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I just finished the next and final Apocrypha zone. I've got to say that, like most of Dragonborn, it was a mix of really good and really frustrating aspects. I'm glad I finally tried this expansion, which imo is much better than Dawnguard. But man, the constant bugs and falling through the floor and dying in Apocrypha and things like that are frustrating too
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Apr 15, 2023 03:32
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| # ? May 5, 2024 23:44 |
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Day 80: 'Dov' means Dragon Time for the showdown with Miraak! It turns out to be a very fun fight, one of the game's better boss battles. Also- I've started work on another Skyrim project. Years ago, the vote was almost split on whether to do this as a warrior run or a mage run and there've been lots of people asking how I'd handle things as a warrior over the years. I haven't decided on the exact format yet, but I'm going to make some content showing at least the outline of how I'd tackle a warrior run, and the maneuvers to use to survive fights.
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Apr 16, 2023 19:09
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Nice work finishing the main questline of Dragonborn.  I was absolutely flabbergasted that the dragon riding is so wonky and janky. I'm really curious how you're supposed to have any survivability as a melee fighter when simply being in range of an enemy who starts a two handed power attack can lock you into being killmoved and end you despite having hundreds of health.
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Apr 16, 2023 20:19
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Poil posted:Nice work finishing the main questline of Dragonborn. Turning killmoves off for everyone is part of my ruleset for this challenge. Because you're right, killmoves are just a dice roll. Even if you could easily have dodged or shield bashed or done Fus or something, the game will just decide you're dead some % of the time if an enemy so much as looks at you in melee. All in all I think I liked the main Dragonborn quest more than Dawnguard. It was shorter and didn't have two branching options true, but the Dawnguard one had a lot of filler-y giant dungeons that got boring. Both did have some different strengths though.
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Apr 16, 2023 22:59
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Melth posted:Turning killmoves off for everyone is part of my ruleset for this challenge. Because you're right, killmoves are just a dice roll. Even if you could easily have dodged or shield bashed or done Fus or something, the game will just decide you're dead some % of the time if an enemy so much as looks at you in melee. To me Dragonborn felt like a new area to explore and Dawnguard felt like a new plot I got to watch.
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Apr 17, 2023 00:24
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Dawnguard felt like playing a game with the DM from DM of the Rings. You were placed firmly on railroad tracks from which you got to watch the DM's pet character do stuff.
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Apr 17, 2023 01:27
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Eric the Mauve posted:Dawnguard felt like playing a game with the DM from DM of the Rings. You were placed firmly on railroad tracks from which you got to watch the DM's pet character do stuff. I loved that comic! You did have a choice of two sets of railroad tracks... on which you had to put up with the same annoying pet NPC though. I suppose Hjalti should get back to that plotline soon and wrap it up too. I've got some big character moments planned coming up.
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Apr 17, 2023 22:18
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Responding to the video: I think there's a difference between knowing the word "dov" and understanding it as a Word of Power deeply enough to use as a Shout. Remember that it normally takes years of meditating on a word to use it in a Shout. You've taken your dragonborn shortcut for granted! Speaking of dragonborn, nice victory over Miraak. He should count as a dragon kill in the stats, IMO. It's one of the more interesting fights in the game even if it isn't particularly difficult for a well-prepared character. It's cool that unlike Alduin, Miraak has a whole arsenal of different Shouts he uses in the fight. If I may nerd out for a minute; that shout he uses to absorb the dragons' souls and heal up, "Ziil Los Dii Du," is an odd one since it contains four words and by definition Shouts consist of three words. It translates as "[your] soul is mine [to] devour." Shortening it to "Ziil Dii Du" or "Soul Mine Devour" is all it would take to make it a proper Shout. Then again it may not really be intended as a Shout but a command that works on dragons under the effect of Bend Will, though that doesn't explain why it works on Sahrotaar who was still under the player's domination. Miraak's VA certainly delivers the line like it's a Shout.
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Apr 18, 2023 02:02
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Eric the Mauve posted:Dawnguard felt like playing a game with the DM from DM of the Rings. You were placed firmly on railroad tracks from which you got to watch the DM's pet character do stuff.
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Apr 18, 2023 13:30
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Mountaineer posted:Responding to the video: I think there's a difference between knowing the word "dov" and understanding it as a Word of Power deeply enough to use as a Shout. Remember that it normally takes years of meditating on a word to use it in a Shout. You've taken your dragonborn shortcut for granted! I think you may be mixing up the two steps of learning a shout. Just learning the word itself seems to be pretty trivial. We learn words just by being told them on many occasions, such as Durneviir just telling us what the 3 component words of his Soul Tear shout mean. Or seeing them written on magic walls. Or hearing the ancient nord heroes use them. Or lots of other ways. Unlocking it (by either spending a dragon soul, or one of the Graybeards using their super magic to let you directly 'tap into their understanding' of the word) is the hard part and requires lots of meditation and understanding. Or using a dragon soul. Hermaeus Mora didn't do that hard part for us. I still had to spend dragon souls to unlock the shout! (Incidentally, seems like that would be a real nuisance if you got to this point in the quest but had no dragon souls because Miraak kept stealing them). Hermaeus Mora only did the really easy part of telling us a word we should already know, and which we could have learned from multiple friendly sources if we somehow didn't already know it. I would expect this kind of garbage from Clavicus Vile, the daedra of tricking you with terrible deals, but not from the supposed daedra of magical secrets and forbidden lore!
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Apr 19, 2023 17:58
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There's still a difference between knowing a word in the dragon language and knowing that it's a component of a shout. The player didn't know and had no way of knowing that the last word of Bend Will was "dov." Literally only Miraak and Hermaeus Mora know about this, and probably some third party in the past or future who Mora learned it from in the first place. Paarthurnax doesn't know it, Arngeir doesn't know it, and it's not recorded on a word wall anywhere that we know of. Sure, Hermaeus Mora's intentions are purely selfish and all he gives you is a piece of information at no cost to himself, but it's not like he cheated you. It was still a piece of information you wanted and needed, he was up front about his price to trade that information, and at the end he upheld his end of the bargain. That's just how dealing with the daedric god of knowledge works. There's no ironic trickery as with Clavicus Vile. Can't believe I'm defending the writing in Skyrim  . I find nothing strange or inconsistent about this part of the DLC's story, though. The few occasions the player learns a shout just from hearing the words bother me more. Usually knowledge of a word is learned from a magical chanting and glowing word wall, or directly imparted by a Greybeard or dragon. I can somewhat justify learning Dragonrend just from hearing it used because who knows how an Elder Scroll being involved changes things, but the one that really bothers me is Esbern being able to teach you Call Dragon just by telling you Odahviing's name.
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Apr 19, 2023 20:05
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I think it's similar to the Greybeards yelling "Dov Ah Kiin" at the start of the main quest. A dragon is just too arrogant to ignore someone with The Voice yelling their name/challenging them, and then you scare/impress him into servitude.
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Apr 20, 2023 12:39
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I frequently ignore that calling shout just because of how tedious it is to make it up to the beards and, worse, having to suffer through their horrible shout tutorial that just drag on for way too long given how uninteresting it is.
Poil fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 12:51
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Poil posted:I frequently ignore that calling shout just because of how tedious it is to make it up to the beards and, worse, having to suffer through their horrible shout tutorial that just drag on for way too long given how uninteresting it is. Especially if you already have shout cooldown time reducers like the Amulet of Talos + Talos Blessing halving your shout recharge time. They'll still force you to wait the full standard recharge time before summoning the next of the three boring targets for Fus+Roh! Awful. LashLightning posted:I think it's similar to the Greybeards yelling "Dov Ah Kiin" at the start of the main quest. A dragon is just too arrogant to ignore someone with The Voice yelling their name/challenging them, and then you scare/impress him into servitude. That's what Esbern says, yeah. Odahviing isn't compelled to respond to the call, he's just an arrogant twit. Mountaineer posted:There's still a difference between knowing a word in the dragon language and knowing that it's a component of a shout. The player didn't know and had no way of knowing that the last word of Bend Will was "dov." Literally only Miraak and Hermaeus Mora know about this, and probably some third party in the past or future who Mora learned it from in the first place. Paarthurnax doesn't know it, Arngeir doesn't know it, and it's not recorded on a word wall anywhere that we know of. Sure, Hermaeus Mora's intentions are purely selfish and all he gives you is a piece of information at no cost to himself, but it's not like he cheated you. It was still a piece of information you wanted and needed, he was up front about his price to trade that information, and at the end he upheld his end of the bargain. That's just how dealing with the daedric god of knowledge works. There's no ironic trickery as with Clavicus Vile. I really don't think there's much lore to support the interpretation that every shout must be exactly 3 specific words in-universe, with all other combinations of dragon language words being worthless. That seems to just be a game mechanic. I mean first of all, obviously we use 1-2 words all the time. As you yourself pointed out, Miraak uses a four word shout. Dragons supposedly converse/fight in this language and one would assume that in lore their arguments do not consist of endlessly yelling FIRE back and forth. Likewise all the lore about the thuum and about how great masters of it couldn't speak at all because literally anything they said could cause devastation. Also there are a couple of shouts iirc which use the same word in different positions and they're perfectly valid. Also, you can learn the words of shouts in any order. The wall or whatever other source will say a specific word on it, but you'll learn whatever the next word in the shout is. Not the one that's written on the wall. That suggests the details of the words and their order don't really matter in character, various combinations are valid and having a common theme seems to be enough for the shout to become more powerful. All of the above suggests that it's just a game mechanic rather than a real aspect of the setting that the shouts we use are each 3 words. If you have a 2 word shout which mind controls anything other than dragons, literally the most obvious thing to try is to add the word dragon to it. But in lore, presumably other words on a similar theme would work too. And again, Hermaeus Mora did not give us any special understanding of the word. He just gave us the word, and we had to unlock the understanding of it the hard way (by stealing it from a random dragon).
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Apr 20, 2023 19:48
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LashLightning posted:I think it's similar to the Greybeards yelling "Dov Ah Kiin" at the start of the main quest. A dragon is just too arrogant to ignore someone with The Voice yelling their name/challenging them, and then you scare/impress him into servitude. I always thought it was a nice touch that the Dragonborn, having the soul of a dragon, is too arrogant not to show up when their Dragon Name is called.
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Apr 28, 2023 23:57
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Incidentally I always thought Alduin's taunt of "MY BELLY IS FULL OF THE SOULS OF YOUR FELLOW MORTALS, DOVAHKIIN!!" was just wince-inducing writing. Because, like, it invites the easiest riposte in the history of everything.
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Apr 29, 2023 00:15
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Day 81-82: Temba Was Right It's time to slay an evil wizard who has been spreading Hermaeus Mora's influence across Solstheim. Again.
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Aug 20, 2023 19:01
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