majestic

Ember quest spoilers: Does that even work that way? It does for mortal souls, but what about demons? Do they get destroyed instead?

Does Hellfire Ray really send to Hell? Because that would be doubly cruel to any demon she kills with it.

The suicide option you have to pick right before deciding on what you want to do. If you have a save, that's over really quickly. No need to play. I did the hidden ending once and picked the Temperance ending at that point because it was what was still open. What a glorious waste of time that was.

Alone or with Rogue?

This... whatever it was, it made Mio cry.

Yeah, Perception 2 is pretty much a fixture in any Trickster run. Persuasion 3 is useful for builds that stack any possible bonus for intimidation. That is a fun build, but it also highlights how ludicrous the game design is. Basically one ends up taking a single level of Cross-Blooded Sorcerer for the Serpentine and Undead bloodlines, and adds a level of Witch for a Raven familiar, stacks STR and CHA enhancements with Indimidating Prowess, and so on and so forth. Either way, making use of most of the Trickster stuff requires in-depth knowledge of the game and available items, but if applied correctly it really is game-breaking. Yes. For all the debate going on in here about how to best utilize Arue, on a full Unfair run, unless you want the experience to be even more frustrating than it already is, most of your group will consist of optimized mercenaries, and it does not matter at all how you use Arue, because she just stays at home. The real difficulty of Unfair runs is less in the bosses and really more in the masses of enemies that spawn and swarm your party, and that they deal so much damage that even a random hit from an enemy archer can one-shot your backline. One of the hardest points of an Unfair run is Sosiel's graveyard quest (even doing it later). The zombies spawn on top of your party and proceed to kill characters in one hit, and you maybe cannot even react to them. Stat priorities shift from regular games at Normal or even Core. @Gromnir already mentioned improving one's initiative roll as a good way to make the game more controllable. Optimizing initiative is not a nice to have on Unfair, it is a necessity. Stacking spell damage through items and bloodlines is not optional. The quicker you can clear screens of enemies, the less chance they have to randomly chunk Ember into tiny little Ember bits. Last Stand is a staple of Unfair builds, as is the aforementioned Diehard feat on animal companions. Spells not affected by enemy Spell Resistance are king. Animal companions that are there to protect their riders also often just take Improved Unarmed Combat to get to Crane Style. Iron Will and Improved Iron will help with preventing involuntary dismounting, which prett much is a death sentence. Oh hello there, little swarm. Gibber. Reload. It is, and I'm never going to play a full game on Unfair again. Ugh. On a general note for the thread, has anyone tried playing a Sensei? Senseis get the Bard's Song ability and can make their Ki Powers apply to all party members at level six. How about a mercenary that can give out True Strike (until the Ki Pool is depleted). You can cast other fun stuff like Barkskin and Restoration too. Best thing about is that you can stop with the monk levels once you're happy with your Ki powers and Inspire Courage bonus and add something else. There's no spellcasting to brick without added levels, so slapping Slayer levels on the character for some sneak damage and Study would not be the worst. Some Fighter levels for Fighter's Tactics perhaps, then use a BFT to make it go brrrrrrr. Has someone tried the Elemental Barrage Geniekind cheese with the EE yet? Was that really fixed?

I have nothing to contribute to the thread's topic, but **** is not on the word filter, in one of these barely explicable happenstances. Much like ass and arse are not, but **** is and arsehole is not. Neither is butthole, nor asshat, nor bunghole. edit: Way to go to prove me wrong, apparently **** was added at some point. How am I going to call Twitter Twatter now? edit 2: So Twatter is not on the filter because it apparently can distinguish between words, but C0ckatrice, C0ckpit and C0ocktail are? Well, as Volo would say: R00fles. What twattiness.

The easiest way that is pretty much always doable (at least pre-EE, no idea about any changes) is to turn off XP sharing until you have a full party, reach level three in the Shield Maze*, give Lann a Divine Hunter level and pick the Leopard companion. Buff it with Camellia, send it to facetank the Water Elemental and win. edit 2: To explain, with reaching level three on Lann, you can give him the Leopard and Boon Companion, pushing the Leopard to level three. That means it can have Doge and Diehard, making it possible to withstand more punishment from the Large Water Elemental. You can (well, should, I suppose) cast Enlarge Person on your party to make everything have reach and hit more easily and harder. Charge in, pull them out, charge back in, as charge gives a nice chunk of extra AB. Use Glaives and the Masterwork Greatsword for the 1.5 extra damage multiplier to get through the DR 5. Other ways are kiting, because it is damned slow, or having a CHA to AC double dip MC - that way you can potentially push your armor class with buffs to a point where it's possible to withstand the attacks provided you can stomach reloading a couple of times. It has 'only' 17 attack bonus, but 37 AC is really hard to reach (more like impossible), so you need as many debuffs on it as you can make stick. Also, of course, do the entire Shield Maze before taking on the Elemental for all the scrolls and potions. *One of the things that is very noticable on Unfair is how many more enemies there are in the game. Combined with hogging all the experience for yourself (it is pointless not to until you can get out of the prologue and add party members or mercenaries), it provides a much needed level boost. That is even more of a reason why simply increasing the difficulty to Unfair for boss fights is not indicative of how a full Unfair run plays. That circular room in Blackwater that @Gorth had problems with - IIRC on Unfair that had three times the amount of demons. With much, much better stats. edit: Ah, ninja'ed.

Oh, that's one thing I forgot to mention, the Freedom Party's members of parliament used to come to the opening of parilament wearing cornflowers (it is tradition to wear flowers in one of your open button holes on opening day). The explanation given - in public - is that they picked cornflowers becaus they are blue (the party color) and that the flowers are pretty. Well, no doubt about either of those. They ARE blue. They ARE pretty. They were also used by the Austrian NSDAP branch as secret code to recognize each other during our own ill-fated fascist government (with the dictator coming from my dear friends, the conservative party - whose images still adorn the party headquarter, because far be it from only Nazi follow ups not learning anything from the past) where the NSDAP was outlawed. Yeah, every time someone cried Nazi, and they basically would go: Nazi successor party founded by prominent SS members wear secret code flowers that helped Nazis recognize each other in the past. Just a coincidence. Nothing to see here, don't play the Nazi card.

Well, not that it will convince you, but the Freedom Party's first chairman was former Nazi Minister of Agriculture and SS Brigardeführer Anton Reinthaller. In more recent times, long term leader Jörg Haider publicly praised Third Reich policies (particularily labour policies, with a wink at useless asylum seekers and migrants not pulling their weight), successor Heinz Strache regulariy participated in Neo-Nazi protests and Wehrsportübungen (use google translate, serviceable enough) and still retains contacts, and their current party leader is responsible for some of the party's best slogans, including but not limited to: Heimatliebe statt Marokkanerdiebe (Patriotism instead of Moroccan thieves!). Wien darf nicht Chicago werden (Vienna must not become Chicago, which back then caused the mayor of Chicago call and ask what's so bad about his city) Daham statt Islam (Home instead of Islam) Sometimes they pick up a caricature or two and change it: Original: Changed: Changes, focused: I'm not sure you'll get it, so let me spell it out for you: That's a whole bunch of anti-semitic imagery that could as easily have been taken from the Stürmer. Sometimes their members have songbooks full of great songs at home. Well, you know, @Amentep has it right. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. Nazis gonna Nazi.

Oh, look, I managed to make a new line in @KP From Another World's signature, and this time it wasn't bait...

@Gorth @InsaneCommander @Zoraptor Cammy spoilers, peek at your own risk:

The best ending is where Not sure what was so bad about the Arasaka ending, other than it being even more tragic than the others. Sort of.

Doesn't make any difference whatsoever. Also true for the prisoner you'll stumble upon later.

Whee, that reminds me, we'll also have a presidential election next Sunday. That'll be amusing, but only mildly. I'm going to cast my lot in with the guy from the Beer Party, because there are no real alternatives (well, there's a Nazi with a decidedly strange name for one*, a gay Nazi, a lawyer Nazi and some other joke candidates to pick from too). If it comes to a second round, which seems rather unlikely at the moment, I'll go with the sitting president, so he can serve his second time, or potentially more likely, cost us a funeral with full honors (currently 78, heavy smoker and the term is six years). Oh, right, the reason, well... our current Mr. President disqualified himself after saying that it might be time to observe what's happening on the energy markets. Observe, mind you. Not do anything about it. In late September. No, you dillweed, the time to observe was last year, and to act - well, it was high noon in February. *Mr. Rosenkranz, dunno, is that just me showing some everyday racism or is it weird that someone with a name like Rosenkranz is part of a party that grew out of NSDAP leftovers?

It's made fresh for the lunch buffet, so even if nobody ate any of it, it's no older than three hours, but I've been to the place every now and then, and they're always hard at work making more, so it's less. Certainly fresher than anything you get from a supermarket. Health regulations and inspections being what they are, Asian joints can't really afford to poison their customers at the moment. Particularily not after that little hooplah a while back where a whole bunch of illegal gyoza/jiaozi/mandu factories were raided by the police. I don't think we ever really qualified as dirt poor, but we were a single income, blue collar family of four for a long time. Some things keep sticking around.

Our local Asian restaurant joined the Too Good To Go service. Me, being the miser that I am, immediately tried it out: So, that's a whole lot of maki (regular and California with avocado, salmon and tuna), fried shrimp and calmari, Korean sticky chicken with noodles, fried chicken wings with rice, a box of potato wedges, some salad and a whole bunch of fried fruit with honey for 9.98€. The only downside is that the pickup time is from 14:50 to 15:00 each day (their lunch break, they close until 17:00), so this will only be viable for working from home days. Well, and you really need to be completely free of that useless feeling of, ah, dignity to go and grab leftovers, because while the app is trying to sell people on saving otherwise wasted food, let's face the facts here, this is takeout for people who are happy with whatever they get for really cheap. edit: With the perspective offering no real insight regarding the size of the boxes, that's two full layers of maki in the box, not just the visible one on top.

Obligatory Jim Beam video linking:

It is pretty boring to do, so it is best to install a mod for it. If you're going to use the cheese, might as well make it easy to use. I mean, sure, you could also spend ten minutes pressing Ember's cackle button and listen to her going HEE HEE HEE all the time, but that's not exactly fun, is it?

You can do that before combat, with the entire party. Protective Luck is a standard action, cackle is a move action. Just keep cackling and it will never fall off, once all your party members sans Ember has it you can cackle twice a round for... two more rounds duration per round spent cackling. Yes, yes, yes. This should be done with Fortune and Protective Luck until you have enough time on the buffs for the entire area.

You should try EverQuest 2 when a new Time-Locked Realm opens up. Before the game update that changed the system to be more like WoW's, it took crafting to a whole new extreme where you couldn't even craft anything beyond the basic items your chosen path offered without ingredients you could only find in the game world which was populated, at that patch level, with enemies you more or less needed full groups to deal with, and using items crafted by other crafting classes. If you were a scribe and wanted to write a spell scroll, you needed to buy vials of ink from a friendly neighborhood alchemist, who in turn needed the vials from a jeweler, while making paper yourself (paper that other crafting classes needed, like carpenters and tailors, for their designs/sewing patterns). Once you had everything together, crafting was a four staged process that had a completion and a durability gauge that filled (and dropped) at regular intervals. You couldn't just craft, you had to pay attention, because during the crafting stages random things could happen you needed to counter with a special ability. Like a loss of heat in a forge, or an excess of heat, knots in the wood you have, and so on. Using the right ability would boost your completion while ideally keeping your durability. Picking the wrong counter ability or ignoring problems would lead to reduced durability. There were also critical successes while countering and critical failures that could randomly happen every moment - the former would greatly add to your progress bar and maybe even restore some durability, the latter would pretty much guarantee that a level of quality would be lost forever. If the game would decided that you were exceedingly unlucky, you might even walk away without any results, a critical failure at the beginning might spell doom for your crafting process. If you start with a critical failure and the game then decides to give you no crafting problem at all in your stage (to boost completion and maybe repair some damage), or worse, a second critical failure, you'd slowly stare at the progress bars and watch your ingredients disapear. You know, the ones you either paid a premuim for at the auction house or went collecting with five other people who all had different things to pick up and wanted to do different things. Having critical failures as a blacksmith was even better, because exploding forges weren't unheard of and could eailsy, ah, kill the player character. At least the game was fun - when you were done with the attunement questlines, some of which took weeks or months to complete because you needed to kill one specific rare NPC for it who would only spawn once a month and only if you wrote a ten page essay in stone giant blood, backwards on vellum blessed by vestal virgins and read the essay at ten and a half seconds past midnight on the first day of a new moon. Okay, that latter part was slightly exaggerated, but killing placeholder enemies for a 1:1000 spawn chance wasn't unheard of, as were enemies that only spawned once in three weeks - out in the open. Back when I played I changed factions (the betrayal quests were the only way to have some class and race combinations in your chosen faction), and for that you needed a week long reputation grind, and something you really needed to camp named NPCs for. Good times. Good times.

Going through Rings of Power is an excercise in tedium. Roughly every ten minutes I check how much runtime is left on the episode, and wonder in amazement how long ten minutes can feel. The dialogue keeps being terrible. To give you non-watchers an example of the good dinner fun we're all having here: Galadriel, to Elendil, having just met Isildur: "His mother, what happened to her?" Elendil, staring at the sunrise and the visible coast of Middle Earth: "It is strange. Most of my life, I've looked East to see the Sun rise over the sea. And West, to see it set over the land. We're sailing into the dawn, and yet, to me, it feels like the coming of night." Well said, Elendil. Well said. Then there's the funny battle against the orcs. Basically, the villagers and Arondir the Tactical Genius, give up this position without even so much as a delaying action (sort of, more in the spoiler). Yes, that in the background is a winding mountain path, the only real way to reach the door there: They go to defend here, where Arondir suggests that their positions (atop the more or less ruined hovels to the left that were mostly burned down an episode or two prior) give them an advantage, but only after letting the entire orc force cross the bridge: That bridge looks like the ideal choke point for a fight. Like, totally ideal. It's perfect. The orcs for sure are going to stumble over each other trying to retreat, and it is going to be so much easier to contain them, especially since there's no way they'll be coming through that little wood next to the bridge to approach unseen, or anything, really... HELP ME, I CAN'T SWIM!

We do have a saying here: Give a cake to the socialists*, and there'll be a part missing, the rest goes to the people. Give it to conservatives, and the entire cake will be gone and only crumbs left over. Give it to (extreme) right-wing demagogues, and even the box goes missing. *Means our social democratic party, not socialists in the sense most of you people take it. And a joke: Ron De Santis, an American and a Mexican are sitting at a table. They're brought ten cookies. De Santis eats nine, then points to the Mexican and yells: "Careful, the Mexican wants your cookie!"

@Gorth you need to start treating your animal companions as if they were full-fledged party members. Just hopping on the horse with a shield isn't going to cut it. If you want Seelah's horse to be tanky, you need to buff it like you would your 'real' tanks, and consider giving it tanky feats, like Dodge, Diehard and Toughness and Back to Back. If you want to go all out on the defensive feats, you can pick up Crane Style by picking up Improved Unarmed Strike, which will not do anything for natural attacks. This is, by the way, another one of those ridiculous advantages of playing an Angel with merged spellbooks. It is really hard to beat being able to buff almost every useful long-term combat buff with but two casts - for the entire party once the Communal versions come, but it's not like the single target ones are significantly more work, and you can make those spells last for a day in the higher levels, and as if that's not enough, you can blast entire screens of enemies for 200+ damage per round with no saves and no resistance, or knock entire screens of enemies prone (while also dealing significant damage to them). We're all talking about how to best break the game and all that, but the truth is since you're playing a Trickster, you'd more or less need to know what you're doing when attempting to do so, otherwise the game gets harder than it would be if you for some reason picked a Cleric or Oracle Angel as your main. Consider for a moment the Paladin 11 / Sohei 6 build mentioned before, that works by far and large and is for most parties an ideal choice so there's nothing wrong about using that on Seelah (other than making your own version on a mercenary handily beating it out in terms of pure effectiveness), but @Gromnir does raise a more than decent point about a crit focused build with Gendarme at level 8. Paladin 11 / Gendarme 8 (Order of the ****atrice) will, with Trickster feats being available, probably outperform that - but that assumes that you've started out picking Perception 1 and moved to Perception 2 for Mythic levels 3 and 4 and you can spend your 'teenage' levels picking up Improved Improved Improved Improved Critical, but also need to keep in mind that as the name suggests, that's four feats used. Well, ain't we lucky that Paladins and Cavaliers get bonus feats? It's the same for casters - your casters can pick the Completely Normal Spell metamagic feat, which moves spells down a level, and yes, that actually does mean you can have all your level one spells as at-will cantrips or orisons. It lets you use Selective or Bolstered at the same spell level and gives you more ranges to work with Heightened should you so choose (there are buffs and other things you may want to have more of - even it it is just Instant Enemy ). It also makes Empower Spell a more viable choice, and you can then have little dear Ember, for instance, have Hellfire Rays with an insane critical hit range that are Empowered. Use a rod that gives you Maximize, and woops. Enemies that went poof before will go POOF. It is also very helpful to figure out how to get to Mythic 4 before doing most of Act 3. Granted, that's true for most characters, but particularily for Tricksters. You might also want that Arcana 1 pick before finding a whole lot of loot too. Trickster can be made to do ludicrous things, from getting weird feats to a 25 BAB to being able to reload item drops until you get a major bonus or making enemies fight each other instead of you, but for all of them, you need to know what you're doing. Playing Angel? Yeah, no, just open your spell tab and click one of the I WIN buttons. The only other Mythic Path that gets obvious I WIN buttons is Lich, but for Lich you need to know a bit about metamagic and Expanded Arsenal shenanigans* to really make their spellbook shine, and ideally go Sorcerer because Sorcerers are gonna Sorcerer (and Sylvan Sorcerers get a full level companion to ride to boot, because why not make the class more lol than it already is). *Expanded Arsenal sums up, not picks the highest. Expanded Arsenal: Necromany and put your Spell Foci/School Masteries on everything else you get your hands on will push your DC and caster levels further. Have fun with your CL 34 Necromancy spells that get +5 or so DC, depending on your feat choices. Makes you wonder what Owlcat thought when they made the Pickpocket background. Outside of edge cases there's no real reason to pick anything else. +2 to Initiative for free? Sign me up. Nothing prevents her from being on Bismuth. It's only 10 feet per round slower than a horse, and the point is not to get her directly into fray, just slightly behind it. Probably also depends a little on whether you play exclusively in TB mode or not. Getting Aru in place is not the issue, making Bismuth survive the ordeal is something else, and level 19 is hardly something to hold against her when the build's to hit chances are rather similar until 19 where Quarry inarguably really takes off (it is borderline unusable before that if you want to argue lost rounds of damage). That's fine, really. I don't agree, of course, and the Neoskeekers build worked well enough for me, at least. Of course, there's a bunch of things that do depend a lot on playstyles and difficulty too. Arguably, assuming @Gorth can put Arue close to the frontlines quickly enough, his Trickster should provide enough crits to make it win out with Seize The Moment. Especially on normal where hitting enemies isn't as much of an issue.

Yeah, I only glanced over your post before, uhm, posting. With the five levels of Mutation Warrior Aru can play make belief in her dream that every melee ally has Seize The Moment and threaten Attacks of Opportunity at 15 feet with a +6 damage bonus (at max level). Weapon Specialization and it's Mythic improvement and Weapon Training makes sure she deals more damage than the increase in Favored Enemy even with Instant Enemy factored in. That just leaves Improved Quarry out - which is indeed a very nice ability - and the +1 to Ranger's Bond. Basically, put her close enough to the frontline and she'll be playing Hawkeye whenever something moves or something eats a critical strike. With her DEX being what it is, there'll be plenty of Attacks of Opportunity for her. With Abundant Casting she has eight slots in level 3 at Ranger 15, that should be enough even without populating other levels. Technically Fighter's Tactics will also copy her Outflank, but I don't see any characters standing in melee without having Outflank, so the benefit is lessened compared to Seize The Moment, which has a higher opportunity cost.