Open Bar: We're going to build a bar, and make the drinks pay for it!

[Cain]

I sometimes think my bank is annoying because of how overly zealous they are with security measures and blocking access if they think your details may have been compromised.

Then I hear horror stories like this and I think "no, my bank's pretty good."

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I sometimes think my bank is annoying because of how overly zealous they are with security measures and blocking access if they think your details may have been compromised.

Then I hear horror stories like this and I think "no, my bank's pretty good."

Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. Also, my bank has fucked up so many times that it's almost like an abusive relationship that makes you scratch your head and wonder why I stayed for so long.

[Freeky]

Good luck with your future banking!  That sounds horrormirthy.  Or maybe ragemirthy.

[Cain]

So, my assassin character in Requiem just one-shot one of the most powerful characters in the game.

See this bastard:



This is Lokil.  In ordinary, unmodded Skyrim, Lokil is about as difficult as any other vampire to kill, which is to say, not difficult at all.  A couple of hits from a smithed silver blade will take him down, no problems.

Requiem, of course, changes this.  Because the Dawnguard questline, for whom Lokil is a starting boss, is considered high level quest material, Lokil is instead a level 80 battlemage decked out in enchanted ebony armour, meaning he looks more like this:



Because this is Requiem, this adds in additional problems.  Ebony armour has huge bonuses to defending against arrows.  Undead are immune to poison, so put them daggers away.  As a battlemage, he has a massive magicka pool, so he's mostly immune to illusion too.  His armour has fire resist enchants, one of the key weaknesses of a vampire.  Up close he wields an ebony mace (in other words, he will tear through your armour) and he casts Frost Cloak at the start of combat, so say goodbye to your stamina, and your ability to move.  Restoration can still take him out, dual casting sunfire at him does have an appropriate effect, but eh, restoration.  Lokil is a notorious check on character progress, and as you can see from this video, even skilled barbarians have problems taking him out.

Assassin type characters, especially assassin archers, are generally considered the weakest build in the late game.

Turns out though if you shoot him in the head with three exploding dragonbone arrows of fire, from a fully tempered ebony bow, with full perks in sneak and archery, he dies pretty hard.  As does everything else around him, since these are basically fireballs attached to an arrow.  In the face.  Repeatedly.

I can only conclude everyone who played an assassin before me is retarded, as I'm kicking ass in the late game. 

[Junkenstein]

Reminds me of an old favourite tactic from the Baldurs gate days - Everyone with bows and arrows of bombardment. Literally unlimited fireballs to the face turning every encounter in the game into a joke given that most things died to 1 and even tough bosses topped out at 3 or so with a couple of plot exceptions. When in doubt, fireballs. If still in doubt, more fireballs.

The days when an RPG can correctly show the effects of scorched earth warfare will be amusing.



What was giving the other guy so much trouble? 2h combat in skyrim was fairly simplistic but pretty effective. Requiem tweak?

[Faust]

It's really hard not to give a snarky summary of Batman V's superman. I mean its juvenile escapism, like most super hero movies, but it's also really dour.
The first Hundred hours or so aren't great, but those last 10 minutes with Wonder Woman are quite good.

[Cain]

Reminds me of an old favourite tactic from the Baldurs gate days - Everyone with bows and arrows of bombardment. Literally unlimited fireballs to the face turning every encounter in the game into a joke given that most things died to 1 and even tough bosses topped out at 3 or so with a couple of plot exceptions. When in doubt, fireballs. If still in doubt, more fireballs.

The days when an RPG can correctly show the effects of scorched earth warfare will be amusing.



What was giving the other guy so much trouble? 2h combat in skyrim was fairly simplistic but pretty effective. Requiem tweak?

Yeah, I did exactly the same.  Focus fire is a hell of a drug.

Requiem has a lot of combat tweaks, so it's hard to say.  Barbarian is a high risk, high gain kind of playstyle.  You either roflstomp the enemy, or they roflstomp you.  Another factor may have been using swords against heavy armour - no penetration bonus, if you don't specialize into greatswords (he was specializing into warhammers).  Up close combat with Lokil is a death sentence, even with Nord frost resistances, and especially also in evasion armour.  Dawnbreaker on a Nord, with a potion of Frost Resist, and Magic Resist, and in heavy armour, with a shield, would be more effective (Daedric weapons = 50% AP before any other bonuses apply, also counts as silver, also does 50 fire damage per strike, with the possibility of a +2500 fire damage attack). 2H is a lot slower in Requiem too, due to the Mass Effect system - weapon and armor weight actually matter, and there is a very noticeable difference in speed tiers between bladed, axe and blunt weapons.  That tradeoff is balanced not only by higher overall damage, but also AP bonuses, hence why Lokil can OHK with his own mace.

But then people also told me Dragon Priests would be hard with the same character type, and I strolled up to one, with Dawnbreaker in one hand, Goldbrand in the other, chugged a "resist everything" potion (snowberries + mudcrab chitin + purple flowers give you all elemental resistances), a resist magic potion, a potion of ably fighting (+40% 1h damage) and used the Shadow Shield illusion spell to up my attack rate.  Oh, and become ethereal shout to close the gap without being hit.  3 dual power attacks and there was a dead dragon priest.

I just think people think they can sit in the shadows with an untempered, mid tier bow (Nightingale at best) and steel tier arrows, and sneak attack everything and crush the game, like they did in vanilla.  Nope, you need to do some enchanting and smithing before that becomes the case.  The tools are there...you just have to figure them out.  Daedra hearts for poisons make dragons a joke...ebony+ tier arrows with shock enchants make automatons a joke.  Dawnbreaker makes undead a joke.  There you go, 90% of the late game, solved.

[Cain]

It's really hard not to give a snarky summary of Batman V's superman. I mean its juvenile escapism, like most super hero movies, but it's also really dour.
The first Hundred hours or so aren't great, but those last 10 minutes with Wonder Woman are quite good.

That seems to be pretty much everyone's impressions.  It's a long trainwreck of a film without much in the way of redeeming plot or even exciting visuals, then Wonder Woman makes it less insufferable, then it ends.

[Eater of Clowns]

It's really hard not to give a snarky summary of Batman V's superman. I mean its juvenile escapism, like most super hero movies, but it's also really dour.
The first Hundred hours or so aren't great, but those last 10 minutes with Wonder Woman are quite good.

What I don't get about the whole thing is why everyone is stringing up Ben Affleck when it's Zach Snyder that's been churning out soulless stylized crap movie after movie for the better part of a decade.

[Faust]

That seems to be pretty much everyone's impressions.  It's a long trainwreck of a film without much in the way of redeeming plot or even exciting visuals, then Wonder Woman makes it less insufferable, then it ends.

Yes, that's it exactly.

What I don't get about the whole thing is why everyone is stringing up Ben Affleck when it's Zach Snyder that's been churning out soulless stylized crap movie after movie for the better part of a decade.

Yeah, a bad characterisation of batman would still have been some kind of characterisation, the characters themselves are simply absent from the film, the actors did what they could with a soulless story and boring dialog. I still like the idea of Ben Affleck as batman, because this film doesn't actually give anything of note to do that you could judge the performance on.

[Freeky]

I have two weeks to make sure 1850 pts of Orks are table quality painted and wysiwyg built. 

I have maybe 350 pts that are the above, and the rest is bits.

FUCK.

[Faust]

The painting is the most fun part. But yeah 1850pt army is going to feel like Malasian wallet factory work doing them in that timeline.

[Freeky]

My favorite part is conversion.  I have a whole unit of bikes that are converted Deffkoptas, and a couple converted from Fantasy's Empire dudes where they're riding the horses. 

[Cain]

Lokil confirmed scrub tier: now with video evidence.  Includes graphic scenes of dead scrub vampires being teabagged.

[Freeky]

Lokil confirmed scrub tier: now with video evidence.  Includes graphic scenes of dead scrub vampires being teabagged.

  Well that seemed easy enough.