PK htiw klaw eriF

Not in the release version, which I guess is both a mercy and a letdown

"Summon Calamity"

I don't think any of that on it's own makes the game sterile tbh. It's not like I didn't feel powerful as a Cipher (before the nerfs) and a Watcher....but I did feel a more than a little bored at many points throughout the game. I'm just going to say the combat mechanics and dry text bombs made the game feel like it dragged on, and there wasn't enough things that were funny or silly to kind of add texture. And the health/stamina in PoE sucked ass ngl. As the numbersman wrote I think there's a difference between relatively worse choices and stuff that is just garbage on it's own terms, like Assassin. WotR has too much stuff like that in it and it does amount to clutter you have to navigate around in order to get to the stuff you're actually going to use. "All the creatures you've read about in this book are nothing compared to the Polpovir. Barely the size of a man, what they lack in size and strength, they make up for in numbers and terrifying viciousness. Their lower halves are a mass of tentacles like an octopus or squid, but more numerous. The tentacles are long, black whips with suction cups on the underside and small thorny barbs on the top. The sheer number of tentacles gives them frightening speed when walking on land, pulling themselves forward almost as fast as a running horse. While they vaguely resemble a human from the waist up, any extended examination proves how wrong that assumption is. Long, stringy black hair falls from the top of their heads to cover a face taken directly from a nightmare. A wide, gaping mouth, cuts across the bottom of its head from ear to ear, full of wicked dagger-like teeth. Two large round eyes are sunken into its head, black as coal, shining with a malevolent fire. A small antenna protrudes from the middle of its forehead, ending in a small nodule that can glow with an eerie blue light. One can imagine a sailor on the deck of his ship at night, looking out across the black water, blood freezing as countless lights appear beneath the surface, rising toward him as the Polpovir swarm upward. Because they seem to be more octopus than man, they can collapse in on themselves, fitting into spaces no person should be able to. The smallest crack in a hull, the slightest separation between boards offers them entrance. It is not unknown for them to slaughter an entire crew from hold up to deck by infiltrating the ship from underneath. Fortunately they do not seem to have spread too far outside of the archipelago, but there may come a day when Polpovir attacks become commonplace." Absolutely not, any polpovir is getting burned to ash just to be sure it's dead. Not as well as I thought. Shifter Aspects are solid and Shifter's Fury works but I didn't get that x3 crit multiplier that you get with Shifter polymorphing. It's a 10 attack per round (before haste or items) with monk AC that can hold it's own though.

With gestalt and datamining I have once again abandoned Lich. I was going to do an Alchemist/Wizard and Grenadier works just fine but....god damn if Reanimator hasn't been living in my head rent free. So I'll either be going to Hyrule engineering school or giving (true) Aeon or Gold Dragon a go while I wait for the new archetypes to drop in the next updates. Time to do some theory crafting to see how a Gold Dragon Shifter goes. One thing I will say is that WotR has effectively killed Kingmaker for me. Make of that what you will. I'm a laughable centrist on PoE/Deadfire, it's a game that I don't despise (and sometimes enjoy) but long stretches playing it wear me out in a way that the Pathcat games don't. Aside from the armor system and double inversion, both of which can go die in a fire, I found Deadfire to be a competently designed game that looks and sounds incredible. However gameplay felt even slower than PoE for me, the storylines are a disjointed mess, and of course there aren't any sea monsters to fite despite that Monsters of the Deadfire book being pure hype. Everytime I go back I end up leaving after a few hours. But dat armor tho, Deadfire breastplate hands down destroys any piece of armor in an Owlcat game.

Well if you want a bad build in PoE 1 just pick Rogue. Trash tier class lmao. But I don't know if I'd call the PiE gameplay sterile per se, in a lot of ways combat is more dynamic than in Pathcat. If I had to hazard a guess I'd say that Pillars plays too slow for my tastes, the design overcorrecred too much away from tpks via fireballs to hew to close to wars of attrition via grazes. When I think on it I rarely played the games outside of the fast mode, and Eder 1v1'd some stuff for like 2 minutes once. Pathcat also has (sometimes limited) respec to get away from bad choices and way too many garbage choices. Part of the shortfalls is inheriting the system, but there's a lot of **** choices that I don't think add anything good to the game.

Some things aren't worth the pain. It's being unable to explain what exactly turns me off that bothers me. I just can't shake the feeling that I should be liking it when I end up throwing in the towel. Just weird. Anyways I've been going gestalt for the last couple of games and can confirm Sword Saint/Inspired Blade is bonkers.

Then that's 10s or even 100s of hours saved. I would disagree with the mod I linked taking down difficulty to casual, all it really does is automate your existing out of combat buffing and I don't believe that it can be used in combat. The problem is the structural gap between a pre-buff routine and a nekkid party, and it seems the game is designed assuming pre-buffing. ...but that is a technical quibble and I agree with the thrust of your post, a substantial amount of combat is decided on the spreadsheet rather than the battlefield. Stacking your stats up to the stratosphere is going to be substantially more effective than tactics in winning the majority of battles, which are definitely more simple than the SCS stuff or even GBA era Fire Emblem. If you want to play on story or casual from the start instead of having to be a part-time manager go ahead man, people should play games how they like. I gave PoE a second chance after playing WotR for the first and managed to beat it, but I got burned out by Deadfire. Despite being more componently made and definitely better looking, I just struggle to get into the PoE games. I can't quite articulate why, but they just don't grab me and eventually it feels more like a chore than something I actually enjoy. Somehow, the shoddily assembled jalopy game works better for me. Go figure.

https://www.texasobserver.org/teachers-strong-armed-to-get-on-board-with-houston-schools-takeover/ Not very good news, burning down public education to float charter schools will be a disaster.

The late-game crusade meetings are something else. To be EEEEVILLLLLLLLL. I kind of want to do it someday, maybe on a swarm run if I ever bother with that, as sort of a meme playthrough to see what happens if "I don't like you. DIE!" was picked every time.

https://www.nexusmods.com/pathfinderwrathoftherighteous/mods/195 Set it up once and save hours of time.

That's quite the downfall. You gonna merge spellbooks?

Henry Kissinger?

That's not fair, Zon-Kuthon showed up to do a devil's bargain with some horse breeders. I hated Diplomacy because the dumb fox lady wouldn't let me do my job. Daeran is indeed the mvp of advisors though, Wolijiff doing a ponzi scheme is also on point.

Yes.

Unfortunately if it's pnp accurate, we can't hurt anyone when time has stopped. He's a gnome now.

Then she's not that smart because in most non-sekrit endings Deskari doesn't die and in at least three endings the Worldwound stays open (and even expands for one). Really it's just plot **** and shouldn't be read into anymore than that. I'll guarantee that BG3 will be a mess for quite a long time. No horny vampire yet. My Lich is going to be power hungry from the start, rp'd as someone who came in search of power above all. I don't like making the Lich a skelly, I much prefer the decaying or preserved but clearly undead Lich aesthetics. It sets it apart from other undead and is more unsettling imo. I do like Arazni's more recent design but she's more of an outright goddess now so I went with classic Lich Queen art as an example. And you know who else was an anime undead monster who raised an army of the dead? Too bad Time Stop isn't in the game. No ZA WARUDO for my Lich.

I think the idea is that Iomedae outright killing Deskarii herself would unite the Abyss by providing them with a common enemy, and that in turn would get all the other gods and planes to jump in. Honestly it's not very convincing because some of the other gods and planes are already involved on some way or another....and because Aroden already did it back when he was still around. At the end of the day it's just an excuse to have your party deal with it instead. Anyways.....I found a mod for a Swashbuckler with the Rostland Bravo archetype. This is bad news for the Aldori Defender, who now has competition for the classic "While you were getting mythic power I studied the blade" builds. And after several rerolls I think I got my Lich down and will finally play an evil necromancer. I kinda want to do the silly little cat romance because

I think that was the first thing that got moded out lmao. Uh...I'm not convinced by the bear sex or edgelord origin but I'll probably play the game months after it releases and it's less buggy. I'll probably go with a College of Valor Bard.

Armenia.

I'm just going to stick with Uncle Dio and The Beasttamer who met a Catgirl From the Strongest Race.

Isekai has gone too far.

Enough to design a law specifically to target it. Construction is big business here and Perry Homes is a major Republican donor. However given the law's broad scope, it's more of an attempt to prevent cities and counties from doing anything in regards to business than taking out this regulation specifically. It's not a surprise, the large cities have been trending away from conservative politics for a while and are also where the majority of business happens, so the Texas legislature is trying to nip any "business unfriendly" regulations in the bud by preemptively blocking cities from doing them in the first place. Assuming the Death Star stands the results are going to be pretty bad, the state of the electric grid two years after an apocalyptic freeze showed how vulnerable it was is enough reason not to trust the Texas government at managing anything.

https://www.texasobserver.org/texans-die-from-heat-exhaustion-after-governor-bans-water-breaks/ As someone who works a job where I am outside for a significant amount of time, I can guarantee that this "Death Star" ban on mandated water breaks is going to result in people dying. The political ghouls and their business backers behind this will have blood on their hands and deserve to burn in hell.

Around here it's guaranteed to have fireworks being shot off (barring rain) as soon as fireworks are able to be sold and maybe a week after. I could deal with it if they stopped at 11 but they like to push it till the am. At least it wasn't until 3am like July 5th.