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What is the earliest you can get an inspiration point? Is it worth it to wait until you have at least one so that you can more or less guarantee a win on the Gale freeing test?
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Mar 24, 2024 22:18
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EorayMel posted:I think the gods are happy to sit that one out It's so funny, I've been watching my wife's playthrough and we were cracking up cause she rehabilitated Shadowheart away from her toxic cult, and then listened to her talk about how she wants a little cottage in the country with Tav and lots of pets, so we assumed she was going to be sorta vanilla and emotionally vulnerable now that she had doffed her justiciar ambitions. Then we find out that the Shar cult has been encouraging everyone to do orgies since forever, and she's extremely down to clown with the drow courtesans, and she wants you to get with Halsin so she can hear all the gory details, and apparently only gets annoyed if you cheat with Mizora because you didn't invite her along. You think you've got this cottagecore tradwife former goth gf and the oops, no, still freaknasty. Good for her.
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Mar 25, 2024 01:28
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Ashcans posted:The real win button is talking all your enemies into killing themselves for you. The entire Thorm family seems very suggestible
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Mar 25, 2024 02:26
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Taking out higher level bosses is really hard when you're still figuring out the game, but once you get the hang of it, it's much easier to punch above your weight. What's your party comp and rough load out?
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Mar 25, 2024 05:43
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Anyone got any fun or interesting build ideas for Rogues? My Tav is a Thief at level 4 currently, and I'm not sure what blends well with that. I feel like it was easier for me intuit fun mix-ups with the fighters and barbs when my wife and I were theory crafting her all star team. Also, I can't remember if I said this before, but to anyone struggling (especially with Act 1 fights when you're pretty resource scarce) you have have HAVE to get a few hirelings whose entire job is to hang out at camp and buff your party with non-concentration all-day spells. A cleric and a wizard ought to do it, though I'm no optimization expert so someone might have an argument that says I'm an idiot and you should get a druid and a sorcerer or something, idk. But having mage armor, longstrider, darkvision, aid, warding bond, etc cast on your party without it eating into any of your spells slots is a huge quality of life boost.
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Mar 26, 2024 00:07
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I finished the first season of Delicious In Dungeon, and the halfling thief Chilichuck was such a mensch that I thought about making a little halfling rogue dude for my first playthrough, only to be confronted with the hilariously, insanely bad creation options for halflings (halfling men specifically). There are no wiry little guys with big ears, just lumpy, depressed looking potato sacks that resemble what you'd get if someone caught an alcoholic Midwestern college football super fan pissing behind the Cracker Barrel and shot them with a shrink ray. Like it seriously looks as though they just took a human frame and squashed the y axis down to 1/3rd, gave them only heads that look like Silent Bob, and left everything else the same. Even their animations seem like they were awkwardly keyed from the human model, but lazily shrunk. The shorter races (other than dwarves) kinda feel like the only thing in the game that Larian didn't seem to give a poo poo about executing well, it's weird. Maybe mods will fix it one day. Edit: speaking of mods, if a campaign creation toolkit ever gets released, this game will live forever. It will become the new Skyrim.
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Mar 28, 2024 23:37
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Zodium posted:skill issue I mean that looks fine if you want a weird little clown guy but it's not for me 
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Mar 29, 2024 00:10
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*Sarah McLachlan - In The Arms of the Angels plays softly*
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Mar 29, 2024 03:30
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Hellbore posted:I feel like they were trying to run as far as possible from having the halflings and Gnomes look absolutely anything like children, for fairly understandable and good reasons. Hmm, I hadn't considered this and I suppose it's certainly possible. I still think there's got to be some way to get to "short elf" and make it work instead of panicking and veering towards .5x where x = Joe Madden.
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Mar 30, 2024 04:13
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Does Dammon not take infernal iron in Act 3 for some reason? My wife has a ton, and I know he's supposed to be able to make special armor with it, but there's no dialogue option coming up for it.
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Apr 1, 2024 03:46
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Gnolls loving rule, they're so metal. Yeenoghu the demon lord makes them insatiably hungry to the extent that it makes them violently and irretrievably insane, and their gift to him is the flesh they gorge on after going on rabid slaughter rampages. After butchering everyone and everything they come across, whole towns and caravans and fields of livestock, they drag the carcasses into big piles around the smoldering ruins they've made, devouring them, sometimes vomiting up the contents of their stomachs into the gore nests because they've choked the flesh down too quickly and too voluminously. When the gore nests get to a sufficient size, they become a portal to Yeenoghu's Seeping Woods in the Abyss, and more fully grown gnolls start growing in veiny, fleshy cysts within the corpse pile. They crawl out, screaming and steaming and starving and wet with stinking puke and viscera, immediately going on a rampage for flesh to sate the curse of their slavering hunger. They're like zombies but way WAY worse, they are just about the worst thing that can happen to an area.
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Apr 2, 2024 03:41
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Eau de MacGowan posted:when did gnolls go grimdark, werent they just furry goofy goblins back in the day? Idk, this was the explanation given in Volo's Guide to Monsters, but I suppose we have learned to take his missives with a grain of salt. I may also be misremembering and attributing some of the demon behaviors from DOOM 2016 to gnolls, but if I am then that's only cause it's cool and I'm the DM 
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Apr 2, 2024 05:15
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Clarste posted:Reading through a history of gnolls through various editions, it seems they've been getting more and more grimdark with each edition, but the part of them being literally birthed in blood and violence was introduced in 5e. Even in 4e though, they were already more demonic than humanoid. This was an interesting read but I completely disagree with how the author constantly harps on the tragedy of not woobifying the demon hyenas. Gnolls are cool as gently caress, it rules that they're insanely evil and metal, why do people want this game to just be going around and solemnly affirming the trauma of every single fictional monster, like, just go rub one out to some furry porn and stop trying to make this game into a dog dating simulator.
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Apr 2, 2024 07:35
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Saraiguma posted:demons always being evil is also racist! No, they are literally created from the ontological clay of archetypal evil in mythic para-dimensional planes that are created by and for the metaphorical extension of human evil. They are not people, they are fictional effigies that answer the question "what if rape and murder and betrayal had a body?" If you want demons to not be evil, then you want them to not exist, because they are fundamentally an archetypal godform who exist solely to be reflections of the anti-social behaviors we fear. If you want a demon to not be evil, allow me to point you towards: the angel. A demon that is not evil. It is fine for this to be true, because all of it is fake fantasy gobbledygook explicitly written to contain it for the purpose of making your little elf knight battle in epic fashion over the soul of the Eldritch McGuffin while you eat pizza with your friends and then go get stoned and see Dune 2.
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Apr 2, 2024 08:02
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Saraiguma posted:If demons have agency and personhood (they do) then them being "always evil" is simply portraying a race of people as okay to murder indiscriminately, alignment is moronic but there are multiple extant ways to forcibly change the alignment of a creature in dungeons and dragons The ones who don't play by the rules of being a huge piece of poo poo don't get to evolve past being a dretch or a mane or whatever it is that's the lowest form of demon, sort of like how you won't find any good billionaires. Maybe there are some good dretches and manes, idk cause you're not likely to ever meet them cause they're just gonna sit in a slime pit at the bottom of another dimension. Escalating in power in demon society requires choices and behaviors that mark you as evil. The more powerful you've been able to become, the more evil you are. It's basically just capitalism. Demons/devils are one of the few D&D monsters I'm fine painting with the Literally Always Dangerously Evil, Untrustworthy, and Anti-Human brush, because they aren't flesh and blood creatures with real, human motivations. They are coalesced metaphor about our darkest impulses. If they were a different metaphor, they wouldn't be demons. A demon who stops being evil stops being a demon. A billionaire who stops being evil stops being a billionaire.
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Apr 2, 2024 08:31
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Martian posted:I gave my entire party Alert as their feat at lvl 4, this seems like the correct choice so far Alert, sentinel, and polearm master are all heavy duty choices, although sentinel weirdly seems like it actually gets worse the more party members have it.
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Apr 2, 2024 09:07
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BG3 definitely seems like its themes are heavily geared more towards character study and found family rather than taking a larger and stickier philosophical issue, naming it The Eidolon of Free Will or something, putting it into a suit of Adamantine Demon Plate, and saying "defeat him to destroy the onslaught of chaos at the cost of never knowing if the mortal realm has true agency of any kind." I haven't beaten Act 3 yet, though I'm pretty close I think. I suppose other themes I'm seeing are the breaking or perpetuating cycles of violence and trauma, the allure of ambition, the way hubris dehumanizes you, and the terror of trusting when you have imperfect information. Questions as well of "do you use your enemy's tactics to rob the already brainwashed of their free will even further if it serves your ultimate goals, and the only real consequence is that it is morally and ethically dubious to do so?"
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Apr 2, 2024 20:34
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Morrow posted:Just to make it even more metal, dead gnolls can be cannibalized by their fellows and reanimated as skeletons called Witherlings that accompany their old crew as extra muscle. God drat I love me some D&D. Also, it seems so strange to me that Larian painstakingly modeled several different ranks of gnoll, gave them stats and mechanics and animations and gear and sound effects, and then used them for one single fight and then you never see one again for the next 115 hours (unless there's a sudden reappearance somewhere in the back half of act 3 that I'm unaware of).
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Apr 3, 2024 19:42
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Medullah posted:There's a few in Moonrise Tower. Ah, makes sense. My wife is the one who's in Act 3 and she assaulted Moonrise without ever realizing you could go inside and schmooze around so I think there's a bunch of stuff we missed there.
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Apr 3, 2024 19:55
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Geekboy posted:I have over two months of played time and I’m sure there’s at least a dozen hours of stuff I’ve never seen (and may never see - Karlach only gets a happy ending goddammit). There is a bad ending for Aylin and Isobel that is so cruel and evil and vile that you couldn't make me pursue it with an over pressurized airsoft gun trained on my bare nuts. If I found out someone I knew did that plotline and it wasn't because they were doing a novelty Awful Choices Only Seventh Run thing I would probably take them aside and have an intervention, like I would think there is something seriously wrong with them. I will never see that content, I do not want to see that content.
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Apr 3, 2024 21:37
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I once read a paper that held forth a position I've thought about a lot in the intervening years: "a game is a broken machine." This may not be universally true, but it's true often. You begin a game, and it has mechanics you haven't mastered, unlocked, or understood yet. There are inefficiencies and problems and roadblocks. The enjoyment comes from repairing that machine; you smooth the relationships, you unlock and create responses which better contend with the inefficiencies or roadblocks. An easy example is a Metroidvania. At the start, you're a lovely, slow, weak little peon with no double jump, and by the end you are a divine wind with full command of the space. RPGs start you as a flimsy little dork with nothing but the option "Attack (Poorly)," and over time you develop the complexity of levels and skills and builds and load outs and team comps that make you feel like a hyper competent switchboard operator, confronting a problem and plugging in the macro that best addresses it. I bring this up because I think that some people like to approach really complicated games such as Baldur's Gate 3 or Elden Ring and mine enjoyment from the feeling of dumping out all the Legos they offer onto the floor and rifling through them to see which pieces stuck to what in unexpected ways that give them the sense of "Aha!" that feels novel and clever, building their version of the completed machine messily and organically. That is the fun for them. Others see the giant tub of mixed Legos and think "I'd like to see a list of what's in this tub, because I'd like to build a well functioning machine, but I get really frustrated when I am looking for a piece and can't find it and don't even know if it's there anymore because maybe I used it in a dumb way already." Theirs is the enjoyment of building a Gundam model rather than a Lego Frankenstein spaceship. These two modes of play often seem so inscrutable to each other as to almost feel like an insult to the other, even though they are both ultimately trying to fix the broken machine.
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Apr 3, 2024 23:07
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Ashcans posted:Some of us are just feral animals and chew the legos. And god blesses you, because you're the only reason people figure out you can do poo poo like (Moonrise spoiler) open Balthazar's secret room with Nere's mushroom covered severed head and not just the hearts found on the adjacent corpses.
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Apr 4, 2024 00:29
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Does the (Act 2 and maybe 3 spoilers) Ring of Mind Shielding actually do anything other than what it says in the tooltip? I don't feel like I desperately need its mechanical utility, and I would be sad if Omeluum ever got recaptured by an Elder Brain just because I was keeping his most prized possession in a bag with 35 other rings I'm not using.
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Apr 4, 2024 08:12
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I was goofing around with (Act 1 under dark spoilers) Sovereign Glut and a mushroom zombie bulette today and kinda just seeing what I could do with them. I ended up casting Aid, Mage Armor, and Longstrider on them, as well as feeding Glut and Elixir of Fire Resist to negate his fire vulnerability and feeding the zombie bulette an Elixir of the Colossus lmao. We absolutely tore through the hook horrors by the Sussur Tree (I had already killed Filro with a zombie minotaur that was like five miles away from the main group; for some reason none of them aggro on you if you're a monster with no party nearby, though the hook horrors almost instantly heal to full after you attack. I was able to drill Filro with a charge rush crit tho so he was not a part of the eventual fight when the party showed up). I even healed Glut and the bulette to full after. I thought I was just so clever. Then it hit me that these two are going to turn on me after the duergar fight, and I'm going to have to deal with 2x HP embiggened Glut with Aid, Mage Armor, Longstrider, no fire vulnerability, and his undead dire bulette with the same (minus the fire elixir). I have played myself. Also, pro tip: if you get Shovel, they're indispensable for having them go invis and standing next to whoever you're gonna be fighting shortly so that your rogue has instant free sneak attack availability as soon as initiative is rolled. If you buff Shovel with Mage Armor, Longstrider, Aid, and an elixir, plus maybe a Warding Bond from someone who stays at camp, they're actually quite useful and survivable. Shovel has gotten the first and last hit in several of my big fights now. Elixir of Giant Strength is probably the optimal choice, but Colossus is the funniest and still very good. Invisible Man-sized Shovel is such a wonderfully unpleasant thing to have skulking about next to you at all times. I wish there was an elixir that could buff their jump scare move.
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Apr 4, 2024 10:56
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That Dang Dad posted:You can also do that trick with Karlach's severed head if you betray her instead of recruiting her. NNNOOOOOOooooo  Anyway I solved my impending Mega-buffed Glut and Bulette Problem by having them help curb stomp the Duergar fight, then jumping the bulette into the lake of death and making Glut jump off of the catwalks until he had low health and starting the conversation with him backed into a corner and surrounded lmao. I may need to flip the difficulty over to tactician mode because my hit points have pretty much been decoration for the last 30 or so hours.
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Apr 4, 2024 21:05
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That plant ambush fight really can be an absurd out of the blue difficulty spike lol
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Apr 5, 2024 03:34
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The voice acting in this game is so loving good and perfectly cast. These characters are so fully formed and well written and unique. I love them so much, how did Larian do this??
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Apr 5, 2024 21:11
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mst4k posted:This is like the 4th time I've played through this and doing tavern brawler monk which I've never done before - insanely strong and REALLY fun after playing softy characters the last few times. Get the Ring of Flinging and Gloves of Uninhibited Kushigo and start throwing things
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Apr 7, 2024 01:59
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My wife's half elf paladin got the ersatz eye and then later on took the ascended brainworm and she's a little sad now because her character looks absolutely demonically hosed up. I feel like the half-illithid hammer hits certain races way harder than others. Dragonborn don't seem to get affected all that much, whereas her half elf looks positively necrotic.
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Apr 7, 2024 22:50
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LifeLynx posted:Yeah I have him as a Gloomstalker right now, but as soon as I get that bonus for him he's paying $100 to Withers for some karate lessons. And then Withers is getting $100 pickpocketed off of him. Eau de MacGowan posted:gobble cock You're right, they should have let us romance a goblin. Tbh I'm actually rather bummed you can't play a goblin or get a goblin in your party. I understand sorta why they didn't, considering how big of an antagonist the goblins are in this game, but hey, you can play drow and duergar, so obviously it's not out of the question for them to have made it work. When I hired a camp wizard to buff the party before it heads out, I immediately took them to the magic mirror and gobbified them as much as I could and gave them a full get up of goblin-looking gear. Now I have a booyag who hangs around my camp and gives everyone Longstrider and talks in a pristine British accent for some reason.
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Apr 8, 2024 21:39
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When my wife and I were hyper-prepping for her to successfully pull a perfect and total victory in the Iron Throne midway through Act 3, our party buff loadout looked like this: -Summons- - two ice mephits - water elemental - deva - Us -Buffs on entire party (Paladin half-elf Tav, Thief Astarion, EK throwmonger Lae'zel, Evoker Gale), including summons- - Hero's Feast - Longstrider - maxed Aid - Freedom of Movement - Movement transmuter stone on Tav - Darkvision on Gale and Lae'zel - Warding Bond on all of the summons - Mage armor on Gale and all the summons - Death Ward on the mephits (would have done all the summons but was running dry on spell slots at this point and we're not so insane that we were going to hire and respec even more hirelings to act as camp casters) If I had known you can place elixirs on the ground and have summons interact with them at the time, we probably would have done that as well. We suplexed that mission after being totally stomped by it three times because we were underprepared and didn't know what we were doing. Having the ability to fly on Tav, Gale, and Lae'zel was very helpful, and bonus-action-dashing Astarion with Freedom of Movement could get nearly anywhere on turn one.
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Apr 10, 2024 01:33
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Black Noise posted:Summons can interact with elixirs in the party inventory screen. Select the summon press tab or the console equivalent and select the elixir in the inventory of someone who has the elixir. Select consume. Oh! I'll have to try it that way. There are a lot of unexplained and horribly unintuitive kludges in the console version. It kinda makes me wish they'd just kept it exactly the same as the PC version and made the left stick act like a mouse cursor instead of a WASD thing. The radial option system is such hot garbage that I'm genuinely shocked they shipped it.
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Apr 10, 2024 01:49
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Snake Maze posted:It hurts but you just have to learn to accept, in your heart of hearts, that getting a free transmuter stone is cheating. The Transmuter in the actual 5E rules can give their stone to whoever they want iirc.
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Apr 11, 2024 20:41
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Docjowles posted:I simply surprise attacked from the rafters and threw poo poo at him til he died without ever taking an action See when I first started playing this with my wife we tried the rafters thing, and Ragzlin simply ran up the ladder and easily threw everyone off to their deaths who hadn't already been greased and drilled by the caster goblins below.
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Apr 11, 2024 23:31
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Qubee posted:Should I be using karmic dice or not? Starting a new campaign with a friend, really enjoying it, but man do my rolls suck rear end both with and without karmic dice. I'm playing as a fighter and I'll consistently miss back to back attacks and it just makes for a trash experience. We're not even playing hard difficulty, we're on balanced, and I'm pretty much just a glorified damage sponge because I can barely land hits. Other dice rolls are equally terrible, needing a 10 and regularly landing sub-5. As others have said, you need someone casting Bless on the party for these early fights. Throwing bottles of grease is also very helpful at this point, especially if you use a weapon with extra reach, because you can hit the prone enemies without stepping on the grease yourself. If you're a battle master fighter, take tripping attack and disarming attack for sure. Trampling an unarmed, prone opponent may be ethically spurious according to the Hague, but the Hague don't operate in Faerun. If you're a strength focused fighter and not a dex focused fighter, throwing daggers, javelins, light hammers, and hand axes will probably get you more mileage than shooting an arrow unless you have a bow with cool powers and extra hit chance/damage.
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Apr 12, 2024 20:39
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Bug Squash posted:I went up into the rafters, cast illusion at the brim of the spider pit, and then fired an arrow of roaring thunder at the entire bunch followed by a grease to cc the mooks still on the level. Oh yeah, once you have a better sense of what you can do in this game, you can get absolutely stupid with it. In my own personal playthrough that I started more recently after watching my wife's character get to Act 3, Dror didn't swing his hammer a single time. All the goblin minions caught a lightning bolt on round 1 and Dror Ragzlin got slammed to the mat and stabbed by hasted Karlach, Lae'zel, and my rogue over and over for the only two rounds the fight lasted. RIP Dror Ragzlin: died at the foot of his own throne.
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Apr 13, 2024 09:05
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Zodium posted:discovered the rat revolutionary in the sharess' caress cellar tonight and had a good chuckle Now to activate Spirit Guardians on Shadowheart and pop some bubble wrap
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Apr 18, 2024 00:34
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Shadowheart's kit makes sense for her backstory as you'll eventually discover, but is kinda dogshit for actually playing her in your game. You can of course re-spec her into several other powerful cleric formations, but even without doing that you can get mileage out of keeping her focused on support. You already know Spirit Guardians is very good, and Spiritual Weapon is useful just for getting more hit points out in the field to soak attacks (it's entirely middling at actually damaging anything other than the paltriest of mooks), but Bless is an easily slept on spell. Once you start putting that out on your crew, you'll wonder how you lived without it, especially if you have someone using one of the -5 to hit/+10 to damage feats. There is a lot of gear that synergizes very well for a support Shadowheart who also dips into radiant damage. Also, regarding skin tone for your Tav (looks good btw!), if you access the magic mirror you should be able to go to skin tone and there will be a button that opens up every possible skin tone you can have rather than just the ones that are default for your race. I think there's a few grays in there? As far as gearing your paladin, there are a few pieces that are VERY easy to miss that are by no means required, but are definitely nice to have, especially early game. If you're interested, I'll spoiler some vague hints so you still have to figure it out, but you at least know where/when to keep your eyes peeled. The spoilers before the dashes are broad general location, and the spoilers after the dashes are clues about those locations. Tollhouse on the Risen Road - look for a place to have a nice seat... or two. Rosymorn Monastary Roof - hop beyond where large birds perch.
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Apr 18, 2024 10:44
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Mod support that allows for actual, from-scratch, new community content? This is gonna be Skyrim all over again and I'm vibrating about it.
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Apr 18, 2024 18:46
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Node posted:The modding tools makes me so excited. Forever game indeed. But do we have any idea of how sophisticated they will be? Could people make entirely new campaigns? Pleeeease! That would be so amazing.
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Apr 19, 2024 07:32
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