holy **** the Redeemer is great. The damage is insane. I'm dropping enemies like Molochs and Chimeras with the quickness.