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Furism posted:Pro-tip: don't bundle your party together next to a big rear end dragon. You learned the lesson the hard way, like everyone. Auto-conversation while moving party. I did learn my lesson and will only move one character forward but again it's a bullshit "gently caress you."
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Aug 17, 2016 14:57
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:With regards to the Endless Paths: He's not immune to paralyze. Make scrolls of paralysis, buff up your accuracy to high heaven, and keep nailing him with them. He'll go down in no time. Also if you run your party away to the left when the fight starts his wing buffet won't hit you. When I fought him on POTD what I essentially did was at the start of the fight run everybody down to the far left corner of that area, buff/summon as much as I could before he started to close, then kept my tanks on him while everyone else stayed as far away as possible while still being able to hit him with spells etc. When you pull him down into the left corner his minions can't cause as much trouble, and they'll tend to bunch up too and so you can AOE the hell out of them. Your main goal though is going to be to keep everyone's accuracy high enough to land paralyzes on him. I used much the same tactics against the Alpine Dragon, except he was actually a bit easier because he's not immune to petrify and petrify amplifies the damage you can do to him by many times. It feels almost cheesy fighting the Dragons this way but for my party at least it was the only way. I suppose if you planned well enough with the right gear and potions you could try to tank and kill either dragon without using hold spells on them but I dunno. I just fought the Spore last night and that was a tricky fight. You almost have to rush through that fight as fast as you can because those tentacles will absolutely obliterate your party otherwise. Ginette Reno fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 15:06
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I'm about 10 hours in at level 6 with a ranger and 90% of what I really ever do is auto attack, which is effective but kinda dull. Does the ranger ever get any cool moves? Considering starting over as a cipher instead. I do realize somebody upthread warned me that the ranger was not super interesting so I have nobody to blame but myself. 
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Aug 17, 2016 15:30
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Unless you're playing on an older version that isn't up to date with patches, dragons shouldn't be breathing at the onset of combat. All proper dragons had a ~3 second buffer put on their breath attacks several patches ago.
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Aug 17, 2016 16:05
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Bold Robot posted:I'm about 10 hours in at level 6 with a ranger and 90% of what I really ever do is auto attack, which is effective but kinda dull. Does the ranger ever get any cool moves? Considering starting over as a cipher instead. There's a high-level ability that adds a burning cone to a gun's normal attack, which is fun and can be powerful, but requires good positioning. You could also invest in Lore and give your Ranger lots of scrolls. Rangers are one of the best spellcasting classes due to their high Accuracy.
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Aug 17, 2016 16:20
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rope kid posted:Unless you're playing on an older version that isn't up to date with patches, dragons shouldn't be breathing at the onset of combat. All proper dragons had a ~3 second buffer put on their breath attacks several patches ago. I'm going to verify my cache. poo poo's been weird. Hardlocks (TWICE last night!), LOTS of spoken dialogue missing its first half, and in almost every single encounter I get a weird floating, twisted, expanding ragdoll when it pauses at some point. That one's actually hilarious (especially on slimes and non-kith) but I'm starting to think something is deeply hosed.
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Aug 17, 2016 16:49
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:Auto-conversation while moving party. I did learn my lesson and will only move one character forward but again it's a bullshit "gently caress you." Yeah, never move all your party at once. Use a scout. There's dangerous poo poo out there.
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Aug 17, 2016 17:21
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Here's something odd. I've been trying to add an item to a merchant's inventory. Failing to find anything resembling a merchant file to edit. I decided to try and replace an existing unique item's .unity3d file, with the item I want to have show up. Turns out that if you do that, the old & new items sort of merge. If you for example replace Waage's Hat of Leadership's file, with that of Rebel's Call and then boot up the game. The new Rebel's Call armor will have Waage's +1 Resolve enhancement in addition to the Wary & Spellbind ones. And if you replace a weapon's file with an armor. The enchant windows for that armor will show both weapon & armor enchantments. How does that even happen? 
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Aug 17, 2016 17:51
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This will probably only appeal to a subset of a subset of people but Brian and Annie Mitsoda's Doublebear group (late of the Dead State disappointment) is apparently releasing a parodic visual novel on Steam today. I don't know if it was just a free time lark or if DS really did that poorly.
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Aug 17, 2016 17:54
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Basic Chunnel posted:This will probably only appeal to a subset of a subset of people but Brian and Annie Mitsoda's Doublebear group (late of the Dead State disappointment) is apparently releasing a parodic visual novel on Steam today. I don't know if it was just a free time lark or if DS really did that poorly. What happened with Dead State? Do you have a link?
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Aug 17, 2016 17:56
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Not much to link to. It came out and not a lot of people were happy with it, for many reasons, even people (like me!) who were so hyped about the game's potential. Just too many seams showing in the design (ex. a skill-based system that actively punishes anyone who isn't specifically combat-and-leadership focused), not balanced well enough (even with a CDProjekt-style free overhaul a few months out from release), and a bad UI in a worse engine. Seriously, I can run ENB'd Skyrim on my laptop but get <5 FPS with Dead State. And visually, it makes me miss Gamebryo. Mitsoda said there wouldn't be a sequel. *e oh and the other thing which is that there's no apparent end state. There's one that seemed like an endgame thing but I'd read on the official forum that it was cut because it was too neat. At a certain point you're just hauling junk to keep people happy and collecting tantalizing bits of lore. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 18:17
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Furism posted:Yeah, never move all your party at once. Use a scout. There's dangerous poo poo out there. I can't be certain but I think this is the exception to the rule. Moving the entire party in scout mode any "I will talk first!" enemy is visible before you hit their trigger and they have a green circle instead of red. This is the ONLY time in the game I can recall (and I could easily be forgetting others, it's a huge game) where it isn't forcast when the conversation will start and the enemy actually comes from way further than you can see. I have played 100% of the game so far moving the party in scouting mode as a group without any complications.
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Aug 17, 2016 18:20
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rope kid posted:Unless you're playing on an older version that isn't up to date with patches, dragons shouldn't be breathing at the onset of combat. All proper dragons had a ~3 second buffer put on their breath attacks several patches ago. Didn't know that, but that's good to know. The Adra Dragon seems to open up the fight with a Wing Buffet type ability and seemed to do that basically 100% of the time when I last fought it a few weeks ago. But it's easy to avoid that ability if you just sprint to the left right when the fight starts as the range on it doesn't seem to be that far. The Alpine Dragon was wrecking my poo poo until I loaded Aloth up with + accuracy buffs and spammed Petrify on it. Feels cheesy but short of having a super roided out Tank that seems to be the ticket. The Adra Dragon is immune to Petrify now but can still be paralyzed so you can do the same thing with it but just swap petrify effects with paralysis.
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Aug 17, 2016 18:26
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The Alpine Dragon trips up a lot of people because his normal attacks go against Fortitude rather than Deflection. So even tanky characters often struggle to survive against him unless they're high Might/high Con Paladins. He also has Sneak Attack and Deathblows, meaning anyone afflicted by one or more status ailments is dead within seconds.
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Aug 17, 2016 19:42
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Bold Robot posted:I'm about 10 hours in at level 6 with a ranger and 90% of what I really ever do is auto attack, which is effective but kinda dull. Does the ranger ever get any cool moves? Considering starting over as a cipher instead. I love Ranger PCs specifically because of this. With six people in the party and multiple casters and then maybe Zahua or a melee Devil to deal with, it can be nice to have somebody who just puts damage on target and minds their own business.
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Aug 18, 2016 07:38
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Bold Robot posted:I'm about 10 hours in at level 6 with a ranger and 90% of what I really ever do is auto attack, which is effective but kinda dull. Does the ranger ever get any cool moves?
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Aug 18, 2016 08:47
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Bold Robot posted:I'm about 10 hours in at level 6 with a ranger and 90% of what I really ever do is auto attack, which is effective but kinda dull. Does the ranger ever get any cool moves? Considering starting over as a cipher instead. I did an all ranger party, Bear Force One, I had them using a lot of scrolls, gave the bears knockdown ASAP and each ranger had different specialties. A lot can be done with speccing but generally speaking, not the most interesting class to play.
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Aug 18, 2016 17:28
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Funnily enough, I just saw a thread on the Obsidian forums which mentioned that Driving Flight and Vicious Aim stack with the various missile spells. That would make a Ranger mage a surprisingly powerful class.
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Aug 18, 2016 22:00
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Bold Robot posted:I'm about 10 hours in at level 6 with a ranger and 90% of what I really ever do is auto attack, which is effective but kinda dull. Does the ranger ever get any cool moves? Considering starting over as a cipher instead. As others have said, rangers aren't a super interactive class, a lot of their abilities are passives. They are damage-dealing monsters though, your pet scales well and there are some really cool bows out there (Stormcaller owns and is easy to get shortly after starting WM1). I would say just stick with it and accept that you're going to spend less time microing your ranger, focus on your casters instead. Or like Samuel Clemens suggests, make use of your ranger's high accuracy, give him some Lore to read scrolls and gear that lets you cast spells. Edit: and the high-level Powder Burn that adds fire damage in a cone (equal to your weapon damage) with guns is very strong but imo a little finicky to use. It does hurt friendlies, and the range of the fire cone is shorter than the range of your gun, so you have to run up closer to combat and carefully position yourself to hit several enemies without dumping 40 fire damage on your tank or whatever. Most encounters you will have a tank between your ranger and the enemy, which makes Powder Burn a bit of a pain. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Aug 18, 2016 |
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Aug 18, 2016 23:50
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I've got a Stormcaller Ranger in my party atm with all of the offensive pet buffs and designed for maximum rate of fire/accuracy and the damage output is insane. Pet will regularly hit/crit for around 70-90 damage and each time the ranger fires an arrow in to a group there's more or less a 40% chance of a returning storm proc. It's a bit more interesting than an ordinary ranger but like others have said the class is pretty no frills, which is fine because having to micromanage 2-3 chars is enough imo. I agree scrolls can be an interesting way to mix things up a little bit – confusion in particular is kinda handy if you're not running a Wizard or Cipher in your group. I was just thinking today I couldn't really imagine playing this game on POTD without a Priest. Does anyone ever do this? It seems like it'd be kinda masochistic.
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Aug 19, 2016 00:10
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Entropy238 posted:I've got a Stormcaller Ranger in my party atm with all of the offensive pet buffs and designed for maximum rate of fire/accuracy and the damage output is insane. Pet will regularly hit/crit for around 70-90 damage and each time the ranger fires an arrow in to a group there's more or less a 40% chance of a returning storm proc. Yeah I thought about posting that too, a ranger with Stormcaller and Heart of the Storm talent (+20% Shock damage hell yes) is probably the highest sustained damage character I've messed with, it's pretty nuts.
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Aug 19, 2016 00:25
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Entropy238 posted:I was just thinking today I couldn't really imagine playing this game on POTD without a Priest. Does anyone ever do this? It seems like it'd be kinda masochistic. I ran PotD with only a Paladin for support and it was fine. Put some Lore on the passive characters so they can use Prayer scrolls.
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Aug 19, 2016 06:26
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My first PotD party was Barbarian, Cipher, Druid, Monk, Rogue, Wizard. The Monk was a Moon Godlike, which made him my main healer for the longest time. That was a custom party, though. When I play with the Obsidian NPCs I won't deny myself the pleasures of Durance.
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Aug 19, 2016 08:25
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I really wish there were more npc companions.
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Aug 19, 2016 10:43
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GreyPowerVan posted:I really wish there were more npc companions. It's hard enough having to choose which of the 5 will join you! I wish there were less companions with a larger personal quest. I understand why they wanted to have a companion for each class and they couldn't have a 5 hour quest for each of them but I would have preferred less of them with more focus on each.
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Aug 19, 2016 10:48
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Furism posted:I wish there were less companions with a larger personal quest. I understand why they wanted to have a companion for each class and they couldn't have a 5 hour quest for each of them but I would have preferred less of them with more focus on each. I agree, it's one of the reasons I'm excited for the new Torment, it looks like it's going to be much more of a deep dive into characters than Pillars is. Pillars doesn't really have any stand out characters, because the PC's a blank slate, they don't really have their own character, though I think the disposition system really helps on that front. All the minor NPCs are just that, minor. The only two characters I think really get properly fleshed out are Durance and, arguably, Thaos.
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Aug 19, 2016 11:17
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I think to make that kind of judgment you should probably distinguish between a character being fleshed out and a character having good characterisation – e.g. an identifiable personality, motives etc ... For instance, I would say that most of the NPC companions in Pillars have pretty decent characterisation. Whether you like them or hate them I'd say the best are probably Durance, Eder, Aloth, Hiravias, Zahua and Sagani (+Itumaak) and the worst are probably Grieving Mother, Devil and Maneha. The rest are somewhere in between. Ironically, even though she has the most text, I find grieving mother to be the worst of all because the only way she expresses herself is through massive text dumps rather than interjections, quips and banters.
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Aug 19, 2016 12:01
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Yeah, a lot of my problem is that the characters are almost nothing beyond their motives. They don't really interact with each other (the rare banters excepted), or characters in the outside world. They're basically walking plot devices. Even when you talk to them, it's normally as a 'tell me about X event' discussion. Durance is better because you have a back and forth with him. It's a believable as a conversation, rather than an interrogation of a dialogue node.
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Aug 19, 2016 12:17
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Entropy238 posted:Ironically, even though she has the most text, I find grieving mother to be the worst of all because the only way she expresses herself is through massive text dumps rather than interjections, quips and banters. I have played through the game 3 times now and ditched the GM immediately after recruiting her. I couldn't stomach the awkward way she was written. I also find Aloth to be quite boring and I don't find his Scottish crazy woman personality to be funny.
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Aug 19, 2016 12:17
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Is the GDC talk online in some form yet?
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Aug 19, 2016 13:10
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Hbomberguy posted:Is the GDC talk online in some form yet? Does't look like it: http://www.gdcvault.com/search.php#&category=free&firstfocus=&keyword=sawyer&conference_id= I didn't realize rope kid did so many presentations at GDC.
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Aug 19, 2016 13:20
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What's wrong with Grieving Mother? I've only had two conversations with her so far so I guess I don't know. The text-dump instead of dialogue thing is kind of lovely and the fact that it has adventure game-esque "You picked the wrong answer so start again!" poo poo makes those incredibly unfun. But so far the story in the memory is kind of mildly interesting sort of maybe? I don't know, she's definitely not a good NPC so far but I wouldn't say she's BAD, at least not compared to everyone else. The NPCs are better than NWN2 (literally taking a dick up the rear end is also better) but absolutely none of the party members have been interesting or had rewarding stories to them so far. Mind you this is without playing with Durance, Hiravas, or the two WM1 NPCs.
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Aug 19, 2016 14:41
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:What's wrong with Grieving Mother? I've only had two conversations with her so far so I guess I don't know. The text-dump instead of dialogue thing is kind of lovely and the fact that it has adventure game-esque "You picked the wrong answer so start again!" poo poo makes those incredibly unfun. But so far the story in the memory is kind of mildly interesting sort of maybe? I'm guessing maybe because of her plot line? I don't want to spoil it but I can see why people might dislike her after running through that due to what it reveals about her. There's certainly no reason to dislike her for her class because Ciphers are dominant. I'm about to que up a new run here but I can't decide between Paladin, Priest, or Druid. They all appeal to me in on way or another. Do Priests of Eothas (or *insert deity*) get much in the way of special dialogue?
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Aug 19, 2016 14:53
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I think her quest line is good and it's great that the other party members don't see her because she's so "faded." But the text dumps are just too much. It's really too bad they had to drop the dungeon they wanted to do where you are in her head.
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Aug 19, 2016 15:56
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The other thing about her is that she is disguising herself from the other party members? Which generates a lot of unanswered questions about what they think is happening in fights, and who you are talking to sometimes. Most importantly she has no banter dialogue I've heard and frankly if is she isn't making GBS threads on Durance then what's the point of having her in the party.
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Aug 19, 2016 16:55
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Furism posted:I think her quest line is good and it's great that the other party members don't see her because she's so "faded." But the text dumps are just too much. It's really too bad they had to drop the dungeon they wanted to do where you are in her head. The "mental dungeon" was supposed to be more  IIRC (don't really have time to check, but I think Avellone discussed this in an interview with the RPG Codex), so that wouldn't have addressed your complaint at all.
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Aug 19, 2016 16:58
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I think the companions have enough depth. I would have liked it if more of the banter between them had more of an arc to it so you could see the relationship between party members develop more. And some of the quests were very short and felt tacked on, yeah. The Grieving Mother is more divisive than outright hated by everyone, I think, but her quest as I remember it is just terrible. Click yourself through walls of text, select dialogue option, and then you either advance (to another wall of text) or try again and hopefully select the one good answer. e: I'm glad they didn't go with the dungeon in her mind idea, though, that would have been too much. Ginette Reno posted:Do Priests of Eothas (or *insert deity*) get much in the way of special dialogue? Wizard Styles fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Aug 19, 2016 |
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Aug 19, 2016 19:50
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Grieving Mother is a Planescape: Torment companion that accidentally wandered into PoE, both in terms of presentation and the themes she represents.
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Aug 19, 2016 19:55
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Furism posted:I think her quest line is good and it's great that the other party members don't see her because she's so "faded." This makes her so incredibly boring, though. She has no party banter. She has no quest banter. She's basically an Inn NPC with stats that you're not allowed to set.
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Aug 19, 2016 20:28
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For God's sake the GM needs a mod to remove the sibilance from her audio-files. Her voice wreaks havoc on my tinnitus.
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Aug 19, 2016 20:31
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