Everything posted by majestic
-
The All Things Political Topic
Trump fired Pam Bondi for mishandling the Epstein files and not being witch-hunty enough. Hegseth and Gabbard are probably nervous since Iran doesn't seem to fold even after today's destroyed highway bridge.
-
What are you Playing Now? Volume XIX: The New Beginning of the End of the Middle
No, there are no achievements for seeing both endings, unless they were added. It's been a while since I have played the game. Don't really see the point. Yes, there's some story and gameplay segregation just before you get help in the final fight if you roflstomped it before, but can roflstomp that even without being overpowered if you got good enough at avoiding damage. INSTRUMENTALITY!
- What are you Playing Now? Volume XIX: The New Beginning of the End of the Middle
-
What are you Playing Now? Volume XIX: The New Beginning of the End of the Middle
To weigh in here, yes - later in the game weapon scaling becomes much more important. You really want to have both weapon scaling stats maxed, as well as might. That is because at some point you'll be getting pictos with really hefty bonuses beyond anything your stats can provide you, but what they don't provide is extra base damage. What they do provide is massive damage scaling. Also, good tip, don't be like me and ignore pictos mastery for pictos you don't want to use right away or don't see a point in mastering. It's better to unlock them while playing the game than having to grind for them later, and yes, that includes the somewhat silly seeming pictos that insta-kills the character wearing it. Of course, you can also just learn every enemy patterns and spend hours trying to learn how to defeat the endgame challenge boss the "fair" way, or you can just hyperscale your damage and kill them before they even get a turn. Don't be shy about using your consumables and upgrade materials. You'll eventually find a way to farm as many colors of lumina as you want. Perfect chroma catalysts used to be limited, but even they can be farmed as of the DLC - although you probably want to use them to unlock the final upgrades for weapons that really help you deal with the endgame - again, don't be like me and finish the Endless Tower before finding your first perfect chroma catalyst. It is so much easier to go through the insane boss grind with, uhm, doing proper damage.
-
The All Things Political Topic
But windmills are eating the cats, or something.
-
Nvidia RTX Series
I was pretty sad when the 14600k did not launch with 8p cores like he said. I actually got excited because that would have been a pretty ballsy move from Intel, rebranding a 13700k as the 14600k. Would have made a pointless generation a bit better. Guess there's some irony in Intel doing that with the Arrow Lake refresh, but with the mid range CPU (what with the 270k plus basically being a 285k for half the price). Maybe I'm just bitter and his other leaks were more on point. I stopped watching videos of his after that debacle. What I was saying is this: don't treat RedGamingTech leaks like those from kopite7kimi. That guy must have some serious sources. :)
-
Nvidia RTX Series
Hello, my name is Paul, and here are the latest rumors and leaks I made up for you. The guy who kept claiming Zen 5 will show a 60% IPC increase over Zen 4 and who said that Intel will massively up the core counts on their 14th gen refresh (extra p-cores for the mid range and entry level lineup, even).
- Funny Stuff - Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it
- Funny Stuff - Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it
-
Intel Thread
It's too bad Arrow Lake wasn't where it could have been at launch. Eh, well, but if Intel can actually sell the 270KP for 300$ and still make some money from it (big if, I guess) then Foveros isn't making CPUs excessively more expensive. Which is a good sign, all in all.
-
Build Thread 3.0
You'd probably get the same results with a 5800X3D or 5700X3D. Game's GPU bound out the wazoo when you turn ray tracing on (and why wouldn't you with a 5080). You should try BG3 or Factorio and cry a little over not picking an AM4 X3D part up when you could though. :p
-
Obituary thread
Fixed that for you. Liked the larger than life persona that he became. Also some of his work - but none of his politics, obviously.
-
What You've Done Today...or yesterday...or what you are doing RIGHT THIS MINUTE!!!
Finally had to upgrade to iOS 26 - iOS 26 compatible devices don't get the iOS 18 updates with the current security fixes needed to fully stop DarkSword. Needless to say I hate every change Apple made to the UI. President Trump, it's not the hard working, illegal Mexican immigrants that you should lock away in CECOT. It's people who think changing user interfaces for the sake of changing them is a good idea, and round and lock up everyone who was involved in creating Liquid Glass as well.
-
The TV and Streaming Thread: Enough episodes for syndication
I don't see it, Wash and Zoe could just play their old married couple spiel without being too young for it, and Alan Tudyk's still a total nerd at heart. Nathan Fillion on the other hand looks like Walter Sobchak and the Dude had a love child. Guess Captain Hammer didn't lie when he said he doesn't go to the gym. :p Realistically, they've all grown too old for their roles. Inara could still work, because Morena Baccarin has this timeless beauty and charisma, but being young and quirky is a major part of Kaylee's and River's character, and Simon's just too old to be the idealistic young doctor. Edit: Also, while there are some posters here who probably think it is a good thing, not having Joss Whedon attached to the project is also questionable.
-
The TV and Streaming Thread: Enough episodes for syndication
Good to know the scorpions didn't get Frankie Muniz. They were after him for a while.
- What are you Playing Now? Volume XIX: The New Beginning of the End of the Middle
-
Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part VII
Cammy is great. Oh yeah me love new forum software, long time Outside of trying to make your party Unfair viable* (as in playing on Unfair the whole time from start to finish), she's actually one of the better companions - Spirit Hunter is a really good Shaman subclass. Offers good support, decent martial prowess and hexes - and she doesn't run away when you go down the more evil paths of the game - well, of course she doesn't. *Not a problem of Camelia alone. The various patches of the game introduced sweeping nerfs to many mechanics that were, while broken, a staple to make some companions really good to use even on Unfair. Some survived the nerfs, more or less. Ember went from deleting endgame bosses in a single turn to "only" dealing upwards of 600 damage per turn, so there's nothing wrong with bringing her along, but others not so much. There's a hilarious exception in Wenduag - with the new classes she does really well as Sharpshooter, if you don't mind having to babysit her, like, a lot, and with Lann being a waste of a party slot in this day and age, that's a win, I guess. If, uh, you don't mind having Wenduag in the party. Good old times of double dipping AC gains, pet levelling being bugged, Crossblooded bloodlines stacking dragon element damage buffs, Greater Vital Strike damage being multiplied by critical hits, Geniekind stacking and Loremasters being able to pull the wildest feats out of their butts. The issue is not that you can't make companions work on Unfair - epsecially when you play one of the stronger mythic paths, an Angel with a merged spellbook will, even with all the nerfs, still pretty much win the game, but you need to get to that point, and the journey is that much less arduous if you take properly min-maxed mercenaries. Playing Unfair is an excercise in making the game as easy as possible on your patience. Can't really recommend it. Much better to just play on Core Rules and have fun with the game.
-
Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part VII
Well, akshually... while scythe is not the best weapon class to pick for them, melee Liches are ungodly powerful. All the bugfixing made fauchards way too feat heavy to pick as weapons of choice, they still do great with Grave Singer, and a lof of the spells you get can't be saved or resisted against, so you don't lose too much from not focusing on your spellcasting abilities. AC double dipping has also been fixed a long time ago, but you'd still benefit a lot from starting out as Scaled Fist Monk. Probably want to go with the Legend path though. It's hard to say no to all the extra levels and feats you get. Makes your melee power go much more brrrrrrrrrr than anything you'd get from finishing the Lich path. Class progression is pretty much what you'd expect - Scaled Fist as first level (AC buff from CHA, extra attack with staves, the works), then Sorceror until you can do Dragon Disciple, then go Eldritch Knight and round out with whatever else appeals to you. If you don't mind hiring a mercenary instead of using companions, having a Skald is a hoot and a half, unless you give your character a class that already has access to rage powers.
- Music: Sharing and Listening - Where words fail, music speaks
- What are you Playing Now? Volume XIX: The New Beginning of the End of the Middle
-
Anime and Manga - New Season
Unless one actually buys into my idea that all of Rebuild is Anno's piss take on the NGE fandumb - which I don't even fully do myself - then the answer is yes, because it can't get any worse from here. Granted, I am almost completely unfamiliar with Yoko Taro's body of work except for NieR: Automata, which I didn't enjoy all that much, but not for reasons related to the game's writing (except maybe trying to have this big reveal that was kind of obvious the entire time, but I can see that working for a lot of people). I know the game has many fans on the forum here, but the gameplay was just cra..., ah, let's just say not for me.
-
The All Things Political Topic - world tidings
I've been expecting the Supreme Court to strike down the tariffs ever since Howard Nutlick's former associates started buying up potential tariff recourse claims. I'd say it can't get any more obvious, but with this administration, any more obvious was stretched to the limit with Trump's meme coin.
- The All Things Political Topic - world tidings
-
POST YOUR SPECS
Inno3D puts the number of fans in the card name. Not all that relevant for a RTX 5080, but there's X2 and X3 variants of lower tier models. edit: Great, thanks to the new forum software not having an overview of the amount of pages, I keep missing that there's an extra page. Ah well, I'll just leave the redundant information here.
-
What are you Playing Now? Volume XIX: The New Beginning of the End of the Middle
Yeah, dunno. Still have Shadow of the Erdree unfinished, but I'm so burnt out on FromSoftware games that I can't get myself to play it. I killed Moon Knight Whatsherface and then said "Yeah, that's it, I'm good" in spite of my progress bar OCD (having to obsessively scour the world for Scadutree Fragments also really doesn't help my desire to pick it up again). Which means I can't comment on Promised Consort Radhan, but the base game is full of steer manure boss design. It just is generally not all that noticable due to the open world design making it really easy to be overlevelled and getting some leeway in the fights. The game is the culmination of the arms race against players, with a major mechanical shift away from being able to react to enemies towards having to memorize attack patterns, and there's nothing in the game that more exemplifies this than Malenia's Waterfowl Dance. Sure it's easy enough to deal with once you know how, i.e. either that it is somewhat reliably cancelled by ice pots or that simply dropping target lock and walking behind her makes her miss the part of the combo that is otherwise undodgeable, in addition to doing a whole lot of input reading (note that incorrigible FromSoft fanboys will say that the game doesn't actually input read, the bosses just react frame perfectly to player animations, which just proves how far up Miyazaki's ass their heads really are). Her heal-on-hit ability is also a hard counter for a variety of counter attack and block builds that otherwise work fine in Elden Ring and even the DLC, where such builds got a boost by the Deflecting Hardtear basically turning your character into Sekiro from, uhm, Sekiro for five minutes, and they actually even patched out ways to hit trade or stunlock her. And let's face it, the first time you got her to phase 2, you probably died to Scarlet Rot because that bloom effect sure goes for a long way and has an incredibly unintuitive moment when it can be dodged. If your main takeaway for stupid boss design from the Elden Ring base game is anything but Malenia's steaming fountain of excrement you're probably playing with Spirit Ashes or in co-op.