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Everything posted by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy
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Plus, in game world physics, "Might" is based in part on the power of your soul, and we know souls aren't gendered, because there are plenty of examples in the game fiction of people being other genders or other races or even other species in prior lives. If you have a strong soul, the physical body is secondary. I've pointed this out before in other threads, but gender and race just matter a lot less in Eora because they aren't fixed, and the soul is more important anyway; every non-diety character in game has in the past been male, female, orlan, human, dwarf, etc., at least over a long enough timeframe. and even some of the dieties manifest as male or female alternatively depending. In Eora, the body is just the husk.
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You may have asked this rhetorically but there is, in fact, a very clear answer to this question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Intolerance cannot and should not be tolerated. The intolerant are not engaging in debate in good faith; they are attempting to use the tools of good faith debate to destabilize and dominate. At this point these days in America, if your first reaction to a work of fiction with actual female characters in it is "UGH SJW," there's no point to further discussion. Social justice is not a pejorative, it is a moral imperative.
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Maybe it's a personal/cultural thing? I know several women who are perfectly comfortable with some friendly roughhousing/backslapping/whatever. Also, women in Eora appear to enjoy greater equity with men than women in real life - everything in the PoE universe is less gendered, with a few exceptions for political roles. Part of that is probably for ease of narrative design (it would be costly to write separate minor behaviors for every character on the basis of gender), but I prefer to just chalk it up to "hey, this is just how things are in this world." The real-world cultural mores that make you feel like Eder's behavior is out of place might just not be present in Eora. I get the sense that gender distinctions just matter a lot less in Eora, possibly because reincarnation is a proven fact. If you know, for a fact, that everyone you talk to has been male, female, squirrel, dragon, whatever, in past lives, all those distinctions probably matter less. On a long enough timeframe, everyone in Eora is not only transgender but trans-species.
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The nice thing about those items is they let you refine your build a bit right at the start without having to go full +2 everything (which imho is absolutely gamebreaking). The belt is especially nice, as it lets you drop your base con down two points lower, which is two points you can safely allocate elsewhere.
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You think that's bad, at leas tthe buff has a long duration. Mental binding has three seconds of cast time and three seconds of recovery ---- and six seconds of duration on the effect. It literally paralyzes you for as long as it paralyzes the target. (Yes, there's dex/int, but there's also miss and graze).
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The build I've basically settled on for a single-class Ascendant. 1) high might/int/per, con to 7, resolve to 5 2) take antipathetic field (good foe beam power) at first level and Arms Bearer talent at 2nd 3) arquebus, pistols/blunderbuss, quarterstaff in the final slot 4) open with gun salvo and then close with the quarterstaff 5) focus on metaphysics skill (to use with the good unique quarterstaff) Even that's probably nonoptimal though and might be better with bows instead of guns. For powers, take as many passives as you feel comfortable doing. Because you'll be only casting while Ascended, focus cost isn't a consideration, just utility (this is why you skip whisper of treason, since you'll be taking othre charms at higher levels). Pain Block and Body Attunement are your must picks; ringleader and/or puppet master are very good; disintegrate, amp wave, time parasite. Having a source of crushing damage is a necessity in this game, and the quarterstaff does great DPS, lets you engage "at range" and has a useful defensive modal. Club is another excellent choice but there's only one good club and it doesn't compare to the two good quarterstaffs, and you need damage, so I generally prefer to let some other party member club-modal my targets for me.
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Oh definitely, but to be fast requires a certain amount of specific strength/endurance whereas I think a lot of people imagine it'd be easy to wield a rapier and easy to be fast whereas a two-handed sword would be hard work and slow (a longsword ain't slow at all), but we can blame movies there as well. You can more specifically blame Dungeons and Dragons as well as other early fantasy settings for confusing people. Your average D&D player has probably never even looked at actual armor and weapons used in the Medieval Era and other time periods which are emulated by these fantasy settings. The fallacy that full plate armor is absurdly heavy and restrictive to movement is borne from this same problem. Players who have "learned" everything they know about these weapons and armor types from video games and tabletop RPGs will have a great many erroneous notions. Full plate armor was not insanely heavy and restrictive to movement unless it was jousting armor or ceremonial in nature, otherwise it would have been useless on the battlefield. Your full-plate wearing combatants had trained and conditioned themselves to wear the heavier armor to the point of being quite agile in it, they could run, jump, swim, do push-ups and other mundane activities just fine. Another example is the longsword vs the shortsword in D&D. The "shortsword" is actually the arming sword or the broadsword, also known as the most commonly issued and used armament of soldiers and warriors. The "longsword" is actually a very unwieldy weapon that took a higher-than-average strength to wield with one hand and was often wielded as a two-handed weapon with less reach but more versatility than the claymore (greatsword) or other similar two-handed weapons. The recent FPS Kingdom Come: Deliverance gets this stuff right. It has a lot of other issues but it put a lot of work into getting this stuff correct.
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"Only four unique" in the context of Deadfire is a good number, more than blunderbusses (2) and pistols (3) (and many other one-handed melee types). Blightheart is inferior in terms of damage to Dragon's Dowry, you need to soulbind it to unlock its potential and can't apparently be enchanted to Legendary quality. Three Bells Through is also inferior to Dragon's Dowry and does friendly fire (shoots in a line, hitting up to three targets friend/foe). Dragon's Dowry packs a hit when enchanted with the +50% Burn damage and has the ability to significantly raise your attack speed, costs 45k. The Red Hand fires two shots in a closer range with a incremental damage +1% per kill until rest, but it is to be found in a random event. If you plan your MC around the arquebus, Dragon's Dowry is arguably the only valid choice. It gets worse if you have Maia in your main party. The Red Hand would at least provide a solid alternative, but it is nowhere to be found. I'd also note that if you put Maia in your party and also want to use guns yourself, you probably want to spec her as ranger/wizard so that she can bind Blightheart as a wizard and gain the additional corrosive damage bonus.
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Oh: if I were making changes to the weapons, I'd suggest either adding a point of DR to all armors across the board, or removing a point of Pen from all weapons across the board. I think this would restore a bit of balance towards the high pen weapons. Back in beta excessive DR was a huge problem so they double nerfed it -- they added a more sliding scale to the pen calculation, and they added a point of pen to everything, so the default became all weapons penetrate, meaning the high DPS weapons no longer really had a downside.