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Probably going to do my Eothan Fighter/Priest just-for-fun Roleplaying run through first and then go for a more serious Skald/Fighter build once PotD gets some tuning.
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May 6, 2018 00:32
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MooselanderII posted:I kind of have found the first PoE game a little tedious, what changes are making this game a bit more dynamic and engaging? Broad strokes, but:
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May 7, 2018 00:11
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isk posted:The writing in Deadfire's pretty funny I got a really good guffaw when you walk into a dungeon room with a bunch of human remains laying about and he quips something like, "Even got a whole room for their skeletons to relax in." The writing in this game is a real breath of fresh air.
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May 9, 2018 04:04
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Jon Irenicus posted:This game is surprising me by just how funny it actually is. Never let Eder leave your party. Probably my biggest and most pleasant surprise of the game so far. The dialogue and characters are so utterly believable, and the humor is both appropriate for everyone's personalities and rip-roaringly funny.
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May 9, 2018 14:58
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Dan Didio posted:My problem is more that I can't waste the guards without them alerting everyone. If I ring the bell, will that clear? It's a bit of a puzzle fight. Notice that big stack of exploding barrels on the section of the docks right below the ship? The two patrolling guards meet up there occasionally. Try applying fire damage to those barrels and see what happens.
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May 9, 2018 15:00
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Kurtofan posted:Where's Mokeha in Port Maje? I can't find her at the village. The lady for the quest? She's in the top-left of the village, up one of the ramps. I think she might also go into her house at the village at night.
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May 9, 2018 15:35
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Avalerion posted:Xoti really doesn't get along with people heh, she's kind of like a funnier and less mean Durance. She gets along with a good number of the companions just fine. I'm running with Eder, Aloth (anti-Leaden Key), and Serafen, and the only person she doesn't completely like is Aloth when he talks about being sneaky and underhanded.
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May 9, 2018 22:58
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Scorchy posted:Man the new music is great and VA performances for Xoti, Sarefen, and Tekehu are exceptional. They're all voiced by veteran video game/anime VAs (Laura Bailey, Liam O'Brien, Travis Willingham, respectively), so no surprise, although Texan twang Laura Bailey threw me for a bit of a loop. Matt Mercer does as great a job with Aloth and Eder as he did in the first.
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May 10, 2018 01:14
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Ginette Reno posted:The ai seems to enjoy beelining towards squishies which is hard to deal with given the smaller party size. CC and positioning are more important than ever. I think that's a good summary. The design of maps, monster abilities, and the smaller party size all contribute to making it much harder to simply stop up a gap with a couple of tanks and attrition things to death.
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May 10, 2018 15:06
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Fintilgin posted:My problem is ship combat runs at like 7fps, 10 with minimum graphics options. I've got a decent if slightly older computer, and a graphics card that exceeds minimum specs, so I'm not sure why Deadfire hates my pc so much. Probably a combination of a large number of combatants and water effects eating up a lot of the processing budget.
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May 11, 2018 04:05
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Just got the bark string between Eder and Xoti where he tells her, in the most polite, aw-shucks way possible, to stop talking to him. This game's toying with my heart more than I thought it would.
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May 11, 2018 04:35
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Heithinn Grasida posted:Does priest, other than priest of wael or maybe priest of skaen, have synergy with anything? All your spells are medium to long casts and most are support oriented. And few of them give you inspirations you couldn't get from another class anyway. The ones that would have synergy, like minor avatar and cleansing flame, come extremely late. The spiritual weapons are really good, but not good enough to justify priest by itself. You can make a decent argument for Priest/Chanter or Priest/Paladin to provide all-in-one party buffing, but the other Priest/X combos mostly feel like flavor things to me. That's fine, though; I recall one of the explicit reasons for multiclassing being included is to provide flavor options for people who're interested in something like that. Scoss posted:Is anyone else noticing degrading performance over the course of a long session? Think it's a combination of long sessions causing memory leaks and/or something to do with frequent alt-tabbing.
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May 11, 2018 04:46
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You can staple Devoted Fighter onto any class to give it good melee presence. I'm running a Devoted Fighter/Skald at the moment and it's downright goofy. Having Acute up for the entire fight means I get constant crits and phrase generation. Only thing that really fucks me over is skeletons (due to rapier use), and even then I've got enough graze/miss mitigation through Fighter talents that it doesn't matter as much to swap to a mace or something.
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May 11, 2018 21:44
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Harrow posted:Honestly I might hold off on playing for real until some balance patches happen--I don't really want to just sleepwalk my way through all the combat (nor do I want to intentionally handicap myself with lovely stats or anything like that). Do the universally accepted handicap: play with a party of four. It's what I did in PoE1 and it made the game remarkably more enjoyable. I still think a 4-player party would've been the best fit for PoE2, but I understand the reasons why 5 was chosen instead.
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May 12, 2018 04:39
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A godlike of Wael just looks like a normal person. That's the joke.
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May 16, 2018 20:49
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Freaking Crumbum posted:will Eder actually hook up with Xoti if you gave him the night market ending in PoE1? i ask because i've had several party banters where she tries to awkwardly flirt with him and he politely declines, and then he pulled me aside and was like "i can't respect Xoti because she believes in the gods and i know they're just constructs" and i was all sad because i was really hoping they'd get together. when i tried to talk him into it, his response was really non-committal and now i'm worried it can't happen between night market Eder and Xoti. I don't think you can. I have Night Market Eder and the last bark string conversation he had with her was along the lines of, "Sorry, but we really shouldn't talk any more. At all." There might be more to it than that, but the impression I get is that she reminds him too much of his own past naivety and he has trouble respecting her enough to even think about a roll in the hay.
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May 16, 2018 21:06
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bewilderment posted:because they're dumb enough to think tradition actually matters in any way whatsoever. I mean, tradition amongst the Huana also involves taking care of everyone in the group in a way that neither the Rauataians nor the Vailians bring to the table. One of the very first sidequests you get involves a Huana woman reacting with stunned disbelief to the idea that the Vailians would let a man starve in the street. The idea that no one's got it fully right - that every culture carries traditions that ennoble them and traditions that grotesquely shame them - is a key thrust of the text. Xae posted:"Hay guise, we didn't have a good enough harvest. Better starve all the farmers to death to improve the harvest next year." It's not really a matters of, "We didn't have enough people farming." The Huana are by-and-large pre-Industrial Revolution farmers (and borderline hunter-gatherers, depending on the island) living on poor soil that's also occasionally inhabited by flesh-eating monsters. There's a whole shwack of things that could go wrong with the harvests that are completely out of their hands, and, save for negotiating with the imperialist outside, cannot be mitigated in the same way a modern famine could. The lowest caste developed out of necessity: it created an ordered means of determining who starved in a time of famine, provided a cultural narrative to contextualize and legitimize the starvation ("they're the lowest caste, it's what they do"), and provided a religious salve for the lowest caste to make their station more bearable (you get reincarnated into a better caste in your next life). It also ensured that valuable roles such as leaders and tradesmen survived the famine to make sure that they could keep their individual groups together and pass down the necessary knowledge to the next generation. The side effect of this is that they're also routinely treated like dogshit outside of times of famine, and the stickiness of traditions means that, even with the farming techniques and food imports of outsiders, the lowest caste is still eating out of a literal garbage dump. Vermain fucked around with this message at 23:55 on May 16, 2018 |
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May 16, 2018 23:44
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Xae posted:https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Penhelm My headcanon is that the whole soul reading business is a bunch of bullshit Webb cooked up to help fund her efforts.
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May 17, 2018 02:19
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Ginette Reno posted:Poe2 has a bit of a Wire-esque theme of bad organizations corrupting good intentioned people. The little story anti-Key Aloth tells about the bloodletting ritual is a good summary of the game's core thrust: that well-intentioned people approaching complex problems with a fixed, paternalistic mindset usually end up making things worse.
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May 17, 2018 17:43
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Fresh Shesh Besh posted:I beat it on my second try, but the fight with the giant grub in the old city was really not very fun at all. I won that fight exclusively because Serafen could just spam Tenuous Grasp over and over and make it sit there like a dumbass for 20+ seconds. I dunno what the "proper" strategy is supposed to be for it.
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May 17, 2018 18:52
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My vanilla PoE1 near-completionist run took me, like... 40 hours? Maybe 50? I'd have to go back and check, but base PoE1 was absolutely not 100 hours unless you were savoring every text box like a Suntory 17.
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May 18, 2018 07:34
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EvilHenners posted:Overall I think Pillars 1 was actually the better game - while clunkier, combat felt better balanced with more variety and challenge Did we play different games? I went through PoE1 on release, and every single fight past Raedric was my three Ciphers spamming Mental Binding and then spamming Mind Blades over and over until we won. White March was a little better, but winning fights still came down to finding the one available chokepoint on the map and then leisurely unloading my arsenal 90% of the time.
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May 20, 2018 01:04
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Insurrectionist posted:PoE1 on launch was pretty bad on the gameplay side imo and even though I'd say Deadfire definitely has bigger issues when it comes to making it feel meaningfully challenging I'm still having way more fun with it. 1 got a lot better with patches on patches of changes and additions. It definitely got more balanced as time went on, but poor map design and a lack of enemy variety meant that chokepoint fighting was still the ideal strategy in almost every encounter, and the overall length/difficulty of battles mostly depended on how many Camping Supply restocks you wanted to go through.
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May 20, 2018 01:08
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jokes posted:A tanky Paladin/wizard with Abraham the Dog has trivialized the game for me. Fighter/Wizard is another solid-rear end combination. Llengrath's + Spirit Shield with Full Plate makes you take next to no damage against the vast majority of attacks in the game, and all of the various tools Fighter has to boost its own hit percentage means that you can win most wars of attrition easily and make your Empowered spells even more guaranteed.
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May 22, 2018 08:20
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I think the big problem with Priests is that their really good buffs are all things you want to use every encounter at the start, which means your Priest is sitting there doing nothing for 12 seconds aside from chain casting buffs and then largely autoattacking due to a lack of remaining spellcasts (and, to be frank, a lack of strongly impactful spells to cast outside of said powerful buffs). They kinda just feel like buffbots.
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May 22, 2018 08:30
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Entropy238 posted:I'm still on my first playthrough and I've found pure Wizards (Aloth) to be really unimpressive so far. Maybe I'm still in the PoE 1 frame of mind? Probably. Stuff like Curse of Blackened Sight isn't comparable to its PoE1 incarnation due to the general decrease in effectiveness of per encounter debuffs. CC/debuff spells are useful for mitigating incoming damage and for countering certain monsters, but damage spells are now actually very damaging and quite worthwhile. An Empowered Minoletta's Bounding/Concussive Missiles will take out half a group easily.
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May 22, 2018 08:45
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doingitwrong posted:I had a blast in PoE 1 causing chaos in the enemy ranks and then picking off the bewildered survivors and it sucks that this is gone from PoE II. One thing I'd like for them to experiment internally with is making it so that Empower automatically upgrades afflictions/inspirations provided by an Empowered ability by one tier. I feel like, at the moment, there's just not enough reason to Empower non-damage spells, given that the better option is almost always to simply Empower yourself and recast the debuff if necessary.
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May 22, 2018 14:17
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Hey rope kid, bug report: there doesn't appear to be any point in the game where you can ask Tekehu, "Huana gently caress?" Any ETA on a fix?
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May 22, 2018 15:49
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jokes posted:Fighter, like ranger and rogue, is a class that is really boring/maybe bad by itself. But mixed with other classes, hoo boy. Even if you touch nothing else in the class, having on-demand Aware and Constant Recovery is more than worth the price of admission. The fact that it has a bunch of extremely good passive talents is icing on the cake.
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May 22, 2018 16:17
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frajaq posted:D:OS 2 is Turn-Based, which means it's a much more accessible game to get into compared to Real-Time-with-Pause chaos. Going back to something rope kid said earlier, one subtle thing I realized that D:OS2 did well is that they provided the option for both pregenerated player characters and custom builds. There's probably an equally sizeable contingent of people who'll throw a game in the garbage in disgust if they can't make a custom dude as there are people who need a strong narrative hook with the character they play beyond, "You're under a curse and have to go do a thing."
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May 27, 2018 05:05
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Harrow posted:The true nature of the reincarnation cycle is something I'm unclear on, I think. Did the Engwithans invent the reincarnation cycle? If so, what happened to souls before? Did they just all slowly disappear? Or did they just hijack the existing cycle to siphon off just a little bit to power their gods, and breaking the Wheel just lets reincarnation continue as it's supposed to but without automatically giving the gods soul power? My take is that the Engwithans didn't invent reincarnation/reuse of souls, but they figured out, through their studies of animancy, what happens to souls when the body passes on and were able to construct Ukaizo on those principles to power the gods (since they knew the collective Engwithan souls would only last for so long). Think of it like petty till theft writ large: the gods take a couple cents out of every purchase - small enough amounts that no one notices except over the extreme long term - and eventually get a million bucks a year. Avalerion posted:That kind of stuff just makes me asume the writers couldn’t bother to come up with anything good so they pull a Wael. Nah. It was the implicit conclusion in PoE1 once you piece together that souls are energy, that souls seem to be dissipating or weakening over time via repeated reincarnations, and that the gods require vast amounts of energy to function. Moreover, it's the exact modus operandi of Legacy of Kain's Elder God, right down to his whole cycle of birth-death-rebirth being called "the Wheel"; it's not an uncommon idea in fantasy literature. Vermain fucked around with this message at 15:34 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 15:30
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Avalerion posted:Sorry, meant intentionally not explaining poo poo in general. I don't think a full, proper explanation would've been difficult to do. You could easily say something along the likes of: Ukaizo rerouted the flow of souls in such a fundamental way that it became integral to the process of reincarnation, and destroying the machine thus means that the process is also disrupted. I'm fully willing to believe that the explanation was cut to make the narrative conversation with Eothas flow better, because the actual physics of why it's happening (some longwinded exposition about how adra works, what Ukaizo's actual functions were, etc.) is less important than what's happening (Eothas is destroying the machine that powers the gods and leaving the fate of kith in their own hands).
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May 29, 2018 17:01
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Freaking Crumbum posted:just so i'm clear, Sun in Shadow is the location where the engwithans created the gods, but Ukaizo is where the engwithans built a device that would allow the gods to sustain their power? because based on what i've seen, Ukaizo feels really redundant to Sun in Shadow. Yes. Sun in Shadow is the factory, and Ukaizo is the power station. They serve different functions.
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May 29, 2018 17:06
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A rapier Devoted/Skald is pretty good. Not only is it thematic, but you can hit the rapier modal right before using Charge into a big group and get a shitload of crits.
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May 30, 2018 17:59
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The Huana caste system is a cultural artifact of a specific time and place, and it becomes increasingly unnecessary as Huana society comes in contact more and more with the outside world. Even if there wasn't overt imperialism coming in from all sides, the introduction of better farming techniques/tools and outside food imports would render the ostensible purpose of the separation of the castes (mitigating the societal effects of sudden famine) obsolete. The big question isn't, "Should the Huana caste system be kept intact?" (it shouldn't), but, "What will it change into?" and, "By what mechanism will it change?" Deadfire's core themes largely revolve around how cultures respond to a changing world, and whether forcing that change is a good thing or not. Aloth's little anti-Key story is a good summary of this: an outside influence comes into an insular community, causing a dramatic cultural shift, which leads to violent pushback when what's seen as a core cultural value is brushed aside. What should Aloth have done? Should he have let the bloodletting ritual continue? Should he have tried a different method of purging the unpleasant cultural element? Should he have simply let things take their own course? It's obvious that not every member of the Huana treats the Roparu with the same tasteless disdain as Onekaza; the Prince genuinely believes in the principle of prize-share and a more equal society. In time, could people like him gradually absorb the incoming transformations of Eoran modernity and successfully navigate Huana culture through it? The alternative view, of course, is that it's impossible, the Huana are inherently flawed as a culture, and the only thing that can snap them out of their stasis is violent intervention. This is the tack that Rauatai takes: their culture has to be obliterated and integrated from bottom to top. That this means generations and generations of the Huana living as de facto second class citizens is obvious, but a Rauataian would tell you that it's ultimately for their benefit. Even the supernatural element of the story is about this. Eothas believes that the gods are simply too integrated into the world for there to be any hope of kith naturally coming to their own conclusions via the study of animancy and eventually spurning the gods. He reasons that the only way out of the intractability of the situation is by violent intervention: by shattering the Wheel, he is forcing kith to come into their own and stop relying on the gods. Is he right to think this? Are kith really hopeless unless their culture is completely upended with what amounts to the "death" of the gods? Or would kith, in time, have naturally freed themselves from the influence of the gods? Ultimately, there's no perfect solutions, especially in the short term. What it really comes down to is: what do you think is important? Is the order and stability that the Rauataians provide the most important thing, regardless of the cultural destruction and subservience it entails? Is the economic development and growth of the Vailians' brand of mercantile capitalism the most important thing, even if it means destitution and landlessness for many? Is the freedom to do as one pleases the most important thing, as the Principi would argue, even if it means parasitizing as a way of life? Or is the preservation of the Huanan culture and personal autonomy the most important thing, even if it means uncertainty over how long the unpleasant parts of their culture will stick around?
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Jun 1, 2018 16:26
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Basic Chunnel posted:I see we've hit the open spoiler threshold three weeks after release Spoilers are a false idea.
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Jun 1, 2018 16:35
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Entropy238 posted:I found a really nice sword that was basically a paddle and did best of slash/crush damage. It’d be perfect for a devoted. It's a macuahuitl you buffoon!!!
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Jun 2, 2018 19:51
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En Garde Motherfuckers posted:(why was that thing even a sword in the first place, it's a cricket bat with I think it makes more sense as a club, given the setting and present level of technology. Macuahuitls were devastatingly sharp and could hack off limbs with a single well-aimed blow, but steel armor made the cutting edge useless. Given that everyone in the Deadfire's running around in chainmail and plate, you'd expect the club portion to get more use.
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Jun 2, 2018 19:57
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Entropy238 posted:Maybe I missed something but I didn't think Bearn was his son? When you talk to Bearn post-Lighthouse, he makes it clear that his father was a completely different man, although he never met him. There's ambiguity since his mom could have been lying to him (although there's no real reason for her to), but even Eder's willing to take him at his word.
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Jun 4, 2018 16:48
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Khizan posted:I just did the 'feed the Roparu' quest via the 'convince the Prince' method for the first time just now, and I feel like it's been misrepresented here. There's multiple ways of convincing him. You can take the benevolent tack if you get the Dawnstars to agree to supply food and he'll admit that it's an enormous embarrassment that the Roparu are being allowed to starve like they are and allows it to go ahead without hesitation. Harrow posted:Seems like a slight waste of Wizard's potential maybe, Wizard has a surfeit of incredibly good buffs, and going Wizard/Melee that focused entirely on self-buffing was a completely viable strategy. Even plain ol' Spirit Shield lasts forever and can push you above the armor threshhold against a huge number of enemies if you're already sitting in platemail. Vermain fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Jun 5, 2018 |
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Jun 5, 2018 19:46
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