Keyrock

You're right, I forgot about regenerate. If I remember correctly, Light magic tends to have more "powerful" or at leat instantaneous healing. Light magic is essentially cleric type spells while Earth magic is more ranger/druid type spells, if I were to make a cmparison to D&D.

No, Shamans have access to all the elemental magics: Air, Water, Fire, and Earth. Light magic covers healing. My Freemage is there to take care of that (Freemage, I believe, is the only class that has access to every single sphere of magic). I'm sure you could pull off an all mage party, particularly if one or two of the characters were the more hybrid classes, like Shaman or Runemage.

Heh. M&M 3-5 had that same difficulty-level nomenclature, and I could never remember which was which. Well, this game was patterned after World of Xeen (MM 4 & 5), so that makes a lot of sense.

Might & Magic X: Legacy. Starting up a new game on Warrior (Hard) difficulty. I only ever played on Adventurer (Normal) during Early Access, so this should be interesting.

I finally settled on a party and it only took me a bit over an hour. I went with Hunter for my main melee damage dealing class because I really like the sound of the Marauder's (what Hunters upgrade to) Harpoon ability, which can pull distant enemies into melee range (suck on that archers and mages). Defender for, well, defense in melee. Shaman as one caster because they're quite hardy physically for a mage, are decent at melee, and because they can grand master in arcane disciline, giving them high resistances to magic (they're really more a hybrid class than a pure caster). Freemage because they can Time Stop when they upgrade to Archmage, and beause Free Mage covers all the areas of magic my Shaman can't use. The best part: No elves.

I've just spent over a half hour in the character creation portion of the game and I haven't finished a single character yet. I'm the type that will spend 15 minutes just thinking up a name.

From the Grantland Shootaround:

Do you even understand what "power rankings" means? I'm in complete agreement that Miami is the championship favorite until someone knocks them out of the playoffs. That's not what power rankings are. Not shocking at all. I'd be shocked if he didn't respond like that. That's how he's wired. That's how you have to be to be an assassin like him.

Here is my emotional roller coaster as I read the details: An RPG from Paradox? Really? On the level? For really real? Color me interested. Elves and dwarves? *sigh* Color me far less interested. Huge procedurally generated map? Color me a bit more interested. 50-100 hours long? Color me a bit more interested still. "Crusader Kings as a RPG"? Color me very interested.

In the Video Game News That Just Gave Me A Raging Boner category, Cyanide just announced Styx: Master of Shadows. Stealth/Assassination-based RPG starring EASILY the more interesting of the two protagonists from Of Orcs and Men, a goblin, no less? Yes, please! On a worrisome note, the stealth in Of Orcs and Men was pretty pitiful, but that game was more built around turn-based-ish solo co-op combat than anything else. Seeing as this game is being built entirely around stealth, I'm hoping Cyanide (and Spiders?) completely revamp the stealth. One of these years Cyanide is going to put out something really special. They've always had great ideas and ambitions and they've always come up short. Maybe this time everything will come together? Please? Pretty please? Now, if you'll excuse me, I must think unsexy thoughts, lest my co-workers give me strange looks.

The Thunder have a heck of a streak going. They've won 5 in a row with wins over Houston, Golden State, Portland, and San Antonio during that stretch. Those are 4 of the other 5 best teams in a ridiculously loaded Western Conference and 4 of the other 7 best teams in the entire league. Obviously they will cool off eventually, but I hope they can keep it going for a while longer. A nice showdown at Miami is coming up next week. It should be entertaining. Edit: Since we're at approximately the halfway point of the season, here are my current power rankings: 1) Indiana Pacers 2) Oklahoma City Thunder 3) San Antonio Spurs 4) Portland Trailblazers 5) Miami Heat 6) Golden State Warriors 7) Houston Rockets 8] Los Angeles Clippers 9) Phoenix Suns 10) Dallas Mavericks

I hope so.

To the best of my knowledge, AwesomeOcelot is correct. While DDR4 will save on power consumption with its lower voltage, it won't bring any speed increases initially. DDR4 has a higher ceiling than DDR3, but you won't see it surpass DDR3 in terms of speed out of the gate, not for at least a year and a half, if the DDR2 to DDR3 transition is anything to go by.

This is probably my favorite part of the pitch: Of course putting it on paper, so to speak, and making it work in-game in an interesting and meaningful way are two entirely different things. I hope they can pull it off, because as much as taking a dude off a horse using the back spike on my pole axe is appealing, using more subtle forms of persuasion to get others to fight and kill off each other while you watch is even more satisfying.

That was awesome. He got called for a charge late in the game he didn't agree with then got T'd up for dropping some colorful language. So after that he just went into **** The Dumb ****, I'm Taking Over And Ain't Nobody Out There That Can Do A Damn Thing About It Mode and just started dropping bombs on the Blazers. That was some prime Kobe or Reggie Miller I'm taking over type ****. I still think LeBron is the best player in the league when he's playing as hard as he can, he's just coasting right now because the East is so pathetic that the Heat can get the 2 seed on cruise control. If anybody is going to supplant King James as the NBA's top player Durant is certainly the top candidate. Paul George is the next guy in line who I think has the all around game to eventually become top dog in the league.

Agreed. I'm definitely down with a historical-ish RPG, basically a more structured and story driven Mount & Blade.

Perhaps you should read something about it. Intel is only supporting DDR4 at the end of the year for servers because of the lower voltage. DDR4 will be released at 2133 MT/s, which is also the speed of the highest DDR3 standard modules, manufacturers sell DDR3 at 2400 MT/s. In the future DDR4 will be faster, but for a while it won't be. It's supposed to appear in enthusiast desktop chips this year too (Haswell-E). You are completely correct that DDR4 won't offer any tangible performance benefits initially, same as DDR3 didn't over DDR2. In a couple of years DDR4 will be significantly faster.

I enjoyed the beta and I am excited for the full release. I almost forgot it was this week! It's tomorrow, isn't it? I'm pretty pumped. I liked what I got to play during Early Access quite a bit.

Thunder won their 4th straight tonight and beat the Blazers for the first time this year (this was their 3rd meeting of 4). Durant continued his insanely hot streak with his 8th straight 30+ game, dropping 46 on the blazers on a highly effiient 17 for 25 shooting, including 6 of 7 from beyond the arc.

Those specs are highly dubious. The GPU is essentially a R9 290X, plus an octa-core PowerPC CPU? In terms of raw horsepower it would slaughter the XBOne or PS4, but how would they sell that at a competitive price without taking a MASSIVE loss on each unit? I mean those are high-end PC specs. I suppose in 2 or 3 years those components might be cheaper, but still.

I find it hilarious when white knights assume they know what the majority of women want. Of course, assuming they know best what a certain group wants and getting outraged for them is prototypical white knight behavior. It's funny that white knights see themselves as some kind of moral role models and waging the war on stereotyping when their actions are the very definition of stereotyping.

Teams from states that have legalized recreational marijuana have a 100% success rate of going to the Superbowl. This cannot be denied, it's science! As an aside, I'm partial to Smoke-A-Bowl as the name for this year's Superbowl.

Sweet. La-Mulana was awesome. I love me some Indiana Jones (the one with the Crystal Skulls not so much) and I love me some metroidvania, so naturally I love me some La-Mulana. I will most definitely be pledging to this. This will easily make it to the 200k initial goal, but hopefully it gets the half mil for mac and linux versions, or better yet the 800k for Evil Stages.

Indeed. Wouldn't be cool if they had side effects, or at least that you run the risk of getting addicted? I mean, like BruceVC mentioned, it's too easy to shake the disease/addiction via one of them super meds lying around almost everywhere. The Witcher games have that to a small degree, where chugging down too many potions can put your toxicity levels into dangerous territory, though they don't really deal with potential addiction. I'm all for drinking potions carrying with it a risk factor, one that should rise exponentially if you quaff large amounts in a short time.

Video games, like movies and television (or even music for that matter), tend naturally to gravitate toward attractive people in starring roles. Sure there are always some parts for fat or weird looking actors or actresses, but the vast majority of highly successful movie and television stars are very attractive people. I guess it all boils down to the medium being essentially the realm of fantasy and when you watch a good movie or play a good video game you place yourself in the stars' shoes (at least I do) and we all like to imagine ourselves as being better looking than we really are. I don't particularly mind. I do wish there were more broad options in character creation as far as body types go, but I guess not all games can have a character creator like Saints Row. As always, if there's enough demand for it, the modders will make it happen. So if you want to play a fat dude or a flat chested woman, chances are modders will hook you up (though the nude mod will naturally appear much earlier because priorities).