Enoch

It would be rather nice to be able to see fatigue levels outside of there either being an icon on your character portrait or not. Among other things, it would make the effects of Goldrot observable.

I know that it's possible to complete GM's quest relatively early in Act 3. The key to advancing it appears to be camping. Sleep outside of an inn or Caed Nua for a night or three and you should get a dream/vision/whatever that advances the questline. Or, it's possible that a script didn't fire correctly.

That's pretty much it, although a splash of something acidic (lemon or your favorite type of vinegar) is a nice addition. They cook quickly-- and cool quickly once cooked-- so it's probably best to toss them on when you remove the steaks to rest.

It seemed like it would be useful when one of your partymembers has a lower Athletics skill than the bulk of the party (e.g., because you're putting every point into Mechanics). But when I tried using it in that situation (a patch or two ago), it didn't seem to do anything. And I haven't yet tried again.

If a team is fully cooperating with a League investigation, a request for an interview of a team employee is functionally equivalent to that employee's boss asking him to step into his office for a chat. An employee who refuses that request has to know that they're running the risk of getting canned.

Repeat interviews are a common technique in large investigations like this. If the employee had refused to be interviewed and been fired by the team for his failure to cooperate, that'd be a different matter. Instead, what we see is the team taking the employee's side against the League. In the eyes of the other owners, the Pats had no legitimate reason to do so-- doesn't matter if it's the 1st, 5th, or 50th interview. Also, Kraft's generally defiant approach is probably what forced the League to bring in a very expensive law firm to perform the investigation. Not exactly the kind of thing likely to endear yourself to your fellow cartel partners. As for Brady, he has rights under the CBA that teams don't. Business cartels can smack down non-compliant member businesses all they want, within the terms of the private contract between them. (And assuming, of course, that they stay within the scope of their statutory protection from antitrust law.) But when they mess with the bargained-for rights of a unionized employee, there is additional scrutiny required.

After thinking about it some more, I've come around to the opinion that the penalties against the Patriots are pretty supportable. Ultimately, this is a cartel cracking down on one of its members for harboring possible violators of cartel rules and obfuscating the cartel's investigation into the same. There's no legitimate reason for the Pats to interfere with the investigation, and the consequences for such are a matter to be determined under the private agreement between Kraft and the owners of the other 31 teams. The penalty against Brady, though, I'm less certain of. It's not clear to me that a League investigator has the right to demand data from a player's personal cell phone under the present CBA. To the extend that that is a significant element of the wrongdoing that he is being punished for, I expect that the NFLPA will have a strong argument in the appeals process.

Don't the Wlidstrike talents only apply to melee attacks?

Well, more enemies means more of the stuff they're wearing and using. (3 guards carry 3 times the armor, weapons, and pocket-change that 1 guard does!) But I don't think that the calculation of what you get from containers is any different on PotD.

It's a common view in troubled nations throughout the world. If you asked folks in such places to list things that would make the quality of life in their country better, "decisive action by the United States" would consistently be in the top-5, and they wouldn't be wrong. Further, if you asked them why that hasn't happened yet, the tendency is to dismiss the real answer ("this country is not important enough for the U.S. to have a reason to care much about what happens here") and delve into conspiratorial thinking. While jockeying to contain Russian expansionism is of significant concern to the U.S. national security establishment, as a general matter, Russian petrochemical projects are of far more interest to Europe than they are to America. The U.S. is happy enough with their current anti-Russia play (i.e., riding the North American fracking boom and working with their clients in the House of Saud to keep prices low enough to starve Russia (and Iran) of revenue) that they're not especially motivated into serious action on every potential pipeline project.

The drawback of the Druid is the lack of a decent per-encounter ability between levels 4 and 9. You'll spend a lot of fights plunking away with a missile weapon to conserve spells. But he/she will be the party MVP in most situations where you know you can let loose with everything you've got. (Well, maybe second to the Priest.) And once you get per-encounter Sunbeams, fuhgettabowdit. Ciphers, on the other hand, are more consistently useful, but they also play the same in pretty much every fight-- CC the main threats, generate focus, and line up "beam" spells. They also have more interesting things to do in conversations. There isn't much druid-specific dialogue.

Yeah, that's pretty crazy. I mean, I get that they see deliberately messing with the officials as a more serious type of transgression than many of the precedents cited, but it really feels like they went overboard to avoid being seen as "going easy" on the defending champion and its celebrity MVP.

Anybody got numbers? I ask because I just completed Champions of Berath to the tune of 32994 XP. I get that it's a tough fight and all (well, it is if you don't use a few summon items, Firebug, and Returning Storm), but that feels a mite excessive to me. Is it possible that the patch didn't change XP awards for quests that were already in-progress?

This makes me feel like an idiot for meticulously checking each shelf to see if it had any titles I hadn't seen yet.

Yeah, there are reasonable arguments in favor of WYSIWYG loot and hand-waving inventory management with the Stash, but, in combination, they make the game economy even more broken than usual.

Honestly, I suspect that this was deliberate-- Obsidian wanted to make strong and interesting female characters, while avoiding the easy prurient route to audience appreciation. They decided on no romance, and they wanted to avoid tempting the audience into asking for it. So we get a devoted mother, a mystical maternal figure (if not literally a mother), and a warrior who has been raised with a somewhat genderless self-image.

i think thats because all of the 'known' Eora is south of the equator (it mentiones Aedyr being equatorialy and north(west) of drwood Yeah, I think that this is for engine/art reasons. Presuming that you keep "up=north" as the standard orientation, isometric-perspective maps look nicer when the sun is in the northern sky. The shadows falling 'forward' towards the camera help the viewer perceive the objects' height.

I've found that 2 ranks of Stealth party-wide are enough to get everybody into a useful first-strike position. One character gets more than that, to get close enough to scout out enemy composition before falling back to the party. My front-liners get a little more, too, just because they're the ones I want to get closest to the foe before initiating combat. If I wanted to sneak by more groups, I'd do invest more here, but, on a first playthrough, I'm too obsessive about finding all the cool loot and scouting items to risk not exploring every corner of the levels.

Yeah, I don't mean to say that the technique lapses on Flowers' college tape aren't something to be concerned over. More that I have little option but to trust that the team likes what they see in his work ethic, intelligence, and other so-called "intangibles" that will help determine how well he does taking on those challenges. (Among other things, I've never met the guy.) And NYG has a pretty good history with high-ceiling early picks who they put a huge effort into screening pre-draft. So, as I said, "tentatively happy."

Pretty boring first round, frankly. I want more Chip Kelly hubris, dammit! As for my Giants, I'm tentatively happy with Ereck Flowers. Looks like a classic "planet theory" pick-- former Giants' GM George Young frequently maintained that players with super-rare size-agility combinations should be snapped up when available because there are only a few guys like that on the entire planet. Flowers is 6'6", 330 lbs, moves well, has 2 years of starting experience with a major program, is only 21 years old, and seems to have the attitude and work ethic that the team is looking for. When a player checks all those boxes, you don't worry too much about technique problems-- that's what you have a coaching staff for.

Anyone care to explain this one to me? I assume you can get minus mechanics via gear or glitches or something? My guess is that it means that the trap will be detected at 4 ranks below the Mechs threshold necessary to disarm it. Either that, or you can now detect traps outside Scouting mode, if your Mechs skill level exceeds the in-scouting-mode spotting threshold for that trap by 4.

Engagement > Fighters have inexplicable mind control abilities.

Yeah, my current party is holding onto a nice wand for GM to use when they finally patch the silly per-pellet focus generation off of blunderbusses.

If you look in the save file, Sawyer has some thoughts on this for you:

It's really really hard for a CRPG developer to make a crafting system that (1) feels worthwhile, (2) isn't totally overpowered, and (3) can safely be ignored by players who'd rather not spend their time picking flowers.