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Same, I was averaging 5~10 fights per long rest by the end of the game because I was trying to efficiently swap people out depending on who was low on health or spells, or use whoever I thought would have the most relevant dialogue for the quest(s).

My default roster was usually either Shadowheart, Gale and Laezel or Karlach, Wyll and Astarion. I was playing an archer sniper ranger so I basically always had two melee, one caster blaster and me as DPS and CC through arrows. I actually really liked the arrow system to give bow users more utility and if I ever run a campaign I’d like to adopt that. I’d make them cheaper though.

I never got to actually use Halsin. I tried to swap him in several times and it just never worked, then he was killed via plot events in act 3 via a mechanism where I could not save him. I used Jaheira a bit in late act 3, just for the Harper & Minsc stuff, not much after that. Never used Minsc, too much overlap with me, Laezel and Karlach.

I found both Wyll and Gale pretty frustrating, but that’s likely because I was trying to be so conservative on rests.

Don’t know how people have already run through 3+ times, I spent like 150 hours on my first run and saw probably 85% of the game… also the ending was pretty disappointing. I’m not itching to dive back in but I’d be interested in DUrge as well as interacting with Minthara more.

I had no idea the crucible was even usable for that, wasn’t telegraphed at all. I found the buff/debuff to be infuriatingly inconsistent and eventually the lava mechanic just broke altogether and the only way to leave that zone was to fast travel out of it, and I could never return.

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The match to the mat is really nice!

Act 2 - Too many weird issues to count with Halsin in act 2. Thankfully I was able to talk to him at camp, get him to go meet me at the Inn and then do the Defend The Portal thing. Then he disappeared for a while, had nothing to talk about at my camp, and the “Show on map” button for his quest didn’t go anywhere. Thankfully it did resolve itself later at the end of the act, I think it might have been caused because I did the hide & seek with the cursed tiefling boy “too early” in act 2?

Early act 3 - The booby-trapped toys quest, after getting the Fist officials to realize the toys are trapped, you get a quest update to go confront the toymaker. Weirdly the only options are kill him or let him leave, not turn him in? I let him leave, he vanished and the quest never updated so I still have it.

Late act 3 - All quests related to Kithrak Voss and the Orphic hammer - I spoke to Voss at the start of act 3, then to Raphael, then Voss again. Many hours later, stole the hammer, went to meet up with Voss in the sewers. He would talk to me, but he just said “Follow me to the tap room”, and then he never left the spot. Tried talking to him on all characters, going to camp, reloading, etc. etc. I think this one might have broken him because I normally have at least one summon out (celestial or elemental from Shadowheart, Wyll or Gale) and NPCs go insane if you have a summon they interpret as hostile. I was able to progress the quest but maybe this interrupted him somehow. Anyhow it would have cost me so many hours to go back to a save before that by the time I troubleshot everything that I just gave up. You can still break Orpheus free at the end and get Voss’s help, but you never get the greatsword (which is a shame because Baldur’s Giantslayer literally does not fucking work on the ONLY two mobs in the game that qualify for its bonus damage after the point where you receive it).

I think she is just kinda the default if you have no imagination - softspoken human female that isn’t totally obnoxious.

In terms of female romance options Lae’zel is the only one who it seemed to make sense would be forward enough to try and jump your bones after just 2 or 3 days. Karlach wasn’t even an option for me, she had no romance adjacent dialogue at the tiefling party. I wonder if part of that was just how late she joined up in act 1, I did get her engine “fixed” for the first time but it was one of the last things I did and I can’t remember if it was before or after clearing the goblin camp.

I did really enjoy Shadowheart’s arc though, especially since I generally adopted a policy to not suggest or try to interfere with the companions’ quests. Just left them to their own decisions without trying to sway them, and the fact that Shadowheart chooses to reject Shar and Lae’zel chooses to reject Vlaakith (or at least hear Voss out) made for two of the most powerful moments in act 2 IMO. There is lots to like about all three of them throughout their arcs and that’s part of what makes them so great.

I’m curious about how dielectric grease on the wires is different to 205g0. I’ve always just brushed 205g0 in a thick layer on to the wires and call it good but never tried anything else, and I don’t even really know what to look or listen for to know if I should be doing something different.

I’ve also seen you should use a syringe to inject extra grease in from the top after a few months, but never done that either and curious how important people feel it is.

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I was pretty light on gold for most of the game because I played a sniper ranger so was spending money on arrows CONSTANTLY. Arrow of Many Targets and the one with smokepowder bomb on the end are especially strong but so expensive. I had to raid the bank to be able to afford the Persistence Armor from Dammon for Shadowheart, even after maxing out his attitude… which it was super weird it took 5k in donations considering you know, I saved his bacon twice and I’m trying to save the world.

What I think could have worked was one or two other major late game items could have also been ported to the House of Hope, and you have to part with one knowing you won’t get it back. Like as a signal that you are basically at the end of the game now, you need to pick your final party config and get them as set up as possible and start letting other things go. I went in to the final section with a lot of gear on other people I really wish I’d transferred to my core team.

I just left it on, I don’t really understand it though. I still fail even trivial skill checks repeatedly with anyone other than Astarion so I’m not actually convinced it does anything at all.

I know there is a kind of philosophy in random dice roll design for software where you slightly skew the distribution of subsequent rolls based on previous ones because it feels more random (rather than getting e.g. 1, 2, 1, 2, which could be ‘truly random’ but feels like ass), but I don’t think that’s what karmic dice is doing. I do play really high AC, with Laezel and Shadowheart in full endgame plate plus a buff here or there I think they run 24~27. It is very hard for enemies to hit us and it feels about right. I would be very surprised to learn that karmic dice is benefiting enemies too, because that seems unintended and not in the spirit of how the tooltip is written.

That’s hilarious, considering she wants 10000 gold the first time you ask and you can haggle her down to 5000. I’ll probably just give them back to her and then buy them so the quest completes - I don’t have much need for money after bribing Dammon down and purchasing his full plate set.

Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1, 16 years ago. The only two meaningful changes for how difficult games should be to run in that time are that 1440p & 2160p have become more common, and raytracing. But consoles being content to run at dynamic resolutions and 30fps combined with tools developed to make raytracting palatable (DLSS) have made developers complacent to have their games run like absolute garbage even on mid spec hardware that should have no trouble running 1080p/60fps.

Destiny 2 was famously well optimized at launch. I was running an easy 1440p/120fps in pretty much all scenarios maxed out on a 1080 Ti. The more new zones come out, the worse performance seems to be in each, even though I now have a 3090.

I am loving BG3 but the entire city in act 3 can barely run 40fps on a 3090, and it is not an especially gorgeous looking game. The only thing I can really imagine is that maxed out the character models and armor models do look quite nice. But a lot of environment art is extremely low-poly. I should not have to turn on DLSS to get playable framerates in a game like this with a Titan class card.

Nvidia and AMD just keep cranking the power on the cards, they’re now 3+ slot behemoths to deal with all the heat, which also means cranking the price. They also seem to think 30fps is acceptable, which it just… is not. Especially not in first person games.

I don’t disagree with your stance, but I am curious why you decided on a trainer instead of picking the easier difficulty. Did you try it and still find it too much? I have read about the differences between modes but haven’t actually tried anything other than normal, and even though I’m extremely familiar with PF 1e and D&D 5e I’ve struggled with lots of encounters.

Prebuilts from brands like Ducky? mechanicalkeyboards.com

DIY kits are generally best bought from their mfg’s - Akko, Keychron, GMMK, Keycult.

More general retailers will have some mix of keycaps, switches, kits, maybe prebuilts and accessories - Novelkeys, Canon Keys, Mekibo, Bolsa Supply (mostly GBs), Vala Supply, KBDFans, KPRepublic (mostly caps), Kono Store, Drop (mostly caps).

To track upcoming and live GBs, at least for keycaps and keyboards - mechgroupbuys.com. It’s pretty dead at the moment but I think the number of active group buys has tumbled recently due to several high profile scandals in the industry (namely Mechs & Co and Rama). Also several major keycap manufacturers piled up huge backlogs during the pandemic that are only just finally clearing up, namely GMK and Milkyway. All of that is causing there to be very few new GBs starting right now, and they can be kind of hard to find unless you’re already in the communities of the designer(s) or refreshing Geekhack.

they quite literally show a popup that uncompleted quests may be broken

It is unclear which quests will be broken, or how many. 15 of the 20 or so quests I had at that point couldn’t actually be progressed then anyway, but 5 could.

you clearly should do before continuing, like exploring the tower

How is this clear? I was assuming once I got to Moonrise it would be one long fight to Ketheric and so was trying to do everything else first, imagining it would effectively conclude the act. I had no reason to assume it would be a social zone that I needed to visit and complete quests in before doing the temple. I had no idea there would be an assault on the tower.

it’s quite clear that once you reach the gauntlet that maybe that’s a bigger thing than a simple side quest, specially when the popup shows up.

The pop-up is, but a similar popup happens when you leave Act 1, but many things remain accessible. So it is inconsistent. I think it would help to have quests show recommended levels so it is more obvious what order you’re expected to do them in - you could still go out of order like you can now, but I think it would be a better experience.

The problem with this is the encounters and enemies have specific levels. If you skip things (and there are several instances where progressing one quest ends or eliminates many others even when they are not mutually exclusive, a la evil vs. good companions) you could end up very underleveled later on. I had several fights early in Act 2 where I felt I was VERY obviously missing content as I needed my entire party to be a level or two higher to get through without save-scumming, spamming items, exploiting mechanics, or all of the above.

A lot are super not obvious too - in Act 1 there are quite a few things you’re “supposed” to do before you go to the goblin camp or else you’ll be pretty unprepared to deal with the sheer number of level 3~4 mobs. But I assumed initially it worked like more traditional RPGs and you do the side quests first and the main quest as the last thing before wrapping up the act. You can also sneak around and pretty much get instantly TPK’d by the Spectator until you have the action economy to deal with it (level 5ish). But in Act 2 you’re actually “supposed” to go to Moonrise first before going to the Mausoleum or else you lose the ability to finish tons of quests and access to several vendors. You’re told to find tieflings, Mol, and Zevlor all at the same time but you have no way of knowing that if you go to the mausoleum first you’ll lose access to the tiefling quest resolution, but not the other two. It’s not obvious at all that you can’t find Mol until Act 3. It’s missing the kind of corrections and hints a DM could do on the fly to keep things moving, or at least nudge you in the right direction if you’re willing to be railroaded in order to see the most content possible.

In the USA licenses are not contingent upon manual vs. automatic. No one checks what car you drive. So you would have to learn somewhere - someone around you has to own a manual car in order for you to learn how to drive one, and here simply no one does. No one in my entire extended family, none of my friends, none of my coworkers I’m friendly with, none of the 50+ cars I have any tangential access to are manual. So even if I wanted to learn, what are my options? Buy an entire car just to learn? Services like Turo won’t let you rent one unless you can drive one already.

We have Driver’s Education in high school but it involves no actual driving - there are separate paid/private courses you can take that might involve defensive driving or learning stick. I did one on controlling skids on wet or snowy pavement and demonstrating e.g. turning under braking with and without ABS. But nothing about manual.

This thread is an amusing display of sample bias. Only people that want to respond yes and brag about it bothering to respond.

In reality only about 2/3rds of people in the US can drive stick and almost no one owns manual cars.

I’ve never driven a manual car. I’ve had people be like “You can’t drive manual?!” and then I would respond “So are you going to teach me?” The answer is always No, of course not, not in their car (assuming they even owned a manual, which none do anymore). My parents had manual cars but sold them 10+ years before having me.

I understand how a clutch works. It wouldn’t be difficult to learn. But what reason or motivation is there to learn when almost no cars are manual? They total something like 2% of new car sales. If you’re buying something like a 718 GT4 RS or a 911 GT3 RS for maximum driving engagement that’s great, but those cars are priced for the 1% of the 1%.

Even if you had a fun car, which I do, the drive to work is stop-and-go, roads are full, even the fun country backroads are filled with traffic on weekends, forests are burned down, gas is eye-watteringly expensive if you have a slightly performant vehicle. The time to have fun driving cars was 40 years ago.

I’ve only played D&D for a couple years and don’t have extensive experience with githyanki lore but my impression is they’re not so much bent on genociding other races as they are exterminating the mind-flayers that enslaved, tortured, and fed on them. Everything about the structure of their society and their philosophy on the value of life hinges around that. They became hyper militaristic - only the strongest and most capable are valued. They seem to regard other races as largely weaker or simply unworthy/uninteresting, but aren’t looking to kill or subjugate them, they’re just irrelevant.

I’m only ~near the end of Act 2, but Laezel’s development has been some of my favorite stuff about the second act.