majestic

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.

As a by the way as I need to play Raft with my nephew now, I just tried making a mercenary, right now it seems to be getting either a level of Hellknight or a level of Demonslayer, not both, as otherwise you end up with a level 19 horse. Like already noticed, something wonky is going on with animal companion levels right now. Demonslayer is probably the level to drop here. Are nice bonuses, but Smite Chaos prevails. @KP From Another World don't forget Spirited Charge, it's on the Sohei bonus list of feats anyway.

My condolences.

No, it's our fault, apparently. Something about changed transit legalities.

No more than five for Weapon Training, then you're good. The rest goes into Ranger for the bond, the additional spell slots and even more bow related combat feats. To make something worthwhile of Seelah, you either have to ignore that she's supposed to be a paladin and make yourself a mercenary Paladin (arguably not necessary on Normal) or go deep into weird build territory. The primary build that ignores her as a Paladin is making use of the tried and true CHA to AC stacking, i.e. you give her a level of Scaled Fist monk, a level of Oracle with Hellbound curse (as that does nothing negative at all for her), Nature as Mystery and Nature's Whispers, then add Archmage Armor as a mythic ability and use her as a Court Poet - but that only makes sense if you run a party that benefits from Insightful Contemplation (a bard song giving you bonus CHA and INT, as well as saves). 16 levels as Court Poet gives you one more level to play with for whatever benefits you like. That gives you a nice bonus to your defensive and spellcasting stats (well, not your party, but more in general), and if you spend the feats on her she can use Crippling Kiss, an Estoc found in Greengates to debuff enemies whenever she crits. You're not going to get a whole lot of damage out of her, but that's not what you lug her around for. She sings and casts buffs and uses Mirror Image and Mage Armor potions to survive. You can, with some, ah, well, let's say, some inelegance do the same build with another Skald archetype, like a Scion or a Herald, or just base Skald. That has the advantage of giving your melee characters additional attacks through the Beast Totem rage powers line (or whatever else you like, but usually it's the Beast Totem powers for additional attacks and that godly pounce given by Greater Beast Totem), but you need to make sure that you don't brick your backline's spellcasting - or anything that is a spell like ability and requires conentration to use. You can turn Inspire Rage off for your characters, just in case you ever wondered what that ability that's something about accepting rage in your abilities tab is for. A full Skald at level 20 has the benefit of being able to give out Rage Powers without that problem. The deal is, that, well, with your party setup, you'd not get much out of it. If you ever find yourself with lots of animal companions and melee characters, then by all means go for it. Now for Seelah's cheeseball build that still lets her be a Paladin. First, give her one level of Sohei and pick a horse. Then 11 levels of Paladin so she gets Mark of Justice, pick Boon Companion up along the way. Pick Long Spear as weapons for Focus, Improved Criticals, etc. because you'll eventually come across the Fabled Hero's Lance. Stuff your bonus stats into CHA, give her a +6 CHA item anything else you can find to buff her CHA. If you don't hit anything with her on normal, you're not using Smite Evil (Smite Evil gives her CHA bonus to attack and her paladin levels to damage rolls). Take Abundant Smite. Mark of Justice is a Smite Evil that works for the entire party. The primary reason pretty much any run in any higher difficulty in this game all but requires a Paladin character with at least (but usually exactly) 11 levels of Paladin. Use the ring that gives you an extra Smite Evil (hopefully you found it). Then... give her a level of Hellknight. No, really, she's not going to complain about having a level in Hellknight, and she'll still complain your ear off about them, but hey, whatever Seelah. Take Abundant Smite Chaos. The two smites stack, and most difficult enemies in the game are chaotic evil anyway. You're now at level 13, proceed to add another five Sohei levels for the funny Weapon Training -> Flury of Blows cheese @KP From Another World mentioned a few pages back, which means taking Weapon Training: Spears. Make sure she and her horse have the Outflank and Back to Back* feats. Mythical Beast and Mythic Charge as mythic abilities are useful. Mount with a Tower Shield equipped for the Mounted Shield bonus AC, then switch to the long spear you want to use. Smite your target, click on the charge ability and watch the chunks fly around. You still have two levels to play around with. There's a bunch of level one investments that are worth a whole lot, a Demonslayer level will provide favored enemy bonuses against the most common enemies in the game, a level of Bloodrider isn't going to break your pet progression and gives you rage (could even pick Limitless Rage as mythic ability) and to top it off the Celestial bloodline auto-good-aligns your weapon and gives a d6 bonus damage against demons - but whatever you want, really. Edit: Since I forgot, if you enlarge both Seelah and her horse in equal measures, she can still ride it. Do that. No point in not doing it, really. It's the primary reason she has a horse and not something like a wolf. Edit2: Testing says that something's not entirely right with Boon Companion at the moment. As such, use Paladin 12 for an extra Mercy and leave out the Demonslayer level. *If you don't know, enemies are flanked the moment two of your party members are engaging them in melee, no matter where they're standing. Outflank is active when she's attacking from her horse. No, it doesn't need to make sense, but it is what it is. That should also explain why Back to Back is a better choice than it might seem. Grey-bore is about as useless as he's boring. I guess you could slap four levels of Freebooter on him for that Freebooter's Bond (no worries, it does stack with Ranger's Bond) and try to make him more than a wet noodle in melee by giving him shield bash and use his dual wielding with an axe and a shield (courtesy of the Freebooter's combat style feats), but still... not only will he be late to the party melee, he'll also be dead really quickly. It's a problem Greybor shares with an awful lot of melee companions that are basically not really salvagable. The worst of which has to be a character you're probably not going to be able to pick up because it requires very specific interactions with one of your companions. Anyway. Make sure he takes Opportunist. Fill the remaining levels with something that adds some utility and continues his sneak attack die. It's really a bit whatever, sadly. The Bard level combat trick should make it possible for her to grab Shattered Defenses at very little opportunity cost to the build, which the other two paths can't really do unless you got out of your way to sacrifice feats for it that could be spent on something else. What she's doing in combat is basically casting Instant Enemy, Ranger's Bond and sing, and that's pretty much it. Depending on what you do with your party it's better than pushing Ranger's Bond to +5, and I don't think we need to argue that her personal combat abilities end up being much better with five levels of Mutation Warrior than with another five levels of Ranger. The question in the end is whether or not a +1 for the entire party is worth it over the Mutagen and extra Feats. Since we're talking about being at level 20, I'm not really sure about that... but anyway, it's not much of a toss up either way.

To be honest and with all respects to the video (Vital Strike was taken down a bunch of nods over the course of patching too) I don't think Aru needs more than 15 levels of Ranger. Yes, another favored enemy would be nice to have, and increasing Demons of Magic to +10 is a fine bonus too, but if you give Aru 5 levels of Bard and you have no other bard in the group, that'll be +2 for everyone and against everything. Depends on your party setup, of course. The other option is making use of Fighter Bonus feats, between the Mutagen gained from Mutation Warrior and Fighter Training, you're not losing out on anything, really. Except Ranger spells. Not much of loss, right? The only thing one needs is Instant Enemy anyway, and that's a level three spell (just take Abundant Casting). Either way beats a full Ranger build.

That doesn't mean it is not from Moria and won't Balrog on you pretty quickly.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, another thing that is great about the Coyote is that it's shape allows you to basically plow every vehicle out of the way at top speed without suffering any major consequences in terms of speed or trajectory. Traffic is just a minor obstacle. Then again, I also just plow through people on the street, that's just free cold blood experience.

The Coyote is the only car that's close to a bike in handling quality, and it is faster than all the bikes. I'm not sure if bikes can be used for quests where you have to put people in your car (your car, not a provided one), but traversing the badlands was the primary reason for switching to the Coyote, and ease of use made sure I never really went back except for joyrides on one of the bikes. One cannot. It's still my favorite way to get around Night City. Hop on the bike, wait for rain and drive through the city. Sometimes end up doing that just for the heck of it, not really playing the game. I still have two minor achievements to do, but I'll put that off until the expansion drops.

Drive around the city and the badlands until they're offered to you. Visually pleasing doesn't factor into it, none of the cars that look good handle well. Well, actually, one could say none of the cars except the Coyote handle well, but one can make due with some, and less so with others. Very much a function over form choice. You'll come around eventually, or you'll drop the racing sidequests too.

The average anime nerd wants to leer at virtual boobies and imagine themselves fondling them, and they're less interested in virtual male reproduction organs, no matter how natural it would be for them to show up. Painful, but that is what it is. After all, even in that dreadfully unfunny video that Chilloutman posted a while back they talked about anime being the last refuge of the macho, and that was a joke with more than just a small kernel of truth. TL;DR: Schlongs make you catch the gay and are too woke.

My choice of cars in Cyberpunk 2077 is as simple as it is functional. There's only one car that is the epitome of handling, speed and off-road capabilities: The Mizutani Shion "Coyote", don't leave home without it. No, seriously, all other cars just suck. A Rayfield Caliburn might be slightly faster, but handles like an old ass.

Bandwidth at least isn't an insurmountable problem. The added display and input lag on the other hand...

Huh, it looks like Animal Domain was fixed at some point and the companions really are lower in level over the course of the entire game. Is this new or did I miss a patch at some point? It's been a while since I tried a build like that, but I just tried making Lann a Zen Archer (3) / Divine Hound (1) / Judge (16) with the idea of using Everlasting Judgements with the animal companion in addition to being able to share them with the party while leveling the pet and everything else like a normal Divine Hunter Lann build (which doesn't get any teamwork feats anyway, just like a Judge doesn't), but it ends up being two levels short with Boon Companion. It's also not a problem with retraining because I tried a mercenary build and you can add exactly one level of another class that has no animal companion with Animal Domain and Boon Companion. It would still be good enough just to hop on to ride around, but there's no point in picking one level of Divine Hound. Might as well go with the usual Demonslayer.

Why would you do that? It is Ember and Nenio in the party, not either Ember or Nenio. Well, I always replace Nenio with a BFT mercenary, but that's just the cheeseball in me. Nenio is more than enough for a run on normal. It works as designed as long as enemies have regeneration, they are unkillable unless you stop it, just like trolls in (A)D&D games, like BG2 or IWD. You have an inspect feature in the game, by the way, that shows you all conditions and buffs that affect enemies, it is usually accessed by pressing 'y' and hovering over the enemy in question, but you can also click the inspect icon (magnifying glass icon in the lower row). It will also tell you which sort of damage you need to apply to stop regeneration. When it comes to electrical damage, random encounters should have given you a bunch of Shock Composite bows around the area, so turning regeneration off should work well enough with Arueshalae. Don't forget to apply Ranger's Bond, that's another AB boost for your party, and consider retraining her. If you went for a level of Vivisectionist for the mutagen, give her levels of Mutation Warrior instead, she can cast Sense Vitals anyway. Mutation Warrior will give her access to the mutagen and more feats. Right idea, wrong class. Edit: Unintuitive design/exploit that needs to be mentioned: if you have feats you want to take but do not fulfill stat point prerequisites, you cannot circumvent the requirements with limited time buffs before the level up, however, permanent buffs work. Feel free to drop a +DEX belt on your animal companions to give them the Dodge feat, for instance. The feat will still be there after removing it.

'tis the season for posting the Onyxia wipe animation, right? Warning, language.

If you don't have any points in Body, then yes, but that also depends a little on your operating system. With a Sandevistan with very low cooldown you probably can make do with just your fists, assuming you don't get bored. No investment in Body, no Sandevistan, you'll need the arms. Well, need. Technically not, but when the enemy boxers can one-shot you, the longer the fight goes on, the, ah, higher the chance for something to go sideways. With the legendary Gorilla Arms the cheapest Kerenzikov is enough to win pretty much every fight with absolutely no effort. Can also gun the psychos down to like 5% and knock them out in one hit, and the bonus to forcing doors open is nice enough. Arms look a bit weird in the cutscenes, especially during the romance with Judy, but that's something else entirely.

Go buy the legendary Gorilla Arms, you'll need them for the boxing subquests anyway, unless you want to skip them. Don't need no perks or anything to punch someone's light out with those.

Yeah, if you invest a bit in Tech and some perks dismantling everything and just crafting gear over and over again works much better than upgrading. Neither crafting nor upgrading is really necessary, not even on very hard though. Just use whatever enemies drop and you're good. Still, being able to craft legendary iconic weaponry at level can give you fun guns to play with for the entire game, like the Shingen Mark V. If you're using any quickhacks at all you need to be careful, some of them have secondary effects that destroy implants and cause real damage. Using Cyberware Malfunction on a psycho and punching them will result in their death one or two seconds after they go down, and Regina will complain your ear off.

I was talking more generally. Photo mode makes no sense to me no matter which game we're talking about, so it's all just nonsense from my point of view.

There's also a scene where the MC and Camellia drink a potion of invisibility and go at each other on the balcony of the Citadel in front of Irabeth (who comes checking what the noise is) because apparently half of that romance was written by E. L. James. edit: Romance!Cammy also gets really, really creepy with her dialogue.