The Gaming Den

I have a skyrim question. I am playing on an xbox.

I did the quest Blood on the Ice wrong and fingered the court mage. I have found out that's the wrong way to do that. How to I trigger the next murder so I can continue the quest, or is it pooched?

Amalur update:

I have four hours of playing time. I've completed 8 sidequests, have five in the can that can be done, and I just saw a couple more quest givers out on the map.

Also, Reckoning mode is damned worth saving for boss fights. One sidequest culminated in squaring off with a bandit leader. His whistled up help. I hit Reckoning, butchered his underlings, and then did the God of War kill on him, got the XP bonus maxed, and then got something well over a thousand XP from that one kill.

I'm also increasing in love with warhammers. They have a nice arc and do awesome damage.

Quake is likewise a good thing to have. Harpoon is an even better one. My usual routine against a Sprite is "GET OVER HERE!" and then kill it with a hit.

If I have a complaint, it's that I need some storage space. I joined a faction and I got rewarded with...

...a cot.

It's a very nice cot, but I'd rather trade it in on a storage chest.

Edit: I was going through the Destinies. They're perks/bonuses you get to pick. Your available ones are based on how many points you have in which skill tree. And you can hybridize--so splitting your points evenly between, say, Magic and Finesse can let you be a magic-ish rogue.

I also noticed that all three of the magic-based (pure magic, magic warrior, magic rogue) destinies eventually let you teleport to dodge attacks, rather than roll.

This is awesome.

Ted the Flayer wrote:I have a skyrim question. I am playing on an xbox.

I did the quest Blood on the Ice wrong and fingered the court mage. I have found out that's the wrong way to do that. How to I trigger the next murder so I can continue the quest, or is it pooched?

No its not

I'll have to try that, the site should show me a location where the bloodworks are. I figured I could find the jail by committing a crime, so I punched Jarl Stormcloak in the face. Yeah, don't do that...

Although the issue is that it's been well more than three days in-game, and a new murder won't happen.

I got Kingdoms Of Alamur hardcopy today, and am installing it. I hate EA's horrible Steam analogue already.

I've played the alamur demo and while the story seems a little shaky, the rest is solid. I think I actually like this more than what I've played of Skyrim.

I just got my first house on Amalur. The town in the Webwood--if you do a certain quest, you're gifted with the key to an abandoned house.

Also, I notice something about sidequests. It seems that good guys give you loot. Bad guys will just pay you. I did a sidequest for a lady, found out something, and refused the bribe attempt and just killed the baddie. And when I saw her, she gifted me with a kickass glove. Thing give a ton of health and mana bonuses, and +5% to XP. So the moral of the story is, "If someone's just offering to pay you for your cooperation, be open to someone else."

Having an actual storage chest rocks. I don't have to periodically sell off loot, and my latest batch of dungeons have been handing out some nice stuff I want to save until I can break it down for parts.

What rocks even more? You can talk to the blacksmith to get your house expanded/upgraded.

So now I have a basement which grows reagents, a Sagecraft station, an alchemy lab, an upstairs, and some other nifty spaces.

And it cost me 387 gold per expansion for, I think, six expansions.

Seriously. Improving your damn house is less expensive than buying gear. I like this.

I also joined the House of Ballads, on the basis that the Fae are going to give the niftiest loot. Maybe. It's the fourth faction, I think--There's the Warsworn (warriors), the Travelers (thieves), and the Scholia Arcana (wizards).

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Now for mechanical fun bits:

Hybrid destinies are awesome and seem to be just as good as focusing on maining one of the three skill sets. I'm working a Rogue/Magic one, and the teleport-dodge is nice. It's shorter-ranged than the roll, but can't be stopped. I got backed into a corner and tried it and zipped to the other side of the enemies. The Fighter-Mage gets that, as well as pure magic-user.

I think it's because every set has both weaponry, passive bonuses, and actual abilities.

I have this advice for folks: If you're going hybrid, pick one for your weaponry and another for the abilities.

So my rogue/hybrid: I have a ton of points in daggers. In fact, I maxed out the "Dagger Mastery" skill, so I get a flat +10 to damage, and then a percentage-bonus to damage with damage on top of that (I think it's 20%). And then I have points in the spells on the magic side of things, as well as to reduce mana costs.

Sidequests are pretty contained to the local regions. I haven't been sent hither-and-yon too much. On

Oh, and it may be obvious but it warrants saying: Save your Reckoning mode for big fights/bosses. And then finish off the boss with it. There's also one sidequest to kill five trolls in a region. Each one gives 500+ XP naturally, so with nailing the button-mashing event, that turned into, like, 1,120 XP per troll. It was totally worth cruising the regular mook enemies to build the meter back up.

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In other news: Take Detect Hidden. Like, two or three ranks. I keep finding unique gear--like warhammers that have a base damage of 58 and Fae shields and this one sandal that...well, seems to be a counterpoint to my gloves, although not in the same set.

Blacksmithing is also worth it. You can forge stuff, sure, but you can also break items down for parts to make -better- stuff. I made a set of daggers that does a nice amount of base damage (for daggers) and inflict fire damage over time.

I'm managing without sagecrafting gems or potions too much for right now, but those are my next avenues to check out.

So, uh, yeah. I've been wiping out as many sidequests as I can find as I go. If anyone has any questions on sidequests (not that they're really involuted. You can tell this game was trying to be an MMO at some point in its development), or mechanics, I'll answer as best I can.

So far, I've been playing a Varani chick who wears plate and uses daggers/faeblades. I am beginning to suspect that, in defiance of RPG tradition, it's the purestrain melee/rogue/magic types who really get boned. See, your skill allocation apparently determines your health and mana per level. So if you go all might, your nifty warrior special abilities get to sit around sucking up skill points, along with a barrel of cocks. If you go all magic, spiders erupt out of the ground and devour you.

Faeblades absolutely rock. They're relatively fast and have a substantial arc. Unfortunately, finding any of them that can socket gems is an incredible pain. Also, they have tricky timing on their delayed special attack.

The special attack system is where all the really shiny non-Reckoning animations come from. Each weapon has their own unique set, one charged attack(For faeblades, a dashing whirlwind), one triggered by attacking, waiting, and attacking again(a jump that knocks down your target), one triggered by attacking after a block, and one from dodging(jumping whirlwind). You get fate from each of them you successfully complete, but in each combat you face diminishing returns if you spam the same one over and over.

The House Of Ballads was pretty cool. The basic conceit is that the Fae reenact all their cool stories over and over, possibly aided by reincarnation and definitely by powerful magic. However, that's started going spectacularly wrong, as various ballads of awesome heroic triumphs get derailed by death of their hero. This is probably the PC's fault somehow.

Basically, the generic magic evil crystal, Prismere, has driven the archvillan, the Maid of Windemere, even more bonkers than she normally is. This, plus its use in the first successful human resurrection experiment, has allowed her to ruin everything. Since all the members of the House of Ballads either suck or died and turned into Winter Fae, it's up to the Fateless One to sort things out. Or sign on with the Maid, whichever, no fate having its perks.

The gnomes are also cool. In addition to touching off the whole plot by meddling with life and death, they are aggressively Roman. Their major buildings have latin names, they have dudes called Praetorians, etc. Also, they have these people called Templar who are pretty much above the law.

They are not, however, above being midget-golfed by a giant mace made out of concentrated fate. Though that guy was implausibly resilient and kept teleporting around, raising barriers, and blasting me with evocations. Only my health-potion IV drip saw me through.

Right after the tutorial, you meet this guy who is a Fateweaver and can see the future via tarot cards and tell the eventual fate of anyone and everyone. Except the main character doesn't have one of those, so there are so very many dialogue options to make fun of him. I'm generally white-knighting it up, but whenever I see a dialogue option like, "You're terrible at this" I can't resist pressing it. Fortunately, there is no morality meter that punishes me for doing that.

Incidentally, dialogue is done via one of those horrible dialogue wheels that so infest modern gaming. Thankfully, it also uses the Elder Scrolls method of just having dialogue topics and not writing out what your character is saying, so there are no instances where you are supposed to say one thing and actually say something completely different. Right side advances conversation, top is nice guy, bottom is jerk, it's basically exactly the same as Mass Effect.

Could someone explain why the hell developers keep using those? I really wish they'd stop.

Reckoning mode is so very broken. You do at least twice as much damage, allowing you to demolish all but the toughest bossfights with incredible ease. It doesn't last very long, though, and if you run out all the dudes you knocked down to kill with the God-Of-War sequence stand back up, albeit with low health.

I use Faeblades, myself, with a thief/wizard thing. I even paid a fateweaver to unbind me so I could get that point out of Warrior and apply it to one of the other.

But I'm actually doing okay on health just because I keep finding stuff that either boosts regen or increases HP. Like, my health regen is 4.5 GP or so a second, with ~400 HP. My armor isn't bad, either.

Reckoning IS your "I win button" at first.

But as you go on...Well, maybe it's just the House of Valor, but I've run into a couple of enemies/fights that I actually couldn't blender down. Of course, I whore out critical increases. So it's a noticeable run of bad luck if I don't get a critical hit in a full attack. Two isn't uncommon. Neither is three.

House of Ballads is neat, but I realized they're a bunch of LARPers. It took some of the shine out of it. Also realizing they just stay in the loop and don't go do anything new...well, yeah. I could side with the Maid of Windemere with a clear conscience.

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Be sure to get the house in the Webwood. And the one in the Hollowlands--complete the sidequests there and you'll have helped out the miners so much they're willing to work a mine for you. You can expand the mine and upgrade your house, and talk to your foreman every so often to get some money. The Webwood town will give you spidersilk to sell for a decent price.

Also, I share your concern about gemstones and how finding socketed good items is a pain. I just went around it and put a ton of points in blacksmithing so I can make my own stuff, and break even the blue-ranked items down for parts. If you keep at it enough, you turn up worthwhile parts (+45 to Health and Mana, +1 health regen, +4 Critical chances, etc) and use them to make your stuff.

Although unique items still win, generally. I am, however, the proud craftsman and wearer of a -really- nice set of magic pants.

Hey, you might be interested in this:

One of the Blacksmith ranks lets you include gems in stuff you make. I just hit that rank.

So, yeah, you can add up to four properties/bonuses to an item during creation. You have the base, and then three extra pieces, and then a gem.

My next move is to buff up my sagecrafting skill and get the pristine shards going on...

I'm running two characters, eventually maybe three. Pure Mage and Pure Finesse are both running just fine. Pure Mage having no hit points doesn't even matter because you never get hit, and you have a thing that does like 15% damage resist and hits any melee monster that closes you. And of course, you teleport instead of dodging, which is good in some ways and bad in others. Spells are fucking great, because you never run out of ammo, and all the enemies are weak against one of the elements, so you just use that one and ignore shit like armor.

Pure Finesse is who knows, but it feels like you are just a slightly less damage version of Might who gets stealth kills and a bow right now. Totally fine with that at present. I wish you could get the chance of poison higher than 15% on attacks, it would make you feel more finessy if you actually relied on poison as a defense to reduce enemies power.

Kaelik wrote: Pure Finesse is who knows, but it feels like you are just a slightly less damage version of Might who gets stealth kills and a bow right now. Totally fine with that at present. I wish you could get the chance of poison higher than 15% on attacks, it would make you feel more finessy if you actually relied on poison as a defense to reduce enemies power.

I'm with you there. DOT effects are generally just piddling extra damage. It'll sometimes kill an enemy, but they have to be close to do death to start with. And enemy HP scaling...well, I have a level 30 Finesse/Mage whose teleport-dodge damages enemies and always inflicts poison. It does, oh, forty or so damage a hit, more if I've got bonuses on it, and gets them with some poison-over-time effect, I forget the exact amount--but under ten damage a second.

And my level-appropriate opposition has HP in the low thousands, generally.

Finesse seems to be intended to be high-mobility combat. Wizard staffs and chakrams can hit multiple enemies at range, all the Might weapons have at least -some- arc making them suitable for crowds, but the dagger and faeblade more or less focus on one enemy (faeblade can hit bystanders, if they're pretty packed in). So it seems to be best to hit one enemy a few times, dodge/block/move, hit another enemy a few times--and just keep moving.

The stealth kills, though, they're too damn fun to do. It's worth keeping a set of daggers around just so you can do them (faeblades don't auto-kill like daggers do, that I've seen). Especially when jottuns, ettins, bolgin, and otherwise tough giants enemies can be one-shotted like that.

You CAN get always-on poison. It's just later (or buy a bow from that shop in town. Erosive? Something like that). Theoretically, any piece of armor, any weapon, any accessory can increase any given stat or ability, or contribute to it in some way. If you can find them in the flavor you want.

That Envenomed Edge skill is probably most useful for increasing ALL poison damage. So when you find a poison dagger or faeblade or bow, it buffs that, too. And those weapons likely also increase poison damage by some percentage. Gameplay's all about picking your focus and going for every bonus that boosts that in some way.

Bows can be surprisingly badass. The upgrade path is "Here, have both flat damage boost and a scaling damage boost, and a bigger quiver. Here, have armor-ignoring flat damage, a bonus to this, and, yes, another arrow. " Stack enough together and a bow can do a lot of damage at a hit, even on fairly tough enemies.

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Forget Detect Locks--that's something where player skill can overcome a lack of ranks. Get the crafting skill up until you can salvage rare equipment, and then break down your spare loot down for parts. Especially loot with bonuses and elemental flavors on it.

Oh, yeah. Fair warning to everyone. The game throws unique gear at you. Some of them are cool. But they do take up space. You'll also be amazed at how many come in things you don't (or can't, in the case of armor) use. My lead character has a ton of greatswords, greathammers, staves and sceptes that don't do jack for me. Not to mention the armor sets that I only have one or two pieces of. The fuckers.

It can be sold off quite a lot of cash, but it's up to you whether to hang onto it in the hopes of completing a set or getting the money. Although my treasure stash is currently holding a wide selection of weapons and armor either made or owned by a selection of the world's heroes and famous figures.

This is old as hell, but since my PS2 has been acting flaky, I don't play if often, so I just bought GTA: San Andres for my PC. It's my favorite game of the series, and I've been having a blast playing it again.

One good and bad thing about knowing where all the armor and good guns are is that it makes the early missions really easy. For example, in one mission, I'm supposed to pick up a bat so I can go cave in some guy's skull later, which I opted not to pick up because I had a knife (good for silent kills). So when I show up at the guy's place, I'm holding an AK-47. Similarly, I just did a mission where we have to lift some military-grade weapons because our gang is under equipped, and again, I show up to the mission with an AK in hand.

"Ryder. These things are just sitting around behind a couple of buildings. Someone seriously puts a new one out every six hours, or so!"

This looks like it could be interesting:
http://indiegames.com/2012/02/freeware_ ... -_the.html

So, the Mass Effect 3 demo. I gave it a whirl.

You can get experience at checkpoints within missions, so you can get a mid-mission level up. Which is good.

People have more powers, but the cooldowns are longer, which really messed with my groove--I played Infiltrator in ME 2, and so I was used to cloaking a lot. Combat uses ME2 shields/armor/barriers, BUT they don't seem to completely null out powers like they did in the second game. I'd have to check to make sure, because I was too busy trying to NOT DIE (did I mention the game's harder? Yeah. Enemies will hit you sometimes, even if you're in cover) to experiment to make sure.

Oh, and Garrus' armor-piercing ammo says it goes through objects now. Upgrading it can make it go through thicker and thicker stuff. This is awesome.

Oh, and powers have, like, six ranks now, splitting into two alternate paths at rank 4.

Oh, and of course, any class can use any weapon, but they may or may not have the slots to hold one of every kind of weapon.

Oh, and the new default female shepard uses too, too much eyeshadow. She looks like a gothic crackheaded panda. But maybe it cuts down on glare or something.

Hey hey guys, the new Jagged Alliance: Back In Action cash in hack job is out!

And it's gotta be some sort of olympics level gold award winner for one of the most DEPRESSINGLY bad RTS remakes of a Turn Based fan favorite ever.

I mean they COULDN'T have just made the damn thing turn based, that is you know, WHY this franchise HAD fans in the first place. And no having a pause button does not make your incredibly second rate and buggy RTS with it's actually worse than usual interface and implementation into a "unique blend of turn based and RTS game play", you SHOULD have learned that from the LAST five RTS remakes of Turn Based classics that used THAT EXACT LINE to refer to the fact that, yes, they too had fucking pause buttons. Mind you, the pause button in the new Jagged Alliance is like the WORST pause button ever the pause interface being freakishly limited, buggy, utterly non-intuitive and generally baddy mc bad bad.

What's really depressing is that it DOES lift a bunch of stuff from the original franchise, enough that some much of a classic is ALMOST there... then hacked to pieces as they throw away key basic mechanical necessities like the Turn Based interface and replace them with some of the WORST implementations of what has never genuinely proven to be a reliable substitute for a Turn Based interface.

Oh and the bugs, I mean hell this game went to release with a bug that prevented medics from performing medical treatments on anyone but themselves. I mean seriously the TUTORIAL could not even be completed unless you knew how to bypass the fucking bug.

PC Gaming. More awesome every day.

Oh man, people do mini-reviews of games here? Let me break some shit down for ya'll (I'm technically from Texas) then.

The game? League of Losers Legends.


INTRODUCTION

Now, I'm about 2 years late to getting into LoL, a game that already has me asking people if they're laughing or not when they mention it.

For those of you who don't know what it is, it's a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Better known as a DotA clone (DotA being a popular Warcraft III map mod). Similar to most people who enjoy a good RTS, I fucking hated DotA with a white hot passion. You controlled one unit (a hero!) who had only four abilities. The goal was to kill the enemy base, which you did by walking up one of three lanes with the help of your own teams' CPU controlled creeps. Each lane has towers in it, and you eventually reach their base and murderize all the buildings to win.

Now, League of Legends is basically the same damn thing. Three lanes, some neutral creeps in the "jungle" that you can kill for gold, xp and temporary buffs, a shop to buy things that make you stronger, etc. The difference is the game is incredibly fun.

THE GAME ITSELF

In Losers you first pick one hero out of, Jesus Christ, like 80something different heroes. Oh, did I say hero? I meant Champion. That's what they're called here.

Anyways, you pick a campion (EDIT: Spelling error or pun? You decide!). These range from the always-drunk and massive Gragas to the lightning-hamster Kennen. There are normal fantasy trope champions as well, and they're pretty much all hit. Weaboo magic furry lady? Ahri (the nine-tailed fox, for people who really like Pokemon, Naruto and hentai) has you covered. Want to be a lich? Karthus. Sentient fish-person? Fizz. Assassin who uses daggers? There are like fucking 5 of those people. Pirate Bounty Hunter? Miss Fourtune. Name a concept and it's there. Fallen angel, knight in shining armor, crown prince, guy from dynasty warrior, guy from 300, fucking EVERYTHING. They come out with a new champion every 2 weeks.

Oh, the downside to all these champions? You need to buy them (or hope they come up on Free Week). Every week there's 10 or so champions that are just free to play, and it always switches around so you can try it before you buy it.

buy, like with real money?

No, while you can use real money you can also use the fake "Influence Points" that you get for playing the game. I haven't spent a dime on the game and I have well over 20 champions that I own, along with 2 full "rune pages" that you use to further customize your champion. I'll get into that shit after the next section.

THE GAME ITSELF

Alright, so let's go over some basics.

When you first make your account you are at summoner level 1. This basically means you are weak as shit. As you gain levels you gain new summoner spells, new "mastery points" and new "rune slots". All of these are introduced slowly as to not overwhelm you, and the matchmaking pairs you up with people of a similar level. This means you have time to learn the core of the game before getting into the nitty-gritty.

So you choose 5v5 because that's what you want to play (3v3 is sort of broken, only go there if you have 2 friends) and end up picking your champion. You get tossed into Summoner's Rift, the 5v5 map, and don't know what to do. That's fine, you're level 1 so EVERYONE is functionally retarded at the game. Just pick a lane, hang out with your minions and try to kill shit.

The core of the game is you want to kill their base. You do this by accompanying your team's minions (computer generated warriors that are super weak) and destroying the other team's turrets. There's incredibly deep play based around last hitting to get gold but keep your lane from "pushing", zoning your opponent out to deny them experience and gold, and "ganking" other lanes to get your team kills (worth lots of gold and xp while denying the person you killed gold and xp).

There's also map control based on global objectives: killing the dragon gives your entire team xp and a lot of gold, while killing the Baron Nashor gives your team a MASSIVE temporary buff, huge amounts of gold and a fuckton of xp and destroying turrets gives your entire team gold similar to killing the dragon.

Still, the goal of the game is to destroy their base.

In order to do this your champion has some basic stats.

ATTACK: How much damage your normal attacks do.

ABILITY POWER: How much bonus damage your abilities do (some characters have abilities that scale off attack power).

ARMOR: Damage reduction for physical attacks!

MAGIC RESISTANCE: Armor for magic!

ATTACK SPEED: How fast you attack.

A WHOLE BUNCH OF OTHER SHIT: Cooldown reduction, regenerations, critical attack chance, movespeed, just a fuckton of things. Different items, buffs and abilities change these numbers.

In addition to your stats, you have four abilities and one passive power. Abilities are special attacks, passives run the gamut from awesome to almost useless, but they're always beneficial.

Ok, so you may be thinking "that's a whole lot of shit to know about," and it totally is. There are tons of ways to build your champion and each one has different drawbacks and benefits.

RUNES, MASTERIES AND SUMMONER SPELLS

Runes and masteries are ways to further customize your champion. Each level you gain you unlock 1 mastery point (up to 30) and 1 rune slot (guess how many there are). You can buy runes using Influence Points (but not real money for some reason) and place them into rune slots. Runes are minor bonuses, like +0.95 magic penetration (makes your magic attacks ignore almost a whole point of mres [everyone starts with 30 mres, some even scale with level so this is NOT A HUGE DEAL]) or +0.45 mana regen per second. They are pretty minor, but they add some customization.

Masteries are generally bigger bonuses, and more unique. You put them into mastery trees. For example, level 1 of the mastery tree lets you put points into either "attack damage, magic damage, bonus damage to minions, and improved offensive summoner spells." The second level nets you either lower cooldowns or higher attack speed. The third level has even stronger options, and so on and so forth. There are three trees (offensive, defensive and utility) and tons of options in each tree.

Summoner spells are special things you can cast to do stuff. There's a spell that lights the enemy on fire, reducing their healing and doing "true damage" over time (true damage being damage that resistances and DR don't stop). There's a spell that makes you teleport a really short distance instantly. There's a spell that lets you teleport to a friendly unit after 3 seconds. There are spells to heal yourself, restore mana, promote something, increase attack speed, and do other stuff. You only get to pick 2 of them and they're on super long cooldowns (often several minutes) so they're basically another point of customization.

OTHER STUFF

After you get to level 30 it's assumed you understand the game. It took me almost a month to do it, and then I jumped right into "ranked" matches because I am surely God's gift to Losers. Ranked matches are extremely competitive, whereas normal matches are generally seen as fun things you do for fun. You can also do custom games, games against bots, Dominion (a capture and hold sort of game) and 3v3 (hilariously broken map).

THOUGHTS

It's totally worth a try to play this game, and the cost of entry is FREE. If you can ignore the often-shitty community (which is improving now that the owner of the game has started banning fucktons of people for trolling, verbal abuse and all that jazz) there's a fun and deep game underneath.

You will never unlock everything without spending real money, but I honestly like the pace I've been unlocking things at (I play a couple games a day, they can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 50 minutes). I generally get a new champion every week or two, and I only get ones that I've played on free week and know I like (or the ones who are so cheap you can buy them after one or two games).

As a matter of fact, ASK ME if you'd like to play and I'll send you an invite. I get free things if I do that, and it seriously just occurred to me. PLAY IT SO I CAN GET FREE SWAG. Man, that throws the entire review into question.

Oh well, get me that swag.


Tl;dr: Give this game a try if you enjoy tactical games, teamwork, giving me free swag or being a dick online. That last one should really get everyone on the Den into it.

Also tried out the ME3 demo. I am most displeased.

Mechanics: Okay, so now you can roll from cover to cover, or do a dramatic roll into the open. That is good. Roll uses the same key as sprint, use, and enter/leave cover. That is bad.

Cover is incredibly sticky. It seems like if you're standing with your back to a wall/support beam, you can't exit cover except at the edge. This would be less of a problem if trying to did not cause you to roll.

Gun-play feels clunkier, and in particular popping your head up for a short burst is trickier.

Story: Hoo boy, where to even begin. I am astounded by the density of problems.

Firstly, there were many fewer dialogue choices for the same length of conversation, although that might have just been for the demo.

Okay, so the game starts with the Reapers about to enter the solar system after apparently wiping out every human colony, a process that apparently did not take very much time. Shepard goes to meet with the Alliance Defense Committee, in an incredibly wince-inducing scene where she chews them out in an incredibly non-specific manner and does not really provide any helpful advice. And most especially does not say anything like, "Well, we're pretty much fucked. I really don't know what to tell you; it is mathematically impossible for us to win." Also, the fact that the Alliance fleet has prior combat experience against a Reaper is entirely forgotten.

This is thankfully interrupted when the Reapers arrive in-system, reach Earth orbit, and destroy the entire alliance fleet over a period of perhaps three min- wait, what the fuck? There has been no prior indication that Sovereign was capable of intrasystem FTL at speeds in excess of 60c. They're a mile long and there are hundreds to thousands of them. How the hell did they sneak up on motherfucking Earth? I mean, of course they can swat the fleet once they actually arrive, there are more dreadnought-size reapers than Alliance ships, but they should still have been detected at least an hour before that.

The defense committee dies of laser, leaving only Anderson(who canonically was not the human council member) and Shepard alive. The two of you shoot your way to a place where you can get onboard the Normandy, fighting husks and a new variant called cannibals that possess guns. The Reapers are randomly firing their secondary lasers at assorted skyscrapers for no especially clear reason. Admiral Anderson decides not to board the Normandy because... Well, actually, I don't know. He rambles about how lots of people are dying and his place is with them, but there isn't even a command-and-control infrastructure present and it is his duty to get somewhere he can actually be useful. Shepard inexplicably does not tell him this.

A couple of transport shuttles arrive to evacuate people, and promptly get shot down by a Reaper after they take off. The Normandy doesn't, presumably on account of being stealth and all, retroactively making the opening of ME2 even dumber. Also, all the Reapers have apparently landed and are walking around on their giant crab-legs. There are three problems with this:

1) Reapers are structurally unstable in planetary gravity without the aid of their Mass Effect cores. These are also used for shielding and their primary gun, which has never been seen fired but was the basis for the Thanix Cannon. So descending into a planetary gravity well is monstrously stupid, as the Turians and/or the Destiny Ascension are still out there, and the Turians have actually copied their guns and therefore can potentially kill them even when their shields are active.
2) Walking. Spaceships. Why are they not either flying or simply sitting there to disgorge troops?
3) The crab-legs also hold the Reaper laser weapons, so while they're walking most of their guns are effectively useless.

Also, frankly after the tutorial mission the idea of actually trying to beat these guys is laughably outlandish unless they are incredibly retarded, even if the Turians have equipped all their warships with Reapertech. I can't imagine any resolution that won't feel like a cheap copout. Like the Great Old Ones, if you want to tell a story where the Reapers lose, they have to not be fully awake and on a rampage.

A note: supposedly the beams they fire are magnetically accelerated molten metal, but they do not look remotely like that. So I'm going to refer to them as lasers and assume the Thanix cannon(which does look like that) is only the main gun.

I won't comment on the specifics of the second mission, because there is no context and the demo apparently skipped a decent hunk of cutscene. But I will note that it enrages me because there is a bunch of bullshit between Wrex and the Salarians that Shepard should respond to by pointing out that the Reapers are in the galaxy and they should shut the hell up. But she doesn't. I assume the Cerberus guys who attack you are indoctrinated or something, but they might just be idiotic jackasses.

I just found a semi-exploit for skills in Amalur.

It's not terribly complicated--when you've got, oh, half a million in gold and you've got a comfortable number of skill trainers found, pay a Fateweaver for an unbind and then go make the rounds of the trainers before you reassign all your points. For 15-30k a pop (depending on the trainer and your own ranks) you can get a decent boost to multiple skills and make your points-by-levelling go further.

I did this because money? Yeah, after a while it's nice to have but not -essential-. Blacksmithing and sagecrafting lets you damn well -make- better stuff than you can find, and you can tailor it to your character more (I regularly critical for more than a thousand damage with daggers now). Potions aren't terribly expensive and you can make them yourself. And Detect Hidden ensures you will never want for loot to break down for parts.

I just wish there was a simple, easy-to-find screen that would tell you all your modifiers to damage, critical chances, and so forth.

In other news, gear that increases Finesse or what-have you? Yeah, you can break the rank cap with that. So my sorcery casting-cost reduction reduced it by 22% at max rank of five. Thanks to some of my gear, it reads at "7 of 5 ranks" and reduces casting costs by 28%.

Maxus wrote:It's not terribly complicated--when you've got, oh, half a million in gold and you've got a comfortable number of skill trainers found, pay a Fateweaver for an unbind and then go make the rounds of the trainers before you reassign all your points. For 15-30k a pop (depending on the trainer and your own ranks) you can get a decent boost to multiple skills and make your points-by-levelling go further.

Congratulations on finding out the most obvious thing? I did that because I already had 4 detect hidden before I ever had the 15,000gp for the first trainer. So I've been doing that since the beginning.

Maxus wrote:I just wish there was a simple, easy-to-find screen that would tell you all your modifiers to damage, critical chances, and so forth.

Me fucking too. Mostly because I would love to not have to do math for my elemental resistance numbers, or for my casting cost reductions. Speaking of which.

Maxus wrote:In other news, gear that increases Finesse or what-have you? Yeah, you can break the rank cap with that. So my sorcery casting-cost reduction reduced it by 22% at max rank of five. Thanks to some of my gear, it reads at "7 of 5 ranks" and reduces casting costs by 28%.

Wonderful. I'll see if that can help boost me up to 100% casting cost reduction soon, even though I'm already at like 80%, so it's largely meaningless.

So, Amalur combat difficulty completely broke in half for me once I reached the second continent and got Relentless Assault and a full set of Prismere armor with socketed gems. I'm three regions from the presumed location of the final boss, and I haven't bought new stuff since. I pretty much chain-spam uninterruptable faeblade strikes mixed with charged attacks and random special abilities to build fate.

I did that Fateweaver trick a bit once, although that was just to get maxed detect hidden as soon as I hit the level to start investing in the final quarter. I have outlandish numbers of lorestones found as a result, which may contribute to the low difficulty of combat. Also, the set which gives bonus Faeblade damage has one stone that didn't spawn.

EDIT: Okay, it turns out that the last two bossfights are both complete bitches in terms of difficulty. But health potion IV came through again.

Yeah, difficulty is either "I can butcher it without pausing" or "I need to pay close attention to my health." The final boss of the House of Sorrows quest chain? Yeah, he could hit me for almost half my life at once with a few of his spells. EVERYTHING ELSE in that mission? I could blender and generally did.

And I'm not surprised by that, really. By that point, you're settled in what you're doing and the game doesn't seem to demand that you optimize every inch out to succeed. Maybe on Hard difficulty, maybe...

Also, just worked out that my current equipment and total effects makes my critical chance 68% (72% against Fae). If I chug a top precision potion, that goes up by 30. I could also increase it by making some more equipment (armor, especially) just for the purpose of boosting it. And my damage boost for criticals is at least 93%.

I knew I had this character fairly stacked for this sort of thing, but it's another to take five minutes to really calculate this junk.

And 100% casting reduction sounds like an interesting exercise. I'll give it a whirl on my pure-mage character.

My pure mage is currently sitting at 65% reduction.

Also, for me (playing on hard) everything is really easy, except physical bosses with lots of minions can result in a few tries.

Basically, I run, currently, though I hope to max it out with better gear, 84% Elemental resistance. So anything that isn't physical can fuck right off I don't care.

Physical stuff, it's all about teleporting around, and or chaining combos that keep things from hitting me, or, against single bosses, just using my stun lock pattern.

If I screw up a little bit and get hit, I have like 12 regen per second, so I teleport around some more, and am back at full.

The only reason the one specific type of boss is a problem, is sometimes their minions will hit you, and keep you off balance long enough for the boss to hit you with a big physical hit, because you will be hitstuned and not able to dodge.

And of course, I die in one hit from any physical boss.

So far, on normal, I've died three or four times. Once was when I didn't realize the Boggarts were Boggart Zealots that I used that Fire Mark spell on and they all suicide-bombed me at once. A couple were in the Maid of Windemere fight-- The minions locked me down and she hit me with her best attack before I could heal.

After that, I started carrying Steel Curtain and other damage resistance potions around. And I keep a couple of precision potions ready if I ever need to nuke something.

I notice there's various investment methods in the game. I wish there was something where you could donate gear to the war cause. I'm sitting on more than fifty pieces of unique (or part of a set) armor and gear that I'd hate to just sell (because what's the money to me, apart from lockpicks and the occasional potion?) But being able to outfit the army's elite corps would be a worthwhile use for that junk.

They just announced the bonus DLC character on Mass Effect 3.

http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/The_Prothean

Edit: Correct that...Seems it's be noised about for a while