[Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part 6]

1 hour ago, Gorth said:

One thing this casual player miss, is a "macro" function to store a sequence of always used buffs for party members. Didn't BG1 or BG2 have something to that effect, where you could store several spells in a kind of trigger?

None of the IE games had this as a baked-in feature but, indeed, a number of mods included a component for keybinds to cast buffs by script. Unlike mods like the one linked by @PK htiw klaw eriF those mods were outright cheats as you didn't even need to have the spells prepared. You may be thinking of the Sequencer and Contingency spells in BG2, but those were very limited -so much so that enemies often ran illegal combinations by script- and best used to rapidly fire offensive spells with no casting time rather than buffing.

[Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part 6]

4 hours ago, Sarex said:

For garbage choices I still think there is something to being able to fail, it makes your success all the more rewarding. Now having said that I do not experiment that much with my builds so I haven't "failed" so far in any of the Owlcat games.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Fundamentally, if you want to have good combinations of choices, others need to be bad. That adds flavor and makes it interesting. I like that. However I like being given an option to correct my mistakes other than throwing 50h+ worth of play in the trash because it's where my build belongs and I cannot respec.

The game does have a large number of single choices that, by themselves, are bad. And when combined are downright terrible and will completely gimp your build. That's not so interesting to me and looks more like clutter. I don't think this is Owlcat's fault, though. It has been a long-standing problem -or feature, depending on who you ask- with D&D, but the tabletop experience is quite different.

[What are you Playing Now? - Games don't make you violent, lag does]

11 hours ago, Gorth said:

I’m so tempted to get JA3. Wish there was a playable demo as the disappointment that was the x-com remake still stings

I played Firaxis' XCOM for like 3h before I threw it out. Tried XCOM2, a bit better, but still fundamentally the same game. Expansion made it better, though that was not hard. Long War (of the Chosen) is a different story. It made the game genuinely good in my eyes. They really nailed the cat-and-mouse feeling of running a guerilla campaign against an overwhelming alien occupier, and there is now an actual strategic layer to the game. Mind, it still is not a "proper" remake of OG X-Com. That niche is meant to be filled by Xenonauts.

How about Aliens: Dark Descent?

[Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part 6]

25 minutes ago, InsaneCommander said:

Companions take part and in some cases you can even choose who will do the task. But if I'm not crazy, there was at least one event where they checked my character's skill level only. I failed the check and the DC it wasn't that high.

I may be mistaken, but I think companion bonuses sometimes apply even in KC's dreams. The implications are... interesting.

[Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part 6]

19 minutes ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

If you want to play on story or casual from the start instead of having to be a part-time manager go ahead man, people should play games how they like.

But my internet cred!
 

  

19 minutes ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

I gave PoE a second chance after playing WotR for the first and managed to beat it, but I got burned out by Deadfire. Despite being more componently made and definitely better looking, I just struggle to get into the PoE games. I can't quite articulate why, but they just don't grab me and eventually it feels more like a chore than something I actually enjoy. Somehow, the shoddily assembled jalopy game works better for me. Go figure.

Yeah, similar experience. I've tried to get into PoE a couple of times over the years and I've always dropped it after a couple hours. And yet I'm loving to hate WotR? Something's wrong here.

[The All Things Political Topic - Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex]

ima just leave this here

Politico - Rust belt on the Rhine

MEFO when?

[Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part 6]

3 hours ago, Sarex said:

But that is half of the gameplay/experience!

...you're not wrong.

I was aware of the different buffbot mods. And the fact that they are so popular highlight an issue with the game itself, in my opinion (and Sawyer's, I guess?). But I get the feeling that they functionally take the game down to "Casual" difficulty. So then why would I not just play on casual from the start and save time? I have probably clocked thousands of hours combined on the likes of BEx 3025, LWotC, Xenonauts... but I just can't stand how shallow the combat feels in this game once you get past all the trap choices, useless spells and mandatory buffing. I'm not sure I'd dare call it bad design, but it does mean that a significant share of the "gameplay" is in the character sheet. I'm not a fan. It's funny because I'm already thinking of what path I want to try next playthrough.

Heh, maybe I really should give PoE a second chance.

[Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part 6]

Sigh. I think I'm just going to turn the difficulty down to story and plow through what's left of the game to see the rest of the story. Can't be ****ed to deal with the combat. Already had a feeling that "tactics" mostly all boiled down to buffing to the gills and AoOing my way to victory when I was forced to do exactly that with Playful Darkness. KC is a Greater Dispel specialist spell master so if it's dispellable, kiss it bye-bye. Act 4 is more of the same, but somehow worse. Pathetic quasit? The azata path fight? Meh. Could go for Greater Enduring Spells so I get 24h short duration buffs and autopilot through the rest of the game, but I'd still have to go through the mind-numbing prebuffing ritual after every other rest, and I do enough drudge work 9-5.

Obviously the gameplay is amazing if one enjoys theorycrafting (or copying stupid broken builds from youtube...), but that's not my cup of tea. This game has really, really made me appreciate DOS(2) combat. I should have done my research better and found out why this is called mathfinder before starting a Core run.

[Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part 6]

1 hour ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

I think they put in one between them, Daring or something.

I just checked, you are right. Guess I mostly have myself to blame for the annoying trash then. Still believe the stat bloat is unjustified on anything below Hard, but I tend to lean more toward thematical builds than uber munchkin-ism (i.e. I might go for a rogue dip with Seelah, but I can't explain Crane monk with Camellia).

Mildly disappointing to verify that in a post-SCS world, CRPG AI is still dumb as a bag of hammers, and cranking stats up to 11 is still the bread and butter of 'challenge'.

[Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part 6]

On 7/2/2023 at 1:41 AM, Gromnir said:

'course why would a casual player know how op is bane of spirit or how to use skalds to roll stomp through melee?

Game knowledge as opposed to general rules knowledge. It's funny because I was just upgrading that relic... it just wasn't ready by the time I did Ivory Sanctum. Perhaps it would be better if they simply relabelled the difficulty levels and Core was called something else, given the general consensus about stat bloat. A bit counter intuitive, but I don't remember what the default suggested mode is.

[Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part 6]

3 hours ago, Sarex said:

I personally liked the difficulty curve, early on every fight needed thinking and later in the game you just steamroll the trashmobs. My complaint is that the boss fights are not hard enough, or to be more precise certain boss fights along the main quest line (the optional bosses are great). I do understand why they did it, as they want people to finish the game and these type of games already have low percentage of people who do that anyways.

I will not say anything bad about the mini game on the world map because for all it's faults it's still in another dimension compared to what you were forced to go through in Kingmaker...

My "complaint" is that the game is too long, which is not to say that I didn't like the amount of content, but I feel like they could have improved a lot of things by spending less time on quantity and more on quality.

Fair enough. I guess I should just accept that I enjoy the idea of playing D&D-based computer games more than I enjoy actually playing them, given the focus on logistics rather than tactics, and the utter paranoia-inducing dice dynamics. I get your point about boss fights, I've had the same experience when going in with a full stack of short duration buffs and the understanding that I don't need to save anything for later. I've self imposed the restriction to only cast short duration buffs after combat starts. I play turn-based and more often than not start with a charge -affording a surprise round- so I'm not handicapping myself too much, I think.

As for the crusade mode, I haven't played Kingmaker so I can't speak to how much better it is than whatever that one had. Not being "as bad as" is hardly glowing praise, though.

[Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part 6]

Really struggling to find a reason to play this game on anything above story, or without ToyBox murderhobo mode on. Random spiders with 45 AC and 20-50% undispellable concealment? Incorporeal minotaurs whose only weak spot is a +15 fort save but it doesn't really matter because they are undead so immune to 99% of effects that call a fort save anyway? 300hp "outsiders" that you can't dismiss and heal back to full after going down (effectively doubling their HP)? None of this is really hard -- I can spam hellfire rays with Ember or heightened disintegrate with KC to deal with the minotaurs for example, but I'd have to rest frequently, which is penalized by the corruption nonsense, which in turn forces me to go back to Drezen or buy sanctuaries in nearby forts... etc. It's a slog and much like the whole HoMM-lite mode, feels like it's fundamentally intended to waste my time. It's funny because boss fights are generally fun. It's some of the regular dungeon trash that I'm finding almost unsurmountably boring to get through.

But in spite of the excessive timesink design, the game is fantastic and I'm loving it. Top notch soundtrack too. Just wish they didn't balance it for the solo unfair youtuber crowd or something. 

[Random video game news... the critical eyes have it]

13 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Not only that, but the alternative backends that fix many of twitter's most annoying problems (e.g. my favorite, unofficialbird.com) seem to be broken right now no matter what profile or post I go to, which means I cannot see anything twitter-related at all. It's really dumb for me too, because I actually tried to register years ago, but every time I make an account, they immediately ban me within seconds. I mean, I can't blame them, it is me after all, but why, what did I do? I had never even posted/commented/liked/favorited anything, and I even registered from my home connection.

Twitter is the worst, to be sure, but I still get occasionally linked something to there and now literally I can't even check out a basic post.

RIP. Ol' Musky at it again, eh?

As good reason as any to fully move to Telegram.

[The All Things Political Topic - Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex]

Didn't see a France thread. Guess everyone's tired of seeing her burn every other year? Heh.

  

On 6/27/2023 at 7:43 PM, xzar_monty said:

Not impressed by that, I'd say, especially because 40 push-ups sound so meaningless: nearly everyone would have to train specifically for that, but there's just no point. After being able to do, say, 25 push-ups, you're not going to gain anything meaningful from being able to do more. It would be much wiser and a better use of your time to work on your bench press instead and try to get that up to about twice your bodyweight.

Being able to do more reps with a given weight generally translates to a better 1RM, and it will build endurance you won't get by doing the typical 3-5 rep sets while aiming for the biggest possible bench. As for the suggestion of targeting 2x BW, sure... if competition is the goal. For reference, 2x BW bench puts one in the elite category of lifters which is like the top 5%. Non-insignificant risk of a pec tear, where heavy bench pressing is overrepresented as a cause, also casts doubt on whether that's a "wiser and better use" of one's time.

[Ukraine Conflict - "Only the dead have seen the end of war."]

6 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

Interesting that it's Newsweek. I think it was also Newsweek that reported how nicely Russia took care to inflict as little damage as possible in Ukraine. Do correct me if I'm wrong. That article has been quoted here, too, and described as a "truth bomb".

Yes, it was a Newsweek piece, and similarly quoted a US official speaking on condition of anonymity. I suppose the main difference between that and this one is that the former wasn't officially disavowed by the intelligence community:

After this story was published, the National Security Council sent Newsweek a statement attributable to NSC Spokesperson Adrienne Watson: "Reports that any such intelligence community assessments exist or that they have been briefed to the president are not true."

Again, whether Putin is going to kick the bucket isn't the most critical question -- at some point he will and these predictions will finally come true. It's what will happen when he does. There's remarkably little reading material on that.

[What are you Playing Now? I name all the operations that go down in Taipei.]

On 6/1/2022 at 12:35 PM, Chilloutman said:

Still going through D2R with my Sorc and Hell is real pain. I did go hydra/frozen orb to evade immunities but still i find a lot of monsters to be fire/cold immune and/or groups where Flayer Shaman is immune to fire and Flyers themselves immune to cold. Grrr. It does not help that my resists are in negatives because I failed to find any good uniques AND Countess is immune to fire AND cold so I can't farm her for runes. Really frustrating. Now in act 3 - the pain act

Yeah, that's why my first character is a fishymancer. Could literally go to Hell naked and do well (slow, though). Hats off to people who do untwinked HC on, like, kicksin.

[Ukraine Conflict - "Only the dead have seen the end of war."]

3 hours ago, Chilloutman said:

I am not huge fan of nationalism myself but idea that social surrounding we live in is not at least partially affected by our ancestors which as group decided on set of morals they followed (eg, national identity per say) is false. Thats why states and nations are different from each other even if the structure holding it together is same. Hence Nationalism can be good and bad

Nationalism is a 19th century political theory that is centered on the idea that what you are describing can only be properly embodied by a nation-state, though. Hardly anyone but the most hardcore globalists disagrees with the notion of national identities, but a lot more people aren't big on the "state" part.

In this light, looking at the historical track record of nationalism, it's hard to rank it higher than "necessary evil" at the best of times.

[warhammer 40k: rogue trader]

1 hour ago, Gromnir said:

heck, look on this board and see how obsidian responds to bug reporting from the community.

Obs use Jira (or something that looks a lot like it) for issue tracking and posting workarounds, but they rarely engage here directly. For TOW, the publisher handled that entirely if memory serves. I have no clue how Owlcat does it, but it can't be much worse than what Larian has for BG3 (internal report form and forums - rarely any dev responses there either) or, heh, CIG's Issue Council.

I think opacity in issue management is something game developers in general could get better at, but it's an ongoing process. Obs have certainly got better at it than they were back in 2004, but then, it would be a bit of a red flag if they hadn't. So perhaps Owlcat have learned some lessons?

[What are you Playing Now? I name all the operations that go down in Taipei.]

On 5/27/2022 at 8:56 AM, Bartimaeus said:

Yeah, not advocating for/against DDG* or the necessity of privacy for searches like that...just that people should be aware that there still isn't any from just using DDG. For browsing, pay for a reputable no-logging VPN or use Tor while also maintaining a separate sandbox with agent/fingerprint spoofing to probably reclaim some semblance of privacy. That should certainly be enough for non-illegal activities, since nobody's going to try to put together a complete picture of what happened where and when to be able to connect it to you if the activity wasn't Serious Business levels of illegal to begin with. And if it was...well, that's probably beyond my level to provide useful advice for (and I wouldn't want to anyways - for me, it's a strong "yes" to a reasonable degree of privacy, but an equally strong "no" to platforms that sell drugs, weapons, confidential information, and/or people).

*Though if DDG's search operators and results weren't hot garbage, it sure would be easier to advocate for them. Their horrible, no good, very bad Bing-derived results are...well, just that.

Agreed.

Just a few remarks on top of that. "No-logging" VPN vendors are a bit of a misnomer. They have to keep some logs for their network infrastructure to work. They just promise to delete them and/or not hand them over to different jurisdictions when required to do so. Some browsers (Opera, Epic) already include built-in encrypted proxy functions, but of course, they aren't actual VPNs so only the browser traffic is encrypted before leaving your endpoint -- meaning some traffic can "leak" through and in theory be traced back to you. And also, "if you're good at something never do it for free", etc. Tor is okay but as mentioned nodes may be compromised and also more and more providers are starting to block Tor nodes as a matter of course.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution, but a combination of measures can make it so it's unreasonably difficult for your ISP to know about your Skyrim adult mods searches. I, of course, use nothing whatsoever because I'm lazy. Welp, hope my boss doesn't find out I guess.

For Serious Business levels of illegal, just hire a botnet. Or even better, make your own and get hired by Israeli intelligence or something.

[What are you Playing Now? Who needs a life anyway?...]

In a fun turn of events, my computer suddenly shut itself down and a distinct burning smell started coming out of my video card. Right, RIP my GPU and all that. However, it still works and there are no exploded capacitors or any obvious damage that I can see after detaching the cooling block to clean it a bit and apply new thermal paste. It's not even overheating. Maybe a bit of lint burned in there and that caused a temporary short which triggered the PSU auto-shutdown or something. Anyway, I'm not going to push my luck because it's a really bad time to be left without a graphics card. I'll bring it to the shop to have it taken a look at next week, maybe.

So, on topic... I guess I will still not be finishing Cyberpunk for the time being, heh.

[ranDom vIdeO game news]

Witcher devs team up with Dying Light 2 studio for new fantasy RPG

Maybe this time they'll do a proper Hellraid instead of a lame and broken DLC for a game where it makes no sense.

[Ukraine Conflict - "Only the dead have seen the end of war."]

9 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

 especially given that people often label sources as not acceptable purely on the basis of their personal ideologies and partisan politics.

This is absolutely priceless considering the context of this whole exchange. I mean, I was here giving Darkpriest **** for posting edgy ZH stuff before it was cool. But whatever, don't let me get in the way of this inspiring exercise of critical thinking and grand showcase of journalistic excellence.

bonus: here's what British tabloids have to say on the subject of POW interviews.

[Ukraine Conflict - "Only the dead have seen the end of war."]

3 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Also interesting how the natural counterpoint (i.e. coming out every time in a knee-jerk reaction) to Russian propaganda is a "British tabloid". As if someone here is using that a source.

lmfao

Guy, someone posted a Metro piece about Russian commanders executing their own soldiers right last page. But yeah, who's using British tabloids as a source?

In terms of "countless", how many books has the writer of that piece authored?

[Ukraine Conflict - "Only the dead have seen the end of war."]

2 hours ago, Elerond said:

You don't?

Nah, I've been mindlessly reposting every "OSINT" report about ghost aces and any British tabloid piece regarding faulty nukes that I could get my hands on, but always prefaced by a lazy "reportedly" caveat emptor. Ain't nobody got time to check if the authors have written literally literally countless books.

Man, I love the smell of self-satisfied farting in the morning.

[Ukraine Conflict - "Only the dead have seen the end of war."]

Would that we held every journalist, outlet, commentator and "anonymous source" to those standards.

Heh.