majestic

Took a chapter out of @Azdeus' Food Heresy (tm). Pizza with kebab. I guess any Italian boardies (not sure, don't think there are any that frequent this thread) will run to mommy to cry at the sight of this, but it is pretty tasty.

This is one of those "well, duh!" tests. No, really, are you telling me that unless you're hitting the CPU limit in games, it is better value to go with a less powerful CPU and a more powerful GPU than vice versa? Nice to see with the lower settings in Fortnite, where the better gaming CPU results in much higher frame rates due to both GPUs being far away from being GPU-bound*. So, basically, for any non e-sports scenarios, or unless you're playing Factorio exclusively and can notice the difference between 400 and 700fps, a 13600k/7600 will easily be enough. Go with the higher powered GPU if you're on a budget. Guess it's nice to have proof to link to. *Minor caveat, in some cases turning on ray tracing in games can lead to the 7800X3D outperforming the 7600 with the 4070 Ti. But even then it is really minor.

Great, I got the "Marazhai's last quest does not work properly" bug in combination with "game crashes on same map when making an athletics check" bug. Both of which are only resolvable by tinkering with the state and teleporting away. Le sigh. Up until that, there were a lot of quirks, but nothing broke completely. Guess I'll just finish the game without finishing the quest first. Savegame Size also seems to have exploded (such is typical for all the Owlcate games as they really just dump the entire game's state as json files onto the disk, which is fun for editing the save games, but pretty wasteful), and it broke GOG's cloud sync size limit. Good thing I don't need really cloud sync for this game. The game is also really inefficient. I can play Cyberpunk 2077 without my fans spinning up to the point of being audible, but Rogue Trader? Constant audible fan spinning. Not even BG3 does that, and BG3 also is pretty heavy on the CPU. Edit: Complain, and an hour later a patch comes out that seems to have fixed all three issues. Well, good on Owlcat.

Is the buzz gone? Can I complain about the 10 hours I wasted on Starfield yet?

Is the buzz gone? Can I complain about the 10 hours I wasted on Starfield yet?

Look on the bright side, at least none of us come from Wittenoom.

I think I figured out why Argenta hyperscales so much in my game. I gave her Extermination, a talent that is supposed to increase her damage by +1 for every attack she makes. The game seems to count shots, not attacks. Argenta goes BRRRRRRRRRRRR. Might be time to see if that Calibrated Heavy Stubber isn't actually the king of weapons. Sure, the Blessed Bolter Casing is not going to work with it, but still, base rate of fire of 12 is insane. So, probably going with the regular heavy bolter and the stubber as my weapons. Nothing wrong with switching guns for the heroic action single sniper shots.

That heavy bolter with +1 rate of fire for each kill does not work as advertised. You kill something with it, it does not update the rate of fire. At least not immediately, and really, who wants to wait for the next turn? The only saving grace is that it has a lot more initial damage per shot. Which is undermined by Argenta not being able to wear the extra rate of fire gloves, or the damage increasing gloves, since for no real reason it needs 70 STR to equip instead of 60 STR. Eh, probably going to switch back to the regular heavy bolter. Makes no appreciable difference and more dakka = more fun.

We'll end up at a lonesome house at a road in the middle of nowhere yet.

Oh, right, for a moment I thought that was because I posted a picture of a t-bone steak with sauce tartare and ketchup a while back, but you're talking about that little incident in the reading thread where Hurlshot and xzar_monty had the same conversation ten posts apart. I am not dogmatically opposed to ketchup either (and I certainly ate the ketchup that my steak came with ), just as long as we draw the line at slathering pizza and pasta with it. As far as food heresy goes, I like eating fries with lingonberry jam. I also don't hate pizza with pineapple and ham, but I do not particularily like it either, but that is me not liking ham on pizza, not being opposed to pinapple. Speaking of pineapple, injecting pineapple juice into meat is one of the easiest ways to tenderize it. It works wonders for duck and goose. Heinz - and I do not know if what we can buy as Heinz ketchup is anything close to the ketchup sold in the US - is easily my least favorite of the store bought ketchups. Now would be the time for @Azdeus to come in here and tell us that he does not like Felix, which is my personal preference, and then we would be done with the third time talking about ketchup in the food threads that I can recall. Ideally that does not come to pass, lest he shows up and posts images of his food again. I mean, that is basically the only thing the we ever agreed upon that was vile.

I fail to see how that is a massive bonus. Sister Argenta is pure of faith and fair in judgment. Your words sound dangerously close to heresy here. Anyway, I just checked all my plasma weapons and found none that would deal 2xINT bonus damage, is that gun for sale? Edit: The game is super schizophrenic when you are playing Dogmatic while still having all possible companions. I was standing next to Incendia Chorda, and she was praising me something fierce for being such an ardent follower of doctrine while I had an unsanctioned psyker, an Eldar, a Dark Eldar and a Cold Trader in my entourage, standing in front of her.

With all buffs and Firearm Mastery I'm currently at 23 shots per burst. Good thing the heavy bolter's magazine is 96 shots. Yeah so that thing has 250% armor and 3000 hit points on Daring, and it still died in one turn. Mostly because the Fanatic level of Dogmatic gives your main character an ability that allows a character to completely ignore any sort of damage reduction for one round. Naturally, that's... Argenta. I mean, who else would it be. Shooting a Plasma gun with 2x INT bonus damage is nice and all, but it sort of pales compared to a 23 burst from a heavy bolter dealing 150 damage per shot because somewhere in its damage calculations, the game totally breaks down. Well, breaks down. Camaraderie stacks off Ballistic Skill, and that is increased by 5 for every stack of Versatility Argenta has, and she starts with 2, gets one for every extra turn and basically one per attack. It also has a slightly bugged interaction (at least for me) with Firearm Mastery where the large heavy bolter base rate of fire allows for an impressive amount of single shots that all stack Versatility even though they really should not. Bonus points if Cassia's overpowered abilities herded groups of enemies together to die in a burst.

@BruceVC, You should really play Rogue Trader. You can live your dream to the fullest as fascist aristocrat.

There is a leaked Geekbench result. The score is pretty much the same as that of any 155H geekbench results, well, the single thread score is better than most, but Geekbench has notorious variances between runs. Now there's of course the issue that Keyrock mentioned, the results would indicate a laptop level TDP, which in a handheld device is going to be a bit of a challenge. Most comments about The Claw I read online are silly debates about the placement of the analogue sticks - mostly started by Playstation Layout Theists, a group of humans who should be burned as heretics they are (eh, I might have played a little too much Rogue Trader recently ). Well, CES is around the corner anyway. If this is really powered by a regular 155H, it'll probably be able to run most games in 720p at 30 fps (if they run, that is), and it'll probably be pretty expensive and really hot (in both the figurative and literal sense), but the rumor mill has it that Intel's been selling CPUs at cost recently while they play node catchup, so who knows. Intel might just be looking for entry into the market to put some pressure on AMD.

Huh, that was unexpected.

If you're dogmatic just hand him over to Heinrix. Good source of dogmatic points and you get an achievement if you turn in all the heretics and xenos in your retinue.

Camellia is an amateur compared to the Dark Eldar, on the other hand, that is completely lore appropriate. They feed on the suffering of others. He also has a romance that basically begins by Edit: Anyway, my game is a state of complete breakdown. Lines repeat during dialogue, rumors are finished but still active, there's some sequence breaking in the dialogue too as people talk about events that have not happened yet and lastly for some reason the game keeps referring to my character as both male and female. In other words, chapter four has been the original Owlcat experience so far. Edit 2: The dialogue also has a bunch of missing prepositions, missing articles and, even weirder, missing verbs. One can infer the meaning of what is going on, but this is a step back from Wrath. Not as bad as it was in Kingmaker though.

It might also be a custom 155H, that is entirely possible, so... yeah. Idle musings at this point.

Eh, somehow I forgot to reply. That is - was, with XeSS 1.2 out now - only true if you used XeSS with AMD or nVidia cards, as Intel is using an entirely different AI model for XeSS on ARC. XeSS 1.2 is looking rather good on non-ARC cards too, although performance is generally less than DLSS or FSR at the same quality settings, but XeSS with a lower rendering resolution can sometimes still beat FSR in terms of image quality (i.e. XeSS Balanced is as fast as FSR Quality while having the same if not better visual fidelity). Depends on the game of course. Yeah, that is going to be interesting. The regular Intel Core Ultra 7 155H would be enough for 1080p with Medium settings, or at least it was on pre-production sample notebooks from Acer, which makes sense as the Meteor Lake CPUs have (up to) 128 Execution Units, i.e. as much as an ARC A380. Still seems kind of risky, I mean, Intel's drivers improved a lot, but there's the odd game or two here and there that won't run at all, or just run terribly. Not going to buy a handheld either way. I mean, one that isn't the Nintendo Switch 2, or whatever it is going to be called. Still hoping they'll call it Super Nintendo Switch. That would be hilarious.

Argenta is using a heavy bolter. You find pieces of equipment here and there that increase the rate of fire, and under the effect of Firearm Mastery and Rapid Fire, she now has a rate of fire of 20 with a burst. With all the damage bonuses applied she kills groups of mooks or even bosses in a single burst, and her damage stacks to truly ludicrous levels with each shot. Anyway, I just equipped the Halo Device. Fun fact, the crap is bugged as hell, if you want to use it you need to go to an area alone - some external area, not your voidship - otherwise companions will interfere and it will not be equipped but still take up an inventory slot.

Chapter three is basically chapter four of Wrath of the Righteous. I just hope the rest of the game doesn't come apart at the seams as much as the content after Alushinyrra did. Anyway, my Argenta has Camaraderie now and it certainly does not work as anyone would reasonably expect it to. The bonus definitely does not go away one she no longer has any adjacent allies, meaning you can really just start with her surrounded by your party and then do whatever else you want. Also gave her Discipline which adds another stack of Versatility whenever she gets an extra turn. Which is fairly often. It kind of takes the fun out of the Space Marine companion you can find in chapter three. He's nice and all that, but he can really only use his Space Marine gear, and between his 3 shot burst and Argenta's 9 (18 with rapid fire), that's just... yeah, no. Argenta can also other heavy weaponry, and he can't.

Achievements are seriously bugged, at least for the GOG version. Two did not trigger so far even though I qualified for them, and there are four or five of them that unlocked without me fulfilling the requirements. I strongly dislike the former, while I don't mind the latter, all the affected achievements were for silly busy stuff like scoring 500 critical hits or dodging 500 attacks, but eh, could have saved those poor gladiators if I had known the achievement for letting them die is bugged.

Well, it's not anime, but animated. David Firth released another Salad Fingers episode a couple of months back, and... uhm... Yeah even for Salad Fingers, that one is a headscratcher.

There are some really strange interactions in combat. It is an Owlcat game, so I expect half of the talents do not work as described. Mastery of Time, for instance, seems to trigger at the damndest occasions. Cassia basically starts combat with three stacks of it, and I do not know why. Seize the Initiative proccs, and I suppose that counts, but why does it count as three stacks? The willpower bonus she gives out with Reveal the Light starts hyperscaling immediately. Not that I am complaining, but it affects everything else, especially Idira and her psyker buffs, which in turn leads to high resolve and exceptional momentum. I found that I am having a little trouble keeping her close to anyone for the effect to be worth it. The heavy bolter's effective range is not great enough, and she's constantly scooting across the battlefield firing at enemies. Focusing all my extra turns on Argenta makes her clear the battlefield, but she does so without being adjacent to anyone just after the first few shots fired.

The one thing I do not like about my current Argenta build is the ramp up time. It takes a bit to get really going. I thought battles would last a little longer than they actually do. Well, takes a bit is probably overstated. My Argenta stacks critical hit damage with every attack (and every stack of Arch-Militant's Versatility), and shooting 30+ bullets in one of her turns while having guaranteed crits means that after the first round even the measly Heavy Bolter base damage deals 50+ damage per hit, and it fires up to 18 times per attack. Still pales in comparison to Mastery of Time, which Cassia should probably pick up really early. Between Mastery of Time and Reveal the Light, Cassia's Lidless Stare can deal 100+ damage to each enemy in its considerable range. If you give her Finest Hour! from the second officer (everyone should have two officers in the group ) everything else becomes slightly irrelevant. Well, almost everything. Argenta was still the MVP against that one Hellbrute I found on a planet accessible in Chapter 2 (although in all fairness, not having a route there and having to create one with Navigator's Insight should have been a hint). I thought about giving her Camaraderie too, but right now, the way I play, she just does not stand next to other people all too much.