Katarack21

That boss fight is ****ing good. In fact, that whole questline is one of my very favorites. I especially liked that the main tactic at the end of White March, "CHARGE THE HEEEEAD!", proved to be a rather bad idea here. Heh. As soon as I realized poor thing's immobile I just unleashed Aloth, Durance and my scroll collection on the poor thing, it was very anticlimactic. Also, how do you piss Galawain off? I think I hanged up on him, but apparently it wasn't enough. You have to actually shut down the machine, I believe.

Had a paladin in my party, with all the abilities. Still kicked my ass--they'd cure the dominated person and then they'd get *insta* dominated again.

Maybe not rogues in general, but assassins get screwed real, real hard.

In my personal experience, the most *fun* I've had with a duel class so far is my fury druid/evoker wizard, but despite the massive amounts of blasting I wouldn't actually say he's OP...he dies *way* to easy.

Fessina is a *great* character, and I actually used her for a while because I think she's awesome, but gameplay-wise, well...I didn't realize she's a conjurer wizard, which means she's *TERRIBLE*.

It's kind of mystifying how some people are experiencing *worse* load times on PoE 2. I'm not saying it's not happening, I just don't understand why or how. In my experience, the load times have been *DRASTICALLY* improved.

Tyranny is *much* more focused on the setting, the story, and the characters than it is on the combat. It's not inferior; it just has different focuses. For what it's worth I love the hell out of Tyranny.

I don't understand this mentality. I get *WAY* more out of a CRPG than a movie, and almost as much as I do from a book. Most movies are fairly shallow; it's a function of the timespan. You don't get to slowly learn about a character of the course of two weeks. You don't get to develop a relationship with them; you just get told a bunch of things. Movies are entirely passive, which brings with a specific type of shallowness due to an inability to *effect* the world and *interact* with the characters.

Death Godlike is fun, but Island Amaua+Deadfire background opens up the most dialogues, I think, and really changes the whole atmosphere of the game.

Strongly disagree. For the first part of the game that's true, but by the middle its' equal, and at the last 3rd of the game single-class characters have it *WAY* easier.

That boss fight is ****ing good. In fact, that whole questline is one of my very favorites. I especially liked that the main tactic at the end of White March, "CHARGE THE HEEEEAD!", proved to be a rather bad idea here. Yeah, I tried that tactic the first time.

That boss fight is ****ing good. In fact, that whole questline is one of my very favorites.

Also, the whole "Your making that up!" statement about my having seen women walk up to men and go "Wanna ****?" is the *EXACT* reason that anecdotes are worthless. Like, literally worthless. I'm not making that up--not even a little--but there's no way to *prove* that to you. It's just an anecdote.

I recall the same thing. Not to mention the Rauataians have two millenia of expertise weathering storms, so I imagine they simply rebuilt the huts in a way they know is better at weathering storms. You are both correct, that is exactly what they did. And they did it by completely disregarding what the indigenous population wanted, and completely ignoring their culture. Because Rauatai knows better. Truth. It's reminiscent of the British colonial rule over India and their "civilising mission". Exactly and that is why the Rauitai are the best long term benefit for the DeadFire. A civilized modern empire is better than stone age savages with oppressive cultures. Savages? Really? And stone age--have you *SEEN* Neketaka?!

Ooh, you linked some literature! Let's take a a look at it. This is from the abstract (incidentally, right after your quotation, which is missing actual quotes or any other indicator of citation, cuts off): Huh. That doesn't seem to mesh with what you're saying. But it gets better. Golly. That's specifically important because it establishes that you cannot characterize gray matter as masculine or white matter as feminine - the two have different configurations and connotations in ways that both are and are not sex-dependent. Now of course, that on its own speaks to the statistical differences between men's brains and women's brains, so I'll link this again: while the grey-to-white matter ratios differ observably between the sexes, the actual significance of those differences is not well established, as women with less grey matter perform equivalently to men with more grey matter on identical tests. But of course, even if you didn't take a look at the article in question, you should already know about its contents, because this ... ... is actually about the article I just linked. It's a pretty good summary! Here's the handy tidbits you didn't include in your post. Interesting stuff! The article's full text can be found here. But, as we'll see, this is greatly recontextualized by later research. See, the studies we've looked at so far are methodologically sound but also older and limited in scope - the Ludders study (from 2011) looked at a sample size of 96 brains, while the Haier article looked at 48 volunteers. These are actually pretty large samples as far as neuroscience goes, and I wouldn't want to imply that these small samples indicate unreliability. But what they definitively establish is that the brain does diverge, statistically, along rough male and female lines. This seems like a good place for me to relink this study, from 2015, which looks at a sample size of 1,400 brains (you can't see me, but I'm fanning myself and feeling faint now), and builds on the Haier and Ludders work towards the conclusion that - rather than earlier notions of male brains vs female brains, or of brains appearing on a linear male-to-female continuum - the average person's brain is a "mosaic" of features, some of which are more common in men, some of which are more common in women, and some of which have no statistical correlation with sex. They also did a psychological study of 5,500 individuals (holy logistics, Batman!), with convergent results. But it gets even weirder, as reality tends to do! Emphasis mine. (I'm really enthusiastic about that bit in particular because it's totally new to me - I learned it while researching my post yesterday, and I wish I could have fit it in. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to!) So, let me see if I can sum this all up. A handy-dandy list may be useful. Per a 2005 article by RJ Haier, based on a sample size of 48, different distributions and ratios of white-to-grey matter are recognizable between male and female volunteers, but appear to produce equivalent general intelligence results. Per a 20011 article by E Ludder, based on a sample size of 96, sex differences between brains are structural, not linear, and cannot be explained away with "men sometimes have larger brains," or "men have more grey matter." Per a 2015 article by D Joel, based on a sample size of 1,400 MRIs, the appearance of masculine and feminine features of the brain is not linear and only predictable in the broadest statistical terms: any given person's brain is a totally unpredictable sampling of features that are typically masculine, typically feminine, or typically unassociated with sex. It also appears that environmental factors can sometimes reverse what is statistically masculine or feminine. I wish I could click like on this post twenty times. It's *beautiful*. I'd also like to point out that I linked to the study about the "mosaic" nature of brains earlier in this thread. :-D

You need scientific research to talk to me about women, mate. Think about that for a second. But here you go: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3110817/ larger overall brain sizes in men and larger global gray matter (GM) proportions as well as regional GM volumes and concentrations in women (Schlaepfer et al., 1995; Gur et al., 1999; Nopoulos et al., 2000; Good et al., 2001; Luders et al., 2005; Leonard et al., 2008). Similarly, larger measurements in women compared to men have been reported with respect to cortical thickness (Narr et al., 2005; Im et al., 2006; Luders et al., 2006a), cortical convolution (Luders et al., 2004; Luders et al., 2006b), and the dimensions of pre-defined regions https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050121100142.htm In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of – or connections between – these processing centers. This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests. The study also identified regional differences with intelligence. For example, 84 percent of gray-matter regions and 86 percent of white-matter regions involved with intellectual performance in women were found in the brain’s frontal lobes, compared to 45 percent and zero percent for males, respectively. The gray matter driving male intellectual performance is distributed throughout more of the brain. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hope-relationships/201402/brain-differences-between-genders It’s no secret that boys and girls are different—very different. The differences between genders, however, extend beyond what the eye can see. Research reveals major distinguishers between male and female brains. Scientists generally study four primary areas of difference in male and female brains: processing, chemistry, structure, and activity. 1) That first study is from 2009, and has been superseded and disproved by more recent research, like that I linked. 2) The second study is *very* careful to use phrases like "in general" and "on average". 3) The third is an article, not a study of any sort. 4) I use scientific studies to discuss science, like brain size comparisons and grey matter volumes. As far as "women" is concerned, anecdotes don't prove *anything*. They're literally *just things you've seen*. They don't reflect the wider world, and there's no way to tell if they're actually things you've seen or just things you've made up. Theirs no peer review, no testing, no *evidence*. It's just *your* claimed experiences, not anybody elses. I can just as easily tell you about all the various times I've personally seen women walk up to men they've never met before and go "Hey, let's ****."--but it would be equally meaningless. 5) You've made hard statements about how women "NEVER, EVER, IN ANY CULTURE, IN ANY TIME" do certain things, and that's *EASILY* disproved by five seconds of time in the real world, or five minutes of research on Google. The idea that it's biologically impossible for women to instigate sexual encounters just doesn't reflect reality. It's not "1%", it's literally a fact of existence. Whether women instigate sexual encounters with men purely for sexual enjoyment comes down to the individual woman, with a great deal of influence from their culture. There are cultures where women *exclusively* instigate sexual encounters, often for purely physical enjoyment, sometimes with men they barely know, and even in *our* culture it's common enough to have it's own slang term--"setting a **** appointment". 6) I apologize for the meme, I honestly didn't realize it had a curse word in it.

I read everything you write in the voice of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons – that’s you’re intention, right? I mean, this has to be a parody account. Someone tell me this is a parody account? They never do this. Never meaning the majority not the less than 1% that do. We’ve already proved nobody believes any scientific facts around this, only their own scientific facts. So unless you're actually a researcher on this topic and produce scientific evidence from your own research, you have no evidence whatsoever to back this up. We can all google for links that contradict everything you just said. So I said – give me examples from your own experiences with women. I've already given mine, and I'm giving no more. I have a hundred things in reality that are backing up because I'm stuck in this echo chamber So let me get this straight: You'll believe *ANECDOTES* before you believe researched, peer-reviewed ****ing science?!

My ship crew doesn't love me, they prefer to play Orlan's Head and the image they use looks strangely like my Watcher...Ha! I was so upset there was no special reaction for an orlan Captain. But... there is! I had different dialogue on my Wild Orlan, with special race tag in the text and all that. Basically, the sailors involved are horribly and predictably uncomfortable. Maybe it depends on the personality types of the crew chosen for the event? I'm playing a godlike with the Orlan base race, and honestly I'm surprised that I couldn't say something, too. I mean yeah, I'm a godlike...but I identify as an Orlan, too!

I think everybody has communicated their ideas rather well, and everybody seems to have a solid understanding about where everybody else is coming from. Just because somebody else is blatantly wrong about some basic scientific facts and I try to refute them doesn't mean I don't understand them or they haven't communicated their ideas. These things aren't opinions. There is no room for compromise on *facts*. You either accept that they are facts, or you spout some bull****. There are no other options when it comes to facts.

The piracy theme is just one party of the greater whole. The setting sort of feels like the Caribbean meets the political intrigue of Renaissance Europe. I love the setting very much, it's immersive and exciting and tons of fun...but it's not terribly original, it's just the Maluka Archipelago circa the 16th century translated into a fantasy setting. That's all it is. I don't mean that in a derogatory fashion; these aren't themes that are commonly explored in video games and it's a setting that isn't commonly seen in a video game, both of which are really cool. I just mean that it isn't some masterpiece of uniqueness and originality. Originality in a traditional fantasy setting is going to be more or less impossible at this point. Tolkien is the grandpappy of fantasy settings and you could say that between Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Golarion we've seen all you can possibly see. Taking disparate real-world cultures and civilizations from various points of history and transplanting them into the setting as discrete nations or realms is standard and expected. Edo era or Meiji era Japan, various Chinese dynasties (typically Han, Qing, or Song), ancient Rome, ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, medieval Muslim regions (middle east, north africa, and west africa generally), medieval India and sometimes British Raj India, and of course Europe. Renaissance is less common but can be found in settings that allow early firearms, Da Vinci's sketches made real, etc. Eora is no different here; at best, we can compare it to Eberron, where the setting uses established tropes and cliches but manages to do a few things creatively with them (for Eora it's the concept of the soul, the wheel, animancy, etc.) Planescape and Numenera are some of the only settings I can think of that I'd genuinely say are pretty original. Monte Cook usually has THAT going for him, if nothing else.

The piracy theme is just one party of the greater whole. The setting sort of feels like the Caribbean meets the political intrigue of Renaissance Europe. I love the setting very much, it's immersive and exciting and tons of fun...but it's not terribly original, it's just the Maluka Archipelago circa the 16th century translated into a fantasy setting. That's all it is. I don't mean that in a derogatory fashion; these aren't themes that are commonly explored in video games and it's a setting that isn't commonly seen in a video game, both of which are really cool. I just mean that it isn't some masterpiece of uniqueness and originality.

Yeah, I had to use the console to fix the stat bug in PoE 1's launch phase and thus never got any achievements past a few in the first act. Really annoying.

I never could, so if that's a thing let me know. As far as I'm aware, it's a Steam issue--Steam interprets the console as cheating and thus disables achievements.

I recall the same thing. Not to mention the Rauataians have two millenia of expertise weathering storms, so I imagine they simply rebuilt the huts in a way they know is better at weathering storms. You are both correct, that is exactly what they did. And they did it by completely disregarding what the indigenous population wanted, and completely ignoring their culture. Because Rauatai knows better. Truth. It's reminiscent of the British colonial rule over India and their "civilising mission".