gkathellar

For a DPS paladin, you're going to be focusing on fire damage. Bleak Walkers in particular (appropriately) bring the pain. For inspiration: Here's a bleak dual-wielder Here's a Bleak Gunner Slow non-bleak gunner If you're playing with IEMod or are otherwise willing to change your Order to something technically illegal, Pallegina's gives you the much-beloved Wrath of Five Suns, which does phenomenal single-target damage and benefits from Penetrating Shot and Ryona's Vambraces. Such a character could have pretty crazy alpha strikes and continuous melee presence by combining Ryona's Vambraces, Penetrating Shot, Flames of Devotion+2 blunderbusses to use it with, Flames of Fair Rhian+the Outworn Buckler, that one belt that gives you free weapon switching, Sacred Immolation, and Scion of Flames. Light everything on fire forever, basically, and keep Bittercut in your back pocket for fights against fire-immune enemies.

You can ignore it, but the fight's pretty easy once you get all of the allies. Personally, I just waited until I was done with the Iron Flail stuff.

It sure is good how they fixed the problem with chanters not wanting to use their higher-level options!

You really missed an opportunity not replacing the "Aye" with "I" there . Dang, now I feel like a real postenago.

... Eothasian? He has an Eothasian prayer book on his desk, and he wants to turn back time. Now I feel kind of bad for him.

As a noun, resolve is the ability to settle on a course and show singular, unwavering focus. Of course, you might say that the Watcher has very low Resolve, what with all the time they waste on pointless sidequests >_> In Pillars dialogues, Resolve tends to play as personal intensity and command.

What be a pirate's favorite letter? Aye, you'd think it be R, but it really be the C!

Mostly I wondered if she showed up in Huana or Rauatai - between her name and her stated motives, it seems like she might be from the Deadfire area.

I notice one of the questions in the history generator is on leaving Concelhaut's apprentice Uariki alive. Can anyone shed light on the effects of this choice? (I'm replaying PoE1 at the moment, and it doesn't seem like there's any way to get the Durgan Iron she's sitting on without her going hostile.)

Can confirm. "Lovetalks" triggered at regular intervals based on a real-time clock, so long as you met certain prerequisites and hadn't yet locked yourself out of the next one. That said, there were some problems with this system. On the practical side of things, they were timed to BG2, which was an enormous game if you explored its content thoroughly, so players who didn't do its 100+ hours of sidequests were often out of luck. In addition, LTs wouldn't trigger during acts 4 and 5, which made sense but also meant some fairly lengthy parts of the game didn't progress the clock. On the technical side, there were bugs in several of the LTs. Jaheira's in particular were extremely buggy, and several options killed the romance that definitively shouldn't have. There were also problems with petrification, imprisonment, and death killing the romances. All of this has been fixed with mods, BTW, and the BG2 romances encompass a vast amount of writing, so people shouldn't hesitate to check them out. I just want Bishop's "romance" to be "fixed" in NWN2 Actually! There is a Bishop Romance mod for the NWN2 base campaign, currently hosted on the Gibberlings 3 website, and also here. No guarantees as to quality (I've not played it), but it does exist. The same writer did mods for the other three romantic interests in the OC.

Do you mean his romance only has 2 conversations? I admit I could only trigger it by using the console, so it only actually happened right before the end quest, so I put it down to having missed most of it. Its... not really that there are two conversations, its that its extremely low key. Its adorable though, if anything I prefer it over Tekehu's (and I love Tekehu with all my heart). Since its so not "in-your-face" it compensates with quite a bit of ambient dialogue from Aloth which is only romance-related, as well as changes in his reactions to certain places and situations. The last conversation in Ukaizo is unbearably sweet. Idk its definitely not Bioware scale or even Tekehu/Xoti in terms of content and flirts, but it fits his character, and if you like his character its good enough imho. If anything it revolves completely around your PC. Of course there could always be more content everywhere, but I thought its worth having even as is. But then I am biased towards long-term companion friednships and history so Aloth will always be default for my character. If you are looking for more written content then it could seem underwhelming. If you tell her you are interested in her then yeah, you are automatically locked with her until you break up. She shows interest in +1 disposition convo as far as I remember. But I can break up with her and pursue some other romance, right? I mean, "break up" isn't the right phrase, I guess... where's the god damn concurrent romances mod damn it

Gee, who'd have thought. Well, specifically, romances get killed if the person leaves the party. Imprisonment and petrification both cause the character affected to leave the party. As a result, even when they're reversed and the character rejoins, the romance breaks. Death bugs were less severe, IIRC. Remember, this is D&D we're talking about. People stay dead slightly more often than main characters in superhero comics.

Can confirm. "Lovetalks" triggered at regular intervals based on a real-time clock, so long as you met certain prerequisites and hadn't yet locked yourself out of the next one. That said, there were some problems with this system. On the practical side of things, they were timed to BG2, which was an enormous game if you explored its content thoroughly, so players who didn't do its 100+ hours of sidequests were often out of luck. In addition, LTs wouldn't trigger during acts 4 and 5, which made sense but also meant some fairly lengthy parts of the game didn't progress the clock. On the technical side, there were bugs in several of the LTs. Jaheira's in particular were extremely buggy, and several options killed the romance that definitively shouldn't have. There were also problems with petrification, imprisonment, and death killing the romances. All of this has been fixed with mods, BTW, and the BG2 romances encompass a vast amount of writing, so people shouldn't hesitate to check them out.

Yeah, IIRC, back in BG2 Jaheira had something like 40+ conversations in her romance line? And like three quests? It was ****ing amazing. It's also just not reasonable to do, unfortunately. BG2 sort of established a tradition of trying to have an absurd amount of content in CRPGs, so much that not even Bioware can really ever replicate it. But we can dream, can't we?

More propaganda against the one TRUE sidekick Ydwin. How dare you insult the sacred waifu Fassina Gentlefolk, gentlefolk, please. The true answer is all of the above. No. Drunk c0ckney gremlin Kristin Schaal > other sidekicks. YOU HAVE MY RESPECT, SIR.

Where's the "like this thirty times" button?

Meanwhile, your avatar will probably stop me from getting the full rest. Yeegh. I'm pretty sure The godlikes taste as follow: Fire Godlike: Well done, extra crispy. Nature Godlike: veggieburger with extra shrooms Death Godlike: Stale Moon Godlike: Moon... Moon... MOOOOOOON! Moonmoon. Yeah I got nothing. Pixie-stix? Marine Godlike: Seafood. Avian Godlike: Chicken. Scratch that, they all taste like chicken, probably. Agreed, though from the short bits that I played as a godlike I was kinda disappointed with reactions from people in the first game. I figured the conversation about godlike with Pallegina at least would be kinda different (just like I expected more from conversations with Edér as an Eothas priest). But I'd also like more playable paladin orders or priesthoods, mostly so I can finally know what their favored/disfavored reputations are. But that is a different topic. Naw, all kith taste like pork.

HEY. You stay away from statue-chan!

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.

And their belonging to certain gods is generally not information supplied by the most reliable of sources. What we know is that tradition has it that certain types come of certain deities, but tradition in Eora is frequently full of duds.

Woden's memories in PoE 1 describe Waidwen as a man with a halo of blinding light around his head, so I imagine Eothas' godlikes would take on similar characteristics. The whole three stars motif would probably be incorporated somewhere in there, too. As for Eothas' god form, it may be extremely non-canon with that we know right now, but I've always enjoyed this fanart's depiction of him: Not fond of Magran, and I wish Ondra had her whole tentacle motif, but in general I love this. It's great.

Vampyr mad scientist with librarian glasses what what I shouldn't like that pun but I do. I like it so much. Grieving Mother. Something about the pale skin, thousand-yard stare and mass-murder via mind control that really does it for me. You have a thing for that weird peasant woman who follows us around? Really? What was even her name again (I'm not gonna lie though I can dig it)

... actually, is there a one-handed crush/slash melee weapon type? Because stone/glass clubs like the macuahuitl could actually be a great way to add that to the game. It'd be a fair bit of work, but it would be a cool addition for one of the big DLCs or something.

Do we know that a god can only produce one type of godlike? It seems to me that any given deity might have multiple different godlike associated with their multiple different aspects. Likewise, more generic godlike might be associated with multiple different deities - like, sure, Fire Godlike are typically seen as Magranic, but couldn't they also be Abydon's (their ability is "Battle-Forged" after all)? Death godlike are often associated with Berath, but Rymrgand also seems like he might create them, or Eothas in his Gaun aspect. I wouldn't assume we're looking at a one-to-one function, here. I thought Moon Godlike were generally believed to be Ondra's? Doesn't really make sense to me that they'd be Abydon's, since the general implication of WM2 is that the whole "Ondra loves the moon" thing is actually the story of her and Abydon, with many of the specifics having been lost to the ages (the biggest clue here is the music - there's a bard in Stalwart's tavern singing about Ondra and the moon, and an instrumental version of the same track plays as the background music at the Abbey of the Fallen Moon). I could also see an association with Eothas, since he's a god of light and healing.

Screw it, I'm taking the bait. IHBT. This is one of those statements that's technically true and also incredibly misleading. Men and women whose performance on IQ tests is equivalent have different proportions of grey and white matter, yes, but all that indicates is that it's not possible to make meaningful generalizations about the significance of of proportions of grey and white matter across male and female brains. The next time you talk about "science says this," I suggest you bring a citation. Nobody was designed to excel at anything. People are, and they are for reasons, but that's a brute fact the only significance of which is itself. The problem being that it's not clear which traits those are, aside from, say, slight predispositions towards spatial versus verbal ability. Even calling them masculine of feminine is unhelpfully reductionist and, frankly, wrong. There are certainly a lot of people who say that X is intrsincially feminine and Y is intrinsically maculine, but unless we're talking about chromosomes, there tends to be a deficit of evidence. Beyond the strictly neuroscientific questions, it's very difficult in general to differentiate claims of inherent ability from differences based on culture, training, and background; not enough studies are performed cross-culturally, which has been a particular problem in psychology and sociology. This doesn't really follow. Questioning the value of claimed anecdotal experience is not equivalent to "tell[ing] science its wrong." I wanted to isolate this statement because it is, to the best of my knowledge, completely factual and not at all misleading taken on its own. But it also has very little, if anything, to do with any of the other statements preceding and following it. Forgive me if I'm misreading, but the implication here seems to be that if someone disagrees vocally with you, they're resorting to name-calling and you can dismiss them, while your vocal disagreements with them are "challenge" and are therefore more elevated in an unstated way. This strikes me as ... essentially a subtle form of name-calling? This ... looks a lot like moving the goalposts, because earlier you make a whole big thing about science and research. At a glance, it looks a lot like you're just giving yourself an out against scientific work that doesn't support your foregone conclusions. In any case, this statement isn't supported by either your previous assertions or your subsequent ones. Human intelligence and human animal instinct are not clearly distinguishable terms, and you yourself note that "intelligence" is a term that borders on meaningless. Both "intelligence" and "instinct" are simply the brain doing what brains do - not what they were designed to do, but rather what they are able to perpetuate themselves doing. To paraphrase Nietzsche: reason is itself a passion. I'm also unclear on what "nature," itself a term that is very nearly useless, has the upper hand against, exactly. See, I've heard a lot of claims about what is "natural." I've heard that drinking the milk of other animals is unnatural (odd, since humans are the only species with the genetic adaptations required to produce lactase enzyme past infancy). I've seen it argued that homosexuality is unnatural (a behavior which appears in virtually all mammals and virtually all avians and has a variety of functions among social animals). I've heard that eating meat is unnatural for great apes (though even the most strictly vegetarian primate diets are inevitably supplemented with large numbers of insects). These claims always seem to be accompanied by the notion that the speaker's social agenda is "natural," and therefore deserves to be taken seriously. It seems to me that if use defines meaning, "nature" is just a word for "the way I think things are supposed to be;" And I think maybe you're saying nature is in competition with political correctness (a term I dislike because in most cases it would be more appropriate to say "correctness"), and in which case my reading is, "the way I think things are supposed to be is in competition with the way things are." I'm sure you'll disagree with that reading, but I honestly find your whole argument to be ill-informed at best and intellectually dishonest at worst, so I ... don't ... really care? Those aren't differences between "races," whatever those are, but between populations. You can legitimately say "in the United States, men with dark skin and men who are more than six feet tall are statistically convergent groups," but all that really says is that certain genes tend to be found with certain other genes, for a variety of social and historical reasons. There's an ethnic group in Southeast Asia who can dive for longer periods than most because of their enormous spleens, which can be keyed to a single mutant gene - does that mean "Asians are good at diving?" No, of course not, because "Asians" is not a real thing. Race in the real world sense is a 16th-century invention, a sort of cultural atavism we use to ignore the reality that breaking people down into generalized classes tends to be really, really misguided in practice. There's an NPC in PoE1 who makes a comment about Orlans. When you call him on it, he says, "Just telling the truth. Seems like that's the greatest crime of all these days." I always liked how true-to-life that was.