Moira

I got inspired to try a swashbuckler myself (thanks OP!). I tested out both paladin and rogue but am having more fun with the latter so far. Sneak Attack allows rapier to make significant damage, and dual wielding light blades makes attacking satisfyingly fast. What kind of character did you end up making, Thalion?

I like the way you roll, supporting your favorite games like that! The big differences between the editions are outside the game; soundtrack files, wallpapers etc. Within the game the backers and pre-orders get only a few items, only one having other than purely cosmetic properties (the ring). So, not really missing much by buying the basic edition if you already have the extras in GOG. My guess is that you can't get the backer stuff in a newly bought game since backers had to pick where they redeem their backer code (GOG or Steam) and could only pick one.

That would be the hotfixes: created companions' lockpicking fix and... what was the other one again... Anyway that patch fixes things that were broken by the earlier patch.

There's more art in this thread than in all the tombstones of PoE put together. Thanks for saving my morning evensong and PrimeJunta :D I knew there was a reason I kept coming back even after limericking ended.

Rogue would give the benefit of Sneak Attacks, which work when an enemy is flanked or otherwise hindered (no stealth needed). You'll definitely want to pair your swashbuckler with a good tanky friend (the first NPC companion you can pick up will do wonderfully) and attack enemies from the side while they have their eyes on the tank. This enables you to wear light armor - maybe only clothes, that can be enchanted to have some Damage Resistance. Très chic! Maybe throw in a pistol as the other weapon, open with a blast and then rush to melee with the tank. If you wish to face your opponents directly, you'll need to do some tanking yourself; boost stats that give Deflection in character creation. Paladins and Chanters can be built as great tanks although such builds often involve heavy armor.

Barbarian is a cultural "other box" and doesn't describe what it it, only what it isn't.

Well, it does say "spell striking" and the arrow touches when it hits. Sweet bow!

So what should Obsidian devs now nerf to give us something new to start threads about? (Other than Ciphers, that's called already!)

Cool, I'd love to look into it. Can you give me a pointer to the source?

They are so very vulnerable and under threat that they write "kill all men" and "put them in concentration camps" on Twitter. Look up Erika's tweets (the offended person). That's the sign of vulnerability all right - openly advocating for killing the oppressors and receiving no punishment (even Twiiter didn't block her). But what do I know about oppression, I've been but beaten at work once some years ago. I drink my daily medications with privilege. I didn't mean Erika (I know nothing of them except that I don't like their tweets), I meant the people who suffer from the vilifying of expressing gender and/or sexuality in non-majority ways. In this case many homosexuals and transgender people. (And for the record, I don't think the oppression they suffer from makes anyone else's suffering less important.) That said, vulnerability leads to fear, fear leads to anger, anger may lead to radicalism... so maybe Erika's crazy tweets grow from being oppressed? But it's beside the point, the important points in my opinion are: 1) did the original limerick contribute to vilifying of expressing gender and/or sexuality in non-majority ways, 2) did the changing of the limerick oppose vilifying of expressing gender and/or sexuality in non-majority ways, and 3) was the changing of the limerick a violation against freedom of expression. I argue that 1) possibly (very much depends on interpretation and can be argued either way), 2) maybe kinda; mainly it sidesteps the original controversy but I think it's also a message that there was no intention of vilifying, and there's some merit in such a message, 3) if it was, it was very minor since no story content was touched and the backer was approached respectfully by Obsidian. Absolutely!

Thanks for answering! (Really.) Yup, I'm totally with you here. By which I mean that I understand your examples and I, as well, view with suspicion and distaste attempts at imposing beliefs on others. Where it gets trickier in my book is when we get to hegemony and vulnerability. To put it extremely simply, in a situation where one thing is repeated enough and conflicting things do not exist (or are vilified or are in extreme minority), this thing becomes de facto truth. It's the truth of the hegemony. Such a truth carries weight and is stronger beyond itself because it has the enforcement of the hegemony behind it. Such truths are arduous to contest - and sometimes they well and truly need to be contested - because of this, and such efforts may seem quite threatening both to those to whom the hegemony is accepted reality and those who are moderate and don't like strife. Hegemony is powerful, and when threatened, can cause grave harm. So that there can be freedom of speech, it may be necessary to protect the vulnerable speakers against the powerful that might harm them. Now, would this limerick constitute such an "artefact" of a truth of the hegemony that it's okay to attack it in Twitter and beyond and demand its unraveling? Many on these forums think not, many think yes. I'm personally not very invested in whether the limerick was offensive or not. I can afford not to be invested because I'm privileged; it doesn't affect my life or my peace of mind one way or another. But I'm not so privileged that I wouldn't know that currently people who express gender and/or sexuality in non-majority ways are in real life under very real threat all the time. Here's the vulnerability part in this case, non-majority gender and sexuality expressions are vulnerable and under threat. Here's my analysis. Now that the limerick was rewritten, the original problematic content, whether it was offensive or not, is no longer an issue and the new content pokes fun at people who take (possibly undue) offense (possibly to an undue degree). Nothing in the game's story was touched or censored. The change also was so small and the way it was handled so reasonable that I don't see any reason to interpret it as a gateway into a future of any noteworthy content censoring. Thus I feel that the outcome is on the side of good. From freedom-philosophical point of view I think it's not only important to allow people to have an opinion but also the freedom to change their mind. And that's why I think it's not cool to reduce the limerick writing backer's choice into caving under pressure. Azradun (and others), we can agree to disagree about this if that's the case. Thanks for having the conversation, that's awesome.

Weird thing that my comics, scifi and games continue to be full of good stuff. Well, some of them are rubbish, but no more so than they were ten or twenty years ago. What have your comics, scifi and games been converted into? I'd like you to ponder on what your cause here is. Why isn't it okay to criticize a content perceived in a video game, if one disagrees with it? We criticize PoE here at the forums all the time. We demand Obsidian to change this and that, do these and those things better, and sometimes call them to be embarrassed of making it buggy/too easy/too difficult/whatever. I read that stuff here every day. Why is the critique on the limerick different?

Kilts! Kilts are not revealing enough if you're a leg man. The point of a kilt is not in what it reveals but how it becomes. Then again, I think that of all attractive clothing.

Kilts!

He said it himself that he chose to rewrite the limerick to "spare Obsidian a PR nightmare". So it was the Twitter comments which practically forced his decision. Also, the Twitter comments caused Obsidian to ask the backer to do something with the limerick in the first place. Yet they're "painted with way too much power"? Ask Mary Sue and PC Gamer then, they both ran articles about those comments and how they influenced "the offensive content" to be gone. I support free speech and part of that is that people are allowed to voice their opinions on matters, also when I disagree with them or even think that their complaint is full of it. If I thought that people generally are so weak that they can't be trusted to make decisions, I wouldn't support free speech. Expression needs to be protected, which means that rules (e.g. on these forums) are needed and dialogue ought to be encouraged, but influencing opinions is not inherently evil. Even if those tweets influenced the outcome, even if the backer and Obsidian reacted to the controversy, I think it's outright insulting to reduce their choices to being slaves and victims to some tweets.